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The link between capitalism and racism

04 May 2015 | Kate Jeffreys


We live in an age of racism. In Australia, the federal and Western Australian
governments attempt to drive Aboriginal people in remote communities
from their land is only the latest episode in the war on Indigenous people.
In the United States, there is an epidemic of police slayings of
predominantly Black young men. In Europe, fascist and far-right parties
have gained ground, attacks on the Roma people continue and anti-Muslim
racism against refugees and migrants is extreme.
Its clear that this is a global problem.
How did we get to this and how do we change it? Socialists locate the
beginnings of racism in the birth of capitalism and argue that to truly
challenge racism, we have to challenge the system that produces and
benefits from it.

Capitalism and slavery

Nineteenth century revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described


the realities of British industrialisation: child labour, the horrors of the mines
and the mills, and the lives lost to the appalling working and living
conditions of the time. Accompanying this was the mass kidnapping of
African people and their sale into slavery in the colonies of the Americas.
The veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified
slavery of the New World as its pedestal, wrote Marx in Capital. Capital
comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
Between 1500 and 1870, slave traders in the service of European powers
kidnapped 12 million people from the coasts of Africa. A nightmarish
journey across the Atlantic followed. The prisoners were chained together,
unable to move and barely able to breathe. One in ten died in transit.
On arrival in North and South America or the Caribbean, plantation owners
bought the survivors in a sickening imitation of the sale of livestock: The
purchasers examined them for defects, looked at the teeth, pinched the
skin, sometimes tasted the perspiration to see if the slaves blood was pure
and his health as good as his appearance, wrote historian C.L.R. James
in The Black Jacobins.
Work on the plantations was ceaseless and brutal. To keep human beings in
subjugation, says James, required a regime of calculated brutality and
terrorism. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, to gather in groups, or
to use religion to express a common cause. Any actions that hinted of
organisation had to be stamped out.
Around one-fifth of those sold into slavery died within a year of their
purchase worked or beaten to death.

Racism
Its tempting to assume that vile racism on the part of the planters brought
about this monstrous episode in history. Yet, as Eric Williams wrote in his
classic 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery, slavery was not born of racism:
rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.
The first source of labour in the new world had been white indentured
servants. People who wanted a better life than that offered by the dismal
prospects of Britain at the time would, in exchange for passage to the
Americas, sell themselves into the service of a wealthier landowner for
years at a time.

But this form of unfree labour could not satisfy the needs of the growing
colonies. Small farmers were pushed aside by the rapacious encroachment
of the plantation system, which produced not for subsistence, but for the
mass export of monoculture crops. From the 1680s onwards, African slaves
became the main source of labour on such plantations.
The reason was economic, not racial, Williams wrote. [I]t had to do not
with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour [the
planters] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was
nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India
and China. But their turn was to come.
A scaffolding of racism grew around the slave system to justify and
reinforce it. Generations of people grew up in a society in which the word
Negro was synonymous with the word slave. Racism was born.

All men are created equal?


The plantation, factory and slave ship owners of the 18th century made
immense profits through the triangular trade.
The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured
goods, wrote Williams. These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of
Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in
exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home
country.
This colonial produce supplied the raw materials for industrialisation in
England. In this way, the triangular trade acted as a motor for the
development of capitalism: By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a
manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with
the triangular or direct colonial trade.
Thus, as Robin Blackburn writes in The making of New World slavery, the
emerging system of capitalism characterised in theory by the sale of free
labour on the market built one of the largest systems of slavery in human
history.
Along with this contradiction came a clash of ideology. The American
Revolutionaries raised the ideals of human rights, democracy and equality.
Radicals such as Thomas Paine supported abolition of slavery. But the
champions of profit did not.
How could the founding fathers of the US most of whom owned slaves

themselves reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with
the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?,
asks US socialist Lance Selfa. The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill
to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers
of the time argued that Blacks werent really men, they were a lower order
of being.
The defeat of slavery in the latter half of the 19th century did not bring
equality for Black people; nor did it end racism. Rather, the ruling class of a
transformed United States adapted racism for use in a new context. Racism,
argues Selfa, no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified
second class status for Blacks as wage labourers and sharecroppers.

Colonialism
The ideology of white superiority fit neatly with the age of empire. Rudyard
Kipling exalted those who would take up the white mans burden,
imposing colonial will on new-caught, sullen peoples half devil and half
child. World powers competed for territory and resources, justifying their
part in the scramble for Africa, and the conquests of Asia and the Middle
East, with a racist narrative in which white heroes brought civilisation to
lesser peoples.
Racism supported the British colonial project in Australia an immense land
grab that was subsequently justified by denying the existence of Aboriginal
peoples. Although Terra Nullius was constantly disproved by the courageous
resistance of Indigenous people, the British colonists steadily expanded
their settlements, forcing the original inhabitants from their land.
The developing wool industry, and the need for vast tracts of grazing land
for sheep, prompted some of the worst massacres of Aboriginal people in
the 1830s and 1840s as the squatters pushed hundreds of thousands of
people from the flat grasslands of eastern Australia.
As the Australian colonies grew, and with them their demand for labour, the
emerging ruling class changed its policy in some locations. In response to
the needs of industry, Aboriginal people were effectively enslaved, rather
than exterminated.
A pseudoscience emerged to justify the actions of empire all over the world,
and to refine the concept of race into its modern form of a set of
biologically inherited characteristics.

Fighting racism, fighting the system

Progressive biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in The mismeasure of man,


debunked the notion that race correlates with intelligence or mental
capacity; and the work of scientists such as Richard Lewontin has shown
that race is not a meaningful way to categorise people genetically. But
simply disproving these poisonous theories is not enough to get rid of
racism. Racism was born from the economic needs of capitalism and
persists today because capitalism still exists.
Today, racism is still used to used to justify land theft and war, to distract
people from attacks on their rights and living conditions, and, importantly,
to turn working people against each other.
Divide and rule has been around a long time. The abolitionist Frederick
Douglass described the process in 1866:
The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily
explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited
on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured
their ascendency over both the poor whites and the blacks by putting
enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.
Today, owing largely to the efforts of anti-racist movements, voicing a belief
in the biological inferiority of non-whites is unpopular. Instead, the terrain
has shifted to cultural racism: Muslims oppose democracy, Aborigines are
bad parents, and other lies. But the function of the ideology is the same.
Identifying the roots of racism, and the reasons it persists, gives us a
powerful tool in the struggle against it. If we know that these ideas are
produced by a social and economic system that needs oppression and
subjugation to function, we know that we need to fight this system if we are
to challenge racism. Likewise, any genuine struggle against capitalism must
be anti-racist and stand in solidarity with those subject to it.
Posted by Thavam

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