Audio version here.
Black people are not really black. White people are not really white. The words “black” and “white”, applied to people, do not mean what they mean when applied, for example, to the stripes on a zebra or to objects like coal and snow. The colors of people’s skins vary on a continuum, from almost black to very light shades of pink. The words “black” and “white” (together with red, yellow, and brown) are used to divide people into distinct social categories, called “races”, with each “race” assigned a different status in social and economic life. How did this artificial way of categorizing and ranking people come to be? And why does it continue to exist in spite of all the political work done to challenge it over the past 60+ years?
Black people are not really black. White people are not really white. The words “black” and “white”, applied to people, do not mean what they mean when applied, for example, to the stripes on a zebra or to objects like coal and snow. The colors of people’s skins vary on a continuum, from almost black to very light shades of pink. The words “black” and “white” (together with red, yellow, and brown) are used to divide people into distinct social categories, called “races”, with each “race” assigned a different status in social and economic life. How did this artificial way of categorizing and ranking people come to be? And why does it continue to exist in spite of all the political work done to challenge it over the past 60+ years?
In my last post, I argued that racism originated
with slavery in the American south in colonial times as a way of preventing
alliances between poor whites and African slaves, and it continues to function
as what W.E.B. Dubois called “a psychological wage” granted to whites: exploited
though they were, and are, by their employers, at least they are better than
the once-enslaved black people who continue to be marginalized and underpaid,
relative to whites. Racism is thus at the service of capital: it prevents
working class solidarity and helps keeps the costs of labor down. Today, I’d
like to do more to show why racism is essential to capitalism. In this
discussion, I will be drawing heavily on an article by political philosopher Nancy Fraser.
Taken in abstraction from each other, capitalism and racism look
like separate issues. Capitalists own and control wealth that can be made to grow
by putting people to work, people who have no wealth of their own and who
therefore have no choice but to sell part of their lives to capital. The
capitalist pays the workers enough (in general) so that they can go on working,
as well as support a family that will produce a continuing supply of workers. But
after paying wages and other costs of production, there is a nice surplus left
over for the capitalist, which he (or the corporation) can use to further
expand production, as well as to finance lives of luxury. The existence of
distinct races of workers does not seem essential to this process.
But capitalism did not just spring into being in Europe
around 1500. Where did the initial supply of wealth that could be used as
capital come from? And why was there a supply of workers who had to sell their
labor power? It wasn’t as if a few smart people decided one day to use some of
their wealth to buy equipment and raw materials and advertise for workers. Nor
did peasants and artisans just decide one day to go out looking for wage work.
A major source of the initial wealth that became capital was
the silver and gold violently expropriated by Spain, destroying ancient
civilizations and enslaving the natives. Then, when too many of the indigenous
people died from disease and overwork, they turned to enslaving Africans to
work in the mines. In Europe, peasants were forced off the land and into wage
labor when, with the help of the State, lands were enclosed for the profitable
raising of sheep for the wool industry. And the nation that was to become the
behemoth of capital, the US, was built on land and resources expropriated from
its original inhabitants most of whom were slaughtered and the rest confined to
reservations. This confiscated land then produced great wealth for capital
investment and the building of the nation, not
by employing workers to grow tobacco,
sugar and cotton, but by violently extracting the labor of people who had
themselves been seized and transported from Africa. Yet all this time, the
nation was claiming to be a democracy, the land of the free where all men are
created equal. The only way to believe this was to also believe that “all men”
meant only white men. America was
thus constructed as a white nation, which
meant that everyone else, whose land and labor we were seizing, was something other than American.
Capital must always be growing. We see now that capital has
two ways to increase itself. First, exploitation.
Capital exploits wage labor: labor creates more than it costs the capitalist to
employ it and that surplus adds to the pile of capital. But the other way is
simply violent theft and seizure: what Nancy Fraser calls expropriation, in contrast to exploitation. The native landscapes
where we now live, paying banks and landlords for the privilege, were expropriated, stolen, from native
people. The nation became wealthy and powerful in the 19th Century through
the expropriation of the lives and labor of enslaved Africans and their
descendants. The ideology of racism, the supremacy of the white man and the devaluation
of blacks and indigenous people, was inevitable and necessary to justify and
explain this ugly reality, the reality of racial
capitalism.[1]
But what about now? Now that the nation, that is its owners,
are rich, haven’t we outgrown our need for racism? Let me quote Nancy Fraser:
No one doubts that racially
organized slavery, colonial plunder and land enclosures generated much of the
initial capital that kick-started the system’s development. But even “mature”
capitalism relies on regular infusions of commandeered capacities and
resources, especially from racialized subjects in both its periphery and its
core. Accordingly expropriation has always been entwined with exploitation in
capitalist society—just as capitalism has always been entangled with racial
oppression.
“Regular infusions of commandeered capacities and resources,
especially from racialized subjects in both its periphery and its core.” What
does this academic language mean? It means that populations, masses, of people
whose skin color marks them as other than white, can be treated as if they did
not have the rights to fair treatment that, at least in principle, white
workers have. Besides the territorial conquest and enslavement of the past,
there are more modern forms of expropriation: prison labor, transnational sex
trafficking, corporate land grabs, foreclosures on predatory debt (think sub
prime loans), and segmented labor markets enabling employers to pay workers of
other “races” less than a living wage, which is a way of stealing from them.
So the claim is that racism and capitalism are entangled
because capital always needs more than the profits it can get from the relatively
honest bargain it makes with workers it pays for their labor. Capital also
needs to steal, to seize, to expropriate. The category of race makes this
possible: Quoting again from Fraser: “’Race’ emerges…as the mark that
distinguishes free subjects of exploitation (citizen workers) from dependent
subjects of exploitation”. Political powers support capital accumulation in
part by fabricating (at least) two distinct categories [i.e. races] of
subjects, one suitable for expropriation, another for exploitation.”
Racism and capitalism are two aspects of one system of domination, the system of racial capitalism. So the movements
against racism and capitalism must be one, united movement.
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