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Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism, Communism, Fascism, and Other Related Concepts
Dr. Steven Rosenthal, Professor of Sociology
Here is a brief introduction to the sociological analysis of capitalism, social classes, and class struggle; race, racism, super-exploitation, and the criminal justice system; imperialism and imperialist wars; fascism and communism. This analysis is derived from the work of the two classical sociologists who contributed the most to a critical analysis of capitalism, racism, and imperialism, Karl Marx and W.E.B. DuBois. Throughout the essay there are links to articles you may be reading during this semester that provide more detailed explanations or applications of these sociological concepts and theories.
Karl Marx argued that capitalism is a racist system of class exploitation, in which capitalist profits are extracted from the labor power of the working class by paying workers less than the value of what workers produce. Marx called this profit surplus value, and he argued that his theory--known as the labor theory of value--unlocked the secret of how capitalism works. Marx further argued that competition among capitalists compels capitalists to extract as much surplus value as possible from workers--in other words, to exploit workers as much as possible. Capitalists pay some workers enough to subsist on, but capitalists also pay many workers less than what they need for survival. Workers who are paid a subsistence wage are exploited, but those who are paid less are super-exploited. Slavery and colonialism were worldwide systems of super-exploitation set up by capitalists in their drive for maximization of profit. Super-exploitation is the concrete material expression of racism. It also requires ideological justification. That is, if you are going to enslave a group or colonize them, you have to make up excuses and justifications. These excuses and justifications constitute the ideology of racism.
Social Classes. Social classes share a common relationship to the means of production (i.e., the factories, offices, mines, transportation and distribution systems) and to other social classes. In capitalist society capitalists are the owners of the means of production , and the workers are the class of people who own only their ability to work (their labor power). Workers sell their labor power, which capitalists buy for a wage or salary. This division into owners and workers is not natural or universal. It is the inevitable result of private ownership of the means of production, which divides society into an owning class and a non-owning class. Class is a relationship of inequality and exploitation. If the means of production were not privately owned--if they were instead held in common by the entire society--and if all members of society worked cooperatively to produce and distribute what they all needed, there would be no division of society into antagonistic classes. Society would be egalitarian and communist. That is the goal that Karl Marx and the movement he began tried to achieve during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also the goal that W.E.B. DuBois increasingly embraced during the latter half of his long life.
Racism consists of both the practice of super-exploitation and its ideological justification. Many sociology textbooks define racism as the belief in the inferiority of a race of people. This is an inadequate definition for several reasons. First, racism is not just a personal belief. It is a systematic ideology, a world view. Second, the belief in inferiority is just one of many racist beliefs that make up the ideology of racism. For example, racist opposition to affirmative action typically involves the false belief that blacks are getting special preferences, and that blacks are taking jobs and college slots from whites. Third, racism is not only a belief or attitude. It is also behavior or practice--the practice of discrimination, oppression, super-exploitation. To sum up, racism is not just the psychological hang-up of prejudiced individuals. It is a pervasive feature of all capitalist societies throughout the world, enabling capitalists to maximize their profits and power at the expense of the working class.
The myth of race. In Sociology we generally say that race is a "social construct," which means that humans made up or invented races. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, recently published a book titled The Emperor's New Clothes. In that book Graves demonstrated many important points about race. Scientifically, there are no biological races among humans. All humans alive today are descendents of common ancestors who evolved in Africa about 130,000 years ago. There is one human race. Recent decoding of the human genome has shown that we all possess virtually identical genes. The minor genetic variations among humans display no consistent correlations with what people widely call races. Attitudes of racial antagonism have not always existed. The concept of race was actually little developed until a few centuries ago, and the actual word racism did not come into use until the 20th century. Race and racism were developed to promote and justify enslavement, extermination, and colonial conquest, which were the foundations of the system of modern capitalism. For more discussion of this analysis, you can read an interview with Joseph Graves (http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01-06.htm).
The invention of racism. Modern racism was developed by wealthy capitalist ruling classes and their intellectual servants. They invented races in order to invent racism. That is, in order to justify the murder, enslavement, and conquest of hundreds of millions of Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans and Australians, capitalists had to redefine them as members of distinct and inferior races. This process began around the time of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and continued through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Black historian Lerone Bennett, in The Road Not Taken, a chapter from his book The Shaping of Black America, 1975, pp. 61-82, originally published in Ebony, vol. 25 (August, 1970), pp. 71-77), provided a good historical analysis of how racism was developed in colonial North America. According to Bennett, the African, European, and Native American workers on the colonial plantations were at first all indentured servants, that is, temporary slaves. They were largely unconcerned about the color of their skin. They worked together, made love together, rebelled, and ran away together. The plantation owners, desperate to control their labor force, pushed Africans down into hereditary slavery in order to divide and conquer. They used their control of colonial society to impose laws intended to force blacks, whites, and reds apart. Bennett shows that racism is not "natural." It is not something that is "just there." European laborers had no inherent fear or dislike of Africans. A century of terror, law, and religious propaganda were required in order to drive white and black labor apart in Colonial America.
Class Struggle. Summarizing Lerone Bennett's analysis using Marxist concepts, we could say that there was sharp class struggle in colonial North America between capitalist plantation owners and working class indentured servants. The capitalists sought to suppress this class struggle by dividing the workers into a "white" race of indentured servants, a "black" race of permanent slaves, and an "Indian" race that was mostly exterminated. Class struggle is the inevitable conflict that takes place between workers and the capitalists who exploit them. As Karl Marx wrote in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto, class struggle has been going on for thousands of years, ever since human societies became divided into opposing classes.
Primitive Accumulation. The process Lerone Bennett described is part of a global process that Karl Marx called primitive accumulation. The first capitalists used the most primitive (that is, brutal and violent) methods to accumulate the capital they needed and to create a vast class of proletarians (workers) who owned nothing but their ability to work. They kidnapped and enslaved tens of millions of Africans and Native Americans and worked them to death in gold and silver mines and on sugar and tobacco plantations. W.E.B. DuBois, in The World and Africa, praised Marx, stating that "it was Karl Marx who made the great unanswerable charge of the sources of capitalism in African slavery."
Capitalism and Super-exploitation. Because racism is indispensible to capitalism, racism did not die out after chattel slavery was abolished. Slavery has been replaced with other forms of racist super-exploitation. W.E.B. DuBois devoted much of his sociological and historical writing to analyzing and explaining the centrality and persistence of racism in modern societies. He wrote his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on the British suppression of the slave trade. Why, DuBois asked, did the British, who dominated and made the greatest profits from the slave trade, decide to suppress the trafficking of enslaved Africans in the Americas during the early 19th century? It was not for humanitarian reasons, Dub Bois explained in The World and Africa (1944). As the British extended their colonial rule over most of the African continent, they developed a system of colonialism that was far more profitable and far more murderous than slavery had been. The British empire was based on the super-exploitation of native labor in their colonized homelands, so they did not want to export their colonial population of cheap labor to their Spanish and Protuguese competitors in the Americas.
Karl Marx also described how the English and American ruling classes used racism and colonialism in 19th century Britain and the United States to maximize profits, to divide white workers from black workers and English workers from Irish workers, exploiting the former while super-exploiting the latter. In 1870, in aletter to a friend in the United States, Marx wrote:
"Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this."
Today capitalists use racist professors, journalists, entertainers,and politicians to peddle racist ideology. This ideology is spread through academic and popular books and articles, television, movies, and newspapers. Racist ideology is spread through fake scientific claims about I.Q. and genes, lies about "reverse discrimination," manipulation of fear of crime, and violence, and the scapegoating of oppressed racial, ethnic, and religious groups.
Super-exploitation enables capitalists to intensify the exploitation of all workers by driving down or keeping down wages and living conditions of all workers. Super-exploitation includes not only lower wages and higher rates of unemployment, but also police terror and lynchings, prison labor and workfare, homelessness, denial of health care in the face of the AIDS epidemic, denial of educational opportunities, and environmental racism, all of which shorten and destroy the lives of workers. All these material phenomena of racism are inseparable from the capitalist mode of production throughout the world.
Capitalism, Racism, Super-exploitation, and the Criminal Justice System. Many writers have analyzed the massive growth of the criminal justice system and the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States since the 1960s. Here are links to three of the best Marxist analyses. Christian Parenti interpreted these developments as a racist strategy of capitalism to control and regulate labor costs. In his book Lockdown, Parenti analyzed police terror, the"war on drugs," and mass incarceration illustrate as capitalist strategies to impose racist super-exploitation on the working class. In The New American Apartheid (http://www.blackcommentator.com/98/98_prisons_1.html), a four-part analysis published by The Black Commentator, crimologists Randall Shelden and William Brown analyzed in detail the use of the criminal justice system to impose a fascist-like system of apartheid in the United States. And, in Capitalism and Incarceration Revisited (http://www.monthlyreview.org/0903vogel.htm), Richard D. Vogel demonstrated how U.S. rulers have used incarceration to suppress working class protest during economic depressions and to coerce working class youth into the armed forces during imperialist wars.
The two main groups of super-exploited workers in the U.S. today are black and immigrant workers. In Europe immigrant workers are the main group of super-exploited workers. Throughout most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, virtually all workers are super-exploited. For a vivid example of how the Fortune 500 meat processing conglomerate Smithfield Foods uses racism to super-exploit black and immigrant workers, read the article "At a slaughterhouse, some things never die: Who kills, who cuts, who bosses can depend on race," (ftp://smrose7:
[email protected]/HogWork.htm) by Charlie LeDuff, from The New York Times, June 16, 2000. This article was part of a series on "How race is lived in America." Then, to learn about how black and white communist workers in the slaughterhouses united to build the most progressive anti-racist union that has ever existed in the United States, read a review by Michael Yates of the book Negro and White, Unite and Fight: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990, by Roger Horowitz. (http://members.cox.net/smrose7/PackinghouseWorkersUnionReds.htm)
Imperialism and Colonialism. As DuBois and Marx emphasized, capitalism has been an international system from its very beginning. The biggest capitalist profits have always come from the super-exploitation of the labor and natural resources of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. During the early stages of capitalism, as Marx noted, this exploitation took the form of slavery and plunder. By the 19th century, the exploiters began to colonize the territories and people of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. They built colonial empires, and they used colonial labor under slave-like conditions to extract immense wealth. By the end of the 19th century, a handful of capitalist nations had divided up the entire world into colonial empires. Great Britain had by far the largest empire and dominated the world.
This period of colonialism was actually an early stage of imperialism, just as slavery was a stage of racist super-exploitation. Racism did not decline with the abolition of chattel slavery, and imperialism did not decline with the abolition of colonialism. Imperialism is the systematic appropriation of the labor, natural resources, and markets of less developed regions and countries for the profit of the ruling classes of the most developed capitalist nations. Capitalists cannot maximize their profits and expand unless they have access to vast pools of cheap labor, control over raw materials or natural resources, and consumers to buy what is produced (markets). Imperialism is therefore driven by the insatiable need of capitalists for these three things. The competition between capitalists within each nation is expanded to competition between the ruling classes of capitalist nations.
For example, the United States ruling class destroyed native Americans to expand its control from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The young U.S. invaded and attempted to seize much of Canada during the War of 1812. The U.S. invaded and seized most of Mexico during wars in the 1840s. The U.S. went to war with Spain.in 1898 and occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines as colonies. During the 20th century the U.S. replaced Great Britain as the dominant imperialist power. U.S. investments and U.S. military bases grew throughout the world. Since World War II the U.S. has been the leading imperialist power in the capitalist world. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has adopted an increasingly aggressive strategy of trying to prevent the rise of any challenged to U.S. global hegemony (domination).
Imperialist wars. Imperialist competition led inevitably to the two world wars, in which two blocs of imperialists fought for a redivision of empires. The winners of these wars seized the empires of the losers and try to restructure the world under their domination. At least 100 million people were slaughtered in these wars. These world wars led to communist revolutions of workers and peasants in Russia after World War I and in China after World War II. The growing communist movement encouraged and assisted the struggle for national liberation by colonized workers throughout the world. As a result, during the decades after World War II, the imperialists relinquished direct colonial control over their empires and developed a system of indirect domination based on economic, military, and political influence over new ruling elites in the newly "independent" nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This new imperialist system without colonies soon produced enormous economic inequalities and devastating wars. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam alone than had been dropped by all nations during World War II. By the end of the 20th century, the worldwide gap between rich and poor was greater by far than it had every been in the known history of the world.
Communism versus Fascism (Nazism). It is often asserted that communism and fascism are similar, but, in fact, they are basically the opposite of each other. Communism is a working class movement that attempts to fight against racism, nationalism, sexism, and imperialist wars, in order to unite all workers to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system and establish a peaceful and egalitarian world run by the workers themselves. Fascism is a racist, sexist, and violently anti-communist movement that uses patriotism, terror, and a police state to unite the people of one country to support imperialist wars against other countries. Fascism leads to war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Capitalists first built up fascist movements in many countries during the period between the two world wars. The KuKlux Klan is a fascist movement. The U.S. has imposed and supported fascist-like regimes in many countries around the world. There are symptoms of fascism today in the United States, Russia, Germany, Italy, India, and many other countries.
Conclusions: (1) Some Reflections on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath revealed the deadly racist core of the capitalist system. The ruling class used the anticipated 9/11 attacks as a pretext to carry out imperialist oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which they had been planning for years. Now they are using the antiacipated hurricane devastation as a pretext to bar the return of a majority of New Orleans’ black workers. This cynicism and ruthlessness is symptomatic of U.S. decay and the growth of fascism in the United States.
The catastrophe in New Orleans lays bare almost every way in which racism permeates the capitalist system. In pre-Katrina New Orleans over half of the black workers lived below the official poverty line. They sent their children to what The New York Times called the worst and most corrupt public school system in the country. Their segregated neighborhoods were surrounded by environmental toxins from the petrochemical industry that—along with tourism—dominates the Louisiana economy. So many black people have been sickened and died from cancer and other diseases caused by environmental racism that the region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge has come to be known as “cancer alley.”
Since 1960 New Orleans has lost over one-fourth of its population. While the bosses destroyed public services in the city, they promoted racist “white flight” to surrounding parishes (counties). There they promoted KKK/Nazi David Duke in an attempt to terrorize black workers and to manipulate white workers into blaming worsening economic and social conditions on black workers, not on the racist bosses whose cutbacks have actually caused the worsening conditions.
The white capitalists who have long run the city of New Orleans have in recent years turned the administration of much of city government over to black officials. They created what political scientist Adolph Reed called “black urban regimes,” where black politicians serve capitalist interests and try to pacify black workers. In New Orleans under this black urban regime, a black neighborhood was destroyed to make room for the Superdome. Another black neighborhood was destroyed to make way for a Wal-Mart and to create a gentrified strip along the Mississippi river between the French Quarter and the Garden District. Politics was devoted to maximizing profits for the vast shipping along the Mississippi River, for the petrochemical industry, and for the notoriously low wage tourist industry. In return for their services to the ruling class, black politicians gained access to a share of the graft and corruption of New Orleans and Louisiana politics. Two readings that present more information and analysis on on pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans are Gentrifying Disaster (http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=764&type=W), by Mike Davis, from Left Turn. Mike Davis, a widely read urban analyst, and Rebuild New Orleans, Rebuild the World (http://members.cox.net/smrose7/Jay%20Arena%20on%20New%20Orleans.html), by Jay Arena, a sociologist at Tulane University shows that the blacks' struggle against expulsion from New Orleans has been going on since the 1960s.
Workers in every other US city would find these developments familiar. They reflect a pattern and strategy followed by the US ruling class since the 1960s to cut wages and public services, segregate cities and suburbs, and transform designated parts of central cities into financial centers and playgrounds for the rich, while black working class neighborhoods got police terror and mass incarceration.
Conclusions: (2) Some Reflections on the Question of Reparations. The call for reparations for slavery for people of African descent has been widely advocated and widely opposed in recent years. If you think through the logic of the theories, concepts, and analysis of this essay, you should see that Marx and DuBois believed that reparations are not a sufficient remedy or compensation for the crimes of capitalism, racism, and imperialism. In the first place, not only African and African American workers, but workers throughout the world have been robbed by capitalism of their lives and the fruits of their labor for over five centuries. Second, this robbery did not end with the abolition of chattel slavery. It has persisted as racist and imperialist super-exploitation. It is not enough to levy a fine for past crimes when those same crimes are continuing in a different guise in the present. Third, such a fine would not in any way put an end to super-exploitation of workers in the future. In fact, it could be construed as a settlement that gives the green light to future robbery. Fourth, mere financial payments cannot compensate for the mass murder that has accompanied capitalism throughout its existence on this planet. Fifth, it is not only individuals but an entire system that is responsible for slavery, genocide, super-exploitation, and imperialist wars. Marx and DuBois concluded that the system itself deserved the most severe punishment--the death penalty. That is, the working class of the world should abolish the entire system of capitalism.