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Causes for Racism, Patriarchalism, etc...
Can someone give me a good explanation about why these exist in the capitalist society? What are the real causes of racism? What are the real causes of patriarchalism? I know that the idiot idealists sometimes say that racism is caused by prejudice, but this is plain stupid.
We are materialists. What are the material or caused-by-material causes for these two forms of domination coming into existence and existing in liberal capitalism?
I am very ignorant in this matter but I can't seem to find texts online (And there should be a Marxist Google, half of these texts justify racism with biological determinism)
Simple. Racism is used by the ruling class to stop opposition to their class position. In the North American colonies in 1660, both whites and blacks were indentured servants. But, the ruling class saw that their indentured servants were organizing for economic justice and such, and did the following:
1) They stopped indenturing white people
2) They gave them a little bit of land.
3) They let the former white slaves head the slave patrols.
And when they did this, the revolts died almost immediately. And that is how the US became one of the rare nations in human history to enslave people based on the color of skin emot-toot.gif.
During the US civil war, southern slave owners said if the slaves were freed, they would take white people's jobs. Sounds a bit similar, no? Of course, poor white southerners didn't notice that slaves already had the jobs and that the plantation owners were tricking them to fight against their own interests.
Now, we have immigrants coming into the country because of god awful conditions in their home countries caused by capitalists, and the capitalists say the immigrants are stealing our jobs when the employer has no intention of 1) Hiring us anyways; and 2) Treating us/paying us better than they treat the immigrants if they aren't forced to; and 3) treating the immigrants better in their home countries to stop the pressure for immigration.
Tim Wise is the guy that helped me formulate this. He isn't a marxist, its not what he focuses on, but he recognizes class. http://www.timwise.org/2008/05/full-...equality-2007/
Last edited by odysseus; 21st November 2015 at 00:44.
So, just one answer and I'm still bugged by this. I'm kinda skeptical to "The evil bourgeoisie manipulates our minds" as it seems kinda "Illuminatist" theory but the example you gave do makes sense.
Yes. This is obviously nonsense. It does not explain anything. Racism causes racist prejudice, not the other way around.
Colonialism/imperialism is at the root of racism. Colonized people are then a source of exploitation. Exploitation is at the root of both racism and sexism.
It can be tough to find good texts. I could find a few of them (not necessarily Marxist):
The Political Economy of Racism
Theories of Patriarchy
I may be able to find more later. By the way, this is the Marxist Google you have been looking for.
☭ “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” - Karl Marx ☭
Recall: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” - Karl Marx
Obviously, this is not all there is to it (and it is not so much a "conspiracy"), but it is definitely true that racism and sexism are ideologically reinforced.
Last edited by Comrade #138672; 26th November 2015 at 15:43.
☭ “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” - Karl Marx ☭
Thank you very much, didn't knew the Marxists.org had a search mechanism.
Capitalism, by design, tries to commodify everything, including human bodies. So it seems to me that racism in the US is primarily an ethical system that emerged from the atlantic slave; in any context where human beings have been materially objectified, it is inevitable that dehumanizing language will reflect and describe that process. Cultural ideology explains why people desire overpriced designer goods (desires manufactured by bourgeoisie); cultural ideology also explains the inverse: any potential threat to the relations of production (in this case the threat is the dignity and equality of black people) must be constructed as repugnant or dangerous; racism is essentially an economic phenomena.
"The mere fact that most states are obliged today to spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly."
Evidently that would equate to racism being caused by racism, which would be a problem for them. There is a certain racism to such viewpoints, by the way, in that they posit racism as inherently logical. 'Biological determinism' rarely adds much to accounts of racism other than 'racism exists because racism exists,' which suggests similar affinities to racism, as also views regarding racism emerging through someone feeling racist, as if that wasn't tautologous.
While this has been discussed previously, and though 'patriarchy' and racism should probably be distinguished in terms of origins and such, it is worth noting that slavery in particular tended to gain such associations in a significant sense when capitalism was in its process of formation, and hence how slavery interacted with the emergence of the proletariat is possibly central to such issues, as well as of course forming a means through which the proletariat evaluated their own position. In a sense the term 'wage slavery' would imply the degree to which undermining these distinctions of race might have been a concern in that they prevent slavery from functioning in complete isolation, and hence encouraged to a degree the unity of these disparate factions. That would have made racism into a fairly important gloss over the actual functioning of the social system, through creating an artificial, sometimes unacknowledged isolation, although it also implies that 'anti-racism' that doesn't grasp these relations might be suspect.
While one could certainly say that capitalism had to leave racism in place despite its push towards abstract equality and the incorporation of people into the work-place, hence in brief that racism could also serve as a distraction from the central class antagonism or express a certain level of detachment or distaste towards such on the part of the populace, meaning a concrete departure from the abstract political equality of capital and its corresponding economic subjugation, this would imply at the least that racism was not fully identified with capital. In that sense, struggles against 'racism' which were not struggles against capital were possible, but it has to be said that racism is not thereby indifferent to capital, but touches very closely on it and requires a high degree of clamping-down to prevent it from leading to explicit socialist conclusions. Ideas of 'prejudice' probably stem from this attempt to do away with the question entirely.
Racism was increasingly incorporated into the search for 'national identity,' or the attempt to define particular nations as unique in some way despite their incorporation into the total capital, which while it was unstable nonetheless was an inherent part of such a process and as such 'racial' issues could overlap closely with opposition to 'globalisation' and such without accepting the trivial alternative of 'localism' which was never likely to appear convincing or be so. It was necessary in such a context to find 'personal' distinctions, or abstract ones, which don't imply a view or activity, etc., which could give the illusion of nationality among bourgeois nations, to substitute for a lack of such in the wider bourgeois context. It was hence the case that alongside the movement away from an understanding of society as such, or as something which isn't just a group of atoms, there was likewise a need for things such as racism to justify national feeling, patriotism, and such other illusions among bourgeois nations. At the same time, of course, the capitalist tendency to label people increasingly irrational had led to a reaction to racism which was in many ways assimilated, but at the same time sterile, while at the same time preserving racism as the only means to preserve the self-conscious irrationality of bourgeois patriotism and loyalty.
As such, racism would have perhaps more of a connection with national questions than other forms of 'discrimination' frequently compared to it.
Racism was likely a product of both resentment by white laborers against non-whites (you still see this today with race-based opposition to immigrant labor) and a need by the ruling class to divide workers to prevent labor and political organization across racial lines.
Patriarchal attitudes seem to come from upper-class family relations; under capitalism they would be reflective of the bourgeois family. I would assume that because upper-class women did not labor in the same way that peasant and worker women did, their sexuality was commodified, hence the bourgeois ideal of the homemaker who is mostly valued for her existence as a mate (even homemaking duties would have been handled by domestic laborers).
Ah, this answer is very good. This seems to be the best explanation. For me, at least.
Really? In Brazil the lower classes are way more patriarchal than the upper class and the ideologized lower class.
Or at least it seems to to me.
EDIT: I know that historically the bourgeois class was more patriarchal at the time of Marx.
