Class rule

It is impossible to properly understand race and racism’s evolution in the US (and elsewhere) without grasping how it developed in accord with the economic and political imperatives of capital and class rule. Racial othering, the dehumanizing consignment of Black (along with Native American) people to the realm of Nature, beyond the sphere of human Society and the social contract, permitted the southern US ruling class and the broader American capitalist system to profit and expand on the basis of the ruthless class-race exploitation and torture of Black labor -- as chattel slaves, sharecroppers, debt peons, prison laborers, and poorly paid wage-earners. It also fueled working class divisions that undermine the popular solidarity required for mass opposition to the American capitalist class. The great Black scholar W E B DuBois wrote brilliantly about what he called ‘the psychological wage’ of whiteness, whereby ordinary white working people cling to the notion that their skin color confers special power and privileges that compensate for their subordination (wage-enslavement) to capital.

At the same time, it is inconceivable that the nation’s savage inequalities of race, intimately related to and overlapping with its ferocious disparities of class, will ever be properly addressed, much less overcome, under capitalism. The bourgeois system, caught up in a continuous global intra-capitalist struggle for markets, materials, labor supplies, and share of the surplus value and profit pie, does not have a socially responsible surplus at hand to even begin to remotely redress the massive racial disparity created by the genocidal oppression and wealth extraction imposed on Black people since even before the nation was founded. At the same time, the ruling class remains deeply invested in racial divide-and-rule. Like economic/class inequality, racial inequality and oppression will never be overcome under the capitalist mode of production, something that is most particularly evident and true in a deeply racist nation whose original and pivotal accumulation of capital was achieved through Black chattel slavery.

Much the same can be said about gender disparity and oppression. Any remotely and unbiased observer can and should know that gender oppression predates the capitalist system and possesses a perverse, many-sided logic and life of its own under capitalism. Like toxic whiteness and intimately related to it, toxic maleness and opposition to women’s rights is a major force in right-wing neofascist politics. It is also a major factor in daily American life, with girls and women regularly subjected to horrific abuse ranging from verbal harassment and shaming to beatings, rape, and murder.

Excerpted: ‘No Solutions Under Capitalism: Revolution is Required’

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