(this article borrows from this article by Matt Birkhold and this book by Cedric Robinson)

To understand racism you must understand capitalism. To understand capitalism you must understand racism. Capitalism feeds on the Aristotelian notion of the haves and the have-nots. That some of us are destined to be slaves to those destined to be powerful and that the central fight in political justice is the battle between the two. Yet, the relationship of race and capital is intimate in the United States not only insofar that capital is racially divided but that capitalism used race as a tool to further its own means.

Capitalism has not always existed, let’s get that out of the way first. The term capital had been used to describe the means of production but not used as a term for an economic system nor as a term for who owned these means. The first usage of the term capitalist doesn’t appear until the mid 1600s and is not popular lexicon until the early-to-mid 1800s. Capitalism, referring to an economic system, does not enter popular usage until to the mid-to-late 1800s, nearly 100 years after America’s independence. This is not when capitalism started, but the portrayal that it has existed for some infinitely long period of time is a myth worth dispelling.

It is not until the mid-1600s as the age of mercantilism dies and the industrial revolution begins that we see the modern makings of capitalism. The proto-industrialization that began at the peak of the Dutch and English East India Companies and continued into the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s is what birthed a system of economics in which individuals, not the state or the aristocracy, could own the means of production. Where trade could be operated for profit by a collection on non-state-sponsored tradesmen and where machinery for industrialization could be constructed and/or purchased by wealthy individuals for their own means, the days of the state’s monopoly on profit had ended.

With this new found economic freedom the mercantile class transformed into the capitalist class who sought to build factories and wealth. Many of them set sail across the world in hopes of opening such industrial sectors in regions where there were none. The New World, the Americas, became littered with groupings of would-be capitalists hoping to find successful mining operations for precious metals or farming operations for rare spices and dyes. With the state guaranteeing them property rights for discovering new lands, these would-be capitalists sought to enrich themselves in a world unshackled from feudal chains. The mid-1600s through the early-1700s become a time of rapid expansion in the Americas as Europeans from many governments flood the land with these ideals.

However, these proto-capitalists ran into trouble. They couldn’t plow these lands, grow these crops and transport them back to domestic markets on their own, and they knew this. They brought with them slaves and servants. Indentured servitude was the modal labor form in the early days of the New World as Europeans brought with them debtors and prisoners, promising them freedom in exchange for the harshest of labors. But, just as feudal revolts overthrew vassal lords, the servants soon fought back. There is power in numbers and the servants knew it. When European peasants arrived in the New World they resisted the exploitation of their labor. Servants would flee into the forests or sabotage work in order to run out the clock on their contracts while avoiding the savage conditions of their labor. Multi-ethnic rebellions began to crop up across Colonial Virginia. Laborers conspired to steal munitions and arm themselves, Black and European arm-in-arm.

In 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion began as enslaved and indentured Africans and Europeans took up arms against their masters. The rebellion lasted nine months. Eventually the colonial government was able to put down the rebellion but along with it came several new laws. Not laws to make life better for the laborer, but laws to divide labor amongst racial lines.

See, it is not that racism has never existed. But, race rarely had such a profound character in the ancient world until the Industrial Revolution. For the most part communities were highly isolated in a pre-globalized, pre-capitalist society. When Mansa Musa parades through the Arabian Peninsula with his riches he is not met with extensive racial epithets. When Julius Caesar and the Romans occupied the Maghreb, and had experienced relations with those even further south and much darker like the Nubians, they did not regard them as lesser simply because of their skin. Slavery was related to a power dynamic, of course, but not inherently related to skin colors. Those who could read, write, build and fight were generally regarded on equal footing regardless of their pigmentation. Those who could be enslaved would be and those who could not would be regarded differently. Racism as a system of power structures that would oppress groups solely on the color of their skin is a capitalist invention.

After Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, colonial governments began to pass laws enshrining permanent, indefinite, enslavement of African persons. Laws barring those of certain skin complexions from citizenship and personhood. Laws banning the intermarriage of Africans and Europeans. What the capitalists were unwilling to pay in cash they could pay in legal privileges for Whites. By enshrining racial discrimination, they could foster a superiority among the White populace that would prevent cross-color multi-ethnic rebellions. Never before had people been ‘White’ or ‘Black’. They had been European (and disaggregated into Italians, English, Irish, German etc) and African. But, now well removed from their homelands and race given a legal status, the capitalists had turned the laborers against one another. The emergence and maintenance of Whiteness became integral to the economic growth of the country and from then-forth capitalism would always be racial capitalism.

W. E. B. Du Bois said that Whites would prefer poverty to equality with Blacks. When the Civil War ended, Blacks did not magically get afforded the equality they’d been promised. Whiteness was already of ingrained value to the White population as an extension of the systemic racial system that had been built. Thus, when presented with an opportunity to follow the political leadership of Black people into a more democratic and humane world, they instead chose to protect their whiteness. Explaining their rationale, Du Bois wrote that while they received a low wage, they “were compensated in part by a public and psychological wage,” that “had great effect on their personal treatment and the deference shown them.” Rather than ‘compete’ with Blacks in an open market, Whites had a space in the economic sector carved out for them from the beginning, and their racial antagonism has long been weaponized by the powers of capital to sustain the capitalist system.

If the workers fight each other, they cannot band together to fight the capitalists. After reconstruction, Blacks continued to be marginalized. When FDR implements the New Deal to save the company from the Great Depression via massive social reforms, Blacks were almost entirely excluded from such benefit. As industrialization rises, profits decline and the protest of the workers rise. This is part of a fundamental flaw in capitalism known as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. But the American Whiteman’s commitment to Whiteness meant this tendency was stunted because Whites would not fight alongside Blacks. And when Whites went on strike the capitalists could hire Blacks to scab, sucking power out of the labor movements. By the time unions in the United States decided to fight alongside Black workers, the United States economy was already a global juggernaut.

The reforms of the New Deal helped the labor movements but did only did so along the color line. Redlining meant that the cheap loans given to workers to start businesses and own homes only went to White workers in White neighborhoods. The G.I. Bill only applied to a largely White military at the time and Blacks were excluded from veteran’s benefits. Suburbs were federally constructed and highways connected Whites to Whites. In 1970 Black socialist activist James Boggs wrote, “In the same way that blacks have been forced to take on the old substandard jobs, disdained and discarded by whites, they have been confined to used homes, used schools, used churches, and used stores…For the used homes and churches they make excessive payments which add to the total capital available to the entire economy for new buildings, new plants, new churches, new homes. As in the days of primitive accumulation, the entire white community benefits, not only from the direct receipt of interest and principal on these homes and churches but in terms of new industries with their streamlined buildings and their increasingly skilled jobs.”

According to Boggs, the economic and technological privilege of Whites in America stunted their social and political growth when compared to disenfranchised groups. For the majority of the history of America, being White offered a ticket to the middle class, while other races had to huddle together in communities forgotten and ignored by the system. “Step by step, choice by choice…they have become the political victims of the system they themselves created, unable to make political decisions on the basis of principle no matter how crucial the issue.” As capitalism began to cannibalize the currency of Whiteness, Whites began to blame the failings of the system on other races. Capitalism is fundamentally a system that requires inequities but when those inequities hit White communities, they blamed the ‘success’ of minorities for causing the failings of the system.

As the Black movement began to grow larger and gain true political currency the hands of those in charge were forced. The movements needed to be co-opted in order to maintain power. While the voices of Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers sounded the panging alarums of a socialist revolt to fix the ails of capitalism and racism those in power behind the spectre of the Red Scare responded by enfranchising Blacks. As laws were made to legally enshrine equality of employment and equality of housing, the two pillars of racial communism (housing and jobs) began to fall. The means of curbing the rate of profit decline in America, racial exclusion of jobs and housing, began to decay. The system needed to change.

Mass incarceration, proliferation of drug usage and a dramatic increase in credit/debt has defined the period of time from the 1980s to the present. Systems by which Blacks and other minorities can still be restricted from the ability to accumulate capital or to act on systems that can change it. It’s why as of 2018 Blacks living in Boston has a familial networth of $4 but Whites have a familial networth of $250,000. It’s why felony disenfranchisement is still the norm in America while Blacks make up a shockingly disproportionate number of those arrested. The currency of Whiteness has been preserved to continue stemming the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. To keep Whites in a position to buy goods by accruing wealth of the backs of poor Blacks. Yet it is also why the veil of Whiteness has been as fluid and transient as ever. Despite the best efforts of the system, Blacks are closer to parity with Whites in the United States than they’ve been since the landing of the Mayflower.

The currency of Whiteness has long lost its edge and is losing its value. While being White still has many structural advantages it is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a life well-lived. For many it is now weaker in power than it had ever been, economically. For many Whites this has led to a greater solidarity with minorities as seen in the multi-ethnic multi-colored protests for Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Pride or the increase in interracial marriages and the mass consumption of Black media. But for other it has given power to a White nationalism not seen in America in decades. The currency of Whiteness is nearly gone and those who once benefited from it are sympathetic to voices promising to make America what it once was. The dog whistles of White nationalism are now bullhorns of racial prejudice that have resonated well with a, not small, group of Whites desperate for a return to their value.

Factories have disappeared, neighborhoods have deserted and wealth inequality has soared at a rate that now leaves substantial numbers of Whites straddling the poverty line. But racism is not something that can be defeated alone. Racism is entrenched into the structural system that has allowed capitalism to last as long as it has in the United States. Capitalism in the US has robbed Peter to pay Paul, or to paraphrase Kanye West, robbed Jerome to pay Brandon, until there was nothing left to take. And now that the economic apparatus has reached its limit and is suffering from an endless series of economic turbulences, the natural outcome of capitalism, a section of the elite see the lessons of the past. And just as colonial governors buoyed capitalism by racial means, there are those would seek to do so again.

It is important to recognize the system. Capitalism in the United States is inherently, and needs-be, racist. As the racial barriers in capitalism began to fray the capitalists needed new ones. The system is built to disenfranchise. Had African boats sailed to the New World before European ones it could just as easily been Black supremacy that reigned supreme in the Americas. The United States was still a burgeoning country when the Europeans raped Africa and Asia for their capitalist exploits. The United States still managed to enforce the same colonial punishments on Latin America. Capitalism, in America, used poor Blacks to enrich middle class Whites so that these middle class Whites could enrich the capitalists in a way that allowed capitalism to maintain itself far past its life-expectancy. The central bonus was forcing Whites and Blacks to spend the first 300 years on this continent fighting one another instead of allowing them a chance to foster class consciousness.

It is not only important to recognize the system but it is also important to recognize how we got here. There has not been a centuries long cognizant effort by some cabal of shadow capitalists to perpetuate this system. The original power dynamic in the settling of America saw Europeans in the dominant capitalist role which made it easiest to ‘otherize’ Africans. Knowing they could not fight off organized labor the capitalists needed to disorganize labor. Capitalists in America, and all of the world, continue to disorganize labor in any means they can, not just racial ones. The racial lines were created which quickly gave value to the currency of Whiteness that could allow a psychological wage to offset the lack of a real competitive wage. Once the first set or two of capitalists and statists implemented this system it was able to reify itself regularly. White children would grow up in an environment where not only were they told they were superior to Black children, but the economic system made them superior to Black children. It deprived Blacks of simple means of entering the market like education, housing and jobs by design.

In many ways we’ve overcome these racial barriers because there is no shadow government that maintains these laws. They can be overturned. The system can be fought. But it has never been easy and it never will be easy. And there can be no end to racism without an end to capitalism. Exploitative systems are all one-in-the-same. If it did become viable in the future there would be no reason to believe that capitalism could not lead to similar racial oppression of Whites or Hispanics or any other group. Capitalism breeds exploitation and systems of exploitation. It does all over the world and has the means to do so again. Capitalism is exploitative and capitalism is racist. Getting rid of capitalism will not necessarily get rid of racism, but racism cannot be gotten rid of while capitalism exists.

-huey