Racism, it seems to me, is a direct outshoot of capitalism. If this (including other seemingly immoral behaviour which I will not explore here) is the kind of spawn capitalism produces, it seems to follow quite irrefutably that capitalism is a deeply immoral system. I would like to contend that the creation of racism is essential to the history of the capitalist regime.
In Marx's Communist Manifesto, he outlines three necessary parts of capitalism that makes it a particularly violent struggle. I will deal with the first one here, in other words, that capitalist society is split into two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariates. That is, the owners of the means of production, and the workers or labourers. Thus, in order to create this system of capitalism, vast amounts ar-of workers were needed. Many of these workers were found in Africa. Africa, in fact, was sucked dry of its resources (both human and natural materials), nourishing and sustaining what are now first world countries, and in the process whithering and creating third world countries. In other words, it is important to realise that the luxury of first world countries are founded on the exploitation and subjugation of third world countries. Felix Mnthali, a Malawian poet, encapsulates this sentiment in his poem "The Stranglehold of English Lit.":
Your elegance of deceit,
Jane Austen,
lulled the sons and daughters
of the dispossessed
into a calf-love
with irony and satire
around imaginary people
While history went on mocking
the victims of branding irons
and sugar-plantations
that made Jane Austen's people
wealthy beyond compare!
It seems logical toto assert that racism went hand-in-hand with this exploitation that layered so much wealth on Western countries. That is, racism seems to have been created at a way of bringing about this proletariat class of workers and labourers. The construct of race was used to continually remind black people of their apparent inferiority and their 'proper' position beneath the rule of whites. In this way, race was a convenient tool to keep an implicitly subjugated proletariate population which Marx regards as so essential to a capistalist system. Surely examples of symptoms of capitalism are Aparheid and slavery?
I am completely open to refutations by Phong, or anyone else who thinks this blogpost has problems.
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world looks rationally back. ~~G.W.F. Hegel
Isn't it possible to regard racism as its own sort of historical inevitability and not solely the result of capitalist infrastructure? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud discusses the commonality and inevitability of strife (of which racism is certainly a form) amongst peoples with relatively trivial dissimilarities. (This analogy works in the sense that race is a largely unscientific and misleading means of categorization.) He writes that despite the overabundance of likeness relative to differences between certain groups of comparable people, conflict often arises resulting from the human inclination towards pugnacity. This proclivity, which Freud calls “the inclination to aggression,” serves to engender camaraderie within a self-recognizing community. Freud writes: “Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness." This inclination to aggressiveness, due to its important definitional value, must inevitably be exercised. Given the simultaneous requisite for community and fraternity and the function of the inclination to aggression to reinforce solidarity, it cannot be easily inflicted on members of one’s own assemblage and is therefore turned outwards. Consequently, a “neighbor is not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts [a person] to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him." If this sort of behavior is one of humanity's unavoidable features, isn't it possible to argue that racism and other forms of discrimination would exist with or without a capitalist infrastructure?
ReplyDeleteIf I may qualify your position a little bit, I wouldn't so much say that racism is derivative of capitalism, but I do think that the two ideas are closely related in form. I would assert that they are both instances of the more general Lord-Bondsman conflict that we find in Hegel -- and it's hard to get more generalized than that. It definitely seems plausible that we could make the case that racism necessarily follows from capitalism, and I think it's important to explore that line of thought. But I think we should also be open to the idea of both concepts (racism and capitalism) as being tokens of the master-slave type, one not necessarily derivative of the other.
ReplyDeleteEmpirically, though, it does make an interesting case as you've described. It definitely seems contingently true at least that racism can follow from capitalism.