Is Racism an Inevitable Product of Capitalism?
The death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer has sparked protests across the globe, with thousands upon thousands rising up against systemic racism. In some ways, this feels disturbingly routine, echoing what’s happened in Ferguson, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and any other city that has exploded in response to police brutality. While the comparisons are unavoidable, this time around things are different. For one, this modern movement has been markedly interracial, suggesting a new wave of opposition that is uniting groups like never before. Additionally, the unprecedented backdrop of a global pandemic-induced recession seems to have expanded the conversation towards a broader anger over the brutality, injustice, and inequality that pervade American society, with African Americans at the brunt of all this. People are fed up with “the system”, which whether they realize it or not, is capitalism. Furthermore, calls to “ defund the police” are really just part of a much broader fight to eliminate capitalism.
There is a famous notion popularized by philosopher and economist Karl Marx that capitalism is fundamentally a system based on exploitation. “Capitalist exploitation thus consists in the forced appropriation by capitalists of the surplus value produced by workers. Workers under capitalism are compelled by their lack of ownership of the means of production to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the goods they produce.” (Marx, 1847). The relationship between the capital owner (capitalist) and the worker is unequal from the outset because the worker is usually allocated a fixed wage, valued at less than what they produced. In one way or another, the rich depend on the abundant supply of the poor to maintain their accrued wealth. This tenet means that capitalist societies can never rid themselves of poverty, “the dependency of the rich on the poor is the fundamental, hidden reality of this system.” (Bonachich, 1989).
In the United States, this reality is often hidden underneath the idea that success is like a race in which everyone has an equal opportunity to get ahead. The rich just happen to be the swiftest runners, the most driven and talented. Therefore, the rich are deserving of their wealth while the poor deserve to go without; a relationship between wealth and poverty doesn’t exist. While on paper a meritocracy sounds fair, in actuality a significant number of people have virtually no hope of ever rising from the abject poverty they were born into. The benefits of capitalism are rarely equitably distributed, as wealth tends to accrue to a small percent of the population which gets passed on from generation to generation. One statistic describing the current distribution of U.S. wealth supports this notion, where the three richest American’s hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country. A basic understanding of the fundamentals of capitalism reveals how capital accumulation depends on exploitation, and it is unquestionable that from the early days of the slave trade through the continued physical and economic segregation of today, that African Americans have been the single most exploited group.
While it is surely impossible to deny that Africans were forcibly brought to America for the sole reason that white property owners could exploit their labor for profit, many people still tend to underestimate how foundational slavery was in helping America become the leading economic power. Slavery was an astoundingly modern industry, estimated to be worth a total $3.5 billion in 1860 , making it the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined (Blight). Karl Marx solidifies this point even further when he exclaims, “It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.” (Marx). In Marx’s view, slavery was an essential piece in the development of capitalism as a world system. Furthermore, this is exactly where African Americans fit into the exploitative properties of capitalism. Understanding slavery as a major financial asset makes it easy to see that we literally bought and sold our own working class to exploit to the fullest extent.
Fast forward to 2020, an era where slavery has long been abolished, the society strives to be colorblind, to judge not by color of skin but content of character, and yet despite this rhetoric systemic racism pervades. You need look no further than four officers who thought they would be justified suffocating someone in front of cameras (and thus the world), to at least question the believability of such a feigned reality. This is the reason why an unprecedented amount of people are finally starting to wake up and protest against a system that has been disproportionately affecting African American’s since our nation’s founding. In the labor market over the past 60 years, regardless of national economic health, black unemployment rate has been consistently twice that of whites, and job applicants with white-sounding names get called back about 50% more of the time than applicants with black-sounding names, even when they have identical resumes (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2003). In our justice system, African American men are about 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police (Edwards et al., 2019), in addition to African Americans comprising 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States, double their share of the total population (FBI: UCR, 2016). Even in housing the aftermath of redlining ensues, as people of color are told about and shown fewer homes than whites, and black ownership is at an all-time-low (42% compared to 72% for whites). These statistics only scratch the surface of the inequalities deeply entrenched in the United States. If success is like a race where the most driven and talented are the fastest, African Americans have not only been starting miles behind the rest, but uber rich predominately white-owned corporations have been exploiting their work to consistently finish in the top-tier, ensuring the minority working class stays at the bottom.
Understanding these protests as part of a much broader struggle against capitalism, means the calls to defund the police are more of a rebellion against a horrible aspect of the system as a whole. A society broken into extremes of rich and poor is a society riddled with conflict. If the three richest American’s hold more wealth than the bottom 50%, what is preventing the majority working class from somehow overthrowing the super-rich minority? This is where the police fit into capitalism, as ensuring the exploitation of the working class. Those in favor of defunding the police see cops as agents of the ruling class, whose goal is to protect private property and preserve capitalism, which implies ensuring that the exploited class stays in their place. This is how many explain our nation’s history of police brutality, to protect the status quo involves preserving a marginalized working class. Such a sentiment is summed up perfectly by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre when he said, “Cops are never sent to protect lives. Their job is to protect property and defend the status quo, hence are violent in their very nature.” (Sartre, 1962). Thus, when people are outside protesting against police violence, against “the system”, whether they realize it or not they are protesting capitalism.
Works Cited:
Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, 28 July 2003, www.nber.org/papers/w9873. Accessed 16 June 2020.
Blight, David. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877. Online.
Bonachich, Edna. “Racism in Advanced Capitalist Society: Comments on William J. Wilson ’s The Truly Disadvantaged.” Western Michigan University, Dec. 1989.
Edwards, Frank, et al. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use-of-Force in the U.S. by Age, Race/Ethnicity, and Sex.” School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, 2 Aug. 2019.
Gerassi, John. Sartre, Jean Paul Literary And Philosophical Essays ( Collier, 1962). Internet Archive, Yale University Press, 2009, archive.org/stream/SartreJeanPaulLiteraryAndPhilosophicalEssaysCollier1962/Sartre%2C%20Jean-Paul%20-%20Talking%20with%20Sartre%20%5Bed.%20Gerassi%5D%20%28Yale%2C%202009%29_djvu.txt.
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1963
Marx, Karl, 1847, Wage Labour and Capital, New York: New York Labour News Company, 1902
“Persons Arrested.” FBI, 2016, ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/persons-arrested. Accessed 16 June 2020.
