How Racism Is An Essential Tool For Maintaining The Capitalist Order - Richard WolffPopularResistance.Org

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Why were African Americans “chosen” to be key (but not the only)
cyclical shock-absorbers in the United States? One factor concerned the
racist legacies of U.S. slavery. They included beliefs that slaves were
either not fully human or inferior humans. Even the U.S. Constitution
had counted a slave as merely three-fifths of a full (i.e., white)
person for census purposes. Accommodation to slavery before the U.S.
Civil War had already shaped a racialized consciousness in both masters
and slaves. And because U.S. slavery entailed different skin colours for
masters and slaves (unlike many slaveries in world history), a readily
identifiable minority had already been defined in racial terms in the
slave portions of the United States. Moreover, that definition had
spread to other parts of the United States as well. U.S. capitalism
used, absorbed, and built on slavery’s legacy by inserting large
portions of the African American community into the shock-absorber role
that the system required. The racism developed by U.S. slavery thereby
both facilitated U.S. capitalism and was reinforced by it.




A significant portion of the white working class in all capitalisms
has always also been forced into the shock-absorber role. “White trash”
in U.S. capitalism was never far from the African Americans similarly
situated. There thus arose possibilities of class solidarity between
these Black and white working-class communities. U.S. history displays
moments when those possibilities were realized, as C. Vann Woodward
documented so well. It also displays moments of intense racist violence
used to block the realization of those possibilities. Employers played
on racialized differences to keep employees from unifying against them.
In bitter competitions between Black and white shock-absorbers for
cyclically scarce jobs, whites could and often did use racism to gain
advantages in access to those jobs. In multiple ways, then, capitalism
fostered and benefited from racism; it thus settled deeply into the
system.




Fundamental injustice characterized the relationship between police
and prisons, on the one hand, and the African American and other
communities (Indigenous, people of color) condemned to play capitalism’s
shock-absorber role, on the other. The solution was and is not better
training or more funding; both have been tried repeatedly and both have
likewise failed repeatedly. A real solution would provide a decently
paid job to everyone who wants one as a matter of right. Unemployment
would then be outlawed much like slavery, child abuse, etc. Taxes levied
on capitalist enterprises would provide the funds needed to find jobs,
private or public, for those laid off by an employer (much as such taxes
help fund unemployment insurance now). Those funds would include wages
or salaries paid for each worker’s time between being laid off and
rehired. Minimum wages, applied universally, would cover reasonable
housing, transport, health care and other living costs.




If such a solution were deemed to be incompatible with capitalism as a
system, capitalism would have to give way to a system that made
adequately paid employment a basic right for all. Enterprise profit
would then finally be ejected from its throne as capitalism’s number one
social priority.




Such a solution would finally free African Americans, Indigenous, and
Brown people from long-standing abuses in and by police and prisons. It
would thus reduce the racism that those institutions have exemplified
and reinforced. It would also reduce pressures on police and prison
personnel to behave in ways that self-destructively rob them of their
humanity as well as oppress others. Police and prisons in the United
States today serve an inherently unstable capitalism by means of
systemic racism. The logic of the alliance between anti-racism and
anti-capitalism could not be clearer.