BEWARE, THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM, BUT RATHER A TRUE INDICTMENT OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND NEGROPHOBIA
Fred Hampton:
We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism…. We’re going to fight… with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.
I take all of the above statements for various forms of class reductionism. Here are my problems with class reductionism:
- While white supremacy is most likely an offshoot of capitalism, capitalism is not the foundation of white supremacy. The difference is fundamental; a house can't stand without its foundations. This is the reasoning those I hold for class reductionists use to justify their argument that not only you can't get rid of white supremacy without getting rid or fixing capitalism, but also that getting rid of or fixing capitalism will fix the white supremacy and racism issues.
- Capitalism is a motor and white supremacy is pollution. If you create a giant motor, and let it run for hundreds of years leading to mass pollution of the planet... Will turning it off or destroying the motor make your planet unpolluted? White supremacy is probably an offshoot of capitalism. That doesn't imply that destroying capitalism will destroy white supremacy. White supremacy became its own entity, with its own means of oppression, its own levers, its own paradigm, that cannot be understood entirely by the prism of class struggle, even if fathered by capitalism.
- Africans in China being barred from businesses, or accused of carrying COVID-19 and evicted and thrown out in the streets... Is that a consequence of capitalism? Is the heavy discrimination/hatred practiced by Italy against Africans standing on the shoulder of capitalism, when in facts, it goes against capitalist interests? Italy to legalize 200,000 migrants in the face of labor shortages; Is Eastern Europe's determination to preserve whiteness from any melanated folks a result of capitalism? Will the white American child who says the n-word all of a sudden be "liberated" from the racism somehow "imposed on himself" by the capitalist system once this one system crumbles?
- White supremacy is a global culture which transcends economic systems. The destruction of black Wall Street isn't the fruit of capitalism. It's the fruit of a culture of hatred that was cultivated organically by all classes of so-called superior races. it doesn't even make sense when put under the lens of capitalism (see below).
- Capitalism doesn't even necessarily fukk with racism, for racism doesn't make sense in a capitalist system, because it makes it inefficient. Barring black workers from your capitalist company doesn't make sense economically. Preventing a major segment of people from getting richer based on an arbitrary trait is destroying a consumer base and huge market. Civil rights/integration benefited capitalism as well as its needs for constant growth, in fact, it fits in capitalist ideals. Capitalist interests were actually some of the reasons leading to the official abolition of slavery by enslaving nations.
- The Kwame Nture argument that because "capitalism destroyed us, then we must be socialist" is also flawed. The argument "my enemy was X when he beat me, so I must become Y, the opposite of X" is a poor one.
Strawman about class-reductionism:
The Myth of Class Reductionism
Although there are no doubt random, dogmatic class reductionists out there, the simple fact is that no serious tendency on the left contends that racial or gender injustices or those affecting LGBTQ people, immigrants, or other groups as such do not exist, are inconsequential, or otherwise should be downplayed or ignored. Nor do any reputable voices on the left seriously argue that racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are not attitudes and ideologies that persist and cause harm.
“Class reductionism” is, in other words, a myth.
Not at all the argument that class-reductionism puts up. Class-reductionism doesn't say that marxists, socialists and other don't believe in racism or minimize it. It says they don't understand its full scope, namely as a culture operating beyond economic systems.
That is NOT to say that capitalism benefits black people, that capitalism is good, that trying to tackle capitalism can't be beneficial to black people. Talking about class reductionism doesn't mean that capitalism is any good. I'm not saying any of that.
I'm saying stop simplifying issues by using shortcuts that trivialize them. I'm not surprised that white Marxists, socialists, etc. love this idea that in fighting capitalism they actually fighting white supremacy. But I'm surprised that today, a lot of black people harp on this idea too, especially with all the progress we made in understanding how white supremacy and negrophobia work globally as a culture, regardless of the system it operates under. I just don't want my peers to fall for the thousandth okey-dokey talking about "comrade"
with their oppressed white brother just to end up in a new system, where the same brother will tell them to stop with identity politics, since "racism disappeared with the revolution stop being divisive". While practicing the same insidious negrophobia & discrimination that permeates every society and system regardless of ideological positioning.
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I wouldn't go that far myself.
