CAPITALISM REQUIRES RACISM AND INEQUALITY

According to Dr Ruth Wilson Gilmore, capitalism requires inequality to function, and racism enshrines that inequality. Or, as the great Pan-Africanist Malcolm X put it, ‘You can’t have capitalism without racism.’

In this clip from a recent talk, Gilmore, a scholar at @GC_CUNY, who has been studying the relationship between racism, capitalism, and the US prison system for over 30 years, explained that capitalism needs to keep people divided into categories to continue exploiting them. If nothing separates us, one can imagine the dangers a united working class might pose to the capitalist system.

In addition to dividing modern workers, capitalists needed to deploy racism to develop the initial capital used to create their now global system. Thus came chattel slavery in the Americas, g*nocide across multiple continents, and colonial theft around the world. 

In the words of assassinated Burkina Faso President Thomas Sankara (1949-87), ‘It is our blood that nourished the rise of capitalism, that made possible our present condition of dependence and consolidated our underdevelopment. But we cannot hide the truth anymore; it cannot be ignored. The figures cannot be simply haggled away. For every Black man who came to the plantations, five died or were crippled.’Sources:https://communist.red/capitalism-and-racism-a-marxist-introduction/

https://www.marxists.org/archive/sankara/1984/october/04.htm

https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2023/02/07/ruthie-wilson-gilmore-abolition-geography

https://globalsocialtheory.org/topics/racial-capitalism/