How Racism is an Essential Tool for Maintaining the Capitalist Order

http://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/26/how-racism-is-an-essential-tool-for-maintaining-the-capitalist-order/
Date Written:  2020-06-26
Publisher:  Counterpunch
Year Published:  2020
Resource Type:  Website
Cx Number:  CX24742

U.S. capitalism survived because it found a solution to the basic problem of its instability, its business cycles. Since capitalism never could end cyclical downturns and their awful effects, its survival required making those effects somehow socially tolerable. Systemic racism survived in the post-Civil War United States partly because it helped to achieve that tolerability. Capitalism provided conditions for the reproduction of systemic racism, and vice versa.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalism's business cycle shock-absorber the last hired, first fired across the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles.

For capitalism, making such a minority absorb most of the costs of capitalism's instability allowed the majority of the working class to be relatively exempted, relieved, freed from them. The majority could be less subject to cycles because the minority was made relatively much more subject. Capitalism promised the majority relatively secure jobs and incomes because it took those away from the minority. The majority could thus worry less about the next cycle, whereas the minority had to worry more and adjust their lives more. Racists could then attribute the resulting differences between minority and majority subparts of a population to inherent qualities of different races instead.

Other advanced capitalist countries found parallel solutions. Some condemned immigrants to play the role assigned to African Americans in the United States. Racism aimed at immigrants often followed. In cyclical upswings, immigrants would be brought in: North Africans into France, southern Italians into Switzerland, Turks into Germany, and so on. Then, cyclical downswings would return those immigrants to their home countries. Capitalisms would thus save on costs of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, etc., for the workers who had returned. While some capitalisms relied on domestic minorities to be shock-absorbers and others relied on immigrants, some countries relied on both. The United States used Central American immigrants alongside domestic African Americans, and it still does. Germany allowed some immigrants to settle and acquire German citizenship alongside Turkish and other immigrant guest workers.

Subject Headings

• Racism