The following is an excerpt from PLP’s document, Fighting Racism: A Key Struggle (1982). For the full version, go to https://tinyurl.com/plpfightingracism. Following the Charlie Kirk debacle, the document serves as a good reminder that while race is a made-up concept, racism is very much a real central aspect this profit system. The fight for an antiracist world is inseparable from a communist one.
The fight against racism is one of the major aspects of the fight for an egalitarian society and should be seen as central to the struggle for communism. Racism is not an “accidental” or “incidental” aspect of capitalism, but an essential one. Nowhere has there been, or will there be, a capitalist society which is non-racist. Capitalist relations of production created historically and maintained everywhere to the present day the material basis of racism. At the same time, racism, closely linked with anti-communism, is a major aspect of bourgeois ideology.
This article raises a four general points:
(1) The fight against racism under capitalism is not “just another reform.”
(2) Capitalism cannot and will not ever eliminate racism, so all non-communist antiracist movements are doomed to failure.
(3) To the extent that capitalist production relations are allowed to exist under the dictatorship of the proletariat, racism will continue to exist even if efforts are made to fight it on an ideological and on an economic level.
(4) To the extent that racism continues to form a part of people’s consciousness, it will be difficult or impossible to build a communist society.
Racism: a central aspect of capitalism
Pre-capitalist societies had many ways of dividing the oppressed classes and creating group hostilities, but the notion of “race” was probably not one of them. The idea of “natural” differences among human groups--in the sense of biological differences—was closely linked to the rise of modern science. In particular, the development of taxonomy (classification of living things) was a product of the rapid overseas expansion of European mercantile capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a prerequisite for the “scientific” classification of human “types.”
Creating racism to justify exploitation
At the same time, the rise of capitalism in Europe depended on the forcible incorporation of Africans, Asians, Native Americans and other “people of color” into the sphere of capitalist production relations. The so-called “primitive accumulation of capital” which fueled the development of industry in Europe was nothing but the expropriation of wealth and labor power from non-European societies. At first, the European bourgeoisie justified this rip-off using religion: the Pope divided the world and told the rulers of Spain and Portugal who could do their ripping-off where. But this was not enough--it was necessary to explain why these people were to be ripped off rather than converted, and besides, after the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the leading national bourgeoisie of England, Sweden, and Holland didn’t care what the Pope said anyway. So, the idea of distinct “racial” groups, some of which were supposedly inferior to others, came to play the key legitimizing role. This aspect of racism has remained important to the present day because the logic of capitalism has continued to require overseas expansion and increasingly complete incorporation of all people of the world into the capitalist sphere.
The particular pattern of racism in North America-- in many respects the pattern for all subsequent development--emerged mainly in relation to the emergence of a multiracial work force in the British colonies. Black and white laborers were forced by law into qualitatively different relations of production: slaves were not simply “zero-wage” earners, but were not allowed even the “privilege” of selling their own labor power on the market as an increasing proportion of white laborers were forced to do. Meanwhile, Native Americans, who were not strong enough to maintain their own system of production in the face of the European invasion, but strong enough to resist enslavement, were subjected to genocide. Anti-Black racism thus became the main form of racism in the United States.
With the destruction of slave-capitalism, and the rapid industrialization of the United States in the late nineteenth century, the working class became multiracial, and the system of racist capitalism took on its present shape. The concept of race was written into law, and strict segregation of the so-called “races” was enforced with the power of the state at the point of production and in every other sphere of life. “Separate” was never “equal”, anytime or anywhere. Differential in wages paid, in employment patterns and job classifications, in “social wages” such as education and health care, and so forth--the super-exploitation of supposedly “inferior races”--provided additional billions of dollars ripped off from the working class by capitalist bosses.
Nothing natural about ‘races’
At the same time, the actual differences in the lives of persons of different “races”–created by the bosses themselves--were explained by the bosses’ ideologues as supposedly the result of so-called “natural biological hereditary differences” among these so-called “races.” Thus, social inequality was defended as an inevitable “fact of nature.” Workers were kept divided, at each other’s throats, and in some cases were used as the shock-troops to keep down the superexploited minorities. The worker-farmer Populist movement was destroyed by this racism, and the U.S. labor movement seriously set back. In addition, this ideology of racism played the key role in preventing the development of communist consciousness on a mass scale. To the extent that the super-exploitation of minority workers seemed “natural” (as in the “social-Darwinist” mythology) any possibity of a society based on full social equality must have seemed remote indeed. Racism necessarily leads to anti-communism!
Because racism is an integral part of capitalism, serious antiracists should become communists. Only by destroying the system on which it rests can racism be eliminated.
The fight against racism under capitalism
Under capitalism, so-called “liberal” antiracism will inevitably be turned into its opposite. Liberalism means relying on the bourgeois state--cops, legislation and especially the courts--to stop the KKK and other racist-fascist groups. This is a real loser! Liberalism pushes pacifism as well as legalism, disarming the anti-racist struggle. Liberalism rejects the view that racism stems from capitalism, blaming it instead on individual prejudice, and singling out the white worker as the villain. Since white workers, too, are hurt by racism, this is a version of “blaming the victim.”
Thus liberalism is also idealist: not recognizing the connection between racist ideas and racist segregation/discrimination, it calls for toleration of racist ideas under the slogan of “free speech.” Liberalism promotes nationalism--”to each his own.” Liberalism and the bourgeois notion of “right” lead to a narrow, economist view of the fight against racist wage differential and so forth, calling for the elimination of overt differential (“equal pay for equal work”), or at best, equal access to different job categories. It cannot deal with the historical fact of segregation and the racist lies pushed to defend it: witness the stampede of liberal ideologues who jumped on the “reverse discrimination” racist bandwagon. Liberalism calls for “toleration” of other “races” in spite of their “differences.” It hides the fact that workers of all so-called “races” have far more in common than they have differences, and the fact that the whole concept of “race” is an invention of the bosses.
Only communist ideas and organization can give the leadership which will ensure that anti-racist organizers avoid these pitfalls. And communists must point out that the logic of real antiracism inevitably leads to an openness to communist ideas.
Because racism is an integral part of capitalism, communists must be antiracist organizers. To take and hold power on a communist program will require masses of workers to the idea of a society organized in the interests of the working class as a class and on the basis of full social (not merely legal) equality. Winning people to these ideas involves convincing them at least of the truth and importance of our analysis of racism. In fact, this may prove to be the largest part of this ideological struggle. Thus, waging serious antiracist struggle on all fronts under capitalism is a prerequisite for the building of communism under the dictatorship of the working class, and is a key political task.