Imperialism and racism are central to the capitalist world economy. The barbarism is a feature, not a bug.
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1960300336221925501
Imperialism and racism are central to the capitalist world economy. The barbarism is a feature, not a bug.
Remember, capitalism is not defined by “markets and businesses and trade”. It is a system where production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big banks, large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investable assets.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs, or to achieve social progress, but to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.
To maintain the process of perpetual accumulation requires massive quantities of cheap labour and cheap nature. You have to deny people control over their land, and deny workers access to the yields of their production.
This cannot be sustained for long within a bounded economy. If you intensify the exploitation of your domestic working class and resource base in this way, sooner or later you will face a revolution.
To avoid this outcome, you need some kind of “outside”, an external frontier, where you can exploit labour and nature with impunity, where you can externalize social and ecological costs, and where any rebellions can be destroyed with brute force.
This is where imperialism comes in. As Utsa Patnaik puts it, capitalism requires “an imperial arrangement” to maintain access to cheap labour and cheap nature, and thereby to stabilize accumulation.
Imperialism is not a side-gig, not an over-reach committed by greedy individuals, it is a structural feature of the capitalist world economy.
Beginning in the long 16th century, the regions of what today we call the global South were forcibly integrated into the Europe-centered capitalist world economy as providers of cheapened labour, resources and goods. This was an extraordinarily violent process, involving colonization, dispossession, mass enslavement, and genocide.
How could anyone possibly justify these horrors? Race. Discourses of white supremacy and racial hierarchy were fabricated by the European ruling classes to dehumanize the majority world, hiving them off from the realm of rights, to provide the ideological scaffolding necessary to justify apocalyptic levels of exploitation and bloodshed in the periphery.
And of course these very same discourses were deployed within the core itself, to justify paying lower wages to racialised people, and to deny them equal access to resources.
They used racial ideology to construct a global division of labour, a massively inequitable global division of wages, and a global hierarchy of rights. Racial ideology was promoted so aggressively that it developed its own momentum of hatred and violence.
Racism, like imperialism itself, is not a side-show to capitalism but a structurally necessary feature of it. It is not a standalone problem that can be addressed with a few liberal reforms here and there. It has always been central to capitalism and it remains that way today.
Overcoming capitalism - in other words, transitioning to a democratic socialist economy - is ultimately necessary to end structural racism and imperialist violence.
The struggle against racism must be anti-capitalist, and the struggle against capitalism must be anti-racist.
These arguments have been established by a long tradition of scholarship -- WEB du Bois, CLR James, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, Utsa Patnaik, Ali Kadri, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and more -- and they remain as relevant today as ever.
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:28
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