Systems of power react to popular ideas that challenge them in a very interesting way – they construct and promote a narrative where the problem might even be acknowledged, but the solution is something that will strengthen, rather than disassemble, the power structure. Let’s exchange anecdotal history, shall we?
One example is feminism. I’m generalising of course but this is a movement that began with people saying “Why the hell should we let a little group of men be in charge of everything? Let’s build power among the masses of women that can challenge their authority, with a view to overthrowing them.” Now this was a very obvious, simple and extremely dangerous idea, and once it had spread to enough people where their movement could not be ignored or ridiculed away, the political establishment began a serious effort to subvert it by creating a new “bourgeois feminism”. This new ideology’s statement began in the same way, but ended differently: “Why the hell do we let a little group of men be in charge of everything? We should have women among that little group.” To many people this ideology has come to completely represent feminism; the more dangerous meme has been obliterated from the public discourse.
The conservatives had to make concessions to the new definition, losing their ability to explicitly discriminate using the law, and some resisted it bitterly, but it was still better than the alternative because while it meant granting individuals equal rights, it left the power structure intact. For example, women can now vote – for the same cluster of drone-bombing corporate stooges who are meant to represent them in politics. Women can inherit money, land and businesses on the same grounds as men – but the way they spend it and get rich off it is identical to how a man would use it. The larger system, with all its exploitation, suicidal short-term thinking, its abuse, is completely intact. The promise to every woman that someone who looks like them can join the board of executives is meant to be a salve.
The situation is even more fucked up when it comes to white supremacy. Explicit discrimination codified in law has been removed in this country, but again this only focuses on individual rights. Even in terms of offering a step up to the bourgeoisie, this is inadequate; nonwhites have got it worse than women because capital has been accumulated by a particular colour of ruling class during a time where they could prosecute their racism using the law and the lash, and while the some of the children who inherit the wealth of rich white oligarchs might be female, none of them will be brown. And there’s a lot of individual decisions a person can make that perpetuate white supremacy; from snitching to harassing people out of neighbourhoods to withholding information or jobs based on race. These social maladies can exist without any legal support; they’re built into the fabric of our society and we’re all taught them at an early age through exposure to the media, if not to actual racists in our family.
What is there to counter this? The liberal method is to categorise people in terms of which group they belong to, and then debate about ranking these groups on a scale of oppression or power. The only practical consequence of this technique is also entirely focused on individuals – we root out racists, or sexists, or homophobes or whatever, and then scold them as being bad people. While political correctness is essentially just basic professionalism and has made things better for many people, it has obviously not been transformative. Of course, the reason this method is promoted endlessly by the only prominent people who seem to give a crap about discrimination is BECAUSE it is ineffective at restructuring society. Tah Nahesi Coates is an excellent writer, but his work reads like a lament; he operates from the futile perspective that race is set in stone, racism is set in stone and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it happening, and instead black Americans must thrive in spite of it. He’s famous for a reason.
And that’s the same reason why discrimination is endlessly promoted by one half of our media while the other half promotes a completely ineffective means of stopping it. It’s obvious that discrimination serves the interests of the ruling class of billionaire psychopaths. Racism in particular is a very valuable servant of capital, because it is a tool to prevent solidarity between blacks and whites. The ability of different racial groups to build trust in order to act together, withhold their labour collectively and build new social systems for providing welfare for themselves can be weakened by making society favour one group over another, which fosters resentment and fear.
In the aftermath of the American civil war, industrialists would enforce subservience of their white workers by threatening to fire them and hire a black dude if they asked for more wages. But both castes started to see their common interest and began organizing together. This unity between workers was highly effective in wresting concessions from the capital class, and they readied a deadly response – every newspaper started blasting out horseshit about newly freed slaves raping white women, the sort of nonsense we’d see screaming out of half the front pages of any newspaper stand in this country on any given day. In the south, Jim Crow segregation was brought in to physically break apart solidarity. These tactics worked. By physically and mentally dividing people along racial lines, everyone was kept powerless and poor.
My point in all this isn’t that beating capitalism will destroy white supremacy or sexism; unions are the principal way for working-class people to get leverage, but in the past they have been infected with prejudice. The plain fact is that the sadistic pleasure some people take in their own sense of superiority over another person is the payoff of racism, and makes this system durable. Let’s be honest – it’s fun behaving like an asshole. For some people, it’s a way of life, and it could be preserved even after our current economic system is replaced. Currently our society rations out the feeling of inflicting pain partly in order to enfranchise a larger number of people in maintaining that system.
So we must prioritise fighting against both. White supremacy serves capitalism by destroying solidarity and rationing out the feeling of power over others, and capitalism serves white supremacy through endless promotion in the corporate media.
Fuck that system. But it has so many holes! Then we will have to fuck it together…