A quick look at the origins of racism in modern society from its roots in the justification of slavery.
Any discussion of racism needs to examine the roots of racism in order to understand it and to struggle against it effectively. There are basically three explanations for the existence of racism.
The dominant view which is rarely expressed as a worked out theory but rather operates at the level of assumptions is that racism is an irrational response to difference which cause some people with white skin to have hateful attitudes to people with black skin which sometimes leads to violent and evil actions. People who have this understanding of racism usually advocate awareness and education as a way of preventing the practice of racism.
The second view is that racism is endemic in white society and that the only solution is for black people to organise "themselves separately from whites " in order to defend themselves and to protect their interests.
The third view and the one which libertarian communists and social anarchists advocate is an explanation of racism based on a materialist perspective, which views racism as a historically specific and materially caused phenomenon.
Racism is a product of capitalism. It grew out of early capitalism’s use of slaves for the plantations of the New World, it was consolidated in order to justify western and white domination of the rest of the world and it flourishes today as a means of dividing the working class between white and Muslim or black, and native and immigrants or asylum seekers.
It is necessary to examine the underlying assumptions about racism in more detail in order to arrive at the materialist analysis of it. Racism is commonly assumed to be as old as society itself. However this does not stand up to historical examination. Racism is a particular form of oppression: discrimination against people on the grounds that some inherited characteristic, for example, skin colour, makes them inferior to their oppressors.
However, historical references indicate that class society before capitalism was able, on the whole, to do without this particular form of oppression. Bad as the society of classical Greece and Rome were it is historically reasonably well documented that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. Slaves were both black and white and in fact the majority of slaves were white. The first clear evidence of racism occurred at the end of the 16th century with the start of the slave trade from Africa to Britain and to America.
CLR James in his Modern Politics writes that “the conception of dividing people by race begins with its slave trade. Thus this [the slave trade] was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religious and philosophers had . . .the only justifications by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that Africans were an inferior race"
So racism was formed by the rich and powerful as an attempt to justify the most appalling and inhuman treatment of black people in the time of the greatest accumulation of material wealth the world had seen until then.
By the end of the 17th century, racism had become an established, systematic and conscious justification for the most degrading forms of slavery.
The justification of slavery by an ideology of racism started to fade under attack by slave-trade abolitionists, and with the decline of the trade itself. Racism, however took on a new form as a justification for the ideology of Imperialism. This racism of Empire was dominant for over a century from the 1840's on.
Concepts such as the ‘white man's burden’ became fashionable especially in England where British Colonialists liked to cast themselves as father and mother with a clear duty to take responsibility for the material and spiritual well-being of their 'colonial' children. Racism became the ideological justification of capitalism's expansion into conquering countries, plundering their wealth and exploiting the natives.
When white imperialism was at its height, a new expression of racism was taking shape - that is anti-immigrant racism which was typified in England by racist opposition to new immigrants from Ireland. The expansion of capitalism required the importation of foreign workers, a trend which continues in industrialised European countries and in America and Australia today. The long boom of British capitalism after the World War 2, for example, encouraged the immigration of West Indians and Asians to Britain. These so-called ‘foreign’ workers provided the employers with the basis for encouraging a split within the workforce.
The same happened in Germany with the immigration of Turkish workers, and the same kind of anti-immigrant agitation emerged in many other European countries and is the main focus of racism in these countries today. Racial attacks on non-white immigrants and on Gypsies have become almost commonplace in parts of Germany and in the past in England. This form of racism has been fuelled by economic crisis and by capitalism's need to find a convenient scapegoat for unemployment, housing shortages and every other problem which the current crisis of capitalism has thrown up. Immigration controls, and often racist anti-immigration laws (which concentrate on non-white-westerner immigration) are a manifestation of this institutional racism.
In many industrialised countries, bosses used workers of different nationalities and races against each other as scabs to undermine strikes, and attack wages and conditions of all workers, while at the same time aggravating racism in those who blamed their fellow workers rather than the manipulative bosses.
Racism and anti-semitism
Anti-semitism is generally considered to be a variety of racism. It has taken different forms over the centuries, being justified on religious grounds during the middle ages, for example. Ruth Benedict argues "during the middle ages persecutions of the Jews, like all medieval persecutions were religious rather than racial. As racist persecutions replaced religious persecutions in Europe, however, the inferiority of the Jew became that of race".
As recent anti-semitism took hold in Europe in the 1890's, Jews started to be attacked not for what they did but for what their forefathers were. This is what racial anti-semitism means. This kind of anti-semitism found an echo in some parts of the working class where Jews were identified as capitalist parasites and usurers even though the reality - in Britain anyway - was that most Jews were in fact workers. Racial anti-semitism was a useful way to deflect attacks for the real problems created by capitalism in general.
Anti-semitism and racism are not an essential component of fascism which is essentially a mass movement of the middle class and petit bourgeois built in periods of defeat for the working class when even the most basic trade union organisation is a threat to profits of capital.
In Italy, for example, Jews were encouraged to join the fascist party in its early days. In Germany, however, the economic condition were ripe for the growth of anti-semitism. Jewish capital was attacked by the Nazis which appealed to the anti-capitalist instinct of German workers and support for Hitler's Nazi Party rocketed. Anti-semitism was also an important part of a Nazi racial philosophy which justified 'Aryan' supremacy and the need to develop 'Aryan' racial purity.
The Nazi holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered alongside an equal number condemned either as political opponents of Hitler or as members of other 'inferior' groups such as Slavs, gays, Gypsies and the mentally ill represented racism and capitalism in their most extreme and barbarous form.
This article has been heavily edited and altered by libcom. It was originally taken from a talk by Trish of the Workers Solidarity Movement. As such it represents the authors opinion alone and may be deliberately provocative in order to start discussion.
1. CLR James archive on the libcom.org library
2. The Industrial Workers of the World union had successes organising workers of all races. A more modern example would be the Dahl Jenson Strike of 1999 in London