Reparative JusticePart 5 of 11 · What capitalism does
Race, work and gender
Racism was invented to excuse slavery. Capitalism still treats our bodies and our work as things to own and sell.
Race and capitalism
Racist ideas were carried from 15th century Europe and developed by its merchants, slavers and colonisers. Racial superiority of White people over Black people was developed, initially to justify the enslavement of African people, and eventually to justify all the ways in which non-white people were exploited by the white colonial powers for centuries. Hand in hand with these developments and over the years, a whole body of ‘scientific’ arguments was developed and used to justify the mass genocides by colonial powers on the myth of race.
The injustice and horrors of enslavement and colonialism powered the Industrial Revolution in Europe and a new global economic system – capitalism. For centuries we been fighting against colonisers and their imperial plunder who have ensured every part of our world is afflicted with capitalism.
Capitalism is the embodiment of the labour and sacrifice of our dead ancestors, from their enslavement and colonisation by Western Europeans. Racism, xenophobia and fascism continue to be used by the capitalists class who created a corrupt system of global governance to ‘divide and rule’ the majority of the world’s population by force who became waged slave labour, where we must earn a wage in order to stay alive. Race makes a perennial underclass, it always has, and everyone above this underclass is faced with propaganda to form a united front whenever crises threatens the elites.
The logic of capitalism dictates that it in order for it to carry out its intended function, to grow and make profits, it must always racialise people, no matter the human cost. There will always be profit in racism and so it will continue in one permutation after another, reworked, reworded, reimagined until that is capitalism is abolished. We cannot undo racism, without undoing capitalism. Race is the modality in which class is lived. S. Hall 1978 Unlike other anti-capitalist movements, Revolutionary Reparations grounds itself in the experiences of the global majority, alongside workers everywhere.
Our bodies and our work
The material legacy of enslavement and colonialism is the effective ownership and commoditisation of our bodies, land, food, housing, goods and resources signed into laws made by the wealthy.
- Under capitalism, our only capital is our body, which is at risk if we do not earn enough to look after it. We now must work, selling our labour (our bodies) for wages to buy commodities for us to stay alive.
- If we do not earn enough, we perish and capitalists continue exploiting others.
- Imperialists start new famines and wars (with bombs, propaganda and sanctions) to exploit new lands, markets and labourers to continue the cycle of destitution, exploitation, oppression, exclusion, whilst growing inequality, poverty, emissions, profit and ultimately power.
Capitalism is an economic system that can only function with classed, racialised and sexed workers creating value for capitalists.
- It can by definition never be an equitable system because there has to be a class of people working to live – the working class, who are also racialised and sexed/gendered in order to maintain hierarchies and implement divide and rule over the mass of the population.
- It creates destitution, poverty and inequality based on our characteristics of class, race and gender.
- Characteristic and identity based oppressions and destitutions are features of capitalism and imperialism to divide and rule us.
This violence on the body is never experienced by those with wealth and power.
- If someone is born into wealth, they and every future generation never needs to work in order to stay alive.
- They live without working, growing their wealth at exponential rates through rents, interest, dividends and other unearned income, widening inequality between themselves and the working class exponentially every second.
- Their wealth does not meaningfully get taxed as they (who include those in government and senior civil service), will not tax themselves to the extent that would require them to work for a living/become working class because a global radical non-violent tax policy movement has never materialised.
Gender liberation
Gender liberation and gender justice means being explicit about the need to abolish capitalism, not offer reformist policies without any anti-capitalist intention. Only by dismantling capitalism and imperialism, and building radical, revolutionary, intersectional, socialist and communist political economies can we live in a world free of sexism, racism, classism and other forms of oppression.