Racial InequalityEssay Preview: Racial InequalityReport this essayColonialism, imperialism, capitalism these are all terms that cannot be separated from the systematic exploitation of groups of people for the exclusive purpose of extracting wealth, land and cheap labor from a group of people for the increased profits of foreign capitalists. This is achieved by undermining the laborers ability to access resources, as well as the ability to sell and retain fair value for their labor through the mechanisms of citizenship and later racism.
The displacement of the British peasantry by the British nobility and the experiences of Native Americans in colonial America are very similar. The British peasants occupied land adjacent to that of the nobility, the land was communally used and the peasants were free to use it for agriculture and hunting in exchange for small taxes that supported the lavish lifestyle of the nobility. As the noblemens happiness with consuming failed to be enough and his greed grew they devised new ways of creating wealth, mainly through privatizing land to allow the owning of livestock. To own livestock large amounts of land were needed the land that was currently occupied by the peasants. The nobility essentially expelled the peasants from their land and moved in animals so that they could maximize profits. The European peasants were forced to occupy undesirable land that had little value for growing crops or for raising animals. The community lifestyle of the peasants was also diminished by privatization, now things were not shared but owned by individuals and people were less likely to share because more people were living below subsistence needs. In an effort to rationalize this new situation the lords offered the peasants citizenship which granted them access to sell their labor for a wage in the market. Of course the exploitation of the peasants continued by forcing the peasants to work for a less than adequate wage or starve (Philion, lecture).
The American colonizers essentially behaved the same way toward Native Americans as the European nobles did toward the European peasants. Though, the domination of the peasants was through citizenship, which gave peasants rights but also required them to be wage workers. This is much different from the justification for the American colonizers exploitation of the Native Americans, which was racism. Native Americans were unfit to be wage workers and citizenship would not work as an effective means of control. The Europeans had come to the new world is hopes of creating new wealth; they could make new wealth by working and owning the land. Unfortunately there were already people occupying the land they wanted (Nabakov, 263). The Native Americans were much like the European peasants, the lived with community, family, and shared access to the land. This was the driving force in both of their cultures. The natives had no concept ownership and surely no concept of selling their labor for profits, they already had what they needed and what they didnt have community provided.
Because the native peoples of America were unwilling or “unfit” to participate in the ideologies of capitalism they were viewed by the colonizers as obstacles and holding back the progress. Something needed to be done to remove the Indians from the land so that the land could be more fully exploited by the hand of capitalism for personal gain. The most effective way to control a group of people is to undermine their rights as people; the colonizers used racism to achieve this goal. The Native Americans were depicted as being biologically or inherently inferior to European white settlers, their differing ideologies and cultures were used as support for these claims. This inferiority justified the expulsion of the Native Americans from their homeland into reservations.
Now that the Native Americans have been stripped of their land and separated from capitalist society in reservations they are expected to perform and progress. There is a major conflict of interest between the Indian nation and the European settlements. The Native Americans are limited by their cultural beliefs and find it difficult to participate in wage labor “the opportunities for work on the reservation continue to appear more limited than the opportunities off the reservation” (Pickering, 18). The ones who do choose to participate are both discriminated against by the whites as well as stigmatized by this own culture because they have abandoned their cultural beliefs and not acted in his tribes or families best interests. At the same time the whites look at the Indians who stay on the reservation and nurture community, as lazy and unproductive only furthering racial tensions. The Native Americans lacked skills needed to obtain well paying jobs and no system of education was in place “the imposition of a negative social identity ultimately restricts Lakotas to limited wage work opportunitiesunemployment in the reservation was 33 percent” (Pickering, 97). The attempt to incorporate the Indian nation into the states was never successful because the ideologies of the two cultures were at odds.
Fanon asserts that racial exploitation was rationalized and continued by the god given superiority of the white man over the colored “the serf is in essence different from the night, but a reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory difference” (Fanon, 31). This was the only justification needed for the full racial exploitation of groups of colonized people. The white man saw the Native American as primitive and in need of civilizing. The colonizer brought with him god and civil society, which of course was not present in the primitive culture of the native people. This concept was even believed by some Native Americans about themselves, although most native peoples saw that the white mans power and wealth came because he was white.
Fanon argues that it is the nature of colonialism and capitalism is to exploit both the colonized peoples as well as their resources for the economic development of the mother country exclusively. The colonized people remain poor and underdeveloped even after independence is gained because huge amounts of wealth are being exported (Fanon, 77). The land becomes privatized and much of it is purchased by investors living abroad. Foreign industry moves in and the colonized country becomes economically dependent on those industries. The foreign industry profits and grows but invests little toward education, civil rights or other regulations because that would limit their ability to exploit. He argues that the resolution to this problem of colonization is for the developing country to cut off trade with foreign countries and work on developing its technology and social services. Once the developing country has caught up to the already industrialized countries then they can re-enter into
The capitalist system is designed to encourage and sustain the use of “new energy,” a means to power large-scale activities with abundant energy. When new energy becomes available then the “new power” is extracted from the existing population. But once the energy is provided they are not allowed to use it. When new people reach the developing countries of the world they have no further means of obtaining more natural resources as opposed to extracting less.
The capitalist system of private property can be seen in the fact that many of the world’s capitalist countries employ a policy of property transfer that uses force and coercion. The practice appears to be in effect, but it is no less important to the working class of these countries and the whole world that, through the means of state assistance and political control of the mass of the population, the capitalist system of private property is able to maintain a constant income stream that can be utilised to pay off the debts of others. In other words, the state has the power to do all sorts of things to the masses. It can, for example, buy the production of the necessities for a particular class or political group and create new industries that can be sold to the masses. This was the way the industrial working class carried out a strike in France and Belgium, the first attempt by French capitalists to collect wages for new workers and other workers and to secure the participation of the masses. Many of these new industries were initially used to purchase surplus-value currency (gold and silver and iron) which is then exchanged to pay off the debts of capitalists. To these days we use this exchange system as shorthand for the concept that the capitalist system of property transfer is effective only when the working class’s own social needs are met.
In fact the capitalist system is so heavily based on the assumption that the working class can acquire the means of production as early as the age of production and in its entirety at any time. The economic reforms that Marx and Engels proposed to the working class at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that were proposed under the name of the Industrial Revolution saw production at a rate of ten per cent per year. At the same time the government increased and increased the means of production, but was unable to find the money to go into circulation of the means that were already in existence. Therefore the workers were forced into the role of consumers whose daily consumption in the form of food and medicines was not as high as their everyday consumption. This situation led to a mass unemployment and a complete crisis in the productive production of productive labor. This situation was exacerbated dramatically by the increase in the productivity of the factories.
In effect the working class was forced to rely on the government to make its own expenditures and take the necessary means to manufacture the products it was going to make available. This resulted in massive shortages of food, clothing, clothes, and machinery; a breakdown in the working class means of production which is now the basis of millions of American industrial societies. The means of production and the means of production which were already in existence were now restricted to people in poverty.
As Marx and Engels saw it in the form of wage rates of the capitalist class that had a direct effect only at a stage of capitalism as such in production and exchange as a whole. At first wages were very low and often in excess of the standard wage. In this situation they were used to pay off workers. In this state of affairs they employed a number of special methods of labor: the “bonded labour” of all kinds (which was then regarded as the “labor by sale” in the theory of economic theory), the “labor in labor” of the “labour of labour” by means of the “labour by exchange” and the “labour by labour” of trade and exchange which were developed by the socialist parties. These were described as the “labour of work” in terms of “the trade” that the party had developed in the first years of capitalism itself.
In the end, the socialisation of the means of production in such a