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Capitalism is a force of destruction. Even those who stick staunchly by the myths equating capitalism with democracy and who proclaim it is the "best system in the world" recognize the necessity to tame its ravenous thirst for accumulation that has left the vast majority of the world scrambling to survive. The radical left recognizes, following Karl Marx, that capitalism cannot be reformed and must thereby be struck down to create an alternative that allows all people to thrive and live with dignity. Yet the radical left is divided on numerous fronts, including on questions of how class and race are related. Understanding the centrality of race is of critical importance, as it affects all anticapitalist work. Racism effectively divides the working class and thereby minimizes our potential to develop a multiracial mass movement against capital.
When we examine the history of capitalist development, we see over and over that the non-Western world and its peoples have been displaced to make way for the interests of the white man. Although the concept of race as a defining characteristic of peoples was constructed to justify U.S. slavery, there can be no question that the genocidal wars waged by white colonizers and settlers were tied to conceptions of the Indigenous "Other" as alien, subhuman, and exploitable capital. It was the pillaging of foreign lands for resources, the enslavement of the non-Western world, and the rape of its women that allowed for the development of mass production, industrialization, and the global capitalist economy.1
Capitalism is a global racialized structure. Although many of the exploited working class are white peoples, people of color, especially women of color, have generally borne the brunt of the human suffering inflicted by capitalism. There is no doubt that colonialism and U.S. slavery were economic systems, but they were also brutal attacks on non-Western peoples who were considered "barbaric animals."
Moving forward to today's imperialisms, we see similar characterizations of the non-Western "Other," albeit with a more politically correct tinge.2 This racist xenophobia is also made less visible with the advent of greater and greater divisions by culture, ethnicity, and religions, which then act as ideological justifications for subimperialist nations.3 Of course, as race is a social construct, racism can be deployed against peoples...