Beyond the Book Club: The Necessity for Anti-Capitalism in Anti-Racist Political Action

2020 was a weird year. There was already the weirdness of the pandemic— and, though in many ways we’re still living in its midst, there’s no need to rehash that— and then there was the weirdness of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement and its subsequent events. I use the word “weird” in not a completely negative sense here; evidently, people having a coming to Jesus moment about the racism of well— everything— was long overdue and necessary. But being a minority during this time, especially a Black person, was very weird. People posting colorful infographics stating that they were in fact not racist all over Instagram and Tik Tok. Strange, almost cringe worthy interactions with peers as they would bring up unannounced that they had donated to BLM National, gone to protests, written a letter to their congressional representative, given a Black person on the street the clothes off of their back, and were “unlearning” their biases. Members of Congress kneeling to the floor of the Capitol in Kente cloth. Just a truly strange, bizarre time to be alive. But three years out from 2020, what have we really learned?

Honestly? I think we’ve learned absolutely nothing. Or at least very little. Besides the point that the majority of individuals might be a little more willing to call the police out on their racist BS or acknowledge that systems in this country have generally been built to exclude Black and brown people, our “racial reckoning” in 2020 did absolutely nothing— particularly on a political level. And this has nothing to do with everyone simultaneously forgetting the Ibram X. Kendi books they consumed like M&Ms during the pandemic. I believe that our failure to truly come to a racial reckoning is because as a country, Americans rarely criticize the one system that is able to keep racism in its place: capitalism. And this fact is clearly evidenced through the political movements which have not adopted anti capitalism as a core component of their work. Though on some leftist corners of the Internet there was significant discourse about such ideas, liberal and mainstream ideologies tried to make things much more simple: we have racist people running the systems, and thus we need to put racist people out of those systems. Then, the systems will no longer be racist! Though it was an effective political technique, as evidenced by the numerous political candidates who ran on platforms of “antiracism,” it also failed to truly get to the root of the problem: the economic system which upholds the racial caste that has been established in this country. In America, class has always been racialized— and the anomalies of a few NBA players or Oprah doesn’t change that fact.

I found it important to write this article around the time of the decision to abolish race-based affirmative action for undergraduate admissions in the Supreme Court, a battle that conservatives fought for decades. I found it fascinating when many people took to the Internet to say comments such as “affirmative action should be class based, not race based” a view that has been echoed by scholars. It is baffling to me that so many people find those concepts to be so separated when they could not be more interconnected. Class is one of the many manifestations of the capitalist system. So why haven’t we come to a reckoning as a country that racism and capitalism are inextricably linked, and have always been intended to be that way?

This article, I hope, will allow individuals to perhaps conduct their own personal reckoning, and understand that being a true antiracist is more than just reading books, writing letters, and educating your kids. It’s also about a fundamental acknowledgement that racism will be forever present until capitalism is no more.

A Brief History of Racism and Capitalism

I’m not the first person to espouse this idea, of course. The intersections of racism and capitalism have been long discussed and theorized by scholars, and have even been brought up in more mainstream works— while Ibram X. Kendi is perhaps not my favorite race scholar out there, he does use a chapter of his bestseller How to Be an Antiracist to discuss such ideas.

But I won’t be using that book, mainly because I feel that he doesn’t truly get to the root of this idea— why are racism and capitalism “conjoined twins,” to borrow his phrasing? For this, I look to the work of Cedric Robinson and his magnum opus Black Marxism.

Black Marxism, while a million pages long, is truly groundbreaking. In the book, Robinson offers a critique of the Marxist analysis of capitalism that’s used by socialists and communists alike, arguing that Marx’s fundamental argument fails to acknowledge the racialized nature of capitalism. Since Marx is not exactly on the top of every American history teacher’s list of historical figures to know, let’s first discuss the Marxist critique of capitalism. Marx argues that capitalism arose as a revolutionary economic system to its predating system, feudalism, and that the two economic systems are wholly separated in this matter. Marx also argues that society’s dominant conflict lies between the classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, not mentioning the implications of race in any sort of way in his analysis.

Robinson, however, throws the Marxist argument completely out of the window. Robinson argues that capitalism never arose as a revolutionary departure from feudalism, but rather, as a mere evolution. And as with things that evolve, they maintain key traits and features of its previous system. We all understand the basic system of feudalism— the lords, serfs, noblemen, et cetera.

What we often don’t learn about is that these feudal castes were racialized, with members in the lower classes being members of groups deemed “racially inferior.” Members of the serfdom class primarily included people such as Jewish people, the Romani, and the Irish, groups that we would now classify as “white,” for the most part. Thus, when capitalism arose from feudalism, it took with it this already pre-established system of race as an indicator and justifier of class, demonstrating that racism and capitalism have been together from the start. Robinson refers to this concept as “racial capitalism.”

Racial capitalism would soon be exported all over the world with the introduction of colonialism, allowing it to spread from its origins in European countries. And because race is a forever shifting social construct, those deemed “racially inferior” shifted— from those who looked white to those who looked Black and brown. If capital is the motive, race is the means: the justifier for the inequality that is fundamental to maintaining capitalism. Thus, to say that race, capitalism, and class are separated isn’t just false, it’s ahistorical— and it also ignores the realities of the millions of marginalized individuals who suffer from this oppressive system every day.

But What About Oprah?

Before I proceed I want to make a few things clear. I know there are many who find this idea to be wrong and even preposterous. “But what about rich Black people? What about the people abroad who come from predominantly Black and brown countries who have struck it rich? What about Oprah?”

But I won’t be using that book, mainly because I feel that he doesn’t truly get to the root of this idea— why are racism and capitalism “conjoined twins,” to borrow his phrasing? For this, I look to the work of Cedric Robinson and his magnum opus Black Marxism.

Black Marxism, while a million pages long, is truly groundbreaking. In the book, Robinson offers a critique of the Marxist analysis of capitalism that’s used by socialists and communists alike, arguing that Marx’s fundamental argument fails to acknowledge the racialized nature of capitalism. Since Marx is not exactly on the top of every American history teacher’s list of historical figures to know, let’s first discuss the Marxist critique of capitalism. Marx argues that capitalism arose as a revolutionary economic system to its predating system, feudalism, and that the two economic systems are wholly separated in this matter. Marx also argues that society’s dominant conflict lies between the classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, not mentioning the implications of race in any sort of way in his analysis.

Robinson, however, throws the Marxist argument completely out of the window. Robinson argues that capitalism never arose as a revolutionary departure from feudalism, but rather, as a mere evolution. And as with things that evolve, they maintain key traits and features of its previous system. We all understand the basic system of feudalism— the lords, serfs, noblemen, et cetera.

What we often don’t learn about is that these feudal castes were racialized, with members in the lower classes being members of groups deemed “racially inferior.” Members of the serfdom class primarily included people such as Jewish people, the Romani, and the Irish, groups that we would now classify as “white,” for the most part. Thus, when capitalism arose from feudalism, it took with it this already pre-established system of race as an indicator and justifier of class, demonstrating that racism and capitalism have been together from the start. Robinson refers to this concept as “racial capitalism.”

Racial capitalism would soon be exported all over the world with the introduction of colonialism, allowing it to spread from its origins in European countries. And because race is a forever shifting social construct, those deemed “racially inferior” shifted— from those who looked white to those who looked Black and brown. If capital is the motive, race is the means: the justifier for the inequality that is fundamental to maintaining capitalism. Thus, to say that race, capitalism, and class are separated isn’t just false, it’s ahistorical— and it also ignores the realities of the millions of marginalized individuals who suffer from this oppressive system every day.

But What About Oprah?

Before I proceed I want to make a few things clear. I know there are many who find this idea to be wrong and even preposterous. “But what about rich Black people? What about the people abroad who come from predominantly Black and brown countries who have struck it rich? What about Oprah?”

Let’s discuss facts. Throughout history, we’ve seen free Black men prosper during times when most Black people were enslaved, or white women who had significant power and influence during a time when most white women could not work or vote. For every rule throughout history, there have always been exceptions, and racial capitalism is no different. There are always marginalized people who have benefitted and prospered from capitalism, the same way there have always been white people who are unable to prosper under the capitalist framework. However, this does not change that capitalism is a system that was born from the European racial caste system and continues to be a system that relies on race as a justifier for the distribution of wealth. Capitalism was built to be racist— and just as there are racists who love Obama and worship sports stars of color, its racism isn’t always perfect.

To address a second point that is usually made against the racial capitalism argument, what about countries that are majority Black and brown? Once again, rich individuals within these countries are large exceptions to the rules, but their personal wealth does not negate the relative lack of wealth in their home countries. It’s not a coincidence that the wealthiest countries in the world are predominantly white— and this serves as a good segue into how racial capitalism and colonialism are inextricably linked. When European nations began to plunder the world for its resources, race was used as a justifier for such interventions.

While the motivator for colonialism was and always will be land, race was used as a way to justify the taking of resources, and to make the subsequent gain in wealth from colonial countries seem natural and justified. Thus, while there may be individuals in predominantly Black and brown countries who have struck it rich, it does not negate the centuries of hyper exploitation from Western nations.

Anti Racism Without Anti Capitalism

This is all to say that anti racism movements without anti capitalism as a core tenet are contradictory, and neglect to truly get to the root of the problem. Racism and capitalism depend on each other for their existence, and only confronting one aspect does little to actually dismantle the racist structures that the world depends on. And unfortunately, it is quite a common phenomenon in anti racist movements to completely ignore capitalism’s role in maintaining racial hierarchies and to instead focus on more surface level structures.

For example, let’s look at Black Lives Matter National, the organizing body that represents the Black Lives Matter movement nationally. BLM National has seven core demands that they advocate towards, including defunding the police and investigating individuals involved with the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. Yet in none of their demands do they call for explicit anti-capitalist action, such as reparations to marginalized communities, a noted anti-capitalist movement, or wealth redistribution.

BLM’s framework primarily focuses on political action that would replace harmful actors with less harmful ones, rather than acknowledging the role capitalism serves in fueling racist hierarchies.

This is not to say that this level of political action isn’t important. But for a movement that is dedicated to the protection and empowerment of Black lives and has effectively become a figurehead for antiracism action in this country, it speaks volumes that even the most dominant movement in the game has nothing to say about how capitalism and racism intersect. While BLM National doesn’t represent all antiracist action in the US (I would also like to note here that as a decentralized movement, BLM National certainly does not embody other grassroots Black Lives Matter movements in the US), its position as an important figure in representing antiracist movements cannot be understated, as well as its influence on other antiracist movements. In addition, the organization also has significant political power, boasting connections on their website with significant politicians such as Representative Ayanna Presley and Cori Bush.

I do not bring up BLM National and their demands to say that one organization embracing anti capitalism would fundamentally change all Americans. What it could do is shift the national conversation about anti racism and anti capitalism, discussions which are often treated as separate and even antithetical to each other.

Black Lives Matter and the events of 2020 also coincided with a resurging movement of Black capitalism, or a capitalist framework which argues that building Black wealth will free Black Americans from the oppression of racist structures. And while certainly I will continue to support Black-owned businesses and initiatives, Black Panther founder Bobby Seale said it best: “We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism, we fight capitalism with basic socialism.”

Conclusion

There is usually one final objection to the racial capitalism argument, one that is parroted by finance bros and average people alike: if there’s no capitalism, what is there? That’s a question that is too large and complex to tackle in this article, and frankly, does little to negate the point that racism and capitalism are inseparable ideologies. What I will say is this: the world existed long before racism, and will continue to exist after. And similarly, the world existed long before capitalism, and will continue to do so after. In order to achieve a more equal, more free, and more just society, a demonstrated commitment must be made to defeat both systems, rather than one or the other.

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