To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!

[AOR]

51. Please stop with the world-salad...

There are no leftists that agree with the word-salad narrative being produced in your posts. This is one of hundreds of these critiques.


http://socialistworker.org/2002-2/431/431_08_Racism.shtml

ALEX TAYLOR

(Snip)


"FOR MANY people coming to radical politics--Blacks and whites alike--hatred of racism and a desire to get rid of it is a huge motivating factor. This is in contrast to some of the common assumptions about where racism comes from.

The first is that racism is part of human nature--that it's always existed and always will. The second is the liberal idea of racism--that it comes from people's bad ideas, and that if we could change these ideas, we could get rid of it.

Both assumptions are wrong. Racism isn't just an ideology but is an institution. And its origins don't lie in bad ideas or in human nature. Rather, racism originated with capitalism and the slave trade. As the Marxist writer CLR James put it, "The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had…that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race."

History proves this point. Prior to the advent of capitalism, racism as a systematic form of oppression did not exist. For example, ancient Greek and Roman societies had no concept of race or racial oppression."