Sanders: A Man with A Hammer, Who Sees Nails Everywhere

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93. What are your views on capitalist social relations ?

What is your political affiliation. Leftist politics is about power and resources and who controls them. Sanders is not a Marxist or a Leftist (anti-capitalist). Bernie Sanders is a capitalist reformer (a somewhat radical one) who believes that a ruling class of private capital can remain in place. No Marxists or anti-capitalist Leftists believe that. Billionaires are but a symptom of capitalist social relations. Marxists believe the system of social arrangements must be replaced. Expropriation without representation of the ruling class. Not the ruling class "paying their fair share." These terms you're throwing around very loosely matter in context.

Institutionalized racism is a symptom and a by-product that arose from capitalist social relations and the capitalist modes of mass commodity production. Capitalism didn't arise out of institutionalized racism. Institutionalized racism arose from capitalism.


How Poor Black Lives Matter to U.S. Capitalism Today: Reflections on “The New Jim Crow”

--by Paul Street

(Snip)

King Cotton

"Black lives have always mattered to white America primarily as a source of economic exploitation. And white American authorities have never been particularly squeamish about killing and maiming Black Americans in defense and advance of that exploitation. Untold millions of Black slaves were tortured and murdered so that Southern tobacco, rice, sugar and cotton planters could extract vast quantities of surplus value from them. As the historian Edward Baptist has recently shown, the violence that was systematically inflicted on Blacks in the forced labor camps of U.S. cotton slavery generated much of the economic surplus that drove the United States’ emergence as a modern capitalist and industrial state before the U.S. Civil War."

(Snip)

"Still, Black lives mattered to northern white capitalists and authorities mainly as a source of cheap, super-exploited labor. Blacks were kept at the bottom of the northern industrial proletariat by their branded status as racial inferiors. Black workers were concentrated in northern industry’s dirtiest, hottest, most unpleasant, worst-paid and least secure jobs. (In Chicago’s slaughtering and meatpacking industry – a major destination for southern Black migrants from WWI through the 1940s – Black employees’ time-cards were specially marked to make sure that they were the first fired and last re-hired during and after seasonal layoffs and economic downturns.) The northern Black population was penned up in inferior and overcrowded ghetto neighborhoods. “Northern blacks,” historian Thomas Sugrue notes, “lived as second-class citizens, unencumbered by the most blatant of southern-style Jim Crow laws but still trapped in an economic, political, and legal regime that seldom recognized them as equals. In nearly every arena, blacks and whites lived separate, unequal lives.” This de facto racial separatism and disparity was sustained and enforced by violence. The agents of white northern repression included street gangs, property associations, city police, and, when deemed necessary – as during the race riots of 1919 (Chicago), 1943 (Detroit), and the 1960s (across urban America) – the National Guard and the U.S. military."

(Snip)

"Becoming the Raw Material

Today, as across the long neoliberal era that began in the mid-1970s, millions of Black working- and lower- class lives still matter to the U.S. power and profits system primarily as subjects for economic exploitation. The exploitation still relies heavily on violence and repression – violence that all too commonly turns lethal, as with the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and the hundreds of other Black Americans (usually but not always young and male) who are killed each year by mostly white police officers in the U.S. But there’s a key difference now. Black lives have been largely torn asunder (along, of course, with many white, Latino, and other U.S. lives) from direct engagement in surplus value-generating productive labor."

(Snip)

"Disturbing Parallels

"The resulting giant army of Black prisoners and “ex-offenders” constitutes a criminalized “underclass” that cycles back and forth between the nation’s worst-off jobless and high-poverty ghetto zip-codes and a sprawling archipelago of high-tech mass confinement holding pens that are mainly located in predominantly white and rural parts of the nation. The prison construction and operation boom – fed by the rising “market” of Black drug criminals – has been a significant source of jobs, tax dollars, and associated local economic “multipliers” for mostly rural (“downstate” in Illinois, “upstate” in New York and Michigan) prison towns. As the distinguished criminologist Todd Clear noted nearly 20 years ago, “Each prisoner represents an economic asset that has been removed from that community and placed elsewhere … represents as much as $25,000 in income for the community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place. This can be a massive transfer of value: A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to children and local purchases is transformed into a $25,000 financial asset to a rural prison community.”


Full article at link...

http://www.blackagendareport.com/poor_black_lives_matter_to_capitalism_new_jim_crow