By the way, in Russia and Poland, before 1860, the majority (!) of the population were slaves. Yet there was no racist ideology underlying it. I wonder if that might be because the slaves looked exactly like their masters. Hmmm. I think just maybe we should stop looking at capitalism as the root of all evil and start looking at the way that the human mind categorizes people who look different from you.
--- On Sun, 10/11/09, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] corporate rationality
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, October 11, 2009, 9:23 PM
> Chris Doss: I hereby suggest that any
> slave system in which the slaves looked appreciably
> different from the masters would result in a racist
> ideology.
>
>
>
> Somebody: Yet, can we say the same thing about capitalism?
> To a certain extent only. A large immigrant population as
> part of the reserve army of labor can foster racism, but the
> whole point about capitalism after the civil rights
> revolution, is that inevitably the next generation will be
> more widely diffused among the different classes. People can
> talk meanly of Mexicans or Arabs or whoever, but their
> assimilated children are increasingly accepted and
> incorporated into the rainbow panoply of corporate
> advertising. This is precisely because people are
> interchangeable under capitalism. It's hard to see racism as
> being anything integral to the system here, considering that
> even the recurring effect discussed above is *rapidly*
> diminishing, as evidenced by a certain biracial president.
> Racism is declining, but is it taking capitalism down with
> it? If not, it's hard to argue that it's an essential
> component thereof.
>
>
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