Capitalism and Racism: Which is Prior?

Marxists, other leftists, and/or antiracists have argued for decades about the relative importance of capitalism and racism. They’ve framed the issue in different ways. Some people discuss which system exerts the greatest force on society. Others discuss which system offers the more fundamental social explanation. Some people talk about which one came first, historically. And still others ask which we should address first in our leftist movements.

Not only that, but approaches aren’t even mutually exclusive.

You might ask: what’s the difference between these frames? If so, that’s unfortunate, because they are different. It’s possible to argue, for example, that racism (or capitalism) came first historically, but that capitalism (or racism) explains more or should be addressed first.

And so, I’m going to sort out some of these issues in this post. I’ll use Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America as a reference point.

Before I do this, I’ll lay out where I stand on the various issues:

1. Between capitalism and racism, we don’t really know which one came first, historically. It depends.

2. People’s experiences vary. Capitalism is more important to some peoples’ experiences, while racism is more important to others’.

3. Capitalism is a more fundamental explanatory force than racism.

4. Leftist movements should address capitalism and racism at the same time.

Historical Priority

I used the word ‘prior’ in the title of this post because it accurately captures the ambiguity I find in these debates. There are different senses of ‘priority,’ and most people discussing these issues fail to draw the relevant distinctions. And so they often conflate different kinds of priority.

Historical priority is merely a matter of which came first. Kendi, for example, argues that capitalism and racism came about at roughly the same time in the 15th century. And that they co-evolved from separate origins, only later interacting with one another. But they started as separate forces and still maintain separate identities.

Origins of Race and Racism

Kendi’s view is plausible enough. The fact is, both capitalism and racism evolved gradually. Drawing the starting line for either is a messy business. And one that reduces in large part to pragmatic issues. Kendi is a historian who’s tracing the history of racist ideas. Because of this, he dates racism to the earliest cases of European slave raids against Africans, which Portugal did in the early 1400s. That’s the earliest plausible date capturing the broadest possible history of racism. Thus, dating racism this way helps Kendi write better history.

The latest plausible date is the development of a worked out, modern system of racial classification. This is arguably Carl Linneaus’s Systema Naturae, published in 1735. Depending on your broader aims, you can plausibly defend an origin date for racism anywhere from the early 15th century to the mid 18th century.

Personally, I find the most plausible date to be the point where two things happened: a.) slavery become more or less exclusively racialized; and b.) Europeans had a classificatory system in place to justify their treatment of Native Americans and black Africans. This gives us the early 16th century for anti-Native American racism and the early to mid 17th century for anti-black racism.

Origins of Capitalism

Capitalism has existed on a local scale for centuries. But its emergence as the dominant economic system can be dated anywhere from the 15th to the 17th century. By the 15th century, the Black Plague and ensuing declines in agricultural production had led to serf revolts in Europe and a large class of free laborers. If you take Marx as an authority here, he considered this early phase of capitalism to be more a part of capitalism’s prehistory than its history. And, if you’re going to read Marx, read a commentary alongside the text.

That’s the earliest plausible date for the founding of capitalism. The latest plausible date is the full emergence of the mercantile system. And again, this is debatable, but it’s widely accepted that this system was in full force by the mid-17th century. The production methods and runaway growth associated with the industrial form of capitalism came yet later.

And so, on the question historical priority, we have a wash. Racism began sometime between 1400 and 1750. Its causes were largely economic, though whether those causes were late feudalist or early capitalist is unclear. Capitalism, as a dominant system, began sometime between 1400 and 1650. Its causes were breakdowns in the feudal order, particularly class conflicts within feudalism.

Explanatory Priority

Explanatory priority is a different concept. It’s a matter of which system offers the more foundational explanation of society. You might think about it in terms of which system is the root cause of social events. Which system comes first historically is largely irrelevant to explanatory priority.

The Marxist take on this issue is that capitalism is prior to racism in the explanatory sense. Class relations are part of the base and are thereby prior to racism, which is an element of the superstructure. I laid out this distinction in the first post of this blog. And, of course, it’s the name of the blog.

Marxists aren’t the only leftists who accept this line of reasoning. Most non-Marxist leftist traditions do as well. It would be fair to call the explanatory priority of capitalism in our current day the central dogma of left-wing thought. A few strands of leftism have flirted with rejecting it, notably Maoism and some kinds of Leninism. But this is a small slice.

Race as Prior?

The contrary thesis that racism has explanatory priority over capitalism was once rare within left traditions, but now a bit more common. It’s associated with the adoption of race-identitarianism. I read Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, as holding this thesis, though I won’t belabor the point now. I wrote about Coates’s book We Were Eight Years in Power in an earlier post.

Kendi mostly avoids the issue of explanatory priority. As a historian, he focuses on historical priority instead. As a philosopher, I’m a bit more interested in explanatory priority. But I suspect that were we to ask Kendi, he’d say that neither racism nor capitalism has explanatory priority. He thinks they came about separately and only later co-evolved. This gels best with the view that neither is the underlying cause of the other, barring some unlikely historical events.

Can Racism Exist Without Capitalism?

I don’t think the questions of historical and explanatory priority are merely academic questions without practical import. What I think we ultimately want to know is whether one system can survive without the other. Could we have a racist socialism or an antiracist capitalism? This bears both on theory and revolutionary practice.

Usually one should take great care when declaring something impossible. The library is full of books, and the Internet full of articles, that rule out things that ended up happening anyway. If you say something is impossible, you’d better have good reasons for saying so.

For Kendi, the answer to the question in the headline here is “yes.” He thinks a racist socialism is completely possible. In support he cites the fact that there are racist communists and racist labor unions. He sees a possible future where labor builds a socialist system that continues ranking black workers below white workers.

And, for my part, I can accept Kendi’s line of reasoning. Most leftists have now rejected narrowly laborist conceptions of socialism. But the possibility still lurks.

Can Capitalism Exist Without Racism?

I’m not going to spend too much time on this one. I think the obvious answer is “yes.” Not only do I think the answer is “yes,” I think there’s a reasonable chance it’ll happen in the future.

Capitalism has proven extraordinarily flexible with regard to shifting race relations. White slave owners forcibly shipped black Africans to the United States and used them for free labor. White colonialists used Native Americans as an endless source of free land. After the abolition of slavery and the establishment of reservations, both groups became in large part components of the reserve army of labor. Capitalism has adapted before. I see no reason to declare that it can’t adapt again.

What capitalism needs to maintain itself in an antiracist world is a way to subjugate labor without racial ideology and racist systems. This includes thing like heavily automated production systems, Six Sigma and Lean production methods, and a reserve army of labor made up of, e.g., immigrants.

Though capitalism is far from there, it’s clear that the agricultural and manufacturing industries are preparing for this future. As is Silicon Valley. The capitalist system is hard at work on this issue.

Capitalism and Racism: Concluding Thoughts

Let’s go back to those four theses I laid out above.

History

Neither capitalism nor racism has obvious historical priority. It depends on our goals and how we define the systems. And so, racism may or may not survive the death of capitalism.

Explanation

As a part of the base, capitalism has explanatory priority. But capitalism’s explanatory priority does not entail that it’s more important to people’s lives or experiences. Some will report that capitalism impacts them more directly. Others will report the same about racism. Both kinds of reports are legitimate. We’re not going to lay down any universal law through deciding whose experiences are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’

Movements

That leaves us with the issue of leftist movements. I think we need to address capitalism and racism simultaneously for both substantive and pragmatic reasons. Substantively, racism and other oppressive systems are tools of capitalism. Pragmatically, addressing racism is key to coalition-building. Racism is important to people’s daily lives, as many people encounter the ills of capitalism through its racist manifestations. Addressing racism makes anti-capitalist movements more relevant to people.

What I find most frustrating about leftists who argue that we should set aside issues of race, gender, et al., is that they’re ultimately bad leftists. Race, gender, and other axes of oppression are part of the class system. You really can’t address class without addressing those issues along with it.

The best anti-capitalist actions take into account the racialized (and gendered, et al.) elements of capitalism. And the best antiracist actions acknowledge that racial classification and racist operations are grounded in class relations.

N.B.

This is Part 2 of two posts on themes from Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. In Part 1 I covered some of the general themes from the book, and in Part 2 above, I focused in more depth on issues of capitalism and racism.

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