COMMENTARY:
The
recent murder of 37-year old African American Alton Sterling by
police in Louisiana is another tragic episode in the long chain of
racist crimes in the U.S. The United States of America- the
metropolis of Capitalism- has a devastating tradition of racial
discrimination. A tradition of human chattel slavery back in the 18th
and 19th century, of lynchings and mob violence against
African-Americans, of racial segregation and discrimination against
black people in the post WW2 decades.
Racism
is an inseparable element of the capitalist exploitative system; it
is in the very nature of Capitalism to produce, promote and feed
racism. After all, the exploitation of the working class by the
capitalists becomes easier and more effective when there are
divisions among workers. For that, racism consists a valuable tool of
the capitalist establishment in creating disunity within workers.
What is best for the exploitative system rather than a splitted
working class, filled with racist poison?
Writing
for TIME magazine, after the murder of Michael Brown by a police
officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the former basketball legend Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar was correctly pointing out: “And,
unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become
nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to
address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but
as what else it is: class warfare” (TIME,
17 Aug. 2014).
Indeed,
the racially motivated crimes must be seen not as an exclusive and
separate issue of “racism” but within the context of class
warfare. The intense class warfare in the U.S. reflects the harsh
reality behind the curtain of the so-called “American Dream”. In
a period of 33 years, from 1980 to 2013, 262,000 black males were
killed in the United States ("A Matter of Black Lives", theatlantic.com). This number is more than four times
bigger than the number of Americans killed in the imperialist Vietnam
War. In 2015, U.S. police killed at least 102 unarmed black Americans
(MappingPoliceViolence.org), while the rate of death for black men
was five times higher than white men of the same age.
The
police brutality against African-Americans goes hand-by-hand with the
rise of racist, neo-fascist white supremacist groups in the country.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the U.S. hate groups
including the notorious Ku Klux Klan have increased dramatically in
the past year- in the multicultural metropolis of Capitalism (U.S.)
there are 892 active hate groups, including neo-Nazis, racist
skinheads, white nationalists, fundamentalist christian groups etc.
The vast majority of these hate, racist groups are based in Texas,
California and Florida.
During
the last years of the capitalist crisis, in both the U.S. and Europe,
we have seen the rise of far-right, fascist and racist groups and
parties. Despite the distance, the cultural and political
differences, the root for the strengthening of such groups is the
same in both the two sides of the Atlantic: the need of the
capitalist system to keep the workers, the low-income people
divided, by reproducing waves of racism, nationalism and bigotry. The
fake divisions within the working class (e.g. white versus black
workers, local workers vs immigrants, etc.) consist an extremely
comfortable situation for the monopolies and their profitability.
There are countless examples which prove the abovementioned argument.
However, we can only refer to a characteristic one – the 1994 case
of Texaco's corporate racism.
In
1994, Texaco- the 14th largest corporation
in
the U.S.-
was hit by a $520 million racial bias suit. The suit, filed by six
African-American employees on behalf of 1,500 other employees,
asserted that Texaco "systematically discriminates against
minority employees in promotions and has fostered a racially hostile
environment."
A
large number of black employees had then testified about racist
incidents at Texaco. Later, The
New
York Times obtained
thousands of pages of sealed court records, as well as government
documents, corporate records and sworn depositions, which exposed how
systematic, racist policies thrived at Texaco. The supposed “equal
opportunity” promoted by the “American Dream” hides numerous
cases like Texaco; cases of racial discrimination, of openly hostile
environment for workers, of capitalist terrorism.
The
conclusion is: Black Lives Matter, but not in Capitalism. In the
capitalist exploitative system what matters is the profit of the
capitalist. Everything else (including, of course, human life) can be
sacrificed at the altar of profit. As Malcolm X, a non-communist but
nevertheless an honest fighter for civil rights, once said “you
can't have Capitalism without racism”.
In Defense of Communism ©.
