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Racism: A Feature Of Capitalism

Racism as it exists today is not a modern creation. Its theory and practice in society is also a feature found back in feudal Europe. It goes back further still. However the principles are the same and it remains, as it was then, a controlling mechanism of the ruling class; a barrier to the redemptive struggle of humanity and the great inhibitor of social progress. Its practice is its own justification. It’s a means to an end and stands paramount to the preservation of an inherently oppressive Western world — without such in place, the status quo could not reproduce itself. This relevance is important because many have been taught nothing about racism; having gone to school 10, 20 years and never coming close to understating the mechanisms at play that pit humanity against each other for, in the last analysis, the opportunity at living a life worth living. Found in the heart of our great capitalist society, then, is the breaking up of peoples across racial, economic, social and political lines; and letting them lose to revenge everything but the capitalist system.

To be a racist reveals in an individual either a conscious mind unaware of class antagonisms designed to foster division or it exposes an individual who embraces the ideology to partake in the spoils of oppression. Whichever is the case both are at peace with the status quo. Blacks hate whites. Whites hate Blacks. Indians hate everyone else. There are numerous divisions in the families and tribes of the earth. Inequality is strong. Instead of uniting against the capitalist as one human family many are alone and unable to bridge the gap– while being at the same time utterly exhausted fighting one another for a slice of the capitalist pie. To be a racist, then, is to be a pawn in a ‘game’ where race superiority exist. Truly, it exist nowhere else.

The poor working class have everything to lose and nothing to gain by being divided by such superficial abstractions. What flies in the face of all this is the fact that history is rich in examples of discrimination of tribes and nations between people of the same skin color. If racism is not limited to just skin color then it can be shown to be something more. Something that serves a more practical purpose as an appendage of the ruling class.

According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary racism is a “belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

Race is defined as a “family, a tribe, a people, or nation belonging to the same stock. A class or kind of individuals with common characteristics, interest or habits.” The term race is not necessarily dealing with color of the skin but rather with peoples or nations.

We must be mindful of these definitions.

The bible reveals that there is a human family of mankind that must be united. One way this happens is to be sympathetic and acknowledge the mistreatment of other families in the earth. We do nothing of this sort by ‘licking our wounds’ coupled with bitterness against all others. This only creates contention and more division.

The prophetic language in the bible has laid the ground work and has shown us of the terrible times of ethnic division in Jesus’ day and beyond. In the book of Matthew, as he himself seen the development of the Roman empire, Christ made mention of the days ahead. He began to tell us what was to take place,

4 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. 6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

This prophesy is not just for the future generation. This rising of nation against nation had began to take place and started shortly after the Messiah was executed by the Roman authorities.

The Greek word in the bible for nation is ethnos (Strong’s 1484) and it relates to a tribe or group of “people joined by practicing similar customs or common culture.” The reality of Jesus’ words are that there shall not just be kingdom against kingdom but ethnicity against ethnicity, family against family and tribe against tribe (regardless of skin color). As Paul and the apostles picked up the mantel of Jesus they began to deal greatly in breaking down barriers of class division and its associated stigmas. They sought to gather into the knowledge of God the ones who became known by the Romans as barbarians (synonymous with the word nigger, the savage)–all those who were outside Roman civilization.

In his book Black Marxism,  Cedric Robinson begins to explain the divisions of the tribes and families that began to take place in Europe,

The social bases of European civilization was among those the Romans called the barbarians. The term signified that the barbarians had their historical origins beyond the civilizing reach of Roman law and the Roman imperial social order. The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Soothe, Burgundy, Alamanni, and the Franks, that is barbarians, whose impact on the fortunes of the late Roman empire from the 5th century was quick and dramatic.

Barbarian according to the Webster’s Merriam dictionary is relating to a “land, culture, or people alien and usually believed to be inferior to another land, culture, or people.” They were the tribes and families, according to Romans, who were “lacking refinement, learning, or artistic or literary culture.”

This type of identification began in Europe first before they decided to go out and conquer other “inferior” people across the globe. Before this however they were barbarians themselves who had their own land outside the “civilized” world. Any tribe or family that were initially outside Rome were not apart of “civilization” and were known as N******, savages and barbarians. The savage European became “civilized” through Roman imperialism and in time brought their civilization to the savage and barbarians in Africa, North and South America and to the savages in the Far East.

The philosophy contained in “civilized” society creates social and class differences, inequality, false sense of superiority and false pride among people (where now you think you’re better than the next). The principle of racism is purely made up. It’s not real. Nobody is born a racist or with notions of superior pride over the next. It is culturally instilled.

Why did the barbarians of Europe come to Rome?

More importantly the vast majority of the barbarians came not as conquers but exactly as in our own day: North Africans, Italians, Polish crossed into metropolitan France to look for work.

–Black Marxism

The idea that the native Europeans came as aggressors to destroy Roman civilization is a ruling class invention. The same way they became slaves was the same way the North Africans, Italians and Polish became slaves to the modern forces of production as they left their conquered lands in the 20th century. They too were known as barbarians to the civilized. This is how it works.  The Irish immigrants who came to America were looked upon as savages. These were your white n******. Just as Rome robbed all the lands and resources the developed nations do the same today. Nothing is new under the sun. This was the fate of the European savage in Roman days, and as we will learn it is the fate of the uncivilized savage today.

In a relatively short time the southern most European lands that were bounded by a Western Roman empire; these people were entirety assimilated by the ingenious people as a primarily slave labor force. It is also important to realize that with respect to the emerging European civilizations, whose beginnings coincide with the arrival with those same barbarians, slave labor as a critical bases of production would continue without any significant interruption into the 20th century.

–Black Marxism

More recently and as their puppet rulers sit and do nothing, our Latin American brothers and sisters become disenfranchised and head north labeled with the term illegal alien. This is simply another term for barbarian: an alien people. The terms are only switched. Illegal alien for barbarian. The ruling class are masters of deceptions. Because many of us don’t understand their definitions, they can have us thinking one thing and mean something entirely different. We may be fooled to believe that it’s a matter of constitutional legality that can be fairly sorted out in the judicial branch of government; since we are ignorant we therefore feel one thing when what is implied is inferiority. They are less than human. Yes, indeed they look at the Mexicans as barbarians.

Also, the citizens who lost their homes in the Katrina floods were called aliens as they fled to the north for relief. This is the stigma they give to the poor as a civilization conquers. Nothing has changed in so far as the how ruling elite and their retainers look upon the poor people.

However, back to Rome.

European society only became civilized after it was absorbed by the racist features of Roman feudalism by employing, as slave labor, the native barbarians.

In the book A Pictorial History of the Italian People,

More important than conquest were internal changes. First the transformation of the Roman-Italian nation and later the transformation of the Roman Mediterranean world. As the result of conquest many Romans have become wealthier. At the same time as the result of long wars and economic competition from the dependencies, many Romans have become poorer; particularly the small farmers. The growing gap between rich and poor in the Roman state were added the differences between not less than 5 classes of unequal citizens in the Roman-Italian confederation. Discrimination between Rome and romanticized Italians on the one side and subjects and the dependencies on the other, and the presence of large number of slaves.

Who were these slaves? The European savage, the barbarians. The Roman republic was being weakened. There was inequality between the new European brothers and sisters entering Rome. A racial element came into play if you were belonged to a particular tribe. Inequality was spreading and in order to justify it the rich teach us today that the poor barbarian-savage does not deserve to live (some will tell you this). Remember the Messiah said there will be nation against nation. This racist baby is brewing up and would become real troublesome to the poor inhabitants of the whole world.

 In the book As the Romans Did by Jo Ann Shelton,

Roman society was extremely class conscious. Three major factors determined the class structure: wealth or lack of it, freedom or lack of it, and Roman citizenship or lack of it. In ancient Rome social divisions were sustained by laws and one group might be denied political and legal privileges allowed to another group. For example until 88 B.C. people dwelling within Italy but not outside of Rome have for centuries lived under the domination of Roman citizens and fought along side the Roman army but they have been denied the rights of Roman citizenship. They could not vote in Roman elections and could participate in the government which ruled them. They could not marry into Roman families and were subjected to execution for capital offenses.

 This is familiar to those who understand so-called Negro history. He could fight in the imperialist wars of the United States and was denied true status as a citizen. This is for a reason–the real history will not be taught in school. And at the same time, this society will encourage you to spend your last dollar to go get an education in the universities; and in doing so you come out just as dumb as you went in. You may be educated in the Roman apparatus but you are no more aware of the real matters shaping the world. You are just as ignorant. People who attend the university graduate only to be turned inside out; to become trained, brained-washed robots who keep the machine running. The output of their education bring advancements to the oppressive order through inventions and labors. Now our children coming up behind us face the brunt of the brutality; they reap the reward of our toils that improved upon the racist state of capitalism

For example, Eli Whitney created the cotton gin in the name of capital and received a pat on the back. He received many accolades. Now as his children come up they are no longer useful; (not to say slave labor was something they needed) but as they used these inventions to advance their production the next generation became prone to starve to death. They find themselves competing against a machine for work (who have no land, no means of production coupled with their labor power stolen).

Continuing,

Distinction biased on wealth and freedom persisted; slaves, freed persons and free persons. Among free person who were Roman citizens, status was biased primarily on wealth. During the period of the monarchy male members of the wealthier families in the community served as kings advisors and since they acted as the elders or the fathers of the state they were called patricians. The rest of the families in the estate were called plebeians [the poor masses]. Patrician rank was therefore inherited and it was never possible for a plebeian to become a patrician except by adoption. The patrician families performed Romes earliest aristocracy and they jealously guarded their own power in the state by establishing ridged limitations on social and political movement of the plebeians who formed the majority.

–As the Romans Did

The rich class created a bureaucracy and established laws to keep their status. This bureaucracy exists today to guard elite powers and to limit what others can achieve. This is why the cost of their education is so high. If the elite class promote to the poor majority that education is the key to success then why is it so unattainable for many? Therefore the poor can never truly attain to higher education (as they call it) if they cannot pay their way. We need to find real education. With their educational institutions the elite have the earth and its inhabitants in ruins. The waters are dead zones, birds are dying, the fields cannot bring forth strong crops in many areas, you cannot tell women from men, family ties are torn asunder and there is sickness and disease all over the world. This is the fruit of their educational apparatuses.

To hell with their education!

However, they have created these laws and through them created inequality. The plebeians, who consisted of the barbarians, the slaves and the low classes now become the justification the ruling class needs to maintain their power. This why it is needed in some societies to have wealth and power in class divisions. The rich have to persuade everyone else that this is just. That racism is just. It becomes justifiable when the poor war and fight others of different skin color for the necessitates of life. This absorbs the energy of potential rebellion and gives the elite further incentive to legislate more laws to keep the status quo. Only if the people knew!

Fast forward to 1900.

There was an utterly stupid book published and circulated in American libraries called The Negro: A Beast written by Charles Carroll (who “spent 15 years of his life and 20 thousand dollars in its compilation”). Carroll’s argument in his masterful book is that the so-called Negro is not even a man. He was not created with Adam and Eve and is not even one of their decedents. He was created with the beast of the field.

What necessitated such a book was the fact that a capitalist society must circulate literature, media, to create ethnic divisions. It is built into societal institutions which are none other than catalysts to capital. To have a society where only a few can attain wealth racism must be a feature. It is certainly without a doubt a feature of capitalism and feudalism. You must brainwash the elite too. The rich lords, nobles and their children must become racist so they cannot have a conscious about the people they are treating like trash because in their own mind, the people they exploit for profit are now become barbarians. The scum. You have to train them this way. This is the foolishness that comes from these so-called wise men of society.

A picture out of The Negro: A Beast

Carroll writes,

The Negro a beast, but created with articulate speech, and hands, that he may be of service to his master–the white man.

The Negro is not the son of Ham. Neither can it be proven by the bible, and the argument of the theologian who would claim such, melts to mist before the thunderous and convincing arguments of this masterful book.

A publication like The Negro: A Beast is nothing new. Our brothers and sisters in Europe were treated the same way when they were introduced face first with Roman imperialism. We must treat all our brothers and sister as one family.

Charles Carroll claims in his book that the so-called Negro did not come from Ham. Let’s examine this claim. In the bible Noah is described as having three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth

Genesis 10:1

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

First, this is tying all humanity into one family. However, a popular lie circulating says that  Ham was cursed. This curse is used by the ruling elite and the retaining class, whether it be the theologian or plantation owner, to justify exploitation of so-called blacks.

Notice Genesis chapter 9,

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Notice who was cursed. It was Canaan, not Ham. Regardless, all so-called black people do not come from Ham (this is another teaching). However, Carroll is explaining to us in his convincing argument and in his masterful book that the Negro does not come from Ham and is a beast,

The histories of every nationality of ancient times sustained by our experience with the Negro in the United States demonstrates that whites must be the master of the Negro else they can never live together in peace. This is the law of God.

–The Negro: A Beast

Ole’ Carroll  said this is the law of God. If you take your time to look up the word Negro it is not just talking about African peoples. In the dictionary it is talking about dark races. For example, the Indians in South Africa were considered to be Negros by the British imperialists.

Why go through all this?

It is to show what must circulate to brain wash the people and to create ethnic divisions. Once you begin to think that you are superior to blacks, or to the Indians (vise versa) or that French blood is superior to the Irish, or if you are German you are superior to the rest of the tribes it will create a system of division. The elite not only create this atmosphere but they absorb this divided energy and put it to their use.

As the capitalist order began to expand its tentacles in the Americas, as feudalism was exhausted and transforming into capitalism, the prevailing order continued. The United States constitution talks about equal rights and freedom to all people but the so-called Negro brother and sister was considered 3/5 a man. The Europeans who came to America, as the mercantile system continued to develop, were faced with the same devil-child of capitalism. The newly rich in the colonies began to populate and perpetuate the same order found in feudal Rome.

Many think that all white people are bad as if they were all owners of slaves. This is the result of the elite who show the brutality of slavery and publish its evils openly; those who control all the media, news papers, book publishing and radios etc. will pit you one against another. The history has been given only in part. The fact remains that only 3 to 5% of the so-called white population owned slaves. You might think only so-called blacks came over as slaves; this is not entirely accurate either.

The enemy is not a particular family of the earth. Our poor brothers of Indian decent, of European decent, our poor brothers of Asian decent are not the enemy. In this epoch of history in America the oppressor is predominantly white skinned. However, travel to Asia and you will see the same oppressors in Asian skin, and with the same brutality. The same mentality. Travel to Africa and you will see the same oppressors in dark skin with the same mentality. The same brutality. Racism concerning skin color simply does not make sense. This propaganda of the-color-of-skin slavery type, pitting the black, white and Indian against each other is not well thought out.

Let’s bring the European barbarians to the shores of America and see what begins to take place in capitalist systems of more recent times. Notice how they keep the confusion of faces among the poor masses to their benefit.

In the book A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (pg.42),

In England, the development of commerce and capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s, the enclosing of lands for the production of wool, filled the cities with vagrant poor, and from the reign of Elizabeth on, laws were passed to punish them, imprison them in workhouses, or exile them. The Elizabethan definition of “rouges and vagabonds” included:

…All persons calling themselves Schollers going about begging all Seafaring men pretending losses of their Shippes or goods on the sea going about the Country begging, all idle persons going about in any Country either begging or using any subtile crafte or unlawful Games…common Players of Inerludes and Minstrells wandering abroade…all wandering persons and comon Labourers being persons able in body using loytering and refusing to worke for such reasonable wages as is taxed or commonly given…

All these are who you would call barbarians.

Such persons found begging could be stripped to the waist and whipped bloody, could be sent out of the city, sent to workhouses, or transported out of the country. In the 1600s and 1700s, by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America.

–A People’s History

Inequality was rampant throughout Europe as it was in Rome. The whole fabric of racism is stitched together by class divisions and those at the top, the few rich, brutalized the many at the bottom. With their bureaucracy and endless rhetoric, inequalities rolled down to justify their position. The elite are ever on guard with political power to remain seated in wealth acquired by theft, deceit and violence. Just like how Carroll’s book explained to us that the Negro was made to be a slave to the white man, the same theories and principles are manifested against other families of the earth.

How does racism, inequality, of the ethnic classes help the rich elite?

Abbot Smith in his study of indentured servitude, Colonist in Bondage writes: “From the complex pattern of forces producing emigration to the American colonies one thing stands out clearly as most powerful in causing the movement of servants. This was the pecuniary profit to be made by shipping them.”

After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their cost of passage by working for a master 5 or 7 years, they were often imprisoned until the ship sailed, to make sure they would not run away…The voyage to America last eight, ten or twelve weeks and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships.

–A People’s History

What were the forces producing emigration to the American colonies? What caused the European brothers and sisters to come over to American?

In the book  How It Began: The Story of Indentured Servitude in America,

The new colonists were also to be provided with houses, orchards, vegetable gardens, food and clothing all free from the Virginia Company. Moreover, after seven years the settlers would share in the profits the company had made in its venture in Virginia and receive free land. Governor Sir George Yeardley promised that the share would amount to as much as a hundred acres a piece. It was not long however, before indentures made their appearance. The first one that is known is dated September 7, 1619 issued by four English gentlemen who proposed to establish what became known as Berkley Hundred in Virginia. For Berkley Hundred there were no glittering promises like those of the Virginia Company. The prospective settlers simply signed indentures agreeing to serve a certain length of time to pay off their transportation to America.

From then on all settlers who could not pay of the cost of their transportation signed indentures, they were no longer freemen but slaves of the planters who bought them until they worked off their debt. Meanwhile in America the demand of labor was increasing at a rate that far outdistanced the number of emigrants from Europe. In Maryland and Virginia raising tobacco had become so profitable that the planters were desperate for help to clear the land of undergrowth and establish larger plantations in other colonies. In other colonies the demand was less but still strong.

In German speaking Switzerland there was a large supply of labor needed for America but because the dissatisfied people of these regions knew little of the opportunities the new world offered there was little more than trickle of immigration until one of America’s famous men, William Penn, solved the problem. Penn’s plan was to persuade well to do Europeans to emigrate to America and bring indentured servants with them. Each servant was to be given 50 acres of land as soon as he had paid off the cost of his journey. Thousands eagerly seized the chance for relief from the disasters of grinding poverty they had suffered.

In Ireland the demand for indentured servants in America was so great that the colonies, which desperately needed laborer, continued to take them for many years through the 18th century and even into the 19th century. Just how big and how evil a trade it became remains to be seen [the book would continue to expose the evil].

When lavish descriptions and promises of the Virginia Company and broad sides published by William Penn and others failed to attract many of the English vast horde of poor people the British government looked for another solution to the difficulty. It was provided not by the government but by merchants, ship owners and wealthy men who saw a chance to reap a golden harvest from the trade in indentured servants.

The promises made proved to be lies.

The deception was great.

How did the colonists and the merchants look upon the poor European coming over to America? What happened to the indentured servant as he became free?

In A People’s History of the United States,

There are cheerful accounts in which they rise to prosperity, becoming landowners and important figures. But Abbot Smith, after a careful study, concludes that colonial society “was not democratic and certainly not equalitarian; it was dominated by men who had money enough to make others work for them” And: “Few of these men were descended form indentured servants, and practically none had themselves been of that class.”

After we make our way through Abbot Smith’s disdain for the servants, as “men and women who were dirty and lazy, rough, ignorant, lewd, and often criminal,” who “thieved and wandered, had bastard children, and corrupted society with loathsome diseases,” we find that “about one in ten was a sound and solid individual, who would if fortunate survive his ‘seasoning,’ work out his time, take up land, and wax decently prosperous.” Perhaps another one in ten would become an artisan or an overseer. The rest, 80 percent, who were ‘certainly…shiftless, hopeless, ruined individuals,” either “died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over, or became ‘poor whites.’”

Inequality followed the poor of Europe coming in to America and they were met with the same system of exploitation. Many of the poor arriving were descendants of the barbarians who came into the Europe of old; who to themselves faced the same system of oppression in Rome with its own racist institution. These Europeans never had land in all three places: America, Europe or Rome. It took many years for them to attain to citizenship in every account.

Whites who did become important figures came to the colonies with wealth in hand and most have been tricked today to think that the majority received awesome benefits. Though the poor European savages received much more than the so-called black they still only received the equivalent of crumbs. They were given just enough to meet the requirements for creating divisions– to make one class feel that the rich were protectors of their interests. The poor whites did not receive anything whatsoever because the rich liked them personally. Rather what was needed was to have one ethnic group against the other ethnic group. And as long the elite can brain wash the masses that the problem is everything else but the system then they can easily rob the earth and its people with ruthless abandon. If you interrupt their flow of mammon the poor then become the problem, the criminal. You’re the criminal if you try to rob the robbers. The barons, the titans, the cartels go unmolested.

Who else? Who’s next? The so-called African is next up.

A People’s History,

African slavery is hardly to be praised. But it was far different from plantation or mining slavery in the Americas, which was lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family ties, without hope of any future. African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel for of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.

Then They were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, chained together in the dark, wet slime of the ship’s bottom, choking in the stench of their own excrement. Documents of the time describe the conditions:…To one observer a slave-deck was “so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.”

Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits (often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish.

The slave has arrived to America. We have read about the poor whites of Europe arriving and even a time before their arrival in Rome. The native Indians were already here, already losing their land. What did capitalistic agriculture have to do with it? Everything. Why is it necessary for the philosophy of racism, which was a feature in feudalism, to enable the rich to justify their rulership over the poor? Why was it necessary to use it in the capitalistic development in the new world?

For control. To secure their class against revolution and against the unity of all the sons of Adam.

Let’s bring it all to terms from the point of view of the capitalist,

…In in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were “remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical differences.”

Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of the tendency.

–A People’s History

Most assume that the laws passed separating whites and blacks was because whites simply did not want to be among blacks. This is not true. It was a tactic of the the rich to create divisions to protect their order. They did not want poor blacks and poor whites to continue to be friends or form alliances. The truth shall set you free.

Under feudalism the elite created divisions between every “uncivilized” tribe beneath them. In capitalism, since the ordering of the economic system is different, the elite have to create divisions among all the people.

Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join blacks slaves to overthrow the existing order.

–People’s History

The elite realized the poor began to over populate them in the colonies. The Indians, the Negro slaves and the poor whites far out numbered the ruling class. The power is truly in the hands of the people.

In the early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation.

As Edmund Morgan sees it: “There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eight Negroes and twenty English servants.”

Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring master to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.

Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.”

–Peoples’ History

The European poor have been tricked. They have been used to fight against the English crown in the Revolutionary war and given some privilege in return. They have been tricked into being a buffer against rebellion. Small privileges are legislated to give some false sense of superiority and a general feeling that the rich class shares in their own interests. But the rich already had plans to bring it back to the status quo after the Independence was gained and the United States formed. History has bare witness.

Today the middle-class is being flushed down the toilet. It’s going that way because the rich had this planned from the beginning. They just had to take a step back to hand out some crumbs, to bring some whites up to fight their wars, separate all the poor and to have the poor whites feel superior to the poor blacks and Indians. Then two oppressive steps are taken forward. It was a masterful plan to uplift some whites and to see them with the doctrines of superiority of Charles Carroll is embarrassing. It’s a smack in the face to all the poor. In the beginning race was not an issue.

But the order of capitalism must be protected so divisions are created as they amass more an more wealth.

Only the ignorant deal with racism. Racism is a trick of the elite merchant classes. The enemy is not a color. The enemy is the found in the ruling class. The ruling class has been in North and South America, in Africa, in Asia and everywhere the economic system is built on exploration. It’s in all the developed world.

Continuing,

With the problem of Indian hostility, and the danger of slave revolts, the colonial elite had to consider the class anger of poor whites–servants, tenants, the city poor, the propertyless, the taxpayer, the soldier and sailor. As the colonies passed their hundredth year and went into the middle of the 1700s, as the gap between rich and poor widened, as violence and the threat of violence increased, the problem of control became more serious.

What if these different despised groups–the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites–should combine? Even before there were so many blacks, in the seventeenth century, there was, as Abbot Smith put it, “a lively fear that servants would join with Negroes or Indians to overcome the small number of masters.”

And so laws were passed prohibiting free blacks from traveling in Indian country. Treaties with Indian tribes contained clauses requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Governor Lyttletown of South Carolina wrote in 1738: “It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes.”

Blacks ran away to Indian villages, and the Creeks and Cherokees harbored runaway slaves by the hundreds…

–A People’s History

They also caused an aversion between Negros and whites, whites and Indians etc. The same dilemma took place with the Mexicans and the Chinese and as the years went on, as the capitalist entrenched and expanded their tentacles,

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century; the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression–a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

–A People’s History

The old feudalistic features of racism has never truly vanished. It’s an age old practice of the ruling class to create division and the lines have been laid going into the 20th century. The idea that racism exist only against one group by the rest, regardless of class, poor or rich, is simply untrue. It becomes, perhaps, selfish when an individual thinks that only their own kind has been afflicted or mistreated and none others. There have been terrible atrocities against so-called blacks, so-called whites, so-called native Americans and against all peoples of color. In this way, it seems every man will claim his burden is the heaviest. However, to have immunity against racism our focus needs to be grounded in understanding and illuminated by the historical record– it needs to be shown who begot this vile racist baby.

We must realize the wiles of the devil. Pitting the white brother against his black brother, the Chinese against his family of other races, the Indian against the whites and blacks (or any number of combination) is brought about by giving one class a small social, political or economic favor inaccessible to the others, regardless of race or tribe and all this, however, is only in so far as it maintains the status quo of the enslavement of all humanity to the capitalist order.

It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants’ struggles of the period 1830-1877. They were nationwide movements, more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air.

–A People’s History

The time of revolution is now.

…thus the redemptive struggle of man goes on.

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Let us build on true independence and salvation for the people. Listen to Racism: A Feature of Capitalism on Blogtalk Raido