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Race: A Social Reality
The absence of any scientific basis for distinguishing one "race" from another makes the whole concept meaningless. Yet biological refutation does not affect the social reality. As Richard Fraser, a veteran American Trotskyist, pointed out in "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution," a document written in the 1950s and recently republished, race remains "a reality in spite of the fact that science reveals that it does not exist." Fraser wrote that: "The concept of race has now been overthrown in biological science. But race as the keystone of exploitation remains. Race is a social relation and has only a social reality."
Racism is rooted in the historical development of capitalism as a world system. It has proved through several centuries to be a useful and flexible tool for the possessing classes. It justified the brutal wars of conquest and genocide, which established the European colonial empires. It rationalized the slave trade, which produced the primitive accumulation of capital necessary for the industrial revolution.
Today racism in its various guises remains an important ideological mainstay for the capitalist elites, providing a rationale for the barbaric oppression of minorities. Racism "explains," for example, why black people in America fail to get a piece of the "American Dream" one generation after another. It can be used to "explain" why Japanese capitalism has been much more successful than its European and North American rivals. The arguments offered by racists, whether the psychotic ravings of a lumpenized skinhead or the "objective," pseudo-scientific scholarship of a Harvard professor, seek to direct popular anger away from the workings of an irrational and decaying capitalist system to some group of "outsiders."
Racism has proved integral and necessary for the proper functioning of capitalist society for a variety of reasons. In the first place, it provides one of the essential axes along which the working class can be divided against itself, encouraging one segment of the proletariat to identify with the exploiters. This impedes the development of class consciousness and undermines the unity necessary to challenge capitalist rule. The working class of every imperialist country has been so poisoned with chauvinism and racism (also promoted by pro-capitalist misleaderships within the workers' movement) that in "normal" periods, workers often identify their interests with those of their "own" oppressors and exploiters rather than with those of workers in other countries.
Secondly, racism, in common with other forms of biological determinism, has an essential ideological function. The bourgeoisie rose to ascendancy under the banner of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Yet for hundreds of millions of people daily reality in the world capitalist order is misery, oppression and poverty. Even in the so-called advanced capitalist countries there is a growing cynicism about the electoral process, with most adults recognizing that the "equality" of the ballot box is no different from the "equality of the market place?every dollar is equal, and big money takes all. Racists are not burdened with the obligation to prove that capitalist society is egalitarian. Instead, they openly claim that the inequalities of class society are based on natural distinctions.
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