Jonah Birch: What would you say are the key tenets of Black Marxism?
Jeff Goodwin: Black Marxism is not homogeneous, but the central idea is that capitalism has historically been the main pillar of racial oppression in the modern era. And by racial oppression, I mean the political, legal, and social domination or control of African and black peoples.
What does it mean to say that capitalism is the main pillar or foundation of racial oppression? Black Marxists point to two fundamental characteristics of capitalism — capitalists’ ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources, on the one hand, and workers’ competition for jobs, on the other — as the root causes of racial oppression. So notice right away that, while racial oppression is produced and motivated by capitalism according to Black Marxists, it is obviously not the same thing as class exploitation. Rather, it facilitates the exploitation of black labor and, thereby, of all labor.
And to say that racism in its modern form is a product of capitalism is not to diminish in any way whatsoever racism’s horrendous consequences. Quite the contrary. Black Marxists emphasize how black peoples in the modern era have confronted political and social domination as well as the extreme forms of economic exploitation this domination has enabled. The political oppression of black peoples is horrible in its own right, and it also makes possible especially brutal forms of labor exploitation.
To be more specific, one inherent characteristic of capitalism is capitalists’ ceaseless drive for cheap labor and resources. This drive stems from the fact that capitalists compete with one another and so are constantly looking for ways to reduce their costs of production. One way to keep labor cheap and docile is to politically oppress workers — to dominate and control them and so prevent them from organizing and resisting effectively. Capitalists would prefer to oppress all workers, but a second-best option is to dominate some significant section of the working class — maybe women, maybe immigrants, maybe black workers.
Black Marxists say that black peoples have been oppressed horribly by capitalists, the government, and the police not as an end in itself, or out of racial malice alone. Where large-scale racial domination and inequality exist, the purpose is generally to facilitate the exploitation and control of black labor — think of plantation slavery and sharecropping and low-wage and precarious work in the United States. In many cases, the motivation behind racial domination also includes the dispossession of land and resources controlled by specific racial groups. Colonialism obviously entails such dispossession and is driven by capitalists’ unceasing quest for cheap resources as well as for cheap labor.