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... ola collapsed. The Soweto uprising of 1976 signaled the beginning of broad-based black resistance. To survive in the changing political environment the NP government developed a series of new responses.
The 1977 White Paper on Defense encapsulated the belief of the security establishment that the country faced a total onslaught on virtually every area of society. The Botha government, which came to power in 1978, broke with the past in openly seeking the support of the English-speaking captains of industry to strengthen the state and persuade the African working class to see the political and economic order as legitimate. The Botha government also vigorously sought to attract black allies, trying to co-opt them into consultative structures and to induce them to "govern" their own communities and help administer the state. To facilitate this, the government reduced explicit white privilege and symbolic domination. State security and development imperatives began to take precedence over narrow ethnic concerns.
The period between the mid- 1970 s to the end of the 1980 s saw the narrowing of the racial salary gap. (Gilomee 538) Capitalism from the days of slavery would create a chasm in the relationships between the races that would blind both sides to the exploitation of the capitalist class. However unlike white America, the situation of the African American population would be more drastically affected by the sanctions of a capitalist racialize d state apparatus. The question then becomes how was the capitalist race psychology developed in the United States and what is the relationship between slavery and capitalism as the American slave, by virtue of his bondage, is not a member of the proletariat. This question can be answered in simple terms. The slave in his person, unlike the proletarian is the commodity labor power. Whereas the proletarian sells his labor power, the slave simply is labor power; he exists as a commodity that can be sold from one individual to another.
The slave does not own his labor power; his labor is a commodity of his owner. Kurnberger is cited by Smith as proclaiming, "They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men. " This statement rings true in attempting to understand the relationship between capitalism and American slavery. Capitalism was at the base of the American, particularly Southern slave economy. Sanctioned by government policy, white men were given free range of investment with their commodity power of black slave labor. The American capitalist world of accumulation of wealth was driven by the labor power of African American slaves. The production of such staples as rice, sugar, and cotton further ingrained the establishment of slavery into the American psyche.
After the American Revolution, a movement towards the emancipation of slaves was a rather realistic development, however, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which made cotton profitable, slavery received a new lease on life. Robin Kelley maintains that, the sale and transportation of black people in the United States thus became big business. What had once taken place mostly on the African continent - the theft of people, the rending of families - now took place with vulgar regularity before the eyes and ears of American whites and blacks. As Marable concludes, "each advance in white freedom was purchased by black enslavement. " Moving on to how race psychology extends from this capitalist structure; scholars from the inception of slavery have argued about the profitability of the slave system. This debate becomes of interest when one seeks to understand the deeply psychological development of racism in the United States as a result of capitalist greed. While Adam Smith maintained that slavery was not a profitable system as it lacked incentives, and consequently production suffered, an argument that is also introduced in the South African case, both Thomas Sowell and Robert Fogel argue that slavery was profitable.
Fogel argues that, The purchase of slaves was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing. " Thomas Sowell, on the other hand, expands on this understanding of slavery, and though agreeing that slavery was a profitable system, he believes that slavery was profitable for only the slave owning class, a minority class within the American socio-economic stratification of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues, we have already noted some of those costs - loss of freedom and diversity of views, repelling many people with skills and resources valuable to the region - but more generally, it is apparent empirically that the incomes of the white population of the United States has been lowest in that region which slavery has existed within the south, those parts in which slavery was particularly concentrated (Mississippi, Alabama, and other deep south states) have long had the very lowest incomes among white Southerners. As such, one wonders what the proletariat class of the American society gained from the establishment of slavery. Scholars often note that the lower classes were more enthusiastic and endearing of slavery then the slave owners themselves. Once we enter upon this stage of discussion, the unique development of the marginalization of African Americans as a monolithic group of inferiors begins to appear. Out of the American capitalist institution of slavery developed a psyche that with capitalism and the capitalist spirit would serve to subvert the economic development of African Americans.
Slavery has been in existence since before the birth of Jesus Christ. Throughout all of its existence in such places as Rome, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean there did not occur the drastic demarcation of slavery to a particular race of people as occurred in the United States. This phenomenon and discrepancy between the American institution of slavery and others rests in the ideological function of slave labor providing for capitalist profits challenging the mythical foundations of the American society. Mark A.
Roelofs has two understandings of American government and society that accurately denotes the interaction of capitalist interests and the development of a racial class. Rolf's identifies the American ethos as being composed of myth and ideology. The myth of the American government is the "conglomeration of saga, crisis, and mission." Myth is real to the American public; it is what provides for the identity of the nation. The function of myth is to reassert the American identity in relative comparative terms to the world of nations. Ideology on the other hand is the day to day realistic operations of the American government. It is the process by which the American government governs.
Manning Marable best illustrates the myth and ideology component of American society as it relates to capitalism when he writes, American capitalism is preserved by two essential and integral factors: fraud and force. Fraud is the ideological and cultural hegemony of the capitalist creed: that enterprise is free and competition exists for all in the marketplace; that success is available for all who work hard, accumulate capital, and participate as voters in the electoral process; the democratic government is dependent upon the freedom to own private property. Blacks, Latinos and white workers are barraged daily with illusions about the inherent justice and equal opportunity within the American system Beneath the velvet glove of fraud exists the iron fists of force. For reasons of history, Black people are more aware than whites of this delicate dichotomy between consensus vs. coercion. The essence of slavery was coercion of the most primitive kind.
In other slave systems provisions were made to humanize and protect slaves as in the case of Rome, or the government under which slavery existed was authoritarian and as such slavery was a natural extension of the state and did not need justification, as in Latin America. However, in the United States, a reconciliation of the myth and ideology needed to take place. America as a democratic nation symbolizing liberty and universal rights, from the inception of slavery, had difficulty with reconciling notions of freedom to the inhumane practice of human bondage. Jefferson called this "American Dilemma justice in conflict with avarice and oppression." In the interest of capitalism, American government and society reconciled the irreconcilable notions of slavery and liberty through a rapacious verdict that classified blacks as lacking humanity. Consequently, assisted by a white establishment, the white population internalized Africans as non-human, barbaric beasts, who benefited from the institutional confinements of slavery. Sowell argues, what the experience of post-revolutionary period suggests is that the ideals of the country made extreme racism necessary for slavery to be perpetuated (Sowell 20).
The American government in its day to day operation functioned as the apparatus through which society was both entrenched with racist ideals as well as performed the enforcement of those ideals. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, representatives were concerned with the establishment of a strong government, which was at the time serviced by the maintenance of slavery. The "inalienable rights" of Afro-Americans were irrelevant. The capitalist entrenchment of the American infrastructure with propaganda attesting to the inferiority and bestiality of blacks served to establish a psyche whose temporal form, dependent on the reconciliation of the American myth of liberty to the American ideology of capitalist interest, served in a bifurcation of the American proletariat.
For the whites, blacks came to be a source of self-esteem and a comfort for their proletarian status, thus relegating blacks to category of a sub-proletarian existence. This development cushioned the white proletariat while serving capitalist ends by making available necessary commodities for avid accumulation of wealth with a lack of proletarian insurrection. As slaves gained freedom and rights a "white backlash"; "a white resistance to the acceptance of the Negro as a human being" resisted the full integration of blacks into the American economy. In describing a relationship with one of his owners Mrs.
Auld, who gave Douglass his first lessons in reading Douglass recounts, the kind heart had but a short time to remain such. That fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. It is here argued that the development of the American understanding of the Negro as non-human became of the prolific sort. Whether resulting from dissemination, from colonial sentiments of race, or from the occurrence of similar processes in other western nations, it is evident that the understanding of black as inferior was implanted into the psyche of Afrikaners before they entered South Africa in 1652. Robert Scott Jasper writes that, although racial segregation was not a feature of frontier life, the settlers assumed and insisted upon white supremacy from the beginning.
By the 1940 s the Afrikaners, who were known as the Boers or volk's, developed a philosophy, grounded in Afrikaner nationalism, that proclaimed Afrikaners to be on a "divinely inspired civilizing mission." Much like in the United States the civilizing techniques used by Afrikaners were those of exploitation designed to capitalize on black labor. The capitalist greed of the Afrikaners did not begin to take form until the middle of the nineteenth century. The process and institutionalization of apartheid in Africa was gradual. Unlike in the United States where slavery was immediately integrated into the economic structure of the United States, apartheid did not take form in Africa until the early twentieth century and then it was not cemented until the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948.
This is where the dynamics of capitalism in the two nations differ. In describing the capitalist process in South Africa in the following paragraphs it will become evident that though similar processes occurred, that is progressive exploitation of black labor and the justification of that exploitation in sociological terms, it will be evident that the structural application of these processes differed to an extreme extent due to the relative rate of industrialization and market driven development of both nations as well as the ecological factors, such as blacks being the majority of the population in Africa, whereas in the United States they are the minority. (By 1809 had the passing of the Hottentot Code, which limited the movements of the Lhoikhoi, precursor to apartheid in the mid twentieth century)... apartheid = series of laws prohibiting the advancement of blacks in South Africa Reconstruction was a time in American history that experienced a level of Black political leadership in American government that has yet to be surpassed. However, this same time period also witnessed the greatest level of black oppression.
Through the mediums of government institutionalization of racism and white acts of terrorism the interest of the capitalist would conform the situation of the American Negro to serving the ends of profit and the accumulation of wealth. With manumission in 1863 and successive developments African Americans became members of the proletariat. However, very rapidly the emancipated slave, encountering capitalist greed and the now deeply psychologically rooted understanding of the American Negro as sub-human was relegated to a nascent existence as sub-proletarian. Instead of the fulfillment of the Emancipation promise of 40 acres and a mule, blacks entered a society hostile to black advancement, a state apparatus that did not recognize black rights, and a labor market that exploited black labor in order to drive down wages and maintain slave production levels. The slaves unprepared for freedom and survival in a rapidly maturing capitalist society found themselves subject to the greed of white capitalists, their propaganda and the bile of white American proletarians. Consequent of emancipation the American Negro gained agency over the commodity power of his / her labor power.
However, the white apparatus, conscious of the implications of black liberation, rapidly sanctioned laws that guaranteed the subjugation of black labor to not only white capitalists, but to the whims of white proletarians. In 1865 a number of regulations that restricted the movement of blacks known as the Black Codes were instituted in order to ensure the subordination of black labor. These laws, enacted by politicians controlled by the capitalist class and the American race ideology authorized imprisonment of blacks for three primary reasons: Any violation of segregation codes monitoring public behavior or activity; any violation of laws governing capitalist agricultural production; and any infraction (misdemeanors and non-capital felonies) against whites. " In addition to imprisonment, black prisoners were often leased to white capitalists for extended periods of uncompensated labor. Aside from such schemes as the Black Codes and black vagrancy laws, with white land ownership and monopoly over societal infrastructures of education, finance and governance blacks had no other option but to sell their labor to white capitalists and be subject to white proletarian abuses. Continuously kept in debt through the sharecropping systems and vagrancy laws, blacks experienced a type of slavery that mirrored their previous circumstances of bondage with the exception of a missing mechanistic level of protection previously inherent to the slave capitalist substructure.
Now the emancipated slave in his person...
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Research essay sample on Capitalism And African American History
