Chapter 12 Review - PART 2

“Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.”
“Socialist and communist spaces are not automatically antiracist.”
“Some of these socialists and communists may not be familiar with the ideological guide’s writings on race. ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America,’ Karl Marx once wrote, ‘the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.’ Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins.”
“In the 1920’s, W.E.B. Du Bois started binge-reading Karl Marx… Du Bois conceived of an antiracist anticapitalism.”

In a more educated society, we should look at Marx in the same way we look at Hitler: even if he said something you agree with, it’s best not to cite their work as a justification for your beliefs. But because we live in a society that holds people like Kendi up as intellectuals, it’s okay to wear a Hammer and Sickle shirt every once in a while. I’ll give Kendi some credit here. He does make the distinction that anticapitalism alone won’t defeat racism, as we’ve seen in almost every communist/socialist experiment, but we also must implement antiracism as well. But, is this true, or just a distinction without a difference?

Economic historian Phillip W. Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research points out the similarities between Marxism and the leading proslavery theorist of the late antebellum period George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh, who is avidly anticapitalist, wrote a book in 1857 titled Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters where he says, “capital was but the accumulation of the results of their labor; for common labor creates all capital.” He continues, “the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitation.” As Magness notes, “Fitzhugh had effectively worked out the Marxian theory of ‘surplus value’ over a decade before the publication of Marx’s own Capital (1867), and derived it from the same sweeping indictment of the free-labor capitalism.” Although Marx and Fitzhugh did not arrive at the same solution, the justification for getting there was exactly the same. Magness writes in his book The 1619 Project: A Critique that Fitzhugh explained, “Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” He continues, “Wage labor, [Fitzhugh] predicted, would be forever insufficient to meet the needs of the laborer due to deprivation of his products from his skill. Slavery, to Fitzhugh’s convenience, could step in and fill the gap through the paternalistic provision of necessities for the enslaved, allegedly removing the ‘greed’ of wage exploitation form the process.” Fitzhugh was able to rationalize his paternalism justification because, “slaves consume more of the results of their own labor than laborers at the North.” Magness explains, “Plantation slavery, according to this contorted line of thinking, thereby mitigated the ‘exploitation’ of wage labor capitalism and returned a greater portion of the posited surplus value. In the Marxian counterpart, a socialist state fulfills a similar function.” I know I’m running a little long in this train of thought, but Magness brings this idea home in better words that I can. When talking about Marx’s and Fitzhugh’s ideas, Magness says, “the two thinkers unite in their grievances: a shared enmity toward market capitalism, and a desire to cast free market allocation of resources aside through coercive social reordering to achieve their respective ideal societies – mass enslavement or global communism.” Magness finishes, “these pro-slavery thinkers found parallel rationale in socialism and deployed it to attack a common enemy of free markets, irrespective of their otherwise-divergent claims, is indicative of a shared illiberalism between the two. In practice, unfortunately, the immiserating historical records of each reveal that the only remaining distinction between their political outcomes consists of the choice between the slavery of the plantation and the slavery of the gulag.”

This also covers another inconsistency in Kendi’s logic: advocates for slavery were almost exclusively against free market capitalism. Although slave traders certainly had some benefits from an unregulated slave trade, slave holders understood the power of free enterprise and the inherent freedom that come with it. In fact, free markets, along with Christianity, was one of the single biggest driving factors in ending slavery in America. The slaveholding South consistently underperformed economically compared to the free North. The popular King-Cotton theory in which pro-slavery advocates said the slave-driven cotton market ran America’s economy and was a main support for the world economy is another piece of revisionist history that, when exposed, favors the counter-narrative to Kendi’s. In summation, slavery and capitalism did not have a friendly relationship, and they certainly would not be considered “conjoined twins.”

“I keep using the term ‘anticapitalist’ as opposed to socialist or communist to include people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use ‘anticapitalist’ because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say attempts to prevent monopolies are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say wars to end poverty are ‘anticapitalist.’ They say campaigns to remove profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are ‘anticapitalist’.”

Anyone who has taken an Econ 101 course in their life can poke a bunch of holes in this logic. The first thing he does is eliminate nuance, and I don’t mean you got to dig deep to find these nuances. They are pretty much surface level, if not exposed directly in his text. Social safety nets aren’t anticapitalist but they help destroy incentives to invest and participate in the marketplace. Monopoly busting is actually a contested idea within free market economic debate because the evil conservatives actually allow for dissenting opinions. Unions are really only a problem if they are public unions, like the teacher’s union, or supported by public dollars. Private unions are actually a feature of the free market, not a nonconformance. Worker ownership, as long as it isn’t forced by government, has never been an issue in a free market. Regulations have a bunch of nuances involved because not every regulation is a law to “save the penguins” as we are led to believe when we hear the word ‘regulation.’ A vast majority of regulations are used to control the marketplace by a bloated bureaucracy. Taxes and high tax rates are often a symptom of fixing markets by paying for its inefficiencies and downfalls than it is something the free market fights against. A guaranteed basic income is explicitly against a free market because it arbitrarily subsidizes consumers and will only result in a battle between inflation and politicians promising to increase the subsidy. And to clarify, all subsidies are anticapitalist. The War on Poverty is another welfare program that not only incentivizes people to stay out of the marketplace, but actually always results in an increase in dependency on welfare programs. His last sentence on the removal of profit motive for any commodity, for the exception of incarceration which is explicitly a function of government, is explicitly anticapitalist. When I was reading this section of the chapter, it felt like I was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I then looked in the notes at the end of the book and found Howard Zinn’s classic revisionist history fiction is actually the source for this part of the chapter, but Kendi decided to not call out Zinn by name in his text. Maybe he thought citing Marx might be the limit of bad actors he could openly cite in the chapter.

“Liberals who are ‘capitalist to the bone,’ as U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren identifies herself, present a different definition of capitalism. ‘I believe in markets and the benefits they can produce when they work,’ Warren said when asked what that identity meant to her. ‘I love the competition that comes with a market that has decent rules…. The problem is when the rules are not enforced, when the markets are not level playing fields, all that wealth is scraped in one direction,’ leading to deception and theft. ‘Theft is not capitalism,’ Warren said.”
“When Senator Warren and others define capitalism in this way – as markets and market rules and competition and benefits from winning – they are disentangling capitalism from theft and racism and sexism and imperialism.”

For one, we should have learned by now to not take Senator Warren at her word for “how she identifies.” And two, dishonest people like Warren and Kendi take advantage of the fact that the term capitalism hasn’t historically been used to describe free markets until Karl Marx came around and popularized the term as a pejorative. Because of this, the term capitalism is adopted to fit and cover whatever exchange fits their narrative. As economic historian Phillip W. Magness points out in his book I cited before, many anticapitalists have “adopted a habit of simply relabeling everything as ‘capitalist’… encompass[ing] everything from laissez-faire non-intervention to protectionist mercantilism to state-ordered central planning.” Magness points this out specifically when talking about the modern genre of scholarly works known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC), an alternative historic theory that books like this (it appears) and the 1619 Project base their economic research on. No free market economist considers theft as capitalistic. In fact, that is the complete opposite of what free market economists believe. Every time a politician points out a ‘shortfall of capitalism,’ they normally use an example that includes government intervention. Slavery is chief among these bad examples because laws implemented by government must be utilized in order to maintain slavery, an idea incompatible with a FREE market. Unfortunately, people like Senator Warren hate theft unless it’s the government doing the stealing.

I apologize for the length of this chapter review, but I think this is by far the most important chapter to expose for the awful ideas it contains. The idea that fixing a free market, which the U.S. economy is not a free market and we should fight to make it freer, will end up leading to more deaths of black Americans than the most racist police force in the country could ever dream of.

Thanks for reading my rant style review of the twelfth chapter of How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Please let me know if you find this useful. My goal here is to explain each chapter enough and in a somewhat objective way so others don’t waste their time and money on investigating this material themselves. I know this kind of goes against the logic of investigation where you want to read the source material yourself and build your own conclusions, but this is a very shallow read that does not strain the mind, in any positive way at least, like any proper academic book should. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

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