“You can’t have capitalism without racism.” With these words, the great revolutionary martyr Malcolm X summed up a profound truth. Racism is a product, not of white-supremacist “culture” or “social constructs,” but of the economic needs of capitalist exploitation.

Millions of Black and white workers face the same problems: low wages, skyrocketing housing costs, crippling debt, lack of healthcare, etc. If Black and white workers united in militant class struggle, it would raise living standards for all—and threaten the continued existence of capitalism.

That’s why communists are—and have always been—militant fighters against racism. It’s also why the ruling class promotes this poison, which played a decisive role in American capitalism’s rise and is necessary for the system’s survival.

Chattel slavery

Racism in the US emerged to serve the needs of the rising capitalist class. Although African slaves first arrived in Virginia in 1619, plantations in Britain’s southern colonies were, at first, worked primarily by indentured servants. These debtors were bonded for a term of several years and freed afterwards—if they survived that long.

Agricultural labor was in short supply relative to the colonies’ abundance of arable land. This imbalance was a recipe for explosions of class struggle, and the colonies were rocked by a series of uprisings in the late-17th century.

In the greatest of these, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, Black and white slaves and indentured servants united in an armed insurrection against Virginia’s governor and burned the colonial capital to the ground.

Chattel slavery expanded rapidly in the generation that followed. Indentured servants could leave their masters when their terms expired, but slaves were the property of their masters for life, as were their descendants, helping to mitigate the labor shortage.

Slavery also created a racial division between Black slaves and free white laborers, allowing the nascent ruling class to “divide and rule,” and prevent future uprisings on the model of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Racist mythology

American capitalism could not have developed without creating notions of race and promoting racism. Defining race by skin color allowed for easy identification and control of slaves. To justify the brutal slave system, the ruling class introduced the idea that whites were innately superior to Blacks.

In reality, race is not biological. Humans are so genetically similar that a person’s race cannot be determined from their DNA. Race and racism are a sort of mythology, like the “noble lie” of Plato’s Republic, shaped by the economic needs of the exploiting class. While biologically irrelevant, the concept of race and the poison of racism persist as powerful tools to divide working people.

Civil war and revolution

Chattel slavery enriched Southern plantation owners and fueled the Industrial Revolution and rise of finance capital in Britain and the Northern US. The vast fortunes of much of the ruling class have their roots in this period.

But over time, slavery became an economic impediment. For capitalism to continue developing, its abolition was necessary. The contradiction between free and slave labor became an increasingly destabilizing factor in American politics, finally exploding in open war.

At its root, the US Civil War was a struggle between ascendant Northern capitalism and the decaying Southern slave system. At first, many in the North hoped to reunify the country with or without ending slavery, but victory could only be achieved through the most revolutionary methods. Over 180,000 Black men—most of them ex-slaves—took up arms for the Union and, fighting alongside white workers and small farmers, obliterated American chattel slavery for good.

Jim Crow

Black people were formally free, but American capitalism couldn’t accept the equality of the races. Southern oligarchs still needed cheap agricultural labor. To force millions of “free” former slaves back to the plantations, they had to reestablish the old system in a new form.

In the aftermath of the war, ex-Confederate states enacted “Black codes.” These laws restricted the rights of freedmen and women (ex-slaves) to own property, carry weapons, work, vote, and move freely.

This made it difficult for many freedmen to find work. At the same time, “vagrancy” was a crime under the Black codes, in essence making it illegal to be unemployed or homeless while Black.

Hundreds of thousands of Black people were arrested for minor offenses and forced into convict labor. The infamous Jim Crow system developed to entrench discrimination and exploitation, perpetuating a cycle of poverty that still affects millions of Black Americans today.

The regime of terror and the increasing mechanization of farm labor sparked the “Great Migration” of millions of Black Americans to cities in the North, Midwest, and West. But in all areas of the country, they faced racist barriers to well-paying jobs, decent housing, and quality education.

Fight racism with class struggle!

Racism—originally a tool to protect and justify slavery—is still central to American capitalist exploitation. Today, the US has the largest prison population in the world, with Blacks incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of whites. Prison labor produces over $11 billion a year, and private prisons are a multibillion-dollar industry.

The American people, and the concept of America itself, are not inherently racist. What is inherently racist is the structure of American capitalism, which sustains and perpetuates racism for its very survival. It’s the capitalists—of all races—who benefit from this system.

Some white workers believe they benefit from racism; the reality is that they do not. Even if they secure better jobs or higher wages than Black workers, racism ultimately suppresses wages overall and worsens conditions for everyone. When the working class unites across racial lines, overthrows capitalism, and organizes a workers’ government, we will uplift wages, benefits, and conditions for everyone.

As the martyred Black Panther leader Fred Hampton once said:

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism—we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.