I always come back to Warren Beatty’s line in “Bullworth”:
“We’ve gotta just keep f*ckin’ each other 'til we’re all the same color!”
Might take a while, but it’s the best solution I can think of.
This is a non-sequitur, since imperialism is merely a stage of capitalism.
The end of racism will only come with the end of capitalism. While racism is not unique to capitalism, it is used by the ruling classes to keep the working class from uniting in common struggle against their common oppressers. The capitalists have always done their utmost to stoke up racial hatred wherever possible. In the U.S., black oppression serves as the bedrock of American capitalism, by forcibly keeping blacks as a super oppressed color-caste–last hired, first fired.
Whatever gains that can be won for oppressed minorities under capitalism are always partial, and highly reversible. The gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950’s-70’s were won through militant battle that threatened to bring down the system itself. The movement had the effect of only co-opting a “talented tenth” of the black population into corporate America, while the vast majority of black people today still live in a racist hell.
Only the multi-racial working class can bring down this vile system of oppression and exploitation and create an eqalitarian system where those who labor rule.
If you hate racism and oppression, the only way out is through workers revolution.
Like I said, the only way to end this stuff is to give up our liberties, as Sandino is pointing out. What scares me is that I think Sandino might consider this a positive tradeoff.
In fact, I said the exact opposite.
The only way to end racism is for the multi-racial working class to unite and overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation itself, and in the process liberate all of humanity from oppression, war and racism. Only when those who labor rule can racism be ended.
The problem is that labor, throughout history, has never agreed that this is the way to go. Most labor has rejected socialism. Socialism and Marxism have long been pushed by middle class vanguards, not by a spontaneous workers revolution.
Might explain why one of the first acts of any socialist government was always to abolish free unions. How ironic.
The most hilarious and ironic thing of all is that throughout Poland’s Communist days, they were ruled by people of either military or middle class background. Their first President under democratic capitalism? An electrician. A worker.
I seriously dobut a worker’s revolution would solve racism… and I would venture that Sandino with his overdone “Communism” is great rhetoric all over the SDMB is about to get pitted or banned.
My parents were refugees from that poison.
You’ll have a hard time selling that crap in the US, where we have millions of people who can attest to what happens when Marxists get the reins of power.
Try selling it to Eastern Europe too, or any other country that threw off their shackles and discovered liberty.
Tell that to the Jews of the Soviet Union.
How to stop racism quickly:
- Kill everyone
- Blind everyone
- Forced interbreeding
Problem solved. Of course, some solutions may be worse than the problems they solve…
Interesting point, Rashak. Should Sandrino be put in a gulag or banished for his views?
Sandrino: since you’re new here, you might need to know about The Pit. agiantdwarf has decided to attack you there.
Sandino, that is.
Yes, this is an excellent example. Traditionally Russia was a viciously anti-semitic country–pogroms were “invented” in Russia, after all. The Russian Orthodox Church is a particularly nasty, anti-semitic, absolutist christian sect, and under Tsarism it was given a dominant position in society.
The Bolshevik Revolution swept most of that crap away. This can be seen pretty clearly by noting that the co-leader of the revolution, with Lenin, and founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was a jew. In fact, jews played a disproportionate role, relative to their percentage of the population, in the revolution and were over-represented in the soviet government. This fact was in the news recently even, as a neo-nazi member of the German Fourth Reich government was forced to resign over anti-semitic statements about jews in the Russian Revolution.
Anti-semitism was not the only vicious, reactionary tendency swept away with the revolution. The revolution gave self-determination to the over 100 nations within the old Tsarist empire, which almost all voluntarily became a part of the Russian Federation of Soviet Socialist States, later the USSR. This federation encompassed all kinds of different nationalities, with different dominant religions and cultures. The Bolsheviks spent enormous resources in sending out workers to build schools, hospitals and other social services in parts of the world previously untouched by civilization.
The difference it made in peoples’ lives was seen most starkly in Soviet Central Asia. These states were long dominated by feudal Islamic reactionary regimes, swept away in popular uprisings inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. The difference between these states and the states just across the border in places like Afghanistan and Iran, was measured in centuries, not decades. Starting from similar societies, the Soviet states were ripped out of pre-medieval obscurantism. One only need compare the difference between Soviet Uzbekhistan and Afghanistan, for example. In Afghanistan women were little more than chattel slaves, forced to wear the head-to-toe burqha, sold to their husbands, and prevented from getting an education or working. In Uzbekhistan women played a full role in society, were provided with education, and so on.
It was the planned, collectivized economies of the Soviet states that allowed this enlightenment to come to this benighted area of the world. The collapse of the USSR brought with it new miseries that look a lot like the old pre-USSR miseries, as the peoples are being thrown back into the middle ages.
Funny I almost added a note about Russian Jews after the Tito comment. Once “freedom and democracy” came to Russia those Jews had to get the hell out of there. I knew a bunch of Jewish people from Russia and the anti-semitic violence really took off with the decline of the atheist govt.
The primary justification for keeping African slaves didn’t have a thing to do with racism. Europeans needed a workforce that was cheap, reliable, and more importantly could not pack up and leave. I wonder how much different the history of slavery in the Americas would have been without sugar.
Marc
By giving “self-determination”, did you mean what the USSR did to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan, and Poland?
And I think there are some Jewish doctorswho might disagree that anti-Semitism was eradicated by Stalin. Trotsky might too, if he didn’t have an ice pick in his skull.
Regards,
Shodan
They wanted it so bad they couldn’t wait to leave when they had the opportunity.
Anti-Semitism was "swept away by the Russian Revolution? I’m so leffink!
Tell that to my antecedents on my father’s side, who lived in Kiev and were machine-gunned by the Russians during WWII.OPh, yeah, and the Jewish graveyard in Kiev was ploughed under for a sports stadium in the 1980s.
Yup, no anti-Semitism in that Worker’s Paradise!
No, Eve…
That wasn’t ‘anti-semitism’…
It was ‘anti-cosmopolitism’…
Bastards.
Sandino, are you perchance President Ford?
I think another problem is that different people define race differently. To us Americans, including I suspect black Americans, the Hutu and Tutsi were the same race. The Protestants and Catholics in Ireland were the same race. Jews aren’t a race, and neither are Latinos–yes, there are some people who fill out a set of traits that are almost always identified with those folks, but many exhibit physical traits that are all over the map. It always kills me when someone like Arafat yells ‘racism’ over the treatment of the Palestinians because Arabs? Not a race either.
If you ever get a chance to visit Russia you may notice a somewhat strange phenomenon. Walking down the streets of Moscow it wouldn’t be that unsual to run into black people who in all respects are Russian. Yet, for the most part their descendents were not Russian, but American. In the 1930’s a pretty large emigration of black people to the USSR occured. Paul Robeson was probably the most famous of these emigrants. For the most part the black people who moved to the USSR were not Marxists or even socialists. But, the stories they tell are fairly universal: after being treated like shit in the U.S. all their lives, they finally felt like real human beings in the USSR.
The USSR did not succeed in wiping out all racism for all time, but this was not due to a lack of effort. The Bolsheviks spent enormous resources in education and combatting anti-semitism and all forms of racism and sexism. Even after the Stalinist degeneration, Stalin’s epigones built the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where the poor from all over the world would come to study. (The capitast robbers who now rule Russia have changed the name of the university, in a general re-introduction of racism.)
Of course, the cries from the anti-soviets in the crowd about anti-semitism in the USSR are the purest mendacious hypocrisy. The western capitalist states, particularly the U.S., are viciously racist societies, a thousand times more racist than the USSR was.