Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth

Evidence

The formal endings of slave systems of production in the nineteenth century marked the beginnings of a profound reorganization of the capitalist world system. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through the deepening penetrations of monopoly capitalism and the impositions of hegemonic colonialisms, slaves were displaced as a source of cheap labor power by peasants and migrant laborers. In Africa, whereas the slave trade had dislocated the reproductive cycles of certain social formations along the coasts of West and southern Africa, the “new imperialism” of monopoly capitalism demanded a more destructive form of appropriation and exploitation. The colonial state parasitized the peasants of the continent’s agrarian hinterlands, transforming traditional economic sectors from the project of reproduction into the source and support of forcibly recruited labor and the sites of cash-crop monoculture and the extraction of minerals and raw materials. To the extent that wage labor expanded in Africa, its level of support was limited to maintenance and not reproduction of labor. In the New World there were also changes. The systems of reconstitution of Black communities were, as well, assaulted by forms of forced labor: peonage, share-cropping, and less than subsistence farming. Moreover, Black workers were subject to displacement from productive land and to publicly and privately organized campaigns of terror and intimidation. Ineluctably, resistance was propelled toward new forms, new consciousness, and new ideologies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Post-1877 capitalism used differential reward by race to stabilize wealth; Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital; Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 584 (+14 more)

Related

• Post-1877 capitalism used differential reward by race to stabilize wealth (similarity 0.91)
• Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it (similarity 0.88)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalism triumphed by cultivating divisions rather than erasing them within the working class (similarity 0.86)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar racial myths functioned as labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.84)
• Post-1877 elites stratified labor by race to stabilize the wealth pyramid. (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.83)
• Depression and slavery-era crises both fundamentally transformed capitalist relations (similarity 0.83)
• Slaves and agrarian workers, not industrial workers, attacked capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Ethnic divisions within a working class can be exploited to strengthen capitalist rule (similarity 0.83)
• Racial repression shifted form with each change in Black labor exploitation (similarity 0.83)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrators promoted racial division to secure white loyalty and preserve slavery #exemplifies (0.85)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.82) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434
• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply #corroborates (0.75)
• Capitalism’s division of labor yields ruling ideas controlled by the dominant class #corroborates (0.72)
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition #corroborates (0.60)
• Racism steered American industrial workers toward counterrevolution in the Civil War #exemplifies (0.50)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism #corroborates (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556