Postwar racial myths functioned as labor discipline for capital

Evidence

The stakes had been high during the decades of the post bellum. As Thomas Rainboro had seen it in England’s convulsive seventeenth century, the question posed in the years following the American Civil War was “Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy.” As ideologues for both victorious northern industrial capital and a now chastened southern agrarian capital, the white intelligentsia—academician and otherwise—rewove social and historical legends that accommodated the exploitative projects of those ruling classes. … Complemented by the terror of state militias, company police, and security agents, the persistent threats of immigration controls, the swelling ranks of reserve labor, racialism was reattired so that it might once again take its place among the inventory of labor disciplines. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 883

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s earlier claim (Ch 7) that racial differential reward stabilized capitalism, and to the terracing metaphor he develops.
• QUESTION: Rainboro’s either/or framing — democracy-destroys-property or property-destroys-democracy — is a useful lens worth comparing to later Black Marxist readings of the same moment.

Related

• Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth (similarity 0.84)
• Post-1877 capitalism used differential reward by race to stabilize wealth (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois saw white labor as co-exploiter alongside capital (similarity 0.83)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.82)
• Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being. (similarity 0.80)
• Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalists deploy racism to fracture labor movements into competing factions (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist expansion pursued racial directions, not the rationalization Marx expected (similarity 0.80)
• Racial ideology actively constitutes labor regimes rather than merely justifying them (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.79)
• Older British Marxists assumed race would dissolve once capitalism fell (similarity 0.78)
• White workers cemented segregation to protect their labor advantages (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital #corroborates (0.95)
• Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth #expands (0.70)
• Industrial capital weaponized racism to fragment the labor movement #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 960
• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations #expands (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427
• Du Bois saw white labor as co-exploiter alongside capital #complicates (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2205
• Labor economics drove the legal invention of Blackness as property. #expands (0.50) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 218
• Racism steered American industrial workers toward counterrevolution in the Civil War #exemplifies (0.45)
• Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation #complicates (0.40) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2159
• Race persisted as epistemic currency even after its formal abolition as legal criterion #exemplifies (0.40) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1011