Terrorism in Charlottesville, Va.: Racism, Explotation, and Terror Has Always Been an Integral Part of Capitalism

Terrorism in Charlottesville, Va.: Racism, Explotation, and Terror Has Always Been an Integral Part of Capitalism — Especially in the United States By Roland Sheppard

The Media, the government, Trump, and the capitalist class promote racist terror at home and abroad, to justify their perpetual war for perpetual peace and austerity — Terror is it an integral  part of the The Iron Heel. The recent events in Charlottesville, Va., reveal the institutionalization of the Racist Ideology of the United States.

Terrorism in Charlottesville, Va. Video: See It. One dead as car mows down counter-protesters in Virginia at tumultuous white supremacist rally One person was killed and 19 others were injured after a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters marching against a “pro-white” rally Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., witnesses and officials said. Video of the terrifying moment shows at least one person being tossed into the air as the silver Dodge Charger mowed into the crowd.

Profits from the trade profits profit fueled the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent rise of capitalism.“Capital”, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, (the) “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” By Karl Marx:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, 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.  … If money … comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Modern day racism was/is an ideology developed to justify the exploitation and oppression of the people of Africa and the rest of the world. This exploitation was also known as the white man’s burden, as capitalism began to rape the world’s wealth.

The slave trade helped to fund the United States, in its development to become a nation. It was even a part of the United States original constitution.

After the Civil War and the elimination of slavery with the exception of prisoners, The first civil and human rights movement by and for Black people started during the Civil War and the period of Black Reconstruction that followed. It was a time of radical hopes for many freed slaves. But it was also a time of betrayal. Then President Andrew Johnson and the non-radical Republicans, in collusion with the Democratic Party, the party of slavery, sold out the early post-war promises for full equality and “40 acres and a mule”.  Instead, the promise of equality was soon replaced by the restoration of the property rights of the former slave owners in the South. This was accomplished by the Compromise of 1877. — How did they accomplish this betrayal? The answer is They used police and terroristic Ku Klux Klan violence. These extra-legal activities laid the basis for the overthrow of Black Reconstruction and the institutionalization of legal segregation (Jim Crow) in the former slave states. To enforce Jim Crow, Black people were, for decades, indiscriminately lynched and framed. — Roland Sheppard,  The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement

Jim Crow Rose and lasted until a new civil rights movement was reformed in the 1960s. Since the 60s, there has been a movement to overthrow the gains that were made at that time. — A new factor had been added to the equation — ‘The Drug Trade’. A very profitable ‘war on Black People and other nationally oppressed minorities

In his 2001 article, War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks,by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, Petras explains that 500 Billion to a Trillion dollars gets added to world capitalist economy through “illegal means.” he concludes the article with the following:

The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity.  ‘This Goes Straight to the Top.’

An article written in Counterpunch titled, Race and the Drug War,  during the last election campaign, points out another factor of the “Drug War:”

. . . Domestically, the ‘drug war’ has always been a pretext for social control, going back to the racist application of drug laws against Chinese laborers in the recession of the 1870s when these workers we reviewed as competition for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class white men and women taking opium in liquid form as ‘tonics’, weren’t harassed. By 1887 the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported. In the 1930s the racist head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as ‘marijuana’ to associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana ‘can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.’ By the 1950s Anslinger had pushed through the first mandatory drug sentences. As so often, Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private remarks. H.R.Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in 1969,prior to launching of the war on drugs: ‘[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.’ So what was ‘the system’ duly devised? On June 19, 1986, Maryland University basketball star Len Bias died from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent Smoke and Mirrors, The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, ‘In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.’ It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. In fact he had used powder cocaine and there was no link between this use and the failure of his heart, according to the coroner. Bias had signed with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston’s rage and grief Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Boston rep, rushed into action. In early July he convened a meeting of the Democratic Party leadership: ‘Write me some goddamn legislation,’ he ordered. ‘All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House.’ In fact the White House was moving pretty fast. Among other things the DEA had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crackhouses. ‘Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam war,” the head of the New York office of the DEA exulted. All this fed into congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House Majority Leader Jim Wright called drug abuse ‘a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young.’ Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that ‘drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield.’ The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug ‘king pins’ and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief focus of the bill was crack cocaine (mainly used in the inter-cities). Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine (mainly used in the suburbs). Under this provision possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was 50 times as addictive as powdered coke. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called ‘violence penalty’.

The ‘War on Drugs’ gave rise to, what Michelle Alexander described as The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. And what Richard D. Wolff, described in his essay, How Capitalism and Racism Support Each Other:

“Racism” is so often applied to US prison statistics and policing; to data on differences in employment, housing, wealth and income distributions, college enrollments, film awards, and so much more; and to hardening hostilities toward immigration. At the same time, racism is so often condemned — at least in mainstream media, dominant political circles and most intellectual and academic institutions. Racism’s persistence where the capitalist economic system prevails raises the question of the connection between capitalism and racism.  Many societies are structured and operate to subordinate one or more portions of their population — politically, culturally, economically or in combinations of these ways — while privileging others. Among the successive generations born into societies with such subordinations, some will challenge and seek to change their condition. Force can try to maintain subordination, but it is costly, dangerous and often unsuccessful. The preferred method has rather been (a) to develop an idea that justifies the subordination and (b) to install that idea as deeply as possible into the thinking of both the subordinated and the privileged. One such idea is “race,” the notion that sets of inherent (often deemed “natural”) qualities differentiate groups of people from one another in fundamental ways. This idea of race can then be used to explain the subordination of some and the privileges of others as effects of their racial differences. The concept of race thus accomplishes a reversal: Instead of being a produced idea, an ex-post justification of structures of social subordination, race morphs instead into some pre-existing “reality” that caused or enabled the subordination. We know how and why racism worked often to support slavery around the world and especially in the early United States. Masters endorsed and promoted ideas that justified slaves as subordinated because they were an inferior race. Racist ideology also sometimes supported feudalism by dividing lords and serfs into different races. Indeed, some early capitalist systems likewise racially distinguished employers from employees.

Malcolm X described the Captialist System as a system that cannot be reformed and provide freedom for Black People. He Stated:

. . . It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg… The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country — it is impossible.  And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. . . . — Malcolm X, Harlem ‘Hate Gang’ Scare Militant Labor Forum, May 29, 1964

Racism will cannot be reformed — it must be overthrown along with capitalism!