PPD Chapter 3: Capitalism, Class, and Domination PDF

CHAPTER 3 - Capitalism, Class, and the Matrix of Domination There are few areas of social life as important as economics, because this is how a society is organized to provide what people need for their material existence. Economic systems are the basis for every social...

CHAPTER 3 - Capitalism, Class, and the Matrix of Domination There are few areas of social life as important as economics, because this is how a society is organized to provide what people need for their material existence. Economic systems are the basis for every social institution—whether family and tribe or the state—which cannot survive and function without an economic base. It takes a great deal of material and labor to build a university, for example, or to pay for political campaigns or maintain a police force or an army. This means that the central role of economics in social life gives individuals and systems powerful reasons to go along with the dominant system. Industrial capitalism has been that system for several hundred years, and since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is virtually the only game in town. Every form of privilege has an economic dimension, which means that the nature of capitalism as a system profoundly affects how privilege and oppression work. The most powerful example of this is race, not only as it operates today, but, even more significantly, where it came from in the first place. Whenever I teach about race, there comes a point when students start saying things like, “We don’t get it. If race is socially constructed and doesn’t exist otherwise, and if human beings don’t have to be afraid of one another, then where does racism come from? Why all the oppression and hostility and violence over something that’s made up? And why would people make it up this way?” Finding the answer leads us into the history of race, where we learn two things that usually startle students as much as they did me when I first learned of them.1 First, racism in its modern form hasn’t been around very long—hardly more than several centuries and certainly not as long as people have been aware of the physical differences now used to define race. Second, racism came into being in Europe and the Americas at the same time as the growth and expansion of capitalism as an economic system, which relied on both the aggressive colonizing of non- European peoples and the institution of slavery. Capitalism thus played a critical role in the development of white privilege and still plays a critical role in its perpetuation. As such, the capitalist economics behind race and racism have much to teach us about how privilege works, in all its forms. Before going any further, however, it’s important to be clear about what I mean by race and racism. Europeans were certainly not the first to think themselves superior to other peoples and cultures. But what they added to this was a belief in the idea that race provides a biological basis for superiority and inferiority, transmitted from one generation to the next through reproduction. This kind of thinking emerged with the African slave trade as a way to justify the wholesale enslavement of not only those kidnapped into slavery, but the perpetual enslavement of their descendants. Racism, in turn, developed as a set of practices that enact and perpetuate privilege and oppression based on race. 2 An understanding of how capitalism figures in all this begins with understanding capitalism itself. 30 How Capitalism Works In describing capitalism, it’s important to distinguish its modern form from the ideal envisioned by Adam Smith in his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith saw capitalism as a collection of small, independent producers and entrepreneurs competing with one another to provide what people need at a price they are willing to pay. This early version all but disappeared well over a century ago as it was replaced by a form of monopoly capitalism dominated by large corporations that are, in turn, owned and controlled by a wealthy elite. Modern capitalism also developed a close relationship to government authority, legitimacy, and power. More than simply an economic system, what we have is a form of political economy— through which the power and resources of the state are used to protect and promote the capitalist system and those who benefit most from it. This aspect of modern capitalism has progressed to the point where democracy is giving way to an oligarchic form of government in which power is held by a few. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, just 158 wealthy families (from a population of more than 300 million people) donated more than half of all the money used in the early stages of the campaign through which candidates are nominated.5 Presidential and Congressional elections require enormous amounts of money, and would-be candidates must secure the support of the wealthy, giving elites a great deal of power in deciding who become the final candidates. The political consequences of concentrated economic power can also be seen by studying how federal legislation gets passed: Economic elites have a substantial impact on law and policy, while the vast majority of the population has little or none.6 In a typical scenario, legislation is passed or policies are enacted that are opposed by a clear majority of the citizenry but are supported by, and serve the interests of, the wealthy. Corporations also routinely receive what critics have called “corporate welfare” (or “crony capitalism”) in the form of government subsidies, grants, tax breaks and loopholes, cheap credit, and, most famously, bailouts, such as the multi-billion dollar Wall Street bailout of 2008. 7 The goal of modern capitalism is to turn money into more money. Capitalists invest in what it takes to produce goods and services—raw materials, machinery, electricity, buildings, and, of course, human labor. It does not matter what is produced so long as capitalists can find a market in which to sell it at a profit—for more than it cost to have it produced—and end up with more money than they started with. Whether the results enhance human life (providing food, affordable housing, health care, and the like) or do harm (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, weapons, slavery, pollution) may be an issue for the conscience of the individual capitalist. But the system itself does not depend on such moral or ethical considerations, because profit is profit and there is no way to tell “good” money from “bad.” Even the damage done by one enterprise can serve as a source of profit for another, such as when industrial pollution creates opportunities for companies that specialize in cleaning it up. Capitalists employ workers to produce goods and services, paying them wages in exchange for their time. Capitalists then sell what workers produce. For capitalists to make a living (unless they produce something themselves), they have to get workers to produce goods and services that are worth more than the wages capitalists pay them. The difference between the two is profit for capitalists and investors. Why, however, would workers accept wages worth less than the value of what they produce? The general answer is that they don’t have much choice, because, under capitalism, the tools and factories and other means for producing goods and services are not owned by the people who actually 31 do the work. Instead, they are owned by capitalists and individual and organizational stockholders. For most people to earn a living, they must work for one capitalist employer or another, which means choosing—unless the workplace is unionized, which most are not—between working on the capitalist’s terms or not working at all. As corporate capitalism has extended its reach into every area of social life, even professionals have to confront this choice. Physicians, for example, who were once regarded as the model of independent professionals, are increasingly compelled to become highly paid employees of health maintenance organizations. As a result, some have lobbied Congress for the right to engage in collective bargaining with HMOs (health maintenance organizations)—in other words, to form a labor union for physicians. Similar things are happening in the legal profession. 8 Since capitalists profit from the difference between the cost of producing goods and services and what they can sell them for, the cheaper the labor, the more money is left over for them. This is why capitalists are concerned about increasing “worker productivity”—finding ways for workers to produce more goods for the same or less pay. One way to accomplish this is through the use of technology, in particular, machines that can replace people altogether. Another is to threaten to close down or relocate businesses if workers won’t make concessions on wages, health and retirement benefits, job security, and working conditions. A third and increasingly popular strategy in the global economy is to move production to countries where people are willing to work for less than they are in Europe or North America. Capitalists who rely on this strategy also benefit from authoritarian governments in these new locations, which may control workers and discourage the formation of unions and other sources of organized resistance, often with the direct support of government. 9 Capitalism And Class The dynamics of capitalism produce enormous amounts of wealth, but they also produce high levels of inequality, both within societies and globally. The richest ten percent of the U.S. population holds more than seventy-five percent of all the wealth, including seventy percent of cash, more than half the land, more than ninety percent of business assets, and ninety-two percent of stocks. The richest twenty percent of households receive fifty-nine percent of all income, leaving forty-one percent to be divided among the remaining eighty percent of households.10 Such patterns of inequality both result from and perpetuate a class system based on widening gaps in income, wealth, and power between those on top and everyone below. 11 It is a system that produces oppressive consequences. For those near the bottom, the costs are enormous, with living conditions among the rural poor, for example, including some Native American reservations, similar to if not worse than what is found in the most impoverished nonindustrial societies. 12 Even among the employed members of the working class, as well as many in the middle class, chronic insecurity takes a physical and emotional toll. A great many jobs are alienating, boring, mind-numbing, and have little use for the talents that people performing those jobs have to offer. And the vast majority of workers have little if any control over the work they do or whether they keep their jobs. It also doesn’t take much to see that with a large majority of the population having to divide up a small fraction of all income, there will not be enough to go around. While capitalism produces an overall abundance of goods and services, it distributes that wealth so unequally that it simultaneously creates conditions of scarcity for most of the population. This makes life for tens of millions of people an ongoing competition that is often full of anxiety and struggle. For most people, it would not take very 32 much—a divorce or a serious illness or being laid off—to substantially lower their standard of living, even to the extent of putting them out of their homes.13 The “American Dream” aside, most people also have relatively little power to improve their class position.14 Much of the increase in household wealth, for example, is built on a growing mountain of debt, people working two or more jobs, and families relying on multiple wage earners to provide the standard of living their parents managed with one. Even when unemployment is low, and during the “recovery” from the economic collapse of 2008, most new jobs that have been created over the last several decades have been low-paying and with little chance of advancement. In addition, studies of occupational mobility show that most people are as likely to move downward as they are upward in the class system. Because of this, and the widening gulf separating the upper class from everyone else, the middle class is shrinking.15 Since 1964, the percentage of people who see themselves as middle class has fallen from sixty one to forty two, while the percentage seeing themselves as working class has risen from thirty five to forty six.16 In short, in an era of corporate downsizing, the flight of well-paying industrial jobs overseas, and the rapid growth of low level service occupations, the struggle to move up, for most people, rarely gets them anywhere but hanging on to what they have.17 There is, of course, upward movement by some, but excluding jobs in high-technology and health-related fields that are currently in demand, this almost always comes at the expense of others who must move down to make room for them, creating what economist Lester Thurow calls a “zero-sum” society—in which gains for some are offset by losses for others.18 This makes it inevitable that a substantial proportion of the population will live in poverty or close to it and that different groups will see one another as competitors and threats to their livelihood. As we will see below, such dynamics play a key role in systems of privilege, especially in relation to gender and race. Capitalism, Difference and Privilege: Race and Gender Given how capitalism works, its connections to race are both direct and indirect. The direct connection is most apparent in the enslavement of Africans on cotton and tobacco plantations, especially with the invention of the cotton gin in 1792 (just sixteen years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations) that made it possible to process vastly more cotton than before.19 The number of enslaved blacks in the U.S. jumped from one million in 1800 to almost four million in 1860, just before the start of the Civil War.20 The primacy of profit was also apparent in the reactions of businesses that relied on paid white workers: they did not object to slavery on moral grounds, but complained that the cost of slave labor was so low that it amounted to unfair competition.21 Following the Civil War, the demand for cheap labor was no less than before, and freed blacks were now often held in a new form of bondage by an oppressive system of tenant farming that kept them perpetually in debt.22 Beyond the South, the profitability of racism showed itself in the widespread use of Chinese immigrant labor to build the western railways under harsh and demeaning conditions. Even farther west, Japanese immigrants had similar experiences on sugar and pineapple plantations in Hawaii.23 33  Capitalism’s direct connection to race also appears in the acquisition of land and raw materials, which, like cheap labor, play a key role in the rapid growth of industry and wealth. In the heyday of capitalist expansion during the 19th century, Europe and then the United States found an abundance of what they needed in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. To acquire it, they relied on varying combinations of military conquest, political domination, and economic exploitation.24 They were spectacularly successful at it, especially Great Britain, a small island nation with few natural resources of its own, which nonetheless managed to become the world’s first global industrial power. Unlike Britain, the United States was rich in natural resources, but whites could get at them only by taking them from Native American tribes who inhabited most of the land, as well as from Mexico, which encompassed most of what is now the far west and southwest United States. Whites took what they wanted through a combination of conquest, genocide, and a complex array of treaties that they routinely ignored. 25 To justify such direct forms of empire building, whites developed the idea of whiteness to define a superior and privileged social category, elevated above everyone who was excluded from it. 26 This was a way to reconcile oppressive and often brutal methods with the nation’s newly professed ideals of democracy, freedom, and human dignity. If whiteness defined what it meant to be human, then it was seen as less of an offense against the Constitution (not to mention God) to dominate and oppress everyone else as the United States progressed toward what was popularly perceived as a divinely ordained Manifest Destiny.27 Other capitalist connections to race have been less direct. Capitalists, for example, have often used racism as a strategy to control white workers and thereby keep wages low and productivity and profits high. This has been done in two ways. First, beginning early in the 19th century, there was a campaign to encourage white workers to adopt whiteness as a key part of their identity—something they had not done before—and to accept the supposed superiority of whiteness as compensation for their low class position. No matter how badly treated they were by their employers, they could always take comfort in being white and free and therefore elevated above people of color, even those who might have a class position higher than their own.28 With the emancipation of slaves following the Civil War, however, lower- and working-class whites could no longer point to their freedom as a mark of superiority. The response to this loss was a period of violence and intimidation directed at blacks, much of which was perpetrated by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan, with no serious opposition from the federal government or whites in the North or South. Another way for capitalists to control workers is to keep them worried over the possibility of losing their jobs if they demand higher wages or better working conditions. Racism has a long history of being used in this way. The oppressed condition of people of color encourages them to work for wages that are lower than what most whites will accept. Employers have used this to pose an ongoing threat to white workers, who have known employers could use racial minorities as an inexpensive replacement. This has worked most effectively in breaking strikes and unions. As labor became more powerful at the turn of the 20th century, for example, employers often brought in black workers as strikebreakers. This strategy worked to draw the attention of white workers away from issues of capitalism and class and toward issues of race. It focused their fear and anger on the supposed threat from black workers, which made them less likely to see their common condition as workers and instead join together against the capitalists. In this way, racial division and conflict became an effective strategy for dividing different segments of the working class against one another.29 34  Similar dynamics operate today. The controversy over affirmative action programs, for example, as well as the influx of immigrant workers from South and Central America and the “outsourcing” of jobs to other countries, all reflect an underlying belief that the greatest challenge facing white workers is unfair competition from people of color both here and abroad. This ignores how the capitalist system is organized to increase the wealth of capitalists and investors by controlling workers in order to keep wages as low as possible. The result is that a small elite is able to control the vast majority of wealth and income, leaving a small share to be divided among everyone else. Such dynamics encourage competition not only in the working and lower classes but, increasingly, in the middle class. Given the historical legacy that cultivates among whites a sense of superiority and entitlement in relation to people of color, such competition is bound to provoke anger and resentment directed at people of color rather than at those whose wealth and power lie at the heart of the problem of inequality. In this way, dynamics of class fuel racial conflict, which, in turn, draws attention away from capitalism and the class oppression it produces. The result, as Michael Reich shows, is that white racism actually hurts white workers by strengthening the position of capitalists at the expense of the working class.30 Beyond race, capitalism also exploits people with disabilities through “sheltered workshops” in nonprofit organizations that secured for themselves an exception to the 1938 minimum wage law, enabling them to hire people with disabilities at less than minimum wages. Working conditions often separate workers with disabilities from nondisabled workers, place them under the supervision of nondisabled people, and provide little opportunity for challenge or advancement.31 Capitalism also makes use of gender inequality.32 The cultural devaluing of women, for example, has long been used as an excuse to pay them less and exploit them as a source of cheap labor, whether in the corporate secretarial pool or garment sweatshops or electronics assembly plants. 33 Women’s supposed inferiority has also been a basis for the belief that much of the work that women do is not work at all and therefore isn’t worthy of anything more than emotional compensation. 34 Capitalism could not function without the army of women who do the shopping for households (which is how most goods are purchased) and do the labor through which those goods are consumed, such as cooking meals. On a deeper level, women are still primarily the ones who nurture and raise each new generation of workers on which capitalism depends, and this vital service is provided without anyone having to pay them wages or provide health and retirement benefits.35 Women do it for free—even when they also work outside the home—to the benefit of the capitalist system and those who control and profit from it. Capitalism, then, provides both the economic context for the trouble that pervades privilege and one of the engines that makes it happen. And the class dynamics that arise from capitalism interact with privilege and oppression in ways that both protect capitalism and class privilege and perpetuate privilege and oppression based on difference. The Matrix of Domination and the Paradox of Being Privileged and Oppressed at the Same Time As the dynamics of capitalism and class suggest, systems of privilege are complicated. This is one reason why people can belong to a privileged category such as male or white and yet not experience themselves as privileged, because they also feel the limitations of being working class or gay or having a disability. So a middle-class white lesbian’s race privilege and class make her less sensitive to issues of race and class, or her experience of gender inequality and heterosexism foster the illusion that she is 35 informed about other forms of privilege and oppression. Or a working-class white man feels so pushed around and looked down on that the idea that whiteness and maleness give him access to privilege seems ridiculous. Part of such feelings comes from seeing privilege as something that is just about individuals. From that perspective, either he is privileged or he’s not, and if he can show that he’s oppressed in one way, then that would seem to cancel out any claim that he is privileged in another. But the truth is more complicated than whether he is privileged, because, as we saw earlier, privilege is not really about him, even though he is certainly involved in and affected by it. He stands to benefit from being identified as white and male, for example, but being working class can set up barriers that make it harder for him to access those benefits. If he cannot earn a good living, for example, he may have a hard time feeling like a man bonded to other men in their superiority to women. The social privileging of manhood still exists, but his class position gets in the way of the advantages that go with it. Another complication is that categories that define privilege exist all at once and in relation to one another. People never see me solely in terms of my race, for example, or gender, but always as part of a package deal. Whether, for example, readers of my books perceive me as intelligent, credible, and competent is affected by more than the fact that I’m a published author, for they also perceive a person of a certain gender, race, and, from various cues, disability status and class, including my PhD. Even if they first meet me on the internet, they will form impressions of me if only by assuming I am white and male unless I indicate otherwise. Given that reality, it makes no sense to talk about the effect of being in one of these categories—say, white—without also looking at the others and how they relate to whiteness. My experience of being identified as white is affected by my being seen as male, heterosexual, nondisabled, and of a certain class. If I apply for a job, white privilege will load the odds in my favor over a similarly qualified Latino. But if the people doing the hiring think I’m gay, my white privilege might lose out to his heterosexual privilege, and he might get the job instead of me. It is tempting to use such comparisons to calculate a net cost or benefit associated with each status. In other words, you get a point for being white, male, heterosexual, or nondisabled, and you lose a point if you are of color, female, gay or lesbian, or have a disability. Add up the points and you have your score on the privilege scale. That would put nondisabled white male heterosexuals on top (+4) and lesbians of color with disabilities in “quadruple jeopardy” at the bottom (–4). White nondisabled lesbians (0) and nondisabled gay men of color (0) would fall in between and on the same “level.” Life and privilege are not that simple, however, with being male giving you a certain amount of privilege and being white giving you more of the same, and being gay taking half of that away. Privilege takes different forms that are connected to one another in ways that are far from obvious. For example, historically, one way for white men to justify domination over black men has been to portray them as sexual predators targeting white women. At the same time, they’ve portrayed white women as pure and helpless and therefore needing white men’s protection, a dependent position that puts them under white men’s control. Note, then, how dynamics of gender and race are so bound up with each other that it is all but impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. How much race or gender “counts” all by itself cannot be determined. 36  This is why such systems have been described as a “matrix of domination” or “matrix of privilege,” and not merely a collection of different kinds of inequality that don’t have much to do with one another. As Patricia Hill Collins, Estelle Disch, and others argue, each form of privilege is part of a much larger and interconnected system.36 Looking at privilege in this way makes it clear that each form exists in relation to all the rest, so that we can stop trying to figure out which is the worst or most oppressive. It also frees us from the trap of thinking that everything is a matter of either/or—either you’re oppressed or you’re not, privileged or not—because in reality most people belong to both privileged and oppressed categories at the same time. There are several ways in which dimensions of privilege are connected to one another. One form of privilege, for example, can defend or reinforce another, as when women who challenge male privilege are called lesbians as a way to discredit them, encouraging other women to remain silent regardless of their sexual orientation. In this way, the prejudice of heterosexism is used to support male privilege by silencing women. Access to one form of privilege can affect access to others. Because the advantages of race, for example, generally give white men greater access to class privilege compared with men of color, white men also have fuller access to male privilege. This happens in part because male privilege is increased by men earning more than their female partners, an advantage that is more difficult for men of color to achieve, given their oppression because of race. Note, however, that this works only for heterosexual white men, since being gay can limit a man’s access to male privilege. Access to one form of privilege can also serve as compensation for not having access to another. Men of color, for example, can make use of male privilege to compensate for the effects of racial oppression, just as white women can use race privilege to compensate for the effects of gender. Finally, as we saw earlier, subordinate groups are often pitted against one another in ways that draw attention away from the system of privilege that hurts them all. Asian Americans, for example, are often held up as a good example—a “model minority”—which makes other peoples of color look bad by comparison and encourages them to blame Asian Americans for their own disadvantaged status. 37 In this way, Asian Americans serve as a distraction and a buffer between whites and other peoples of color, as Korean Americans did in Los Angeles after the police who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted and the rage of black people spread to Korean neighborhoods, where stores were burned to the ground. Only when the rioting reached the edges of white neighborhoods did police finally respond to pleas for help. 38 The complexity of the matrix makes it clear that work for change needs to focus on privilege itself, in all its forms that condition how we think of ourselves in relation to inequalities of power. We will not get rid of racism, in other words, without doing something about sexism and class, because the system that produces the one also produces the others and connects them to one another in powerful ways. 37