Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
While that sounds convincing, I'm not entirely sure if it's accurate: deciding on the target of oppression, which isn't a small part of discrimination, seems to be certainly something that comes from attitude.
I don't consider myself an expert on this matter, so I'm happy to get educated.
[edit: typo]
Racism can and did exist under other forms of society in the past, it's not unique to capitalism
capitalism isn't new, it's just a way of defining a system in which one group of people has things and then another group of people uses the things to provide for society. we've all been dealing with capitalism for ~16,000 years, we just haven't been using the terms of capital to understand how or why our oppressors do the things that they do.
racism, ultimately, in our current understanding of it, is much much newer than capitalism, and it was formulated as a justification for the aims of the capital holders to go out into the world and steal more capital and further entrench an economic system in which they owned everything and produced nothing.
This one is a bit of a stretch I think, mostly became of the "racism gets it's power from capitalism" part. The power of racism comes from the power of racist people. Capitalism tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few individuals. Thus, if those people happen to be racist towards some group, they'll push the society they exist within in that direction. However, people still have power under any economic system, what changes is who has more of it, how they come by it, and what the relative distribution of that power looks like. Even in a hypothetical system that gave each person within exactly equal power, of whatever other source you can think of- if a large part of that society were to hold bigoted views, then their actions would still be harmful towards whatever group they were bigoted against, and thus racism would still exist.
That isnt to say that capitalism is entirely irrelevant to this, those at the top of a capitalist system effectively determine who is targeted or privileged at the moment and so them losing power should at least change how and by whom racism is experienced- but it wouldn't end it, because prejudice and tribalism run deeper than economic systems and wont disappear just by changing around who owns what.
That being said, a more fair economic system shouldn't make racism any worse, and it should help numerous other problems, so this doesn't change the conclusion that capitalism needs to go, I just think this problem (racism) is a harder one to fix than that.
Based Beedrill
