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Capitalism and African American History

Uploaded by spootyhead on Apr 18, 2007

Capitalism and African American History

At the base of the South African and American systems of racial discrimination is an understanding and internalization of the structural implications of capitalism and its accompanying spirit. Applying Karl Marx's and Adam Smith's definition of capitalism in conjunction with Max Weber's understanding of the "spirit of capitalism", it is here affirmed that a golden thread of capitalist thought serves both as initiator and sustainer of ideals necessary for the systematic oppression of "black people" in both South Africa and the United States. This oppression adheres to a cult of philosophy that is grounded in a doctrine of class determinacy characterized by racial particularization. Thus, parallel to the thread of capitalism evolves a sociological internalization of black inferiority that resides in the radicalization of class. This categorization of race is created and is constantly being reformed by the temporal adaptations of the capitalist. The adaptations and eugenic biases of South African and American capitalist's are institutionalized within government and government comes to function as the apparatus through which the capitalist conditions societal economic relations in order to secure profits. A socio-historical argument will be developed based on the analysis of historical developments in both South Africa and the United States.

Capitalism, in accordance to Marxian theory is an economy or social structure in which a minority of society owns the means of production. Where capital is explained as the raw materials or machinery used in the production of "new instruments of labor," the minority, termed the capitalists and identified as the bourgeois, utilize capital, the means of production, to create wealth. In this economy, the Proletariat, the trades people, shopkeepers, and peasants; those who because of lack of capital are not able to compete in the capitalist economy, are forced to sell their labor as a commodity to the capitalists in order to survive. As far as capitalism is marked by the accumulation of wealth, Weberian doctrine in conjunction with Marxian classifications of the capitalist society provides a complete understanding of a uniquely western type of capitalism.

Proceeding from Weber's understanding of profit and accumulation of wealth and consequently the "spirit of capitalism" money becomes, "of [a] prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on." Weber expands upon his definition of the Spirit of Capitalism...

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Uploaded by:   spootyhead

Date:   04/18/2007

Category:   American

Length:   45 pages (10,119 words)

Views:   3569

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