Page 17 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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characterized by mercantilism; war; slavery; conquest and colonization; genocide or
ethnocide; intensification of racial/ethnonational, class, and gender stratification; and
continued subjugation of peoples by European capitalist powers and their collabora-
tors.This period extended approximately from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth
century. The transformation of mercantilism into industrial capitalism and the ex-
pansion of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
Western Europe increased the demand for raw materials, free or cheap labor (mainly
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slaves), markets, and the intensification of global colonial expansion.
The same global processes that resulted in the colonial beginnings of the United
States in the seventeenth century and the emergence of the Ethiopian empire during
the second half of the nineteenth century brought about the subjugation of the African
American and Oromo peoples in two different corners of the world. Capitalism
brought large-scale and long-term structural changes first in Western Europe and then
to the whole world.The processes of expropriation, slavery, and colonialism resulted in
hierarchical organization of world populations through the creation of an elaborate dis-
course of racism to maintain the system. It is essential to provide a pragmatic definition
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of racism in this discussion. As the meaning of race is complex, so is that of racism.
Racism is a discourse and a practice in which a racial/ethnonational project is politi-
cally, culturally, and “scientifically” constructed by global and regional elites in the cap-
italist world system to naturalize and justify racial/ethnonational inequality in which
those at the top of the hierarchy oppress and exploit those below them by claiming bi-
ological and/or cultural superiority.“A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, rep-
resentation or explanation of racial dynamics,”Howard Winant notes,“and an effort to organize
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and distribute resources along particular racial lines.” Simply put, racism is an expression of
institutionalized patterns of colonizing structural power and social control. It is mani-
fested in individual and cultural practices. Race and racism are socially and culturally
constructed to maintain the identities of the dominant population groups and their
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power and privileges through policy formulation and implementation. By inventing
nonexistent “races,” 43 the racist ideology institutionalizes “the hierarchies involved in
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the worldwide division of labour.” Race and racism are sociopolitical constructs since
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all human groups are biologically and genetically more alike than different. Robert
Staples asserts that “it is useful to view race as a political and cultural identity rather
than to apply any genetic definitions. Race is a political identity because it defines the
way in which an individual or [a group] is to be treated by the political state and the
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conditions of one’s oppression.” Race and racism as politicocultural constructs define
the relationship between the dominant and subordinated racial/ethnonational groups
and legitimate the imposition of dominant values. 47
To justify racial slavery and colonialism, the ideologies of racism and cultural uni-
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versalism were developed in scientific clothing and matured during the last decades
of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth centuries. In this process, class and
gender oppression and exploitation were intensified, and naturalized too.The crisis of
the capitalist world system during the first half of twentieth century, the intensifica-
tion of competition among the European colonial powers, and the maturation of the
White racist ideology resulted in the First and the Second World Wars.These crises
marked the decline of the first global historical wave and the emergence of the sec-
ond historical wave.The second historical wave emerged as a turning point after the
First World War as social movements and national liberation movements or revolu-
tions. Immannuel Wallerstein notes that the Second World War “marked the opening