Caste, Class and Race

In the citing paper

“A second class, which Cox alternatively calls 'the aggressor class,' and 'the attacking class,' is indeed essentially engaged in struggle against the ruling political class”

In the citing paper

“violence is frequently an effective, if sanguinary, means for the attacking class in the political class struggle, at least when the ruled population 'feels that it is being unjustly 'oppressed' and that it can command the power to bring the government to terms'”

In the citing paper

“Such racial forms of prejudice may, however, take any number of guises-any 'race' may, conceivably, be the target for racial prejudice depending on the needs of the ruling class.”

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“In Cox's view, racial prejudice and collective racist actions-that is, the 'public estrangement of sympathetic feeling for and loss of social identification with [an] exploited group'-are undergirded by and meant to justify the impersonal imperatives of a particular mode of production, namely, that mode of production which requires a large docile labor force available for exploitation”

In the citing paper

“there developed in white Europe an elite political class of exploiters, 'mainly capitalists, urban dwellers, [and] business people'”

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“Cox rejects the possibility that lynch mobs are spontaneous acts of vengeance or autonomous instantiations of racist terrorism because, not unlike the racialized working-class conflicts seen above, he thought that the political-social context, far from disallowing such phenomena, in fact encourage and set the stage for it-an atmosphere he calls the 'lynching situation'”

In the citing paper

“By 1550, however, the burgeoning capitalist powers had championed an intellectual, the Spanish philosopher Ginés de Sepúlveda, who first began to justify European capitalist exploitation of native people in racist terms, though only in nascent form”

In the citing paper

“For him, racial prejudice is not autonomous, outside, or independent of the political economy but is always deeply embedded within and a function of it”

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“The elite (i.e., the ruling political-class) would be its intellectuals and creators, though not necessarily its primary practitioners.”

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“It is the apparent spontaneity, autonomy, and originality of intra-class racial prejudice, not the racial prejudice itself, which is, for Cox, a simplification.”

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“It is a situation that the ruling political class creates through politics, formal and informal education, policing, statutes, unequal distribution of resources, and negligent economic institutions.”

In the citing paper

“Absent such a total social force, Cox thought, the working class could do a great deal, over time, to eliminate racial prejudice among its own ranks.”

In the citing paper

“The exploitation of native peoples,' Cox concluded, 'is not a sin, not essentially a problem of morals or of vice; it is a problem of production and of competition for markets.”

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“Race prejudice, from its inception, became part of the social heritage, and as such both exploiters and exploited for the most part are born heirs to it.”

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“when the inertia of such an antagonistic situation no longer suffices or when it begins to wear down or become ineffective, the ruling class will intervene in any way they are able. Cox calls this police-like behavior of the ruling political-class an 'eternal vigilance' in maintaining an ever-present threat of interracial violence”

In the citing paper

“For Cox, the police were one of the key instigators of allowing and encouraging such a terroristic atmosphere, as they did not arrest nor prosecute lynchers, or were active participants of the mob themselves”

In the citing paper

“'Sepúlveda,' Cox argues, 'may be thought of as among the first great racists; his argument was, in effect, that the Indians were inferior to the Spaniards, therefore they should be exploited'”

In the citing paper

“Once it is accepted that capitalist societies require for their existence a docile labor supply, such a mass of human beings needs to be made to continuously submit to that very system.”

In the citing paper

“Sepúlveda became an intellectual for the early development of expansionist capital on the American continent, first as an apologist who justified the brutality required to subdue the potential laborers, and second as he marked 'the beginning of modern race relations…only nascent race prejudice'”

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“The only way for capital to accomplish its self-imposed imperatives of profit, Cox thought, was to ensure that the working classes were divided amongst themselves and not attacking the ruling political class.”

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“the anti-Negro attitude which the ruling class propagates among the white masses cannot be 'in the mores' of the people of the South because at least half of them, all the Negroes and a considerable minority of whites, reject them entirely.”

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“wherever one finds capitalist societies, racial prejudice will be its dominant ideological alibi.”

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“the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America”

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“the exploitative act comes first; the prejudice follows”

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“There then are race relations…they are labor-capital-profits relationships; therefore, race relations are proletarian bourgeois relations and hence political-class relations”

In the citing paper

“Thus, for Cox, racial prejudice is inherent to capitalism, and in this precise sense, racial capitalism, as a necessary system of exploitation and ideological alibis, is always capitalism tout court .”

In the citing paper

“Cox argued that the ruling political class recognizes that it is constantly at war with the subordinate political class”

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“for Cox racist prejudices are created and deployed primarily by the ruling political class for the purposes of exploiting the working class”

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“It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socioattitudinal facilitation-at that time only nascent race prejudice”

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“it will attempt, so far as it can, to divert the attacking energies of the subordinate class away from itself and redirect such violence into intra-class conflict.”

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“This trade did not develop because Indians and Negroes were red and black, or because their cranial capacity averaged a certain number of cubic centimeters; but simply because they were the best workers to be found for the heavy labor in the mines and plantations across the Atlantic”

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“When white workers attack Asian immigrant workers, Cox thinks, it is never for the benefit of the working-class, even if they think so: their jobs and well-being were not saved by resorting to violence, nor could it be coherently described as progress toward socialism. But such violence does serve to benefit the ruling political class.”

In the citing paper

“a powerful white exploiting class, by 'might of the strong' and for 'economic expediency,' pushed the Negroes down into chattel slavery and then, as a justification and facilitation of this, utilized the means of propaganda, which are ordinarily in its control, to develop racial antagonism and hate in the white public for the Negroes”

In the citing paper

“It is the clearest expression in Cox's oeuvre that shows, on the contrary, that average white people are indeed some of the most violent practitioners of racial prejudice”

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“Lynching in the South is not a crime, and this notwithstanding the fact that a few state statutes apparently proscribe it”

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“Cox situates the case of anti-Asian prejudice within a section entitled Race Prejudice, Class Conflict, and Nationalism because he believed it was ultimately a case of labor relations between exploited and exploiter. Neither intolerance nor persecution correctly identifies the social attitude for this situation; it is rather, for Cox, exploitation, and race prejudice.”

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“Cox's second conclusion, therefore, is that racial prejudice has become necessary to developed capitalist societies.”

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“the socialist revolution, for Cox, is the only conceivable way to eliminate the brutality of exploitation and the structures he believed were necessarily entailed in the system which produced and came to require them.”

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“But neither the lynch mob nor any form of racial prejudice, Cox submits, is a natural destiny of a society, no human community is prescribed to be the perpetrators or victims of racial terror, nor is it part of an essential human nature to be cruel and antagonistic.”

In the citing paper

“It requires, for example, an economic, educational, legal, and punitive apparatus which conjures, deploys, and exploits racial prejudices in order to maintain an internally antagonistic labor supply. It also requires a ruling political-class whose inherent interest is to extract such brutal asocial behavior from a significant section of the ruled.”

In the citing paper

“Lynching is crucial in the continuance of the racial system of the South”