2006-06-27
Socialism, Based on Racism?
Lefties often portray capitalism as "based on racism". Yet capitalism has enabled more poor people, including those of all "races", to elevate themselves to, and maintain themselves in, prosperity and security than the competing economic model, socialism. Here economist Walter Williams exposes the racism of those who created socialism... so often embraced by lefties. As the fathers of these two competing economic models debated the respective merits, Williams shows that it was the capitalists who advocated an end to white-on-black slavery, an end to imperialism, and the establishment of equality of rights, whereas the socialists advocated the opposite.
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3 comments:
I am not a socialist, but...
Just because the founding theorists of socialism were racist doesn't mean the principles of socialism are racist. The principles have nothing to do with race.
Prominent socialists like Kwame Nkrumah, Huey P. Newton, Fidel Castro and Jesus of Nazareth have not exhibited signs of racism. This article proves that a few old, white academics in Europe were racist at a time when many of the people of Europe and America were just as racist.
It also does not disprove the racism of capitalists like the Dutch West India Company. The fact that capitalist societies who previously advocated slavery and colonialism were forced to give up the practice by people like Nat Turner, Toussant L'Overture, William Lloyd Garrison, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ho Chi Minh doesn't mean that they were/are any less racist.
This article proves absolutely nothing of the sort.
If Churchill had his way, the British empire would still rule much of the world with racist principles, and in reality it does through neo-colonial practices. The US continues to promote racist imperial excursions like those in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iraq.
But economic principles are not inherently racist. The practitioners may be, but the theories of capitalism and socialism have nothing to do with race.
Nadir: Williams' point is that many lefties (but not you, you say in the face of these facts) hold the racism of some of the founding capitalists as evidence that capitalism is inherently racist. Until this column I had never even known that some of the founding socialists were racist as well. Capitalism itself disfavors racism; it favors free people with universal equal rights, with restrictions only of imposing on the rights of others (stealing or destroying their belongings, harming them, misrepresenting a contract, etc.)
Certainly many of the white slavery advocates were capitalists... but they were bad capitalists. As Williams pointed out (or nearly did), capitalist analysis favors wage labor and free people over slavery societies as the best way for the most people to obtain the most prosperity. Your writing above indicates your view of "capitalist societies" as comprising monolithic support for enslavement of others, when as Williams demonstrates, many capitalists were at the front of both anti-slavery and anti-imperialist movements, and certainly not merely because Nat Turner or Ho Chi Mihn forced them into these views.
Meanwhile, many prominant founding socialists advocated both slavery and imperialism.
Heuy Newton, Castro, and Mihn all had glowing charactorizations of the socialist founders, and scathing attacks on the authors of the US constitution. Did those modern socialists know the views of those founding socialists?
The facts seem clear to me, in any case, that modern blacks, Cubans, and Vietnamese do much better with capitalism than socialism, and immigration patters strongly indicate that they agree with this assessment (regardless of what they may say).
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