Reparations or Revolution?

The question of slavery reparations requires a communist analysis of capitalism, slavery, racism, and imperialism.

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has shown that he remains committed to being a dishonest apologist for racism. Gates published an op-ed article in The New York Times (4/23/10) titled “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” He argued that African leaders entered into what he calls “complex business partnerships” with European slave traders.

Thus, Pres. Obama, “the child of an African and an American…is uniquely positioned to attribute responsibility and culpability…to white people and black people on both sides of the Atlantic,” so that the “divisive” issue of slavery reparations can be settled.  What Gates is suggesting — without being honest enough to come right out and say it — is that President Obama should bring African and American leaders together at the White House — as Obama did with Gates and officer Crowley who arrested him — so they can put the question of slavery reparations behind them.

Both Gates and Obama have a history of blaming Africans for past slavery and present poverty and exploitation.  Back in 1999, Gates produced a Public Television series, “Wonders of the African World.” He emphasized the role of Arabs in the
African slave trade, while glossing over the role of European and American slave traders. He avoided any serious discussion of the devastating nature and impact of colonialism and imperialism in Africa.

Similarly, Obama, speaking in Ghana in July 2009, lectured Africans to stop using slavery and colonialism as “excuses” for their lack of “good governance” today. Obama delivered this hypocritical message as his administration supports corrupt undemocratic governments, expands the U.S. military presence through Africom (the Pentagon military command for Africa), and escalates wars in Central Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Obama delivers similar lectures to African American workers, parents, and schoolchildren. He insists that they have no excuses for failing to get ahead, despite racist cuts in school budgets, massive unemployment, and mass incarceration.

What Gates is trying to do by writing about the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade is to exaggerate it and thereby imply that it is comparable to the role of European and American slave traders.  This is an old lie that has been pushed for the obvious purpose of diverting attention from the main perpetrators onto the minor collaborators.  Moreover, the fact that there were Jewish collaborators with the Nazis has not prevented large-scale reparations to Jewish groups.

Gates also dishonestly downplays the American responsibility for slavery. Columbia University historian Eric Foner, in a letter to the Times (4/25/10), pointed out that “the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808…It was Americans, not Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave system the modern world has known, a system whose profits accrued not only to slaveholders but also to factory owners and merchants in the North.

Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade within the United States, in which an estimated two million men, women and children were sold between 1820 and 1860.  Identifying Africa’s part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront the institution’s central role in our own history.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, in “The World and Africa,” (1940), noted “it was Karl Marx who made the great unanswerable charge of the sources of capitalism in African slavery.” Marx described how capitalism emerged through a bloody process of genocide, slavery, and colonial conquest which divided the world into a small class who possessed great wealth and a large class of proletarians robbed of everything they had except their own labor power. Capitalism arrived, Marx wrote, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Communists understand that the crime of slavery was embedded in the larger crime of the rise of the global system of capitalism itself.  Enslavement, conquest, and genocide carried out by European capitalists against the populations of Africa, Asia, and the Americas required the development and systematic establishment of a racist structure and ideology wherever capitalism spread. From chattel slavery capitalists developed colonial slavery and wage slavery and exploitation of the working class.  Each kind of slavery requires intense racism.

Gates suggests that reparations would be a one-sided punishment on whites that overlooks the shared responsibility of blacks. But the actual problem with reparations is that they are a vastly inadequate punishment or remedy for the crimes of slavery and racism.

First, these crimes did not end either in the U.S. or in Africa with the abolition of chattel slavery. In the U.S. these crimes persisted for another century as racist super-exploitation under Jim Crow segregation. They persist in the present period as what Michelle Alexander — in a recent book — calls “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” There are more blacks in prison today than at any time under Jim Crow.  It is now legal to discriminate against blacks who have a criminal record in jobs, housing, education, and any government assistance program.

A 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy estimated that from 1998 to 2006 (before the sub-prime crisis), blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from sub-prime loans. That was before the worst of the housing crisis and wave of evictions disproportionately hit black homeowners.  Similarly, in Africa, the slave trade was followed by colonialism and post-colonial imperialism, which have killed more African workers and yielded greater capitalist profits than slavery did.

Second, reparations are supposed to be an act of repair based on some genuine regret for previous harm done.  Capitalists who continue to profit from racist exploitation, debt slavery, mass murder in imperialist wars, plunder of resources, and environmental destruction are incapable of repairing the world and incapable of meaningful regret. We should not spread the illusion that capitalists will ever be capable of making things right for their victims.

Reparations for slavery in the U.S. — in the unlikely event it ever happened — would be used to further consolidate the position of black capitalists, politicians, and administrators as members of the U.S. ruling class.  It would produce more of the same results the Obama presidency has thus far produced. That is, it would confuse and pacify sections of the black working class, while continuing imperialist wars in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Reparations would continue mass incarceration of African Americans, racist detentions and deportations of immigrant workers, trillion dollar bailouts of bankers, insurance, and pharmaceutical, and hospital companies, massive loss of jobs, housing, education, and health care for workers, and environmental destruction that threatens the lives of billions of people all over the planet. 

Third, it is not just capitalist individuals, companies, or countries that are responsible for slavery, genocide, super-exploitation, imperialist wars, and global warming.  It is the global system of capitalism as a whole. Whatever bi-racial reparations formula Gates and Obama might try to sell as appropriate for the crimes of Western and African slave traders, workers must not allow the capitalist system to be let off so lightly.  Capitalism deserves the death penalty.  The working class must destroy the capitalist system.  Only under communism will workers be able to repair the world for all the people who live in it.