THE past few weeks have reignited the decades-old fight against structural racism and police brutality. 

George Floyd, a 46-year-old man from Minneapolis, was murdered by police in broad daylight after a shopkeeper called the police on suspicion of Floyd using a counterfeit $20 bill.

Common to the vast majority of police brutality cases is the male sex of offending officers. 

The institutional racism of the police is aggravated by male violence, resulting in serious injury and death. 

To recognise the sexed power dynamic involved in the state’s policing of its ideologies is not to detract from racial inequality. 

Instead, it demonstrates a desire to understand all the forces at play — the only way to offer a comprehensive and long-lasting solution.

Acknowledging the role of masculinity in ideological oppression requires a degree of introspection on men’s part. 

In the case of institutional racism where the aggressor is the state, the average working-class male considers himself blameless. 

Sexism, on the other hand, is much closer to home. Most men enforce the ideological oppression of women in their professional and personal lives and find this painful to acknowledge, let alone challenge. 

Yet it is crucial that this is challenged. Fostering aggression in males through pervasive sex stereotyping is not just a means of enforcing the sexed oppression of women. 

As is evident in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and countless others whose names must be remembered, male violence also enforces the ideological oppression of black people — yet in this case, they are state-sanctioned to do so.

The common cry from the left is that the defeat of capitalism will bring with it an end to all forms of oppression, including racism and misogyny. 

Although this may be comforting in its simplicity, it ignores the long-standing and synergistic relationship between racial oppression, sexist oppression and capitalism. 

Sadly, many Marxists dismiss these forms of oppression as secondary to class struggle and, more recently, sneer at them as divisive identity politics.

Yet those who are subjected to racial and/or sexist oppression know, viscerally, that their struggle is worthy of comprehensive political analysis. 

With the left only offering a lukewarm analysis which characterises racism and sexism as mere symptoms of capitalism, black people and women flock to liberal political movements which offer to address the specific condition of their struggle — Black Lives Matter, Me Too, etc.

A simplistic anti-capitalist narrative is no substitute for a comprehensive, Marxist analysis of race and sex.

Racism and sexism: pillars of capitalism

Black and female oppression are not simply byproducts of capitalism; they are the pillars that hold it up. 

Class society was built upon the slave labour of black people and the reproductive labour of women. 

Without an analysis of both these forms of material oppression, and the ideological oppression which is used to enforce them, efforts to destabilise capitalism are futile.

Race is a relatively new concept, born out of European colonialism. The forcible and violent colonisation of Africa and the enslavement of its people necessarily required a certain amount of PR spin back home. 

Public acceptance of this was crucial as the fertile land and hot climate of Africa — along with a plentiful supply of new labour — had enormous untapped economic potential. 

Similar to the Irish before them, black Africans were characterised as genetically inferior, animalistic savages. 

However, a visibly different physical characteristic (blackness of skin) allowed Africans to be easily identifiable as “other” and so the “biologically inferior” narrative stuck more easily to black-skinned people than it had to white indentured servants. Thus, the social conception of race was born.

The 13th amendment of 1865 abolished slavery in the United States “except as a punishment for crime.” Through this loophole, black Americans could legally be enslaved provided that they had first been convicted of a crime. 

And so, the mythology of black criminality was popularised through Jim Crow laws — leading to a mammoth spike in the black prison population. 

It was these black convicts who set to work constructing America’s roads, laying America’s railway tracks and quarrying building materials. 

The slave labour of black convicts quite literally built the nation’s infrastructure which, in turn, has been used to exploit the working class ever since.

Not long after the victories of the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon launched his now-famous “war on drugs” campaign — a rebranding of racialised mass incarceration connecting black people with drug crime in the eyes of the US public. 

This campaign saw disproportionate arrests, convictions and sentencing rates for drug offences by black people. 

John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, explains: “The Nixon White House … had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. 

“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And so, just as America’s roads were built by late 19th- and early 20th-century prison inmates, 21st-century prison labour is still used to manufacture a range of products — including US military supplies. 

It is also contracted by private companies which have included household names like Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, Shell, IBM and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. 

After the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, British Petroleum used Louisiana prison inmates to clean up the oil spill. Most of these jobs are unpaid or paid a few cents per hour.

Minneapolis revolt

The Minneapolis protesters pose a very real threat to the capitalist status quo on two fronts. 

First, they cause immediate economic harm: acquisition of, and damage to, private property. 

More importantly, however, they cause ideological harm. The actions of the protesters lay bare the fragility of the capitalist state, whose very existence relies on the inaction and complicity of the working class it oppresses.

Where it is becomes clear that civil unrest cannot be ignored, the state must choose between two undesirable eventualities: the weakening of its position through legal reform; or its complete destruction through ideological and material revolution. 

The state invariably opts for the former. It seeks to appease the public through individual court cases and minor legislative changes, billing these as historic and monumental — though their revolutionary impact is nil. 

The state concedes just enough ground to quell public anger; a price it is willing to pay to regain ideological control of the masses. 

In Minneapolis, this has taken the form of sacking the four police officers involved in George Floyd’s death and the arrest of Derek Chauvin — albeit on weak, third-degree murder charges (later upgraded to second degree). 

Whether this will suffice to subdue the protesters and stifle public outrage remains to be seen.

Once the immediate danger of revolution has passed, the state then reinvents this ideological oppression. 

Racial oppression, for example, has appeared in several different forms throughout the centuries: colonialism and slavery; Jim Crow laws and segregation; Nixon’s war on drugs, mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. 

This demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between material and ideological oppression; without the eradication of both, the vanquished form re-emerges. 

The material abolition of slavery was not accompanied by the breakdown of corresponding ideological oppression and so it re-emerged in the form of Jim Crow laws.

Conversely, the militant response to George Floyd’s murder challenges the ideological face of racial oppression, but is in danger of neglecting the corresponding material oppression. 

Though there certainly are pockets of astute understanding of the prison-industrial complex among black activists and communities, the general protest movement is marred with superficial liberal analysis. 

If this wave of revolt challenges the police brutality facet of racist oppression, but not the prison-industrial complex, the state will be free to rebrand its racist ideology into a more palatable or less recognisable form — and continue to materially exploit the slave labour of disproportionately black convicts.

What is to be done?

While we can hope that the current protests evolve into a form which challenges the ideological and material oppression of black people, the same must also happen regarding sexual oppression. 

Politically disempowered black communities have organised such effectual mass movements — not once, but regularly over decades and generations. 

Yet, other than the early 20th-century women’s suffrage movement (and, arguably, the women’s liberation movement of the late ’60s to early ’80s), there has been little to no challenge to the ideological and material oppression of women. 

It is only through the destruction of racism and sexism — the pillars which hold up class society — that we will can achieve the complete and permanent overthrow of the capitalist economic system and its accompanying ideologies.