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Instructors: Dr. Leo Roepert
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
Pol. Öko. Rassismus
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
6,0
Language of instruction:
German
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 24
Comments/contents:
The history of Western societies is often told as a progress story of the gradual generalization of democracy and the market economy. A reciprocal relationship between the two is often claimed: the expansion of the market economy has at the same time contributed to the establishment of the democratic principles of freedom and equality. That the history of modern capitalism is also a history of racism and racially legitimized domination does not fit into this picture. To this day, the connection between racism and capitalism has hardly been addressed in public or academic circles. Instead, racism is usually individualized by describing it as irrational prejudice or discriminatory action.
However, a closer historical and sociological look shows that racism is deeply embedded in the structures and the culture of modern society. In the seminar, we want to explore the connections between racist discourses and relations of domination and the essential economic structures and features of modern capitalism (property, commodity production, labor organization, capital, trade, etc.). Historical, sociological and economic perspectives will be linked.
Modern racism emerges in the era of colonial expansion of European states. Racist discourses legitimize violence against the colonized, conquest and expropriation of land, and the exploitation of unfree labor. Karl Marx had already pointed out that slavery was the "pivot of bourgeois industry": "Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry." Recent historical research has confirmed this judgment: The "original accumulation" of capital and the economic structures of colonial merchant capitalism were based largely on the exploitation of slave labor. Central to this were the American plantation economy and the transatlantic slave trade. European slave traders deported millions of Africans to North and South America. There they were forced to work on plantations, whose products (including tobacco, sugar, and cotton) were subsequently exported to Europe. Some of the goods produced by slave labor were in turn transported to Africa to be traded for new slaves.
In the course of secularization and the spread of the bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality in the 17th and 18th centuries, the traditional religious worldviews that had long served to justify violence and domination lost their persuasive power. They were replaced by the natural sciences and theories of race. These postulated that humanity could be divided into races on the basis of external and internal characteristics, and that these races were hierarchically related. The white race was rational and disciplined, while all other races were inferior and therefore had to be controlled and civilized.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, racism generalized and transformed. It is no longer applied only to the relationship between colonizers and colonized, masters and slaves, but increasingly to the internal relations of dominant Western societies. In the context of worsening economic crises and imperialist competition between states, history and the present are interpreted as an existential racial struggle. Nations are understood as racial units that must be protected from harmful influences and strengthened through targeted political measures.
In the seminar we want to examine the connection between racism and capitalism, especially in its historical emergence and development, but will also address the significance of racism in contemporary capitalism. A prerequisite for participation is a willingness to read and discuss the seminar texts on a regular basis. Since most research on racism takes place in the Anglo-Saxon world, we will also read many English-language texts. The format of the exam will be a paper on the topic of the seminar. More detailed information about the requirements for the paper and the course of the seminar will be given in the first session.
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