The Economics of Racism and Social Division

How might a different economy help end the rise of the far right?

A lot is being written about racism at the moment. With far right violence bringing terror to our towns and cities, and hate-fuelled narratives pervading social media and politics around the world, many are asking why is this happening and what can we do.

It is easy to lose hope, and easy for those who have been working for a lifetime on building a better world to think that work has been in vain. But this is not a new problem, and it will not be solved by any one person, organisation or movement. The fear of the ‘other’ has been around for millennia, and for almost as long, those in power have been actively fuelling that fear for their own gain.

Mass European colonialism started in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries, and reached its peak in the 1800s. It is no coincidence that many historians would say that capitalism as an economic model has its roots at a similar time, and what we would consider ‘modern global’ capitalism really took hold in the 19th Century too.

That economic model (and it’s important to remember it is just that — a model), requires the ‘capital’: land, money, power, resources (including people), the ‘means of production’ and so on, to be held in the hands of a few, and for the many to be in service to those few in order to produce for them more capital to fuel its own growth.

Colonialism was the natural extension of this model and of its need to gather up more resources — both human and natural. Those that had land and power across Europe, having exercised that power over the many in their own countries to grow their ‘capital’, then travelled the world and actively and violently seized it elsewhere.

Now here, in the 21st Century, that prevailing economic model still has us striving for an endless amount of ‘growth’ of this capital as the thing we value most. If the production and consumption of more ‘stuff’ — as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does not go up, month on month, year on year, all the resources of the state and beyond are put to turning that around. In order for that to be possible, on a finite planet, the ‘many’ must continually work longer and fight harder for fewer…