Jonhnson Chapter three

Chapter Three- Capitalism, Class, and the Matrix of Domination

In this chapter, Johnson stipulates that capitalism played a major role in the development of white privilege and still plays a major role in its perpetuation. He states that this is so because of the importance of economics in social life, the means by which people provide for their material needs. Because economics are the source of wealth and the basis of every institution, they influence the running of these institutions hence giving these institutions no option but to go with the dominant economic system. Johnson states that capitalism has been this dominant economic system for the last several hundreds of years. A dictionary definition of capitalism points out that it is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately owned and controlled and which is characterized by competition and the profit motive. In this chapter Johnson explains how a capitalistic type of economy leads to a privileged group and an oppressed one. This is because where there is a privileged group, there ought to be an oppressed group. In proving this, he explains how capitalism works.

He starts by stating that “the basic goal of capitalism is to turn money into more money” (P42). With this basic goal, capitalist buy raw materials and labor and produce goods to sell and get more profit. Because the focus is on making more profit, the capitalist aim at increasing their produce-“worker productivity,” for the same or less wages for workers. Therefore, they aim for cheap labor, because “the cheaper the labor, the more money left over for them [capitalists]” (P43). Some of the strategies the capitalists use to ensure cheap labor and more goods hence more profit is top use technology which reduces the number of workers employed or replace workers completely. The other strategy is to threaten closure of the companies if workers protest for wage increase. Therefore, the workers do not protest because they depend on this work for survival. The last and newest strategy is to “move production to countries where people are willing to work for less than they are in Europe or North America and where the authoritarian governments control workers and discourage the formation of unions and other sources of organized resistance, often with direct support of the U.S government” (43). This ultimately leads to workers being oppressed because they do not have other means of survival but to work, and investors, known as shareholders, being privileged by gaining more out of the little they invested in.

Jonson further states that “the dynamics of capitalism produce not only enormous amounts of wealth but high and increasing levels of inequality both within societies and globally” (43). To prove the enormous inequality that results from capitalism, Johnson cites some statistics that show that more than two-thirds of all the wealth, including almost 90 percent of cash and half the land, is owned by the richest ten percent while less than a quarter of the wealth is left for sharing among the lowest sixty percent of the population. Such differences, Johnson states, “result from and perpetuate a class system based on widening gaps in income, wealth, and power between those on top and everyone below them” (44). The ones at the bottom end up leading very oppressed lives because even though there is plenty of goods produced, very few is left for a lot of people to share hence leading to scarcity of goods amongst those at the bottom of the socioeconomic class while those at the top have all the privilege of having abundant goods.

Furthermore, Johnson shows how a capitalist type of economy led to white racism when millions of Africans were enslaved as a source of cheap labor on the cotton and tobacco plantations for the sole purpose of making more profit because no money would be invested on wages. Chinese immigrants were also used to build the western railways under harsh and demeaning conditions. Capitalism has also contributed to white racism through the acquisition of land and raw materials. Military conquest, political domination and economic exploitation were used by whites to acquire land from anyone that wasn’t considered white. This lead to oppression and developed the idea of whiteness to “define a privileged social category elevated above everyone who wasn’t included in it” (46-47).

But Johnson admits that the issue of privilege is complicated. This is the same reason why someone may belong to a privileged category and still feel oppressed. He explains this by stating that there are different categories of privilege. Therefore, it is possible that one can feel privileged in one category and yet feel unprivileged in another category hence we can belong to both privileged and unprivileged categories at the same time.

While reading this chapter, I understood the capitalistic type of economy. In as much as I had an idea of what capitalism is, I probably did not care so much to learn more about its effects. I was stunned at the percentages in the unequal distribution of wealth and almost all other things in terms of land and even education. i.e. the privileged go to better schools and learn in better conditions than the oppressed. It made me understand why most things in the U.S. are made in China. One of my friends one time was saying almost everything in America is made in China including the American flag. But what really surprised me the most is that in my country, we have things made in China and yet of poor quality than the same products found in the U.S. So why the difference? I now understand that it is due to the effects of capitalism. Because my country is a third world country labeled in the bottom category, we have to share the remainder of what the ‘privileged’ first world countries have left for us even when we have an abundance of natural resources. My country does not have as much commanding power and influence in the production as the United States, maybe that is why we get low quality products.