General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Can We Have A Toughtful/Respectful Discussion Of Civil Rights Versus Income Inequality ??? [View all]DemocraticWing
(1,290 posts)The reason homophobia exists, for one thing, is the societal assumption that LGBT people can't have children. In a capitalist system this means we aren't producing future workers, and the system needs more (mostly cheap) labor to survive. That doesn't necessarily mean that LGBT people can't have children (many do, in fact) but the ideal world for the capitalists is to put everyone into relationships where a man and a woman are breeding new children to enter the workforce.
This is the heart of sexism too: why do these people detest abortion and birth control? Because it allows women to choose how many children they have instead of giving birth to hordes of new workers. The capitalists also wish to confine women to the home, because they can raise these large amounts of children while performing large amounts of unpaid domestic labor. This establishes the system of patriarchy in which women are exploited to the extent that they do most of the world's work but own so little of the property.
Racism is probably the most easily identifiable, for American capitalism was actually built upon the concept of unpaid labor in the form of slavery. This has persisted since, and the reason the capitalists want to keep minorities poor is so they can have a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor. The civil rights movement was steeped in socialist critique of the capitalist system--not just MLK, but also W.E.B DuBois, Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph, etc. This of course has managed to manifest itself in the racist systems we used to oppress Hispanics and Asians as well. The system of illegal immigration is set up not just to keep the "undesirable" out of America, but also because undocumented workers can be legally paid less than human wages for their work. Who are they going to call, the government who would send them back to their home countries?
If this all seems dark, it's because capitalism is very dark. Some would even go so far to call it evil. We really have to fight it, not just for the disaffected white working class who no longer vote Democrat, but because it's the common enemy of all who find themselves oppressed.