It is true that a tremendous amount of the wealth of this country has been produced through the exploitation of Black people and other people of color in actual slave, or near-slave conditions—but that is not the only major source of this ill-gotten wealth.

In the earlier history of this country, and up until recent times, large amounts of wealth were created by generations of poor wage-workers within this country, most of them white (many of them recent immigrants from Europe), who were brutally exploited by the ruling capitalists—and murderously suppressed by police and “private” thugs, when they rose up to resist their terrible conditions of exploitation. This went on together with the even worse oppression and exploitation of Black people and others.

In more recent decades, the process of capitalist production, carried out through the exploitation of masses of people, has been increasingly globalized, and this has been accompanied by major changes in the economy, and the “social structure” and social relations, within this country itself. One major result of this has been the elimination of millions of jobs in basic production within this country, affecting large numbers of white workers formerly employed in those jobs, and contributing to massive unemployment among Black people, and Black youth especially (even as this unemployment is seriously underestimated/undercounted in official government statistics).

As I noted in the previous message (number Thirty-Eight), this is extensively analyzed by Raymond Lotta in Imperialist Parasitism and Class-Social Recomposition in the U.S. From the 1970s to Today: An Exploration of Trends and Changes; and The “Industrialization” of Sexual Exploitation, Imperialist Globalization, and the Descent Into Hell, which are available at revcom.us.

In message number Thirty-Eight as well, I discussed the fact that the mode of production—the nature of the economic system, and its basic relations and actual dynamics—is the foundation, and sets the terms, for how society functions and what are the overall relations among people in that society. And I emphasized this fundamental point:

So long as you have a capitalist economic foundation, which is based on exploitation, you will have a society full of oppressive relations.

This has been true throughout the history of this country. It was true when the ruling system in this country was one of literal slavery combined with developing capitalism (as was the case at the time of the founding of this country nearly 250 years ago). It was true after the Civil War, in the 1860s, largely put an end to slavery and led to the rapid expansion of capitalist relations of exploitation. And it is true today, when this capitalist system has developed into an international system of exploitation—capitalism-imperialism—with the increasingly parasitic nature of this country, feasting off the ruthless exploitation of billions of people world-wide, including hundreds of millions of women and more than 150 million children forced to work in near-slave conditions in sweatshops, mines and farms.

And once more from message number Thirty-Eight (quoting from my work Breakthroughs):

If you want to get rid of all these different forms of oppression, you have to address them in their own right, but you also have to fundamentally change the economic system to give you the ability to be able to carry through those changes in fundamental terms. To put it another way: You have to have an economic system that doesn’t prevent you from making those changes, and instead not only allows but provides a favorable foundation for making those changes. (Breakthroughs can also be found at revcom.us.)

Bringing into being such an emancipating system is the essential aim of the revolution that is urgently needed, and is possible, in this time we are living in now, with all the oppression, destruction, and chaos caused by this system of capitalism-imperialism. It is what is given life in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored—setting forth a sweeping vision and a concrete blueprint for a radically different and emancipating system, aiming for the ultimate goal of a communist world, in which all of humanity can truly thrive, without division into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed.