The feudalist opponents of capitalism may have had some incipient "racism", but the capitalists of the original/primitive accumulation acted as racists, and racism was invented to rationalize the capitalist slavery and colonial system. The "free" market system doesn't promote cooperative economics between "races" , but rather racistly oppressive capital-wagelabor relations with colonies and neo-colonies, which are class exploitative and hierarchical.
"Friedman" market economics in the U.S. produce and reproduce racist social structure, from segregated residential patterns and ghettoized poverty to segmented labor markets/arbitrage . Charles * From: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED] This idea goes back to the 18th C. literature on Doux Commerce, which described the same thing in terms of nations. Peart & Levy's books say that the opponents of capitalism were racists, but the economists, reflecting actual markets, saw everybody as equal. Needless to say, not many here would agree. , Autoplectic wrote: > "The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate> each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic> backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't> do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences." Hey, do you have any examples of pro-capitalist or (in their time in the US and Britain) mainstream economists being racist? I'm curious because Coleman's "economics and its enemies" says "anti-economists" are racist on the basis of some quotes from John R. Commons and Marx and Engels. Fred Lee reviewed that book and gave a relatively recent neoclassical model of housing segregation as an example of orthodox economists (or economists, given Coleman's definition) being racist, but I don't think its a good example because the problem was that the model ignored racism. However, I'm sure there must have been racist orthodox economists, especially given the time period some of them wrote in.
