Who benefits from the racial wage gap?
The savings from the racial wage gap or, as Winston and Perlo would call it, super-exploitation, is accumulated by employers, business owners and large landowners in a word, capitalists. While it is true for some white workers, higher incomes have produced sustained wealth gap (through access to easier credit, better public services, homeownership and equity), on the whole employers are the ones who materially benefit most from the promotion of racial divisions, prejudices, stereotypes and racially-determined access to income and wealth. In fact, the racism as inherent in this racial income and wealth gap is necessary for capitalists to offset what Marx saw as the capitalism’s general tendency to see the rate of profit fall. Without racism (and other means of increasing exploitation), profits would erode. For Henry Winston, the immediate solution to this contradiction lay in the struggle for democracy and the unity of all workers, the building of the labor movement to improve everyone’
