The Grand Design: The Reproduction of Inequalities in the United States

• In Event: 1122 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Knowledge, Market and Economy

Abstract

This paper examines how the modern capitalist system has been producing and reproducing social inequalities over the centuries in the global north, particularly in the United States. By drawing on sociological perspectives, the article investigates how capitalism reinforces racial, class, gender, ethnic, political and other forms of inequalities. The paper also proposes an alternative theoretical framework, i.e., the “grand colonial project.” This colonial project is a critical analytical approach to explain modern capitalism, and its contribution to (re)produce inequalities. It also analyzes colonial system and its connection to the unequal social structure. The paper redefines the colonial system to fit it into the colonial project framework. It is a system that creates private property and establishes authority over the native people through gaining coercive and strategic access in a territory (both physical and social), plundering resources, doing business, reinvesting surpluses, and forming multiple binary communities such as self vs. other, rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural, and noble vs. masses.

The central argument of this paper is that capitalism as an unjust social system thrives, functions and survives through using eight rules of the capitalist project such as a commodity, human labor, capital, profit, the market, the state, the consumer, and the ideology and creating eight colonial systems such as settler, ambulatory, planter, predatory, spatial, institutional, global, and performative. The paper claims that these rules and typologies are in place for reproducing inequalities in US society. The article explains each colonial system and its embedded forms of disparities by taking a distinct historical route and a different theoretical perspective. Finally, the paper argues that every contemporary social problem has at least one historical past, and based on that history the grand colonial project attempts to explain the present.

Author

• Lipon Kumar Mondal, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University