We are in a revolutionary situation today. Exacerbated by the pandemic, the economy is in crisis. Millions remain out of work, even as inflation skyrockets and war looms across the globe. Society polarizes as instability and turmoil ensue. The impoverished workers demand solutions as they fight to obtain the basics of life – food, water, housing, education, and health care.
The entire system is in the process of destruction, brought on by a crisis of epochal dimensions, as new electronic tools of production are developed that permanently eliminate human labor. The system cannot be reformed. The ruling class’s response is to protect its private property and wealth at all costs. The new class of workers created by electronics can only move to put itself in a position to reorganize society in its interests.
Southern Strategy
It is in this situation that the question of political power becomes paramount. From the country’s inception, the South has been at the core of the formula for political power by the ruling class. The ultimate aim is to control the Southern worker and, by doing so, provide the base for politically controlling the entire country.
The Southern strategy is a strategy of the ruling class as a whole: it is the political formula for how the ruling class maintains its supremacy in a bourgeois democracy, and it encompasses both political parties. The party that can sweep a solid South prevails in the electoral arena. This was particularly evident in the 2020 elections.
On June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the Civil War, the slaves in Texas finally received the news of their emancipation. They were free, and it has been a day of celebration ever since. But that freedom rang hollow without a means of livelihood, labor rights, the right to vote, access to education, and all of the civil rights necessary to participate fully in a democratic society. This immediately became a problem for the American ruling class: what was to become of the Southern worker? How were they to be controlled? When emancipation was declared, that meant that the divide between slave labor and free labor was removed. How was a united working class, particularly in the South, to be contained?
Reconstruction was a temporary effort to provide basic human rights to the Black masses: the right to vote, labor rights, education, and the distribution of land were even briefly considered.
But ever since the Hayes-Tilden betrayal in the election of 1876, the political concept of state’s rights has dominated Southern politics. Henceforth, the agreement was made that the South would rule in its own way. The Reconstruction governments were abolished, the Black workers were driven from the polls, all workers were forced to labor with no rights, and the Democratic party, in the heyday of Jim Crow, became the sole political party in a solid South.
White supremacy was employed with a vengeance. The most horrid conditions were imposed upon the Black masses. Still, at the same time, white supremacy was an appeal to the white masses to join with their white superiors, thus ensuring the supremacy of the ruling class. White supremacy is utilized to divide the Southern worker along color lines, but it is also a form of all-class unity. All-class unity always accrues to the benefit of the ruling class and is an integral dimension of the Southern strategy and program. The critical question is the supremacy of which whites?
In the 2020 elections, the Republican Party, which for the most part ruled statehouses across the South, employed its Southern strategy. They were confident that they would sweep the South and thus ensure the presidency. But what they did not count on was that the Democratic party had its own Southern strategy. That strategy was not that they had to sweep the South, but by only winning away one or two states, they could prevent the ascendancy of the opposing party. Their formula was to unite a coalition of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian and other minority groups, women, gay rights groups, and white liberals. The most significant number were, of course, the Southern Black masses.
The Southern strategy of the Democratic party coalition today is also a form of all-class unity, and here as well, all-class unity accrues to the benefit of the ruling class. The Democratic and Republican parties are the twin parties of the ruling class, each employing their versions of a Southern strategy to tie the Southern worker to the ruling class and thus maintain their supremacy.
When the Democratic primaries came to the South, Biden was running fourth. The progressives were poised to capture the nomination. But when in South Carolina Jim Clyburn, senior congressman, and leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, stepped forward to endorse Biden, the entire Black political elite from across the South closed ranks behind Biden. The Democrats won Georgia in a hotly contested race with a record turnout in the election.
New Class of Workers
In the 2020 elections, a kind of wild card was played that no one expected. That was the participation and impact of the new class of workers, including the most impoverished section of the Southern working class. In a study conducted by the Poor People’s Campaign, it was noted that of the 168 million Americans who voted, 59 million, or 35 percent, were classified as poor or low-income, earning less than $50,000 per year. In Georgia, it was 37.84 percent. These workers of the new class entered electoral politics to fight for a class agenda that included a living wage, healthcare, education, voting rights, and the fight to stop ecological devastation.
The report points out that “the racial demographics of low-income workers in Georgia were fairly evenly split between Black and white low-income workers, with 1.9 million low-income white voters casting ballots last year and 1.6 million low-income Black Georgians going to the polls,” suggesting that “it is possible to build coalitions of low-income voters across race around a political agenda that centers the issues they have in common.”
The South has long been the most impoverished section of the country. But what is described here are the conditions of poverty of a new class of workers — a condition growing and spreading across the country. The process is to drag the entire working class down to the level of the impoverished Southern worker.
States’ rights and the formula for rule that is the Southern strategy is the path to power for the ruling class, but it is also the content of the Southern program itself. It is the state’s right to suppress the vote, to restrict the access of those impoverished workers who made the difference in the last election. New laws also give the state the right to take over county and city elections boards and overturn any election they don’t like.
The new class of Southern workers is the target of the current drive to suppress their vote. They made the difference in the election. If they can be eliminated from the next election (just eliminate “11,780 votes” in Georgia), the outcome can be rigged in the ruling class’s favor.
Gerrymandering is the state’s right to redraw voting districts to benefit the ruling incumbent political party.
State’s rights are right-to-work. Right-to-work laws are the right of the state to prohibit the ability of the workers to bargain collectively with their employers for wages, benefits, or workplace conditions. Every Southern state has passed right-to-work laws, spreading across the country.
State’s rights are the right of the states to refuse to accept the expansion of Medicaid. It is the right of the states to nullify vaccine mandates, to disband mask requirements. It is the right of the states to refuse any measure or regulation that they deem to be detrimental to corporate profits and control.
State’s rights mean low taxation on the rich and the corporations. State’s rights mean little to no regulations on how corporations conduct their business. The cumulative effects of more than a hundred years of raping Southern land are superstorms, hurricanes, tornados, massive flooding, and severe drought, laying waste to the land and its people.
State’s rights are the Southern strategy and the Southern program. State’s rights are spreading across the country; many states are taking up many of the same components that prevail in the Southern states. The Supreme Court is now viewed as a state’s rights court.
Path to Power
Revolutionaries today ignore the Southern question at their peril. Even though the South today is no longer the undeveloped agrarian reserve it once was – solar panels dot the countryside where cotton once grew, and robots build electric vehicles in the rural South – the South today is an integral part of a globalized economy. Even so, the formula for political power remains the same: the path to political power in this country runs through the South. That is so for the ruling class, and it is so for the new class of Southern worker.
A new, revolutionary class is arising across the country, including the workers of the new class in the South. This new class must also have its own Southern strategy. If the strategy of the ruling class is to divide the working class, then the strategy of the new class in the South and across the country can only be class unity around a common program. If the strategy of the ruling class is to tie the workers to themselves in one version or another of all-class unity, then the strategy of the new class can only be class independence. It must put forward its independent program and fight forward to reorganize society in its interests. The path to power for the new class of workers runs through the South.
May/June 2022. vol.32. Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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