The conscious political unity of our diverse working class is necessary for building the power to create a new society, one where our collective social wealth is used to ensure that all of humanity and the earth will thrive. Understanding the historic role of African Americans in the working class is essential for building the unity needed to win.
Slavery and genocidal land theft were part of the economic base of this country from the start. Capitalist productive relations required the dehumanization of the Indigenous People to legitimize land theft, and the dehumanization of African people justified the brutal system of chattel slavery in a nation making a name for itself as a (bourgeois) democracy. The ideas of society as well as the political structure, institutions, laws, and law enforcement—the superstructure—arose to support, protect, and promote that base.
Race is a social and political construction not a biological or scientific reality. It has been used by the ruling class to justify brutal exploitation and create divisions between laborers to prevent their unity around class interests.
After the bloody Civil War ended legal slavery, the enslavement, brutal control, dehumanization and killing of Black and Indigenous people were still historically ingrained and integral to the political and ideological superstructure of our country.
The continued need for cotton ensured that a new system of semi-forced labor—sharecropping—would be implemented to exploit the formerly enslaved. This system ensnared poor white workers as well (about 2/3 of the sharecroppers). Jim Crow segregation—including laws limiting meaningful interracial relations—was brutally enforced both by law and extralegal terrorist groups such as the KKK. Segregation kept workers tied to the land and, despite some efforts, generally unable to unite.
The invention of the mechanical cotton picker was the basis for freeing the sharecroppers to migrate for better paying industrial jobs. By pushing sharecroppers off the land and into the cities, the new technology also laid the basis for the Second Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement, a courageous struggle to fulfill the freedom dreams that were not delivered with emancipation. The eventual defeat of legal segregation meant that African Americans would individually enter their respective classes. Necessarily, each social class benefitted unequally from desegregation.
Still today, police violence, COVID-19, and other health problems disproportionately affect Black people. At the same time, the impact on Black people is disproportionate by economic status, and it is the poorest people of all colors who are most impacted. The legacy of slavery means that Black people are more likely to be poor. Ruling class media, defending capitalism and the inequality it requires, conceals this complicated relationship.
When the former sharecroppers migrated to the cities of the north and south, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow ensured that African Americans were offered the lowest paying and most dangerous industrial jobs. Therefore, when automation began replacing factory jobs in the 1970s, African Americans had the least seniority and the most easily automated jobs. In this way, history put the descendants of African American slaves at the core of a new class of workers of all colors being created by labor-replacing technology. This new class is being pushed out of the new economy that cannot meet its basic needs. It is an abolitionist class because it must abolish the private property system to survive. It is a communist class because it needs an economic system based on the public ownership of the things we need to survive, and distribution of these things according to need.
Because of this history of slavery and genocide, an ideology of white supremacy is part of how the ruling class still rules. This historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression continues to work for the ruling class in at least two ways. One, it is carved into the economy. The resulting oppression, subordination, and brutalization of workers of color expands profit for the small ruling class and misery for the entire working class. Two, the ideology of white supremacy is used to divide the masses of people, hide our common class interests, and prevent the political unity to fight forward.
Slavery’s stamp on capitalism and society is strong to this day. Workers in the South, the site of the most thriving slave economy and where the largest population of African Americans still lives, continues to experience disproportionate economic and social deprivation that affects workers of all colors.
The southern strategy that has kept wages and rights suppressed in the South has also been used by the rulers to attack workers across the country. When the ruling class no longer needed the mass of workers, they began withdrawing the social safety net since there was no need for a reserve army of labor. Most Americans accepted what appeared to be the government abandoning and blaming the Black poor—cutting aid to families, children, the elderly, ill and unemployed. Of course, once legalized, these policies applied to everyone.
The unity demonstrated by the rebellion in response to the police murder of George Floyd disarmed the rulers. The sustained actions of an estimated 26 million people of all colors was recorded as the largest protest movement in American history. The broad and united response to police violence and systemic racism threatens the ruling class reliance on racial division and raises demands on the State to divest from policing and invest in human services and needs.
By attacking the legacy of slavery and brutality, the rebellion was aimed at the political superstructure that protects capitalism and private property. It is part of revolutionary struggle. Amid a pandemic, climate devastation, a President who publicly supported white supremacist groups, and the abdication of our rulers of any responsibility for people’s lives, the rebellion was a response to changes at society’s economic foundation.
Police in America kill about 1000 people each year. Awareness that Black people are disproportionately killed by police, at more than twice the rate of whites, has grown, but the media often fails to note what the people of all colors killed by police have in common—they are almost all poor. Police violence targeting the new class, with African Americans at its core, is a tactical offensive by the ruling class central to their fight to impose fascism on society. Uniting behind the demand that Black lives matter is part of going on the strategic offensive to fight for a new world. The rulers understand this and are mounting their backlash, stoking fear of crime and promoting more police as the only solution.
Class equality cannot be accomplished without eliminating racial inequality, and racial equality cannot be accomplished without the victory of the class struggle. The fight for racial justice and class justice are not in opposition to one another but are part of the same process. Understanding and opposing white supremacy is part of class consciousness, just as is understanding that white workers are also suffering from the new economy and that we are all being displaced and abandoned by the government’s collaboration with corporations.
Unity is key to any victory. The unity of the revolutionary force, the new communist class being created today, depends upon a growing class consciousness. The rulers’ goal is to stop the revolution from proceeding on a class basis. Changes in the economy present the problem to the ruling class of maintaining working class disunity. Social privileges granted to white workers over Black workers have always kept the workers apart. Today, the growing poverty and displacement of more and more workers of all colors is creating the basis for class unity.
As digital technology replaces human labor, the value of labor decreases, and the rulers are having to abandon the social bribery that was once systematically given to more privileged workers (e.g., early immigrants over recent immigrants, white over Black). For the first time in our country, the formula that has been used to control and exploit all workers for centuries is beginning to crumble. Real class unity of the American working class is objectively possible.
Nothing can be done without this unity and consciousness. Unity of the new class around distribution based on need is the only ideology that reflects the reality of material conditions and the potential of the new technology. It is the only ideology that truly expresses the interests and aspirations of most of the world as they struggle for their immediate needs.
Fully conscious of the legacy of slavery and genocide and how the ruling class attempts to use race politically, our strategic focus is on the political unity of the new class. We unite with the movements against police violence, oil pipelines, and systemic racism as well as the movements for voting rights, public education, and the rights of migrants. All are part of class struggle and the struggle for a new society. Our approach is to unite based on the demands of the new class that our government ensure equal access to the resources that humanity and the nature we are a part of need to thrive. RC
January/February 2022. Vol32.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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