America’s working class is enormous and diverse, yet we share a life-shaping commonality — we must sell our labor to live. Because we have no choice, some call us wage slaves. Black history month asks us to consider the system of African American slavery that built the wealth of this country and lingers still in the systemic racism intertwined with capitalism. Doing so reveals a path between America’s earliest abolitionist movement and the abolition of poverty and wage slavery today.
Abolition of Slavery
America’s chattel slavery was dehumanizing, brutal, and highly profitable. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, slavery had created more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Delta than anywhere else in the nation. The South’s cotton industry made up at least two-thirds of the world’s cotton supply by the Civil War. If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world. The U.S. became one of the leading global economies, due in large part to stealing labor from Africans and selling them as commodities, worth $4 billion by the end of the Civil War.
Manisha Sinha, author of the extensive history The Slave’s Cause, writes, “As most abolitionists understood, the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved…. Fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.” The history of the movement to abolish slavery is a progressive and impassioned story of enslaved Africans, free Black Americans, European immigrants, and white Americans, all integral to the movement.
In the late 1600s, Quakers protested slavery and in 1754 issued a formal condemnation. In 1773, slaves and the Sons of Africa formed an anti-slavery committee, modeled most likely after the Sons of Liberty. Two years later, French-born Anthony Benezet helped form the first American abolitionist society in Philadelphia, including “Common Sense” author Thomas Paine. In the New England colonies, slaves petitioning for freedom during the revolution helped initiate the movement toward emancipation. Meanwhile, slaves in Pennsylvania ran away in record numbers, and free Blacks petitioned against new slavery laws. They protested, spoke, and wrote, often collaborating with white abolitionists. By 1784, Pennsylvania and all the New England states had abolished slavery.
A new wave of abolition began in the 19th century with the publicity of the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy to organize a slave uprising in Charleston; the 1829 publication of David Walker’s abolitionist pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World; the 1831 emergence of William Lloyd Garrison’s important abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator; and Nat Turner’s 1831 multi-plantation slave rebellion. Abolitionists formed numerous organizations, sending petitions with thousands of signatures to Congress, boycotting products made with slave labor, holding meetings and conferences, and giving innumerable speeches for their cause. The 1837 first issue of the Black abolitionist newspaper Weekly Advocate promoted “Universal Suffrages and Universal Education,” and promised, “we shall oppose all Monopolies, which oppress the Poor and laboring classes of society.”
Former slave and leader in the abolition movement, Frederick Douglass, worked closely with Garrison for 10 years. After conversations with the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, Douglass came to acknowledge that violence may be necessary to end slavery, breaking with Garrison. Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman advised Brown on his 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. Free Black and white abolitionists financially backed Brown’s revolutionary efforts to end slavery. Though the attack did not instigate its intended mass slave uprising, and Brown and most of his men were executed, their actions inspired the coming Civil War.
750,000 Americans (including 40,000 African American soldiers) gave their lives to settle the question of chattel slavery. The War was revolutionary: ending with the greatest redistribution of wealth the world had ever known, $4 billion in human private property returned to the 4 million formerly enslaved people themselves. Unfortunately, the poor and laboring classes could not yet be liberated. Reconstruction was ended by removing the Federal troops from the South, unleashing terror upon and disenfranchising the newly freed African Americans.
The Great Migration
One hundred years of legal and cultural segregation maintained the concentration of poverty in the South. The formerly enslaved worked in slave-like conditions as sharecroppers, enforced by Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. After WWII, the mechanical cotton picker reduced the need for sharecroppers, accelerating a mass migration to urban industrial centers. Six million African Americans migrated out of the rural Southern United States between 1910 and 1970, the number of African Americans employed in industrial jobs nearly doubling.
By the 1960s, new automation began to reverse the opportunities in the cities. General Motors began using the first assembly line robot UNIMATE in 1962, and by 1964, President Johnson convened a commission to research the effect of robotics in the workplace. Industrial jobs that paid decent wages began to be replaced by revolutionary labor-replacing technology.
Growth of Abolitionist Class
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows six million manufacturing jobs lost since 1970. Since the more recent African American migrants from the South tended to be most recently hired and in the most easily automated jobs, they were among the first fired as the electronic revolution progressed.
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. The new economy proliferated part-time, temporary, and minimum wage jobs. Poverty, housing insecurity, and health problems have been the results.
Yet, this class’s position outside the economy is its power. The new class must fight politically for its right to survive. Its political program is the abolition of the system of private property and the distribution of goods according to need. The new class is an abolitionist class.
The growth of an abolitionist class threatens the ruling class’s hold on private property. They cannot allow the new class to have a say in society’s direction, instead resorting to increasingly violent social control. A militarized police force beats and murders the new class, tears families apart, deports, imprisons, and moves against the protestors. Central to the historical fight, Black workers are targeted by these developments and are leaders in the response.
Police shot and killed 5000 people between 2013-2019, the American Public Health Association declaring it a “public health crisis.” Like the coronavirus and other health problems, Black people are disproportionately harmed—killed by police at three times the rate of whites. Uniting behind the demand that Black Lives Matter is part of the defense of the new abolitionist class and a fight for a new world.
In May 2020, a rebellion sprung from the heartless police murder of George Floyd in the middle of a pandemic that disproportionately kills African Americans and others in the new class. 26 million people of all colors protested across the country for weeks, calling for an end to police terror and systemic racism.
This rebellion birthed a movement to defund or abolish the police and the entire prison industrial complex (PIC), calling on the government to invest their funding in human needs (e.g., housing, food, health and mental health care, public transportation, education, etc.).
Kandist Mallett writes in her November 2, 2020 Op-Ed column for Teen Vogue, “Black Canary,” “Throughout Trump’s presidential term, abolitionist movements have become popularized: abolish ICE, the police, prisons, the electoral college, and the Supreme Court. These movements have been covered in the press as isolated phenomena but viewed collectively what they truly express is a need to destroy the old so that something new can be created.” She’s right.
PIC abolitionists recognize the need for a new society, as when organizer and educator Mariame Kaba said in an April 10, 2019 interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC: “For me, capitalism has to go. It has to be abolished. We live within a system that’s got all these other isms, and we’re gonna have to uproot those. So, we’re doing work every single day to set the conditions for the possibility of that alternate vision of a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance.” Abolitionist scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore told The Intercept that abolition must distribute “the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people.”
The motions to defund and abolish the police demand the government take care of the people abandoned and abused by a system that prioritizes private property over human lives. With movements to cancel rent and student debt and provide healthcare to all, this new abolitionist class demands a government that works for them. Fighting against police violence, they fight a State force that maintains the private property system. Winning will require the abolition of this system.
To liberate today’s wage slaves, the new abolitionist class is best positioned to lead us to a cooperative society, where the collective wealth is shared, and all of humanity and the earth can thrive. From those who once were private property to those of all colors whose lives have been destroyed by the private property system, today’s abolitionist class is fighting to transform society. RC
January/February 2021. Vol31.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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