February, 2007

Editorial: What African American history means for all of us

It is through the history of the struggle of Black Americans for equality that the real history of the U.S. is revealed. From the "three-fifths Compromise" of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the present, American history, at its core, is the history of the unceasing efforts of the U.S. ruling class to keep the Black masses "in their place" in order to guarantee the domination of the U.S. working class as a whole.

To accomplish their goal, the ruling class created and nurtured an antagonistic division within the working class on the basis of skin color. Throughout U.S. history, racism has been a powerful weapon for the capitalists. They recognized early that it was through the control of Black slave labor that they controlled free white labor and hence the entire country.

Each era of U.S. history has been marked by the refinement of the color bar. The period from the early 1600s to the Civil War saw the perfecting of chattel slavery and of the ideology of white supremacy. During this era the problem of labor scarcity was solved by the brutal exploitation of Black labor on the slave plantations of the South. Millions of poor whites were deluded into defending slavery, thereby guaranteeing their own deepening impoverishment. The ideology of white supremacy sought to encourage especially poor whites to ally themselves with their employers or with the slaveholders rather than the enslaved workers. No matter how degraded the white workers' own conditions, miniscule legal and social advantages kept them loyal to the capitalists.

Following emancipation, racism was refashioned in the form of Jim Crow laws, KKK terror and lynch rope violence, imprisoning the Black freedmen in a new bondage of sharecropping. There they were joined by poor whites who, though they generally shared the same 30-cent-a-day wage as Blacks, clung desperately to their social privileges.

Post WW II era technological advances such as the mechanical cotton picker eliminated sharecropping, thus destroying the economic basis of the Jim Crow system. This paved the way for the emergence of the modern civil rights movement. Here, the heroic struggle of Black Americans and their allies achieved some notable victories. The legal basis for color discrimination and segregation was destroyed, with a tiny minority of African Americans -- the Black capitalists and the "Black middle class" -- enjoying the fruits of this victory.

However, for the overwhelming majority of Black Americans, centuries of struggle bore no fruit. Unemployment among Blacks persists at rates double that of whites. In 2005, Blacks, at 14 percent (39.8 million) of the population comprised 22.4 percent of the unemployed, 25 percent of persons in poverty and over 40 percent of all inmates in federal and state prisons.

But the statistics depicting the desperate plight of Black Americans present only part of the unfolding picture. The sop of social privilege for whites hides the fact that historically as well as presently the majority of the poor are white; 26 million or 70 percent of the 37 million in poverty are white. Between 1998 and 2003 the income of whites in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution declined by over 3 percent (from $20,038 to $19,372), while that of Blacks at the bottom rose nearly 6 percent (from $10,324 to $10,936).

The facts are indisputable; the number of whites at the bottom of the economic ladder grows continually and at an ever increasing rate. What is becoming apparent is that Blacks form the core of what is actually a rapidly growing new class of the poor, composed of all colors and nationalities, created by the growing domination of labor-replacing electronic production.

The arising of this new class of poor means the possibility, at long last, of the unity of workers along class lines and across the color line. It means the possibility of ending the capitalists' ability to use race to divide and control the workers. Just as the application of steam to Northern industrial production sounded the death knell of slavery, so too will electronics signal the eradication of the color line and the imminent destruction of the capitalist system.