Thesis
There is a duality of class systems in the US. One system is a white class system, composed of capital and white workers. But overarching the white class system is a racialized class system, in which white society as a whole, with its white class system embedded in it, has formed the "ruling class," first over a black bond-laborer working class on plantations, then over a continental black and brown work force, and finally, with the rise of 20th century US coloniality, an international third-world working class. The purpose of this essay is to examine the structure of this duality, and the history of how it came into existence.
Introduction: the heritage
Karl Marx famously said that class struggle was the engine of history. But understanding the class structure of the US, in order to comprehend the nature of that engine, has often been a problem. There have been periods of hard-fought unionization efforts, to the point of guerrilla warfare simply for the 8-hour day. Yet, culturally, the thought that everyone is somehow middle class seems unshakable, to the point where poverty was an embarrassment rather than a symptom. In terms of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 70s, class became a cultural dimension of one's situation, rather than economic. And finally, there were recurrent attempts to redefine class in order to figure out what it meant politically in a service-oriented economy, in view of the history of industrial class struggles in Europe, and the political class consciousness they developed. This essay is an attempt to show why European concepts of class have never fit the US situation.
At the time of its inception, two salient aspects of the US as a nation stood out. The first was its origin as a colonial society, an aspect of its genesis that has marked it up to the present. The second was its initial preservation of the institution of slavery inherited from its colonial origin. These two factors worked to mark the growth of class relations following independence. During those early decades prior to 1840, when white skilled workers in the northern states sought to organize themselves into a political force in the new states, they excluded black workers from their organizations. Not only did this signify that they were defining themselves as the working class, but they were defining the working class was white at a time when vast majority of laborers in the US were black, toiling under forced labor conditions on plantations in the southern states. Slavery didn't condition class relations; working class consciousness defined itself in opposition to the enslaved bond-laborer through its exclusion of free black skilled laborers.
Two other salient aspects marked the aftermath of independence, as the political expression of colonial origins and the preservation of slavery. The first was a sense of militarist impunity, and the second was the evolution of a two party political system. US militarism was first directed as a colonialist drive against the indigenous, then against all others on the continent under the messianic banner of Manifest Destiny. Once the continent was secured, it took the form of assaults and interventions throughout the world. The milestones of that latter process were the occupation of the Philipines, the use of atomic weapons against the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the long string of wars fought in the third world since World War Two (from Korea to Afghanistan). The ultimate effect of these wars has been the establishment of US political hegemony in the world. The two party system emerged from the politics of slavery, and produced a system that then monopolized internal politics. Because of its winner-take-all binarism, in which 51% of the vote gives a candidate 100% of the representationist power, political thought and activity must either enroll itself in one of the major parties or form a social movement outside them (in other words, marginalize itself). [1]
Despite a belief in democracy, most people in the US have rarely sought to reconcile that with the anti-democratic essence of colonialism, slavery, militarism, and the unavoidable disenfranchisement that accompanies "winner-take-all" elections or the impossibility of a single elected delegate representing multi-interest, multi-class, and multi-cultural districts. In particular, militarism and the two party political monopoly have been the context for the labor movement. They have not accounted for the relatively apolitical character of the unions (broken only three times by the emergence of industrial union movements in the 1870s, the turn of the century, and the 1930s), but they have obstructed its ability to develop a coherent or sustainable form of labor party.
We cannot afford not to take these factors into account in analyzing the class structure and class relations in the US. But when we do, we find ourselves including dimensions of description that disrupt and go beyond the classical notion of capitalist class relations inherited from European thinkers. For instance, if we look at the labor movement, we encounter certain paradoxes. And when we place it in the context of the corporate structure, we find we have to consider a definition of class that is at variance with the classical notion of relation to the means of production. And this relates directly to the originary character of the corporate structure in the US.
Let us look at some of these paradoxes, and the historical specificities of economic structure in which they are embedded. The corporation is not simply an enterprise. It is also a structure that has conditioned US social development. To put together the corporate structure, the specific form that labor unions have taken in the US, and the role of racism in the labor movement in terms of that inheritance, we will need a different theoretical framework to put it in. For that, we can turn to Oliver Cox and his redefinition of class.
The paradoxes of the labor movement
In the last 50 years, the labor movement has been characterized by a number of well-known paradoxes. When movements arose during the 1960s and 70s contesting racial oppression, patriarchy, the social stultifications of consumerism, and the murderous impunity of militarism, the organized working class for the most part watched from the sidelines, disparaging the tendency toward radicalism that from time to time emerged from them. Unions were generally unsupportive of civil rights (with some exceptions), supportive of US interventions and wars (with other exceptions), and fostered consumerism as the true goal of wages-and-hours contract negotiations. Today, they still oppose affirmative action, and comply with the government's technological wars of horrendous aggression against sovereign nations. And they watched passively as the industries labor had built and operated, and on which it therefore had a huge claim, got loaded onto railroad cars and ships and disappeared over the horizon, often with government subsidies, taken to lands cleared of radicalism by those same US interventions. (One exception was Youngstown Sheet and Tube, in which a rank-and-file group sought unsuccessfully to rescue the plant from disappearance.)
It was (and is) puzzling why a working class, whose labor and poverty fed the riches of the elite, should not be in favor of equality, the greater democracy implicit in social cooperativism, and the justice that attends recognition of other nations' sovereignty. Instead it equated freedom with shopping, democracy with party politics, and justice with policing radicalism. This multiple paradox concerning the expression of working class interest constitutes the central problematic of democracy for the nation. And it has everything to do with colonial origins and the persistence of slavery until the Civil War, as we shall see below.
But first, lets briefly outline the most salient aspect of the present situation, which can be summed up as government refusal to take responsibility for its own citizens. The present crisis, a collapse of several levels of derivative securities markets triggered by a mortgage meltdown, has stopped the world's productive economy in its tracks as a side effect. [2] Houses are foreclosed, jobs are lost, pension funds disappear, all without recourse, or government intervention to stop and stabilize the economy. Government bails out the banks, restoring to them what they lost through their unregulated carelessness, but refuses to undo what the people have lost as a result. Health care, already in the hands of the corporate world, is further commodified with the aid of government "reform." Large corporations are given the green light by the Supreme Court to use their huge wealth to control political parties, and to control knowledge and information through the media.
The picture this paints is that the corporations have become the citizenry and real humans have become essentially irrelevant. Responsibility to the citizens would be represented by universal (uncommodified) health care, universal (unsegregated and equitably financed) education, and the guarantee of an affordable place to live. But we have lost our political space, and are left only with the choice to be workers, soldiers, or prisoners, none of which provide a structural connection to governance. In other words, the general powerlessness is precisely a loss of citizenship.
If powerlessness is an extension of government irresponsibility, it is represented most blatantly by social attitudes toward homelessness and wars of intervention. A general social acceptance of the fact of homelessness signifies that real estate has greater rights than humans, and can price millions of people out of the rental market with impunity, and without recourse. At the same time, social institutions such as education and health care erode because the funds that would have sustained them disappear into the war machine and its militarism. The government even refuses responsibility for the welfare of its veterans, those who fight its wars (25% of the homeless in the US are veterans). [3] Both homelessness and interventionism represent intense violations of human rights, of democracy and law, because they represent forms of impunity. The first is the impunity of property, and the second is the impunity to commit mass murder (through invasion). Impunity itself is a form of abrogation of responsibility to law and social norms. To assume impunity is to become a law unto oneself. One criminalizes the victim in order to decriminalize the criminality of impunity and its victimizations.
Nothing symbolizes this situation as strongly as the criminalization of entire communities, a process today represented by the prison system. The prison system of the US is the largest in the world. With 5% of the world's people, the US holds 25% of the world's prisoners. 75% of those prisoners are people of color. This prison industry, fed by police racial profiling, a system of victimless crime laws that allow the police to dispense with the need for a complainant, obedience rules that allow the police to criminalize anyone they decide to stop on the street, and biased prosecutions that charge innocent people with felonies in order to plea bargain them into prison, has become the material symbol of a new post-civil rights form of segregation. Again, the criminality of impunity (segregation and the arbitrary nature of police profiling and harassment) is decriminalized through the criminalization of the communities against which it is committed.
How are we to understand class and class relationships in a situation in which corporations have become the primary citizenry, and the working class remains quiescent in the face of the injustice of aggression, the anti-democracy of segregation, the social dispossession of runaway shops?
There is one element of pragmatic logic in it: jobs. Prisons create jobs; militarism and military industries create jobs; and the commodification of people through the privatization of services like health and welfare create a service industry that provides jobs. Through the sanctity of job creation, the government's irresponsibility to its citizens is made to look like a sense of responsibility.
Except that labor's acquiescence to the closing and moving of industry remains unexplained by this logic. But there is something about US colonial origins and its initial preservation of the slave system that will explain it. To approach this, let us look at the concept of class through the issue of jobs.
Class in a corporate society
Class and jobs in a corporate framework
The primary fact concerning jobs is that this society is wholly commodified, meaning that the first necessity faced by each person is an income, because one has to buy everything one needs to survive. Biological survival, for which food and shelter are primary needs, has been transformed into the abstraction of social survival, for which a job and an income are the primary needs. One area in which the total commodification of society becomes a violation of human rights is with residence. The irreducible human need for an income, in the form of a job, means that a place to live is a primary necessity. A place to live then must be seen as a human right, part of the basic structure of survival. The fact that human rights can have no voice against property rights marks the epitome of political irresponsibility in this society.
The process of commodification reaches its highest level in a corporate economy, because only a corporate economy has the concentration of wealth and power to commodify social services and human needs themselves, in a process known as privatization. To commodify every level of social existence, from entertainment to political participation, from education to insurance, involves the privatization of public assets and the production of service industries (which grew in the void created by runaway shops and the de-industrialization of the economy). What a service industry does is commodify the relations between people, or between a corporation and people (clients). Material goods serve a person's relations to him/herself; services become the condition of relations between individuals and society.
Let us begin by noticing that in a corporate society (whether one works for a corporation directly or not), the class relation between the owners of capital and the workers hired to work for it (characteristic of the 19th century) has been broken. For the corporate structure, property is separated from ownership. Ownership occurs in stock and securities markets, in the trading of pieces of paper that may (or may not) represent real assets and real production, but have no intrinsic value. They have value only as long as they get traded, and they get traded only as long as there is a demand for them. Though that demand for securities determines the value of productive assets it represents, it has no interest in the real social character of what those assets produce, other than an increase in that value (profit). The profitability of capital occurs for the corporation through production, but it occurs for ownership through its mobility in the securities markets. Owners relate only to other owners across the securities markets, and not to workers. Workers stand in relation to property, where the corporate structure constitutes that property.
The corporate structure is actually an organization of people, stratified according to tasks – e.g. production, managerial control, and directorial policy-making. Corporate stratification is essentially an organization of forms of responsibility between layers of tasks, as a system of political relationships. Each stratum is responsible to those above it, with no responsibility for the well-being of those below except to insure that they perform the tasks demanded of them. That is, internally, a sense of responsibility runs only one way.
What characterizes the corporation as a political entity is its ability to sheild its personel from liability for what the corporation does externally in the world. That is, one of its (cultural) products is a general abrogation of social responsibility. The government's abrogation of social responsibility is a reflection of this same phenomenon characteristic of the corporation. In that sense, we can see that the layering of tasks and responsibilities characteristic of corporations has also become a general model of organization for this society. We have but to think of the way unions and political parties are organized. They both reflect the corporate structure.
In place of social responsibility, the corporation substitutes a demand for allegiance to itself as an organization, and to an internal consensus on its overall purpose. Allegiance to the corporation's institutionality is demanded regardless of its external activities or political interests. The political interest of its members (employees) is reduced to rising in the internal corporate hierarchy; it is only the corporation itself that has extant external political interests. In other words, allegiance is structural, a sense of identification unifying those who work for it, while diminishing the difference between those who manage its exploitative functions and those it exploits.
This confluence of allegiance and graded hierarchy unifies the varying organizational strata while blurring the class lines that would otherwise separate the exploiter and the exploited, management and productive work. A difference in relations to means of production dissolves because all are employees of the organization (corporation) itself, which represents property (assets) as such, and not ownership. Each stratum relates to the physical (productive) assets of the organization through the strata below it.
The problem of class definition
Class has traditionally been defined by relation to income level, or by relation to means of production. Definition of class by income level relates class only to consumption while not providing for a sense of social status with respect to economic structure (such as those marked as capital and labor). Definition of class according to relation to means of production, however, only relates to ownership or non-ownership of productive assets, which elides the issue of economic status raised by the economic shift to service industries (what is the relation of a computer programmer or a waitress to the means of production?). [4] In a social situation in which there is a total commodification of society, an economy shifted to service industries, with a general domination of the corporate structure, an alternate mode of of understanding class presents itself which perhaps substitutes for the blurring of class distinctions defined by relation to the means of production.
If ownership and property have been separated, then the difference between a worker and a capitalist can no longer be defined in terms of ownership; ownership is no longer a relation between them. But the general (abstract) primacy of an income means that a difference can be defined between them in terms of work. Workers work for their income, while "capitalists" put their money to work for them. Workers face the possibility of losing their jobs; capitalists do not (they can only make bad investments). But this suggests that everyone who works for an income (from janitor to CEO) is a worker. This is too broad a definition.
Though it is easy to distinguish between employment at the top and the bottom of a corporate structure by income, nevertheless, all who work in it work in a stratified structure in which there are gradations of command and responsibility. All the employees have corporate status, separated only according to where in the corporate hierarchy they work, without clear distinctions of strata, except those of responsibility. For the corporate structure, responsibility is a one-way street. One is responsible only to those above, with none for those below.
But an important distinction between people resides in their respective need for a job. One can differentiate between a middle class worker and a working class worker in the following way. A middle class worker is one who can survive for a while without an income after losing his/her job (because of having savings or other assets like a house or corporate stock) while a working class worker would have to find another job right away (after unemployment insurance ran out). Both face an insecurity of employment, but at different levels of threat because of their relative ability to sustain themselves once unemployed. (This description exempts upper management, which lives on stock ownership, with large salaries and bonuses, who hold their jobs for the purposes of playing with their money and their power. Their relation to capital is mediated by their relation to power, acting in the space of separation between the financial markets and the organizational hierarchies they command.)
Like the 19th century structure of classes, we have basically three: an investor class, a middle managerial class (middle class workers), and a class of working class workers. The "working class workers" are in a comparable situation with those laborers of the previous era, though the latter were more greatly reduced to a choice between starving or working (proletarianized). But the "employers" in this present system are not "capitalists" but the corporations themselves, and hiring is part of the "work" of a section of middle management.
Many small businesses still exist, but they for the most part constitute ancillary entities tied to corporations, or operating under corporate franchises. In short, all classes obtain their income by relating to different levels of corporate operations. That is, all work for the corporation, and all are subjected in varying degrees to corporate demands for allegiance.
What would constitute class consciousness for a working class understood in terms of relations to work? Because class is considered here in terms of work and survival rather than in terms of one's relation to the total social product, class consciousness would have to be seen differently. The first necessity that an individual faces is job security, with a wage that keeps up with inflation, and which must include, beyond rent, food, clothes, and health insurance, an educational systems for one's children. Political interests would include regulation of the banking and corporate economy to maintain utility rates and control inflation, which actually means preserving one's wage levels. They would also include the end to war and militarism, which absorbs the social wealth (working class wealth) that would pay for health care and education, and leaves local government impoverished. Finally, they would include an affordable place to live. Capital (in its corporate form), in opposition to this, seeks deregulation, high real estate values, moderate inflation to continually reduce real wages, and war as the most profitable of enterprises. The ideological components of working class interests would thus be cooperation, equality, and anti-militarism, depending on numbers and unity as the primary resource from which to muster strength against the massive monetary power of the community of corporations.
The nature of the unions
But there is another part to the story of class consciousness. If a working class has political needs, such as economic regulation to prevent inflation from eroding wage levels, or an anti-militarism to prevent the social resources it produced from from being destroyed in adventures of mass murder, then it also needs a political voice. And this recalls one of the aforementioned paradoxes, the apolitical nature of the unions in the US. With a couple of historical exceptions (the IWW or Knights of Labor), unions tend to focus non-ideologically on shop conditions, wages, hours, and economic benefits for members. What unions generally do not do is link factory organization to neighborhood social conditions, housing, or to political movements that contest the priority of property rights over human rights. [5]
One source of this abrogation of social involvement can be found in union structure. The dilemma all union leaders face is that, on the one hand, they must preserve a sense of militancy and solidarity in the membership in order to wield it as a weapon against management in negotiations, while on the other, they must repress any autonomous militancy in order to deliver membership obedience and acquiescence to the terms of the contract agreement. This repeats the structure of corporate responsibility, which is upward toward leadership, a sense of militancy-on-command that obviates any leadership responsibility toward membership autonomy. Negotation sessions are kept closed to membership observation in order to constrain membership autonomy, and to maintain the one-way flow of responsibility. Allegiance to the organization has to be primary over a consciousness of class political issues or interests in order to insure the pragmatic solidarity leadership requires. Thus, even discussion of political issues (such as war or affirmative action) within official union business or under official union auspices is discouraged, since differences of opinion could polarize and thus divide the membership. Union leadership stands in contradiction to management one moment and integrated into it the next, while the membership finds its relation to the world (both to the employer and to other workers) mediated by a parochial organizational framework.
This has been a big problem for rank and file movements seeking to replace leadership it sees as corrupt or excessively bureaucratic. A pro-democracy movement wishing to install a more militant leadership often crashes against this structural necessity for abstract solidarity. Should it succeed in placing a new leadership in office, that leadership immediately faces the problem of keeping the contract system stable, which requires playing the same double game with membership militancy again.
This is one reason much of the tradition of union segregation remained uncontested, even after the civil rights movements. There is no arena inside the union for changing its political stance toward the rest of society. Most unions during the Jim Crow era had had constitutional provisions restricting them to white membership, or had segregated locals. As Bruce Nelson has shown for the longshore workers, in both the ILA on the east coast and the ILWU on the west coast, white supremacist locals persisted even up to the 1980s. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of the ILWU, since an overarching solidarity had been needed to win the SF general strike in 1934 out of which the union was founded. But even Harry Bridges, the man who forged this unity, found himself having to accept the segregationism of some of the west coast locals, in order not to initiate discord that would disrupt the local's inner coherence. [Nelson]
Of course, there are exceptions – but it is precisely the exceptions that reveal the cultural depth of the norm (in this case, the apolitical nature of unions). In 1948, a Packinghouse organizing campaign in Chicago proposed from the beginning to take a principled stand against racism and segregated unionism. The organizers spoke and acted against the detrimental and disuniting effects of racial prejudice for labor. And they won spectacularly, building a large and successful union in the Chicago packinghouses. But the ideology of class unity, with its staunch and natural opposition to racism, along with the actual experience of what such solidarity could accomplish, didn't even get across the street. It had no effect on factories and industries elswhere in the city. Other unions in Chicago continued to be segregated. To be an exception means to stand out from the norm in such a way as to start no trend nor change of tradition for others.
Herbert Hill, in his history of the UMW, an industrial union that had from the beginning included black workers, gives a few illustrative examples of a tradition in which white solidarity superseded class experience. Though the UMW was integrated, there were some locals in which the white workers would strike if black workers were hired. [135] Hill tells of an 1894 coal strike in Alabama in which black and white workers fought side by side. After they had won, white workers would still not ride or sit with black workers, nor fraternize with them, and the mine shafts remained segregated. [HH,150] He gives another example of a mine strike in Illinois, involving both black and white miners in 1899, during which the company brought in black strikebreakers from out of state. [165] After the strike was over, the white miners expressed hostility toward the black union members, and harassed them despite their participation in the strike, as if their blackness rendered them closer to the strikebreakers than their actions placed them to the union. In other words, race trumped class in the relations between workers who worked and even struggled side by side. The exception here is not the racism of the white miners but the UMW itself, with its integrated membership, in which the ambient norm of segregation still effected itself.
What are white people preserving and defending in acting out hostility and exclusionism? One would think that the solidarity needed to win a strike at one time would remain a consciousness of solidarity when needed at a later time. Clearly, white anti-black racism goes beyond simply having a group to look down on, to feel superior to, in order not to be on the lowest social rung. Exclusionism goes beyond a feeling of superiority, because it depends on a gratuitous hostility. That hostility would be unneeded if one could already "look down" on the other. And inversely, "superiority" remains an empty feeling when it can recognize itself only through active inferiorization of those it wants to consider "naturally" inferior. Harassment and hostility toward those in solidarity testifies to an intentional and gratuitous antipathy and anti-solidarity. And that intention signifies that something culturally profound (beyond psychology) is being enacted.
Labor organizers have often spoken against racism as a "divide and rule" strategy on the part of employers. Turn white and black people against each other, they say, and the unity necessary for better employment conditions will be prevented. But this only begs the question not of how it is done, but of why it works so well? Where does it get the power to so consistently (with exceptions) trump class solidarity?
If we observe the northern states immediately after the revolution (a century earlier than Hill's examples), when working class organizations were first being formed, we find the same exclusionism. White skilled workers began organizing to establish political standing for themselves in the newly independent states. They had had a certain social status within the English colonial framework, and wished to preserve that. Economic possibility had changed with independence, however, and skilled workers found themselves threatened by the rise of domestic banking operations and the birth of a factory system. They sought organizational forms that would politically position them favorably in the new conditions. And those forms, like most working class organization, depended on numbers and solidarity.
Their first organizational strategies were to control the labor supply through union membership, boycotting shops that paid below what the union decided its scale should be. But they also excluded free black skilled workers from their organizations, as well as from many job sites, even though those workers had skills comparable to or better than the white workers (they at the same time admitted immigrants from Europe into membership). (Litwack, McManus) They often went so far as to strike or boycott shops that hired black workers, despite the fact that their project of establishing political status for themselves as workers depended on numbers. Thus, they weakened themselves politically in the name of a white exclusivity, even in the shadow of the Declaration of Independence and its proclamation of equality. This too suggests that their racism was something other than a employer tactic. It participated in how white workers autonomously constituted and identified themselves as a class. Indeed, it suggests that white workers in the north were actually defining themselves as the working class through their own exclusionist attitude toward skilled black workers, while paradoxically doing so at a time when the vast majority of workers in the US were black, working under conditions of forced labor on southern agrobusiness plantations. [6]
In sum, a common thread stretches across the century from the dawn of working class identity to its later unfolding in Hill's examples, a thread that marks the cultural depth of the intentionality that immerses a class identity within a white identity. To trade class solidarity for white solidarity indicates a duality of identity and a duality of consciousness.
Cox's theorization of class and class consciousness
We need a different conceptual framework in which to understand the class dynamic of this duality. Let us look at Oliver Cox's distinction between social and political classes. It offers a theorization of class that will accord better with this picture of a dual consciousness than the singular view of class relations that has its inception in white society and white working class self-definition (derived, in fact, from European historical experience).
In Cox's distinction, a political class differs from a social class in that the latter refers to a status group established by some objective factor, while the former is a consciously formed group that is focused on transforming the social configuration of power. Examples of objective factors that would determine a status group would include relations to the means of production (e.g. industrial workers), or a system of social categorization (e.g. Jim Crow's production of marginalized or ghetto-ized communities), or a group's entrapment within certain bureaucratic operations (e.g. welfare recipients). They are factors that impose similar social or economic conditions on people in terms of which group members encounter themselves as having a common destiny. (154) That is, a social class has both an objective and a conceptual character. For instance, the group of all wage earners, in their acceptance of their social positions, form a social class that interacts with the class of employers who hire workers for a wage. In this conjunction, the group reflects the contours of the "social order" in which it forms, (147) without necessarily generating a consciousness of having a common interest. In other words, social classes constitute a system of groups that interact according to the social functions and structures that relate them to each other.
Political classes, on the other hand, do not constitute a system in the sense of forming components of a given social order. Instead, they confront each other antagonistically in their struggles for power, and thus change according to their fortunes in those struggles. Political classes constitute themselves within an active organizational milieu. They are composed of those who support a goal or purpose on an organized basis and are willing to act on it. (154) A workers' movement to win recognition for their unionism (such as characterized the industrial union movement during the 1920s and 30s) transformed those workers into a political class. The welfare rights movement of welfare recipients for a more humane and democratic welfare system likewise formed a political class through their organizations and struggles (involving the support of many case workers as well). While social classes are aware of themselves conceptually, political classes coalesce around a project, a vision and a consciousness that changes in the face of its opposition's adamancy.
Cox points out that members of a political class do not necessarily have to have a common social status. A political class is not confined to drawing its members from a single social class. Working class consciousness would not need to be limited just to workers; it could unite all those who accepted the political goals of a working class struggle. Similarly, a political class supportive of capitalism would not necessarily be limited to property owners. But because a social class can at most become "status-conscious," (162) Cox argues, class consciousness in the sense of generating a class struggle can occur only within a political class. Political classes form through the acceptance of a need for common struggle and the changing of power relations.
Thus, the dialectic of class struggle occurs in the domain of political classes. When class conscious workers form a political class that contests the absolutism of property rights or seeks a share of state power, it forces the ruling class, as a social class, to become class conscious in defense of its position of power, and to reconstruct itself as a political class. When workers can be conditioned to accept the stability of their contract conditions or to accept the cultural sanctity of the property interests they work for as a social class, the ruling class need not organize itself as a political class with respect to them, and can simply proceed with its collective endeavor to maximize its profits. [7]
The value of Cox's theorization of class over the so-called objective accounts of other ideological analyses (such as the traditional Marxian) lies in its inclusion of the intentional activity of people in the formation of historical class forces. Intellectual or community groups standing in opposition to capital in alliance with the labor movement do not have to equivocate about calling themselves working class in their activities and projects, but can take responsibility for the historical events that have brought them together. The social character of the Farm Workers Organizing Committee (FWOC) in California during the late 1960s and 70s is an example. As a "union movement" it was an alliance of migrant and migratory workers, social communities dotting the agrarian landscape in California's central valley, and a vast network of urban progressives, pro-labor advocates, and a few unions. Though not all identified themselves as part of the working class in a traditional or social sense, they all formed part of a working class struggle, and thus belonged to the working class as a political class in Cox's sense.
Parenthetically, this ended for the FWOC when California law legitimized the farm-workers' union. The transformation of the movement into a recognized labor union prioritized its contractual relation to the industry over its social movement character. The community organizations it had built as a movement in the small, mostly Chicano towns – which had formed the backbone of its organizing campaigns as a social movement – were then abandoned by its need to structure itself as a legitimate, recognized, and non-political union. The modes by which the US political structure can constrain social oppositional movements through legalization and institutionalization are many and varied.
The structure of class in the US
The colonial corporate structure
Let us return to the two salient factors concerning the birth of the US as a nation. First, it grew out of a colonial society, and thus carries the marks of that structure with it. Second, when it emerged as an independent nation, it preserved the institution and the ethos of slavery as its central economic form. Both of these factors had been central to the invention of the concept of race at the beginning of the 18th century, and thus to the development of a culture of racism. But they are also deeply embedded in the formation of class relations.
A brief glance at some of the legacies of the colonial structure will provide a context for this conjunction of race and class. The colony was organized by the Virginia Company on a corporate model (the Virginia Company actually dissolved in 1623, but its structure remained the form of organization of the colony even after that). Its purpose was to produce commodities for an international market that would make a profit for the colony and for the investors back in England. Its first product was tobacco, a drug that found an easy market in Europe. Its second product was slavery and the slave trade.
As mentioned earlier, the corporate structure, even in colonial society, is a stratification of power in which a governing board (whether elected or not) makes policy for the rest of the organization. In the Virginia colony, there was a Colonial Council which served as an on-site board of directors, a class of large landowners functioning as middle management, and labor structured hierarchically according to whether free or still indentured, skilled or unskilled. A class of small farmers grew slowly composed of indentured laborers who had completed their terms of servitude and been given land. During the first two decades, all settlers, from plantation owners to indentured laborers, were employees of the corporation. When the first Africans arrived, they were paid for by the Colonial Council, and distributed among different plantations, pursuant to its function of organizing the labor supply for the colony.
As a corporate enterprise, each level of organization was responsible to those above, while requiring obedience from lower levels. Each stratum in this system was expected to behave as a social class with respect to higher levels and a political class with respect to those lower and under its command. It differed from the European feudal aristocratic hierarchy in its greater degree of stratification, as well as the fact that a person's social position was governed by an agreement or contract rather than by birth.
This kind of structure is not limited to profit-making businesses. We find it reflected in fairly diverse domains of social enterprise. The traditional industrial union in the US uses it as an organizational paradigm. There is an executive committee that acts as a board of directors, a varying system of business agents and shop stewards which constitute a stratification of middle management between the union's membership and its executive committee, and a membership required to fulfill its responsibility to attend meetings, but with little real policy-making power. For the most part, it serves to ratify (or not) what the leadership decides. Political parties tend to be organized on a similar model.
And it has had far-reaching cultural affects. For instance, the craft union ethos during the 19th century took the corporate paradigm as a kind of template. Skilled workers typically excluded unskilled workers from their organizations and ignored their interests as workers, while requiring the unskilled to be totally obedient. That is, responsibility ran one way and hierarchical power the other. Even today, tool and die makers see their skill craft as an identity that hierarchically differentiates them from journeymen machinists. In general, in the US, workers tend to identify themselves by occupation, on a social scale of skills, rather than simply as "workers."
For the colonies, allegiance to the corporate organization was primary. During its earliest years (cerca 1610), the colony faced starvation out of ignorance of how to relate to the land. Those who sought to escape and live among the Algonquin, who had no such trouble, were recaptured by the colony's militia and publicly tortured, often to death. In other words, a militarized insistence on allegiance was the colony's basic response to crisis.
The ethos of corporate allegiance has long affected 20th century labor unions, in the form of jurisdictional difference. "Jurisdictional disputes" have represented a form of territoriality that gives priority to organizational identification over a broader sense of class unity. One of the major weaknesses of the great railroad strike of 1877, for instance, was a refusal of many unions in Chicago and Detroit to act in solidarity in the name of "jurisdictional" difference.
What organizational allegiance or stratum identification provides is a cultural sense of belonging and identity. It generally supersedes ideology or worldview because ideology does not have the social immediacy of institutional identity. It is this sense of belonging that renders institutional identification, and the identity it provides, such a powerful cultural factor.
As an extension of the colonial focus on allegiance, it is worth noting that the US is the only industrial country that requires all school children to pledge allegiance to the nation. No other imposes such a procedure. It testifies to a certain weakness of social cohesion, admitting that simply being born on the land and to the people is insufficient to establish "American" identity.
Slavery and the structure of racialization
The other legacy provided by the colonial period was the system of forced labor called slavery. The origins of African enslavement are not to be found in the Africans, but in the relation of the English to the corporate structure of their colonial enterprise. In the Virginia colony, membership was granted only to the English. Though until the 1660s, Africans were considered indentured bond-laborers and held to similar labor conditions and term lengths as the English, they were denied access to English law, and thus denied indenture contracts. The trading of contracts were used by the English to consign or transfer laborers from one landowner to another. Without contracts to legally facilitate consignment, the transfer of African bond-laborers required a market place to which the person could be taken. Auctions quickly became regularized in these markets. Auctions then augmented the Africans' commodity status beyond that of the English (both were chattel as indentured).
Without legal standing, the promised release dates for the Africans were more easily ignored or arbitrarily extended. English bond-laborers lost exchange value as their release date approached; the exchange value of Africans could be maintained by extending or forgetting about a release dates altogether. These differences in legal and social status placed English and African bond-laborers in increasingly disparate political economies. It is important to note, however, that until the defeat of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, bond-laborers made common cause in resisting or escaping their harsh conditions.
A key to understanding how the invention of racial difference evolved from this political economy is provided by Theodore Allen, in his concept of an intermediary control stratum. Allen argues that a control stratum was critical to establishing colonial stability. He looks closely at the English colonial administration in both Ireland and in Virginia, and finds that in both cases, a sector of the colonizing group was given the role of policing and regimenting the colonized, with similar socio-cultural results. Allen argues that the resulting social hierarchy in both cases was similar, namely that the Irish were "racialized" with respect to the English and their Scottish control stratum in a manner similar to the "racialization" of the Africans with respect to the English. In other words, the invention of "race" depended on a form of social structure rather than on the color of the people racialized.
In Virginia, after the colony had shifted its plantation labor force from English to African bond-laborers (a process that started after the 1650s), and after Bacon's Rebellion had thrown the colony into disarray, and after it responded to that disarray with the codification of slavery in 1682, a control stratum was constructed out of poor white farmers and laborers. The task of these slave patrols was to guard against runaways and to repress any signs of organization, autonomy, or rebellion among the slaves, in exchange for which they were granted special privileges in colonial society. It was the colony's ability to give English laborers a policing function that succeeded in breaking the solidarity that had previously held sway. Earlier efforts had focused on differential punishments for collaboration in resistance between the two groups. The elite had exhorted the English laborers to not act in solidarity with the Africans by edict and calls to obedience. But these efforts had all failed. Indeed, it was their common cause that had made Bacon's Rebellion such a powerful event. It convinced the Colonial Council that a differential cultural identity had to be developed, though it probably had no idea what it was about to unleash.
The primary cultural effect of the intermediary control stratum was the transformation of colonial social identity. The slave patrols, in fulfilling their task of stopping runaways and suppressing resistance, quickly discovered that arbitrary and gratuitous violence against the Africans led to gratitude on the part of colonial society, and inclusion. The colonial elite interpreted this violence as actual suppression of rebellion among the bond-laborers. For the patrollers, this meant that their violence enabled them to supersede their marginalization as poor in the colony. Gratuitous violence became the norm for them, as their ticket to social respect and a sense of belonging. Not only did their activities engendered a conjunction of all classes and strata among the English in opposition to the Africans, but it generated a new sense of cultural identity. It was in the matrix of the cultural unity constituted by its social conjunction against the Africans that the English developed a sense of white identity. The English did not begin to see themselves as white until the 1690s.
In other words, what preceded the invention of a concept of "race" was the invention of "whiteness" as a social and cultural identity. But what preceded the invention of that "white" identity was a massive campaign of demonization and denigration of the Africans initiated by the Colonial Council for their participation in Bacon's Rebellion, which formed the matrix for the colony's acceptance of and desire for violence against the Africans. As a symptom of this process, the very language was transformed. Where previously, the terms English and "Negro" had referred to geo-political origin (England and Africa), these terms were replaced by color designations (white and black) that then ceased to be simply descriptive terms for color and became instead the names for social categories.
Where a difference in legal status (their preclusion from a labor contract) provided a social basis for African demonization, that demonization then provided the social basis for legislating their permanent servitude and dispossession (in the earlier years, many had worked out their standard induenture and been given membership and land in the colony). The socio-political difference engendered by the slave codes provided the basis for a cultural unification (across class differences) of the English as white. And the paranoia among the English as white engendered by its founding in demonization produced an institutionalization of violence against the Africans (I am using "paranoia" to refer to both an institutional and a social-psychological attitude).
It was the English unity as white produced by the control stratum's policing and violence, identification with which transformed whiteness into a social category, that succeeded in ending the common cause of the bond-laborers, where previous legal and political measures had failed. Those previous attempts had been futile because there had been no process of assimilation into an alternate unity for the English laborers. Whiteness and the social consensus of identification with it provided that alternate cultural matrix. And the necessary condition for that unification in white identity was the vicious dehumanization of the Africans. White identity was born out of the criminality of enslavement and brutality, paranoia and gratuitous violence.
If "race" as a difference in social categorization emerged from the invention of whiteness and a white social identity, the modern biological concept of "race" was a derivative by-product subsequently theorized by 18th century European naturalists like Linneaus and Buffon. The concept of race was not produced ideologically, but culturally under the force of colonial administration, its need for stability and its need to valorize its violence against the Africans.
In Cox's terms, the institution of violence against the Africans (now racialized as black), the prevention of any political autonomy among them, and the paranoia that drove that process, constituted white society as a political class in relation to its black labor force. If white workers remained a laboring class within that colonial structure, it was as a social class whose political focus had been shifted to their operations against the black bond-laborers. The primary class relation between planters and bond-laborers was shifted to a relation between whites and slaves – that is, between colonial society as a corporate entity and its class of black enslaved laborors.
It is important to understand that the concept of race was not invented with respect to the indigenous. Because they refused enslavement, and had the power to combat the colony's early rapaciousness, they were thrust away. For the most part, after Bacon's Rebellion, they simply became trading partners. It was only after the revolution that the settlers engaged in the genocide of clearing the land.
Race as a system of social categories meant a differentiation of peoples within the same social framework. It was because the Africans were internal to colonial society and its economy that a concept of race as social categorizations could be developed. There was no necessity for it; the English could have thought in terms of democracy, common humanity, cooperative economy like the Algonquin, and humane labor conditions. The colony clearly had alternatives for dealing with the social rubble left by Bacon's Rebellion. They chose not to, and part of the motivation for that choice was their immersion in the corporate structure. But the psychology implicit in the paranoia engendered by the Colonial Council's actions should not be minimized. To enslave is to act criminally against others. To make criminality the foundation of a society and a social identity necessitates finding a way of perceiving it as actually virtuous and ethical. To see the other as a threat, to perceive the other's resistance to oppression as aggression, and to then consider one's own aggressive violence as self-defense, were all elements of constructing that sense of virtue. Therein lies the source for the central structure of racialization, the impunity of the racializers in decriminalizing their own criminal actions precisely by criminalizing their victims.
Then as well as now, the social divisions and exclusions produced by racism and racialization cannot be understood without including the unification and sense of belonging that the violence of racism produces among white people as their white racialized identity. This then is the operative modality of whiteness and white racialized identity in maintaining its existence as a social identity and a coherent cultural structure. It is the basis on which many white people saw the civil rights movements, black power, and affirmative action as aggressions and unwarranted demands on US society.
The control stratum and White Working Class Consciousness
Having attained inclusion and a sense of demarginalization, the white laborers of the slave patrols found themselves enmeshed in a double institutionality, with a double role to play. They remained exploited laborers in the colonial economy, while becoming the instrument of colonial sustainability and cohesion. They were thus doubly productive, both of capital values through their labor and of the colony's social and cultural identity through their policing activities. In this dual role, they developed a dual class consciousness and a dual identity, members of a social class as laborers because members of a political class as a control stratum.
They brought this dual consciousness with them from their colonial past into the post-revolutionary period. In the decades following independence, white skilled workers in the northern states sought to construct forms of organization that would both preserve the status and dignity of their crafts in the new political conditions and give them standing and influence. Their exclusion of free black workers from their organizations as well as from many job sites was unprecedented. They had worked side by side with black skilled bond-laborers of comparable skills for many years under colonial conditions. (McManus, 183) Yet after independence, shops that hired free black skilled workers typically faced walkouts or strikes by the white workers to force the firing of the black employees. Even as early as 1795, white workers petitioned various state and local governments to pass ordinances that would bar black workers from certain trades.
During these early decades, ironically, white workers supported the abolition of slavery. Their anti-slavery sentiment was not a reflection of solidarity with black laborers, however. It was a way of freeing themselves from having to work with them. Many black laborers were given the task of hiring themselves out, earning money for an "owner" through their industrial labor. As bond-laborers, they were paid less because not free to bargain for better conditions. Essentially, their employment was an arrangement between two white people. Though working under conditions determined by white "owners," they were nevertheless charged with being "unfair competition" by the white workers working alongside them. In effect, the black laborers' conditions of enslavement were blamed on the black laborers, and held against them. Thus, white workers supported abolition in order to eliminate the possibility of being forced by white ownership to work with black workers.
Ultimately, however, by excluding freed black laborers from their organizations as unfair competition, rather than join and coordinate with them, white workers created them as competition. And at the same time, they reduced their own power as a class political force in the new states. They evidently felt they were enhancing their cultural power by giving greater importance to their membership in white society then in fostering labor solidarity (across racial lines). But it essentially marked a refusal to abandon their earlier role as a control stratum.
In fact, it was linkage to the Democratic Party that they substituted for the autonomy that labor solidarity would have given them. Northern white workers found an ally in the Democratic Party because it stood against the Federalist project of banking and financial capital development, and favored racial segregation. The Democratic Party was the party of the southern plantation owners and slaveholders. Recognizing that it could not openly promote slavery in the north, it sought to reduce the social situation of free black people to one of such extreme degradation through dispossession and disenfranchisement that it would dissuade black bond-laborers from attempting to escape from the south. (Tise) On these bases, the northern branch of the Democratic Party gained a constituency among white workers.
In the 1820s, campaigns in the northern states to disenfranchise free black people were initiated, and crowds of whites often beat or killed those who sought to vote. From 1831 to 1836, in Philadelphia, there were race riots and white mob invasions of black neighborhoods to prevent black people from voting. By 1840, black disenfranchisement was written into most northern state consitutions. Not all white workers were segregationist in this sense. But because some acted as a force for exclusion of black people from membership in US urban society while others chose not to stop them in the name of class solidarity, they collectively continued their dual role as producers of white cultural cohesion.
The exclusion of black workers from skilled occupations, enforced through a generalized violence against them, amounted to a process of proletarianization. Black skilled workers, divested of access to skilled employment by white exclusionism, gradually found themselves losing their skills and being reduced to unskilled status. Against this, they had little political recourse. In some areas, they succeeded in forming cooperative shops. A black ship-caulkers’ cooperative in Baltimore was one example (Foner,15). They turned to the construction of autonomous social organizations, community unions, churches, etc. Nevertheless, these had to remain partially clandestine to survive. There was vandalism and arson against black churches, and riots that scapegoated black communities. In one case, a massive act of arson against a black community in Philadelphia was generated gratuitously by a rivalry between companies of volunteer fireman. (Ignatiev, Laurie)
By participating in this process of black proletarianization, white workers were in effect defining a class relation, and a class difference, between themselves and black workers. It was not simply that they assumed overlordship; their activities were similar to those of the British state in the 16th century that uprooted the agrarian communities of northern England to force them to become wage laborers. (Marx) That is, their actions deprived black people of status and recognition as people and as workers, while white workers lay claim to that status precisely through those same actions. In addition, their actions engendered a class difference between themselves and black workers because they had different relations to capital. Where white workers related to capital directly, as the wage laborers capital brought into existence for itself, black workers related to white capital through the control stratum, that is, through white workers defining themselves as the working class as such. The first implication of this was the white elimination of any common class interest between white and black workers.
In acting to exclude black workers, white workers essentially constructed themselves as a political class, engendering a class antagonism not only between themselves and black workers, but between themselves and black people in general. Though they understood that their essential strength lay in numbers, and "class solidarity" was the watchword of labor organization even then, they chose to weaken themselves as the price of a ticket to status and entitlement as white. Thus, they accepted social class status in white society by establishing their existence as a political class in their on-going production of the social cohesion and consensus of whiteness. In other words, they politically constructed their class consciousness as white workers in primary allegiance to white society rather than to working class solidarity, and transformed that white allegiance into a class relation, as a systematic political activity against black people. Most in fact continued to support southern slavery, claiming to fear the labor competition from masses of freed slaves, while engaging in tortuous contortions of logic to rationalize not seeing slaves as workers. (Roediger)
If these white workers constructed their political position on the basis of white solidarity, it does not imply that they constructed their class consciousness on the basis of racism. Racism is the name for what they were doing socially. But the basis of their political class existence lay in a system of social identification, a system of white solidarity. White solidarity can be expressed only through hostility to black people. Racism, the many actions of racialization (hostility and contempt, anti-black suppression through exclusion, and dispossession through riots) become the means for which white solidarity is the end. While many white people actually saw black people as an "enemy," others had other kinds of personal relations, some of which may have been of friendship, between themselves and black people. But then as now, white people had to choose between membership in the white socius (their society of other whites) or ostracism from it.
In other words, prejudicial activity has social meaning before it has psychological, and it gains psychological meaning through the sense of social belonging for which it is given as an essential means. Racism presents itself as prejudicial in its performance of gratuitous contempt or hostility, but it performs its acts of social violence in the interest of white identity, as a ticket to inclusion. This is something that white people have to understand. The focus of their racism is not the other but themselves. In that sense, racism and racial prejudice name symptoms of a more profound cultural structure for which violence and criminal anti-democratic activities are essential elements of an institutional identification with whiteness, and thus of white social identity itself. It is a collective criminality that hides from itself through a social ethos of abrogated responsibility, which white society inherits from its historically given social structures, and through which it continues to valorize the control stratum activity that it inherits from its origins in slavery.
In sum, the decision by white workers to define themselves as the working class, which meant to define the working class as white, was added onto the class collaboration implicit in their control stratum functions. They were, in effect, two aspects of the same thing. The cultural preservation of the dual productivity in which white workers engaged as workers and as a control stratum suggests why white racism has historically worked so well as a weapon against working class organization in the US. It was already, at a cultural level, from the very origins of the US as a nation, a fundamental element of white working class identity. Were racism simply ideological, argument and experience would have had greater effect in countering it. But identity is a stronger influence then argument or ideology because it is given socially as a sense of belonging, an active form of institutional identification, the very ground from which one then argues.
Working class existence in the US cannot be understood without taking account of that dual role and the dual consciousness that accompanies it. White workers are white not simply because racialized as white, but because they function as agents involved in the production and preservation of whiteness as a cultural structure. Indeed, we see this unfold again after the Civil War, despite the presentation of an opportunity for something different to occur.
The situation after the Civil War
In looking at the Reconstruction period, Dubois describes the political necessity, from the victor's standpoint, of enfranchising the freed slaves and absorbing them into the Republican Party, in order to maintain political power in the post-war south. (RR,370) Insofar as the vast majority of black people in the south were working class, the Republican Party became a form of proletarian party, ironically inverting the role played by the Democratic Party in the north as the party of the white working class. In other words, Reconstruction marked a moment of convergence of interests between northern capital and the southern working classes, in essence amounting to putting the working class in political power in the Reconstruction governments. (Olson, 11) And DuBois then argues that what the black working class accomplished during Reconstruction could have been maintained if the white workers of the south had made common cause with them. (RR,708) But this was not to happen. White workers in the south followed their northern counterparts into the Democratic Party, whose program was to put the landowners back in political power, repress the freed bond-laborers, and demolish Republican presence in the south.
Even as early as 1868, the National Labor Union (NLU) and other unions refused to admit black workers, leaving them unorganized or directing them to form black locals. The NLU was the first attempt to form a national union organization in the US. It did not ideologically contest capitalism or property rights, but dedicated itself to seeking the "success of republican institutions" (electoral representation, division of powers, free speech, etc.), and proclaimed the independence and honor of the "producing classes" as its goal. (Commons,145) The role of unions was to give labor an equal voice, to adjudicate differences between labor and capital, and through worker unity to gain labor its rightful share of what it produced. (153) Viewing labor and capital as having shared interest, it considered itself to be a defensive bulwork against the excesses of the latter by insuring labor's rightful place in society. (151)
Though the NLU recognized black workers as workers, and advocated general worker unity, it refused to include them organizationally, and proposed common cause only grudgingly. Out of a reverse pragmatics, rather than a sense of class commonality, NLU chairman Sylvis explained to the membership, "if we don't make friends with them, capital will use them against us." (159) Like earlier craft unionists, he perceived black workers from afar, as alien, an objects to be addressed only in order to neutralize a threat. To consider cooperation in the context of separation only reinforced a sense of contradiction and class difference rather than common class interest. This was even openly expressed by white observors to the 1869 "National Colored Labor Convention" in Washington DC. When black delegates suggested that trade unions which excluded black workers were committing an injury to the class, their statement was labelled "unintelligible." As one observor remarked, with temerity: "they (black workers) do not see as we do in this labor movement." (Commons,243ff) Black delegates to the convention who affirmed the white hierarchical attitude, on the other hand (namely, that the working class was white and that black workers needed to act in solidarity with it), were praised.
And this, as we have seen, was the tenor of Herbert Hill's UMW examples. At one and the same time, black workers were considered workers from which solidarity was demanded, and excluded as alien and a threat to labor. The idea that white workers considered themselves "the" working class is evinced by the general demand that black workers make solidarity with them, and not the other way around (another example of one-way responsibility). Hill mentions instances where mine workers prevented black workers from getting hired, but then called on them for solidarity during a strike when the black workers were brought in to replace them. Labor's reluctance to support affirmative action in the present period is a contemporary reflection of the same thing.
White unionist disparagement of inclusionist organization ultimately had dire consequences. In 1876, as the economy fell into crisis, white northern capital broke its tacit alliance with the southern black working class. The next year, 1877, the first national railroad strike occurred, which shut down significant sections of the country. A moment of possible autonomous action and class unity opened up,The exclusion of black unions from the councils of labor, however, weakened the strike as it developed, to which the jurisdictional divisions among unions added. In the context of the return of the Democratic Party to political power in the south, with its focus on subjecting black people to new forms of servitude (mostly through sharecropping and the crop lien system), these factors marked the defeat of the strike. At that moment of organizing and action, it was not capital that was blocking black people from participating politically and organizationally in this working class movement, but white workers. This again was a process of reducing the social status black workers had attained, and again proletarianizing them.
As Dubois puts it, white workers had been convinced that the degradation of black workers was more important than the uplift of white workers. They were not simply responding to a divide and rule strategem. It was more intentional than that. They knew, DuBois argues, exactly what they were doing.
The control stratum and Class Relations
What this history demonstrates is that white working class consciousness, its involvement in the on-going operations of a control stratum, and the structures of racialization have all worked together in the US. That is, a class analysis of the US (as a racialized society) must take into account the specific forms that the control stratum takes at each historical moment. [8] To simply attempt to adopt a class analysis derived from 19th century Europe would fall prey to an ahistorical understanding of class. Though the forms of control stratum may differ from era to era, the principle upon which it was developed in the colonial era as the expression of a culture of whiteness deploying norms of violence, systematic terrorism, internal black exile, and a consolidation of white cultural consensus remain in effect. Let us look at some subsequent forms.
Jim Crow constituted a system in which impunity was given each white person to exact obeisence from any black person, as an aspect of everyday white social life. Put in place through legislation after 1876 in the south, and by cultural extension in the north, its norm of disenfranchisement divested black people of the right to testify in court against white assailants, thus enabling no legitimate self-defense against incipient violence. Though para-military terrorist groups like the KKK served as the vanguard of control stratum, the line between their mob violence and quotidien white impunity was never anything but blurred.
What the generalization of control stratum activity to the entire white population meant for whites was that membership in whiteness could, and was required to be made public on a daily basis as a performance through gratuitous anti-black hostility for an audience of all other whites. In that way, the entirety of white society was transformed into a control stratum, unifying itself through the performance of white violence against black people. Even during the Depression, 50 years later, as Robin Kelley describes it, the attempts of impoverished sharecroppers, white and black, to form unions in the south, crashed against this sense of standing in the white socius. [9] The white farmers would not join the black sharecroppers union because it would mean ostracism by the rest of the white population. The dire conditions of the Depression themselves were unable to unify black and white farmers.
The experiences of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor follow suit, even in the face of some white attempts to break the constraints of segregation. The Farmer's Alliance was a cooperative movement whose foremost goal was to escape the hold of crop-lien debt by which farmers were kept impoverished. A crop-lien was a mortgage on a crop given by local commercial or banking interests under which the farmer was furnished with seed, tools, food and other supplies for the growing season, at usurious interest rates from which farmers rarely freed themselves. It meant that the lender would seize the crop when grown, handle marketing it, deduct the debt and interest, and give the farmer what (if anything) was left. The effect was to reduce farmers to a form of debt servitude. In the southern states, black farmers who sought to leave to escape their servitude to debt were put on chain gangs if caught.
Started in Texas among white farmers who had themselves migrated out of the south, it spread back into the south and into the midwest. It included those black farmers who had also managed to escape the south and obtain land west of the Mississippi. But they were few. And at no time did the Farmer's Alliance in the south attempt to build a political opposition to the chain gang system, or Jim Crow in general, though elimination of those institutions would have greatly increased their strength as farmers. The Alliance limited its project to supply (seeds, tools, loans, etc.) and marketing cooperatives. The purpose of the latter was to pool a region's crop for sale so that no farmers would be left behind and the sale could be delayed until the price rose above its immediate post-harvest lows. The Alliance never attempted to organize production cooperatives, however, which would have meant pooling land and labor, despite the fact that this would have greatly reduced expenses. Production coops in the southern states would have meant bringing in the mass of black sharecroppers, and transforming the agrarian class system, based on real farmer solidarity. Without production coops, the supply and marketing coops became service organizations, easily dominated and then destroyed by the banks. Stopping short at the color line in this way condemned the Farmer's Alliance to being short-lived.
The Knights of Labor arose at the same time, and also included both white and black workers. After the economic crisis of the early 1880s, its membership increased enormously. Oddly, in 1886, when the leadership called for local struggles and strikes instead of organizing for a general strike (for the 8 hour day), as some members proposed, membership dropped off. Within a year, it was down to less the 20% of what it had been. Most labor historians blame this sudden demise on political divisions created by the dispute in tactics, or on the loss of the southwest railroad strike in 1886. But what local struggles would also have entailed was total unity of both black and white workers. The main exodus of locals from the Knights were of the mostly white craft unions, which then entered the newly formed AFL.
In light of Herbert Hill's reports, we can say that the situation only got worse, the further US society got from the Emancipation Proclamation. White solidarity took stronger precedence over class solidarity, which in turn implied that solidarity with black workers would call in question the basis for white workers' identity as workers.
What the experiences of the NLU or the Knights of Labor reveal superficially is that common interest is not enough to alleviate or expunge the racial divisions in the working class. Time and again, class organzation has broken apart over the issue of social equality. While common interest may include a common vision, interest itself does not have the power to transform social identity. And social equality is a question of identity, not of interest.
The identity that supersedes class interest is a racialized identity. It allows itself to be subjected to oppression not because it can mark others as lesser beings for itself (and to feel better because it is not on the bottom rung), but because it feels included, even as the bottom rung, in the society with which it identifies (white society). The real goal of white racism is not exclusion but inclusion. The exclusion of black or brown people is the means (and "brown" here is used as a socially categorizing term for Native Americans, Latinos and Asians, as people racialized by white society based on the template used to racialize black people, each process of racialization producing whiteness as its ultimate product, in different ways in different regions). This is why anti-black racist violence typically seems so psychotic, so gratuitous. Its real focus is other whites, and a reconfirmation of white racialized identity, not the black people against whom its hostility is aimed. As long as anti-racist campaigns only address interest (through an assumption of common interest), and not the cultural structures of whiteness and white racialized identity, they are doomed to fall short.
The Duality of Class Structure
Racialization as a class difference
The historical references made here to the Farmer's Alliance and the Knights of Labor are admittedly superficial. They only imply an interface between class interest (organization) and the color line, somewhat circumstantially. But what nevertheless lurks within each story is the familiarity of the context in which the class difference between white workers and black being analyzed here resides, because of their different relation to capital. Jim Crow laws separated white and black farmers from each other by the different destinies each faced in attempting to escape debt servitude. The fate of black workers was never independent from whether white workers chose to include them or not, nor from the option open to white unions to migrate from one federation (Knights) to another (AFL). That did not mean that black workers, left in the lurch by white, were therefore impotent. Far from it. But their attempts to organize social and political strength was forced into a different, more potentially lethal quality of clandestinity.
On the other hand, while white workers and farmers may think of their own organizational efforts or options as primary within their own perception of their contradiction with capital (financial or productive), their ability to negate or threaten the efforts of other communities of workers, whether intentionally or not, stands outside that contradiction because inside a common political project with capital. White workers, by becoming the class through which black workers had to relate to capital as a political role (deciding politically to include black workers only in terms of obeisence or one-way solidarity, if at all), established whiteness as the primary defining factor of their class organization. In other words, they rendered whiteness a class factor, as a political class of workers, the effect of which is a view of class power in which there was no common class interest between white and black workers.
Racialization, the structured cultural processes by which white people create classes of people of color through a violent exclusionism as the foundation upon which they create themselves as white, can then be seen as analogous to the relation of capital to workers. Capital creates workers by hiring them to fill the jobs it creates to make products whose sale then renews and increases it as capital. Whites create non-whites through an exclusionism, a system of social activities (racism) whose reduction of those non-whites becomes the production and maintenance of whiteness and white society itself as a cultural structure. Black people fill the social category that whites create for themselves as a control stratum in order that that reduced social categorization imposed on black people produce white people in turn as white. Workers of color are dispossessed for the purpose of intensified exploitation by capital, with exploited white workers being nevertheless the primary agents of this dislocation, for which white workers obtain identity and membership in the cultural structure of whiteness. But the people white society brings into existence as racialized through its dehumanizing activities (and racialization is a system of activities, not of states of being) are those who represent the process of producing white society and white supremacy. White society does not simply exist; it must constantly be producing itself to maintain its existence through its exclusion of others. White society as a cohesive whole thus plays the role of a ruling class (analogous to capital) toward those through whose exclusion it has made itself white, though with a white class system intact within itself.
As a control stratum, white workers act intentionally (and they may not be the only white people acting in the control stratum, but it is they who abandon the other (class) category of solidarity in so acting, whereas middle class whites do not). Even when they are not the active participants in this process of proletarianization, the absence of extended solidarity toward workers of color, the withholding of that class solidarity, is also intentional. It may arise out of a fear of white ostracism or white violence for having betrayed white solidarity if they did, but it is a choice. And it is what makes white exclusionism in general possible. This is what DuBois pointed out about the moment of inception of Jim Crow. It was a moment in which what freed black people had accomplished during Reconstruction could have been preserved, but which was lost because white workers did not join with them in it. Instead, they joined the effort to re-enslave black people to debt servitude and segregation. Even today, as passive withholders of solidarity in the face of other white-oriented actions of hostility (police profiling, for instance, or opposition to affirmative action), white people provide the environment of white anti-black impunity, as the essence of control stratum activity.
Thus, in a historically continuous fashion, the dual role that white workers played engendered a dual consciousness for them that extends into the present. They live their white class consciousness as workers, dependent on class solidarity, while living their control stratum role in white solidarity. In the former, they depend on elite recognition as white, which requires that they balance a sense of militancy (as workers) with a sense of acceptance (as white). In the latter (control stratum) role of constructing white consensus and cultural coherence, they gain recognition as workers in the former role. It is this structure of racialization that forms the template for the double role that labor union structure plays in relation to employers. Within this dual consciousness, white workers' existence as exploited becomes acceptable insofar a black (and brown) workers are proletarianized, and thus excluded from recognition.
The double role white workers play as exploited workers producing capital values in the white class system (which also exploits black and brown workers, but through the mediation of the white control stratum), and as the control stratum of a white racialized "ruling class" in the racialized class system is more complex than can be summed up as class collaboration. White workers form, at one and the same time, a social class in one role and a political class in the other. The concept of "class collaboration" (albeit driven by racism) represents a perspective that sees only what is internal to the white socius, and not the duality of roles white workers play. Thus it implicitly accepts the notion that the working class is white.
This systemic duality between political class and social class begins to explain why white solidarity has traditionally trumped class solidarity for white workers in the US (it only "begins to explain" because the specificity of each historical moment, the potential for threats and violence, have to be taken into account). It also begins to explain (better than the concept of class collaboration) the general preference for weak apolitical unionism on the part of most white workers. Apolitical unionism does not call into question either white identity or membership in the white socius, while allowing white workers to position themselves as the class of workers within the white class system. It institutionalizes white working class membership in its white identity. In that sense, the unions of the US can be said to be structurally white as organizations, despite the existence of black or brown members or even leaders.
Conversely, the existence of a duality of class systems implies that white labor history and black labor history are different, and have to be rewritten in relation to each other. Black labor history cannot simply be included in the other. The history of slavery and the abandonment of black bond-laborers by white workers is a different history from that of the white socius, and thus from the white working class. [10] Indeed, historically, the first form that US capitalism took was the slave system. It was a class system for which the plantation served as a unit of mass production producing commodities for an international market. It provided the economic environment within which a white class system emerged with the rise of industry after the revolutionary period. The original source of accumulated capital was both slave labor and the slave trade itself. In other words, in the US, white society brought itself into existence as a "ruling class" (a corporate structure exploiting black labor) before it underwent class division within itself to form the white class system. In Marx's terms, the entirety of the US capitalist establishment and its accumulated capital is grounded on the material crystalization of past black labor. To the extent that a "white race," producing itself through its racialization of others, preceded its own internal division into classes, it constitutes a legacy carried over from the colonial past. And that legacy was in turn crystalized in the socio-juridical structure of the US as a nation by its initial decision to preserve slavery after the revolution.
If white workers tend to remain a social class within the white class system, negotiating endlessly for wages, hours, and benefits, in order to preserve their integration into the coloniality of white society, for which they are in turn critical agents, then no struggle for power would ever have presented itself as sensible for them within the white class system. Indeed, such a concept would remain alien. If power is constituted by white coloniality, then white workers in their white solidarity already partake of it. And conversely, for the racialized working class in the racialized class system, no attempt at autonomy or political participation, such as was represented by "black power" or the Panthers, would not be see by white society as a whole as a struggle for power, or tolerated even briefly.
In sum, racialization in the US has not just produced a two-tiered system of class exploitation. It has constituted a dual economy comprised of two qualitatively different class systems, one of which is included within the ruling class of the other. The boundary between these systems is the control stratum, in which white workers have traditionally played a central role. The symbolism for the difference between these two class systems is what is called "race." But "race" is a verb; it is something that white people as a group do to others as groups. [see Appendix] There has never been a time when black workers have not had to defend themselves against white supremacy, which often comes from the guy working the next machine down the line. And though white workers have at times crossed the line between systems, and fought a working class struggle in the racialized class system (through autonomous organizations outside the white class system; the early years of the UMW, the Knights of Labor, the IWW, the industrial unions of the 1920s and 30s), none has persisted. Ultimately, insofar as working class struggle has always been a struggle against proletarianization, the real domain of struggle for the liberation of labor from (or the alleviation of) its exploitation by capital can only be the racialized class system.
The Presentday Nature of Class in the US
To understand the present configuration and construction of classes in the US, it is the nature of the contemporary control stratum and the on-going process of proletarianizing that it foists between white society and people of color that must be understood (and today, the racialized working class is an international class facing familiar impoverishment through globalized debt servitude and corporate investment). That is, a class analysis of the present must begin with the forms, the political institutionalities that the control stratum takes, in which the coloniality of white hierarchy is revealed.
Today, since the civil rights movements and the world anti-colonialist upheaval of the post-war period, the control stratum, the structure that maintains the coherence of white racialized identity, and the cohesion of a culture of whiteness, has become more complex. [11] If, in 1800, the working class in the racialized class system were mainly black workers in forced labor on plantations, in 2000, this racialized working class has grown to include the third world areas of the globe, as well as people of color inside the US. In part, what brings them together in the same (racialized) class status is the international hegemony and centrality of the US economy, as the dominant economic, cultural and political entity in the post-war world. Though first subjugated by European colonialism, these post-colonial areas are now subject to globalized debt to the World Bank, the structural adjustment programs of the IMF, and to EuroAmerican corporate investment.
In that sense, the agencies that maintain corporate domination over the third world, from the World Bank to the hundreds of US military bases placed around the world, function as a control stratum at the globalized level. That is, they take the original sense of a control stratum constructed in the Virginia colonies as a kind of template; it is part of what distinguishes contemporary coloniality from 19th century European colonization. Control is also produced through trade embargoes on those recalcitrant nations who refuse to betray or abandon their sovereignty. Embargoes have been imposed by acts of Congress on Cuba, Iraq, Libya, and Zimbabwe, among others. Thus, the two major parties, which constitute Congress between them, function as part of the international control stratum insofar as they have not questioned the criminality and human rights violation of the embargo as a corporate tactic (of starving a population in order to transform its government's policies). Nor have the two major parties questioned the dehumanizing criminality implicit in the trade policies the embargoes are designed to foster. In sum, one major shift in the structure of the control stratum has been from the para-military terrorism of Jim Crow to transnational forms of financial and military coercion.
Domestically, since the civil rights movements, a police-prison complex has served to resegregate society. The rise of the prison industry has already been mentioned. The police have acted to fill it through extensive racial profiling, with an autonomy provided by a vast system of victimless crime laws (which allow the police to dispense with the need for a complainant). They have been granted increased impunity through extended obedience statutes. These permit the police to criminalize any individual at will. An officer has but to give a humiliating command to a person stopped on the street, and any opposition by that person in defense of his/her dignity or self-respect can then be charged as disobedience and resistance. This gives the police the power to determine arbitrarily whose sense of self-respect will be honored and whose will be criminalized, whose humanity will be respected and whose humanity will be degraded. As such, insofar as the police act according to established racial profiling procedures, they reconstitute a color line in their operations, as a reinstitution of racial segregation.
Prosecutorial bias then gives state sanction to these police operations, with people of color charged with felonies where whites face misdemeanors. The increased charges lead to plea bargaining and the imprisonment of many innocent people. The result has been a black and brown prison population ratio eight times its proportion of the nation's population. Thus the police and district prosecutors have become a major element of the control stratum, whose project is the reinstatement of an insular unified white culture. It is ironic that this is accomplished in the language of civil rights (equality before the law and colorblindness).
Other aspects of the supposedly overthrown structure of Jim Crow emerge from this system. Disenfranchisement accompanies massive incarceration and felonization of a population. A "tracking" system has been instituted in secondary schools that for the most part equates to a continued segregation of education.
If the "two party system" functions internationally as an element of the control stratum through the US military and financial establishments, it functions domestically in the same capacity, though also within an adoption of the very language of civil rights. For instance, in an electoral system, the notion of a "minority" refers to those people who lose when a vote is taken. But in the US, people are referred to as a "minority" as a state of being, before any vote is taken. People of color (as racialized groups) became "minorities" after they gained voting rights in the 1960s, replacing previous derogatory racial designations. To label a group a minority in the absence of a specific vote is to proclaim it to have been outvoted in advance. It thus signifies a group's exclusion from political participation in normal processes at the hands of a majoritarian group (whites) who thereby preserve the integrity of their majority and control. Minority status is thus something that one group of people does to another. There is no such thing as a "minority" as such. There are only groups that are minoritized by a majoritarian group. In effect, "minority" is a euphemism for racialization. To the extent the two party system functions with respect to "minority" constituencies, in order to exclude them from the general field of politics, it participates in their dispossession and exclusion (even by accepting them as a constituency, as the Democratic Party has done with the black community, for instance) and thus serves as part of the contemporary control stratum.
But let us return to the white working class, as represented by the labor movement in general. From its support for the Chinese exclusion acts of the 1880s to its opposition to affirmative action in the 1980s, the labor movement has seen people of color as a special threat, whether it owns up to that or not. It was this sense of threat that took precedence, for instance, in the Brooklyn community control struggle during the 1960s. At that time, a number of black communities sought to improve their children's education by including black, brown, and third world history and culture in the curricula. In response to the communities' demand for greater control of the neighborhood schools, the city simply turned the schools over to the community, without allowing time for the community to organize transition committees or new administrative norms or procedures. The city thus created enormous problems for the community, setting the stage for failure. At the same time, it informed the teacher's unions that they no longer had contracts with those schools, since the schools were to be administered under new auspices. The unions then struck the schools in order not to reliquish their contracts, thus further disrupting the already gargantuan task of reorganization facing the communities. Instead of stepping in to help with its own administrative experience and expertise, the teacher's unions served as an additional barrier to community control. While many union members supported community control, they got trapped between two forms of solidarity, one in each class system. Solidarity in the white class system meant preserving the union in its current (social class) status. Solidarity in the racialized class system meant making working class solidarity with the excluded and oppressed (the communities as a political class), but breaking solidarity with the unions. Their institutional affiliation in the white class system (even for many black or Latino union members) took precedence for them. That is, their social class status took precedence over acting within a political class framework.
In a similar vein, unions showed a degree of passivity nationwide over the issue of runaway shops. In the wake of the Vietnam war, heavy industry started moving to lower wage areas (the south, Latin America, Asia, etc.). The Reagan administration provided subsidies to corporations to move out of the US. Though labor had contributed to the value of those factories, with which the corporations absconded by moving the shops, and though the plant closures meant enormous dislocations in people's lives, no union, city council, or county council acted to stop the runaway process. No union suggested that it would not allow its job sites to just be wisked away (in contrast to Europe, where unions consistently stopped such moves either politically or by direct action; indeed, in Germany and France, laws have been passed that make it prohibitive for a factory to close and leave). Instead, they tended to affirm that the factories were private property, and the owners could do what they wanted with them. Both union leadership and membership knew that the moves would decimate their unions, and create enormous unemployment for a while. But many of the white members were not sorry to see the integrated membership dissolved. And even more figured that when new economic development filled the void left by these shuttered industries, they would get first consideration for those jobs as white. In other words, their silence in the face of this economic disruption was a way of suppressing black and brown participation in the unions. [12]
This kind of stance is even consistent with the traditional nationalist protectionism of the US labor movement. During the debates on NAFTA in the 1990s, the labor movement did not advocate labor solidarity across the border with Mexican workers, but took a protectionist stance instead, in solidarity with US domestic business interests. National protectionism, as an expression of white exclusivity, has for the most part been a traditional stance of the white labor movement in the United States.
What is common to the labor movement's choices in all three events -- opposition to community control, acquiescence to plant closures, and protectionism -- is their location within the white class system, a sense of white solidarity expressed through a refusal of class solidarity in the racialized class system.
White populism
In place of a politically conscious union movement that could embrace all workers (perhaps through worker cooperatives), there lurks a white populism beneath the surface of white society, as the form that a political class of workers will take in the white class system. We have seen such a populism emerge in campaigns against affirmative action, for three-strikes laws, the Minutemen anti-immigrant movement, and now the Tea Party movement. These movements reflect a peculiar form of powerlessness, an emergent need for recognition as white that would reaffirm identity regardless of how justice or democracy is thrown aside.
The opposition to affirmative action programs accused them of being quota systems, forgetting that the system of segregation for which affirmative action had sought to be a correction had been a white quota system (as close to 100% as possible). The movement to pass three-strikes laws was a movement to build the prison industry as a form of post-civil rights segregation. The Minutemen publicized their desire to build a wall on the border, but they built their movement through harassment of Latino workers and families in the northern and south-eastern states. The Tea Party movement is a form of white populism that has appeared on the political scene with the election of Obama and has grown in opposition to his health care reform proposal. The original promise of reform was cheaper or free health insurance for everyone, at a time when health insurance rates have become exorbitant. The movement's populist rejection of government alleviation of the burden of exorbitant health care costs (whether the resulting overhaul actually does that or not, and it is questionable whether it does), appears patently contradictory and irrational. It is not based on a love for exorbitant costs, nor anger over the government bail out of banks rather than homeowners. The reality of its rejection is more insidious. It resides in its whiteness. It did not seek to derail universal health care because it was proposed by the Democratic Party, nor by the Obama administration, but because it was to be universal. It threatens to erode the product of past control stratum activities, whose purposes were to preserve universality as the sole privilege of the white socius. [13]
This has happened before. When welfare was first instituted under the New Deal, during the Jim Crow era, it was for white people only. After the civil rights movements opened welfare to all, white people began turning against it. We have seen white welfare recipients voting for candidates who promised to dismantle the welfare system as a whole, in order to remove black and brown people from its rolls.
With respect to the runaway shop issue, WJ Wilson says, speaking of the suburbanization of new employment (in his book on precisely this process: When Work Disappears), in the two decades prior to 1990, "60% of the new jobs created in the Chicago metropolitan area have been located in the northwest suburbs of Cook and Du Page counties. African-Americans constitute less than 2% of the population in these areas." (37) Ironically, at the same time that their industrial employment was being pulled out from under them, white workers shifted their political support to the Republican Party, the party of big business that was in the process of taking their jobs away. They did so because the Democratic Party had ostensibly taken on black and brown communities and interests (which had no where else to go) as constituencies for itself. For many white people, voting Republican meant voting against the Democratic party, which in turn meant voting against its black and brown constituencies.
The three eras of US class history and the true exceptions to racialization
But there have been real contestations of the racial exclusionism of control stratum actions, beyond the exceptions (of certain strikes or union organizing campaigns), and they have truly changed the face of the US. Three times in US history, a substantial number of white people have crossed the class line in the racialized class system to support the justice of the anti-racist and pro-democracy cause. These moments divide US history into roughly three eras: the slavery era, the Jim Crow era, and the present era. Each era experienced a pro-democracy upsurge that stood opposed to the anti-democracy of white exclusionism. As each pro-democracy movement arose, however, it was repressed.
Each era could be said to have begun with a document that affirmed social equality -- the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954. A social movement (a political class) then arose that took the ideals expressed in those documents seriously (abolitionism, Reconstruction's multi-racial democratic governance of southern states, and the civil rights movements), and sought to construct a democracy of all the people, black, brown, and white. These movements presented themselves as demands for a non-hypocritical form of justice and governance in which cultures and classes could express themselves and their social autonomy as self-determining groups. In doing so, they each produced a crisis for white identity, disrupting its social coherence.
In each case, the white socius responded through various forms of white populism that renewed control stratum activity to suppress the promise of equality. Abolition, for instance, was attacked as radical, communist, or anarchist. Under the force of appeals to white solidarity, the movement's original focus on the criminality and immorality of slavery was shifted and diluted to the ancillary issue of whether to allow the extension of slavery to the new territories, and to the campaigns to segregate and disenfranchise free black people. Ultimately, most middle-of-the-road white abolitionists acceded to both campaigns. By the 1840s, the abolitionist movements had been marginalized as a radical fringe, while white supremacy was nationally affirmed and legitimated in the 1856 Dred Scott decision. In the case of Reconstruction, southern state governments were violently overthrown by a variety of white para-military mobs (the KKK and others). Not only were the remnants terrorized into submission, but lynchings became a norm which the federal government actually refused to outlaw as such. Once again, the white supremacist culture took political control of the country.
Finally, repression of the equality and democracy for which the civil rights movements had fought can be measured by the evisceration of civil rights laws and the defunding of civil rights agencies that began during the 1980s, and ultimately led to the repeal of affirmative action standards, the establishment of police impunity on the basis of racial profiling, and the construction of the largest prison industry in the world. The disruption of black and brown communities resulting from wanton and arbitrary arrest patterns, the accompanying disenfranchisement of people, an extreme presence of police similar to an occupying army, have in effect reinstituted legalized exclusionism (segregation). Where the civil rights movement demanded citizenship, participation, equal protection under the laws for the formerly segregated, the language of their demands was warped into what could be used against them: equality under the law became profiling and criminalization, democratic participation became minoritization, and citizenship became a prejudicial colorblindness. US society has been reracialized in order to reconstitute the cohesion of the culture of whiteness.
In other words, each of these eras represents a period of extended class struggle in the racialized class system. A pro-democratic political class appeared, to which the white ruling class (the white socius) responded by various forms of repression. In each case, white support and solidarity with black and brown people was gradually worn away, reestablishing white consensus, through renewed operations of a control stratum. In effect, the history of racialization in the US is not a history of racial "progress," but a history of the reconstitution of a political culture of whiteness against recurrent uprisings for the establishment of equality and democracy. And the racial segregation that each campaign of repression has reinstituted has been a class distinction re-established within the racialized class system.
Changing the Concept of Class Struggle
What this duality of class systems implies is that we must change our way of conceiving class relations and class struggle in the US.
The most persistent form of class struggle in the US has been that of black and brown people against their racialization and proletarianization at the hands of white supremacy and the white control stratum that works for it. The history of struggle against segregation, exclusion, disenfranchisement, and exploitation by a black political class has been through a multitude of organizational forms, including black unions, churches, black insurance and burial societies, social welfare organizations in black communities, and mass confrontations. But the civil rights demands of the black and brown communities have been the same throughout US history, from those included in the Pennsylvania constitution of 1780 (repealed in 1790) to the civil rights act of 1866 (vetoed by Johnson, passed over his veto, and overthrown by paramilitary activity), to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s. These have been demands launched from within the racialized class system, and which crashed against the control stratum guarding white society. After temporarily affecting politics in the white class system, they were rejected, and the separation between systems re-established.
If the racialized class system is the primary site of class struggle, that is where a true working class consciousness will emerge. For white workers to truly join the working class, they will have to abandon their dual role as social class in the white class system and as a political class whose power resides in reconstructing and maintaining segregation in its ever innovative forms. A new concept of solidarity within the racialized class system will have to be invented, one in which solidarity is truly class oriented, and not its one-way orientation toward the white working class. For white workers, it will mean leaving behind their participation in the control stratum, crossing the racialized class divide, and fighting against white supremacy and the white ruling class it represents.
To understand how to do that, a radical analysis of the structure of capitalist power as such will be insufficient. It will have to include a description and critique of the forms of control stratum. That does not mean just paying special attention to the forms of suppression of people of color. It means paying special attention to the way the ordinary institutions of US society perform the dual functions of black/brown exclusion and the consolidation of white consensus as tne core of white cultural coherence.
As we have seen, the major forms of control stratum today are the prison industry, police impunity through profiling and obedience statutes, the two party system, and the quiescence of the unions as an adjunct to their organizational structure. It is class struggle against capitalism that is today being carried out by movements against the prison industry, against police racial profiling and impunity, against the imposition of economic famine on communities of color (by redlining, disinvestment, unemployment, and police occupation), against a tracking system in education, for community control of policing, education and health care, by the unionization movements of people of color, and by the immigrant rights movements. These people are all participating in a political class in class struggle against the control stratum and the institutions of white society.
If there is a major element of this account of a duality of class systems that most people fail to understand, it is the part in the control stratum played by the two party system. Because the two major parties monopolize political thought, they stand as intermediaries between constituencies and representation. As corporate structures themselves, they are today the most insidious and at the same time the most effective form of control stratum. They are even granted this power and political supremacy by third parties insofar as they accept "third party status." Their effectiveness lies in their ability to include small numbers of black or brown people in various levels of government while increasing the non-representation of black and brown people and communities in governance.
Against the power of the two party system (including the futility of third parties), the elimination of the single delegate district, winner-take-all system, and the institution of proportional representation would wrench the electoral system out of the grasp of the two major parties and the doimination of white supremacy as the ideology of the white socius for which the present electoral system works. A campaign to institute some form of proportional representation, as a way of creating a space for both political thinking and political participation, would thus also be an element of class struggle against the white socius as the ruling class in the racialized class system.
As elements of a class struggle, none of the movements mentioned above could be simply considered campaigns against "racism." A campaign against "racism" would be futile, since "racism" is merely a symptom of the operations of an entire structure of racialization, the effects of which are manifest in the activities of the control stratum. Struggle in the racialized class system should not be reduced to an ideologized racially-oriented anti-racist campaign. It needs to be seen as a battle in a real class struggle against capitalism in its guise as a white socius functioning as the ruling class in the racialized class system. As a class struggle, it would necessarily focus on the real alleviation or elimination of proletarianization and exploitation. White workers must understand that by entering into struggle in the racialized class system, they are grasping the first real possibility of joining a political class of class conscious workers.
There are a number of corollaries to this view of the US as a duality of class systems. The first is that the civil rights movements were the last real, deeply transformative class struggle fought on a national basis in the US. Failure to see those movements as class struggles (to which the white left and the white unions fell prey, even while in the middle of them) bespeaks an impoverished and indeed ahistorical understanding of class. Those movements not only changed the face of society and its structures of racialization, but also its way of being capitalist, and its mode of exercising control.
One way the "face" of racialization changed was through the emergence of a black and brown middle class. As with every class struggle (which elevates a few workers, for instance, into corporate management, supervision, and union leadership), one of the results of the civil rights movements has been to propel some black and brown people into the professions (law, medicine, finance, corporate management, etc.), though rarely in large or unharassed numbers).
The black and brown middle class is composed of people who managed to obtain employment in white institutions (banks, investment firms, law firms, the military, the police, etc.), in the process of which indicating that there are very few autonomous black or brown institutions. In fact, part of the central operations of the control stratum have been to destroy any autonomy in those communities. Thus, this black or brown middle class forms a mask behind which white society can pretend that those who suffer the exclusion forced on them (ghetto-ization) have only themselves to blame, that it no longer occurs at white hands.
A second corollary is that black (and brown) nationalism can be understood as forms of working class organization within the racialized class system, and thus as ideologies of (racialized) working class solidarity. During the epoch of anti-colonialist revolutions after WWII, these "nationalisms" recognized their connections to liberation movements throughout the world (in international racialized class solidarity). Nevertheless, many in the white left relegated them to subsidiary status, and considered their anti-colonial solidarity as secondary if not reactionary because "nationalist." At the same time, the unions abjured them as politically adverse to US unionism, and separatist politically. But if the left missed what these nationalisms represented, the white ruling class did not. It understood all too well that community autonomy and power were serious threats to its own coherence, and to the cohesion of the culture of whiteness on which it depended. An entire government program of repression (COINTELPRO) was developed to destroy these movements.
A third corollary is an insight into why Marxism has never developed a mass working class following in the US, as in Europe. Marxists in the US have rarely extended their influence among workers beyond trade union organization because they were never been able to fathom the structure of white solidarity by which the white working class was constructed. The class analysis one gleans from the Marxist text describes the European class structure, which has limited value for the US when left unmodified. A Marxism that spoke to the real class structure of the US would demand that white workers abandon their role as control stratum, abandon their role in generating white racialized identity, and cross over into the working class, which means joining it in the racialized class system. But this is something their white identity forcefully denies them as an option.
The Marxist sense of an historical destiny or "role" for the working class to end class society would not make (and has never made) sense to the US white working class insofar as it finds itself already included in the "ruling class" of the racialized class system. For white workers enforcing whiteness, there has been no historical role to grasp beyond what they were already in the process of fulfilling. To put an end to class society, from the perspective of white workers in the control stratum, would be to put an end to their white identity as well as their separation from workers of color as a class difference. Liberation from exploitation for white workers, on the other hand, would mean exclusion from the white socius from which they acquire their social identity. In other words, for white workers in the US, there is a strong opposition between liberation and identity.
The call to class struggle cannot be made at any level of generality in the US because it has to be made to white workers differently than to black or brown. Even at the height of industrial union organization in the 30s, the mutuality represented by the struggle for union recognition, and the fact that recognition itself was central to the construction of the union, both re-affirmed white workers' sense of standing in white corporate society, while not alleviating black or brown subjugation to the control stratum in the slightest degree. The exceptions, and there have been exceptions, have succeeded only in gaining "recognition" for black workers -- but as adjuncts to white hegemony, as white-by-association, and not as black workers. That is, they are deculturated as black within a white form of solidarity, while still marginalized and excluded as black.
Ultimately, the socialist call for class unity, which addresses itself to white workers as workers, has had no meaning for white workers as white. It has remained blind to the fact that race is the foundation for the unity of the white working class within a dual and heterogeneous class structure -- that is, that white working class unity is before all else white unity. When socialists call for working class democracy, they imply the inclusion of black and brown workers, which violates the structure of white solidarity within which white workers valorize themselves as workers. Marxism has always considered "racism" to be an ideology rather than a cultural structure, a tactic of division rather than a fundamental dimension of the class structure and identity of the US. But "racism" is the mark of white allegiance, which means that race is not the way the working class was divided against itself, but the way the white working class was constructed, or has constructed itself, as a class. In fact, division in the working class was the foundation for race and racism, not the other way around. Racism is the way white workers reside in a class relation to a black (and brown) working class. What the socialist call has traditionally blinded itself to is that, in the racialized and white dominated condition of US society, the condition for working class unity in the United States is the condition for its disunity.
Appendix
There is a logic to the development of a concept of race out of the evolution of white cultural identity. Though the concept of "race" appears to be "natural" in humans, it required the emergence of whiteness as a cultural concept to become possible in its modern sense. Intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous peoples revealed that physical characteristics reside on continuous spectra. For color, this means that, for any two people of different colors, a third can be found whose color will be between them. This implies that there are no natural divisions between peoples based on color. The primary principle of whiteness, however, is that though a white woman can give birth to a black child, a black woman cannot give birth to a white child. For a person to be white, all foreparents must be white. In other words, there is a purity condition for whiteness that holds for no other racial group. It is that purity condition that produced the first "division" in the continuous spectrum of color, and thus produced the possibility of a further invention of divisions. Whiteness and white supremacy did not evolve out of a concept of race; the concept of race "naturalized" the socio-political hierarchy engendered through the enslavement and violent dehumanization of Africans in the name of which Europeans proclaimed themselves white.
As an historically determined concept, then, "race" is something that one group of people (whites) does to others (non-whites). In that sense, "race" is more properly understood as a verb rather than a noun. The verb is "to racialize." "Race" divides society into racializers and the racialized. But the verb does not mean "to create races"; it means to create a system of social categorizations, as a vertical hierarchy of groups, that are then naturalized as "races." It is something only whites have an interest in fostering, first because they place themselves at the top of this hierarchy as supremacist, and second, because it has become the mechanism by which they produce their whiteness, that is, their identity as white.
Notes
1- The existence of social movements, contrary to popular belief, is proof that the society is not a democracy. If it were, the channels of participation in the formulation of policy by those to be effected by political decisions would already be in place, meaning a social movement would be unnecessary. That is, democracy, again contrary to popular belief, is not signified by a vote, or by the election of representatives who do not or cannot represent, but by the involvement of those people who will be effected by a policy in the discussion, formulation, articulation, and decision on the policy in question.
2- A derivative security is an invented security whose basis is other securities, not real assets. The corporate stock of a productive corporation is a security whose basis is real assets. What the present crisis represented was the explosion of the transformation of debt into tradable securities by the invention of derivative markets (places where such things could be bought and sold). The volume of these markets reached into the trillions of dollars. These derivative securities were designed to make profit on the payment of debt, beyond the profit made on the lending of money. They collapsed when payment stopped.
3- Associated Press report, Nov. 8, 2007.
4- The service and professional industries were traditionally built to service the needs of capitalism and capital circulation, and to maintain economic viability and social stability through advertising, sales, health, education, and policing services (all essential to the realization of the wealth of surplus value exploited from productive workers). For Marx, service workers were paid out of the surplus value pool, but they didn't add to that pool. Thus, they were ancillary to the real working class, which was composed of productive workers. In a consumerist corporation-dominated society, this provides insufficient insight. Today, service workers are the largest sector of the working class, and the SEIU is the largest union in the US. They play an essential role in the profit picture of US capitalism, whether they produce surplus value or not. Robert Reich has redefined these three economic classes (productive, service, and entrepreneur), describing them as transformed by the social domination of the corporate structure. For him, there is an elite composed of technological and financial technicians, a drone class existing in peonage to the service industries, and those that are cast-off and abandoned. Perhaps the white populism at work today is a vague attempt by deindustrialized white workers to reserve a place for themselves in that second class, and thrust all others into a third class existence.
5- One important exception is the UMW, which built hospitals for the appalachian coal miners, supported by a tonnage royalty won from the mine owners. Mining is one of the most hazardous jobs, and those hospitals were an essential part of the job. In 1962, when the mining industry threatened to stop the tonnage royalty that kept them open, it sparked a wildcat strike in eastern Kentucky that shut down all mining.
6- In the south, as Starobin shows, many slaves were used in industry – mining, steel, iron works, leather, shoes, sailmaking, coke, etc. They depressed wages because they had no control over their work conditions as bond-laborers. White workers in the south sought to have them excluded from industry, rather than abolish slavery, but then faced a reaction to that effort in industry's hiring more slaves. In the Tredegar Steel Works in Richmond, Va., when white workers struck in the 1850 to protest the hiring of slaves, they were fired and more slaves hired. Thus, the slaves functioned both to reduce labor conditions in factories, and to obstruct labor organization in the south. Nevertheless, the white workers refused to make common cause with them, which would have involved a working class movement for the abolition of slavery. They could only envision structures of exclusion of free black workers.
7- There can be, in many cases, a time lag within this dialectic. For instance, the movements of the 1960s surprised the government (which was focused internationally on its post-war global hegemony) with their demands for justice, equality, democracy, and participation. Only by the 70s had the ruling class transformed itself to politically obstruct those movements through new forms of policing, control of the media, factory moves to low wage areas, educational emphases on careerism, a halt to desegregation, and a prison-industrial complex.
8- Allen himself did not pursue the forms of its persistence, contenting himself with having shown the connection between the control stratum and the "invention of a white race" as fundamental to colonial stability in Virginia. He shows how the shift from class identity to racial hierarchy was deployed throughout US history to maintain privileges for white workers. But it is important to include the specifics.
9- A socius can be understood as a group that coheres through a common sense of identity without seeing itself as a community, or with any degree of uniformity. It is its social identity that renders its members recognizable and identifiable to each other. The term preserves the notion of an amorphous population united around a common cultural idea with which it identifies. For instance, the idea of a "white race" has no independent existence outside of its ability to define itself through its racialization of non-white people. In that sense, white people are not who they are as white because their whiteness depends on their ability to racialize others. The "white socius" names the cultural group of people who identify with whiteness, and who culturally accept the myth of its being in some sense natural as well as supremacist.
10- Even what happened to Henry Lewis Gates on July 16, 2009, is a clear example of this. Gates had returned from a trip late at night, and found the front door of his house jammed. While trying to force it open, the police arrive. It didn't matter that Gates was in his own house, and identified himself as the owner of that residence, he was nevertheless arrested. The cop was white, and thus this black man could be charged with disorderly conduct even in the privacy of his own home, because he was black. The encounter was not one of law enforcement, but of white society preserving itself against an alien presence in the person of Gates. Gates is a distinguished Harvard professor, and thus far from the status of a worker. But the ethos and motivation of his arrest directly reflected that of a century and a half earlier. In 1866, after the Civil War and the ending of slavery, but before onset of Reconstruction, the federal government imposed what amounted to a Black Code on freed black people, requiring them to not only have a job, but sign a year's contract with a plantation employer or face arrest. (Foner,180ff)
11- European colonialism saw itself as white during its second wave, which began in the early 19th century. The first wave, during the 17th century, produced a system that gave rise to the invention of whiteness and race in the Virginia colonies. (Martinot) After the naturalization of this cultural concept by European naturalists in the 18th century, it became the form taken by European colonialists in African and Asia.
12- There is an analogy between the refusal of unions and city councils to act against the runaway shop movement, though it left them in some cases destitute, and the refusal of the government after the civil war to distribute land to the freed black laborers. It is the idea that though people labor on capital assets to produce greater value for those assets, whose overall effect is the development of the economy, the proceeds from that labor belongs to the owner of the assets. That ethos determines that capital values produced by 200 years of forced labor belongs to the landowner, and the value of factories in which people labored is out of reach of those laborers, though they created it. No principle of fairness exists that will give the laborer a claim on the value s/he creates. It is an extension of the ethos that gives priority to putting one's money to work over that of making a living by working. In a comparable manner, male domination is guaranteed by putting one's maleness to work socially. And white supremacy is guaranteed by putting one's whiteness to work socially. Both provide economic benefit over those who have no maleness or whiteness to put to work for themselves. Those others simply have their own labor to deploy, to take a job and work, in order to survive.
13- The Bush adminsitration actually imparted greater powerlessness on people than any previous president through war, violation of human rights, and curtailment of Constitutional civil liberties. Yet he faced no white populist upheaval because the terms of his autocracy were couched in defense of white society against attacks by people of color, whether metaphorized as Islamic or Arab, terrorist or simply alien and other. White people understood themselves as the constitutncy for which the government was taking responsibility in its paranoia.
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