The election of Barack Obama has been historical. Historical not simply because Barack Obama is the first African American president, but also because his election victory represents another page in the history of a struggle of a whole people who have aspired to freedom and equality. While no one is under the illusion that that struggle came to a close on November 4th, no one can say that the country has not changed forever.
Since its founding, America has moved from a government controlled by slave-owning white men who believed that possession of property determine civic identity. Excluded were women, non-white people, working-class people, and the poor. Moving far beyond that time and place, our country now is being led by an African American man who has called on all Americans, of all races, ethnicities, orientations and genders to unite and change the country.
What a change!
Some people have identified this change and progress as the unique identity that is America. Others point out that if there is a unique American identity, it is always in flux, highly contested, emergent and unsettled; and it remains divided by class. Progress isn't inevitable but struggle is, no matter where you live.
As we celebrate African American history month, we celebrate a victory by one main branch of the struggle, led by a people for fighting for their freedom and joined by all people who fight for equality and justice.
The onset of the current financial and economic crisis has taught us that the struggle is far from over. As Political Affairs publisher Joe Sims points out in his article for this issue, 'The End of Neo-Liberalism and Bush's Last Scam: How Racism Sparked the Financial Crisis,' the way in which, in its drive to recover from a declining rate of profit, finance capital lured millions of American families, among whom disproportionately were African Americans and Latinos, into shady 'subprime' mortgages. Working families of color were especially entrapped in a cycle of debt and foreclosure that has cost them about $200 billion in lost property, writes Sims.
This is how racism led to the collapse of the financial markets and put/drove capitalism into quite possibly its deepest global crisis since the Great Depression. Today, with the collapse of the Republican Party as a national party and the rejection of free-market fundamentalism, an ideology which created the framework for and justified the depredations of finance capital, a breach has occurred, a vacuum which new ideas or remedies have yet filled. Political Affairs pledges to wade bravely into this breach in 2009, beginning with the present issue, which includes a stimulating discussion with PA contributor John Case on 'Depression Economics and Socialist Transition.'
Let's Talk About Capitalism
Super-exploitation on the basis of race, the project at the core of finance capital's housing scheme, as Sims explains it, is nothing new to capitalism. Scholars like Victor Perlo, for example, have calculated the impact of the wage gap by/according to race and ethnicity, on communities of color. In his books Super Profits and Crises and The Economics of Racism, Perlo presented carefully-collected data showing how corporate America adds to its bottom line by means of racist practices in hiring, wages and promotion, “red-line” housing policies, limiting access to credit, and so on.
As the late Communist Party Chair Henry Winston argued in his book Strategy for a Black Agenda, capitalism uses racism to fragment working-class unity and divert anger and political struggle away from the ruling class. In addition to promoting racist media imagery and hostile personal feelings, capitalism over time has systematically created different levels of wealth and economic condition based on race. For capitalists, economic segmentation has the added benefit of producing additional profit. Notably, wage differentials based on gender produce a similar effect and share a similar cultural dynamic with differentials based on race. In addition, the 'triple oppression' of women workers of color has been well documented.
Economic segmentation by race persists. In addition to Sims' article, a recent study by the Journal of Political Economy instructively reveals the ongoing 'role of racial prejudice in the wage gap between whites and Blacks in the US,' as reported by . Over the course of his or her lifetime, the study finds, a Black worker could expect to lose up to $115,000 in wages due to the racial wage gap. With 16 million African Americans in the workforce today, over the course of decades in the job market the total sum of lost wages is staggering.
While the authors of the study conclude that only about one-quarter of this wage gap is due to prejudice, the study fails to calculate the systemic nature of the racial wage gap apart from what they have described as caused by 'prejudice,' or to estimate how much it is related to historical factors that arose from racially-motivated inequalities. Nor does the study seem to take into account the higher likelihood of more and longer periods of unemployment for African American workers (see, for example, the vastly disproportionate loss of jobs by African Americans in manufacturing between December 2007 and December 2008, according to New York Times).
In an otherwise useful report, the Journal of Political Economy study effectively promotes a false distinction between racial prejudice, which is usually defined in terms of the habits, feelings or perceived experiences of individuals, and racism as a systemic process or set of historical circumstances and social practices that are linked to, but transcend, individual feelings.
The authors argue that aside from prejudice, wage differentials are caused by the 'choice' of where one lives or different levels of education, failing to talk about the obvious manufactured disparities and historical discrepancies in these factors. For example, the authors reveal, with little comment, that an African American in Mississippi will likely experience a higher racial wage gap than an African American in Wisconsin.
Further, the authors leave aside an analysis of labor union membership as a factor in dramatically reducing or eliminating the racial wage gap. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that union membership on the whole closed the wage gap by more than $200 per week, or more than $10,000 per year, for African Americans in 2007.
Because the authors of the study on the racial wage gap say that geographical location is a factor, it is worth noting that geography also plays a role in the likelihood of union membership. Some states, especially in the Southern US, have laws making large-scale union organization virtually impossible, and in most such areas there is likely to be at least some historical link between the persistence of racial prejudice and anti-union laws.
To use the 'location' example cited by the authors of the Journal of Political Economy study, Mississippi is a so-called right-to-work state with laws that make union organizing extremely difficult, while Wisconsin has a far higher union density and is generally more labor-friendly. Anti-unions laws in Mississippi (and other Southern and Western states) were not written just because the authors of those laws hated unions. In the case of Mississippi, they were written because the authors of its 1890 'right-to-work' state constitutional amendment feared that African Americans, who comprised a large, super-exploited segment of the state's working population, might join with other working-class people to change the balance of power. Thus, there are historical and social factors, beyond personal prejudices, that link the racial wage gap to the union membership gap.
Who benefits from the racial wage gap?
The savings from the racial wage gap or, as Winston and Perlo would call it, super-exploitation, is accumulated by employers, business owners and large landowners – in a word, capitalists. While it is true for some white workers, higher incomes have produced sustained wealth gap (through access to easier credit, better public services, homeownership and equity), on the whole employers are the ones who materially benefit most from the promotion of racial divisions, prejudices, stereotypes and racially-determined access to income and wealth. In fact, the racism as inherent in this racial income and wealth gap is necessary for capitalists to offset what Marx saw as the capitalism's general tendency to see the rate of profit fall. Without racism (and other means of increasing exploitation), profits would erode.
For Henry Winston, the immediate solution to this contradiction lay in the struggle for democracy and the unity of all workers, the building of the labor movement to improve everyone's standard of living on an equal basis, and special concern for the impact of historical and contemporary systematic racism on communities of color. The long-term solution would be to change the system altogether, he pointed out. Perlo demonstrated, for his part, that the racial wealth gap did not in fact translate into greater power or significantly increased status for white workers as a whole. He showed that in places where racial divisions were strongest, labor unions had the least influence, poverty for all groups was highest, and access to quality education, health care, or improved economic opportunities was the lowest.
The general economic numbers today bear these facts out. As Sims reveals in his article, worker productivity has climbed steadily over the last decades while wages have remained stagnant. Further, the general timeline of the stagnation of wages coincides with the rise of the ultra right as the dominant political force in the US as well as a general decline in the density and influence of labor. These facts reveal several things: primarily, the necessity for capitalism to increase exploitation in order to maintain a sustainable rate of profit; also, the exploitative and anti-democratic fundamentals of the ultra-right ideology that justifies exploitation; and finally, the necessity of strengthening the labor movement on a multi-racial, multiethnic, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic character.
This basic systemic flaw in capitalism, so starkly exposed by racially motivated super-exploitation, is what haunts capitalists about the specter of communism. This apparition is so horrifying because it reveals the basic contradiction between democracy and exploitation, equality and profit, between humanism and a callous disregard for human life. That is why we at Political Affairs fully agree with Winston and promote the struggle for democracy, because it is at its heart the struggle for the unity of the whole working class, and its fight to increase its organization, improve its economic condition, and build its political power. Communists embrace cultural difference, support full equality, and insist on the elimination of prejudices and unequal social practices. We join with all who put the value of human beings before the bottom line or other narrow ends.
Labor's historic worker-to-worker struggle against racism in the 2008 election was a hopeful, desperate sign that things may be finally turning a corner. If the net results of that electoral effort are a marked improvement in the ability of workers to join unions (with the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act), and they can now gain affordable and universal access to health care, and win equal access to quality education (following the program Ben Sears carefully elaborates in his article, 'Needed: A New Deal for Schools'), it will be a big victory indeed. If the fruits of our labor are not squandered on costly military ventures overseas, and if we succeed in putting the economy on a sound footing again by building a new renewable energy industry that prevents climate catastrophe, then it just might be possible to say that indeed November 4th saw the beginning of “the change we need.”
