THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO CAPITAL
Part 1
By James Miller
This essay argues that the social sciences taught in nearly all capitalist educational institutions—sociology, economics, political science, history, cultural anthropology, and philosophy—have been systematically distorted by the dominant social class to justify their rule. The journalists and propagandists who act in support of the capitalist ruling families seek to legitimize and inculcate myths and illusions that justify the domination of the master class. The social sciences have thus become “apologetic,” meaning that they now exist to garner support for the existing social regime. But the earlier scientific approaches to human society had their origins in ancient times as genuine attempts to systematize and spread genuine knowledge. More recently, since the 17th century, the social sciences have branched out into separate disciplines and for many decades have updated and sharpened their methods of investigation. When initially emerging in the period of the European enlightenment these social sciences took the form of philosophical and historical inquiries to advance the understanding of humanity’s origins, progress, and potentials. But by the 19th century a strictly objective analysis of social practices and beliefs had run into stiff opposition. The growing power and influence of the ruling capitalist class increasingly influenced the opinions of the investigators who, in the past, had been searching for verifiable objective explanations.
The wealthy property owners who gained political power in Europe and North America throughout the 17th and 18th centuries increasingly recognized that the masses of workers and farmers could pose a threat to their power as these toilers became aware of their exploited condition and their potential to resist. It would be helpful if the ruling rich could make the masses of workers and farmers believe that the rule of the economically dominant class was beneficial to all. For this, it became necessary to develop ideas that stressed the harmonious coexistence of wealthy families with the relatively impoverished. The rich, they reasoned, had gained social prominence through their ingenuity and energy, and were naturally destined to play a more prominent social and political role. In addition, by offering gainful employment to the poor, the big property owners provided the masses with opportunities to improve their lives. What’s more, many of the rich, due to their family heritage, had been educated in colleges and universities and possessed advanced knowledge. Naturally, education, whether obtained from institutions, or from self-study, enabled them to play a leadership role in creating a new nation. The main purpose of this essay is to trace the evolution of the main features of the philosophical and cultural beliefs and policies of the ruling class in the U.S.
Of course, propaganda alone had no social authority unless it were backed up by military and police power. Violent repression of mass resistance was not just a “final expedient,” but an ever-present threat. Engels explained in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:
But we have seen that a police force became also necessary to maintain order among the citizens. This public power of coercion exists in every state. It is not composed of armed men alone, but has also such objects as prisons and correction houses attached to it, that were unknown to gentilism. It may be very small, almost infinitesimal, in societies with feebly developed class antagonisms and in out of the way places, as was once the case in certain regions of the United States. But it increases in the same ratio in which the class antagonisms become more pronounced, and in which neighboring states become larger and more populous.
Universities in the colonial period were generally founded by churches to train ministers, or to educate the offspring of the wealthiest families among the colonists in manners, morals, philosophy, literature and history. Many of them modeled their curricula on the existing English church-sponsored institutions Cambridge and Oxford. The well-to-do families hired tutors for their young ones, so as to prepare them to get the most out of a university education. In this way the knowledge of Europe was transmitted to the rising generations in new world. This higher education helped to form the predominant moral and political outlook of the propertied leaders of the North American colonies.
In the period leading up to the Revolutionary War and the approach to the adoption of a constitution for the new nation, many of the political leaders were drawn into debates and controversies over legal, economic and moral questions. For the most part the proposals advocated in these debates were derived from principles inherited from Europe, but they had a practical purpose in a new continent: how to direct the efforts of the colonial population on a course that would lead to a strong and prosperous nation. This led to the long-lasting debate over what would serve the best interests of the population: free labor or slavery? The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the signal for this issue to be resolved in battle. And the war resulted in the abolition of slavery through the passage of the 13th Amendment.
Once having resolved the division of the republic over the question of slavery, the well-heeled manufacturers, merchants, landowners and bankers, together with their elected representatives in federal, state and local governments, had to come to grips with some very serious, long-term questions relating to their capacity to preserve their social and political domination. They were in the process of forging a capitalist class on a national scale, with the same national and international requirements as any European capitalist class: private ownership of productive land and factories, means of transport of goods, military defense, a common currency, rules of commerce and banking, a reliable system of weights and measures, and a system of laws, civil and criminal, and means of enforcement. Further, they needed a uniform policy for managing the rights and duties of the workers and farmers—the majority of the population—whose labor would be required to provide the necessities of life for all, as well as profit, rent and interest for the property owners. For most of these aims, simply building on the European traditions would suffice. The main question that remained unsolved in the 1870s was the fate of the ex-slaves.
The history of the United States involved many twists and turns from the time of the Pilgrims to the present stage of decline (dating from the late 1970s), but it was the period of the construction of the capitalist productive institutions and relations prior to the Civil War that was decisive for the formation of American capitalism and its ideology. The industrial progress gained in the free labor sector of the nation, which predominated in the North, increasingly demonstrated to all fair-minded observers that the future of the nation lay in the hands of these industrial pioneers—not in the hands of the slaveholders. In the 18th century the generation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could not have foreseen the immense achievements that lay ahead as capitalism grew and matured, nor could any of them have imagined what torrents of blood would be spilled during the process of forging the future.
Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond
But in order to create the optimal social and economic conditions for the unrestricted growth of capitalism on the North American continent, it had proved necessary to defeat the slaveowners control over the federal government, and allow free rein to capitalist growth on a national scale with continuing development of the free wage-labor system. But under conditions of free labor, working people were free to move about, change their occupations, and form associations to defend their interests. At the same time working people, as free citizens, developed the potential to form political parties, fight for voting rights, and strive for political power.
The policy of Radical Reconstruction adopted by the U.S. after the defeat of the Andrew Johnson’s “soft on slaveowners” policy was an initiative of the Northern victors under Ulysses S. Grant to ensure the definitive end of slaveowner power. Federal troops were stationed in the former states of the Confederacy to guarantee the rights of the non-slave-owning classes. But during this period of turbulent social change, there were many political initiatives to form a fighting alliance of former slaves with Southern wage-workers and farmers. These fights represented efforts by working people to expand the reach of their political power within the country and thus achieve a better life—higher pay, shorter working hours, safer working conditions, and time for self-development. And in order to gain these advances, they would need to make use of the freedoms enumerated in the US Constitution, especially the first amendment.
Radical Reconstruction left the former Confederate states occupied by federal troops, which gave some free space for the ex-slaves to organize themselves politically. But the big landowners, primarily former slaveowners, remained politically dominant through their control of the Democratic Party. The close election of 1876 was referred to the Supreme Court to decide who was the winner, which led to the “Compromise of 1877.” This decision was adopted by Congress, naming Republican Rutherford Hayes the winner over Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate. This choice embodied the agreement among the ruling stratum —bankers, industrialists, merchants and big landowners— to withdraw the federal troops while permitting the former Confederate states freedom to maintain what came to be known as the Jim Crow system, a form of rule based on exclusive government control by the “white race” and the division of the working people by race, placing the Black people in a subordinated status compared to the Caucasian wage workers, farmers and other plebeian elements.
Indoctrinating the population
Prior to the Civil War, the newspapers and books enjoyed by the growing literate population were primarily devoted to issues of interest to the economically dominant classes. To the degree that class bias was featured, it was mainly either pro-free labor or pro-slavery. And on both sides of this divide, there grew specialists in communication, journalism and propaganda, whether of the academic or the popular varieties. Apart from scientific and academic scholarship, there was a growth of popular literature devoted to satisfying the political or entertainment needs of the laboring masses who farmed the land, built the roads, rails and structures, dug the coal, spun the yarn or wove the fabrics. Ans as for journalism, news reporting was published that served the needs of the propertied classes and their close associates in politics, business and law.
Newspapers in the early 19th century newspapers were mainly published for the wealthy elites and their literate hangers-on. As Batya Ungar-Sargon writes in her book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy,
It’s no surprise that the press was antilabor; in 1829, New York’s newspapers existed for the political and business elites. If you were a well-to-do businessman, you were served by mercantile papers containing shipping schedules, wholesale prices, ads, and international news. There were also political papers, which reproduced full-length speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made by politics.
There was very little news available for the urban laboring people until 1833, when Benjamin Day, a New York printer, launched the first penny-paper, The Sun. Ungar-Sargon explains:
Day brought the scandals of the upper classes to the working poor, and he forced the conditions of the poor on the upper crust. He also sold help-wanted ads looking for cooks, maids, coachmen, and waiters, which meant that those searching for work and those searching for workers met in his pages. Once he had the attention of the employers as well as the employees, Day advocated vigorously for higher wages and shorter working hours. In 1834, he printed in full a manifesto entitled “Union Is Power,” written by a group of girls who went on strike at the Lowell Mill. And when New York’s seamstresses went on strike, they had his full support, too.
The growth of the factory system in the North in the early 19th century brought to the fore the harsh realities of the exploitation of wage labor, and led to the formation of unions as vehicles of workers’ efforts to protect their vital interests. In those days the class struggle was an everyday reality, known to all. Howard Zinn in A Peoples’ History of the United States explains:
Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Eleanor Flexner (A Century of Struggle) gives figures that suggest why: women’s daily average earnings in 1836 were less than 371⁄2 cents, and thousands earned 25 cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, “a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘moneyed aristocracy’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it.”
Farrell Dobbs, in Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years, describes the growing class battles in the antebellum years:
Experience gained through these isolated struggles led to recognition of the need for organizational coordination. Central labor bodies consisting of all local unions within a given city began to take shape. Some of the skilled crafts launched national formations embracing specific craft units located in various cities. Efforts then followed to create a national federation of all the unions in all the crafts.
… Parallel with this trend a broad campaign was opened in the mid-1820s to institute a ten-hour work day. Since the employers imposed exceedingly long hours of labor, there was great incentive for this struggle; and it was conducted militantly. The specific goal was attained in certain instances and at least some cut in hours was generally won.
At the same time the victory of the North in the Civil War was an enormous boost to capitalist expansion, both geographically in the North American continent, as well as in their capacity to expand all the human and material engines that served to amass enormous sums of wealth. As Farrell Dobbs writes in Revolutionary Continuity, Vol. I:
Giant trusts were formed by industrial and banking combines in moves to establish monopolies. This trend soon produced a bumper crop of multimillionaires who fattened on harsh exploitation of wage-labor and wanton depredation of national resources. These plutocrats became the real power behind the bourgeois-democratic governmental façade, and they dealt brutally with all who resisted their ruthless methods of coining superprofits.
… By 1877, radical reconstruction had gone down to bloody defeat, and not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered the worst setback in its history. The defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of the industrial ruling class, who were incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers.
As the tensions of the civil strife intensified, there was a tendency for white farmers and wageworkers in the South to feel more acutely the burden of living under the thumb of the ruthless aristocratic master class. There was no democracy for white workers and small farmers; the slavocracy did not allow any of the populations in its domain to challenge their rule. Thus whites with little or no property were an underprivileged class. As Keri Leigh Merritt explains (Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, p. 67):
Problems over white labor—the absence of full-time work, the lack of opportunities in general, and the inability of many workers to earn a living wage—created a potentially explosive society. Complete with large percentages of slaves and a sizable, disaffected poor white underclass, a constant state of anxiety engulfed much of the Deep South in the years preceding secession.
If these two classes ever banded together against their common oppressors—as they had before repeatedly throughout America’s short history—they threatened the fortunes, the power, and even the lives of the region’s masters.
Meanwhile, the 1873 crisis had precipitated mass discontent among workers and farmers throughout the nation. As Farrell Dobbs explains ibid.:
Beginning in 1873 the capitalist economy fell into the worst crisis experienced up to then in the United States. Millions lost their jobs and unemployment remained high for several years. Taking advantage of the social turmoil and demoralization created by depression conditions, the boss class proceeded to inflict reverses upon organized labor. Wages were cut, hours of work lengthened, and the trade unions, lacking a federation to coordinate defensive actions, were dealt one setback after another.
Against the conditions imposed upon them by the crisis, as well as by the harsh treatment they received at the hands of the bosses, the workers broke out in a wave of battles in 1877. Throughout the Eastern and Central states, thousands of railroad workers and their families, together with thousands of allied working people, fought massive battles for the rights of working people to earn a decent wage and to be able to enforce labor contracts. Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States, describes the impact of the first U.S. party of working people which occurred in the summer of 1877:
In St. Louis, itself, the Workingmen’s party called an open-air mass meeting to which five thousand people came. The party was clearly in the leadership of the strike. Speakers, excited by the crowd, became more militant: “. . . capital has changed liberty into serfdom, and we must fight or die.” They called for nationalization of the railroads, mines, and all industry.
At another huge meeting of the Workingmen’s party a black man spoke for those who worked on the steamboats and levees. He asked: “Will you stand to us regardless of color?” The crowd shouted back: “We will!” An executive committee was set up, and it called for a general strike of all branches of industry in St. Louis.
The birth of such a party, and what it might be able to achieve on behalf of its working-class members and supporters, produced a major sensation in the minds of the wealthy rulers—and not a pleasant one. Now they understood they had a “worker” problem on their hands (if they hadn’t already understood that before). The employers understood there would be a volatile political constituency within the mass of workers which would pose a serious problem for a long time to come. But they were confident that this problem could be placed under control, provided these troublesome elements were properly educated and guided by the wise counsel of their social superiors—teachers, journalists, politicians, historians, philosophers, and celebrities. (And, needless to say, those trouble-makers who failed to learn their proper place in the social pecking order could be dealt with using more “persuasive” means.)
The memorialization of the national trauma occasioned by the Civil War turned out to be a starting point for the construction of a powerful framework that the rulers could appropriate for their use as a weapon to divide the working class against itself. As David W. Blight explained in his book Race and Reunion:
Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a family had escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13–43 had died in the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as many soldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it.
Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers in countless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered to mourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, their skeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia. Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well before the war ended, both in towns on the home front and sometimes at the battlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monuments representing their dead, and so was born the ritual of “Decoration Day,” known eventually also as Memorial Day.
The “great compromise” of 1877, worked out by the top Democratic and Republican leaders, sealed the fate of African Americans and their agrarian and proletarian allies, not only in the Southern states but also, to a lesser degree, in the North as well. The capitalist ruling class, now dominant throughout the country, had learned from the experience of the Reconstruction process that they would be much better situated for the future if the races were divided, black against white, so as to weaken their class struggle of the masses against the propertied rulers. Great efforts were made to insure that “home rule” in the Southern states would be the established political condition, so that Black people would be denied their constitutional and civil rights. (“Home rule later was dubbed “states’ rights” so as to frame these policies as applicable to all states, not just those in the South). Thus racial antipathy, racist oppression and discrimination became a fundamental aspect of bourgeois ideology in the U.S., not because racism had become embedded in the popular consciousness, but because massive resources were devoted to building up the material and moral foundations of the oppressive Jim Crow system in the South, and to the deepening and perpetuation of the racial divisions within the working class. Thus the aim of the rulers was to weaken their class opponents through the promotion of racial divisions. Over time, as the workers learned how to fight for their rights, they increasingly understood the necessity of overcoming these divisions, and in the 1930s they promoted and practiced racial unity.
Once the capitalist families in the U.S. had achieved unchallenged political power, they maneuvered to build up the social structures that would prevent all rivals—especially the wage workers and family farmers—from challenging their prerogatives. They managed to convincingly promote themselves as the protectors of all rights, the friends of the poor and oppressed, the source of all social opportunities and benefits—in short, the best of all possible superintendents. In the present era, having direct control of the corporations that own the newspapers, social networks, and television media, as well as control over the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S., has been a big advantage in dominating the ideological culture. Decisive influence over the education systems is in their hands. Their political supporters exercise control over the content of textbooks used in primary and secondary schools, as well as over the education of the teachers. Much of this leverage depends on their ability to influence the university curricula. But we should not think that this control was, or is, exercised directly by the billionaires themselves, or by their capacity to enforce agreed-upon rules and regulations. Between the government and the institutions responsible for inculcating pro-capitalist ideology into the population there is a multitude of interconnecting institutions and processes. The needs of the ruling class are the foundation of all the mechanisms of mass influence. V.I. Lenin said, in State and Revolution, “the centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie is connected with these institutions by thousands of threads.”
But what were the aims of the capitalists as they surveyed the polyglot terrain of the national culture they were shepherding? Above all, they wished to have their fortunes protected, and to generate the ideal social conditions for the accumulation of wealth. This meant, among other things, taking measures against those elements of society who were likely to challenge their power and prerogatives. As owners of the means of production, the surplus wealth produced by the masses of workers and farmers accrued to them, while the amount of value created in the production process that was left to the laborers was just enough to support them and their families with little or nothing left over. Capitalism is not just a society based on exploitation; it is a society whose central purpose is the extraction of wealth from the laboring people for the benefit of the exploiters who rule over them. And this is why it is so critical for them that the working people be made to believe that the capitalists are their irreplaceable guardian angels. Without the job-givers, how can you get a job? With no job how can you survive?
The institutionalization of the Jim Crow system, which embraced a broad range of legal and social restrictions imposed on the African-American residents of the U.S. (more strictly enforced in the South than in the North), placed these “citizens” outside the protection of the 14th, 15th and 16th Amendments to the Constitution. While slavery was no longer legal, there persisted a widespread practice of temporarily enslaving Black workers, which came to be known as the convict lease system. Primarily institutionalized in the former states of the Confederacy, this was one of many discriminatory methods used to make use of unpaid labor in a Black skin that the former slavemasters believed was their natural birthright. Douglas Blackmon explains in his book, Slavery by Another Name:
By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.
Working people—in manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation, banking, and commerce—are the overwhelming majority of the population in the world, especially in the developed capitalist world. If there were democratic processes of government, the workers would have more votes than the capitalists, who are a tiny minority of the population. It is for this reason that the capitalists must have the power to decisively influence the political and economic beliefs of the population. The universities and other institutions of higher education, if they are to be useful for the capitalists—who created them in the first place—must provide reliable scientific education in physics, chemistry, agronomy, mathematics, and anything related to advancing the technology of production. These skills are vital for the further development of modern technology, the material base that the capitalists control in order to rake off the surplus value of production. As for the humanities: sociology, political science, economics, cultural anthropology, history and philosophy, their purpose is to mislead the working people about the basic foundations of human society and make them believe that they are living in a nation that is ruled by intelligent and magnanimous people who are dedicated to increasing the happiness of the majority of the population. Thus the humanities have become a mélange of myths and pseudoscientific doctrines that proclaim the superiority and perfectibility of capitalist institutions and traditions.
Above all, during the period of the consolidation of the modern capitalist regime after the Civil War, the leading bourgeois publicists and boosters needed to mold the political beliefs of the working people. One of the main institutions supporting this ideological conditioning is religion. Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” On the one hand, religion offers consolation for suffering by the ever-present vision of the “promised land.” The working people must suffer patiently while awaiting their “final reward.” To the degree that religion remains a vital force among working people—and the goal of the preachers is to make every effort to maintain that force—there is a persistent reluctance to struggle for a better life in this world. Nowadays religion is a greatly diminished force in the motivation of individual workers, but the ruling class in the U.S. persists in keeping up their tradition of honoring the Catholic pope (a symbol that links earthly power with heavenly authority), and emphasizing the importance of the religious beliefs and church observance of the leading politicians, especially the president of the U.S.
Throughout the period of Reconstruction and its aftermath, and the following rise of the “robber barons” (J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller) and the years of the growth of the labor movement, two visions of the meaning of the Civil War emerged and competed: the “reconciliationist” vision and the “emancipationist” vision. These visions, or idealizations, expressed in millions of speeches, magazine articles, journal entries, poems, songs and novels, contributed to the emergence of the national capitalist ideology, or belief system, sinking deep into the consciousness of millions of workers and farmers. In the end, it was the reconciliationist vision that ultimately prevailed for a century after the war. According to this perspective, the Civil War (the “war between the states,” as the white supremacists called it) had been a monstrous national tragedy that mistakenly divided a nation that, by its very nature, shared a common heritage and future. In this reactionary imagining the presence of an African American population simply disappears. Black Americans are reduced to a nonentity. As David Blight explains (ibid.):
In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race. But the story does not merely dead-end in the bleakness of the age of segregation; so much of the emancipationist vision persisted in American culture during the early twentieth century, upheld by blacks and a fledgling neo-abolitionist tradition, that it never died a permanent death on the landscape of Civil War memory. That persistence made the revival of the emancipationist memory of the war and the transformation of American society possible in the last third of the twentieth century.
As we should understand by now, the national political culture is sculpted and fine-tuned by the primary arbiters of culture—the powerful people in or near the dominant class who are in a position to determine which books are promoted in schools, universities and in bookstores, which celebrities get the most prestigious places on the stage, which songs are sung at the beginning of sporting events, which ideas are favored, and which ideas are out of bounds. Jim Crow meant the denial of rights, and much more for Black people living south of the Mason-Dixon line; and for Black people living in the North, discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and more. But while the ruling class extinguished the emancipationist vision from all the honored institutions of the United States, this vision nonetheless survived in the Black population and among the class-conscious workers, and was constantly renewed by outbursts of defiance and struggle from the lower orders which interrupted the national harmony during the decades after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This question was ultimately resolved by another revolution in social relations: the Civil Rights movement.
The Civil Rights movement, a mass upsurge of protests and mobilizations, based in the trade unions and community organizations representing Black Americans, necessitated attempts by the government of the capitalist rulers to settle the issues posed by the democratic demands of the civil rights advocates. but also required an adaptation of the national ideology to the new situation. Instead of being considered a nonentity, the Black population became a “valued and respected” component of the American people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 codified the gains of the movement, and at the same time placed limits and restrictions on the scope and depth of the legal changes that were authorized. These limits and restrictions reflected the unwillingness of the rulers to grant any more political rights than were absolutely necessary. After all, they still supported the “reconciliationist vision” and only took a step towards the “emancipationist vision” because they felt that, for them, it was the lesser evil.
But in spite of the resistance of the capitalists and their political parties, the Civil Rights legislation, a product of the strivings of the masses of workers and farmers, had created the foundation for further struggles to advance and enforce desegregation in schools and places of public access, wider voting rights, anti-discrimination policies in housing, company policies and law, affirmative action in workplaces and schools, etc. These political achievements were widely recognized, and were absorbed by the large majority of the population. Among the working masses there was a decline of racial division and bigotry, and a growth of interracial solidarity. Among the professional middle class there were efforts to support affirmative action in workplaces and colleges, to rewrite the history books, to inaugurate African-American Studies departments in universities, etc. Martin Luther King’s birthday was declared a national holiday in 1983. Thus the ideological climate of the entire country shifted towards an appreciation of harmony between the races.
But these changes were neither initiated nor appreciated by the ruling rich. The post-WW2 Democrats (aka Dixiecrats) and Republicans opposed the movement to overthrow Jim Crow segregation, and continued to back the status quo by placing obstacles in the path of civil rights fighters and painting these activists and their organizations as “communist,” “subversive” and anti-American. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972, instructed FBI agents to infiltrate and wreck the civil rights organizations and spread propaganda to defame and persecute the civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. Larry Seigle, in 50 Years of Covert Operations, writes:
What is known, however, makes it abundantly clear that the FBI's campaign of slander, frame-up, blackmail, and assassination against Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Black Panther Party, and other fighters for Black rights in the 1960s was not an aberration. It was the continuation of a course that began the day that the Roosevelt administration called on the FBI to go after "subversives.”
The conditions prevailing under the Jim Crow system had been an advantage to the profitability of the factories, mines, commercial enterprises, agribusinesses and banks utilized as engines to generate profits from the labor of the masses of U.S. workers of all races and nationalities. As owners of these businesses, they maintained wages and benefits as low as possible in order to maximize their profits. Wherever the working class is divided into factions that despise and disparage one another, workers won’t be able to successfully organize unions that can function effectively to strike and win higher wages and improved benefits. Every strike opens up the opportunity for non-striking workers to take the jobs of the strikers. It is important to understand that the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s were preceded by a series of changes within the workers’ movement that favored the unification of workers of all colors and nationalities. This unification generated actions of solidarity that prevented one group of workers to trample on the rights of another group by acting as strikebreakers. The Jim Crow segregation of the labor force that prevailed during the pre-WWI period began to breakdown during the strike waves of the 1930s. As Art Preis (Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO) explains:
All the schemes of the employers to divide the workers and smash their strikes failed. During the postwar strike wave in 1919, the employers had brought thousands of unwary Negro workers from the South to use as scab labor. The end of World War II, however, found 1,600,000 Negro workers in unions, primarily in steel, coal, automobiles and meat packing. A third of the delegates to the CIO United Packinghouse Workers convention were Negroes, and hundreds of thousands of Negro militants bolstered the picket lines.
… Particularly noteworthy was the role of the Negro workers in the Lackawanna strike. "No group played a more commendable role than the Negro workers," reported the March 8, 1941, Militant from Buffalo. "The lowest paid and the most oppressed of the Bethlehem workers, the Negro workers gave an unexampled demonstration of union courage and fighting qualities. Negro workers were in the forefront of every battle on the picket lines." Undoubtedly, their example helped to influence the Negro workers at River Rouge in the Ford strike a few weeks later.
The struggles of workers to overcome racial barriers in the 1930s laid the foundation for the struggle to overcome Jim Crow in the post-WW2 period. The power base of the Democratic Party was the Dixiecrat wing: a group of U.S. Senators, Congressmen and state-level politicians who were elected in states where African-Americans did not have the right to vote. These politicians were white supremacists and segregationists, and could not be won over by arguments. They utilized Ku Klux Klan violence and intimidation to stifle protest for a century — from the 1860s to the 1960s. The did not prosecute lynch mobs, and would not allow Blacks to serve on juries or testify in courts.
Nonetheless, decisive sectors of the ruling class and its political representatives recognized that clamping down harder on civil rights fighters would precipitate even broader and more destructive battles, so the lesser evil was to give in to the civil rights pressure— but without giving any more reforms than they absolutely had to. And they promoted federal legislation to accomplish this end.
After the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in 1865, the elements of the capitalist class—manufacturers, merchants, bankers, and large landowners—were coming to grips with a new, broader horizon of self-development. They were confronted with all the questions of how to best take advantage of the land mass under their control now that the slave power had been taken out of the equation. Would they try to offer the freed slaves jobs or farmland to sustain themselves? Or leave them on their own and let the chips fall where they may? But aside from this, the rulers, throughout the Reconstruction period and after, had to develop coordinated policies of limiting the growth of the potential power of the laboring classes as a prerequisite to preserving their own power.
The process of Radical Reconstruction failed to make significant progress in the provision of land because free land (in Sherman’s phrase, “40 acres and a mule”) would have provided the material foundation for the growth of a mass of free farmers. The rulers feared the emergence of a fighting alliance of workers and farmers, embracing the big majority of the population, which would be strong enough to effectively oppose the capitalists’ drive to obtain complete control over the nation’s highest levels of authority. The politicians in the federal government bickered over whether to limit the violent KKK-type thug attacks on the former slaves, and in the end did very little. They increasingly recognized that land grants to the freed slaves had the potential of undermining their own power. Black people with land would establish a stronger base for a unification of working farmers, both Black and white, as a unified fighting force. Radical Reconstruction was increasingly abandoned by the ruling classes North and South, as was the slogan “40 acres and a mule.”
As the Jim Crow system was strengthened in the 1880s and 90s the African American population struggled to keep alive the “emancipationist vision” of a good life for Black people in the United States as farmers, skilled workers, and small business operators. That became a limited reality for a very small portion of the Black population. At the same time, the big landowners in the South, together with the wealthiest propertied elements in the North, increasingly advanced their interests by means of the propaganda campaigns on the theme of “reunion of North and South.” In the late 19th century, there were multiple celebrations and much propaganda about the “war between the states” having been settled by a “great peace,” and a new paradise of brotherhood between the former quarreling sections of the nation. In all of this glorious celebrating, there was an end to any mention of to the “Negro problem.” This “problem” simply disappeared in all the public festivities of national import. David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion, states in his prologue to the book:
In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race. But the story does not merely dead-end in the bleakness of the age of segregation; so much of the emancipationist vision persisted in American culture during the early twentieth century, upheld by blacks and a fledgling neo-abolitionist tradition, that it never died a permanent death on the landscape of Civil War memory.
Blight’s comment here helps us understand an important feature of the self-serving mythologies promoted by the ruling rich: the transitory nature of all phases of social development. Progress in human solidarity is anathema to the class interests of the lords of capital. The fictions they promote are part of a system which relies on competition between capitalists and workers, between different ownership groups within the propertied classes, and between workers themselves, as they struggle to get employment and feed their families.
But all this competitiveness, while it pushes forward economic progress by spurring each one to maximize their economic activities, is nothing more than a passing phase in a world in which human solidarity and scientific thinking are growing but have yet to realize their full potential. The Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s showed not only that the discriminatory laws and traditions of Jim Crow could be defeated by mass mobilizations, but that millions of working people in the U.S.—of all races—were more than willing to struggle to put an end to the ugly and painful realities of racial oppression. During this period of history young people, workers, and farmers more and more realized that not only do the victims of racial oppression feel the pain, but the bigots undermine their own self-esteem by their brutalization of others. The Civil Rights revolution itself grew out of a higher level of consciousness that had evolved within the working classes in the U.S., as a result of the intensified labor battles that arose in the first half of the 20th century. Workers’ changing attitudes were rooted in the growth of trade-unionism and the recognition that they could gain better wages and working conditions if they refused to allow the bosses to divide the workers against each another on the basis of race, sex, nationality, or religion. Divide and rule is the key to success for the capitalists in the world where the meaning of success is defined by the possession of wealth.