Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically

by David Gilbert, J. Sakai

A sober examination of the historical role of the white working class and its place in the US imperialist system. With suggestions for the possibilities of developing this class into a revolutionary class as part of a broad social movement. Includes commentary from Settlers author J Sakai. Gilbert was a member of both SDS, and the Weather Underground.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, United States

72 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 1984

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

David Gilbert is an American radical leftist organizer and activist who is currently imprisoned at Auburn Correctional Facility. Gilbert was a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of the Weather Underground Organization. After about ten years underground, he was arrested in October 1981, along with members of the Black Liberation Army and other radicals including Kathy Boudin, his partner and mother of Chesa Boudin. The details of his arrest are included in the entry on Kathy Boudin in the section entitled "1981 Brinks Robbery." He and she both participated in that robbery and were sent to prison for their part in the resulting murders of Nyack police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady and Brinks guard Peter Paige. (In 2004 the US Post Office in Nyack was renamed in honor of the slain men.)

Reviews

[Reid tries to read · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short essay analyzes 3 books and then the 1960s as a whole to help understand white working class racism through a materialist perspective

1. Theodor Allen’s White Supremacy In The U.S.; Slavery And The Origins Of Racism
This book posits that racism was first cultivated within England’s Virginia colonies in the Americas to create a division between white and black laborers, and thus have the white laborers police the black ones. Up until the 1680s, white “involuntary servants” (who were essentially enslaved) and black slaves often intermarried, escaped, and rebelled together. As the plantation system began growing and developing faster, servants were needed to work longer (fixed-servitude had originally been a 7 year requirement), so perpetual slavery became more attractive and efficient. This slavery was imposed on black people instead of white people, but why?
Servant rebellions had threatened the ruling planter class as a whole. The biggest of these was Bacon’s rebellion, where black and white people fought side by side to abolish slavery (what Allen fails to mention is that they were also fighting for increased support in exterminating Indians and stealing their lands). To prevent more rebellions from taking place a series of laws were pushed through in the late 1600s to separate and alienate black people from white people. In 1661 a Virginia law imposed twice the penalty time for escaped English indentured servants who ran away together with African life-time servants. Soon, white women were penalized if they had children with African men. White slaves were given privileges not afforded to black slaves, like exempting white women from field work while, simultaneously, requiring black children as young as 12 labor in the fields (white children did not have to labor until they were 14). In 1680, black people were forbidden from bearing arms, and it was made legal to kill an escaped black man if they “resisted recapture''.
By 1705 the distinction between white and black servants became solidified: black slaves would be held in lifelong bondage while white servants only were held for 5 years while also being granted more legal protections than the slaves.

“ Quite simply, the poor whites were needed and used as a force to suppress the main labor force: the African chattel slaves. The poor white men constituted the rank and file of the militias and later (beginning in 1727) the slave patrols. They were given added benefits, such as tax exemptions to do so. By 1705, after Blacks had been stripped of the legal right to self-defense, the white bond servant was given a musket upon completion of servitude. There was such a clear and conscious strategy that by 1698 there were even “deficiency laws” that required the plantation owners to maintain a certain ratio of white to African servants” (p. 3)

2. W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction
Black Reconstruction posits two important arguments:
1. The Union/Lincoln didn’t free the slaves; the slaves essentially freed themselves. They did this by escaping their plantations en masse, depleting the South of much of its economic power, and by volunteering to fight for the Union army (200,000 freed slaves ended up fighting in the war at a point when the North’s desire to fight was waning).
2. The period of Reconstruction was an era of increased black role in governance, as well as important democratic reform that brought about things like free public education, public works projects, and advances in women’s rights. But this period of egalitarian advancement was crushed by a systemic campaign of terror that the North turned a blind eye to.

In the pre-war period, 7% of white Southerners owned 75% of the slaves, while 70% of white Southerners owned no slaves at all. Yet these slaveless poor whites essentially agreed to police the slaves despite the fact that slavery itself was a net-negative to their material interests, because slave laborers greatly undercut their own wages. So why did they agree to do this? For one thing many poor whites were provided with non-laboring work directly related to the slave economy (i.e they could be overseers, slave drivers, members of slave patrols, etc.). Poor whites also developed a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” mentality, where they did not consider themselves laborers but rather someone who was on the path to owning their own slaves. This mentality was born out of the fact that around ¼ of southern whites were petty bourgeois or small-scale slave owners.
In the North the working class was considerably racist towards freed black people, and therefore there were relatively no pro-abolition strains within the Northern labor movement. However, Northern working class whites did oppose the expansion of slavery, which if it came to the North it would undercut their own wages, and if it went out west it would monopolize the “free” land they so greatly coveted. Even the poorest of white workers, the European immigrants, despised black people due to the fact that the bottom layer of white labor felt from black people for jobs most intensely, and they therefore blamed black people for their low wages. An example of racism from immigrants was the Irish “anti-draft” riots, which often turned into murderous riots against local black populations.
After the civil war a “dictatorship of labor” formed in the South. White and black laborers had an interest in acquiring the land formerly controlled by the slave owning class, but an alliance between white and black laborers against the planter class never materialized. Du Bois gives 5 reasons why:
1. Poor whites wanted to stop poor blacks from having access to the better available land. They opposed people from having ownership of the lands they worked on because the freed slaves would then be given the best plantation lands
2. Poor whites believed the planter class controlled the black vote, and would therefore be used to politically outmaneuver poor white’s class aspirations
3. Petty bourgeois whites wanted to keep black labor cheap
4. White labor did not want freed black people to be able to compete with them for jobs
5. Although white labor was given low wages, they were compensated for this with social status such as access to better public areas, schools, etc; had police recruited from their ranks; were given better treatment in the court system; etc.

Another factor was the fact that the main power backing Reconstruction, the Union army, was primarily a tool of Northern capital. Although Northern capital definitely was determined to break the national power of the Southern Planter class, it saw no benefits in granting control of private property (or allowing for the liquidation of private property as a whole) to black people. It is therefore no surprise that, by 1868, the Union army had forced all the freed slaves off the plantation lands they had been communally working on.

“Black Reconstruction was also defeated with the complicity of Northern capital which was sealed with the withdrawal of Union troops in 1877. The defeat of Reconstruction meant that the color line had been used to establish a new dictatorship of property in the South. For Black labor, this meant a move back toward slavery in the form of sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and violent repression. For white labor, their active support of the “color caste” (white supremacy) immeasurably strengthened the power of capital, which ruled over them.”(p. 9)

3. J. Sakai’s Settlers
Settlers covers the entirety of U.S. history, but Looking At The White Working Class Historically focuses mainly on Settlers coverage of the 1930s. Sakai’s general view of American history is that white Americans have mainly benefitted from the oppression of peoples from the Third World. In the 1930s, Sakai argues America’s various European immigrants were inducted into the mass of what he calls ‘white Amerika’, which is essentially America’s settler mass which have privileges that anyone not allowed into this settler “class” (although by definition this is not a class but a subset of a class) do not. Throughout the 1930s these settlers were brought into the American imperial machine; while America began building its hegemonic dominance abroad, the job of the white working class domestically was to serve imperialism at home while supplying themselves as cannon fodder for America’s war machine. To serve imperialism domestically the government, through FDR’s New Deal, was allowed to regulate trade unions and ensure their loyalty to imperialism.
A problem arose due to the fact that black labor had become integral to 5 key industries by the 1930s (Automotive, steel, meat packing, coal, and railroads). Therefore, powerful unions like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) had to integrate black laborers into their unions to ensure pro-imperialist union control over major industrial sectors. So, in areas where black labor was strong they were integrated into white unions under white leadership, and in areas where black labor was weak they were segregated from the white unions. Unions like the CIO then gave better contracts and more desirable jobs to white workers over black ones.
Sakai argues that ”Those expansionist years of 1945-1965... saw the final promotion of the white proletariat. This was an en masse promotion so profound that it eliminated not only consciousness, but the class itself.” (Settlers, p.147). In essence white supremacy has choked out any international class consciousness from white workers.

Key takeaways:
“the great value of the Ted Allen essays (is that they) show how white supremacy was a conscious construction by the ruling class under specific historical conditions. This implies that, under different historical conditions, there also can be a conscious deconstruction by oppressed nations, women, and the working class” (p. 12)

“we must guard against the mechanical notion that economic decline will in itself lessen racism. The lessons from DuBois’ description of the “anti-draft” riots of the 1860’s (as well as our experience over the last 20 years) shows the opposite to be true. Under economic pressure, the spontaneous tendency is to fight harder for white supremacy. While the absolute value of privilege might decrease, the relative value is usually increasing as Third World people abroad and within the U.S. bear the worst hardships of the crisis. The white workers closest to the level of Third World workers can be the most virulent and violent in fighting for white supremacy.” (p. 12)

”Imperialism in ascendancy has been able to offer them more bread and butter than the abstraction of international solidarity. But a more fundamental interest could emerge in a situation where imperialism in crisis can’t deliver and where the possibility of replacing imperialism with a more humane system becomes tangible.” (p.12)

“the women’s movement and the social movements, to be revolutionary, must relate to racism, national liberation, and Third World leadership. But we should add that, as with the youth movement, each should be looking for ways to extend its base into the working class on an anti-racist and pro-women’s liberation basis” (p. 16)

“Peace, ecology, the homeless, health care, education all speak to important pieces that express the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of the whole system. Of course these movements have been, almost by definition, reformist. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be under all circumstances: e.g., 1) a deeper crisis in imperialism where it has less cushion from which to offer reforms, 2) a situation where revolutionary alternatives are strong enough to be tangible, 3) a political leadership that pushes these movements to ally with national liberation, promote women’s liberation, and deepen their class base, while at the same time drawing out the connections among the different social movements into a more coherent and overall critique of the whole system. Under such circumstances and leadership, the social movements could not only involve far more white working class people in anti-systemic struggles, but would also serve to redefine and revitalize class issues and class struggle itself.” (p. 16)

“A key factor for whites is the tangibility of a revolutionary alternative as opposed to the more immediate relative privileges that imperialism has had to offer. In this regard we have no map of what the future will bring. The experience of the 60’s does offer some possible lessons for when the system is under stress. 1) Anti- imperialist politics are more important than initial class composition. 2) Culture, especially with ties to Third World people, can be an important force for building progressive cross-class movements. 3) In seeking to extend such movements, revolutionaries should look for intersection points of white working class interests with the advance of national liberation, such as the draft. 4) Women’s liberation must play a central role in all movements we build. 5) The various social movements, if we can fight for an alliance with the national liberation and the presence of women’s politics and leadership, can be important arenas for extending base to include working class people, mutually redefine class and social issues, and make the connections to an overall anti- systemic perspective.” (p. 17)

[sube · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introductory work about the white working class in the us; has some useful points about allen, du bois, and settlers - who are each summarised and then interpreted - as well as the place of the experience of the 60s radical movement, RYM et al.