New Southern Strategy — 1 — Death of the New Deal and Rise of a New Labor-Black Alliance

February 2, 2008

“There is no evil that has inflicted more pain and suffering than the
evil of racism in our country… We have a special responsibility to
fight this evil… by educating those who won’t vote for Barack Obama
because he is Black.” With these words Richard Trumpka,
Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO and ex-president of the United
Mineworkers of America, opened the National Convention of the United
Steelworkers of America in Las Vegas, June 30-July 3, to a standing
ovation. In that same venue, USW President Leo Girard declared that
“Impoverished workers in the developing world are as much our brothers
and sisters as the men and women who brought our union to life.”

The Democratic Primary season was marked by grave warnings that a
Barack Obama candidacy would jeopardize the Democractic Party’s
ability to win against John McCain. ‘Safer.’ the pundit logic went,’to
avoid the elephant in the room.’ What this line really argued was that
an Obama candidacy was doomed because working-class whites are
irremediably racist, and that Democratic strategists needed to accept
that ‘reality’. It goes without saying that many of those who pushed
this argument are sincere Democrats who wish a more progressive
Democratic agenda. But it was WEB DuBois, speaking 75 years ago in his
landmark ‘Black Reconstruction,’ who pointed out that the only robust
progressivism of US history has been that founded on an alliance of
white and Black Labor.

The reason is not difficult to grasp. Democracy, DuBois said, rests on
the rights of Labor, whose ability to fight for its agenda- to fight
for those things which are important to working people- is rooted in
the alliance between white workers and that ‘basic majority of workers
who are Black, Brown and Yellow.’ Democracy is not a neutral entity,
the ability to vote or speak one’s mind. It is the ability to organize
for an agenda, and in the end, there are but two agendas for this
country: the Corporate agenda, in which Corporate America reaps
enormous profits, and organizes the rest of us to make that happen, at
our own and our children’s expense; and the workingclass agenda, in
which society’s resources are used to benefit all - if need be, at the
expense of Corporate America. Corporate America does not need
democracy - it runs the country. It is Labor that needs democracy,
because it is the working people of this country, of all races, whose
standard of living have taken a relentless beating these last thirty
years, and who need the space and the means democracy guarantees to
rebuild and relaunch their movement for pressing change.

The eight years of Bush-style Reaganism especially have shown that the
agenda of this country’s working people and the agenda of its
corporations could not be farther apart. For Corporate America, the
agenda is war: securing the Mideast oil fields by occupying Iraq, Iran
and Afghanistan; or, alternatively, turning the Western Hemispere into
a huge biofuel dump, an armed camp from which to yet again attempt to conquer the world.

Total expenses for the Iraq war are over $2 trillion, in an economy
which produces $8 trillion a year in net wealth. This enormous drain precludes National Health Care. It precludes fighting global warming. It precludes legislation that would make it easier to join a union. The minimum wage is outrageously low, while public assistance to the armies of underpaid workers - absolutely necessary to many folks’ survival - is insufficient, and substitutes taxpayers’ dollars for what should be the employer’s responsibility to pay a living wage.

The working-class agenda, on the other hand, is an agenda of peace. It
is an agenda whose highest priorities are health care for all, quality
public education for all, an end to poverty, quality housing, cultural
access. It is an agenda in which government has the resources to
invest in these programs. War cannot co-exist with this agenda. The
two priorities - war and national development - are each too vast to
share resources. We can finance one or the other, but not both. Orrin
Hatch, the right-wing Senator from Utah, in the wake of the 9–11
bombings, said ‘anyone who thinks we should be spending money on
health care and education instead of national security is crazy.’ Now,
after seven years of war which have killed tens of thousands and
plunged us into a super-recession, it is time to turn that equation
around: anyone who thinks we should fund wars across the globe rather
than our children’s health and development is not only crazy, but
criminal.

Critical to winning the working-class agenda is a vigorous fight against racism. This is a development with deep repercussions for US society: for the first time in history, the struggle of working people for a better future can only be won in the context of a vigorous antiracist struggle. This is not to say that whites in the US have not fought racism before. Among white workers, the fight against racism has deep roots. In the Civil War, the Amalgamated Iron Workers Union virtually ceased to exist after 1861 as its members enlisted en masse in the Federal army, and the state of West Virginia exists today because the miners of western Virginia rebelled when their state legislature voted to join the Confederacy. Black-white unity was a hallmark of the CIO approach to industrial unionism in the 1920s-1940s, and among the TUUL unions before that (read: Hosea Hudson’s autobiography, ‘Black Worker in the Deep South,’ or Robin Kelley’s ‘Hammer and Hoe’). The Civil Rights movement of the1950s-1960s actively recruited, and found fertile ground, in its call for a Black-white front against segregation.

DuBois points out that even in its more developed second phase, the Civil War was not a fight against racism, but an alliance of anti-racists and racists united in their opposition to slavery. To the Northern capitalists who dominated that alliance, Black citizenship was the inevitable ‘price’ for the destruction of the Slave Power. The South was a de facto British colony. The flow of raw materials to Britain, and the river of manufactured goods from Britain to the South, thwarted any effort to develop Northern industry into a world power. The South by secession had denied the United States the labor
of 4 million Black Americans- the heart of the national economy. The South had to be forced into a national fold. The race riots of 1863 made clear to the Northern industrialists the need to arm Southern Black folk to win the war (DuBois estimates 40% of the Federal army in 1863–1865 was Black). Then, too, the need to forcibly deconstruct Southern society required new social protagonists: the Southern Black worker and the Southern poor white, whose unity propelled the Reconstruction.

The support Southern working folk, Black and white, had from the white capitalists of the North was purely tactical. The very power of the anti-racist majority that took shape in the Reconstruction South so frightened burgeoning Northern capital that within ten years of initiating the Reconstruction that same Northern capital orchestrated a coup to end it.

The Labor Movement of the 1930s-1940s, the political backbone of
Roosevelt’s New Deal, was founded on Labor’s commitment to the
alliance of Black and white workers. The power of that alliance can be
measured in the fact that as late as the 1970s, the Democratic Party
could count on a white workingclass plurality in the Deep South to
help propel Jimmy Carter to the Presidency. Yet the shift in the
Democratic Party’s strategic alliances in the Cold War 1950s
diminished the Party’s commitment to a Black-white workingclass
alliance even as the Party moved to absorb the Civil Rights movement.
In the place of a national strategy at least partially founded on the
necessity of an alliance between Black and white Labor, the Democrats
substituted the theory of ‘communities’, a kind of political ‘separate
but equal’. At the same time McCarthyism, coupled with Johnson’s
‘Great Society’, devastated the Labor Movement while promising white
workers a share of the benefits of imperialism abroad in exchange for
tacit acceptance of a racist, imperialist corporate agenda. This
carrot and stick approach blocked the forward movement of progressive
Labor and indeed ushered in decades of political retreat.

Today, Corporate America is no longer able to realistically promise anything to the workingclass of this country, white or Black, except longer hours, less pay, harsher conditions, a worse life. The entire 1980s were predicated on the idea that the Cold War quid pro quo was no longer economically feasible nor politically profitable to the US corporate class. And while the Reaganites inside and outside the Republican Party dreamed of a new US corporate world hegemony following the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War, that simplistic vision has not panned out. What began at the doors of Stalingrad in 1943- the breakup of the colonial world- has progressed to a point in which the rest of humanity cannot be bullied around. There can be no more Keynesianism or ‘Great Society’ or whatever else one wishes to call it. Today, there are but two choices: a new New Deal, based on anti-racist unity; and fascist barbarism, based on the idea that ‘we’- be that we Americans, whites, or some other unholy concoction of rightwing propaganda- have ‘rights’ deniable to others, whether the right to feed our children, the right to educate them, the right to take them to a doctor, the right to put a roof over their
head.

Charles Sumner, Senator and Abolitionist, on 5 February 1866, with the smoke of war still shrouding the Southland, stood before a packed Congress to demand the Black vote. ‘Twice,’ he declared, ‘necessity has spoken to us, insisting: first, that the slaves should be declared free; and secondly, that muskets should be put into their hands for the common defense. …Reason, humanity, justice were powerless in this behalf; but necessity was irresistible.’

Necessity speaks again, and urgently, today. This country cannot survive another four years of Reaganism. Labor knows this. Labor has the leadership, the organization and the numbers to carry the antiracist struggle into the very heart of our society, and carry the day. Barack Obama’s candidacy, far from an exceptional event in human history, is an indication that the people of this country are indeed in step with the great forces of history.