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From Socialist Worker, No. 84, June 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE MASS VIOLENCE that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King is the most appropriate reception for the publication of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Bantam Books, 12s. 6d.) set up by President Johnson to investigate the “causes” of last year’s negro uprisings.
A committee of the American ruling class such as this, packed with sociologists and sub-committees of businessmen, is faced with the problem of reconciling the supremacy of American capitalism with the existence of the human degradation, poverty and racialism in its midst.
The Commission achieves this reconciliation to its own satisfaction through the definition of the problems of race and poverty as the personal responsibility of all American citizens – “the shame of OUR cities” “the crisis of OUR nation” for which we, as potential white racialists, all of us, are responsible.
The logic of this is the emphasis on racialism as the basic cause of negro unemployment and poverty. “White racialism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” (p. 203)
Even within this context of emphasising the role of race prejudice, there is no attempt – and nor can there be without challenging the legitimacy of the capitalist system – to seek out the role of racialism in the exploitation of the working class generally.
This inadequacy shows up most clearly in the report’s almost incoherent potted history of negro resistance since slavery. The removal of the vote from the negro and the imposition of Jim Crow in the 1890s. for example, is seen totally as a question of white racialism.
The class unity of negro and white agricultural workers in the agrarian radical movement of the 1890s against the big southern landowners is totally ignored as is the imposition of Jim Crow and the disfranchisement of the negro as part of a direct political campaign by the land owners to direct the impending class warfare into racial channels and to (successfully) convince the poor white that his enemy was the negro not the southern ruling class.
The most useful part of the report is its statistics. Collectively they shatter the myth of negro improvement in economic and social conditions. The gap between the average white and negro income per family widened from $2,174 in 1947 to $3,036 in 1966 (at 1965 price levels).
These figures can be supplemented by others from the manpower report to the president (US Department of Labor 1967) which shows that during 1959–64 the US National Consumer Price Index rose by 8 per cent. Total US family income during that period rose 8.6 per cent but on examining the the actual distribution we find that for the poor and mainly negro areas of Cleveland for example, family income over the same period rose by 6.5 per cent, that is slower than the rise in prices, but for the prosperous white suburbs of the city it rose 16.5 per cent.
Similarly with rents. The average weekly rent in South Los Angeles (the mainly negro poor area) rose from $69 in I960 to $77 in 1965, while in east Los Angeles rents rose over the same period from $63 to $75. These figures are only a small sample of the data on poverty and inequality provided bv the report.
The implication that a solution to the problem of the emancipation of the negro can only be seen as a problem of the emancipation of the working class as a whole and not as a question of a “ massive national effort” is nowhere drawn in the report. Measurement of attitudes is statistically often meaningless, but what evidence there is goes against the assumption that is embodied in the report that white racialism is still the root cause of the poverty of the negro ghetto.
In a survey of attitudes on housing segregation from 1942 to 1963 the percentage of respondents in opinion polls favourable to housing integration increased from 35 per cent of whites in 1942 to 51 per cent in 1956 and 64 per cent in 1963 (source Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences).
Yet according to the report, housing segregation is increasing. The report shows that during 1940–1950, 109 major cities increased their degree of segregation and from 1950 to 1960, 83 of the most segregated of these increased still further.
Similarly, opinion polls show increased acceptance of school integration yet in 15 northern cities the Civil Rights Commission found last year that during 1950 to 1965 school segregation had increased.
White racialism is no longer important as a cause of the ghetto. It is rather the vicious circle of poverty, insecurity, poor educational performance and low income which faces the working class as a whole and thus faces the negro as a worker. It certainly does not face the prosperous “black bourgeoise” which says “cool it” whenever the working-class negro takes to the streets.
Because the problem is not seen as a capitalist one, the Commission can convince itself that it is making bold new recommendations when in fact it is advocating more of the same chaos and inactivity that is already embedded in the so-called “war on poverty.” The report points out that in 1966 only a third of the people below the US poverty line received social security payments. It also admits that vast amounts of federal money allocated to the war on poverty simply fail to reach their destination.
In Detroit last year federal funds for retraining unemployed reached under half of the unemployed. In Newark, New Jersey, federal funds for retraining programmes reach less than 20 per cent of the unemployed. Yet all the report can do is to call for the creation of three million new jobs through a simple mechanism of tax incentives to business, and to retrain the unemployed to fill them by coordinating and revitalising the hotchpotch of programmes and organisations created by the war on poverty.
There is no attempt to evaluate the success of this. Facts like the high drop-out rate from youth unemployed training programmes such as the neighbourhood youth corps, or the complete mis-use of federal funds get no mention. In Watts, Los Angeles the federal government has spent £1.5 million since the 1965 riots. 51 per cent of this has gone on administration.
Neither is any mention made of the continuous struggle to obtain funds from a right-wing Congress. In 1966, 14,000 children were killed by rats in the USA – yet last year Congress threw out a Rat Control Bill.
The converse of white liberalism is black separatism.
The slogan of Black Power is a correct description of the situation as the working-class negro sees it from the ghetto, where the only whites he encounters are cops and employers. Thus exploitation and power become racial exploitation and power.
But in itself the slogan is dangerous. Due to its transitionary nature it can easily lead to black separatism or “self-help” such as attempting to set up all-black business in the ghettos, which can do little to alleviate the economic and social plight of the negro.
The negro cannot win alone. The next step in the struggle is the hardest. It is the reforging of the link between white and negro workers which was made in the 1890s and continued sporadically until after the last war.
The recent increase in militancy of the white working class gives some hope that the link can be made. It is a good sign, too, that the distinction between the ghetto dweller and the reactionary black bourgeoisie has become a part of negro consciousness.
It is only when class replaces race, only when the negro emancipates himself from capitalism as a worker, that he can emancipate himself from the ghetto as a negro.
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