When slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of formerly enslaved Africans did not end. Capitalist-inspired racist ideology helped enable the bosses to exploit black labor to a higher degree than it did white labor. Prison chain gangs were fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, injustices cloaked by Jim Crow laws. The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States….[Emphasis added — ed.]
“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially unemployment), which was so vaguely defined that any black man could be convicted of it. Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.” One key aspect to this sham of justice, then and now, was that state legislatures and Congress define many offenses as crimes without victims — no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Among victimless crimes, possession of drugs is the contemporary equivalent to vagrancy.
With the skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in recent decades, beginning with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and escalating with the “War on Drugs” under Ronald Reagan, a huge proportion of black workers — mainly men — have been re-enslaved. In Chicago, for example, 55 percent of adult black men have felony records. Overall, black men in the U.S. are incarcerated more than six times the rate for white men. They have a one-in-four chance of being jailed during their lifetimes; and one in fourteen are in jail or prison at any one time (see PLP pamphlet “Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style”).
The U.S. prison population, the largest in the world, is 70 percent black and Latino in a country where black and Latino people represent only 29 percent of the population. Latino workers are also imprisoned far out of proportion to their share of the population. The vast majority are behind bars for non-violent violations of drug laws, which were deliberately designed to turn a medical problem into a criminal act. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, however, the proportions of black and white workers who use or deal in drugs, is approximately the same, between 6 and 7 percent.
Of late, the label of “drug criminal” is increasingly and falsely applied to Latino immigrants, the vast majority of whom come to the U.S. to find jobs that have been destroyed in their native countries by U.S. corporations. In the drive for maximum profit, corporate capital moves south across Latin America and dispossesses millions of rural workers of their land and livelihoods. This creates an army of unemployed workers who are available for the ever-shifting needs of global corporations.
Today’s equivalents to the slave drivers’ guns and whips are the police, courts, jails and prisons. After Congress upgraded drug charges from misdemeanors to felonies, convictions or forced plea bargains for drug possession leave people ineligible for the rest of their lives for food stamps, public housing, and — in practice — from most jobs. This in turn all but destroys the opportunity to have and love a family. No other country brands drug possessors as felons or imprisons them for victimless “crimes” at anywhere near the rate in the U.S.
Although chain gangs were abolished in the early 1900s, the entire working class remains bound to this day to the capitalist class. Chattel slavery (enforced by chain, whip, and gun) has simply been replaced by wage, debt and prison slavery, where workers are chained to their jobs by the underlying threat of homelessness and starvation. Immediately after the Civil War, black and white sharecroppers were primarily bound by debt slavery; they incurred financial obligations to their landlords that they could never pay off. In today’s financial crisis, mortgages, rent, and credit card debt play a similar role. In place of the slave driver and bounty hunter, the banks and large property owners force us to do the capitalists’ bidding.
The racist inequalities of capitalism injure all workers. According to a study by economist Michael Reich, the places in the U.S. where wage differentials between white and black workers are greatest are also the places where the wages for all workers are lowest. The capitalists need racism to justify the super-exploitation of certain groups of workers. Racism is also the capitalists’ main tool to divide the working class — both in the reform struggle for higher wages and better working and living conditions, and in the revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism altogether. In fighting back against racism, workers are laying the indispensable foundation for a communist revolution and a communist world.
References
Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, NY, 2010.
Beckett, Katherine, and Sasson, Theodore, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2004.
Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, NY, 2008.
Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Metropolitan Books, NY, 2010.