"It is doubtful", wrote W. E. B. DuBois in 1936, "if there is another group of 12 million people in the midst of a modern cultured land who are so widely inhabited and mentally confined as the American Negro".12 Of the thirteen million Negroes now in America, nine and one-half million still live in the South. It is to the Southern economy, therefore, that we shall have to turn. The horrible situation that exists in the South is possible only in a fascist country or in a democratic country where the economic basis is so powerful that it over-rides all other considerations. The cotton plantation in the days of its power drove the Negro down as a slave, and such power as it has today it uses to dominate the Negro in the South and project its influence in the North.
The greatest victim of the dominance of cotton culture is the Negro. It conditions him as a man apart, as a "chemical" that will not dissolve in the American melting pot. For so archaic a system as cotton culture in so advanced a country as 20th century American can keep from collapsing only through despotic social relations and quasi-totalitarian politics. Any freedom of movement that the Negro might get would topple the whole intricate structure of cotton culture with its semi-feudal relationships which are already much aggravated by the proletarianization of the Negro. Thus the Negro is "conditioned and developed by special economic relations" which pursue him everywhere, in the country and in the city, on the plantation and in industry, South and North. That is the basis of the discriminations that exist in the North. The basis is not in the Negro's color or "stigma" of slavery or "plots" of capitalists. Great problems of this kind are not a result of any plots of capitalists nor even of historic tradition. For the historic tradition to be so persistent it must feed and nourish itself in economic roots deeply embedded in the community.
Historians who state that the Negro problem is rooted in slavery and stop there fail to see the crux of the question. The "stigma" of slavery could not have persisted so long if the economic remains of slavery had not persisted. The Civil War abolished the institution of slavery, but did not give the land to him who tilled it. Not having got the land, the peasant's fate was inevitable, whether he be white or Negro. Even in Russia, where there was some fraudulent attempt to give the serf the land, it was impossible for the Russian serf to rise above the needs of the backward economy. All the more so in the South where the Negro did not get his "40 acres and a mule". Cotton remaining dominant, semi-feudal relationships were inevitable. The division of labor set up by the cotton economy may not be disturbed. The social relations arising on the basis of the cotton economy remain "less changed than the soil itself on which the cotton is grown".13 Within the economic remains of slavery lie the economic roots of the Negro Question.
Unfortunately, America is so barren of Marxist economists that here, too, a Russian has produced the most profound study. Lenin, seeking to clarify the situation and evolution of Russian agriculture, embarked on a study of New Data on the Laws of Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, which comprised an analysis of Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States. Previous to the writing of this work in 1912, Lenin, in his theses on the agrarian problem, demonstrated that "the contradiction between the whole social development and serfdom ... retards economic development and is a source of oppression, barbarity and of innumerable forms of Oriental despotism in Russian life".14 And in his study of the American development of capitalism in agriculture Lenin found a "striking similarity between the economic position of the American Negro and that of the former serf of the central agricultural provinces in Russia".15 The Narodniki, on the other hand, (even as our contemporary analysts) glossed over the feudal survivals. America, they said, was a country that had never known feudalism. It is this statement which served as the basis of Lenin's counter-thesis: "This statement is directly contrary to the facts, for the economic survivals of slavery are not distinguishable in any respect from those of feudalism".
It is true, of course, that America started its course of independence with no feudal vestiges. But it should not be forgotten that with the development of the plantation economy of the South, with the invention of the cotton gin, there was a development and extension of the slave economy. A civil war was as necessary to overcome that economy in America as a bourgeois revolution was necessary to overcome feudalism in Europe. It seems, in fact, that the later the bourgeois revolution against feudalism or slavery takes place, the less complete it is due to the higher class differentiation in developed bourgeois society. At a certain stage it becomes impossible for the bourgeoisie to carry out this revolution at all. That is the historic foundation of the permanent revolution. It is the lateness of this development in the United States which accounts for the tenacious economic survivals of slavery which still exist in the country and dominate the life of the Negroes.
Lenin points to a glaring example of the survivals of slavery in the superstructure - the appalling state of illiteracy among Negroes in the South - and comments: "One can easily imagine, the aggregate of legal and social relationships corresponding to this disgraceful condition in the field of literacy".
But Lenin does not stop there. He then asks the question which goes straight to the root of the matter: "What, then, is the economic foundation upon which this fine superstructure developed and is maintained".
His answer is: "It is a foundation typically Russian, the 'real-Russian' system of share-tenancy, viz., share-cropping.
Let us investigate this "real-Russian system" of share-cropping in America. Without such a basis all talk of "stigma" of slavery, "psychology of Jim-Crowism",* or "capitalist plots" is not only superficial but serves to disorient the revolutionary movement and leads to reactionary politics.
The economic survivals of slavery manifested themselves in the crop lien system instituted at the end of the Civil War and which still exists to this day. The crop lien system turned the South into an immense shop and still holds the tenant and cropper in a vice. The cropper has neither control over the nature of his crop nor of marketing it. The cropper owns nothing but his labor power, and must part with half of the crop for "furnishings". Somehow the rest of the crop seems likewise to go to the merchant upon whom he depends for his every purchase of clothing, food, implements and fertilizer. The cropper is charged exorbitant prices but he must not question the word of the boss who keeps the books and makes the "settlement", at which time the cropper finds himself in debt and thus unable to leave the land. To this day more than one-third of the croppers are one and one-half years behind in debt.
The merchant dictates his very diet - salt pork fat, meal and molasses. Unfortunately, with his pellagra-ridden body resulting from this diet, he must likewise turn to his creditor for the cropper never has any cash for medical treatment. This personal dependence for his piece of pork, stitch of clothing, medical attention, means social subordination and political dependence. Again we must turn to Lenin who found the basis to this subordination to be the backward economy. And "a condition and result of the system of economy was the extremely low and routine state of technique for the land was tilled by small peasants who were crushed by poverty and degraded by personal dependence and ignorance".
To this day the Old South is more characterized by the mule than the tractor. Here it is possible only to indicate the powerful economic basis of Negro oppression in the United States and the degree to which it is woven into the whole capitalist structure of the country. This bankrupt system of production had for years been feeling the growing chaos of the world market. Under the normal, capitalistic development, the capitalist crisis would have dragged the Negro from his personal subordination and lifted the whole Negro struggle to a far higher plane. The function of the crises is to weed out all inefficient sections of production and leave the social organism shaken, but technologically on a level superior to that which existed before the crises.
In the course of a "healthy"** capitalist development, the South should have, during the last 25 years, experienced a powerful movement towards the disappearance of share cropping and an equally powerful tendency towards larger and larger units of production as well as intensive mechanization - all in the ferocious struggle of the survival of the fittest to capture the shrinking world market. The Negroes would have been uprooted from the primitive "boss and black" relationship into the ranks of an agricultural proletariat, and the economic basis would have been laid for a more or less rapid readjustment of the social structure and political struggles of an advanced character. But the crisis in the world at large and in the country as a whole, combined with the political power of the Southern oligarchy and its satellites resting squarely on the economic subordination of the Negroes, enabled it to squeeze sufficient subsidization out of the capitalist government to maintain the rotting system. Today share cropping can remain by subsidy and subsidy alone and, despite all changes, it is on this that rests the social and legal relationship to which Lenin referred.
The A. A. A. is the worst enemy of the emancipation of the Negroes in the South because it not only checks the development of the country as a whole but maintains the economic system which is the basis of his special political and social enslavement. What the Souther Bloc bellows in Congress may irritate the sensitive ears of the Harvard man in the White House but when he comes down South, they tell him what to do.
When the New Deal came South, "the paternalism of the planter, the dependency of the tenant so meticulously maintained, the stern objections on the part of the landlord to any change in the traditional relationship" made it difficult and in some cases impossible for the government to deal directly with the cropper.16 The fear of the planters that the cropper be removed from his influence and learn that he is not personally dependant upon him set up well-nigh insurmountable barriers to the croppers getting any benefit from the A. A. A.. The county agent in charge of the A. A. A. payments, for instance, had to make the credit store the point of distribution of A. A. A. checks. The result was that the merchant retained the check either for the "unpaid debts" or for "future furnishings" to his tenant. Or the merchant would suggest that the checks be given to him outright. Under the prevailing relationship in the rural South, such a "suggestion" is tantamount to an edict that the Government agent has to obey.
The prevailing relationship which makes such a suggestion a law is known as the "boss and black" relationship, and its economic root is the cotton culture. That is so pervading a relationship that it still holds though cropping is no longer an exclusively Negro occupation. There are in the Old South now 5 and a half million white tenants to over 3 million Negro tenants, though of the croppers the Negroes still constitute the majority.
"The old boss and black attitude", write the authors of the most concise economic study of cotton culture, "pervades the whole system ... The fixed custom of exploitation has carried over to the white tenant".17
Share-cropping with its "boss and black" relationship is further proof of the economic remains of slavery. It keeps the Negro chained to the lowest rung of the ladder and creates the Negro Problem. If a white man enters the plantation-tenant set-up, though verbally he be the most violent protagonist of the race issue, he must bow to the inevitable and be subjected to the "boss and black" relationship. Nevertheless the solution of the situation of the white cropper does not involve the application of Lenin's Theses on the National Question any more than did the situation of the serfs of the central agricultural provinces of Russia except in those places where the conditions of race became an outward manifestation of the basic agrarian problem, as religion in Ireland and social culture in India were essentially manifestations of the fundamental agrarian problem.
Although the agrarian question was and still is the basis of the Negro Question, the proletarianization and urbanization of the Negroes have produced other factors, which we shall now consider.
The miners' strike has been by far the most significant strike since the outbreak of the war. The single fact that in many of the Southern mines the majority of the workers were Negroes brings into sharper relief the importance of the proletarianization and unionization of the Negro more than a ton of theses on the subject could. Nevertheless, in considering the proletarianization of the Negroes, we must remember its historic beginnings in the South where to this day the majority remain in agricultural pursuits. That could have been so only because the industrialization that came South was build not on the ruins of slavery but along side its economic remains.This conditions the Negro not only in agriculture but also in industry both in the South and in the North. We will consider, first, the South, then the North.
Industrialization in the South, instead of disintegrating the peasantry, i.e., transforming it in its majority into proletarians, and thus creating the traditional home market for bourgeois production, developed so haltingly that the black peasant - and that means the major labor force involved in the major crop, cotton - remained largely untouched. The bourgeoisie decided upon this sacrifice of the home market for the sake of maintenance of the social structure there.18 By the time textiles came South, the bourgeoisie was very much aware of the real relationships in cotton culture and the explosive force contained in any change of the black peasantry to industry, which would have meant a rush of the Negroes to get away from the plantation. Hence they left intact the black labor supply of the plantations, not in order to have a labor reserve, but in order not to intrude upon the semi-feudal agrarian relations upon which cotton production was based.
Thus the "plot" for the maintenance of "white supremacy" in the South arose from the actual process of cotton production. There was a "gentleman's agreement" that Southern industry develop under the conditions that it leave untouched the black labor supply of the plantations. Just as cotton labor was at first exclusively a Negro occupation, so textile labor was exclusively a poor white occupation. As late as 1937 only 20,000 of the 350,000 workers in the textile industry were Negroes and practically all of them were employed not in direct process of production but around the mill. Nevertheless, although the first steps in industrialization - light industry - bypassed the Negro, heavy industry did not. The Negro being at the very bottom of the social structure, capitalist society pushes him into the worst paid industries. But for that very reason, as the capitalist economy develops, these industries become more and more important. Thus, from the very fact of what he is in capitalist society, form the very fact of his national oppression, the Negro becomes one of the forces for the overthrow of capitalism. The Negro proletariat has been very strategically placed in industry. By 1907, 39.1% of Southern steel workers were Negroes. In 1930, out of a total of 12,392 employed in the iron and steel industry, 13,331 or 68.7% were Negroes.
The Negro has been an integral part of labor in heavy industry since the earliest days of Southern industrialization. He was a militant member of whatever unions took root there. At the height of its power, the I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World], claimed one million members, 100,000 of whom were Negroes. The most important of the IWW unions among Negroes were precisely in prejudice-ridden South, in the labor industries in Louisiana and Texas and among the longshoremen and dockworkers in Baltimore, Norfolk and Philadelphia, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in the lumber camps of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas had 35,000 members in 1910, 80% of whom were Negroes. In recent years unionization (C.I.O [Congress of Industrial Organizations], U.M.W. [United Mine Workers of America]) has spread through the South and the Negro has become an established part of the trade union movement. Many of these unions have overcome racial barriers to the extent that they have mixed unions.
Between the two extremes - textiles which employ no Negroes in the direct process of production, and the mines and steel mills in which Negroes are more or less equal in number to whites - there are the so-called strictly "Negro jobs" - saw mills, fertilizer plants, etc. These employ mainly Negroes. They remain unorganized. They are located rurally so that the Negro is as much isolated as a factory worker as if he were a peasant still. It remains a fact that the greater part of the "all-Negro jobs" in the South are still in segregated and semi-segregated jobs and industries. On the other hand, the contiguity of farms builds up a community of interests so that practically right on the farm we have the factory workers who know of no personal dependence in production relations and who bring to their peasant brethren that all-important knowledge in breaking up semi-feudal relations.
The proletarian Negro is not the cowed plantation hand. He is literate and has been disciplined by the factory. He knows the might of a cohesive group, organized by the very process of production. He is and feels himself a potent factor. He is no small minority to his white brethren in industry. The relationship in the most concentrated industrial districts of the South is 55% white to 45% Negro, and in some he forms the majority. For example, of the 23,000 U.M.W. members in Alabama mine fields, the Negroes number 14,000 or 60%.
Nevertheless, the "boss and black" relationship - that is, the racial relation having its roots in the plantation economy - still pursues him in the city as well as in the country. Wage differentials exist in the factory as in the field. Segregation, Jim Crowism, social discriminations persist. The contradiction between the potency in the process of production and his seeming impotence outside cannot but find a manner of expression. The explosive power in the struggle of the Southern Negro proletarian in the Southern metropolis will have significance in repercussions for the contiguous rural Black Belt. It will strike directly at the heart of the Southern economy and Southern politics and upset as well Northern capitalist interests which have so readily accepted the South's segregation pattern in order to coin surplus value from it. But among the millions suffering on the plantations and among the hundreds of thousands who have won themselves a place in industry, the problem before them is and must continue for a long time to be the emancipation from the national oppression which they feel at every turn. The bourgeoisie has posed the question in this form to draw the most reactionary conclusions. To the problem as posed by the bourgeoisie the proletarian vanguard must beware of merely giving a direct negative or simple negative. Outside the unions and inside, it must pose the emancipation of the Negroes themselves, but as an important contributory factor to the whole struggle against bourgeois society.
So basic a contradiction in so important a section of the economy (as is cotton culture) and one which has such powerful social and political repercussions could not possibly be confined only to the South but is reproduced, and in certain phases far more sharply in the North. Charles S. Johnson, for instance, in his Growing Up in the Black Belt, - points out that the urban Southern Negro in the North is more race conscious than the Negro in the South. The full importance of this development we shall grasp when we trace the proletarianization of the Negro in the North.
The basic movement of capital in 1917-1919 and the movement of the industrial reserve army of labor bring the Negroes to the North and from the fact that they are Negroes sends them into mass industries. With World War I the Negro becomes an established part of the American labor force, constituting in 1930, 22.7% of labor in building trades, 16.2% in unskilled in steel, 25% of unskilled in meat packing, 31.7% of longshoremen, 89.5% in saw mills. However, so long as basic industries remained unorganized - and they could not but remain unorganized until the unions let down the color bars along with the craft lines - the Negro could not become an integral part of the trade union movement. But with the coming of the C.I.O. we witness the unionization of the Negro on an unprecedented scale.
Nevertheless, in the North too, the proletarianization and trade unionization of the Negro did not raise him to the status of the white proletarian and did not dissolve his struggle for elementary democratic rights into the general class struggle. First, in the trade unions he must fight as a Negro for his place as a worker. Wage differentials, seniority, upgrading have by no means been abolished. Then, outside of the trade union, he is ghettoized.
Both South and North the Negro has become urbanized as well as proletarianized. While in 1890 the rural Negro population constitued 80.2% of the total Negro population, the percentage of rural Negroes in 1930 dropped to 56.1%. In that year in the South the Negro was urbanized to the extent of 43.9%. In 1916-1924 one and one-half million Negroes left Southern farms.
In Northern cities Negro populations seemed to grow up overnight. Between 1910 and 1920 the Negroes in New York grew from 91,709 to 152,647, an increase of 60.3%. In Chicago the Negro experienced a 148.2% increase and in Detroit a 511.3% increase, from a mere 5,741 in 1910 to 40,838 in 1920. The two great Negro migrations from the South - 1916-1919 and 1921-1924 - have no parallel in this war [World War II], but there has been a significant migration to the Northwest. By 1940, 23.8% of the Negro population lives in the North and Northwest. 90.1% of those are urbanized.
This urbanization is of the utmost importance. The Negro Question becomes, in Marxian terminology, more of the National Question than ever and there is not the slightest doubt that Trotsky's insistence on this question was a result of the knowledge of the inevitable dual development of the social consciousness of the country as a whole and the race consciousness of the Negro. For whereas 20,00 Negroes in Harlem are weak and isolated, hundreds of thousands in Harlem today - 16.9% of all Northern Negroes live in New York City - create a tremendous basis for the development of the Negro and his consciousness.
It is the creation of comparatively free proletariat and semi-proletariat of the large urban centers in the North which created the possibility for the development of the powerful Negro press. In this respect, Gunnar Myrdal has correctly pointed out: "The foreign language press is doomed to disappear as immigrants become fully assimilated and are not replenished by new immigration. The Negro press, on the contrary, is bound to become ever stronger as the Negroes are increasingly educated and culturally assimilated but not given the entrance to the white world".19
A beautiful example of this dual movement and its economic base was given by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1937. A bourgeois newspaper most intensely race conscious and increasingly so, it nevertheless for this very reason led the swing of the more progressive Negroes in the community towards entry into and acceptance of the C.I.O..
It is precisely in the Northern urban centers that the political results inherent in the situation in the South receive their sharpest political expression. Capitalism, in dragging the Negroes from the South, cannot prevent the explosion and revolt of the national oppression which the semi-feudal economic relations in the South not only generate but are able to keep in subjugation. The ghetto-like existence, the social humiliation not only spring historically from the cotton plantation. The cotton plantation exports to the North its workers imbued with the ideology of the South along with the Klan, the Knights of the Camellia, etc. to stimulate, encourage and organize the anti-Negro prejudices of the people of the North, fortified among the working class by competition in industry
12 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, (Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1935), p. 703.
13 Allison Davis, Burleigh G. Gardner, and Mary Gardner, directed by W. Lloyd Warner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of' Chicago Press. 1941), p. 266.
14 V. I. Lenin, The Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century (written in 1908, published in 1918).
15 V. I. Lenin, Section 3: 'The Former Slave-Owning South' of New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture (1915). The translation of this portion of the text on the Marxist Internet Archive reads:
"Thus it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who 'were formerly landowners' serfs'".
* Alfred Freeman, "The Psychology of Jim Crowism", New International, Vol. X, No. 2, Feb. 1944.
** Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, p. 297: "How would this conflict be settled and the 'healthy' movement of the capitalist production resumed under the normal conditions? ... under all circumstances the equilibrium is restored by making more or less capital unproductive or destroying it" [Chapter 15].
16 Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree and W. W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Field Studies and Statistical Surveys, 1933-35, (University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 58.
17 Ibid., p. 10.
18 For a lament about [what] the great loss and sacrifice of the Southern home market means to this day, cf. Report on Economic Conditions of the South, prepared for the President, by the National Emergency Council.
19 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, (Harper & Brothers Publishers: New York, 1944).