Ernest Rice McKinney Archive | ETOL Main Page
Problems of the South
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 32, 12 August 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
These articles are to be about the campaign now being conducted by the CIO and the AFL to organize the South. The articles will be largely a discussion of the CIO campaign for reasons which will be discussed later. The articles will deal not so much with the CIO itself but with the South. It is necessary to know something about the South if one is to understand the meaning and significance of this campaign. Such a venture as “Operation Dixie” is no common garden variety of trade union organizing drive. In many important respects it is something quite different, from a trade union organizing drive in the North.
While it is true that any trade union organizing project must be carefully and cautiously planned and carried through with the utmost attention to correct strategy arid tactics, these factors must have special attention in the case of the South. This is particularly true in relation to the CIO. The CIO is the outstanding example of the notion and the practice of industrial unionism, vertical trade union organization, over against the craft or horizontal organization, such as one finds with the AFL.
The CIO finds and has its base among the mass production workers both in industry and agriculture. That is, the CIO draws its support mainly from the semi-skilled and unskilled workers and toilers. Among these are the workers in the textile, garment, automobile, mining, chemical, lumber, furniture and rubber industries, as well as the millions of semi-proletarians engaged in capitalist agriculture. The CIO, therefore, particularly in the South, will be conducting an organization drive among the genuine proletarians and toilers and not among the skilled workers: the “aristocracy of labor.”
The southern section of the capitalist ruling class does not take kindly to any form of aggressive or effective trade unionism. This is true of the industrialists, the planters, the financiers, the politicians and their satellites in the schools, church and press. This section of the national ruling class is not only still on the make in its own name but it is at the same time the representative of, and a committee of management for the big northern capitalists who operate extensively in the South.
Both northern capitalism and its native southern representatives are interested primarily in the recovery of the South’s tremendous natural resources and raw materials for the production of manufactured goods, at the lowest possible cost of production. This means that the northern capitalists desire that the South remain predominantly an agricultural region and a producer of raw materials. This means that the southern economy will be operated with the lowest possible capital investment and with a minimum of surplus wealth for investment in industry.
The economy of the South therefore remains somewhat of a colonial economy: producing raw materials, opportunities for the investment of northern capital and a market for the sale of manufactured articles processed and fabricated from those raw materials. Such a system makes the South a great debt ridden area. It has small financial reserves of its own, so to speak. The financing of its industries and its agriculture is done by the North. A large part of the profits from agriculture and industry go to the North and are not used for the social, economic and cultural improvement of the South.
Such a system demands that the wages of the masses of the people be kept at the lowest level compatible with existence. With the bulk of the wealth drained off by the big capitalists of the North, the native southern industrialists, financiers and planters, in order to get their share, resort to the harshest economic, political and social measures against the masses of the southern people.
Not only is the South a predominantly agricultural area but it is even the most backward agricultural area. It “is an agricultural area in the midst of an industrialized nation. It derives its living mostly from the soil while the rest of the nation obtains its from manufacturing, service, distribution and management.” The per capita income from all farm areas is far lower than industrial per capita income, but in the South the farm income is the lowest in the nation.
The situation in what there is of southern industry is about the same. There are scattered concentrations of industry in the South. There is a large concentration of textile manufacture, iron and coal in Alabama, tobacco manufacture, and numerous chemical, rubber, aircraft and other manufacturing plants scattered over the area. The dominant capitalist enterprise however is agriculture. Agriculture with its sprawling cotton plantations, rice and cane fields and its tobacco culture. To this must be added the other sources of raw materials; the forests and the lumber industry and all the multitude of raw materials produced for chemical manufacturing.
Not only are wages lower in the South than the rest of the country, but the wage level is in part determined by the situation in agriculture, the dominant capitalist enterprise. To raise wages in the industrial centers and the manufacturing enterprises means to encourage migrations from the plantations, the forests and the fields. This will necessitate increasing the wages of agricultural workers in order to maintain the supply. Another factor encouraging the leaving of the farm in the South is the heavy debt and mortgage burden on the farms, and the exhaustion of land by erosion and lack of the necessary knowledge and capital to carry on agriculture in the modern way.
All of these factors which we have mentioned only briefly help to explain the reasons for the opposition to the organization of the masses on the part of the southern industrialists, financiers and planters. As we said before, the local southern capitalists operate not only in an independent way but also as the local managers for the big northern capitalists. They try to retain as much of the wealth produced in the South as they can in order to build their own fortunes, prestige and power.
The coming of the CIO into such a situation is filled with danger for them. They have not arrived yet. They are in constant conflict with the northern capitalist ruling class over the division of the wealth produced by the southern masses. They strive to have an ever increasing portion of this remain in the South. They have inner conflicts among themselves. There are southern patriots among them who wish to throw off the “yoke of the North,” and establish an industrial economy in competition with the North. There are others who are satisfied to remain direct and exclusive hirelings and representatives of northern capitalist enterprise. These proponents of the industrialization of the South are in conflict with the planter interests, who do not believe that the way out of the swamp of debt and mortgages, held by northern banks and insurance companies, is to be faced with the competition of urban industry for “hired hands.”
All of them: planter, industrialist and southern financier, resent and will oppose vigorously the CIO with its industrial unionism, coming to upset the status quo. These leaders know and understand that the root problem of the South is its economic backwardness; its poverty and, to them, the accompanying necessity for maintaining low wages. The organization of the southern masses is a direct attack on the wage scale. Not only a direct attack on the wage scale but an attack on low wages and the lowest standard of living in the country, by mass organization of the bulk of the population: skilled and semi-skilled, craftsman and common laborer, city worker and rural worker. This will be the result even though the present CIO drive is confined in the concrete to the industrial areas. The reverberations of such an organization campaign will be felt in the rural sections; on the plantations, in the cane breaks, the forests, the rice and tobacco fields and in the lumber camps.
The raising of the standard of living of the urban workers will either draw the rural workers away or create an insistent demand from them for an improvement of their own standard of living and working conditions.
This is what the leaders of the South and their retinue of political demagogues are talking about when they speak of the CIO as “Communist,” “foreigners,” “outsiders,” and “trouble-makers.” This is why they would prefer the AFL with its outmoded craft structure and indifference to the problems of the masses of the workers. These leaders and their political managers and arrangers know also that an organization such as the CIO cannot confine itself to the purely economic disabilities of the mass of the people. Due to’ the poverty of the masses, their low cultural level and their complete lack of organization, they have no way of improving their situation. They cannot participate in politics in any effective way. They can have no say in the levying of taxes; they can only pay the taxes set by those who can engage in politics. They cannot put pressure on for educational, health and cultural facilities because they are virtually impotent in the political area.
They cannot organize themselves because of their poverty, lack of experience and an age old lethargy which has been induced by the conditions under which they have existed. The coming of the industrial union movement, however, with its relatively broad and enlightened program, will provide not only the medium of trade union organization; but an educational, cultural and potential political apparatus for the southern masses as they have never known before. Such an awakening is what is known as “Communism” in the ranks of the southern capitalist ruling class.
(Another article by David Coolidge on “Operation Dixie” and its problems will appear next week. – Ed.)
Ernest Rice McKinney Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 6 July 2019