in spite of militant campaigns like the struggle for the eight-hour day. Speaking of attempts to unionize in the aftermath of Reconstruction, he wrote: “One can see for these reasons why labor organizers and labor agitators made such small headway in the South. They were, for the most part, appealing to laborers who would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives …”193 This psychological wage was sufficient to divide the working class when it most needed unity, and the revolutionary opportunity presented by Reconstruction was lost.
* * *
The grand narrative offered by Du Bois, of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, served as the fulcrum of STO’s theory of US history, but it left two key topics unaddressed: the origins of white supremacy and racial slavery, and the post-New Deal rise of the black freedom movement. To address the former, STO looked to the pioneering research being done by Ignatin’s long-time comrade Ted Allen. Allen, a white communist militant from New York, had been a member, along with Ignatin, of the CP splinter known as the Provisional Organizing Committee, and the two had long shared a common interest in Du Bois and his theory of US history. In between day jobs as diverse as coal mining, mail delivery, and teaching high school, Allen managed to conduct impressive original research on the historical origins of racial slavery in North America.194
Allen’s work reflected the influence of Du Bois both in his stark challenge to mainstream historiography and in his deliberately unorthodox twists on left analysis. Arguing first that “the capitalist system of production was in force from the beginning” in the slave-holding colonies, he followed Black Reconstruction in rejecting popular Marxist notions of slavery as a semifeudal economic system displaced only in 1865 with the victory of the industrial North in the Civil War.195 But Allen went further, declaring provocatively that slavery had not always been racially based, and that white supremacy as we know it was the result of strikingly conscious decisions made by colonial slave-holding capitalists almost two centuries before the Civil War. In assessing the colonial history of Virginia in particular, Allen focused on the second half of the seventeenth century as the period when a previously multiracial population of bond servants was divided into a pool of white workers indentured for a limited term of several years and a pool of black workers who were converted into permanent and hereditary chattel slaves.196 This division was, according to Allen, the result of uprisings like Bacon’s Rebellion, in which black and white bond servants sacked Virginia’s colonial capital of Jamestown in 1676.197 Allen’s research produced significant evidence, from primary documents such as the colonial records, demonstrating that, fearing the power of such a unified group, the colonial elite intentionally granted specific privileges to white servants—especially the eventual prospect of freedom—that were denied to blacks. The unstated quid pro quo was that white workers were expected to help police the black population, rather than unite with them in subsequent rebellions. This often took the form of white bond servant participation in armed slave patrols and militias that repressed any spark of resistance. Here, said Allen, was the origin of white supremacy as an ideology, and of the “public and psychological wage” identified by Du Bois. Colonial Virginia was the birthplace of the white skin privilege.
As for the other end of the arc of US history, both its publication date of 1935 and its stated topic prevented Black Reconstruction from addressing the inspiring trajectory of the black freedom movement in the period extending from the New Deal through the post-war era. The bridge between Du Bois’s psychological wage and the white skin privilege analysis of the late sixties was precisely the civil rights movement, and in particular the evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The origins of the civil rights movement lay in the cross-pollination between long-standing black demands for freedom and the strategic orientation toward direct action that had come to prominence through the CIO organizing drives of the thirties and forties. The exigencies of World War Two had made it clear that the ruling class commitment to white supremacy could at least be modified if sufficient pressure was brought to bear. For instance, A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement used the threat of a major demonstration by African Americans and organized labor to force the US government to prohibit racial discrimination in both military and civilian spheres of the defense industry.198 Beginning in the mid-fifties, the civil rights movement attempted to replace the external pressures of war with the internal one of direct action. From the beginning, the movement was black-led, but the commitment to the goal of ending racial segregation ensured an integrated movement. Cofounder Ella Baker brought Du Bois’s influence into SNCC, which developed as a multiracial organization of young radicals so devoted to direct action that an arrest record quickly became a badge of honor.199 As the sixties progressed, however, the interaction between predominantly southern blacks and largely northern whites led to a growing awareness of the relative privileges experienced by the white students: those from the North could leave the struggle whenever they chose simply by returning home, but even those from the South received less harsh treatment from the white power structure. None of this made white activists necessarily less committed to the cause, but eventually the black leadership of SNCC came to a realization: if freedom for black people was ever to be achieved, two parallel struggles were needed, one in which blacks fought for their liberation, and another in which progressive whites struggled with other white people in order to convince them to support black liberation.200
Large numbers of white radicals, especially those centered around SDS, took this perspective seriously, and began to act on it with little, if any, conscious awareness of Du Bois’s concept of the psychological wage or Allen’s notion of white skin privilege. At the same time, the antiwar movement provided another resonant theme for radicals of the late sixties, who watched anti-imperialist movements develop throughout the third world, most famously in Vietnam and Cuba. For many, white supremacy could be viewed as the domestic manifestation of imperialist capitalism. In this context, white skin privileges were one aspect of a broader oppression of the global majority of humanity. Further, the development of youth culture (both pop- and counter-) over the course of the fifties and sixties provided another pillar for the antiracist sentiments of the white new left. As the historian Paul Buhle notes,
Subjectively, the role of Black culture in the teenage lives of the future New Left prepared the way. Only Communist or very racist parents, it is safe to say, perceived the breadth of this influence from sports to music to sexual fantasy.… To affirm solidarity with Blacks in any political sense was a minority act; but the sympathy towards Black culture reached further among millions of ordinary teenagers than any previously Left-orchestrated effort could have envisioned.201
The convergence of specifically North American experiences—both cultural and political—and a global assessment of revolutionary momentum contributed to the openness shown by many white radicals to some form of the white skin privilege analysis as the sixties progressed.
* * *
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
