“What is Freedom?” asked General William T. Sherman at a gathering with 20 freedmen in Savannah on January 12, 1865.  “Placing us where we could reap the benefits of our labor “ replied Garrison Frazier. “And Slavery?" Sherman asked.  “It is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent,” Frazier answered.

Throughout the history of America, the laboring masses have dreamed of freedom from the domination of property over slave labor and free labor, and of the reconstruction of society to enjoy the full fruit of their labor.  Abolition, Reconstruction, Freedom.  On these hinge both the history and the future of our country, and the South has been and will be the linchpin that determines the outcome.

Abolition and Reconstruction

Slavery was at the the bosom of American capitalism from its earliest beginnings.  The interests of the Southern slave-owning class were protected in the very fabric of the Constitution itself. Southern slaveholders controlled the Presidency of the United States for 41 of the first 50 years.  Eighteen of 31 Supreme Court justices were slaveholders in these years.

The slave-holding class dominated both Black slaves and landless white laborers.  Desperately poor, white laborers numbered as high as half of the white population in the South, and in a society that came to equate white skin with independence and freedom, the presence of poor whites belied the notion that all whites were superior to all people of color.

Even with Jacksonian democracy, which was supposed to extend the franchise to all adult white males, the slave-owning class managed to lock out poor whites by virtue of property qualifications.  The doctrine of race and racism, originated in the 17th century, was needed by the slave power to control Black and white labor.  This ideology of white supremacy only guaranteed the supremacy of the slave-owning class. 

Resistance to the Confederacy and to secession basically split along class lines. Poor white laborers had no objective interest in defending slavery and the very class that oppressed them. 

Shortly after Sherman’s meeting with the freedmen in Savannah, he issued Field Order 15, which effectively redistributed abandoned and confiscated plantation lands to the former slaves. “Forty acres and a mule” became the particular expression both of the abolition of the property of the slave-owning class and the self-determination of the newly freed slaves, who were now free to reap the benefits of their labor.

 President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner from Tennessee, had a different view of Reconstruction. Within six months of becoming President, after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, he had rescinded the redistribution of plantation lands to their former owners. Even after the Radical Republicans in the Congress gained the upper hand for a time, the program for the breakup of the plantations and the elimination of the slave-holders as a class could not go forward. Such a program, the New York Times editorialized at the time, “strikes at the root of all property rights.” A “war on property to succeed the war on slavery” could not be allowed to go forward. The former slave power must become subordinate to Northern capital, but property relations must not be altered.

For Northern financial and industrial interests, the South, and particularly the Black Belt region of the South, offered a reserve of cheap materials, almost limitless opportunity for high return investment and an abundance of cheap labor. To achieve their goals, they had to break the power of the Southern planters and replace it with their own.

They used the impulses of the freed slaves to batter away at the power of the planters on the political front. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed, Black males got the vote throughout the South, and for a time the new Reconstruction governments were about the business of building a new society, opening new schools and hospitals, electing representative governments, and overturning the most oppressive laws of the previous period. Meanwhile, Northern financial and industrial interests consolidated their economic control over the South.

 Once the old planter class had been rendered totally subservient to the aims of Northern industrialists and financiers, the war on property relations was stopped in its tracks. The Hayes-Tilden Agreement of 1877 ratified the alliance between the now dominant Northern and financial interests and a subordinate Southern ruling class. Reconstruction was abandoned, and with the help of KKK terror, the Southern planters were returned to power to rule the South as they saw fit.  In return, Northern interests were guaranteed the huge profits from the region, and were able to use the expansion of capital these profits represented to lay the foundation for imperial expansion into the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of the Pacific.

 The South controls the Nation and Wall Street Controls the south

“We have no chance to rise from beggars,” Black leader Harrison Bouey declared from South Carolina in 1877.  “Men own the capital we work.” The Southern workers, Black and white, were free, but free only to labor. “Compulsory free labor” best described the condition of the Southern worker.  Sharecropping replaced 40 acres and a mule.  The sharecropper had no property rights at all, only as a wage laborer forced to work the land. Vagrancy and lien laws were passed and the convict lease system was developed.

The Southern so-called Redeemer state governments replaced and dismantled Reconstruction.  Both Blacks and poor whites were effectively disfranchised with poll taxes, literacy tests and outright voter fraud. In the struggle over which whites would rule, the Blacks was disfranchised, but in the process a great many poor whites were disfranchised as well. The Southern rulers consolidated their power by directing sustained campaigns of violence at any common ground between Blacks and whites. These campaigns, fueled by white supremacy and economic instability, aimed to control all the laboring people of the South.

Dominated by the planter and Northern financial industrial elite, the new governments embarked upon a reactionary program designed to secure maximum profits for private capital. Taxes were cut to a bare minimum, as they proceeded to slash state budgets, closing public hospitals and cutting education and other public services. Regulations on business and on environmental standards were virtually nonexistent.

With a class-skewed virtually white-only electorate, the one-party Solid South emerged as the balance of power in national politics. Even as a minority wing within the New Deal coalition, the role of the South served as a reactionary pole, pursuing policies of protecting white supremacy in the South, while minimizing the influence of organized labor and keeping taxes as low as possible. The anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947 with an alliance of conservative northern Republicans and southern Democrats. They were also able to block the passage of national health insurance. The ruling class was able to use the South to block any effort of the workers to better their situation that did not first benefit the interests of capital. W.E.B DuBois brilliantly summed this up when he stated, “The South controls the nation and Wall Street controls the South.”

The “Southernization” of America

We see the consequences of this history today. Neoliberalism is little more than the old Southern low-wage, low benefit, low tax program. In 1985, in the wake of the development of so-called 2-party politics in the South, the Democratic Leadership Council was formed, with a neoliberal program at its heart. DLC candidate Bill Clinton was elected on a program of smaller government, states rights and welfare reform. By the 1990s Southerners from both parties had come to dominate both the executive and legislative branches of government, and with the blunting of party lines, the political system today has come again to exhibit the core characteristics that shaped the Solid South.

 The “Southernization of America” has come to be expressed politically in the neoliberal mantra: slash social programs, privatize public services, deregulate the economy and the environment, cut taxes for the rich, increase military spending to fund the drive for empire, while at the same time chipping away at democratic processes and institutions. The national program of the ruling class, the Southernization of America, is the program of global capital in the epoch of globalization.

Globalization and new forms of poverty

George W. Bush, after witnessing the deep poverty revealed by the devastation of Katrina, said last September, “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” His bold action has been to cut the very programs that could benefit the poor. But he was right about the extent of the poverty that still prevails in the South. The South continues to be the region with the highest poverty rates in the country. In Mississippi it is almost 18 percent, in Georgia almost 15 percent. Atlanta’s official poverty rate matches that of New Orleans, almost 28 percent.

While it is true that there has always been poverty in the South, the poverty the South is confronting today has a different character. When the South was transformed by the mechanization of agriculture in the 1940s and the laborers fled to the factories of both North and South, the fare of the workers in the South was largely relegated to the low-wage , non-union jobs provided by runaway factories from the North. As the South has become industrialized and urbanized, now the people who must work for a living are confronted with the decline of industry and the rise of an economy based in electronics. In a word, globalization.

 The paradigm of globalization is the robot. Robotic or automated production personifies wage-less production. As jobs are being permanently eliminated, the value of the labor of all workers is measured in terms of the robot. This new reality is creating a new kind of poverty, and a new class of poor. They are the homeless, the absolutely destitute, and they are also the temporary worker, the day laborer, the part time, and no benefits worker, the throwaway worker on the way to becoming permanently unemployed. They are the locked out, the dispossessed.

The state, acting in the interests of the capitalist class, has moved openly to direct rule, expressed in the form of the merger of the corporations and government. From tort reform to billion dollar tax cuts to secret deals, the government/corporate merger is moving aggressively to consolidate its rule.

Georgia: what globalization means

Today the numbers of manufacturing workers are fast declining to those of the agricultural worker. Where once agriculture predominated as an employer, today the agricultural workforce is less than 3 percent. Where for a time the South led the nation in percentage of manufacturing jobs, it is now down to 11 percent in Georgia, and in Atlanta it is only 7.4 percent. Union membership in Georgia has declined to 5 percent. In South Carolina it is only 3 percent. Wal-Mart has become the single largest employer in Georgia. And of course, it is non-union, setting the example for low-wage, low benefits employment.

The pace continues to accelerate. In Atlanta, both Ford and GM are closing the last two remaining auto plants in the South that are operated by union workers. Textiles have taken the hardest hit, with 90,000 jobs lost in Georgia in the past five years. And while many of the plant closings represent shops running away to cheaper labor across the globe, much of it is also a phenomenon of permanent job losses due to advances in technology. Foreign auto plants dominate the Southern landscape, all of them non-union.

In the recent session of the Georgia legislature, a 4 percent tax on energy was eliminated, but only for the corporations. Developers may build roads and other infrastructure and then tax homeowners to pay for it. Developers are now being allowed to build in what were once protected stream buffers.

Yet, while permanent job loss and poverty grows, the welfare rolls in Georgia have been cut by more than a third in the last two years. Attempts to pass living wage provisions have been outlawed by the state. The state now also boasts that it has the toughest anti-immigration legislation in the country, promoting it as a model for the nation. Undocumented workers will be denied access to state services. The old convict lease system has surged back in a new form. The Georgia state legislature passed a 2005 law (HB 58:Working Against Recidivism Act) allowing corporations to build factories on prison land, employing prisoners and obligating those prisoners to pay a portion of their “wages” for their prison upkeep.

New proletariat challenges old forms of control

The permanent elimination of jobs means growing homelessness. The homeless are at the core of the new proletariat, and are at the cutting edge of the movement of the poor for their own emancipation. They are the  laborer, cast aside from production, reduced to begging for day laborer jobs, temporary work or for crumbs. They cannot confront the corporations at the work place. Cast outside the system, their very fight for survival is a political fight, a fight against the state.

Capital faces the problem of controlling the growing mass of dispossessed and impoverished Americans. In Atlanta alone, there are over 7,000 homeless, and estimates vary from 38,000 to 70,000 for the greater metro area. It is also said that as many as 1,000 of the homeless each month wind up in jail. The dream of the corporations, represented by Central Atlanta Progress, in league with the government, is to have a downtown free of the poor. Hence the passage of several “Quality of Life” ordinances, which make it a crime to “remain in a parking lot,” “lay or slouch on a park bench,” “urinate in public,” and now the creation of a “Tourist Triangle” in which panhandling is banned and the poor are to be excluded.

These measures were met in Atlanta, and in other cities where they have been instituted, with a tremendous outpouring of resistance from a broad spectrum. Demonstrations and camp-ins at City Hall last year in Atlanta led to organizing in the poor neighborhoods throughout the city with calls to expand the fight to include demands by the poor for housing for all, health care for all, living wages for all. Such demands lay the foundation to organize around the common interests of a class, regardless of color, and as such challenges the means by which the South has historically been controlled.

Abolition. Reconstruction. Freedom.

The South is not only key to the rule of capital, it is a linchpin for the emancipation of all peoples from the domination of capital. The battle lines are being drawn and our class is beginning to move. The merger of the corporations and government positions the propertied class for direct and open rule. Consequently the demands of the workers for housing, health care, living wages, are revolutionary demands, achievable only by the abolition of private property itself. Only then may the new class “reap the benefits of our labor” by the reconstruction of society on a cooperative basis.

 

June.2006.Vol16.Ed4
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