Every day the people most affected by the economic crisis are caught up in the struggle for their basic needs, for education for their children, for health care when they get sick, for housing when they are evicted, for food when they are hungry. And where do they turn? To government. The role of government and the allocation of public resources is the central and critical battleground for how we go forward as a country and as a people. How that battle is being played out in the South is indicative of what lies ahead for our future.

W.E.B. Dubois best expressed the thread that runs through all of American history and politics; “As the South goes, so goes the nation.” From the concrete specifics of American history, the ruling class today strives to maintain its rule in an epoch in which the supremacy of private property without capital must seek a fascist solution. Their solution – which can be summed up as small government, big State –  necessarily means the shrinking and elimination of all public resources for the growing mass of dispossessed while expanding the apparatus of control. The Southern program historically provides the basis for the solution the ruling class requires.

In the face of this, it is the task of revolutionaries to discern both the substance and the features of this developing motion. That is why it is critical again to look at the role of the U.S. South in the political economy and politics, and indeed, the revolutionary process in this country.

South in U.S. development

The South has long been a bellwether of American political, economic, and social development throughout the history of the nation. Just as slavery was an integral part of the economic development of the nation from its earliest beginnings, just so was the slaveholding ruling class in the South able to protect their form of private property in the very fabric of the Constitution itself. For most of the first fifty years of the young country, the Southern slaveholders controlled the Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court. It was only when a rising new industrial capitalism in the North began to gain ascendency and to challenge the political hegemony of the South that – in the name of defending the Constitution, states rights, and the idea of Jeffersonian democracy – the Southern rulers seceded from the Union and attacked the North.

That cause was lost (but not forgotten) as slavery was abolished and the process of reconstruction in the South began. The new governments for the first time allowed the participation of both the freedmen and poor whites, and for a while they were allowed to move forward with a new experiment in democracy. Northern capital, however, saw the dismantling and break-up of the slaveholding power as an attack on private property that could not be allowed. The 1876 Hayes-Tilden agreement sealed the defeat of Reconstruction.

The "Redeemer" governments were given a free hand to dismantle the gains made during Reconstruction, cutting taxes and slashing spending for schools, public health and other social programs. The reins of power were returned to the firm grasp of the Southern ruling class, themselves now obedient to the interests of industrial capital.

White supremacy reigned, but the “free” Southern worker, both black  and white, had no rights but the right to labor, tied to the land through the sharecropping system. Of course, the principal aim was to control the black worker at the heart of America’s first colony, the Black Belt South, as a means to control all labor. The extension of the Black Codes signaled a fascist form of rule, and was later studied and incorporated by the German fascist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In the New Deal era, Southern politicians blocked any real progress in the interests of the working class nationally. They opposed the public works and other programs that sought to put people back to work, and later in 1947, for example, passed anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley "right to work" act  which ensured the South would remain a largely non-unionized area.

As World War II came to an end, agriculture began to be mechanized, and the industrialization of the South began in earnest. Jim Crow, with the aid of the Civil Rights movement, was forced off the stage at last. But even this second Reconstruction did not challenge private property relations, and the best the Southern worker could hope for was a new kind of wage-slavery in industry. Almost before the process of industrialization was complete, a new revolution in the economy began to take place: the introduction of labor-replacing electronics spread and was generalized by economic globalization.

The South and the New Economy

Corporations across the globe were looking for places to develop the new global market-place, to transform themselves into the “lean and mean” enterprises best equipped to prosper in a climate of ever advancing technology within the developing global economy. The modern South was just such a place.

As the textile mills and garment factories were downsized and outsourced, the Southern business and political leadership envisioned a prosperous future paved with microchips and lighted by fiber optics, but one in which the interests of capital trumped all others. Low taxes, minimal government and regulations on business, anti-unionism, and an ideology of rugged individualism – all provided a fertile environment for a society in which the tyranny of the marketplace prevailed.

From 1984-2004 over 30 million jobs across America were permanently eliminated. The elimination of the old industrial technologies meant the elimination of jobs; for the workers it meant being subjected to the discipline of downsizing and outsourcing. The Southern value of working hard was reengineered to mean subjecting the workers to the requirements of lean production.

Contingent and “flexible” labor, contract labor, tenuous work for less pay and fewer benefits became the norm in the South while at the same time the Southern ruling class fed Southern workers a steady diet of the ideology of personal responsibility and anti-government individualism. "Right-to-work" was enshrined as a corollary of the right of free speech. The unfettered marketplace was hailed as a model of rugged individualism; ideas of Jeffersonian freedom as a corrective to the excesses of the welfare state. And Southern evangelicals provided the religious sanctions for economic individualism. At the same time, average real wages declined and income disparities widened.

While the worker as an individual was increasingly subjected to the whims of the marketplace, and government social resources were slashed in the name of minimal government, the Southern political structure had no qualms about intervening on behalf of the corporations. What appeared as the usual healthy dose of corporate welfare was really an expression of the merger of government and the corporations operating in their own interests. Tax concessions for business, reduced regulations, financial incentives and privatization of public resources were all features of a bipartisan program for developing the New Economy in the Southern states.

In the current crisis, “Robin Hood for the wealthy” and the corporations accelerates at the same time that the systematic dispossession of the “public sector” advances. In June a new bipartisan Council on Tax Reform and Fairness was created in Georgia, composed of current governor Sonny Perdue, former governor Zell Miller, the head of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, among others. Their job is to propose tax reforms that will continue to shift the tax burden to the poor and working people of the state, while advancing tax cuts and breaks for the wealthy and the corporations. This is in addition to half a billion dollars in tax breaks passed by the legislature in its last session. Such drastic shifts will only bring further cuts to health care, transportation and education – already suffering from rising tuition costs, increased classroom size, and massive teacher layoffs.

Small government, big State

The program of the Southern ruling class and their political counterparts is to “get the government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” while at the same time strengthening the State apparatus of control. In other words, small government, big State. This is nothing less than a prescription for fascism.

The program of the Southern worker, and of all the dispossessed, is to expand the resources necessary to life itself – food, shelter, health care, education, jobs. In order to obtain these, the dispossessed must necessarily fight the State, and in that sense the battle for the necessaries of life is at the same time a battle for democracy.

It is conceivable that fascism could proceed as a movement to defend democracy and a return to the principles of the Constitution, a refrain that is being heard more and more stridently from the South, particularly in the calls for secession and states’ rights, and from the organizers of the Tea Party movement. The calls for small government, less taxation, deregulation, and an anti-union environment characterize the form of rule of the Southern states even as it is paired with accelerating the process of privatization and outright corporate welfare.

Like any movement, the Tea Party movement is a mixture of various forces still in motion, with myriad groupings and individuals contending for leadership.  There are the entrenched establishment who fund and play a role in organizing, such as, Dick Armey (Freedom Works), Ralph Reed (formerly of the Christian Coalition), Ron Paul and his son Rand (libertarians), Newt Gingrich, and Phil Gingrey, both from Georgia. There are the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs, all of whom compose the ideological shock troops to advance their objectives. And there are a myriad of other organizations, such as, the The Oath Keepers with their roots in the military and prepared to take up arms, the Fair Tax Nation that calls for replacing all taxes with a national sales tax, and anti-immigration nativists who demand that the undocumented be hunted down and deported in the name of national security.

They elevate the Constitution to the level of a sacred religious text, with particular emphasis upon the 10th amendment, which supposedly provides for the supremacy of states rights. This was also the basis of the Southern defense of slavery and the framework for the secession and formation of the Confederacy. Today it is utilized to resist federal government stimulus funds, as well as to oppose the establishment of national health insurance.

The State is being reshaped to serve the interests of the ruling class in the defense of private property. This is not simply a set of policy choices. In a time in which the mode of production itself is shifting to accommodate the decline of value brought on by laborless production, the State is moving to direct control by the corporations, and privatization and the shrinking of the public sector is a necessary consequence of this process.  It is experienced by the masses as the destruction of society itself as we know it.

The focus of the American revolution now underway is centered squarely upon the question of the role of government. Will the resources of society be protected by the State in defense of private property or will those resources produced by all of society be utilized to provide health care, education, housing, food  and jobs for all? The first solution leads toward fascism, the other toward a communal society in which the prosperity produced by a new economy establishes life, liberty. and the pursuit of happiness as the final accomplishment of the American dream.

September.2010.Vol20.Ed5
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