A class consciousness among the working masses, one that takes the issue of race seriously, is critical at this moment. Still, the democrats are working to disrupt this effort to organize against the capitalist elite.
“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” – Carl von Clausewitz (1873).
The primary weapon of the ruling class is capitalism, and the greatest anathema to the capitalist construct is multiracial, multiethnic, and, intergenerational/intergenderational working class solidarity and militancy. This has been known since the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion, which occurred just ten years after the colonies’ so-called Declaration of Independence from the British empire. The significance of Shays’ Rebellion is multifaceted – not only did it represent a coordinated class struggle against the newly minted ruling class of the independent states, it also exposed the fickleness and abject hypocrisy of so-called revolutionaries like Samuel Adams.
On the one hand, oppressed farmers who rejected being sacrificed by wealthy financiers to pay down the debts of the “American Revolution,” rightfully believed, as one anonymous farmer put it:
“I’ve labored hard all my days and fared hard. I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war. . . . I have been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me. . . . I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors, nor lawyers, and I know that we are the biggest party, let them say what they will. . . .We’ve come to relieve the distresses of the people.”
On the other hand, famous “revolutionaries” like Samuel Adams concluded, “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death,” despite the fact that, the Governor of Massachusetts, ratified policies that would seize and sell the land and livestock of farmers to the wealthy for cheap rates to which they responded with nonviolent civil disobedience. Adams had no issues with the Governor, in collusion with the ruling class, utilizing the same tactics as King George to allow Massacussetts financiers who were paying themselves windfall profits as part of paying down the debts owed by the new United States to fund its “revolution,” by extracting from common people. Capitalism gets its power, in part, by seducing “revolutionaries” like Adams into the praxis of paradoxical osmosis – the process of becoming the oppressor who swore to usurp while unconsciously utilizing the same tactics that push people down, instead of holding them up.
This is a perpetual theme observed throughout the history of the U.S. republic.
Moving forward to the early 20th century, a significant epoch for both the rise and precipitous fall of multiracial class solidarity, we must analyze the significance of one of the greatest labor uprisings in U.S. history, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. As comrade Howard Zinn notes, “Most of the time when class solidarity is discussed, it is thought of in a way where class consciousness supersedes or wipes away other forms of consciousness such as racial or ethnic ones. However, when one digs into the history of the battle, it is obvious that class solidarity did not erase racial or ethnic issues.” He concludes, “Instead, [during the Battle of Blair Mountain] union organizers and officials worked diligently to address the civil struggles of Black miners.”
This is not to say that all the white mine workers were without anti-Black. racist views, but as Zinn confirms, Blair Mountain did cross many racial and ethnic lines as evidenced by the fact that a committee of three commanders who led many of the mineworkers included one white American man, one Black man, and one immigrant of Italian descent. As such, Blair Mountain was more than an exercise solely of class solidarity, it also demonstrated the power of class struggle when it synergizes and intersects with the interests of white, Black, immigrant and other workers.
The extensive impacts of Blair Mountain are irrefutable – it increased consciousness about poor and unsafe working conditions, it demonstrated the power workers have over the national economy, and it was integral in increasing the number of unionized workers from the United Mine Workers of America to the later formed Steel Worker, American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This in itself must have induced fear and even duress among the ruling class and their purchased political acolytes. That said, the rising tide of communism and socialism in the United States during the early 20th century was the last straw – the capitalist ruling class needed to respond and quickly bifurcate, create fission, and, by all means necessary, disrupt and dismantle growing and demonstrable multiracial class solidarity among the masses.
The Great Depression, which the capitalist class predicted would only last a few weeks, represented a grand elucidation of the contradictions of, and minority beneficiaries of capitalism. This epoch also saw the height of the communist party in the U.S., who were known to include and exercise more of a racial analysis than their socialist counterparts. According to the historian, Norman Markowitz, understanding that the U.S. treatment of its Black population was a key component of capitalist rule, the communists “saw the unions as the best means of organizing Black and white working people to fight together against all forms of racism, with racism among the white working class being a central focus.” This notion is vindicated by the 1931-1932 case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youth in Alabama who were falsely accused of raping a white woman, but were exonerated due, in large part, to the assistance of the Communist Party who assisted with funding their legal defense and raising national awareness and solidarity.
One can only imagine how apoplectic the white supremacist, capitalist ruling class was at the idea that any white people, much less communists, would play a leading role in defending and freeing Black men subjected to the kangaroo courts of the Jim/Jane Crow south. This chagrin must have been compounded by the growing number of United Statesians who considered themselves communists/socialists , especially in large cities in most of the country. Enter Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called New Deal initiative – on its surface, a grand plan to direct massive government spending to lift people out of poverty and put them to work in good, unionized jobs. But this interpretation does not provide the full story, which includes the myriad ways that the New Deal also had the effect of denying generational wealth for nonwhite populations, while also acting as a cudgel for multiracial working class solidarity by opening the doors of whiteness to some previously denied membership including, but not limited to, European immigrants, especially those of Italian and Irish descent, and white passing, European Jewish people.
Poor and working class people have been at war with capitalists and the ruling class for time immeasurable. If the fog of war can be defined as, “confusion caused by the chaos of war or battle,” FDR’s New Deal very well acted as a fog machine in its efficacious strategy to pit workers of different races and ethnicities against each other. As author, Ira Katznelson observes in his landmark book When Affirmative Action was White, “By not including the occupations in which African Americans worked, and by organizing racist patterns of administration, New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens.”
It can be argued that one of the more iniquitous and draconian elements of the New Dea, specifically the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, was the intentional exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers – two employment sectors with high numbers of nonwhite workers and, in the case of domestic workers, specifically, high numbers of Black and Brown women. By allowing this to happen, both the Democrats and labor unions signaled they were willing to sacrifice multiracial, multiethnic, and intergenderational working class solidarity to improve economic and working conditions for white workers at the direct expense of nonwhite workers. As Katznelson states, “The great majority of southern members of Congress supported these bills, thus allowing this pivotal New Deal legislation to succeed.” He continues, “The South was willing to support their wishes provided these statutes did not threaten Jim Crow. So southern members traded their votes for the exclusion of farmworkers and maids, the most widespread Black categories of employment, from the protections offered by these statutes. “In circumstances where congressional Republicans were adamantly opposed to these laws, the Democratic Party made these racially relevant adjustments to secure a winning coalition that included southern members of the party. As a result, these new arrangements were friendly to labor but unfriendly to the majority of African Americans who lived below the Mason-Dixon line.”
By allowing a break up of multiracial class solidarity, Democrats and willing unions paved the way for a concerted attack on the very idea of unionization and collective bargaining itself, vindicated by the notorious Labor Relations Management Act of 1947, commonly known as “Taft-Hartley.” In fact, it was southern Democrats who joined with Republicans to not only pass the act, but to also overcome a veto issued by President Harry Truman who, ironically, referred to Taft-Hartley as, “a slave labor bill.” And we all know what followed – since the passage of Taft-Hartley, the share of unionized workers in the private sector has dropped from approximately 33% to just 6% today.
This trend does not include the assault on public sector unions, who have also been significantly and adversely impacted by the rise of “right-to-work” laws that have been ratified in states that were previously the epicenter of radical labor organizing, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. This move had particular and disproportionate impacts on Black workers who made up approximately 15.3% of the public sector workforce in 2022 , and currently make up 18.3% of federal workers in 2025 . That said, the concerted assault on the public sector workforce did not commence in 2011 with passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin – President Ronald Regan was a major progenitor of this assault using a new weapon of the ruling class and the capitalists that continues to act as interdiction for working class solidarity and labor power – neoliberalism.
A brief synopsis of neoliberalism, adroitly characterized by George Monibot , “Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.” And as it pertains to labor unions and class solidarity Monbiot adds, “The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone.” Here we can see how, with neoliberalism, the capitalist, white supremacist, ruling class have a primary and effective instrument to exacerbate the fog of class war and, in the process, pit workers of different races, ethnicities and gender identities against each other. To this end, to characterize neoliberalism as solely a right-wing construct would be an exercise of myopia.
A simple analogy that could easily be utilized as an SAT question would read, “capitalism is to Emperor Palpatine as neoliberalism is to Darth Vader.” And like the dark side of the Force seduced and corrupted Anakin Skywalker, neoliberalism did the same with so-called progressive Democrat party presidents like William Jefferson Clinton, who injected neoliberalism with legislative steroids including, but limited to, ushering the labor job, U.S. manufacturing killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the repeal of Glass Steagall that ended the separation of commercial banking from investment banking thereby providing for the impetus of “too big to fail,” and signing the Faircloth amendment that prohibits the federal government from constructing public housing.
His Democrat predecessor, Barack Hussein Obama, not to be outdone by the previous “first Black president,” may have been more insidious with his brand of neoliberalism, but embraced the ideology nonetheless. Both his “Affordable” Care Act and bailout of the corporations who were directly responsible for the largest national financial plunge since the Great Depression in lieu of the people pushed to the margins of, and, far too many, into a circumference of penury vindicate this sentiment. Obama’s neoliberalism had an even more deleterious effect on multiracial working class solidarity due to his race – and while blaming his failed policies on solely or primarily on his blackishness are feckless, his racial identity provided the right with even more ammunition as exemplified by the advent of the Tea Party and other right wing forces who became more radicalized during his presidency.
The electoral shellacking experienced by the Democrats in the past election would have you think that the party and its progressive wing would heed the call to build racial, ethnic and gender solidarity. Instead, the Democrats have signaled they have no desire to be an opposition party, and have more of a desire to flirt with right wing ideologies, including white “supremacy,” transphobia, genocide, and war. Neoliberalism has even seduced diet socialists like Alexandria Occasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who continue to sheepdog bewildered residents of the U.S. into the clutches of a party that has all but announced their primary directive – win back white Trump voters at the expense of poor and working class of all races but especially Black, Brown, Indigenous people who are supposed to be the “backbone” of the Democrat Party. A recent memo by the liberal Democrat consulting group, Third Way, confirms this. Therein, the flag of white “supremacy” ideology is firmly planted via suggested strategies including, but not limited to:
- Stop addressing voters as identity blocs and instead focus on shared American values;
- Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets);
- Push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging;
- Push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging;
- Many working-class voters reject policies seen as giveaways (e.g., student loan forgiveness, universal basic income);
- Democrats need to stop demonizing wealth and corporations broadly;
- Show up in rural communities and places where Democrats are unpopular;
- The emphasis on climate change is seen as harming job opportunities and economic growth, especially in working-class communities; and
- Critique corporate excess and corruption but avoid an anti-capitalist stance.
To date there has been no push back on this piece of political detritus from any of the “progressive” members of the Democrat Party, and Bernie Sanders has not mentioned it once on his recent sheepdog tour that’s attracting majority white attendees. The effect of this unprincipled positioning is giving rise to an unchecked season of class reductionism where any discussion of race is rejected and rendered into pariah status. And with President Trump’s brand of populism still being embraced by a significant portion of the U.S. population and the lack of a true opposition party to raise awareness and a proverbial alarm, we are potentially heading to a pernicious conclusion of a cross class white supremacist coalition that eschews any serious discussion about race and has the ultimate effect of unifying the white left with the white right.
Neoliberalism is a hell of a drug.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a writer, and policy analyst. Anthony is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace.
source: Black Agenda Report