On August 28, 1963, 300,000 demonstrators converged in multiracial unity for the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom. Fifty years later, with racist inequalities growing wider all the time, we can see the limits of reform under capitalism — and the urgent need for communist revolution.
The 1960s were a brighter time for the U.S. working class. Despite reversals of workers’ power in the Soviet Union and China, the revolutions in those countries still inspired class struggle. Two mass movements — for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam — galvanized millions of workers and youth. Rebellions broke out in oppressed and brutalized poor black neighborhoods, from Harlem and Newark to Watts and Detroit.
The March on Washington was designed to channel this anger into a set of legalistic demands. Not everyone went with the program. Malcolm X denounced the march as a “circus” and a “farce.” The author James Baldwin was banned from speaking by mainstream civil rights leaders who were currying favor with President John F. Kennedy. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) John Lewis did speak, but only after the organizers censored his critique of the president’s pending civil rights bill. Among the lines they struck: “Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts.”
Legal Reforms Can’t Protect Workers
The approved demands were read aloud to the throng by pacifist Bayard Rustin. Among them were the passage of “effective” civil rights legislation, the immediate end to segregation “in every school district” in the U.S., the “defeat” of unemployment, an increase in the national minimum wage, and a call for “black men and men of every minority group” to get “all of the rights…given to any citizen.”
The capitalist ruling class, shaken by the urban uprisings of the sixties and the threat they posed to the profit system, gave its bought-and-paid-for politicians a new set of marching orders. The Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The number of elected black officials grew from 1,469 in 1970 to more than ten thousand today.
But none of these laws or politicians can alter the fundamental fact that U.S. capitalism is in crisis. The bosses’ rate of profit is falling. Imperialist rivals are rising. (China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturer, and is building a modern deep ocean navy.) With no mass movement to be pacified, and no other nation standing as a communist beacon, U.S. capitalists have been free to intensify their attacks on workers’ standard of living. While median household income has been flat since 1973, and conditions for the poorest are in free fall, the 400 richest U.S. billionaires are now worth $1.7 trillion. According to Forbes magazine, their assets — essentially the profits they’ve stolen from the working class — grew by $200 billion in 2012 alone.
The civil rights movement represented millions of honest working people — black, Latino, Asian and white. Many sacrificed careers and even their lives in this anti-racist struggle. But the movement had no chance to realize its goals because its leadership focused on legal reform within the status quo. Under capitalism, laws can always be changed or reversed or ignored to suit the rulers’ needs of the moment. (This was true long before the Voting Rights Act was gutted last month in a transparently racist decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Laws are the smoke and mirrors the bosses use to conceal what really runs their system, the rule of maximum profit.
New Presidents, Same Old Racism
We’ve had nine presidents after Kennedy: Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, white men and Barack Obama. Nine administrations later, the movement’s “dream” is fast receding amid the nightmare of capitalism. Officially sanctioned racism is on the rise, from police murders of black teenagers to Obama’s wholesale deportation of nearly two million immigrants. Racism will never be reformed away; it’s an essential component of the profit system. The capitalists need it to exploit workers (including white workers), and also to keep them from seeing their common interests — or their common enemy.
Today, material conditions for the working class in general and black workers in particular are deteriorating. Despite countless waves of reforms, we are in many respects worse off than we were thirty or forty years ago. Jobs and freedom, among other things, are harder to come by than they were in 1963. Consider:
- Mass incarceration. In 1963, the U.S. incarceration rate (per 100,000 adults) was less than 200. Today, despite violent crime dipping to record-low levels, the rate has surged to more than 700 per 100,000 — far higher than in any other developed country. A total of 2.2 million people — 70 percent of whom are black and Latino — are now behind bars, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly five million more are on probation or parole.
Mass imprisonment and the bosses spreading of drugs was a response to the black rebellions in many U.S. cities. The bosses created the racist “War on Drugs,” instigated by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and sustained by every president since. As a result, black men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men. More than one of ten young black men between 20 and 34 are behind bars; one of three can expect to go to jail or prison in their lifetimes. Most were arrested on petty drug offenses, the majority for simple possession. - Mass unemployment. Over the half-century since 1963, the government’s “official” rate for white unemployment has averaged 5.1percent, less than half the black unemployment rate of 11.6 percent. (To put this in perspective, the overall unemployment rate during recessions in this period has averaged 6.7 percent.) As of last month, the “official” jobless rate for black workers was 12.6 percent. More than four of ten black youth are without work.
Moreover, these official figues exclude workers who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, part-time workers who can’t find full-time jobs and workers who have been jobless for more that six months. With these groups factored in, the true unemployment rate becomes 23 percent (shadowstats.com). And for black workers it may be well over 40 percent.
Even those who find jobs are often mired in poverty. In 1963, the minimum wage was worth more than $9 an hour in 2013 dollars. Today it stands at $7.25. - Massive school segregation. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, 30 years after violent racists tried and failed to stop integration in Boston, school districts throughout the U.S. have resegregated with a vengeance. While Reagan and both Bushes were openly hostile to school desegregation plans, neither Bill Clinton nor Obama have done anything substantive to stem this tide. By 2010, 38 percent of black students were in schools with fewer than 10 percent white students. Sixteen percent were in apartheid schools where white students numbered less than 1 percent.
As documented by Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project, separate is still unequal. Segregated black and Latino schools tend to have fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and less politically connected and wealthy parents. Inferior schooling creates an achievement gap, and gaps in future income and health as well.
- Massive inequalities. As reported by the New York Times (July 30), the United States — the sixth-richest country in the world, based on national income per person — has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates among the developed nations. The U.S. also ranks among the highest for child poverty and overall poverty, and among the lowest for life expectancy. Due to racism, all of these numbers are much worse for black and Latino workers.
Racist wage defferetials, alongside hospital and school closings and deadly cuts in social services, add up to super-profits into the trillions for the capitalist class. They pay for the bosses’ wars in the Middle East and Africa while funnelling billions to Wall Street CEO’s.
Smash Racism with Communism!
It’s a good start to march for jobs and human rights, but we cannot stop there. To put an end to the inequalities and all the racist horrors of capitalism, we need to smash a system built on profit and replace it from the ground up, with a society based on workers’ needs. We need a communist revolution led by a revolutionary party — the Progressive
Labor Party. Join us!
