U.S. Capitalism: Racist Divide-and-Rule

(Quote of the Week)

Writing during the outbreak of the 1950s civil rights struggles, George Breitman, a leader of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, explained that the bourgeoisie’s strangling of Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War signified that anti-black racism would endure as a fundamental feature of American capitalism. Today, the deepening immiseration of the black masses and the rollback of many gains of the civil rights movement underscore that genuine equality for black people will be achieved only through a socialist revolution carried out by the multiracial proletariat.

The striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further.

But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled—by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society. After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on—for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country.

—George Breitman, “When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began,” Fourth International (Spring 1954)