Workers Vanguard No. 854	16 September 2005

Capitalist Rulers Left Blacks, Poor to Die

New Orleans: Racist Atrocity

For a Planned Economy Under Workers Rule!

SEPTEMBER 12—New Orleans, one of the oldest, most cultured, most complex of American cities, remains devastated, its residents dispersed, its dead still uncounted and unburied. Whole communities along the Gulf Coast have simply disappeared. Hurricane Katrina has ripped away the tattered facade of the U.S. government as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” exposing the racism, venality, ruling-class arrogance and utter ineptitude of the White House gang. A wave of revulsion has swept the country at the government’s response to the disaster, undercutting the post-September 11 “national unity” hysteria that had already taken a beating over the debacle in Iraq. Sections of the ruling class itself are hammering at Bush, not least for damaging the image of the “world’s only superpower” internationally.

Now they are even trying to forbid news media from showing the dead, who are still shamefully left to lie in the open while troops patrol the streets. When the troops were needed to evacuate people from New Orleans, they weren’t sent. Now, they’ve been mobilized above all to assert control over the city, to disarm the remaining population and to enforce the government’s suppression of the truth about the number of dead. While the government and media claim that the number is far lower than initially estimated, it is known that 25,000 body bags have been sent to New Orleans.

They want to hide the evidence of their crimes against the people of New Orleans. But what is starkly exposed is the raw reality of race and class in capitalist America.

It is not just that the victims in New Orleans were primarily black and poor, but a spotlight was thrown on the desperate conditions faced by black people across the country. New Orleans has its own peculiarities, including geography. But across the U.S., the mass of black people is forced to live in inner cities that are little more than rotting shells—from Newark and Camden to Detroit and Gary. No jobs, no health care, schools that are little more than prisons. This country’s racist rulers see no reason to spend money to maintain a layer of the black population that is increasingly seen as a surplus population. The horrific images of homeless, hungry and dehydrated black men, women and children in New Orleans prompted many to compare them to images of the Third World. In fact, in measures such as infant mortality, America’s ghettos do approach Third World conditions.

Rap musician Kanye West was widely cheered for saying on a telethon what millions are thinking: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The matriarch of the Bush clan, former first lady Barbara Bush, sniffed disdainfully after looking in on the Houston Astrodome, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas”! With naked class contempt, she declared, “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” She was speaking of starving people who had just had everything in their lives ripped up, had just lost their homes and their jobs. Many didn’t even know if their friends and companions and family members were drowned or saved.

But it’s not just Bush and the Republicans. The other capitalist party, the Democrats, is also directly responsible for deaths that likely number in the thousands. The black Democratic Party New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, ordered an evacuation but provided no resources for anyone without a car to get out. Former president Bill Clinton publicly solidarized with Bush Junior and also Senior, seeking to restore the spirit of “national unity.” Nationally, Democratic politicians are clamoring that the administration’s inaction over New Orleans shows its incapacity to respond to “terrorist” threats. They aim to present themselves as the party best able to wage the “war on terror,” a code word for ripping up the rights of immigrants, black people, the labor movement and most everyone else.

Despite differences over particular policies, the Republicans and Democrats are united in defending capitalism—an anarchic, irrational profit-driven system that cannot even provide for the safety and welfare of the population. The situation cries out for a socialist planned economy, in which natural resources and the technological and productive forces of society would be marshaled on behalf of human needs, not profit. What is urgently required is to build a workers party that can lead a workers revolution to rip power from the hands of the capitalist class and its political agents, right-wing Republican and liberal Democrat alike.

Criminality Upon Criminality

Billions in government handouts are being shoveled out as fast as possible—to the politicians’ corporate cronies. It’s a real “gold rush reminiscent of corporate America’s efforts to profit from the reconstruction of Iraq,” as the capitalists’ house organ, the Wall Street Journal (9 September) put it. Republican Congressman (and former real estate entrepreneur) Richard Baker of Baton Rouge told lobbyists in Washington, D.C., that “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Forty years ago, this was expressed as: “urban renewal” means “Negro removal.” In fact, the social disaster was manmade, and what’s happening now is sheer profiteering. Gasoline prices have soared above $3 a gallon and are expected to go higher. A Wall Street Journal (7 September) editorial was cheerfully headlined: “In Praise of ‘Gouging’.”

The government’s generosity toward its corporate pals stands in stark contrast to its murderous indifference and gratuitous cruelty toward the black working people and poor of New Orleans. Fury at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) finally forced the removal of its chief, Michael Brown. When Wal-Mart tried to deliver trucks of bottled water, FEMA turned them back. Absurdly evoking “terrorist” threats, FEMA delayed evacuation flights until they could get federal marshals on board every plane, which is not even done for everyday commercial flights. When starving, dehydrated, dying people tried to board flights out, FEMA “Homeland Security” agents initially stopped them because there weren’t working X-ray machines to check if they were carrying bombs!

Many liberals are complaining that the disastrous government response to Hurricane Katrina shows how FEMA, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, has been “neglected” over the years. In fact, FEMA’s “mission,” established in the heat of the U.S. rulers’ anti-Soviet war drive in the 1980s, was to prepare the infrastructure for a military dictatorship in the event of a “national emergency,” including plans for rounding up Central American immigrants and U.S. citizens in concentration camps (see “Reagan/North’s Plot for Military Coup,” WV No. 433, 24 July 1987).

On August 30, two Navy helicopter pilots disregarded orders and ferried more than a hundred hurricane victims to safety. They should have been greeted as heroes. Instead they were reprimanded, and one of them was reassigned to overseeing a temporary kennel to hold the pets of service members evacuated from the area. Their commander said, “We all want to be the guys who rescue people. But they were told...that is not the priority.” Anger ran so hot over this incident that several men in their unit removed the patches from their sleeves reading, “So Others May Live,” in open defiance of military discipline.

New Orleans police tried to keep people from even helping each other. Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and a local activist in the Algiers neighborhood, which was not flooded and where phones worked, reported that police told people who had dry homes and boats that their help wasn’t needed. Rahim wrote that “the people who could help are being shipped out. People who want to stay, who have the skills to save lives and rebuild are being forced to go to Houston” (San Francisco Bay View, 31 August).

Rahim described “gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed, and any young Black they see who they figure doesn’t belong in their community, they shoot him.” When a band of some 200 people, including visiting paramedics from a downtown hotel, tried to walk out of New Orleans over a Mississippi River bridge into a white area, suburban cops turned them back and fired over their heads, saying, “This isn’t New Orleans” (New York Times, 10 September).

Now the forces of the capitalist state are taking steps to disarm residents who managed to stay. No one, except for the armed thugs of the government, is to be allowed to defend himself. In this dire situation and in general, we defend the right of the population to bear arms. No to gun control!

The rulers’ fear of an armed population harks back to the fear of “servile insurrection” that haunted the slaveowners of the pre-Civil War South. The role of the federal troops sent in to New Orleans is above all to reassert control over the city and its people. Immediately following the flooding, the cops herded prisoners out of New Orleans and into the infamous hellhole of Angola prison. Many were kept handcuffed on a highway overpass in the merciless heat, held at gunpoint until they could be shipped to a prison. About the only thing this government knows how to build and maintain is prisons. One of the first “public works” undertaken by local authorities was to turn the Greyhound bus station into a jail for “looters,” with a sign reading, “Welcome to the New Angola South.” We say: Release them and drop all charges against them! Immigrants along the Gulf Coast are in particular danger of deportation if they can’t produce legal residency documentation. We call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

Capitalist Chaos and Profiteering

The fatal undermining of the flood control system around New Orleans did not begin the day that George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001. Far from it! Over two decades of neglect include the eight years of the Democratic Clinton administration in the 1990s, during which the U.S. experienced an economic boom and the federal government managed to run a sizable budget surplus.

But the pork barrel triumphed as usual, as politicians of both parties diverted the Army Corps of Engineers’ money to far less important projects, as right-wing New York Times columnist John Tierney pointed out in “The Case for a Cover-Up” (10 September). Thus the Louisiana Congressional delegation and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, who now attacks Bush for not anticipating the breach of the levees, “have been shortchanging the levees themselves” and have “directed large sums to dubious Corps projects aimed at increasing barge traffic, not preventing floods.” And it’s not just the Mississippi Delta. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, some 13,000 traffic fatalities each year result from inadequate highway maintenance. Compare this one, all but hidden index of death by government neglect to the number of youth killed each year by firearms—some 2,800 in 2002—which is widely publicized by proponents of gun control.

The Gulf Coast disaster has exposed the deadly logic of the capitalist ideologues who extol the “magic of the market” and preach the virtues of “small government.” One of these types, right-wing libertarian Grover Norquist declared: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The White House and Congress reduced the size of government funding for flood control and disaster relief, and as a consequence, there are likely thousands of people, mainly black and poor, who have now drowned.

The decades-long deterioration of this country’s government-maintained and -funded infrastructure has gone hand in hand with the deindustrialization of the United States. Hurricane Katrina knocked out 10 percent of the country’s oil refining capacity. There is no spare capacity, which is why oil companies are about to make a killing at the pumps. There has not been a new refinery built in the U.S. since 1976. Over the past quarter-century, total refining capacity has declined by 10 percent while consumption of gasoline has increased by 45 percent.

Why has this happened? At bottom, it is because of the basic laws governing the capitalist system of production. The rate of profit, which determines where the money goes, was too low to induce the oil companies to invest in new refineries. As Robert Mabro, head of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained: “The fundamental problem is that we depend on oil companies that dislike the refining business because of historically low returns but whose deficit can produce an economic, social and political crisis” (New York Times, 4 September). Even before Katrina, sharply rising energy costs were dampening the feeble economic expansion. Now the energy crisis, a blatant case of the irrationality of capitalism, is likely to tip the U.S. economy into a recession.

Meanwhile, the airlines are trying to bust workers’ unions, destroy their pensions and cut their wages, all the while claiming that high oil prices are making them do it. With early grain ready to ship but with few facilities working, farmers who ship crops down the Mississippi River are faced with ruin. The shrimping and oystering industries are wrecked. Poultry plants are destroyed, their stock rotting.

What Needs to Be Done

Over a million people are displaced. The masses of displaced people must be provided with jobs—union jobs at union wage scales, with health care, housing, clothing and all other necessities. Instead of being regarded as victims, these working people can be incorporated into a force for their own revitalization. What is needed at the minimum is a massive program of federally funded public works to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf Coast. There should be workers committees that would make sure that shoddy designs and penny-pinching construction could be vetoed before they endangered people’s lives, and that lifesaving repairs and maintenance would not fall victim to the ax of austerity.

However, not only the Republicans but also the Democrats will oppose any such program that smacks of “socialism.” There is one and only one force in American society that can change the current political balance in favor of working people: a revitalized labor movement. A number of Democratic politicians and liberal commentators are talking about public works programs like those of the 1930s New Deal. But it was the great labor battles of the time that forced the U.S. rulers, represented by Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to institute those projects as well as economic reforms like Social Security, unemployment insurance and welfare.

The labor bureaucracy—in both John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO and the recent breakaway coalition led by the SEIU’s Andy Stern—are just as opposed to fighting for a program of unionized public works as the two capitalist parties are to accepting it. Despite wide sentiment at the base to participate in relief and rebuilding efforts, the union misleaders have done nothing to undertake the mobilization of unionized workers that is necessary.

The union tops’ refusal to engage in class struggle is rooted in their support to the capitalist profit system, expressed politically in their ties to the Democratic (and sometimes Republican) parties. To unleash the social power of this country’s multiracial proletariat, there needs to be a fight to replace the labor bureaucracy with a leadership committed to mobilizing labor’s power, independent of the capitalist state and politicians, in the interests of all the exploited and oppressed.

The Bush administration and Congress are handing out billions in no-bid contracts for Gulf Coast rebuilding to the big corporations that are already looting Iraq—Halliburton; Bechtel; the Fluor Corporation. Significantly, Bush issued an order exempting jobs created by these companies from the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which stipulates that federally funded construction projects pay prevailing wages, which in practice are usually significantly above the legal minimum wage. This is a calculated blow against the labor movement.

Popular outrage at the response of the Bush administration to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina extends to anger at its crony capitalists who run Halliburton, Bechtel et al. A labor campaign to unionize the corporations engaged in “rebuilding” New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast would have massive popular support. Such a campaign could be an important first step in the long-needed unionization of the South and more generally the revival of the declining union movement.

Reformist leftist groups are pumping out lists of immediate demands for flood relief, for housing, for jobs—all urgent necessities. But what is left out of the equation is how we’re going to get those things. The agency for social change—the working class, including its key black component—is not what they look to to carry out their demands.

Typical of this approach is the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP). In a 4 September statement that calls for “a planned, cooperative economy run by the workers,” the FSP argues that “public pressure” can prevent the Bush administration from using the crisis to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel, et al. Workers World Party’s new front group, the “Troops Out Now Coalition,” one of the groups organizing the September 24 protests against the occupation of Iraq, calls for “Money for Hurricane Relief, Not for War.” A coalition statement calling for a “national campaign for emergency action” headlines, “The Bush Administration Is Criminally Negligent.” It then states, “We call on the Bush Administration” to do all manner of good things, including “a massive jobs program at union wages for rebuilding.” What is this, Christian redemption through good works by war criminals?

Such groups cynically appeal to naive young liberals who believe that the American government, even under Bush, can be made to respond to “public pressure.” In practice, such pressure politics is a vehicle for bourgeois “lesser evilism,” i.e., the Democratic Party.

Left-liberal publicist Naomi Klein states in the Nation (26 September), “New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood.” But how? New Orleans is owned already, by corporations and big landlords. They must be expropriated, their system of exploitation overthrown by workers revolution, before such mass rebuilding in the interests of the people can take place.

American Capitalism and Black Oppression

Some 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, the Gulf Coast disaster demonstrates that the basic condition of blacks as an oppressed color-caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of American society has not changed. Black and white liberals have long hailed the civil rights movement of the late 1950s-early 1960s as a historic triumph in the struggle for racial equality. Certainly, the end of legalized segregation in the South was a genuine and important democratic gain. But black oppression is rooted in the very structure of American capitalism, as the catastrophe in New Orleans has so graphically demonstrated. As we wrote in an early, basic document of the Spartacist League:

“The vast majority of Black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life to those who buy labor power in order to make profit. The buyers of labor power, the capitalists, are a small minority whose rule is maintained only by keeping the majority who labor for them divided and misled. The fundamental division created deliberately along racial lines has kept the Negro workers who entered American capitalism at the bottom, still at the bottom. Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through the struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.

“Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class.... Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.”

—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist special supplement, May-June 1967

The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. But the civil rights struggles remained under the leadership of liberals like Martin Luther King Jr. who were tied to the Democratic Party and more fundamentally came up against the inadequacy of democratic reform in addressing the de facto segregation and impoverishment of black people.

The deindustrialization of the Northeast and Midwest beginning in the 1970s has been especially devastating for blacks, since unionized industrial jobs were central to the fragile economic base of the segregated black communities. Budget cuts at all levels of government and the slashing of social welfare programs, carried out by Democratic as well as Republican administrations, have hit particularly hard at the large sector of black workers employed in public services, and all but eliminated the slim lifeline formerly available to the unemployed ghetto masses.

The net worth (assets minus debt) of the average black family is today less than one-tenth that of whites ($6,000 versus $67,000). Black unemployment is almost two and a half times that of whites. And black people are twice as likely to die from disease, accidents and homicide. Seeking to escape poverty and learn a usable job skill, young black men join the armed forces at a rate close to 50 percent higher than their white counterparts, thereby becoming cannon fodder for the U.S. imperialists in their military adventures like Iraq. Over 900,000 black men and women, including one out of every eight black men between the ages of 25 and 29, are in prison, mainly victims of the bipartisan “war on drugs.”

The attacks on the black population have also been wielded to undermine the conditions of the entire working class. In 1980, the average CEO received compensation 40 times that of an average worker in his company. Today it’s more than 500 times. The average real hourly wage of workers without a college degree is less today than 25 years ago. Today as before, labor and black struggle will go forward together or be driven back separately.

The Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation

Black people are not just victims of American capitalism. Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, whose rate of union membership is 32 percent higher than that of white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat—in urban transit, longshore, steel and auto. The proletariat alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party.

But for that to happen, the two main obstacles preventing black workers from playing that historic role must be overcome. These are the Democratic Party, especially its black component, and the trade-union bureaucracy. Beginning in the 1960s, the Republican Party positioned itself as the party of the “white backlash,” while the Democrats moved to co-opt young black activists into the government bureaucracy, initially through the “War on Poverty” programs. Since then, black Democrats have often served as mayors of major cities where they act as overseers of the ghetto masses. It is these politicos who have implemented on the ground the killing cuts in social welfare programs. It is the cops under their command who brutalize and imprison young black men en masse.

The trade-union misleadership’s willful refusal to combat the racist oppression of blacks, and in recent decades of mainly Latino immigrants, is the single most important factor underlying the decline of the union movement. This is nowhere clearer than in the South, which has been the main regional bastion of anti-labor reaction since the building of the integrated industrial unions in the 1930s.

The momentous working-class battles that built these unions, often under the leadership of “reds,” took place against the political backdrop of the so-called “New Deal coalition.” In the North, this consisted of sections of the liberal bourgeoisie, the labor movement and the black and Jewish minorities. However, key to the Democratic Party’s dominance nationally was the support of the white ruling class (the Dixiecrats) in the Jim Crow South, a racist police state in which blacks were stripped of every democratic right and liberty. The New Deal coalition literally extended from black leftist union organizers in the Midwest to Southern sheriffs who were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Even in the heyday of labor radicalism in the 1930s and early-mid ’40s, no serious and sustained effort was made to unionize the South, for the labor tops recognized that this would require smashing the entrenched system of white supremacy and would therefore have destroyed the fragile “unity” of the Democratic Party. That unity was finally broken up by the civil rights movement, as the main body of Dixiecrats decamped to the Republican Party.

Since the 1970s, parts of the South have experienced significant industrial growth, including large-scale investment by European and Japanese corporations attracted by the region’s relatively cheap labor. Only a very small fraction of Southern workers are unionized, although there are some crucially important beachheads of union strength such as the predominantly black ILA longshore union locals on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Organizing the region’s proletariat, which now includes increasing numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America, cannot be achieved on the basis of narrow business unionism which accepts and adheres to this country’s harsh anti-labor laws. It will require a level of working-class and black struggle that challenges the very foundations of the American bourgeois order.

On the one side, the black masses will rally behind racially integrated workers struggles against the local white power structure. On the other side, the Southern branch of the U.S. ruling class—both Democrat and Republican—will resort to police, company goons and professional strikebreakers while using racist demagogy to turn white workers against the labor movement. The defense of strike pickets and the need to defeat racist terror will be directly linked.

This is a concrete expression of our perspective of revolutionary integrationism. Counterposed to both liberal integrationism—the false view that black people can achieve social equality within the confines of American capitalism—and to all forms of black separatism, revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. There will be no social revolution in this country without a united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party. And there is no other road to eliminating the special oppression of black people than the victorious conquest of power by the U.S. proletariat.