James Boggs, 1969. This text remains as relevant as ever! Excerpt From Racism and Class Struggle


I cannot account for why many of us are here, but the fact that we are here indicates to me that the black movement has now reached the stage where it compels us to confront the question: What kind of economic system do black people need at this stage in history? What kind of economic system do we envisage,
not as a question for abstract discussion, but as the foundation on which we can mobilize the black masses to struggle, understanding that their future is at stake? It is now nearly fifteen years since the black movement started out to achieve civil rights through integration into the system. Year after year the movement has gained momentum until today millions of black people in all strata of life consider themselves part of the movement. At no other time in our 400 years on this continent have black people sustained such a long period of activity. We have had rebellions and revolts of short duration,but it is quite apparent that what we are now engaged in is not just a revolt, not just a rebellion, but a full-fledged movement driving toward full growth and maturity and therefore requiring a serious examination of the fundamental nature of the system
that we are attacking and the system that we are trying to build.
It is also now quite clear that black people, who have been the chief victims of the system | that is under attack, are the ones ‘who :have to. make. “this examination; because for us it is a very concrete and not just an abstract question. We have evaded this question because in reality we recognized that to tamper with
the system is to tamper with the whole society and all its institutions.Now we cannot evade the question any longer.
When we talk about the system, we are.talking about capitalism.I_repeat:.When_we.talk.about.the system, we. are talking about capitalism. Let us not be afraid to say it. And..when we talk about-capitalism,-we are talking about the system, that has created the situation that.blacks are in today! Let us be clear about that too. Black underdevelopment is a product of capitalist development. Black America is underdeveloped today because of capitalist semi-colonialism, just as Africa, Asia, and Latin America are underdeveloped today because of capitalist colonialism. We cannot look at the underdevelopment of the black community separately from capitalism any more than we.can look at-the.development.of-racism-separately from. capitalism. The illusion that we could resolve racism without talking about the economic system came to an end when we arrived at the point of talking about power to control and develop our communities. Now we are forced to face the question of what system to reject and what system to adopt. This has forced us to face squarely the relationship of racism to capitalism. Capitalism in the United States is unique because, unlike capitalism elsewhere—which first exploited its indigenous people and then fanned out through colonialism to exploit other races in other countries—it started out by dispossessing one set of people (the Indians) and then importing another set of people (the Africans) to do the work on the land. This method of enslavement not only made blacks the first working class in the country to be exploited for their labor but made blacks the foundation of the capital necessary for early industrialization. As I pointed out in the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party:* Black people were not immigrants to this country but captives, brought here for the purpose of developing the economy of British America. The traffic in slaves across the Atlantic stimulated Northern shipping. The slave and sugar trade in the West Indies nourished Northern distilleries. Cotton grown on Southern plantations. vitalized Northern textile industries. So slavery was not only indispensable_to the Southern economy; it was indispensable to the entire
national economy.
At the same time the land on which American Southem plantations and Northern farms were developed was taken from the Indians. Thus Indian dispossession and African slavery are the twin foundations of white economic advancement in North America. No section of the country was not party.to.the defrauding of the red
man or the enslavement of the Black. What white people had achieved by force and for the purpose
of economic exploitation in the beginning, they then sanctified by ideology. People-of-color,they rationalized, are by nature inferior; therefore, every personof color should besubordinated to every white person in every sphere, even where economic profit is-not-involved. The economic exploitation of man required by capitalism,
wheresover situated, having assumed in this country the historical form of the economic exploitation of the Black and red man, this historical form was now given the authority of an eternal truth) racism acquired a dynamic of its own, and armed with this ideology, ” white Americans from all strata of life proceeded to structure all their institutions for the systematic subordination.

The early struggles to abolish the relatively superficial manifestations of racism in public accommodations have now developed into struggles challenging the racism structured into every American institution and posing the need to reorganize these institutions from their very foundations. Housing, factories, schools and universities;labor unions, churches, prisons and the armed services; sports, entertainment, the mass media and fraternal organizations; health, welfare, hospitals and cemeteries; domestic and foreign politics and
government at all levels; industry, transportation and communications; the professions, the police and the courts; organized and unorganized crime; even a partial listing of the institutions now being challenged suggests the magnitude of the social revolution that is involved.
In the course of its escalating struggles, the Black movement has steadily and irreversibly deprived all these institutions of their legitimacy and their supposed immunity. I said_earlier that black underdevelopment is the result of capitalist development. At the bottom of every ladder in American society is a black man. His place-there is a direct result of capitalism supporting-racism and_racism supporting capitalism.
Today, in an effort to protect this capitalist system, the white power structure is seeking once again to re-enslave black people by offering them black capitalism. Now, scientifically speaking,
there is no such thing as a black capitalism which is different from white capitalism or capitalism of any other color. Capitalism, regardless of its color, is a system of exploitation of one set of people by another.set.of people. The very laws of capitalism require that some forces have to be exploited.
This effort on the part of the power structure has already caused certain members of the black race, including some who have been active in the movement, to believe that self-determination can be achieved by coexistence with capitalism—that is, integration into the system. In reality, black capitalism is a dream and a delusion. Blacks have no one underneath them to exploit. So black capitalism would have to exploit a black labor force which is already at the bottom of the ladder and is in no mood to change from one exploiter to another just because he is of the same color.
Nevertheless, as residents and indigenous members of the black community we recognize its need for development. Our question, therefore, is how can it be developed? How should it be developed? To answer these questions, we must clarify the nature of its underdevelopment. The physical structure and environment of the black community is underdeveloped not because it has never been at a stage of high industrial development but because it has been devastated by the wear and tear of constant use in the course
of the industrial development of this country. Scientifically speaking, the physical undevelopment of the black community is decay.
Black communities are used communities, the end result and the aftermath of rapid economic development. The ‘undevelopment of black communities, like that of the colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is a product of capitalist development. At the same time there is an important difference between the economic
undevelopment of a colony in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, and the economic undevelopment of the black community inside an advanced country like the United States.
The economic undevelopment of a colony is the result of the fact that the colony’s natural and historical process of development was interrupted and destroyed by colonialism, so that large sections of the country have been forced to become orremain pre-industrial or agricultural. For example, many of these
societies once had their own handicraft industries which were destroyed by Western economic penetration. Most were turned into one-crop countries to supply raw materials or agricultural produce to the Western imperialists. In struggling for independence from imperialism, these societies are fighting for the opportunity to develop themselves industrially. On the other hand, the physical structure of the black communities inside the United States is the direct result of industrial development, which has turned these communities into wastelands, abandoned by an industry that has undergone technological revolutions. The physical structure of black communities is like that of the abandoned mining communities in Appalachia whose original reason for existence has been destroyed by the discovery of new forms of energy or whose coal veins were exhausted by decades of mining. It would be sheer folly and naiveté to propose reopening these mines and starting the process of getting energy from their coal all over again. When one form of production has been rendered obsolete and a community devastated by an earlier form of capitalist exploitation, it would be supporting a superstition to propose its rehabilitation by a repetition of the past. You don’t hear any proposals for white
capitalism in Appalachia, do you? Secondly, the black community is not technologically backward in the same way as the majority of communities in an undeveloped nation in Asia, Africa, or Latin America are. In
these countries the vast majority of people still live on the land and, until recently, had had experience in using only the most elementary agricultural tools, such as the hoe or the plough. In these countries a revolution in agriculture must accompany the industrial revolution. By contrast, the mechanization of agriculture has already taken place in the United States, forcing the black people (who were this country’s first working class on the land) to move to the cities. The great majority of blacks have now lived in the city for the last generation and have been exposed to the most modern appliances and machinery. In the use or production of these appliances and machines, the blacks are no less developed than the great majority of white workers.
The undevelopment of blacks is primarily in two areas:

  1. They have been systematically excluded from the supervisory, planning, and decision-making roles which would have
    given them practical experience and skills in organizing, planning,
    and administration.
  2. They have been systematically excluded from the higher
    education which would have given them the abstract and conceptual tools necessary for research and technological innovation
    at this stage of economic development, when productivity is more
    dependent on imagination, knowledge, and the concepts of systems—on mental processes—than it is on manual labor.
    From the preceding analysis we can propose certain fundamental guidelines for any programs aimed at developing black
    communities:
  3. Black communities are today capitalist communities, communities which have been developed by capitalist methods. Their
    present stage of decay, decline, and dilapidation—their present
    stage of undevelopment—is a product of capitalist exploitation.
    They have been used and re-used to produce profit by every form
    of capitalist: landlords, construction industries, merchants, insurance brokers, bankers, finance companies, racketeers, and manufacturers of cars, appliances, steel, and every other kind of industrial commodity. Development for the black community means
    getting rid of these exploiters, not replacing white exploiters by
    black ones.
  4. Any future development of the black community must. start from the bottom. up,-not from the top down. The people at the very bottom of the black community, the chief victims of capitalist exploitation, cannot be delivered from their bottom position by black capitalist exploitation. They are the ones in the most
    pressing need of rapid development. They are also the fastest growing section of the black community. They are the black street force, the ADC mothers, welfare recipients, domestic servants, unskilled laborers, etc. These—not the relatively small black middle class—are the people who must be given an opportunity to exercise initiative, to make important decisions, and to get a higher education, if the black community is to be developed.
    The creation of a middle class of black capitalists would make the distribution of income inside the black community less equal, not more equal. It would be the source of greater chaos and disorder inside the black community, not more order and stability, because the layer at the bottom of the black community, far from seeing these black capitalists as models and symbols to be admired and imitated, would be hostile to and strike out at them.
  5. Struggle should be built into any program of black community development in order to stimulate crisis learning and escalate and expand the sense of civic rights and responsibilities. The struggles should be on issues related to the concrete grievances most deeply felt by the lowest layer of the black community
    —on issues of education, welfare, health, housing, police brutality—and should be aimed at mobilizing this layer for control of these institutions inside the black community as the only means to reverse the manifest failure of these institutions to meet the needs of black people. It is only through struggle over such grievances that the largest and most important section of the black community can be involved in decision-making. The most important obstacle to the development of the black community is the lack of power on the part of blacks, and particularly on the part of this section of the black community, and therefore the lack of conviction that anything they do can be meaningful. It is only through struggles for control of these institutions that they can achieve a degree of power and an increasing awareness of their importance and their responsibilities. Only through struggle can a community be developed out of individuals and the leadership necessary to any community be created.
    4, Any program for the development of the black community must provide for and encourage development at an extremely rapid, crash program, pace and not at an evolutionary or gradual pace. Otherwise, in view of the rapid growth of the black population, and particularly of its most oppressed sector, deterioration will proceed more rapidly than development. For example, in a community where there is a pressing need for at least 10,000 lowcost housing units, the building of a couple of hundred units
    here and there in the course of a year does not begin to fill theneed for the original 10,000 units—while at the same time another thousand or more units have deteriorated far below livable level. The same principle applies to medical and health care. To set up a program for a few hundred addicts a year is ridiculous when there are hundreds of new addicts being created every week.
  6. The black community cannot possibly be developed by introducing into it the trivial skills and the outmoded technology of yesteryear. Proposals for funding small businesses which can only use sweatshop methods or machinery which is already or will soon become obsolete means funding businesses which are
    bound to fail, thereby increasing the decay in the black community. Proposals for vocational training or employment of the hard-core in black or white businesses (on the theory that what
    black people need most to develop the black community is the discipline of work and money in their pockets) are simply proposals for pacification and for maintaining the black community
    in its present stage of undevelopment. There is absolutely no point in training blacks for dead-end jobs such as assembly work, clerical bank work, court reporting, elevator operating, drafting,
    clerking, meter reading, mail clerking, oil field or packing house working, painting, railroad maintenance, service station attending, steel mill or textile working. There is little point in training blacks for status quo jobs, such as accountant, auto mechanic, bank teller, bricklayer, truck driver, TV and appliance repairing,
    sheet metal worker. There is great demand for these jobs now, but new methods and new processes will make these jobs obsolete within the next decade. The jobs for which blacks should be educated are the jobs of the future, such as aerospace engineers, recreation directors, dentists, computer programmers, mass media production workers, communications equipment experts, medical technicians, operations researchers, teachers, quality control.
    There can be no economic development of the black community unless black people are developed for these jobs with a bright future. At the same time the preparation of blacks for these bright
    future jobs must not be confined to simply giving them skills. In the modern world, productivity depends upon continued innovation which in turn depends upon research and the overall concepts needed for consciously organized change. The only practical education for black people, therefore, is an education which increases their eagerness to learn by giving them not only a knowledge of what is known but challenges them to explore what is still unknown, and to interpret, project, and imagine. The only
    practical enterprises to develop the black community are those which are not only producing for today but which include research and development and the continuing education of their employees as an integral part of their present ongoing program. Black youth, born during the space age, are particularly aware
    not only of the racism which has always confined blacks to deadend jobs but of the revolutionary changes which are a routine part of modern industry. Any attempt to interest them in dead-end jobs or in education for dead-end jobs will only increase the decay and disorder in the black community, because rather than accept these jobs or this education, black youth will take to the streets. Any programs for developing the black community must have built into them the greatest challenge to the imagination,
    ingenuity, and potential of black youth. What youth, and particularly black youth, find hard to do are the “little things.” Whatcan mobilize their energies is “the impossible.”
  7. Any program for the development of the black community must be based on large-scale social_ownership-rather-than—on private individual enterprise. In this period of large-scale production and-distribution, private individual enterprises (or small businesses ) can only remain marginal and dependent, adding to the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness inside the black community.
    The social needs of the community, consciously determined by the community, not the needs or interests of particular individual entrepreneurs, must be the determining fact in the allocation of resources. The philosophy that automatic progress will result for the community if enterprising individuals are allowed to pursue their private interests must be consciously rejected. Equally illusory is the idea that development of the black community can take place through the operation of “blind” or “unseen” economic
    forces. The black community can only be developed through community control of the public institutions, public funds, and other community resources, including land inside the black community, all of which are in fact the public property of the black community. Massive educational programs, including programs of struggle, must be instituted inside the black community to establish clearly in the minds of black people the fact that the institutions which most directly affect the lives of the deepest layer of the black
    community (schools, hospitals, law-enforcement agencies, welfare agencies) are the property of the black community, paid for by our taxes, and that therefore the black community has the right to control the funds which go into the operation and administration of these institutions. This right is reinforced and made more urgent by the fact that these institutions have completely failed to meet black needs while under white control.
    All over the country today the police are organizing themselves into independent political organizations, outside the control of elected civilian officials and challenging the right of civilian administrations and the public, whom they are allegedly employed to protect, to control them. Community control of the police is no longer just a slogan or an abstract concept. It is a concrete necessity in order to overcome the increasing danger of lawlessness and disorder that is inherent in the swelling movement toward independent bodies of armed men wearing the badges of law and order but acting as a rallying point for militant white extremists. In these campaigns special emphasis should also be placed on the question of land reform and acquisition. Over the last thirty years, the federal government has changed land tenure and agricultural technology through massive subsidies involving the plowing-under of vast areas of land, rural electrification, agricultural research, etc. But all this has been for the benefit of whites who have become millionaire farmers and landowners, at the expense of blacks who have been driven off the land altogether or have been retained as farm laborers, averaging less than $5.00 a day, or $800 a year, in wages.
    In the South the black community must undertake a massive land reform movement to force the federal government to turn these plowed-under lands over to the millions of blacks still in the South, for black community organizations to develop. Black community development of these areas in the South should include not only the organization of producers’ and distributors’ cooperatives but also the organization of agricultural research institutes, funded by the federal government, where blacks working on the land can combine production and management with continuing education, research, and innovation. The responsibility of government for funding research in relation to agricultural development is well established. Nobody has a greater right to these funds than the blacks now in the South and other blacks who will be drawn back to the South to assist in community development of agricultural lands. In order that the black people in these agricultural areas do not fall behind their brothers and sisters in the cities, land in these communities should also be set aside for recreation, medical facilities, and for operation of advanced communication centers.
    A similar campaign for land reform and acquisition should be organized in the urban areas of the North where the great majority of blacks are now concentrated. The concept of “eminent domain,” or the acquisition of private property for public use, has already been well established in the Urban Renewal program. However, up to now “eminent domain” has been exercised only in the interest of white developers and residents, and against the interests of black homeowners and the black community.
    Federal subsidies have been used to expel blacks from their homes, businesses, and churches, and then to improve the areas which have then been turned over to private developers to build
    homes for middle-class and wealthy whites. The principle of “eminent domain” must now be employed to
    acquire land for the purposes of the black community. Vacant land, land owned by whites which has been allowed to deteriorate, etc., must be acquired and turned over to black communities to plan and develop under black control and with black labor, for the purpose of creating communities which will meet the
    many-sided needs of black people for housing, health, education, recreation, shopping facilities, etc., and which will be a source of participation, pride, and inspiration to the black community and particularly to black youth.
    The black community cannot be developed unless black youth, in particular, are given real and not just rhetorical opportunities to participate in the actual planning and development of the black community. The feeling which black youth have now is that the streets of the black community belong to them. But
    without a positive and concrete program to involve them in the planning and construction of the black community, they can only wander these streets angrily and aimlessly, each one a potential victim of white-controlled dope rings.
    The application of the concept of social ownership and control by the black community is essential to the involvement of the black street force in the development of the black community. These “untouchables” have no property which they can call their own and absolutely no reason to believe that they will ever
    acquire any. The only future before them is in the prisons, the military, or the streets. They are the ones who have sparked the urban rebellions. Yet, up to now, after each rebellion they have been excluded from participation, while middle-class blacks have presumed to speak for them and to extract petty concessions which have uplifted these blacks but have left the “untouchables” out in the cold. The “untouchables” have not been organized into decision-making bodies with issues and grievances and aspirations and rights to development. Instead, middle-class blacks have been used to pacify them. But the fact is that these street forces will not just disappear. They are growing by leaps and bounds, threatening not only the system but also those who stand between them and the system, including those blacks who presume to speak for them.
  8. Since pacification of these rebellious forces has been the chief purpose of all so-called development programs, it is no accident that most of these programs have been single-action, one-year, or “one hot summer” programs, without any fundamental perspective for developing new social institutions or for
    resolving the basic issues and grievances which affect the largest section of the black community.
    On the other hand, it is obvious that any serious programs for the development of the black community must be based on comprehensive planning for at least a five-year period. Piecemeal, single-action, one-year, or “one hot summer” programs are worse than no programs at all. They constitute tokenism in the economic sphere and produce the same result as tokenism in any sphere: the increased discontent of the masses of the community.
    The purpose of these five-year comprehensive programs must be the reconstruction and reorganization of all the social institutions inside the black community which have manifestly failed to meet the needs of the black community. Any programs for the development of the black community which are worth funding
    at all must be programs that are not just for the curing of defects. Rather they must be for the purpose of creating new types of social institutions through the mobilization of the social creativity of black youth, ADC mothers, welfare recipients, and all those in the black community who are the main victims of the
    systematic degradation and exploitation of American racism. Development for the black community at this stage in history means social ownership, social change, social pioneering,and social reconstruction.

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