What do we mean by exploitation?

Published at Socialistworker.org.

THE TERM "exploitation" often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a "fair wage day's wage for a fair day's work"--the supposedly "normal" situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a "middle class" standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.

Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.

Marx argued that the ultimate source of profit, the driving force behind capitalist production, is the unpaid labor of workers. So for Marx, exploitation forms the foundation of the capitalist system.

All the billions in bonuses for the Wall Street bankers, every dividend paid to the shareholders of industrial corporations, every dollar collected by capitalist landlords--all of this is the result of the uncompensated labor of working-class people. And because exploitation is at the root of capitalism, it follows that the only way to do away with exploitation is to achieve an entirely different society--socialism, a society in which there is no tiny minority at the top that rules.

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EXPLOITATION IS not unique to capitalism. It has been a feature of all class societies, which are divided into two main classes, an exploited class that produces the wealth and an exploiter class that expropriates it.

Under slavery, exploitation is naked and obvious to exploiter and exploited alike. The slave is forced by sword and lash to work for the master, who provides just enough to keep the slave alive--all the rest of the fruits of their labor are forcefully appropriated by the slaveowner.

Similarly, under feudalism as it arose in its classical form in Europe, the serfs work on a plot of land that belongs to the lord. They work for part of the time for themselves, producing their means of subsistence, and the rest of the time, the product belongs to the lord. The terms of exploitation are clear to serf and lord alike--the serf labors for the lord, and receives nothing from the lord in return.

Capitalism is different among the chief forms of class societies Marx examined in that the exploitative nature of labor is hidden by the wage system. Except in cases of outright fraud, workers are hired, labor for a given amount of time and receive a wage in return. It appears on the surface that an equal exchange has taken place--but this isn't the case.

Why not? The capitalist, in addition to purchasing various inputs into the productive process--machinery, raw materials, etc.--also buys what Marx called "labor-power," increments of workers' time during which the capitalist controls the workers' creative and physical energies.

Under capitalism, most needs are met, at least for those who can afford them, by commodities--commodities being goods and services produced for sale on the market. Working-class people, who don't own the means to produce and sell commodities, have one commodity they can sell: their labor-power, their ability to work. In this way, workers are forced to sell themselves to some capitalist piecemeal in order to acquire money to buy the necessities of life.

Labor-power, according to Marx in writing his first volume of Capital, is "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he [or she] sets in motion whenever he [or she] produces a use-value of any kind." In other words, labor-power is the capacity to work, to create value, which the worker sells to the capitalists in increments for a wage.

Labor, on the other hand, is the actual process of work itself. Like the buyer of any commodity, the capitalist claims the right to consume the commodity they purchase. In this case, the consumption of labor-power consists of the control of the labor process and the ownership of the products workers create during it.

According to Marx's analysis, unlike machinery, raw materials and other inanimate inputs that pass on their value to the product but create no new value, labor-power is a "special commodity...whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value." In other words, workers produce new value contained in the final product, which belongs to the capitalist.

The distinction between "labor-power" and "labor" is the key to understanding exploitation under capitalism.

When a capitalist pays a worker a wage, they are not paying for the value of a certain amount of completed labor, but for labor-power. The soaring inequality in contemporary society illustrates this--over the past three decades of neoliberalism, the wealth that workers create has increased, but this has not been reflected in wages, which remain stagnant. Instead, an increasing proportion of the wealth produced by workers swelled the pockets of the superrich, who did not compensate the workers for their increased production on the job.

It appears that the capitalist pays the worker for the value produced by their labor because workers only receive a paycheck after they have worked for a given amount of time. In reality, this amounts to an interest-free loan of labor-power by the worker to the capitalist. As Marx wrote, "In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use-value of his labor-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he receives payment of the price. Everywhere, the worker allows credit to the capitalist."

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CAPITALISTS PURCHASE labor-power on the market. In general, the wage--the price of labor-power--is, like all other commodities, determined by its cost of production, which is in turn regulated by struggles between workers and capitalists over the level of wages and benefits, and by competition between workers for jobs.

As Marx wrote in Wage Labor and Capital, the cost of production of labor-power is "the cost required for the maintenance as the laborer...and for his [or her] education and training as a laborer."

In other words, the price of labor-power is determined by the cost of food, clothing, housing and education at a given standard of living. Marx adds that "the cost of production of...[labor-power] must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones." So, wages must also include the cost of raising children, the next generation of workers.

So in Marx's generalized analysis, the level of wages depends on what it takes to keep workers and their families (who represent the next generation of workers) alive and able to work--with their standard of living affected by the outcome of class struggles between workers and capitalists.

The crucial point is that the cost of wages or labor-power depends on factors completely independent of the actual value produced by workers during the labor process. This difference is the source of "surplus value," or profit. So let's compare the price of labor-power to the value, expressed in price, of the commodities that workers creates through their labor.

To take a simple example, let's assume that a worker is able to produce in four hours new value that is equivalent to the value of their labor-power for the day--to, say, $100 in wages. Marx called this "necessary labor," because it is the amount of labor required to replace the wages paid by the capitalist, and because if the worker labored independently and not for a capitalist, it would be "necessary" for them to work four hours to maintain their standard of living.

If it was a matter of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work," workers ought to be able to go home after four hours of labor. In our example, the capitalist is paying them $100 for the workday, and the worker produced $100 worth of new value in the form of products that belong to the capitalist, which they can sell on the market to recoup what they spent on wages and other costs of production.

But things don't work this way under capitalism. As Marx wrote in a pamphlet calledValue, Price and Profit, "By buying the daily or weekly value of the laboring power of the [worker], the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use or make that laboring power during the whole day or week."

Hence, the worker, in order to receive a wage equivalent to the value they produce in four hours, is forced by the capitalist to work longer--a total of, in our example, eight hours. The value created during the additional four hours, embodied in the products produced by the worker during that time, is what Marx called "surplus value."

When this surplus product is sold, the capitalist pockets the proceeds--this, according to Marx, is the secret to the source of profits. And it's not only industrial capitalists whose profits derive from surplus value, or unpaid labor. The "rentier" classes, such as finance capital and landlords, take their cut from the wealth extracted from the labor of workers in the form of interest on loans to the industrial capitalists and to others in society, rent for factories and homes, and so on.

Exploitation forms the basis of all the profits shared among the entire capitalist class. It is not simply the case that the wealthy have a lot while workers have little; capitalists accumulate wealth through a system of organized theft from the working class.

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AN UNDERSTANDING of the basics of Marx's theory of exploitation helps to explain the different forms of struggles between workers and capitalists. To take a few examples (although there are many more):

One of the earliest such struggles was over the length of the working day, which Marx discusses at length in the first volume of Capital. So long as everything else remains the same, capitalists can increase the amount of "surplus labor" over and above that needed to produce the value of wages by extending the length of the working day. This increases the rate of exploitation, as workers spend a greater portion of the working day performing unpaid labor for the capitalist.

In the 1880s in the U.S., workers, led by anarchists and socialists, waged heroic struggles to limit the working day to eight hours. These workers were struggling to decrease the rate of exploitation. By fighting for a shorter working day, they were fighting to decrease the amount of unpaid labor they were forced to perform for the capitalists.

Similarly, struggles over wages and benefits are struggles over the value and price of labor-power, which is an expression of workers' standard of living. Capitalists seek to lower wages and slash benefits, decreasing the price of labor-power in order to increase the accumulation of surplus value, to maximize their profits.

This is evident in the current wide-ranging attack on workers' living standards, from public-sector workers' wages, pensions and health benefits to private-sector workers such as those at Verizon. The 45,000 union workers who went on strike at Verizon and the public-sector workers and their allies who rose up in Wisconsin were fighting to defend the price of labor-power.

Most importantly, Marx's theory of exploitation reveals that because the source of capitalists' wealth is the unpaid labor of workers, the interests of workers and capitalists--like slave and master or serf and lord before them--are diametrically opposed and are impossible to reconcile. The two will always come into conflict since capitalists can only increase their share of the wealth at the expense of workers, and vice versa.

Workers have to struggle to decrease the severity of the exploitation they face under capitalism. But as long as the capitalist system exists, workers will be exploited, and their unpaid labor will remain the source of the profits that are the lifeblood of the system.

Therefore, Marx concluded that the only way for workers to control the wealth they create and use it to meet their needs was under a different system altogether. As he wrote in Value, Price and Profit, "Instead of the conservative motto 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionarywatchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!'"

According to Marx, only when workers control the means of production for their own benefit can exploitation be abolished--only then will "the expropriators [be] expropriated."

No unemployed need apply

Published at Socialistworker.org.

HERE'S THE latest perverse story from what's being called the "jobless and wageless recovery": Significant numbers of employers are openly discriminating against unemployed job seekers.

No, that's not a typo. According to"Hiring Discrimination Against the Unemployed," a study by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) published in July:

U.S. employers of all sizes, staffing agencies and online job posting firms are using recruitment and hiring policies that expressly deny employment to the unemployed--simply because they are not currently working. In other words, at a time when the competition for jobs is extraordinarily intense--with nearly five unemployed job seekers for each new job opening--some businesses and recruitment firms are telling would-be job seekers that they can't get a job unless they already have a job.

Employers are blatant about this discrimination, which is legal in every state except New Jersey. The NELP report cites language in ads placed by large corporations such as Allstate Insurance and the University of Phoenix, which that applicants "must be currently employed." Other employers require that unemployed applicants have been recently employed.

Discrimination against the unemployed is especially devastating in the midst of a jobs crisis in which U.S. workers face rates of long-term unemployment worse than any period since the Great Depression. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "6.18 million or 44.4 percent of all unemployed workers" have been jobless for longer than 27 weeks, with an average of over 40 weeks on unemployment for these workers.

This bias is also a pernicious, albeit formally indirect, form of racial discrimination.According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, seasonally-adjusted unemployment for African Americans stands at 15.9 percent, compared with 8.1 percent for white workers. For Latinos, unemployment is also disproportionately high, at 11.3 percent.

Therefore, discrimination against the unemployed will disproportionately hurt Black and Latino job seekers, widening these racial gaps.

Unemployment is a constant feature of capitalism, even in boom times--and the millions of additional unemployed workers are out of work today not because there was a sudden outbreak of laziness among U.S. workers, but as a result of the financial crisis of 2007-8 triggered by widespread fraud and excess on Wall Street.

Employers justify the decision to discriminate against the unemployed, especially those out of work for extended periods of time, by arguing that the skills of the long-term unemployed atrophy. They claim the long-term unemployed fail to stay on top of new developments in their field and become unaccustomed to work routines.

Such reasoning highlights the utter disregard for human need that is systemic to capitalism. To bosses driven only by the profit motive, workers are expendable. Rather than provide an opportunity for the unemployed to get back on their feet, the system chews workers up, and then puts them out to pasture when they are no longer deemed useful.

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VARIOUS non-governmental organizations, including USAction and Color of Change, have launched petitions encouraging Monster.com, a leading job search website, to stop posting ads from employers who discriminate against the unemployed.

Democrats also have introduced legislation in the House and Senate, the "Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011," which would prohibit discrimination against the unemployed in hiring and in job postings.

According to a poll conducted by the NELP, such legislation has the support of some 63 percent of respondents, and 90 percent consider discrimination on the basis of employment status to be unfair.

However, even this goes too far for some. Steven Yarusinsky and Daniel L. Saperstein, lawyers at the New Jersey law firm Proskauer Rose, attacked the proposed the Fair Employment Opportunity Act in a recent Washington Post article.

After shedding the obligatory crocodile tears over the high rate of unemployment, Yarusinsky and Saperstein argue, "First...[b]anning unemployment discrimination would equate an often fleeting status with a permanent condition or trait, trivializing the underlying purpose behind discrimination law to prohibit employment decisions made on account of considerations such as race, for which there is never legitimate justification."

This is absurd on its face, given that nearly half of the currently unemployed have been without a job for over six months. And given that those discriminated against on the basis of race are disproportionately represented among the unemployed, far from "trivializing" their rights, additional protections for the unemployed would disproportionately benefit those who already face discrimination for other reasons.

But Yarusinsky and Saperstein continue:

Second, to analogize unemployment status to other protected classes opens the door for the creation of many more such classes--potentially clogging the nation's courtrooms with frivolous lawsuits...employers will have no choice but to expend valuable resources and time--otherwise invested in the workplace--seeking legal counsel to avoid harsh penalties.

This illustrates that what is bad for employers, whose interests the authors represent, is good for workers, and vice versa. Whether or not anti-discrimination protections for the unemployed will lead to protections against other forms of discrimination (and this is hardly a bad thing for the millions of oppressed people facing discrimination in this country) is irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is the injustice of discrimination on the basis of employment status.

Also, employers could avoid lawsuits simply by not discriminating against job applicants. Given that corporations are currently hoarding records amount of cash, it's difficult to feel too sorry for them potentially having to shell out some of it for legal fees. Of course, Yarusinsky and Saperstein do not express the same sympathy for the unemployed--who tend to lack the money with which to hire lawyers to file frivolous lawsuits.

Finally, while acknowledging that today, many are "unemployed through no fault of their own," the writers argue against anti-discrimination protections because "in good and even troubled economic times, long bouts of unemployment may bespeak a bad work ethic or some other improper behavior--a legitimate consideration for any employer."

In other words, they argue against protections from discrimination for the unemployed because such discrimination provides employers with a means to weed out potentially undesirable employees. If some unemployed but qualified workers are unfairly excluded as a result, so be it.

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THESE ARGUMENTS against the Fair Employment Opportunity Act, which would begin to address a basic and deeply unpopular injustice for which there is currently no recourse in any state other than New Jersey, reveal the truth behind a fundamental myth propagated by apologists for capitalism.

The labor market, we are told in our Economics 101 textbooks, is a level playing field where employers and employees meet as equals. Workers are "free labor," supposedly able to choose another employer if they are dissatisfied with their current boss, or to reject a job offer if they are dissatisfied with the wages and benefits on offer.

However, to borrow the criticism so often leveled at socialists by capitalist ideologues, this "sounds great in theory, but doesn't work in practice." Anyone who has ever looked for a job and jumped at the first offer because they needed to make rent that month, or stayed at a job they hated because they needed the health insurance, knows what a lie this is.

As Karl Marx wrote in Capital, under capitalism workers are "free...in the double sense": they are not slaves or serfs, but they are also "free from...any means of production of their own." In other words, while workers are not bound to any individual exploiter, because workers lack the means to produce on their own, they must sell themselves to some capitalist in order to survive. And not even that is guaranteed, a fact illustrated by the record levels of long-term unemployment in this time of crisis.

Capitalists and their mouthpieces like Yarusinsky and Saperstein oppose any and all checks on their power; they know the game is rigged, and they will do whatever it takes to keep it that way, no matter what the cost in human terms.

The jobs meltdown

Published at Socialistworker.org.

TWO YEARS after the economic "recovery" is supposed to have begun by the official calculations, the latest report on jobs from the U.S. government shows the Great Recession is alive and well for anyone who has the misfortune of looking for work.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. economy added just 18,000 jobs in June, and employment figures for May were revised down to just 25,000 new jobs. That's a huge drop from February through April, when politicians and commentators celebrated announcements of more than 200,000 new jobs each month.

In addition, approximately a quarter of a million people gave up looking for work in June, joining the ranks of the millions of "discouraged workers" who are no longer even counted among the unemployed.

A significant portion of the decline in the overall unemployment rate in the past 18 months is the result not of new jobs being created, but of unemployed workers giving up on finding work. But job creation in June was so bad that even with so many "discouraged workers" dropping out of the statistics, the unemployment rate still jumped to 9.2 percent.

Unemployment is always a feature of capitalism, even in boom times, but it has reached nightmarish proportions in the U.S. and across the world in the wake of the most recent economic crisis.

In an issue brief that puts the June unemployment numbers in perspective, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that while there are currently 6.9 million fewer jobs than at the start of the Great Recession, "we should have added around 4.1 million jobs to keep pace with population growth. This means that the current gap in the labor market is roughly 11 million jobs. To close that gap within three years, we would have to add around 400,000 jobs every single month."

Even worse, the number of underemployed--those who work part time but would like a full-time job--has barely declined during the "recovery." As Shierholz writes, "In the 23 months since the end of the recession, the total number of un- or underemployed workers has decreased from 26.1 million to 24.6 million, a decline of only 1.5 million."

The picture looks grim from the statistics--but the individual stories behind the numbers are even more wrenching. As Chelsea, from Rochester, N.Y., described her situation:

"I have an associate's degree, and when I lost my union grocery job last summer, it was four months before I found anything. And that anything was Wal-Mart. I lost my health insurance, I had health issues that began to spiral out of control, and I faced an imminent eviction. Now I can only work 25 hours a week or I lose my Medicaid, without which I can't work or live."

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UNEMPLOYMENT FOLLOWING the recent recession is much longer term than in any recovery of the recent past, with over 45 percent of the unemployed having been without a job for over six months.

And after being hardest hit in the depths of the crisis, Blacks and Latinos haven't shared equally in what little job growth there has been. Unemployment for Latinos stands at 11.9 percent, a very slight decline from 12.2 percent two years ago. And during the "recovery," unemployment for African Americans increased from 14.9 percent to 16.2 percent, according to Shierholz--compared with a jobless rate of 8 percent for white workers.

Budget cuts at all levels of government have exacerbated the jobs crisis, especially for Black workers and women, who are disproportionately represented in a public sector that has shed more than 400,000 jobs since the recession.

These public-sector losses have erased nearly half of the growth in private-sector jobs, according to Shierholz--and the austerity agenda coming from both Democrats and Republicans promises more job losses to come in the public sector, as well as cuts to wages and benefits.

According to BLS figures, job losses and long-term unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession represent a deep hole unlike any other recession since the Second World War. And there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.

The bad employment news comes as the college class of 2011--which the Wall Street Journal dubbed "the most indebted ever" due to their record average student loan debt of $22,900--joins millions of workers in the search for jobs that just aren't there.

According to Time magazine, with estimates of real unemployment among those under 25 topping 50 percent, it's expected that as many as 85 percent of new college graduates will move back home with their parents.

For example, Owen, who is finishing up his college degree in New York City, has been searching in vain for a job for over six weeks:

I've been sending out resumes daily, talking to everyone I know. I've turned up nothing. I've gotten two interviews, but no callbacks. It's depressing. If I don't find a job in the next six weeks, I'll have to move back in with my parents in Maine, where the job market is even worse.

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OF COURSE, the misery isn't being shared by America's ruling class. In fact, Corporate America is profiting as a result. U.S. corporations raked in record profits of $1.68 trillion in the last quarter of 2010, even more than the boom years before the Great Recession, helped in no small part by the jobs crisis.

These profits were achieved in large part because companies were able to return production to pre-crisis levels, or close to it, while employing millions fewer workers--in other words, making their employees work harder to produce more for the same or less pay and benefits.

Karl Marx's words in Capital never seemed more relevant: "The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve [of unemployed], while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to overwork and subjects them to the dictates of capital."

Meanwhile, capitalists are hoarding the immense wealth from this increased level of exploitation, rather than investing it in expanding production and creating jobs. As the Canadian Marxist David McNally wrote:

The big reason for the failure of jobs to return is that while profits have recovered, business investment has not. In one major economy after another, corporations are hoarding cash rather than investing it...Put simply, the rise in profits is not translating into new capital accumulation on any meaningful scale. Instead, corporations in the U.S. and elsewhere are simply hoarding cash, holding onto it in larger amounts than at any time in the last 60 years. By the beginning of 2011, in fact, non-financial firms in the U.S. had at least $2 trillion in cash and checking deposits."

With Republicans and Democrats bickering over how much to cut, not whether to cut at all, it's clear that there won't be any alternative to austerity and the corporate offensive coming from above. The challenge will have to develop out of the self-organization and solidarity of the working class--employed and unemployed.

In fact, though it is generating records profits, the jobs crisis is also at an international wave of discontent and protest that is finding expression from the Arab revolutions that began in Tunisia and Egypt, to the huge labor protests of Wisconsin, to the strikes and mass mobilizations in European countries like Greece and Spain.

In all these struggles, un- and underemployment, especially for young workers, are an important grievance.

Historically, the unemployed have played a vital role in class struggle, even in the midst of a crisis, when employers attempt to pit workers against each other. For example, organizing among the unemployed was essential to winning the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, the first of three major labor battles that year which opened the way for the mass union struggles to come.

As Subterranean Fire author Sharon Smith wrote, the strike at Auto-Lite:

began on very weak footing. The 4,000 strikers represented less than half of the total workforce at Auto-Lite. Moreover, fully one-third of all Toledo workers were unemployed at the time. Under these conditions, the strike could easily have been doomed, since unemployed workers might have been expected to rush to take the strikers' jobs in desperation.

Instead, the unemployed played a key role in winning this strike, thanks to an ingenious strategy advocated by the radical pacifist A.J. Muste, an organizer from the American Workers Party. Although courts had prohibited solidarity picketing, Muste's Lucas County Unemployed League pledged to bring large numbers of unemployed workers to the picket line...

When the National Guard was sent in to help the police, its troops fired on the picketers, killing one and injuring many. But the picketers kept fighting back in a standoff that lasted six days--until the company finally agreed to close down production at the plant and troops were removed on May 31...The company finally surrendered on June 4, agreeing to recognize the union and to rehire all of the strikers to their old jobs--in a complete victory.

Despite the mass human suffering reflected in the jobs reports from May and June, there is also hope to be found in the struggles of today and yesterday against austerity and for the right to jobs with dignity and security.

The making of white people (Book Review)

Published in the International Socialist Review, May-June, 2011 issue.

Nell Irvin Painter
The History of White People
W.W. Norton, 2011 • 496 pages • $18

Nell Irvin Painter begins The History of White People declaring that “because race is an idea, not a fact…its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm.” In the just under 400 pages that follow, Painter recounts more than 2,500 years, from the ancient Greeks through today, of examples of thinking on peoples now thought of as white.

Painter, who has written several books on African American history, focuses here on whites, as they are often defined as “the leavings of what is not black,” and much of what has been written on white races has fallen into obscurity.

What emerges from this is a convincing argument that race, far from being a permanent scheme of categorizing human beings, is a social construct, a relatively recent development that has changed over time.

Painter points out that “for most of the past centuries…educated Americans firmly believed in the existence of more than one European race.” She explains that this view legitimized the rule of elites by attributing the inferior social position of slaves and workers to a perceived racial inferiority. She points out that while today this ideology is recognized “as it relates to black race…in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white.”

Those at the top decide who’s white

Painter’s definition of who qualifies as white is ambiguous, sometimes used interchangeably with “American,” and differs depending on the historical period. Generally, it seems that “American whiteness,” according to Painter, implies belonging to a group considered by elites to be “Americans,” a category that has remained in flux and is intertwined with class and gender.

The book is structured around four “enlargements of American whiteness.” The first three include the extension of suffrage to all white men in the late eighteenth century, the acceptance of Irish Americans alongside Anglo Saxons as “superior stock” in the late nineteenth century, and the same process for the descendants of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, including Jews, following the Second World War.

These successive groups of immigrants initially faced harsh discrimination and were labeled as an inferior demographic threat to “real Americans.” Painter details how political and economic leaders used anti-immigrant hysteria to crack down on the growth of unions and radical movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, identifying left movements as an “alien” threat to the existence of American society.

Sometimes these “inferiors” were classified as white, as in an 1876 Thomas Nast cartoon that labels an offensive, stereotypical caricature of an Irish man as “white.” According to others, they were not “white,” or were at least members of a race deemed inferior to and separate from the Anglo-Saxon ideal: Painter cites Ralph Waldo Emerson who in 1829 spoke of “the Irish” and “the Caucasian race” as distinct.


Painter argues that the “fourth enlargement of the American” is occurring today as people of color break into the highest echelons of American society and larger proportions of the population identify as multiracial. She wonders, “Is this the end of race in America?,” but tempers this by pointing to attempts in recent years to use the science of DNA, which undermines scientific notions of race, to relegitimize race and racial differences.

Although she concludes by saying that “poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior,” Painter does not explain what produced this yearning in the first place and why elites continue to be driven by it.

In discussing the persistence of racism in the modern United States, Painter overlooks the significance of events like the housing crash, which has disproportionately impacted people of color while the right has scapegoated these victims, blaming them for Wall Street’s crisis. Such developments, more than discussions on the lack of connections between DNA and race, are vital to understanding the role that race and racism continue to play in the United States.

This omission highlights a weakness that runs throughout the book: Painter focuses almost exclusively on elite opinion, especially in academia, rarely mentioning those who dissent from white supremacist thinking and not rooting academic thought firmly enough in its political and economic context.

Similarly, she mentions challenges from within academia and from a handful of Black activists, but largely glosses over the role of mass struggle, including of whites who have challenged white supremacy directly by struggling in solidarity with Blacks.

This approach has its uses, as these elites have historically been the driving force behind the invention and propagation of racist ideas, but it leaves out the perspectives of those targeted and demonized by racism. Simply shining a light on white supremacist arguments is enough to make apparent their absurdity, often presented at the time as science.

For example, Painter recalls the Prussian “father of art history,” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who in the eighteenth century promoted a white beauty ideal based upon Roman copies of ancient Greek statues carved in white marble. Winckelmann never traveled to Greece to see the originals, which were painted a darker hue.

Then there is Samuel George Morton, a leading American anthropologist in the mid-nineteenth century who collected and measured nearly 1,000 skulls in his lifetime, “which he judged to predict intellectual ability according to race.” Morton, a staunch white supremacist, measured ancient Egyptian skulls and concluded that most were white. Painter writes: “[A]ncient Egypt’s glory is linked to the superiority of white people…Never mind puzzling details. What looked like wooly hair in ancient Egyptian depictions Morton deems wigs worn by Egyptians over their real hair, which surely was straight and light-colored…”  

However, the question of why self-contradictory racist ideas were promoted by academic and political elites for hundreds of years is one that Painter touches on but does not satisfactorily explain.

Painter argues that racial schemes set the poor and powerless at the bottom and the rich and powerful at the top.… [I]nnate qualities are needed to prove the justice—the naturalness and inalterability—of the status quo.” Of course, “in the United States…that often turned into a justification for African slavery.”

However, she does not pay sufficient attention to the events that precipitated the rise of racial slavery and the foundation of American definitions of whiteness as counterposed to Blackness.

The Marxist Theodore William Allen, in his classic 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, argues that beyond being simply a social construction or “yearning,” in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia “the plantation bourgeoisie established a system of social control by the institutionalization of the ‘white’ race whereby the mass of poor whites was alienated from the black proletariat and enlisted as enforcers of bourgeois power.”

Defining race in response to struggle from below

In other words, rather than simply a justification for a status quo that consisted of the enslavement of Blacks, racism and racial slavery were established out of necessity by a ruling class of slaveholders in order to secure a supply of agricultural labor and cement their rule over Black slaves and poor whites. The promotion of white identity was used by the ruling class to build a cross-class alliance and use poor whites to enforce an economic order to the detriment of Black slaves and poor whites. As the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “they divided both to conquer each.”

Painter recounts the largely forgotten history of white slavery in Europe and of white (and Black) indentured servants sent the to British colonies, pointing out that in mid–seventeenth-century Virginia bonded whites outnumbered Africans on tobacco plantations. She does not mention Bacon’s rebellion, however, when, as Allen writes, “the armed working class, black and white, fought side by side for the abolition of slavery,” missing an event that is essential for understanding the advent of racial slavery and the genesis of the modern American white/Black racial dichotomy.

In the decades following the defeat of the rebellion, the colonial ruling class passed a series of laws that singled out descendants of Africans for special oppression. By importing African slaves to ensure a steady supply of labor, racializing perpetual servitude, and employing poor and indentured whites as an armed force to repress Black slave revolts, colonial planters created a system of divide and rule.

Also left unexamined is the era of Radical Reconstruction, when Black freedman challenged white supremacy, voted, and were elected by the thousands to local, state, and national offices, while many poor whites gained the vote for the first time. Reconstruction was overturned by a wave of Klan terror and the disenfranchisement of Blacks, an outcome of a struggle over the fate of the newly freed slaves.

The Populist movement of the 1890s challenged the racist Democratic Party’s stranglehold on the South, providing examples of the possibility of solidarity between poor white and Black farmers. Following the defeat of Populism, Jim Crow laws were enacted across the South, a response to interracial challenges to the ruling class reminiscent of the response to Bacon’s Rebellion. And, as Painter addresses, post–First World War radicalism was met by the ruling class with a Red Scare that included the scapegoating of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, waves of deportations, and anti-immigrant legislation.

The Communist Party, which in the 1930s included tens of thousands of whites struggling for racial equality alongside Black members, is mentioned only once in the context of their use of “Nordic” figures to represent “the American worker.”

This is not to say that for most of American history majorities of whites haven’t harbored racist ideas; they have, and millions still do. The point is that by excluding so many whites who challenged white supremacy, The History of White People leaves the reader with an account that does not do justice to the role such struggles played in shaping elite definitions of whiteness and the policies enacted to enforce them. Rather than being simply a social construction emanating from academia and achieving consensus among the broader populace, changing definitions of American whiteness have been shaped by the outcomes of struggles that challenge these elites from below.

In spite of these weaknesses, The History of White People is a valuable text, full of fascinating examples of the absurdities of racist elite thought. Painter argues convincingly that race and racism are not part of “human nature,” as is commonly assumed, but were created and enforced by those at the top of society. If human beings invented these disgraceful institutions, we can tear them down.

The profit guzzlers

Published at Socialistworker.org.

SKYROCKETING GAS prices are hitting working people hard across the country, whether the impact comes at the pump or in the increased price of food and other goods or in a variety of other ways.

But that's good news for the small number of people who profit at our expense--the executives and shareholders at oil corporations reporting mega-profits, and the Wall Street speculators who are raking it in with bets that have driven oil prices higher still.

Gas prices continued their relentless climb in the early weeks of May, reaching a national average of $3.97 a gallon last weekend, just 14 cents below the all-time record of $4.11 set in 2008 and over $1 more than this time last year.

The rise in prices is being driven by a spike in the cost of crude oil, which had been trading at well over $110 per barrel, also the highest since 2008, before dropping last week to $97 per barrel on Friday.

Yet despite the fall in crude oil prices, gas prices continued to go up last week. Drivers in some states have been hit harder than others--in 13 states and Washington, D.C., including California, Illinois and New York, average gas prices are over $4 per gallon. In Chicago, the price for a gallon of regular unleaded is hovering around $4.50.

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THE SPIKE in gas prices is adding further strains on the budgets of workers at a time when millions are struggling to cope with an anemic job market and the austerity agenda--the bipartisan assault on the living standards of working people in the form of cuts at the local, state and federal level to programs they depend on.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in mid-April, 71 percent of respondents said increases in gas prices caused financial hardship in their household, with 43 percent reporting serious hardship.

The media have been filled with stories of people riding their bikes or taking public transportation instead of driving because of gas prices. But for most people, this isn't a realistic option--whether because they have a lengthy commute to get to work or face a lack of reliable or affordable public transportation, often a target of the budget ax. The time lost in alternatives to driving is particularly hard on U.S. workers, who work more hours per year than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.

High gas prices discriminate, too. Poor drivers are hit harder, not only because they pay a higher proportion of their income on gas, but because they typically can only afford older, less fuel-efficient cars. People of color are affected disproportionately by the price rises.

In an article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Eugene Kane made spot checks at gas stations in inner-city Milawukee and found many people buying less than a gallon of gas at a time:

A tank of gas at $4 a gallon costs approximately $50 to $60 dollars if you're driving a midsize car. Frankly, that's too much money for some households to pay on a regular basis.

[Gas station owner Diane] Stowers wasn't surprised at all to hear about the low purchase prices. "Hey, some people are busting into their piggy banks to buy gas," she said. "They are getting whatever they can get."

Stowers said it wasn't uncommon to have customers who limited their purchase to the bare minimum. "I get the $2, $3, $5 buyers all the time."

Also especially hard-hit are the underemployed--people who would prefer full-time work, but have only been able to find part-time jobs. According to Gallup, 9.6 percent of workers in the U.S. were in this position in April. Not only are these workers paid less, but many have multiple commutes to a second or third job--which have been made more expensive by rising gas prices.

As Sarah, a student in North Carolina who works two jobs, says, "Even though I drive the most fuel-efficient car I can afford, and take the bus whenever I can, gas still eats up one-third of my pay," up from one-fifth or less before the spike in gas prices.

"Between the two [jobs], I still can't afford an apartment. I alternated between squatting and couch-surfing until I found a room to rent that affords little privacy, is 10 minutes on the highway from the nearest grocery store--making bike commuting nearly impossible, which was how I used to get around--and doesn't have access to bus service."

High gas prices reach into every part of our lives. For example, Jeanette, who lives in rural Vermont, is now only able to see her partner on weekends due to the high cost of gas and lack of affordable public transportation. Her partner, who is currently applying for asylum in the U.S. because of threats to her life in her home country, must travel out of state weekly to meet with her lawyer, a two-hour trip each way. According to Jeanette:

Now, [my partner] has been offered a job about one hour away. Since [she] can't drive and there are no buses, I'd have to give her a ride both ways...Fifty percent of her paycheck or more would be spent on gas alone. I am working part-time while in school, and I can't support the two of us, so she needs to work. If she takes the job, she will have to sleep there during the week...I will only see her on weekends, which is when I work.

The thing we are giving up because of gas prices is our time with each other. The asylum process is extremely stressful for both of us, especially for [my partner], and we need a lot of emotional support. Our time together, just to hold each other at night and comfort each other, is incredibly important right now, because [her] life is literally on the line.

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MEANWHILE, THE oil giants are making out like bandits.

According to MarketWatch, oil company profits jumped 45 percent in the first three months of 2011, over the the first quarter of 2010. Leading the pack is ExxonMobil, whose profits increased 69 percent to $10.7 billion, followed closely by Royal Dutch Shell, which raked in $8.8 billion, a 60 percent increase.

So while workers struggle to pay for gas so they can commute to their jobs and pick up their children from school, Big Oil is pulling in profits of about $300 million per day--or $12.5 million an hour. That's equivalent to the U.S. average hourly earnings for nearly 550,000 people in the U.S.

The exorbitant oil and gasoline prices are taking a bite out of consumer spending and increasing the cost of raw materials, thus contributing to a slowdown in economic growth and increased jobs losses. GDP growth in the U.S. slowed to 1.8 percent for the first quarter of this year, down from 3.1 percent in the last three months of 2010--andnew jobless claims grew for three straight weeks in April to over 425,000 for the week of April 23.

According to Republicans, though, the problem isn't that oil companies are making too much, but that the government is preventing them from making even more.

According to a report in Politico, House Speaker John Boehner "said that Obama's moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf, as well as his decision to cancel leases on drilling in national parks, has contributed to the rising prices." Similarly, Rep. Michael Murgess of Texas made the dubious claim that the House's passage of a bill promoting faster leasing for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean was behind the recent drop in oil prices--even though the legislation hasn't been considered by the Senate, and probably wouldn't be signed by Barack Obama.

Obama is hardly the enemy of the oil industry that Republicans claim--his administration has supported the expansion of offshore drilling, and back in October, he lifted the moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed after the BP disaster.

Regardless, though, Boehner and other Republicans who hold up domestic oil drilling as the solution to high gas prices are blowing smoke. According the CNN Money:

[A] 2009 study from the government's Energy Information Administration [found that] opening up waters that are currently closed to drilling off the East Coast, West Coast and the west coast of Florida would yield an extra 500,000 barrels a day by 2030.

The world currently consumes 89 million barrels a day, and by then would likely be using over 100 million barrels. After OPEC got done adjusting its production to reflect the increased American output, gas prices might drop a whopping 3 cents a gallon, the study said.

Boehner and Co. are simply using high gas prices to score political points, while trying to help the oil giants rake in bigger profits.

Nor can the rise in gas prices be blamed on a lack of supply in general. Despite the disruption to oil production in Libya, caused by first the Muammar el-Qaddafi's war on democracy protesters and then the U.S.-led military intervention, the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration reports that world oil production hit an all-time high of an average 88.15 million barrels per day in the first quarter of 2011, a 2.6 percent increase over the first quarter of 2010.

Over the same period, world oil consumption increased at a slightly faster pace, by 3.1 percent--though consumption overall trails production. Yet during roughly the same timeframe, the price of a barrel of crude shot up 32 percent, peaking at $112.29 on April 22, 2011.

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THE PRICE of crude oil always increases during times of political instability in the Middle East, the main oil-producing region of the world. But this is only one aspect of a central reason for the current spike in oil prices, as it was when prices skyrocketed in 2008: Wall Street speculation in commodity futures.

Futures are contracts in which buyers and sellers of commodities, ranging from food to precious metals to oil and gas, arrange a price for a future sale.

In theory, futures are supposed to help producers lock in a sale in advance to guard against sudden swings in prices. For example, wheat farmers worried about a surplus crop that would drive prices down could buy a futures contract to guarantee a price now, while buyers of wheat could product themselves against a bad harvest that would drive up prices.

But like all of Wall Street's operations, there's an element of gambling involved that has existed since futures were first developed. Originally, though, the role of speculators was restricted by law. Most trading in commodities futures took place between actual buyers and sellers of the commodities the contracts were based on. Speculators played a role in helping to fill in gaps or counter imbalances in the market, but their role was minor.

This changed beginning in the 1990s with the deregulation of the financial markets. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the government agency charged with regulating this market, granted exemptions to Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street firms that removed limits to speculation in commodities.

Today, the vast majority of all trades involving commodities futures don't involve the actual physical transfer of commodities. Most are purely speculative bets on changes in the prices of underlying commodities--bets made by people who don't intend to produce or consume anything.

Because most of the speculative money flowing into the commodities futures market are bets that prices will rise, the speculation itself drives up prices. During bubbles like the one that developed in 2008, prices become completely detached from supply and demand or the production costs of real commodities.

In 2008, speculation in commodities futures drove food prices to record highs--with the result that hundreds of millions of people were plunged into hunger, and dozens of countries experienced food riots. The price of oil was subject to a similar speculative bubble in 2008--and a similar dynamic seems to be at play today, with speculators betting that the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as their own gambling, will drive up the future price of oil.

According to Sen. Al Franken's (D-Minn.) office, speculation in oil futures has increased 35 percent since January.

Yahoo! Finance reports that Goldman Sachs told its clients that it estimates as much as $27 of the increase in the price of a barrel of crude oil is the result of speculation. As Yahoo reported, "That translates into 70 cents per gallon at the pump, according to Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program."

Whatever the exact numbers, the role of speculation is clear from the volatility in the price of a barrel of crude oil. Though there have been no dramatic shifts in oil production or consumption, the price of crude oil increased 40 percent from December through April, before dropping 15 percent last week. Notably, this sudden price drop mirrors what happened in the fall of 2008, which saw several dramatic declines after a summer where oil hit a record price of over $145 per barrel.

Whether oil prices will continue to decline remains to be seen. While some analysts contend the trend will continue, with somewhat lower prices at the pump as a result, "Goldman Sachs, which in April predicted this week's major correction [decline] in oil prices, said on Friday that oil could surpass its recent highs by 2012," according to theEconomic Times.

Food prices are also experiencing an increase, due to a combination of high fuel prices, speculation, poor harvests and the diversion of food crops for use as biofuels. The World Bank's food price index jumped by 15 percent between October 2010 and January 2011 and is only 3 percent below its 2008 peak"--and analysts expect food prices to continue to rise through 2011. The World Bank estimates that the spike has caused "a net increase in extreme poverty of about 44 million people in low- and middle-income countries since last June."

The financial speculation on necessities like food and oil serves no useful purpose except to swell the pockets of the minority of investors who profit at the expense of the rest of us. Prices are driven through the roof and billions suffer because they have to pay more--while the already wealth elite laugh all the way to the bank.

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RISING GAS prices are finally starting to have an impact in Washington politics.

With his approval ratings falling due to public frustration over gas prices, Barack Obama has announced the creation of a task force to look into possible fraud or illegal manipulation of oil prices. Similarly, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and even Obama administration officials have floated proposals to reduce or eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for the oil giants, which total about $4 billion per year. Even Republican John Boehner has hinted that he is open to ending some of these handouts.

But none of the proposals will address the root of the problem--oil company greed and the gambling of the Wall Street speculators.

After the financial meltdown in 2008 and their sweeping election victory that gave them control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats had an opportunity to impose new regulations that would rein in the financial markets. But the financial reforms passed last year do almost nothing to limit the gambling on Wall Street, and Obama's Justice Department shows little inclination to go after cases of fraud.

As for the $4 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for Big Oil, they should have been ended long ago--but they're a drop in the bucket. If the politicians really wanted to do something about gas prices, they could impose tough controls on prices--and impose a high tax on the oil companies' super-profits.

But you'll never hear those solutions in a political system where officeholders claim they care about ordinary people to win votes, but then serve the interests of Corporate America once in office.

The anger at soaring gas prices is beginning to find some expression in acts of collective resistance. For example, students and professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts are planning on walking out on the commencement address by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and instead attending a lecture by an advocate of clean energy.

More such protests are needed. The first step in building a movement that can challenge the oil profiteers is to expose the rip-off--and make sure that everyone understands that the pain we feel at the gas pumps is the result of corporate and Wall Street greed, not wars and revolutions in the Middle East or environmental regulations at home.

We need to build a movement that links the defense working-class living standards to the defense of the environment and other social justice questions. Our demands for clean energy and affordable, reliable public transportation are an indispensable part of the struggle for a better world--because until there is a fundamental overhaul of our energy and transportation infrastructure, when it comes to being squeezed at the pump, working people will remain at the mercy of big oil and big finance.

Transphobia at the golden arches

Published at Socialistworker.org.

I APPRECIATE Christine Darosa's coverage of the terrible assault against Chrissy Polis at a Baltimore McDonald's ("The bigotry behind a terrible assault"). I was outraged that a McDonald's employee would film the attack and encourage the assailants to flee, rather than coming to the aid of Polis.

McDonald's claim that "there's no room for violence under the Golden Arches" rings hollow, as does the rest of their statement: "McDonald's is a safe welcoming place for everyone. We share our customers' concern. We are doing everything possible to make sure the right thing is done."

McDonald's had plenty of warning that transphobia was a problem at their company and, judging by the actions of the employees in their Baltimore store, and by the fact that the word "transgender" does not turn up on their website, it is clear that they have not done "everything possible" to address the issue.

In December of 2009, a McDonald's manager in Orlando, Fla., left a telephone message for 17-year-old transgender job seeker Zikerria Bellamy telling her not to bother applying for a job at McDonald's because "we do not hire faggots."

After widespread outcry from the LGBT and activist community, McDonald's fired the manager in question.

Similarly, the company claims that in response to the attack at the Baltimore restaurant, its "franchisee continues to investigate the behavior and response of his employees," and that "appropriate action is taking place as warranted."

It's not enough to wait for incidents like these to occur, and then deal with them on a case-by-case basis only after there is bad publicity for the company. McDonald's still does not have a policy prohibiting discrimination against employees based on gender identity or expression.

Until they take the first step of banning discrimination against transgender employees and applicants, as well as training managers and employees on the need to oppose transphobia and hate crimes, McDonald's should be condemned for failing to take these issues seriously, despite two serious incidents involving their company in less than 18 months.