Capitalism and the Black Working Class

Why do we center the Black working class in our revolutionary struggle? It is because of the acute and historic exploitation of Black people in the US and because of their revolutionary history in struggling against this oppression. Black men are paid $0.71 for every dollar paid to white men, and Black women are paid just $0.63 for every dollar paid to white men. The median wealth for Black families in the US is $24,100, compared to $188,200 for white families. In the period between 1972 and 2019, Black unemployment rates were frequently double white unemployment rates. What is the cause of this?

In Chapter twenty-five of ‘Capital’, Karl Marx explained that capitalism required what he described as a “reserve army of labor”. The reserve army of labor is the population of workers who are currently unemployed. They are described as a ‘reserve army’ because of the way in which they are used by the capitalists. When a new market opens — due to new investment or political, social, or technological changes — unemployed workers are drafted in large numbers to work in this new sector. They are deployed like a military detachment to power the growth of new markets. Currently employed workers can not fulfill this requirement because transferring them to a new industry would only deplete the labor force of established industries, potentially canceling out any new financial gains. But without constant growth, the capitalist system would collapse due the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Therefore, capitalists require a permanent (though fluctuating) reserve of labor power waiting to enter the market at a moment’s notice. If not, they would not be able to take advantage of new economic opportunities. In explaining this concept, Marx showed that capitalism requires unemployment in order to function.

Another critical feature of the reserve army of labor is the effect that it has on the price of labor — i.e. how much workers are paid. The ratio of employed to unemployed workers determines the degree of downward pressure on the wages of the employed. If employed workers are unsatisfied with their pay, there are always unemployed workers who will do the job for less money. One-hundred percent employment would remove this leverage from the hands of employers. The reserve army of labor instead allows capitalists to buy labor power at a much lower price.

In explaining who is forced into the reserve army of labor, Marx categorizes the different types of reserve workers. In describing the “stagnant” (chronically underemployed) category, he wrote:

[T]he stagnant [population], forms a part of the active labor army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labor power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages.

Reflected in this text is the image of the Black working class, who are faced with some of the worst working conditions, housing conditions, and wages. We know why the surplus army of labor exists, but not why Black workers make up such a disproportionate percentage thereof. Marx continues:

It recruits itself constantly from the [newly redundant] forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery.

Which portion of the US population was thrown most violently from the agricultural economy as mechanization increased in the early 20th century? The process described here is precisely the process that fueled the Great Migration of Black workers from 1916 to 1970. The development of industrial agriculture caused a contraction in the job market of the US south for both Black and white workers, spurring an increase in white violence against Black people — both factors then accelerating the exodus of the Black population. These Black workers, driven from the south, relocated to the industrial north and west, filling the new manufacturing jobs that were opening up at that time. As capital destroyed agricultural jobs, it created and recruited the surplus Black laborers to power new industry in the north.

It was the historical circumstances of the Black population, first as chattel slaves and then as low-wage agricultural labor, that forced Black people into the role of stagnant surplus labor once industry had reached the necessary stage of development. But the Great Migration largely ended after 1970. Why has there been so little of what liberal economists call “social mobility” for Black workers in the decades since?

The gains in wages and property, which occur occasionally, allowing workers to move from the lower strata of the working class to the higher and even the small business strata, are not the result of capitalist expansion. They are driven instead by infusions of wealth by the government into the hands of workers as the result of climactic struggles of labor. These infusions — medicare, social security, the G.I. Bill — are concessions meant to quell the outrage of the working class (and were notably not initially given to Black people). Capitalism, on the other hand, can only produce poverty for the vast majority.

The downward pressure on wages caused by the creation of a surplus labor army is in fact self-perpetuating. As profits increase and the means of production are expanded, the amount of human labor (variable capital) purchased also increases, but at a much slower rate. A rate that continues to decrease over time. This is because:

…the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralization of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes…

When capitalists acquire wealth, they invest much of it into technology which makes the individual worker more efficient, therefore decreasing the total amount of workers needed. The more surplus value (‘profit’) workers create, the more capitalists funnel that wealth into technology. This changes the ratio of constant capital (machinery, automation) to variable capital (human labor). The specific change is that the proportion of constant capital grows larger and larger. Giving an example in this change in ratio between machinery and human labor power, Marx states:

…If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc., so that, as the capital increases, instead of ½ of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc., is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. Since the demand for labor is determined… by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases.

Not only does automation lead to the purchase of more machinery for automation (accompanied by a much slower expansion of human labor), but that process accelerates over time, like a wildfire which sends sparks flying into neighboring woods, creating new fires and increasing the local atmospheric temperature, which in turn feeds the flames.

Finally, as more and newer technology makes workers more efficient, that efficiency means that workers create more wealth which is in turn funneled back into the cycle by the capitalists. Therefore, the workers tragically contribute to their own ejection from the labor force:

[W]ith the development of the productiveness of their labor… there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of laborers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion [layoffs]; the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately. The laboring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.

Having entered the industrial workforce as a reserve army of labor, Black workers were placed in a self-perpetuating system of pauperization. The concept of “social mobility” could never be achieved by the greater proportion of the Black working class because, as Marx has shown, the harder Black people work, the poorer they become. They have been fed into jobs that will only provide capitalists with the means to eliminate more jobs.

It did not take long for Black workers to sense the larger injustices at play. What initially started as a civil rights movement for equal treatment in the 50’s and early 60s rapidly morphed into a full-scale struggle against the entire system. The administrators of the capitalist state were in no way confused by this phenomenon or its causes. They understood the toll capitalism had exacted on the Black community. Being the servants of capital, they were both unwilling and unable to change the fundamental causes of the unrest. Instead, they chose to learn a different lesson. The uprisings of the late 60’s (which happened mostly in the industrialized north rather than the rural south) made clear that a militarized occupation would be necessary to fix Black workers to the role of the reserve army of labor. The war on drugs and mass incarceration were crafted as a tool to meet this need.