One-hundred and ten years after O’Hare published her racist polemic, another white woman with ties to the political Left in the U.S., Krystal Ball, appeared on the Marxist economist Richard Wolff’s podcast to once again downplay the role that racism plays in the struggle between capital and labor.
“I am of the opinion that there is no war but class war,” she said. “It’s too easy to say that culture war issues . . .like gun rights or abortion or white supremacy, that these are distractions. What I think they are instead is they mask these deeper issues of class and of economics and of distribution.”
While far more nuanced than O’Hare’s, Ball’s viewpoint is nonetheless an attempt to gaslight what is, by virtually any measure, an apartheid state in which jobs, opportunities and advantages accrue to the whitest and not necessarily the best. If capitalism in its most molecular form is defined as a war between master and slave, then racial capitalism represents a codicil to this arrangement whereby half the slaves believe that they are, in fact, the master, as the late, Marxist historian Noel Ignatiev was fond of saying. Another Marxist historian, Philip Foner, elaborates further in his classic text, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981:
"When the president of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills in Atlanta, with 1,400 employees, hired 20 Negro women to work in the folding department of one of the mills in 1897, the entire white workforce (went on strike). The company agreed to fire the black workers on one condition: the white workers would have to work overtime for free.”
From cotton to cars to credit, the principal commodity may change but white racism remains, as the assassinated black revolutionary George Jackson once wrote, the biggest barrier to forming a cohesive workers’ movement in the U.S. The result is two nations in one, with whites’ overall living standards rivaling Canada’s or Western Europe, while blacks live a life that is closer in quality to Mexico or Palestine.
-- Jon Jeter, "The White Socialist Left: Seeing a Bleak Future for ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
