Column: Workshop Talks
December 1999

Fighting in the shadow of slavery

by S. Hamer

Workers in the South have been struggling for more than 200 years, from the backbreaking labor of the cotton fields to the noise and dangers of the factories. We have been trying to overcome the inhuman treatment of the racist landowners and bosses. We have been hoping to find an answer to the question: how can we find total freedom instead of this destructive capitalist society?

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was the beginning of the hope that we could banish out a hatred so deep in America. It seemed as if it was within our reach to change this society. But it didn't fully happen. And now, when we are about to enter the 21st century, it seems like the conditions for many Southern workers are heading back toward the 19th century. There is still a shadow of slave labor, a shadow of sharecropping, a shadow of prison labor over all of us.

LIVING WITH LEGEND OF 1960s

Why didn't the movement of the 1960s go on to total freedom? Many people say that the answer is the power of capitalism, the power of the state. I live in Mississippi. I know the power of corporations and the power of the state. They go hand in hand in Mississippi; both are together in keeping workers down.

But that isn't the only reason the movements of the 1960s didn't go through to total freedom. I believe that part of the reason is that the Idea of Freedom needs to go deeper than where the movement has taken it up to now. There are no more shackles around our ankles; the chains which bind us are mental chains.

Sometimes in a great struggle, like a strike, we can take big steps climbing up the ladder to understanding the Idea of Freedom and being able to tell others about it. And then sometimes, when the excitement of the movement is over, we can slide backwards and find the shackles wrapping around our thinking. How can we break those chains? That problem is what is facing all of us. Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

In 1986 Black women organized a union in the heart of the Mississippi Delta at the Delta Pride Catfish processing factory in Indianola. We won our first contract, but it was not a good one, not a strong one. So we had to organize ourselves again, and we had to look at what we really wanted as workers, as Black women. That is how the 1990 Delta Pride strike began. It is very hard to tell exactly how the Idea of Freedom develops. Sometimes, just when you worry that workers will not be able to throw off the mental chains, they rise up and show that they really can make a whole new world.

ORGANIZE IN SPIRIT OF FANNIE LOU HAMER

But those moments are precious and hard to reach. In the South today there is a lot on the other side of the picture. Last month, just 22 miles away from the Delta Pride Catfish plant, in a little town called Ruleville, we tried to organize a nursing home. Even though this company harassed and mistreated the workers, paid them poverty wages and often fired them on false charges, we lost the vote. The workers couldn't take a step on the road to freedom.

Ruleville is known for a great woman, Fannie Lou Hamer, who led the voting rights movement in the state of Mississippi. She was a great speaker and inspired people to think about the meaning of freedom. Her gravesite lies one-half mile from this nursing home. Why didn't the workers at Beverly Nursing Home organize in her spirit? Why weren't they able to see that they had power and worth in coming together instead of depending on handouts from the white man?

As I see it, the "plantation mentality" is so powerful, and the climate of fear is so oppressive, that every workers' movement, every freedom movement, needs a philosophy of liberation to help us develop ourselves. This philosophy is not something outside of workers. It is part of our being. It is what really makes us human. But it is not always easy for us to see. The reason is that this racist, sexist, oppressive society makes us think that we are powerless and ignorant. That is why it is important to spell out a philosophy of liberation.

Karl Marx was the first one who really laid out the whole basis of this philosophy of liberation. In MARXISM AND FREEDOM Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, explains what Marx's philosophy was all about. She wrote:

"Our epoch has been characterized by 'a struggle for the minds of men.' Unless this struggle begins with a concept of totally new relations of men to labor and man to man, it is hollow. The todayness of Marxism flows from this: no philosopher has ever had a grander concept of humanity than did Marx, and yet no philosophic conception was ever rooted more deeply in the first necessity of human society-labor and production.... The problems he posed 100 years ago are battled out today as concrete matters in the factory and in society as a whole.... Communism to Marx was 'not the goal of human development, the form of human society.' Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing" (pp. 21-22).

I like this paragraph so much because it shows how Marx could see labor as the key to a new revolution. Marx says that it has to be done with the workers. Some intellectuals still don't see this. Raya Dunayevskaya is showing us that for Marx the test of every idea is human freedom. That is why Communism is the opposite of Marxism. That is why you can't have freedom for whites if Blacks are still kept down. That is why you can't have freedom for men if women are second class. There has got to be a total change in this society to accomplish that total freedom.

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