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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2002
Black/Red ViewBrokering reparations?by John Alan Recently the California Department of Insurance went back into its old files on insurance companies and released to the public the names of the African-American slaves who were insured by their white masters during the slave era. These old documents have given a tremendous boost to those who are now demanding reparations for slavery. WEALTH BORN OF SLAVERY Rev. Jesse Jackson declared that this business relationship between slave owners and insurance companies shows that reparations from private businesses is warranted. California's Governor Gray Davis said, "Clearly, we want to right any wrongs and do justice to people who were taken advantage of, if that's the case..." In California, Davis said, this also includes Chinese and Mexican Americans. Rev. Jackson agreed and said "the Chinese Americans came to America on the same slave ship with African Americans." Obviously he meant that only metaphorically. Rev. Jackson's metaphor is inappropriate here, since it hides a crucial historic difference between the aim of the labor performed by African-American slaves and the harsh exploitation of the "free" Chinese labor in post Civil War California. African-American slave laborers in the South were primarily engaged in producing commodities for the world market, such as cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar. The slaveholders, the owners of those great plantations on which slaves labored knew, from the beginning, that the origin of their wealth and its accumulation were primarily due to slaves. Karl Marx saw in this white master and Black slave social relationship an economic category that was "the pivot of industrialism." He wrote: "Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies; it is the colonies that created world trade; it is world trade that is necessary condition for large-scale machine industry." It should be noted here that in the above quote Marx was not justifying African-American slavery. Instead, he was relating slavery to the totality of the economy, through which the labor power of the slave created both the world market and industrial capitalism. WHO WILL 'RIGHT THE WRONG'? Chinese labor brought to California built the railroads that integrated the U.S. and brought the Pacific Rim into a new world market created in the 19th century. By the time Chinese laborers came in large numbers African Americans had been here for three centuries and legal slavery was abolished. In 1882 California passed a Chinese Exclusion Act, and when they needed more labor they brought in the Japanese. In the 1920s a similar act limited Japanese immigration and that is when they started the bracero program to import Mexican labor. A pertinent problem confronting those who are demanding reparations is: who can they put on trial and who can possibly pay reparations for three centuries of accumulated capital? Or, to put it the way Gov. Davis did, who is going to "right the wrong"? It would be extremely difficult to tabulate the tremendous amount of capital that was accumulated by three centuries of extorted labor. Furthermore, the capital produced by slave labor has merged, long ago, with the total social capital of this nation. FREEDOM MOVES HISTORY Those who today demand reparations for past slavery should put the whole of American civilization on trial by demanding the end of racism and permanent poverty. The only way to "right the wrong" if you want to do it in terms of "payments" is to turn over the whole social capital to the workers who create it all. This would call for a great deal of activity, thought, and social reorganization, which is much deeper than searching though centuries' old insurance archives to find a paper trail of the master insuring the slave. Such a search may be interesting to the historian but politicians seem to want to abstract all this history because the only determinant they understand is money. Concrete history is important because it proves that what moved it is the African American quest for freedom. That quest has always been the opposite of the accumulation of capital in this country. That was also Marx's view as he saw the victory over slavery open up a whole new labor movement in the U.S. Only the completion of that revolution will solve social problems and not Rev. Jackson's willingness to broker with Gov. Davis over a long history of the exploitation of African Americans. |
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