On the Question of Prejudice

Now we must go over to the question of the nature of race prejudice and its role in the American system of race relations….

When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.

The position in which the Negro people are placed in U.S. society is the direct result of the system of color slavery. Color prejudice under slavery resulted from the degraded position of the Negro. The Negro was virtually the entire southern working force and color prejudice reflected the degraded position of labor as a whole in society. The greatest humiliation that white men in the old South could undergo was being forced to do productive labor.

In this society before the Civil War, discrimination thus had the advantage of being appended to a peculiar and special mode of production in which servile labor appears natural, and is in fact the basic labor of society.

The Garrisonians claimed that slavery was only a moral question. And while their militant actions were in violation of this concept, they maintained that all that was necessary was to show that it was morally wrong and slavery would cease to exist. But the Garrisonians were wrong. Because slavery was a matter of a social system, a mode of production, tremendous wealth amassed by its ruling class, and state power to protect it. They were also proven wrong by history, where war and revolution, not moral suasion, were necessary to end slavery.

Now, we know from a study of the history of capitalist development throughout the world that one of the important aspects of the emergence of capitalism is the creation of the free labor market, where the laborer has nothing but his labor power to sell, and may go and come through the country in search of a buyer for this commodity.

However, the triumph of capitalism in the South brought not the free labor market, but the adaptation of the plantation system of color discrimination and compulsory labor to capitalist property relations. In this contradiction between the tendency of capitalism to operate with a free labor market and the reality of semi-slave labor, all the weird social relations and prejudices which originated under slavery were intensified by the victory of capitalism.

Prejudice is not the cause of discrimination, as the liberals claim, but is the product of the reciprocal relation between discrimination and segregation. At the foundation of the southern system are the great economic, political and social advantages which capitalism derives from color exploitation, and the advantages accruing to a small white middle class. The principal prop of this system of discrimination is segregation. Without segregation the racial division of American society is meaningless and withers away. Segregation is maintained basically not by prejudice but by force and violence and the legal structure of the South.

Prejudice is the product of this complex social relation. But although it is directed immediately against the Negro, its object is the working class as a whole. Through discrimination and segregation, Negro labor is degraded and its wage falls to the bare subsistence level. But this sets the pattern and controls the conditions of labor as a whole.

Color prejudice thus reflects both prejudice against labor as a whole and the degradation of the southern worker. In the South white labor is disfranchised along with Negro labor and the standard of living of the white sharecropper or factory hand is little better than that of the Negro.

Discrimination and prejudice in the rest of the United States derives directly from the southern system, feeds upon it, and like racial discrimination throughout the world is completely dependent upon it. The capitalist class adapts to its needs the fundamental features of the southern system. In every possible way it perpetuates the division of the working class by establishing throughout the entire nation the basic reciprocal relations between discrimination, segregation and prejudice which are so successful in the South….

But since discrimination in the North and West derives from the southern system, it will never be eliminated until the southern system is uprooted and destroyed. Similarly with prejudice. Education against prejudice has its importance in the Negro struggle. But only the destruction of the economic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it. This will be accomplished only by the socialist revolution.