More languages
More actions
Chapter Five: Segregation
If “there still remains a racist and segregated division of labor,” it follows that there is a racist and segregated distribution of housing. How does ACTA account for this?
“In this world one thing alone retains its links with reality and is thus able to transmit the changes in reality and provide the ballast of a concrete element to this delusory system. This one thing is wages.”
Though now in decline, the United States has been the leading empire in the world since the end of World War Two. As such, most corners of the earth have felt the wrath of our capitalists and their military. Here inside the empire, we have all reaped the benefits, although the distribution of the rewards of imperialism is not equal. ACTA’s horizon is not to redistribute these rewards within our borders, we aim to tear out the root of imperialism. Nevertheless, the unequal effects of imperialism are concrete and influence the conditions of our struggle.
enjoyed by our workers are not arbitrary, they are concessions won by class struggle waged in the context of the international division of labor. Because all productive activity is connected materially and socially yet at the same time privately owned, it appears that there could be no other outcome from the US working class’ demands for higher wages than for the owners of the means of production to simply shift their sources of profit from one locale in the division of labor to another, avoiding any significant or catastrophic decline in their profits.
However, because our labor unions have been stripped of their revolutionary orientation, the glow of cheap devices illuminates the satisfied faces of our narrow-minded “organized” workers. This has taken the pressure off capital. A once worthy opponent has bowed out of the ring. Put very simply, the workers could be using their key weapon, strikes, to force the hand of capitalists to do just about anything they can imagine. For example, US and Canadian workers could struggle to close copper mines in Panamá. The workers could struggle to raise wages in African countries. It is a stomach-turning fact that what is happening in Palestine as we write this would not be happening if workers throughout the western countries belonged to revolutionary rather than reactionary unions.[1] Instead, our bourgeois trade union leaders gave away the workers’ legal power to strike as soon as the capitalists flashed cash bribes in their faces.
All of these facts notwithstanding, this is not a well-rounded or acceptable perspective. It has to be recognized that the capitalists organize and wage class struggle in ways that go beyond the undue powers that accompany their ownership of the means of production and thus give them dictatorial reign over, for example, the organization of the productive process in factories and offices. They are not indifferent obstacles to working class power. They attack worker organizations in the struggle over the workers’ demands on their own oppressive terms. The history of capitalism is chock full of
the most brutal and violent examples of repression against strikes, slow downs, walk outs, sabotage, factory occupations and every other kind of tactic the working masses have employed in the fight. Because the capitalists are also wedded with the state, they have the police, the national guard, the CIA, the FBI and the military more or less at their disposal. Not to mention the fact that their wealth allows them to contract and command private armed militias to surveil and suppress worker rebellions.[2] This has undoubtedly played a significant role in the dimming of the workers’ revolutionary light. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that whatever concessions the bosses have made to the workers in the form of wage increases have been made because they amounted to less money than the costs of suppressing the workers’ organizations.
Wages move in tango with the costs of living; at bottom, high wages are not the product of an abstract desire. The essential conditions of capitalism were rapidly established on American soil as soon as Europeans settled and colonized this place, and this meant the presence of both people who owned the means of production and people who owned[3] nothing but their power to work. The ones who possessed nothing else were forced—by direct and legal violence in the case of slavery or by the supposedly neutral conditions of “free” society in the case of proletarians—to offer their labor-power to the people who owned the means of production at a price[4] that is always conditioned by the relative negotiating power of the workers and owners, but with a bottom limit determined by the absolute minimum consumption necessary for the workers to survive. This reality is the original source of all working class organization. The struggle for higher wages originates from this original condition of labor, the split between the owners of the plantations, factories, tools, and material, and those who have no tools but their own bodies.
Wages are the value of labor-power, expressed in price over time; i.e. “$15 per hour.” The standard of living is the collection of raw materials that are used by the laborer in the process of reproducing their labor-power, i.e. housing, food, clothing, education etc. Wages are determined by the values (and prices) of these standards of living. Wherever money mediates the relation between individuals and the products of their labor, wages and the standard of living form an inseparable unity.[5]
To return to the question at hand, the observant reader will see in this unity the essential inseparability of the question of wages from the question of rent. If we examine the division of labor and hence the division of wages, we find that different wages can imply nothing else but a different standard of living. It is obvious that a person’s standard of living is predicated on the condition of their dwelling. High wage workers live in good houses in good neighborhoods, low wage workers live in slums. From houses and slums we arrive at the question of rent without difficulty, and of course we find our friend, the tenant, who just one moment ago was the worker.
Our interpretation of exploitation in capitalism is fundamentally Marxist. Exploitation corresponds with the amount of work a person is forced to do over and above the amount that would be necessary to provide for himself. To make a simplified explanation, say that if a person’s wages are $15 per hour, and he works for 8 hours every day, then he ostensibly requires $120 per day to live. In order to have a reason to employ him, his boss must be able to sell the product of his labor for at least $120. In this scenario, assuming normal conditions of the market, the boss would break even and the worker would have produced no surplus labor, no surplus value, and thus would not be exploited. But say the boss was able to sell the product of the worker’s day of labor for $130, pocketing $10 for himself. That $10, we call surplus value and the amount of time the worker spent that corresponds to the production of that value we call surplus labor. This is exploitation, simplified, in the Marxist sense.
It follows from this that whatever can be done to decrease the worker’s wages relative to the amount of work that he does increases the degree of his exploitation. Obviously, if the worker’s rent is low his wages can stay low. Low wages do not necessarily result in high rates of exploitation (because a low wage worker may be employed in a low productivity occupation), but exploitation is much more prolific among low wage workers precisely because it sets such a low threshold for his labor time to pass over from necessary to surplus labor time. There is therefore a natural correlation between low rents and high exploitation. What is being argued here is that low rents are the basis of low wages.[6] Not, as is more commonly implied in orthodox economics, that low (or high) wages cause low (or high) rents.
However, what is experienced by the tenants of African and Latin American origin who pay relatively low rents is not what is experienced when other types of commodities are bought for low prices. The typical reason that prices fall (outside of market aberrations, including big swings in supply relative to demand) is from a systemic lowering in the costs of production. The typical pattern for achieving this revolves around some combination of increased productivity and/or an increase in the exploitation of labor via technological innovations or a prolongation of the working day by producers in competition. What a landlord sells for low rents is an adulterated product, not a product made with “improved” techniques. Adulteration is how a slumlord lowers his costs of production. A slum is an adulterated house.[7]
Let us shed our ambiguity: in our present conditions, low rents are desirable. What is not desirable are houses left in ruin, where rats crawl through baby cribs and piss leaks through collapsing ceilings onto the heads of poor tenants.[8] In capitalism, low rent and slum quality housing are two sides of the same reality. Revolutionary tenant-unions will be in the position to enforce the ‘artificial’ collapse of the link between rent (exchange value) and quality (use-value). A tenant union can pull a landlord down contradictory paths, like execution by quartering. It can demand the repair of a building at the same time as it can demand that the rent goes untouched. Specifically in the case of tenants organized in slums, it is exactly this kind of tampering with the ‘logic’ of capitalism that should be the focus of our strategy.[9] This is the kind of strategy that will drive small-scale capital out of the sector and throw the “housing crisis” back in the faces of the state and the monopolies. It is also the kind of strategy that hinges upon the expansion of the struggle, requiring a leadership that maintains class-struggle as its infinite horizon, not “peace.”
The inseparable wage-rent unity described above can only lead us to the perspective that the tenant struggle is the worker struggle. It is no different in essence than the trade union struggle. It is only different in form. The wage-rent unity, the connection between standard of living and labor-power is revealed in this. The extremity of the blunder made by the working-class movement by narrowing its focus to wages without recognizing their unity with the composition of labor-power, i.e. the factors necessary to restore the worker each day, is enormous. In effect the historical movement has brought wages and rent into contradiction by allowing wage gains to be captured by landlords under the banner of “market forces” without providing any leadership or instrument of struggle at the workers’ homes. This short-sightedness is exemplary of the workers movement’s disinterest in keeping the entire slate of broader revolutionary political demands out of its range of vision.
As stated in the previous chapter, an obvious consequence of this trend is the housing crisis itself, born from the impotence of workers without the totalizing perspective that recognizes wages and the standard of living as one—not two opposite “relational” sides. If we want to remedy this impotence we must restore—or perhaps establish for the first time—an organized, practical movement (a struggle!) which understands the composition of labor-power in its proper place as an identity with wages. Labor-power, that weapon which workers sell to the capitalists is composed of something, gains its use-value from something, replenishes itself and emerges renewed each day from something—the given standards of living—accorded to the worker by his place in society. None play so great a role in this rejuvenation of human potential than the conditions of his dwelling,[10] where his health is restored and replenished, where his sanity is maintained and his life is kept on track, all in order to continue working and living—to continue fighting. Housing is labor-power. The tenant struggle is the worker’s struggle for himself.
The prospects of struggle for the oppressed nations in the US, i.e. African-Americans, Latin-Americans, etc., are also based on the continued exploitation of the world. But imperialist exploitation is not automatic or static, nor is it enforced by the capitalist class without interference: it is conditioned by the class struggle. The US working class bears responsibility in the imperialist set-up. It must be self-conscious of this in its struggle to break that set-up. For example, if the African nation within the US is to develop and rise to political equality with the Europeans, as measured by the standard of living, this does not theoretically have to be subsidized by the further brutalization of the workers of Continental Africa or El Salvador. It can be subsidized by the landlords and, of course, the high wage workers in the US. It goes without saying that this could occur only on the condition that our working class leaves behind its narrow-mindedness and adopts a revolutionary point of view.
It is self-evident that the international division of labor and the consequent divergence of wage scales and standards of living do not start at our nation’s borders and extend outward to the rest of the world from our working class as a homogenous block. The divergence penetrates inward, shattering our own workers as well. From this perspective, revolutionary tenant organization is a crucial struggle for the national liberation movements within and without our country.[11] Racist segregation is the local product of our empire’s organization and management of the labor process on a global scale.
Segregation has always been studied primarily from the perspective of jobs and housing. The material basis of these paired intuitions (which are certainly correct) have previously gone unaccounted for and therefore their necessary innerconnection has remained unexamined. Our perspective corrects this. Jobs, housing, wages, rent, division of labor, standard of living, etc.—the individual categories of past research into segregation all slot into an order when we begin from the Marxist position that socialized production is based on private property and proceed to uncover all of the consequences determined by this fact.
Segregation is a direct legacy of the colonization of Africa, the export of African labor-power to the American plantations and the crisis that was created within the class-struggle by the attempts to integrate the mass of ex-slaves into the division of labor beyond the confines of the agricultural South. There is no space here to recall the enormous wave of terror that has been inflicted on the black masses since their arrival in the cities at the hands of both white capital and white labor organized under self-interested leadership. Unfortunately, this terror wave has not ebbed much. Look no further than the division of Chicago into distinct white and black metropoles. We could talk similarly about the conditions of migrants from Latin America, especially Mexico.
To state the obvious, tenant unions need to be built to oppose landlord terror where it is most despotic and oppressive—specifically racist, i.e. in the slums—and the only thing standing in our way is our own disorganization.[12] But ACTA has every intention of rectifying this. The tenant movement is in its spring. It is a blank slate, free from the aristocracy of “organized” workers and their leaders dictating to anyone what the dreams of the working class may be. The field is wide open for revolutionary leadership and ACTA wants to earn it.
One of our guiding principles in these early days of the tenant union movement must be to combat the tendency—already apparent in numerous US tenant unions[13]—to build our struggle by copying and pasting the models given to us from the labor movement. This is a grave error, one that will be potentially impossible to reverse. Tenant unions do not combat exploitation directly because they do not manipulate the relationship between necessary and surplus labor time. But tenant unions are able to condition the boundaries of exploitation by fighting back against the degradation and oppression of workers and enforcing changes of the wage level by interceding in the determination of rent. It is up to the trade unions to go beyond their current limits, adopt a revolutionary point of view and to fuse their strategic scope with the organization of workers in their home life, i.e. as tenants. If we can manipulate the price of rent toward the destruction of landlords, it will be up to the workers organizations to make use of the simultaneous devaluation of labor power to press the attack on the bosses rather than allowing them to enact a corresponding decrease of wages. If rents increase in the course of the battle—as a consequence of struggling to improve the conditions of slum housing, for instance—the labor organizations must also ensure that the effects of this crush down on the shoulders of the capitalists rather than on our brothers and sisters in the international working class. Revolutionary leadership in combination with the weapon of the strike is indispensable on both sides of the struggle. Unless they are happy with their current trajectory toward the sewer of history, western trade unions are going to need to join us in the recognition that success in the tenant struggle will revitalize the field of battle for all the workers of the world.
- ↑ This should not be conflated with that myopic notion of those socialists who lament the absence of an “israeli workers movement” bolstering the left wing in an apartheid, oppressor state while upholding that state’s legitimacy. We should also not be mistaken for exaggerating the role that our revolutionary workers movement could play, nor are we suggesting it could or should replace the guerrilla war as the center of resistance. Our regret is not that the “workers movement” of the west can’t replace this armed struggle, but that our workers are not prepared to offer their weapon of true solidarity with the Palestinian guerrillas to augment the efforts to free Palestine.
- ↑ See the Pinkertons.
- ↑ Technically speaking, slaves did not own even their own labor-power. Their body possessed it, but their master owned it as his private property. This point belongs above the level of analysis that is occurring here, but we felt it was important to mention.
- ↑ There is a common confusion around the question of whether or not the labor-power of southern slaves was paid for by the slavocracy. Without a bare minimum level of subsistence, no one can live, let alone work. Slaves were given their subsistence directly by their masters, however meager and in whatever form. Concretely, occasionally slaves kept their own small plot on the plantation for producing their own subsistence, whereas wage workers are given money to buy the same things. In any case, both the slave-driver and the boss provide subsistence to the worker from the pool of labor (or value) they have accumulated in the course of exploiting workers. Workers are always paid with the product of their own labor or, what amounts to the same thing, the labor of another exploited worker and, in this sense, no boss has ever paid a worker.
- ↑ This unity renders absurd those silly questions economists are always asking, such as, “Do high prices cause higher wages, or do high wages cause the inflation of prices?” Does inhaling come before or after exhaling?
- ↑ Obviously, our answer to this is not that we should struggle to raise the rents in order to raise the price of labor power! No thank you. We’d like to imagine a real transformation for a change, and no longer preoccupy ourselves with wages, rent—value. We do not want to raise wages, we want to bring our nation’s qualitative standards of living into decency, which means, to us, into harmony with all of the people of the world. That entails different things for different American people. People of European descent will need to lower their standards, while people of African and Latin American descent can raise theirs, generally speaking. Beyond this, it is then only a question about free time. In other words, it is a net good that the monetary and material costs of reproducing ourselves are kept low because this opens the door for mankind to pass its spare time in the pursuit of different experiences. But as long as the means of production are owned privately rather than socially, the surplus time of the masses of earth will be squandered in the production of more value. Concomitantly, this condition establishes a (unequally distributed) perpetual rise in standards of living—as measured by consumption, not free time. This feedback loop compels the working classes to fight to keep themselves in chains, to the delight of capitalists everywhere. Put in slightly different terms, if exploitation is the difference between work that is necessary for society and work that is surplus, that gap can be closed by a decrease in the duration of working time just as well as it can be done by an increase in the worker’s level of consumption, as is typically the approach. This means nothing shy of eliminating the capitalist class in all its manifestations because surplus labor is performed under the dictatorship of capital and entrenched by a workers movement that has accepted high levels of consumption rather than free time as the measure of freedom.
- ↑ “In London there are two sorts of bakers, the “full priced,” who sell bread at its full value, and the “undersellers,” who sell it under its value. The latter class comprises more than three-fourths of the total number of bakers...The undersellers, almost without exception, sell bread adulterated with alum, soap, pearl ashes, chalk, Derbyshire stone-dust, and such like agreeable nourishing and wholesome ingredients...Sir John Gordon stated before the committee of 1855, that “in consequence of these adulterations, the poor man, who lives on two pounds of bread a day, does not now get one fourth part of nourishing matter, let alone the deleterious effects on his health.” Tremenheere states...as the reason, why a very large part of the working class, although well aware of this adulteration, nevertheless accept the alum, stone-dust, etc, as part of their purchase: that it is for them “a matter of necessity to take from their baker or from the chandler’s shop, such bread as they choose to supply.” (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1)
- ↑ When we talk about housing conditions, we are talking about the oppression, degradation, and brutalization of the working class, not exploitation in the sense defined above. Insofar as we might struggle to leave rents untouched or even lower them, the value of labor power will follow, and thus the tenant union struggle does not directly combat exploitation. It is up to the workers organizations to similarly enforce a system-breaking strategy: to rip apart wages from the value of labor power while at the same time struggling to mandate that the capitalists do not make up the difference by the further exploitation, oppression, degradation and brutalization of the working classes elsewhere.
- ↑ In the case of tenants in affluent neighborhoods, strategy based on system-breaking is also the order of the day. But different conditions require a different approach. Rents are high in these neighborhoods and this is reflected in the quality of the housing (certainly not without exception!). The white tenants should struggle to lower the rents while demanding that their conditions remain well-kept. The point is not to make a general strategy. The point is to indicate the general tendency that the struggle needs to follow to crush the dictatorship of landlords. Tenant unions are the only instruments capable of carrying out any strategy. It goes without saying that tenants in the slums should fight to lower rents, too, because, while the prices they pay are relatively low, as a rule, rent composes a larger share of their wages in absolute terms than it does of the wages of tenants in fancy neighborhoods. In popular jargon, despite their lower rents, poor tenants are more “rent burdened” more prolifically than their well-to-do counterparts. For example, in West Garfield Park, 4 out of every 10 tenants give more than 50% of their wages to their landlord. In Logan Square, only 1 in 10 do such a thing. (American Community Survey, US Census). This is despite the fact that rent is $1.42 a ft. in Garfield Park and $2.19 a ft. in Logan Square. There is a division in the composition of labor-power that corresponds to the division of labor. Strategy needs to be specific to these divisions.
- ↑ The sheer volume of scientific research that shows the intimate connection between the conditions of housing and a person’s health could fill a small library. The conclusions are indisputable.
- ↑ Historically speaking, there have been two periods of concentrated tenant organization in Chicago, both focused on the racially discriminatory nature of housing provision. The first period was during the Great Depression, when the Communist Party USA was highly focused on reversing evictions in the southside slums. Their unemployment councils can be thought of as historical antecedents to the modern tenant union. The second period was in the 60’s during the frenzy of activity which surrounded MLK Jr.’s Freedom Movement when it came north, emblematic of this was the campaign known as the Movement To End Slums. Needless to say, neither of these efforts ended the slums. It is not a coincidence, in our opinion, that for different reasons both movements did not center tenants in the struggle based on their economic relation to capital, though the Communists came closer. In the case of MLK, the freedom movement treated housing too abstractly. This allowed them to mix the tenant struggle with the struggle for black homeownership/landlordism against redlining while ignoring the concrete ways through which the interests of homeowners and tenants come into opposition in society dominated by value. MLK was also focused on neighborhood integration to the exclusion of a concrete analysis capable of apprehending the laws of motion specific to property values in the context of segregation. Arghiri Emmanuel refers to this bluntly: “There are pleasant districts where whites live and unpleasant districts where blacks live. And yet everyone is free to live wherever he likes. What happens then? As soon as some blacks settle in a district, the whites leave it and go off to find somewhere else to live. As there is plenty of room elsewhere, whatever blacks may do, there will always be pleasant and unpleasant districts. It would be pointless to advise blacks to go and live in the pleasant districts. These were not chosen by whites because they are pleasant, they are pleasant because whites live there. If the blacks moved in they would cease to be pleasant!” (Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange)
- ↑ See chapter 6.
- ↑ See the Connecticut Tenants Union for the exemplary case.