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excoriated by the medieval church for centuries, was transformed,expanded, and legitimized, as feudalism, wilting at its roots, lostground to an ineluctable and predatory capitalism. This new andseemingly invincible system was sustained by a hitherto unsurpassedgreed for gold and a passion for discovery, empire building, slavery,and profit making.9

The first non-natives to permanently settle in what is now theUnited States were "African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 bySpaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt.") Before the Pilgrimslanded at Plymouth Rock, the Spanish had settled a third of what wenow know as the United States.

The Europeans who colonized the northeastern part of the UnitedStates also were engaged mostly in business ventures. Few o f thesettlements were driven by flight from religious persecution. The•London Company and the Plymouth Company were joint-stockventures that sent settlers to colonize the United States in order toengage in businesses such as logging and trade."

Capitalism has been entwined with issues of race from its verybeginnings, but more so in the Americas than in Europe. In England, ascapitalism was developing, the working class was almost all white.People of color who were a part of the English economic system livedin faraway colonies. I n contrast, as capitalism developed in moreracially diverse North America, work and social life were organizedalong racial lines. Racial formation is such a dominant part of the UShistorical experience that we often see ourselves more as members ofracial groups than as having any class position, a consciousness thatoften seems strange to Europeans.

In order to have a clear understanding of how class operates in theUnited States, it is helpful to understand the ways that members ofdifferent racial groups have different historical experiences o f theworkings of capitalism.

African Americans f irst entered the US economic order asenslaved people. This meant that, while they were doing the work thatproduced the much o f the wealth that the nation's economy wasfounded on, their work was not based on wage labor.

Once slavery was abolished, many African Americans foundthemselves in a situation similar to that o f slavery. In much of theSouth, slavery was replaced with sharecropping. In that system, thosewho worked the land were paid a share of what they had grown; the restwent to the landlords. I f the crop was bad, the farmworker ended up

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going into debt, needing to pay the landowner for seed, fertilizer, andsupplies. This system ended up maintaining many o f the economicaspects of slavery long into the 20th century. Many African Americanwomen also worked in the households of landowners or professionals,in forms o f domestic labor that combined elements o f feudal andpatriarchal relations along with capitalist ones.

Barriers to equal participation in the system of capitalist labor stillexist for African Americans. Labor unions largely excluded them untilthe 1930s. White Americans came to see African Americans as notreally legitimate workers in the wage system. They have continued to bepushed to the margins of the economic system, often still working inlow-wage service jobs. The methods of exclusion have been legion andcontinue to this day.

While African Americans became integrated into the economy ofthe United States as a super-highly exploited group, Native Americanshave generally been pushed out o f the economic order altogether.When the colonists first arrived in North America, they often workedclosely with indigenous peoples in order to learn how to survive in thisnew and strange land. After that first period of learning was over, themistreatment intensified. While Spanish colonists succeeded i nenslaving indigenous people i n Central and South America, theCaribbean, and in the US Southwest, the English colonists choseextermination a n d expulsion a s t he i r preferred method o fexpropriating indigenous resources.

At various times, the US government has tried the strategy o fforced assimilation for Native Americans. Much of the rhetoric of theruling class i n the f i rst centuries o f colonization claimed thatindigenous peoples were backward and that their lives would beimproved i f they could be trained to embr ce Christian beliefs andEuropean habits. Rhetoric aside, assimil o n campaigns workedexactly as intended by colonial leaders, brea g down the communalstructures that had kept communities together and making expulsion oftribes from their land easier for the colonists to accomplish.

The process of coerced assimilation often focused on indigenouswomen. In most indigenous societies, women did hard agriculturallabor and were important parts o f the social decision-makingprocesses. One o f the tasks the Europeans set for themselves inconquering the Native Americans was to transform their gendereddivisions of labor.

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In an essay titled "Distinctions in Western Women's Experience:Ethnicity, Class, and Social Change," historian Rosalinda MendezGonzalez writes that leaders of colonist expansion

recognized that to break down Indian resistance it was necessary toundermine the tribal and clan social organization of the Indians andto enforce upon them the individual nuclear family, with thehusband the authority figure over the women and children. Thisattempt had the multiple purposes of forcing the Indians to alienatetheir communal tribal lands, breaking their economic and social clanorganization, transforming them into individualist and competitivecapitalist farmers, and providing the nudear family institutionthrough which the ideology of private property, individualism anddominant-subordinate relations could be passed on.12

Once land was held by private individuals, those individuals could be•coerced through violence, starvation, or bribery to give up their land.

Some indigenous groups, such as the Cherokee, did adapt anddevelop social forms that were hybrids of European and indigenousways. For a while, the Cherokee thrived and it looked as if some formof coexistence for groups that bent to European ways might bepossible. The cruel lesson from this experience was that as soon ascolonists were interested i n the land occupied b y Cherokees,assimilated or not, they were forced to leave it. And the assimilationprocess made this easier.

While Native Americans today populate every class and economicstrata, indigenous culture and many Native Americans continue to existlargely outside the dominant class system. Life on the reservation isbased on a combination o f traditional communal tribal economicrelations and, where the land is so poor or the social relations sodestroyed as to not allow subsistence lifestyles to thrive, dependence ongovernment subsidies. While many non-indigenous people today see astragic what has been done to indigenous Americans, they also believethat the destruction of idigenous cultures was inevitable, that NativeAmerican traditions are incompatible with modem life and wil leventually disappear. And yet, while the position of Native Americansin the economic structure remains extremely marginal, there is adramatic resurgence of Native American culture going on.

There is incredible work going on to reclaim lands, to protectlanguages and cultural traditions, and to develop economic resourcesthat will lift people out of poverty.13 In addition to traditional economic

Capitalism and Class 6 7

activities, many tribes have used their semi-sovereign status to createcommercial gambling businesses, which have generated resourcesneeded t o run autonomous cultural, educational, and economicsystems. With the development of the casino economy, a new hybridsystem seems to be emerging, with the tribal governments collectivelyowning economic resources that are administered i n traditionalcapitalist ways, exploiting the wage labor of those who work in them.

Asians and Latinos have been largely concentrated at the lower endof the working class for much of US history. Interestingly, when theUnited States annexed half of Mexico in 1848, members of the Mexicanruling class came along with the poor and the Native Americans. Someof them were absorbed into the US owning class, but most had theirland expropriated through complex legal maneuvers. This part of ourhistory is largely ignored, and all Latinos are often assumed to beforeigners and recent immigrants.

Many of the Asians and Latinos who came to the United States inthe 19th century came as single men working in jobs highly segregatedby race and gender. Women from these groups were generally notallowed to immigrate. When the work was completed, the men wereexpected to leave. The image o f these etImicities as outsiders haspersisted, and it remains one of the core racist concepts used againstthem. They are often seen as not belonging, as tmloyal to the country.

The role of these groups as outsiders and not as full members ofthe capitalist economic order was developed in the 19th century in waysthat helped consolidate whites into a coherent racial group. Accordingto Tomas Almaguer, at that time the ideology of "free labor" unifiedthe interests of whites of different classes.

White Americans o f all classes—the European American workingclass, p e t i t e bourgeoisie, a n d self-employed proper t iedclass—accepted the social world this ideology promoted: a nexpanding capitalist society based on free labor, individualism,market relations, and private property.""Free labor" was free in the sense that workers were neither

enslaved nor indentured; at least hypothetically they could bargain withowners for the terms of their employment. And while it wasn't reallyfree, workers were led to believe that they were free under it.

This racist labor division was the foundation of US capitalist classrelations. And while it exploited the white working class, it providedwhites a sense of dignity and superiority in comparison to people of

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color who were forced to participate i n feudal and slave-basedeconomic systems. While many Latinos and Asians were petit-bourgeois shopkeepers, traders, and independent miners, i n thepopular consciousness they were still associated with semi-feudal farmlabor and the slave-like conditions of contract labor.

There emerged during this period a strong symbolic associationbetween different minority groups, on the one hand, and variouspre-capitalist economic formations on the other. White antipathytoward Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chinese and Japaneseimmigrants was typically couched within the rubric o f this "freewhite labor"/"unfree nonwhite labor" dichotomy: Mexicans becameinimically associated with the "unproductive," semi-feudal ranchoeconomy that European Americans rapidly undermined after[California's] statehood; Indians with a "primitive" communal modeof existence that white settlers ruthlessly eradicated through violenceand forced segregation; and Asian immigrants with a "degraded"unfree labor systems unfairly competing with and fettering whitelabor) 5

Blacks were associated with slavery and with the virtual slavery ofsharecropping.

The hostility of the white working class towards including peopleof color in their organizations—and in their sense of solidarity as aworking class—helped to keep these racist "pre-capitalist" systems oflabor in existence. When the Federal Wage and Hours law was passedas part of New Deal legislation in 1938, it specifically excluded farmlabor from its protections.16 Farm labor was instead regulated under theFarm Labor Standards Act, which was much weaker. This separationcontinues in some forms to the present day and partially accounts forhorrendous working and living conditions for farm laborers, most ofwhom are people o f color. The legal standards for working hours,health, and safety in farm labor are all much lower than for the rest ofthe working class.

W kite r m i x t unit i1x n A t k e tack of CIMS COMCic14511Z55Racist ideology, promoted b y socially conservative a n d

pro-capitalist groups, leaves many whites believing that they are moredeserving of the benefits o f society than people o f color, and thatpeople of color are given social benefits that come out of the pockets of

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whites. These beliefs lead to a white unity that tends to blunt the edgeof class divisions.

The mid-19th century—when there were large immigrations fromEurope and the non-white population expanded with the annexation ofthe western states and Asian immigration—was also a time o fexpansion and consolidation of the concept o f the white race. Theconcept of the white race expanded to include immigrant groups, suchas the Irish, Germans, Jews, and Slavic people, who had previouslybeen excluded from the definition of white. Before that time, each ofthose groups had been discriminated against by the dominant Englishand Protestant groups. Conflict with Mexico, and to some extent therise of Chinese immigration, made it possible in the 1840s and -1 850sfor leading Democrats to develop racial schemes that gathered allEuropean settlers together as whites against the "colored" races.

The idea of white unity also helped bridge the differences betweenwhites of different classes. This consolidation of the white race has hadvery important implications for the development of the class structureof the contemporary United States. There has been some degree ofunity among people who see themselves as white, and this unity crossesclass lines. This racial unity among whites has ended up helping theruling class keep many white people loyal to the capitalist system asprivileged workers within it.

Historically, many radicals have argued that attention to racedivides the working class. They claim that the most important conflictin a capitalist society is between the owners of the means of productionand the workers. They argue that the path to class liberation is unity,and unity is achieved by focusing on what working people fromdifferent races have in common

Eugene Debs was the very successful leader of the Socialist Partytoward the end of the 19th century. He was imprisoned for speakingout against US involvement in World War I and received almost amillion votes when he campaigned from his prison cell to be elected USpresident. In discussions of race, Debs shared the view of many radicalsof his titne.17 He argued that attention to race was unnecessary.

We have simply to open the eyes of as many Negroes as we can anddo battle for emancipation from wage slavery, and when the workingclass have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economicas well as political free men, the race problem will disappear.18

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Others have attempted to build class unity between the races byteaching whites about the ways that racism is bad for the white workingclass. Keeping African Americans out of unions, for example, meantthat Blacks were available to be used as strike breakers. Their exclusionkept them from feeling solidarity with the striking workers. This lack ofmultiracial unity leads to an inability of the working class to advocatefor its interests as a whole.

In 1948, Black communist organizer Harry Haywood wrote,It is not accidental that where the Negroes are most oppressed, theposition of whites is also most degraded.... "[Kleeping the Negrodown" spells for the entire South the nation's lowest wage and livingstandards.... Sharecropping has drawn in to i ts orbi t tens o fthousands of white workers.... Political controls which are aimedprimarily at the disenfranchisement of the Negro have also resultedin depriving the mass of the poor whites of their right to a ballot.19

Presently, there are many way3 racism keeps the white workingclass from acting in ways that are in the interest of the working class as awhole. Politicians are able to mobilize white workers' resentmentsagainst "undeserving poor people who sponge off the system." In thedebate over welfare that took place in 1996, an image was created of theundeserving welfare cheat. In popular consciousness, this person wastypically a Black female, even though the majority of people on welfareat that time were white. Anti-Black racism was mobilized in ways thathurt poor whites as well as poor people of color.

Similarly, racism has been used to mobilize resentments againstundocumented immigrants in ways that hurt the working class. Arguingthat US citizen workers have a "right to jobs" and undocumentedpeople don't, the government uses these distinctions to crack down onundocumented people when they attempt to unionize and count onracist resentments to prevent white workers from coming to the aid ofimmigrants. And yet the presence of large numbers of non-unionizedworkers in any given industry drives down wages, hurting all people inthose sectors, no matter what their race or nationality.

When US auto makers were beginning to develop their globalapproach to manufacturing, anti-Asian racism developed among white,African American, and Latino workers. The mainstream mediadeflected blame for the loss of jobs from the actions of the US-basedmanufacturers and focused on the rise o f Asian manufacturers. Aviolent wave of anti-Asian hysteria hit the country, and little attention

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was paid to the failure o f the US manufacturers to anticipate NorthAmericans' desire for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. I t was in themidst of this hysteria that Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit in1982 by two white men angered at the loss o f jobs in the US carindustry.

While not challenging the claim that racism divides the workingclass, the white historian David Roediger adds a twist to this analysis. Inhis book The Wages ofniteness, Roediger asks: I f racism has no positivebenefits for the white working class, why is it so persistent? He pointsout that while whites may lose in some basic economic ways, they alsogain. There is a social wage paid to white workers for their whiteness.

As a case study, Roediger traces the history o f the Irish in theUnited States as they moved from being considered members of aninferior race to being included as white. As this transformation tookplace, their social status and access t o political power increaseddramatically. Roediger argues that the white working class hashistorically used its position of power to keep ahead of people of color.Roediger argues that working people in the United States must takeracism very seriously and uproot it from their consciousness, for it isonly through concerted efforts at anti-racism among whites that a realunity can develop among members of the working class.

While people of different races are woven into the class formationin different ways, each o f those racial groups also includes genderdifferences. Women and men are positioned differently in the classformation. The main forms of gender difference that are built into theUS class formation have their roots in the gender ideology that thedominant European groups brought with them to the Americas. Menwere to be in business and government, and women were to be thewardens of the home. While the early white settlers in the northeasternpart o f the United States lived in societies where women and menworked together without a distinct separation of spheres, according toJean Boydston, the roots of a gendered separation between public andprivate came with the colonists from England.

A largely subsistence oriented people, the New England Puritansdefined the household as "the economical society" and understoodthat family survival required the wife's work. In the garden, thebarnyard, and the larder as much as it required the husband's work in

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the fields and meadows and barn.... A t the same time, colonialsociety contained the ideological foundations for later denial of theeconomic worth o f wives' labor. As ministers reminded women,husbands—not wives—were the public representatives o f thehousehold.... Wives' subordination was embedded in the Englishcommon law that the Puritans brought with them to New England.As femme covert a wife's legal identity was subsumed under that of herhusband, who was recognized as the owner of her labor-time.2°

As the industrial economy developed, men's labor increasinglysubsumed women's and made it invisible. In working-class families,men worked for a wage in capitalist enterprises. Women of all racesoften did too, but they also did much work that was unpaid. Boydstonargues that women contributed as much as men to the economicsurvival of working-class white families of the 19th century. We canonly see their full contribution when we take into account not only theirwage labor, bu t also their unpaid efforts such as childrearing,housework, gardening, nursing the o l d and sick, scavenging,bargaining, and bartering with neighbors.

Boydston argues that this invisibility of women's work was to theadvantage of the industrial employers. Marx had noted that a workerneeds to be paid at least the amount it takes to keep him or her alive.Boyds ton expands on this by pointing out that if a wage earner is livingoff of the unpaid labor of a wife, the owner benefits along with thehusband in the exploitation of her labor.21

Along with capitalist forms of appropriation, there has existed apatriarchal form o f appropriation. We will look at this in depth inChapter 6. For now it is worth mentioning that much of the importantwork that women of all races have done traditionally has been done inthe household. Even when they have worked in wage labor, womenhave done a vastly disproportionate amount of household labor. Theconcepts we use to analyze economic activity have been developedwith capitalist production in mind and largely do not account for theproductive activity that takes place in households. Thus, the work doneto take care of people's basic personal, emotional, and childcare needsis largely economically invisible.

Domestic labor is not considered real work when it is not paid.When it is paid, as with much of the work that has traditionally beendone by women o f color working as laundry women, nannies,housekeepers, and cooks, it often takes place at the margins of capitalistlabor. Paid domestic work rarely ends up being counted in the official

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economy as productive labor because much o f it isn't taxed, andtherefore isn't tallied by government institutions. This "informal" laboris thus done without the basic protections that have come to beassociated with capitalist labor relations, such as time off, healthbenefits, pensions, and the like.

As capitalist industrialization developed, the idealized role for awhite woman was that of homemaker. She was supposed to provide forthe personal maintenance of the worker and the reproduction of theworking class. Marxist feminists have argued that in the dominantideology of capitalism, the man is responsible for production, while thewoman is responsible for reproduction—reproducing the workforce.

The trade union movement in the 20th century fought hard for theability of male workers to support their wives and children at home.They demanded a "family wage," meaning a wage large enough tosupport a whole family. For much of the 20th century, the idea that aworker's wages were supposed to be enough to support a family was anassumption built into most union contracts.

Beginning in the 1970s, demands for a family wage became harderto win. As real wages (that is, wages adjusted for inflation) began to godown dramatically, fewer families were able to maintain their formerstandard of living on one income.

Modern capitalist societies are based upon the norm o f theheterosexual nuclear family. Nuclear families are more compatible withcapitalism than are extended family structures. As opportunities forwork move geographically, nuclear families can uproot and settle downsomeplace else far more easily and quickly than can extended families.The idealization of the romantic heterosexual couple is a part o f thesocial glue that holds this family structure together.

In reality, the ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family with a femaleat home accurately reflects only wealthier whites. Relatively few whiteworking-class men have been able to "provide for their families" in thisway; likewise, since men of color have systematically been denied workthat paid a family wage, only a small percentage of women of color havethe luxury of being stay-at-home wives and mothers. The connectionbetween women and the household has meant that women have beenexcluded or marginalized from the better paying forms o f capitalistlabor. Jobs that have traditionally been women's jobs typically pay lessthan traditionally male fields, and when women work in the same jobsas men, they are often paid less.

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In the early part of the 20th century, people advocating for theinterests o f working-class women have pursued two completelydifferent strategies. Some argued for women's greater and more equalinclusion in wage labor, while others fought for the family wage—theidea that women should be able to stay home and raise their children.This has often been an important demand for women of color, whohave traditionally worked in wage labor but at very low wages. Thetrade union movement has taken both o f these positions as well,sometimes arguing for equality and sometimes arguing for a familywage.

While Emma Goldman and other anarchists have advocatedstrongly for workplace equality for women and criticized the nuclearfamily, many Marxists in the early part of the 20th century favored theideal of the family wage.

Trit# unions

The struggles over racism among sectors of the working class andthe complex positions of women in a capitalist economic structure raisechallenges for organizing among the working class. One of the mainorganizing strategies that members of the working class have used tochallenge capitalism is the trade union. In Chapter 4, we will look atother ways o f challenging capitalism. For now, we will look at thecomplex and often contradictory roles played by unions.

As the industrial capitalist economy developed, so did tradeunions. Early trade unions were modeled after the craft guilds of theMiddle Ages in Europe. I n these, skilled workers controlled theconditions o f their labor, trained new members o f the guild, andrestricted entry into the guild. The early unions were organized by"craft" rather than by workplace. Craft unions attempted to protect thebenefits that come from having specialized skills. These craft unionsusually worked to improve the conditions of a "labor aristocracy" madeup of skilled white men, and to protect their members' jobs and statusfrom the rest of the working class. A more progressive tendency alsodeveloped that attempted to unify the working class, including peopleof all races, immigrants, women, and the unskilled.

Trade unions have sometimes been organized with the specificgoal o f challenging the existence o f capitalism. A t other times inhistory, they have been used to tame the working class and make iteasier for capital to extract a profit without too much strife.

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1 E h r e n r e i c h (2001), page 26.2 R e s n i c k and Wolff (1987).3 B r a v e r m a n in Edwards, Reich, and Weisskopf (1986), page 93.4 H e i n t z and Folbre (2000), page 16.5 E d w a r d s , Reich, and Weisskopf (1986), page 168.6 E d w a r d s , Reich, and Weisskopf (1986), page 173.7 H e i n t z and Folbre (2000), page 24.8 Z i n n (1980), pages 98-9.9 C a r e w (1988), page 23.10 L o e w e n (1996), page 76.11 L o e w e n (1996), page 76.12 Gonza lez (1997), page 13.13 L a d u k e (1999).14 A l m a g u e r (1994), page 33.15 A k n a g u e r (1994), page 14.16 Z i n n (1980), page 394.17 M o l l o y (1992), page 186.18 D e b s in West (1988), page 19.19 H a y w o o d in Roediger (1998), pages 127-8.20 B o y d s t o n (1994), page 46.21 B o y d s t o n (1994), page 54.22 Z i n n (1980), page 320.23 Z i n n (1980), page 320.24 Z i n n (1980), page 321.25 Z i n n (1980), page 322.26 H a y w o o d in Zinn (1980), page 322.27 Z i n n (1980), page 320.28 Z i n n (1980), page 331.29 Z i n n (1980), page 356.30 G r e e n (1980), page 92.31 Z i n n (1980), page 390.32 G r e e n (1980), page 150.33 Z i n n (1980), page 395.34 G r e e n (1980), page 198.