Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

their places as barbers and servants." In New York City But its petit-bourgeois confusions let the capitalists easily
Afrikans were the majority of the house-servants in 1830, outmaneuver it, each time herding it back to resentful acbut
by 1850 Irish house-servants outnumbered the entire quiescence with skillful applications of "the carrot and the
Afrikan population there.(25) The Empire was swiftly stick".
moving to replace the rebellious and dangerous Afrikan
proletariat by more submissive and loyal Europeans.
What was the essence of the ideology of white
labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. Lenin pointed out
Even in the Deep South, urban Afrikan pro- in the great debates on the National Question that the heart
letarians were increasingly replaced by loyal European im- of national oppression is annexation of the territory of the
migrants. In New Orleans the draymen were all Afrikan in oppressed nation(s) by the oppressor nation. There is
1830, but by 1840 were all Irish.(26) One historian points nothing abstract or mystical about this. To this new layer
out: "Occupational exclusion of Blacks actually began of European labor was denied the gross privileges of the
before the Civil War. In an unpublished study, Weinbaum settler bourgeoisie, who annexed whole nations. Even the
has demonstrated conclusively such exclusion and decline particular privileges that so comforted the earlier Euro-
(of skilled Afrikan workers-ed.) for Rochester, New Amerikan farmers and artisans-most particularly that of
York, Blacks between 1840 and 1860. My own work shows "annexing" individual plots of land every time their Ema
similar decline in Charleston, S.C., between 1850 and pire advanced-were denied these European wage-slaves.
1860. And these trends continued in Southern cities during But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for
Reconstruction. A crucial story has yet to be told. The themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The
1870 New Orleans city directory, Woodward pointed out, ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the
listed 3,460 Black carpenters, cigarmakers, painters, Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges
shoemakers, coopers, tailors, blacksmiths, and foundry (such as "white man's wages"), beginning with the right to
hands. By 1904, less than 10 per cent of that number ap- monopolize the labor market.
peared even though the New Orleans population had increased
by more than 50 per cent."(27) Beneath the great We must cut sharply through the liberal
events of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the genocidal camouflage concealing this question. It is insuffirestructuring
of the oppressed Afrikan nation continued cient-and therefore misleading-to say that European
year after year.
workers wished to "discriminate against" or "exclude" or
were "prejudiced against" colored workers. It was the
This was clearly the work of the capitalists. But labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the
where did the new stratum of Euro-Amerikan workers economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy
stand on this issue? The defeat of the Slaveocracy, the of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Inpolitical
upheavals of the great conflict, and the enormous dian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California
expansion of European immigration had stirred and and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and
heartened white labor. In both North and South local Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to
unions revived and new unions began. New attempts enter an economy they hadn't built, and 'annex', so as to
emerged to form effective national federations of all white speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.
workers. Between 1863-73 some 130 white labor
newspapers began publication.(28) The Eight Hour Day Naturally, the revisionists always want to talk
movement "ran with express speed" from coast to coast in about it as a matter of white workers not sharing equally
the wake of the war. During the long and bitter Depression enough-as though when a robber enters your home and
of 1873-78, militant struggles broke out, ending in the takes everything you've earned, the problem is that this
famous General Strike of 1877. In this last strike the white thief should "share" your property better! Since the
workers won over to their side the troops sent by the ideology of white labor was annexationist and predatory,
government or defeated them in bloody street fighting in it was of necessity also rabidly pro-Empire and, despite
city after city. White labor in its rising cast a long shadow angry outbursts, fundamentally servile towards the
over the endless banquet table of the bourgeoisie. bourgeoisie. It was not a proletarian outlook, but the
degraded outlook of a would-be labor aristocracy.
Truly, white labor had become a giant in size.
Even in a Deep South state such as Louisiana, by the 1860 We can grasp this very concretely actually incensus
white laborers made up one-third of the total settler vestigating the political rising of European labor in that
population.(29) In St. Louis (then the third-largest period in relation to the nationally oppressed. Even today
manufacturing center in the Empire) the 1864 census show- few comrades know how completely the establishment of
ed that slightly over one-third of that city's 76,000 white the Empire in the Pacific Northwest depended upon
men were workers (rivermen, factory laborers, stevedores, Chinese labor.* In fact, the Chinese predate the Amerikan
etc.). In the Boston of the 1870's fully one-half of the total settler presence on the West Coast by many years.(31)
white population were workers and their families, mostly When the famous Lewis & Clark expedition sent out by
Irish.(30) In some Northern factory towns the proportion President Jefferson reached the Pacific in 1804, they arrivwas
even higher.
ed some sixteen years after the British established a major
shipyard on Vancouver Bay-a shipyard manned by
The ideological head on this giant body, however, Chinese shipwrights and sailors.
still bore the cramped, little features of the old artisadfarmer
mentality of previous generations. When this For that matter, the Spanish further South in
giant was aroused by the capitalists' cuts and kicks, its - -- -.
angry flailings knocked over troops and sent shock-waves *As well as the later waves of Japanese, Filipino and
of fear and uncertainty spreading through settler society. 32 Korean workers.