Myths About American Democracy Crumble

The burst of racist hatred (or, as pressmen pitifully like to put it, of “black revolts”) in the North of the US dramatically exposed the inconsistency of those myths the fictional integrity of the “American system” stood upon.

In US historical mythology, the Civil War was fought between the North, which incarnated civilization, and the South, embodiment of barbarity. Culture against obscurantism, philanthropy against the sinister domination of slave traders.

The industrializing capitalism of Northern States did not go to war against the underdeveloped, agricultural economy of the South in order to defend its freedom to exploit that massive reserve of labour power bound to a clod of earth, but took arms to defend and affirm the undying principles of freedom, equality and brotherhood instead.

Blacks fled in part to the North, attracted by that illusion of freedom and brotherly equality both reward and consequence of the Civil War.

They were indeed free but only to sell their defenceless labour power. Free to be on their own and not under the protection assured by the habit of slave traders to use their lash against slaves, of course, but to also feed, dress and keep alive the flogged for as long as possible.

They were not tied to the patriarchal farm of their master anymore but they became slaves of the contractors of cheap labour force, the promoters of strikebreaking and competition among workers, the owners of horrific hovels in frightful, overpopulated neighborhoods.

The illuminated bourgeoisie was touched by the Jewish ghetto (and for good reasons if the former had been honest) while it was just building its black ghetto, its Harlem, to make it a paradise for swindling shop owners, usurers, trafficants of male and female flesh, dealers of religious pills and marijuana.

They were not flogged anymore but they were slowly grinded and worn out as the subtle mechanism restated the old chains by their feet.

Blacks were mere labourers but if the non qualified whites were able to cross the job barrier, they could not.

The marginalization of their ghetto and its houses compared well to the marginalization of their professional qualifications and because new black immigrants were unarmed, defenceless, distrusted, lost in a world both indifferent and hostile, black labourers discovered that, on equal terms, their wage was less than half the wage of their non black brothers (today, after so much progress, it increased to… 57%!).

The marginalization of salaries joined the marginalization of jobs.

In the North, brotherhood applied.

But only on condition that black “brothers” did not violate the sacred fence of white supremacy, that they travelled in separate wagons, ate on different tables, “learned” in their own schools – the most miserable and ill‑equipped – and lived inside the paddock of horrific slums.

Blacks were equal only inside that prison that is factories, in the sense that they were the most exploited among the exploited. But even in that case an invisible barrier made them more miserable, more mistreated and in conclusion more enslaved.

According to that very mythology, the towering bourgeois “civilization”, product of the capitalist industrialization, recognized equal rights to all American citizens. Possessing these rights was enough to make blacks equal to whites in reality.

Today it is acknowledged that, a century after the Civil War and the victory of “civilization” over “barbarity”, equal civil rights are not even ensured on paper. At the same time, the state of affairs proves that, in reality, in order to own the missing part of equality that the new laws “pledge” to blacks, they have to use brute force against those very law enforcement that should shield them against the violence every American institution is soaked in.

Myth pretended that the racial barrier was not a product of social reasons but of moral and intellectual ones, born out of the lack of “enlightenment” and “moralization” in white skinned citizens due to secular prejudices and inherited deficiencies.

These days, even the most conservative Italian newspaper acknowledges that black Americans’ condition is the way it is because they are and have to constitute the reserveless army available to the exploitation of the productive machine. It is acknowledged that racial hatred is indeed class hatred, racial violence is violence that is inseparable from the economic base and the general fabric of present society. It is acknowledged that blacks are rioting because their wages are immensely below the national averages and they are squashed inside filthy neighborhoods that emanate misery, depravation and sickness. Moreover, they are defenceless prey of looters such as buyers of human flesh, traffickers of alcohol and narcotics (or prayers), usurers and tax and rent collectors all while being sentenced to the hardest, filthiest and most vile jobs. In conclusion, they are the most proletarian out of all the proletarians of the star‑spangled republic. They are the southerners of that country and they get the treatment that here, in the highly evolved Northern Italy, southerners, without reservations, have the “honor” to get.

These days, even a catholic and social reformist social worker such as Harrington has to acknowledge that even in the case in which the most perfect among all laws wipes out the racial restrictions that have blacks disheartened and subdued, their condition of disheartenment and submission would persist as racism is gangrened inside the very mechanism of the bourgeois society.

According to American mythology the US was not and is not imperialist, has not colonized nor colonizes anyone and doesn’t fear colonial revolts.

In reality, American capitalism has colonized its own underdeveloped areas and did to its own citizens of proletarian class what the old imperialisms did to black peoples that were subjugated with iron and fire.

The black revolt is both an episode of proletarian class struggle against the capitalist exploitation and colonial uprising against the bourgeois colonizers.

Let the moralists spill tears!

Our hope for the revolt is to catch fire, and to blend, beyond the secular prejudices, with white proletarians’ class struggle. We hope the latter comprehend that one is the enemy, the very same one that split the proletariat in the past and still does!