This paper is an attempt to reanalyze class relations, and working class identity, in the US, as grounded in the structures of racialization and white supremacy that have defined this country. This paper was given at the Radical Philosophy conference of November 1998, at San Francisco State University. It was then published in Social Justice, vol 27 (1); Spring, 2000.

Introduction

In the United States, the hold of racism on white workers has been a constant historical problem for working class organization. It has been a barrier to both union organizing and socialist class consciousness. There are many instances where white workers have actually rejected unionism, typically in the South, because it implied shared membership with black workers. Even in the face of utmost hardship, white workers have traded away economic improvement and class strength for illusory cultural privileges of whiteness. The contemporary quietus toward runaway shops reflects this same trade off; white workers watch the overall job base erode in the belief that ultimately only the lower layers of the workforce will be effected.

Radicals and organizers usually explain racism as a management tactic to divide and control the working class. But this explains neither its power, its longevity, nor its tenacity. Instead, the notable historical exceptions to which radicals make reference remain primarily exceptional cases.

Labor history suggests racism has been far more than a tactic, that it is something that resides instead at the very core of the culture. For instance, in the northern states, immediately after the revolution (1800-1830), white craft workers and artisans supported the abolition of slavery. To a great degree, slaves in the north were skilled workers, craftsmen of competence equal to the whites, and often employed in direct competition with white workers by their white owners.[1] Against this competition, white workers had little recourse; their real competitor was the white slaveowner. When slavery was abolished, however, these same white workers excluded the freed slaves from their organizations, supported disfranchisement, and at times organized boycotts against employers who continued to use black skilled labor. (McManus,183) In other words, they had supported abolition in order to then exclude the former slaves as real competition. Thus, they helped initiate the prototype structures of segregation that would later become Jim Crow.

By excluding black workers, rather than join and coordinate with them, white workers not only created them as competition, they threw away the chance to make themselves as a class a larger and more significant political force in the new states. In their rhetoric of exclusion, whites charged black labor as being inferior, or incapable of good work, precisely when the skill of black workers was equal to or better than that of white workers, and in demand. Ultimately, under the heel of segregation, black workers were relegated to unskilled labor, and lost their crafts.

The "free labor" ideology of the 1850s, which played a role in the settlement of the midwest and of California,[2] rested on similar contradictions. This ideology derived from the Jacksonian valorization of the "producing class" of workers and artisans. It affirmed the dignity and honor of work, and opposed slavery as demeaning to labor -- but only within a white orientation. Ideologically, it equated black workers, both free and slave, with slavery and servility. It thus became part of the rationale for advocating the exclusion of all African-Americans from the new territories, on the claim that their mere presence would degrade the honor of white labor. All in all, white workers opposed slavery to exclude black people, and opposed black people to exclude slavery.

As Saxton demonstrates, in California, this process of exclusion did not function to divide the working class, but to define the working class as white. The "free labor" ideology assumed a certain class mobility for wage laborers, by which they could eventually rise to forms of self-employment. (IE,22) That is, workers relied upon a sense of common interest between labor and capital, a social parity between the two that would permit both working class mobility and individualism. For this reason, one could include the "free labor ideology" in the categories of populist ideas. Traditionally, populism opposed capitalist enterprise as oppressive or exploitative only when it became too big, hindering worker mobility (or farmer stability) -- that is, only under monopolistic or oligopolistic circumstances. (RFL,33- 4) In these terms, white working class movements against oligopoly and its political hegemony were more to demand parity, to sue for full social "recognition" of their status as the producing class, rather than contest capital's role.

But if parity means recognition rather than economic equality, then many things will satisfy it. And the primary one, in terms of "free labor," was an establishment of white solidarity. In California, the populist working class movement of the 1850s and 1860s was willing to compromise with white capital as soon as it agreed to segregate non-white labor (mainly Chinese at the time, but black as well). (IE,92ff) The class mobility assumed by the "free labor" ideology posited a form of white collaboration between classes which became the condition for white working class solidarity itself, the essential condition for class self-awareness.

Ultimately, free African-Americans were not excluded from California. But white workers refused to admit black workers into their craft and political organizations, while welcoming newly arrived white workers. Chinese workers were segregated as unskilled labor and disenfranchised, as black workers had been in the post-revolutionary northern states. [3] In general, in assuming class mobility for themselves, white workers participated in consigning non-white labor, through exclusion, to permenant proletarianization. As such, the "free labor" idea expressed the claim to a class difference between white and non-white labor. Though not a class distinction across the means of production, it was a distinction socio-politically productive of a white working class identity, through the production of an economic distinction between themselves and (for instance) black workers. To the extent it expresses a "sense of proprietary claim" or entitlement to a certain social position, as Herbert Blumer argues, (RFL,18) it takes on the trappings of a real class distinction.

In the United States, Marxism has sought, since the 30s, to theorize the situation of the black worker and the black community on a class basis.[4] But the examples considered here would suggest instead that class rests on a basis of racism and racialization. Almaguer suggests as much:

Who gained access to land, owned businesses, became skilled workers, and, more generally, was subjectively placed in either a "free" wage-labor market or an "unfree" labor system was fundamentally determined on the basis of race. (RFL,13) 

In short, "race" is part of a political process whereby class membership is assigned, and class identity constructed. If race lies at the foundation of class, then class relations in the United States need to be re-examined. European models and theories of class relations, which have been accepted more or less uncritically in the United States, would have to be put in question to the extent they understand class in terms of nation and nationality rather than race and racialization. As a case in point, the notion of "union recognition," which is such a critical step in the building of unions as institutions of working class strength, would have a different meaning in the United States than in Europe. The concept of "recognition" of labor, as it weaves its way through United States history, overlays on unionism a cultural intersection of labor's demand for social parity with an established sense of white solidarity. 

A Reading of the Colonial History

The sources or antecedents of a "class consciousness" that grounds itself on white solidarity go back to the colonial period. In returning to them, however, we must recognize that a history of racism is never unproblematic. It reveals the same knots as the "free labor" ideology. For instance, while chromatic differences seem to be sufficient for racist exclusion and racial segregation, it is racism that renders chromatic difference noticeable, as well as strange and fearful. The problem of history with respect to race is that while whiteness can be shown to have been constructed socially and historically, it would only be in their guise as hegemonic that Europeans would have constructed it, while their construction of racial hierarchy would already assume a white racism by which to stratify it.[5] If white racism constructed race, on what racial ground had it already constructed itself as whiteness? If the process of racialization is driven by the establishment of dominance, from whence arose the notion of race that drove dominance to construct itself as white? To untangle this knot, we shall look at Virginia in particular, which led the way for the other colonies, both north and south.

The central socio-economic elements of the plantation colonies could be characterized as follows: 1) allegiance to the colony; 2) a corporate mode of social organization, in which the central governing body took responsibility for regulating and administering production, marketing, and labor, in order to insure the profitability of the social body; and 3) the evolution of a system of slavery. Since it can be argued, as Theodore Allen does at rigorous length,[6] that the notion of racial difference evolved from this structure, and was not its underlying condition, the question becomes how that happened. How was the socio-historical gap between economic structure (plantation slavery) and social racialization (white hegemony) traversed? In addressing this process, I will argue that two seemingly ancillary, though structural, factors need to be taken into account: the slave market and the legislation of sexuality. It is through the interaction of these elements, within the corporate structure of the colony, that whiteness, race, and racism were invented -- and upon that basis, unlike Europe, a structuring of class relations.

In Virginia, from the beginning, the demand for allegiance to being English and Christian was absolute, and strictly enforced. This was not a trivial issue; it was a primary response to internal crisis by the colony as a corporate enterprise (for which the settlers were essentially employees). During the first decade, the colony found itself unable to cope with the wilderness and faced rampant starvation. Many English sought to escape to nearby indigenous communities (a number of Algonquin peoples) who understood the land and suffered no hardships there. They were recaptured and tortured, often to death, for having deserted both the colonial enterprise and the Christian project.[7] An important concomitant to this punitive terror was the rhetorical demonization of the indigenous.

The initial goal of the colony was wealth. Parallel to the Spanish quest for gold, the English sought a product from which profit could be extracted, to provide corporate earnings. Tobacco cultivation was the first suitable enterprise they came upon. Tobacco was a drug that could be mass-produced as a commodity, and whose English market was assured. It rapidly became the colony's chief source of wealth, eventually serving even as currency in market transactions, and the calculation of human value and wages. The central problem of tobacco cultivation was labor. Until 1650, English indentured bond-laborers, and empoverished tenant farmers working for debt relief, made up the majority of the plantation labor force.[8] As Allen argues, indentured servitude was a proto-type of chattel, because it established the ability to trade the laborer by trading the contract, and to assign the laborer for the satisfaction of transactions and debts. (IWR,97ff) Chattel bond-labor became the juridical standard for the plantation system in its English variety well before Africans became a primary labor source.

As the use of African labor grew and became predominant after 1650, however, it was socially differentiated from English labor by the fact that Africans were not given contracts. (IS,38) The contract provided for length of service, a release date, and sometimes a grant of land upon release. These conditions were denied the African laborer. For the English laborers, this did not constitute a social distinction, however, and common cause between English and Africans in escaping was the rule rather than the exception during most of the 17th century. (PH,31) The difference mattered for the elite, however, and African servants were listed separately from English, using changed or invented names. Without a written contract, Africans were placed outside the law; their color became a mark of juridical status, and their terms of servitude were at the whim of the landowner. Though at first, many were released after serving a period comparable to European laborers, more and more had their time extended. Yet it was a contested issue among plantation owners for decades; only slowly did the colony move toward perpetual servitude for Africans.[9]

The absence of written contracts for Africans also became the defining condition of the slave auction market, and made it central to the colony's economy. Without a contract, the bodily presence of the bond-laborer was required.[10] As an auction market, it became the means of determining the current value of the laborer, and thus too, the value of the estate that owned such laborers. That is, the auction market became a way of measuring wealth, like the stock market today. These markets constituted an important step toward considering African labor real estate, as well as labor, which provided the ultimate motivation for establishing perpetual servitude for Africans.

But it took time. Along the way, from the 1650s on, there was a slow increase in differential punishments, ever more severe for Africans than for English, for instance, for attempting to escape, for which time of servitude was added. The statutory reduction of all Africans bond-laborers to perpetual servitude occurred in 1662. But only gradually, under the operation of such statutes, and the auction markets, were African bond-laborers transformed first into commodified wealth, and then into inheritable property.

The halting nature of the process testifies to the contested character of African status (as slave or indentured) throughout the 17th century. Essentially, the Virginia colony groped toward a concept of slavery by addressing issues that arose in adjudicating economic claims, such as debt payment or inheritance -- always to the benefit of landed wealth rather than laborer humanity -- and the social regulation of the labor supply for the colony. If what came to be known as slavery was in partial unofficial practice by some landowners by 1640, socially recognized as a predominant economic form and practice in the 1660s, it was only codified as a system in 1682 and 1705. In other words, it was not established full-blown; it emerged gradually, over the course of a century, out of economic pragmatics within a profit-oriented plantation society.

1862 also marked an important milestone in the development of social distinctions between African-American and English bond- laborers. In that year, by colonial statute, children of mixed parents were given the servitude status of the mother. Mixed marriage had always been punished in the colony; between English and Algonquin on religious grounds; between English and African on economic. Mixed bond-laborer marriages of any kind were codified in 1640 to reduce both partners to greater servitude. And in 1662, sexual relations between "Negroes" and "Christians" were subject to fines, while mixed marriages were prohibited. What this suggests, of course, is that such marriages had become too prevalent for the colonial elite, implying that anti-African feeling was far from the rule among the English laboring population.

But the child servitude statute was an unusual reversal of patriarchal tradition -- though clearly in the planters' economic interest. As a legislation of sexuality, it produced a social distinction between English women and African women with respect to personal relations, marriages, and finally motherhood. African women were legislatively reduced to being "breeding stock," while English women were condemned to careful sexual surveillence and constraint, since any mixed children they might bear would be free. All women were thus relegated to the level of productive resources, either of wealth or the heirs of wealth. And English women became the embodiment of a purity condition that was ideologically essential before the idea of a "white race" could even be thought, let alone given social reality.[11] Guarding the purity condition of women and ultimately of whiteness became one of the primary cultural practices of slave society, its means of extending corporate structure and interests into all personal affairs.

Women and womanly being were thus deployed to conceptualize an English-African distinction. And through womanly being, the child servitude statute became a step toward the eventual (18th century) process of biologizing the distinction between English and African labor. We see it later restated in the "free labor" ideology, which reformulated the notion that all black people were by nature slaves. The legislation of women and sexuality became part of the mechanism by which a difference in juridical status between English and African labor was transformed into a distinction between English and African being, and laid the basis for this distinction to be understood as white and black.

The first use of the term "white" to refer to the English only occurs in 1691, in an anti-miscegenation statute. (SL:III,86) And this too was the culmination of an evolutionary process. The first colonial distinction had been between "Christians" and "heathens," the latter term comprehending both Algonquins and Africans. Originally, the colonists sought to convert the Africans, and promised freedom to those who became Christian; when this became a threat to plantation wealth, it was eliminated by statute. (IS,45) The descriptive binary then changed to English and Negro, and after that to Christian and Negro. After 1667, the term "Christian" increasingly connoted "non-Negro," occurring in those rhetorical positions that would later be filled by the word "white." In other words, only over the course of a century, did the English coalesce around the notion of being "white."

As early as the 16th century, "white" and "black" had been used in literature and travel accounts, as Winthrop Jordan has shown, from which he argues that racist hostility anteceded the founding of the colony and slavery. But in the 16th century, "white" and "black" were used as descriptive rather than racializing terms.[12] "Black" becomes a racializing term for African-Americans only when used in conjunction with the racialization of the English as "white" in the formation of social categories. If the process of racialization began at the end of the 17th century, the term "race" itself, as a socio- political name for that process of racialization, would only emerge toward the middle of the 18th century.

Bacon's rebellion of 1676 marked an important milestone in this process. The rebellion erupted out of an agrarian geo- political contradiction in the Virginia colony. To rise in status in the colony required wealth, and the main avenue to wealth was the acquisition of land. The colonial elite curtailed new land seizure beyond the colony's boundary in order to preserve certain trade relations with the indigenous people. They also granted farm land to small farmers, new arrivals, and newly freed indenturees on the western periphery of the colony to serve as a buffer between themselves and the Algonquin. Nathaniel Bacon, himself a large landholder, organized these marginalized outlying farmers to war against the Algonquin (that is, to open new lands through military adventure), and then turned against the colonial elite for insufficiently defending those same farmers against the Algonquin counter-attacks.[13] The politics of his campaign had three components: 1) a struggle of (outlying) county farmers against the central elite for greater county representation; 2) a struggle of small county farmers against the county elites for greater local representation; and 3) a campaign against the indigenous as the "real enemy." In its program for representation, Bacon's Rebellion reveals the main characteristics of all subsequent populism (a question to which we will return): the conjunction of democratic pretensions (a rhetorical struggle against the rich) with an opportunistically machinated chauvinist campaign against a non-white group (the Algonquin, in Bacon's case).

The significance of Bacon's movement lay in the common cause made by English and African bond-laborers. In his ranks, both appeared under arms together, though Africans had long been prohibited from bearing arms. (SI,39) This again suggests that antipathy toward Africans was essentially class-based, and of importance mainly for the elite. According to Zinn, the rebellion convinced the colonial elite to take measures foreclosing concerted action against itself. That is, a merely juridical distinction between African and English was no longer sufficient. To turn one actively against the other, the terms of differentiation had to be changed. The colonial council launched campaigns of demonization of Africans, and laws against the special danger of "Negro insurrection" appear in the colonial codes in 1682. (SL,II:492) In 1691, further laws against miscegenation were passed.

But to manifest the differentiation the elite desired, more concrete activity was needed. Poor white farmers were conscripted to the task of enforcing the slave codes. Their job was to guard against runaways, man patrols and commandos under elite leadership, and suppress all appearance of autonomy on the part of slaves. Negligence in this duty, let alone complicity in escape, was punishable. As if to acceed to the demand for participation that Bacon had demanded, while still maintaining the disfranchisement of the small farmer, the elite gave poor whites the job of policing rather than making policy. In effect, English laborers were kept powerless and hard at work by giving them a political role, if not rule.

The existence of this intermediary control stratum produced a coherent structure of internal solidarity between economically diverse positions in the colonial structure. As long as the colonial Council, as the corporate direction of the colony, acted to insure the continued viability of the small farmers, the small farmers acted to assist the elite in preserving its labor force. The overall effect was to guarantee the continued existence of slavery for the plantations. And it defused the potential for conflict arising from economic competition between small and large farmers, keeping it from becoming an agrarian class antagonism. Elite control was thus exercised through granting the power to control to all whites as such; and plantation hegemony took the form of white solidarity. The primary political differentiation between whites became administrative; that is, social difference was defined by structural roles rather than by economic position. Thus, the primary class relation between planters and slaves took the form of a relation between whites and slaves -- that is, between colonial society as a corporate state, and the slave labor that state functioned to preserve.

When, with the rise of industry, different forms of labor relation (wage labor, prison labor, etc.) emerged, they were integrated into this overarching white social machine under the aegis of the corporate state. As the importation of African labor increased into the 18th century, the elite ideological calls for social solidarity against the "growing danger" this represented, the "enemy within," evolved into a predominant social ethos. The paranoia first employed against the indigenous through a demand for allegiance to being English, was again deployed to shift people's self-conception from being English to being white.

In sum, whiteness and white supremacy did not evolve out of race relations, but were themselves the socio-political relations that brought race into existence. Indeed, if whiteness can engender itself as such only by racializing others, it can only be understood as a social relation, a social hierarchy of racialized identities. White racialized identity is constituted through identification with that social structure; and whites become a self-constituting group only within the relations of racialization. In that relation, the other is interior and essential to white identity, yet separate and inimical as other. The substance and essence of white identity is external to it in the racialized other; its meaning as white exists through that other. With dominance comes dependency; with denigration comes indispensibility.

In the United States, the relation of whiteness to domination is not one of historical precedence, of one having been generated out of the other, but of form and content. In the colonies and the nation that emerged from them, whiteness (and from it, race) is the form that domination took. Within a structure of corporate social control, racism and white supremacy were not invented to "divide and rule" the working class, within an existing class structure, but as the primary mode of organizing the structure of labor itself. Racism is the very name of the process whereby a class structure itself was produced.

Class Relations in the Corporate State and Corporate Society

But the class structure of the colony now appears to exist in two disparate economic spaces: first, there is a relation between the plantations as the economic core of white confraternal society and their black bond-laborers; and second, there is a system of relations between whites within the overarching corporate social matrix. It is a double class structure. But to the extent that the production of whiteness is a predominant factor in the construction of class, it will require a wholly different way of understanding class from the European model.

If the evolution of slavery and the evolution of white supremacy (two sides of the same coin) depended on the construction of an intermediary control stratum governed by white solidarity and deployed against the class of black plantation bond-laborers, then three class relations are generated: the relations of white elite to black labor, of elite to control stratum, and of white workers to black.

The colony's economic base, which required the construction of slavery, was a profit-oriented form of agricultural mass production. The necessary conditions for its operations were the controlled settlement of new land, the regulation of commodity marketability, and the preservation of slavery as the system of labor. In fulfilling these needs, the colonial council, and later the state and federal governments of the United States, functioned as a corporate directorship, a corporate state, administering social processes in the interests of overall profitability. But this required not only the supervision and regulation of labor, and the allocation of materials and access to markets; it also involved the guarantee of allegiance by its personel to the corporate goals. Hierarchical coherence and integrity, as the condition for participation of all social strata, was of the essence. Whiteness became the means of guaranteeing allegiance.

Within a corporate structure, one's primary relationship to others is not economic, but administrative, a differential of roles within an administrative apparatus. In white society, as the administrative apparatus of the slave/class economy, white solidarity functions as the matrix of social cohesion that sets all whites in a structural relation to each other. It becomes the content of that apparatus, the way it defines itself as a class that stands opposed to the slave/class. The corporate state's cohesion, constituted as white solidarity, becomes the way society defines itself as white. White class distinctions, because constructed within this matrix, become stratifications within the cohesiveness of this administrative apparatus. The notion of "productive labor," which Andrew Jackson utilized so skillfully, takes its character as an honorific not from the fact of work but from its participation in the corporate social matrix, that is, in whiteness (and only as long as it does not cross the color line!). Thus, when class struggles germinated with the development of industry and industrial class relations, they rarely found themselves capable of seeing beyond the dimensions of social profitability and allegiance to the corporate society from which they emerged.

In effect, both allegiance and profitability become attributes of whiteness, which is in turn the content for which the corporate state is the form. Indeed, the corporate form perfuses United States society from top to bottom. Though the Virginia Company went bankrupt in 1624, its style of rule was sustained by the Virginia Colonial Council, which exercised similar controls on production, land use, and the disposition and control of labor. Today, townships, towns, and counties are in fact incorporated areas. What the corporate structure provides for, and prioritizes, is non-responsibility. Within the corporate structure, each individual is responsible to those above, in diverse ways; but one is not responsible for what one does to those below, unless it threatens to disrupt the system. Welfare reform, downsizing lay-offs, redlining, the use of stun-belts, and many forms of victimization or assault are honored, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly by blaming the victim. Should a local entity get too independent, democratic, or resistent, it will be put into receivership -- as we have seen recently with the Teamsters Union.

This picture presents another side of the question of labor competition. From its inception, the slave system set the slave as laborer in competition with white skilled workers, in which the white worker could not compete because the slave was an extension of a white owner. Powerless against the black bond- laborer's white authorization, the white worker was established as a marginalized labor force, outside the main class relation, but nevertheless with membership at the center, with the responsibility of preventing rebellion against that center. Given power over the black person as such, the white laborer found the structure of white solidarity to already be the milieu of his/her existence. The white worker thus had a double incentive to suppress the black, to mitigate competition on the one hand, and to drive black people to resistence on the other, against which the white worker could act and gain the approbation of the society to which s/he was responsible.

The Panic of 1741, in New York City, is a perfect example of this process. A slave conspiracy was imagined which pushed a coterie of shopowning and professional whites into the limelight in the subsequent investigation. (McManus,133ff) The principles of economic well-being (profitability) and belonging (allegiance), to which the poor and middle class whites clung directly reflected the corporate ethos. In inventing the conspiracy, these whites recapitulated the situation that Bacon's rebellion constructed for the marginal farmer in the Virginia colony: an opportunist struggle against a non-white other, a responsibility to defend the society that itself used the marginal against that non-white other, and a system of corporate recognition of the marginal for their efforts.

While relations between white corporate society and its wholly subalterned non-white labor force were regulated by the control stratum (of poor white farmers, workers and artisans), class conflicts occurring within white corporate society were regulated under the aegis of allegiance to white solidarity. White workers had a double role to play: as workers and as white. But if the exploitation and oppression of black workers and black people in general assumed primary place, as the very source of cohesion for the white corporate structure as a whole, it rendered white class conflicts within that structure secondary to its racialization. Working class interest as such became an impossible concept in the context of a white worker identification with white society against its black working class.

Parenthetically, a concomitant effect of the control stratum machinery was the development of a system of paternalism by the slave owners. Eugene Genovese argues that it became an important element of plantation operation.[14] "Paternalism" represented the granting of security to black people against arbitrary treatment by the patrols or vigilantes of the white control stratum. Without having been spoken for, a person could be subject to attack by those functioning in the security apparatus. A black person spoken for by a member of the elite was to an extent protected against the inherent excesses of slave enforcement. But in that sense, far from being an ameliorating factor for the cruelty of slavery, as Genovese suggests, it was in essence a "protection racket." The elite established a norm of arbitrary assault or terror against black people, and then offered "protection" against it as a privilege that could be both extended and withdrawn at the will of the elite.

Insofar as white workers constituted the boundary between white society and the black slave class, the ambiguity of their position, both at the margin as workers and at the center as white, explains their response to the abolition of slavery in the northern states. The abolition of slavery did not just provide the opportunity to strike back at the competition of skilled black workers, against which white workers had previously been powerless. The abolition of slavery marked the moment when the different forms of marginalization of white and black labor could change places. By marginalizing black workers, white workers both asserted and seized a place for themselves at the center as the working class itself. It was one and the same process. Having supported the abolition of slavery, their subsequent support for segregation and disenfranchisement of the freed slaves marked the operation of their class consciousness, an act of self-definition and self-positioning as the working class against those who had been the working class for corporate society. It was the moment when white workers ceased to be adjunct to a system of slavery, and claimed class being in all its socio-cultural centrality. It was this sense of class identity that Andrew Jackson played on so successfully with his concept of the "producer ethic." It is this sense of class transformation that is contained in the racist contradictions of the "free labor" ideology that white workers clung to. The possibility of such a shift further testifies to the fact that the relation between white and black workers had indeed been a class distinction.

Though the marginalization of black people represented a white worker awareness of class, beyond mere allegiance to whiteness, it implied a blindness to the notion that solidarity with the freed slaves would enhance their class-oriented political power. To have seen that would have meant giving up the very foundation of their political being altogether. If, later, the "free labor" ideology proclaimed the black worker inherently a slave, it was not simply because slave status was central to the juridical means of bringing the racial concepts of "black" and "white" into existence. For the white worker, "free labor" and the white solidarity it depended on were, and still are, the names for a demarginalization that has defined "the working class" as such. What comes with it, as its historical secret, is that for white workers to be the working class already means to be in collaboration with (white) capital.

The entire structure of these white working class dynamics is discernible in the agon of the National Labor Union (NLU) in 1868. The NLU was the first attempt to form a national union organization. It dedicated itself to seeking the "success of republican institutions," and proclaimed the independence and honor of the "producing classes" as its goal.[15] In the NLU's ideology, unions were organized to give labor an equal voice, to adjudicate differences, and gain labor its rightful share of what it produced. (CA:IX,153) That is, its axiom was a shared interest between labor and capital, and against the excesses of the latter it sought recognition of labor's rightful place in the social scheme. (CA:IX,151)

Though the NLU recognized black workers as workers, it refused to include them organizationally. In spite of advocating general worker unity, it called for black workers to form their own unions, and their own locals. Common cause was proposed only grudgingly, out of a reverse pragmatics, rather than a sense of class commonality; "if we don't make friends with them, capital will use them against us." (CA:IX,159) Just as the craft workers of Boston had done in 1800, they proclaimed black workers to be competition, and addressed them as an issue only to neutralize that competition. In effect, black workers were considered outsiders, and talk of cooperation occurred only in the context of separation. That is, the NLU looked at black workers through a sense of contradiction first, not of common class interest.

This is confirmed by the words of white observors to the 1869 "National Colored Labor Convention" in Washington DC. Black delegates to that convention who affirmed the white attitude toward labor organization, and the necessity of collaboration with capital, were praised as intelligent. But when some delegates suggested that trade unions which excluded black workers were committing an injury to the class, they were declared to be unintelligible. (CA:IX,243ff) In effect, they had questioned the white solidarity upon which white working class existence depended; in other words, solidarity with black workers would call in question the basis for white workers' identity as workers. The observers remarked, with temerity, that "they (black workers) do not see as we do in this labor movement" (leaving unsaid what is not seen). And they then reproached the black workers for not "joining us" -- by building separate unions. (CA:IX,246)

This class paradigm extends into the present. In the first half of the 20th century, though class antagonisms shook industrial capital, unions rarely allowed themselves to think of undermining profitability or even contesting its propriety. Before unions were legalized by the New Deal, industrial unionism was labelled treasonous, though not because it betrayed the nation, or even profitability; what it betrayed was the solidarity assumed by the corporate state -- that is, white solidarity. When, in 1907, J.P. Morgan suggested industry recognize unionism, proposing that union organization would function as a control stratum in the huge factories being built, and in which labor discipline was becoming a problem, he was following directly in the footsteps of the Virginia colonial administration. Recently, during the debates on NAFTA, the labor movement did not advocate labor solidarity across the border with Mexican workers, but took a protectionist stance instead, in solidarity with American business. It is the only stance that has ever made any sense to the white labor movement in the United States. The labor movement has always seen immigration as competition, and called for its curtailment, rather than advocate the formation of cooperatives of workers by which to create their own job base, and into which as many workers as possible could be welcomed.

Conclusion

The racialization of the working class has not produced a two-tiered system of class exploitation; what the corporate state has produced instead is a double economy, comprised of two qualitatively different systems of political economy, overlaid upon each other. The first system, derived from plantation mass production and a slave labor force, is the relation between the "white socio-economy" and those non-white peoples who reside culturally and politically outside it. That is, white corporate society as a whole constitutes the "ruling class" with respect to the non-white people it exploits. The second system, the white economy itself, is a corporate capitalist economy whose class structure approximates that of Europe, but whose principle of cohesion and allegiance is racialization. The first economy conditions the integrity of the white economy as a corporate society and culture.

In the corporate state, white workers do not have a common interest with black workers, because they have a different relation to capital than black workers have. They belong to the corporate state, from which black workers have been excluded. The primary relation between white workers and capital is not across the means of production, but rather through a social administrative hierarchy, whose purpose is to administer those who are outside the corporate state. White workers also relate to capital across the means of production, but that remains a secondary relation.

Perhaps this explains why the Marxist sense of an historical destiny or "role" for the working class to end class society has never made sense to the white working class in the United States. Marxism has never extended itself beyond trade union consciousness because it was never able to fathom the structure of white solidarity by which the white working class was constructed. Even at the height of industrial union organization in the 30s, the class mutuality represented by the struggle for union recognition, the centrality of recognition itself to the construction of class (union) activity, re-affirmed the white workers' sense of historical position, their standing within the white corporate state. In other words, for white workers, enforcing whiteness, there was no historical role to grasp beyond what they were already in the process of fulfilling. The exceptions, and there have been exceptions, have succeeded only in gaining "recognition" for black workers -- but as adjuncts to white hegemony, as white-by-association, and not as black workers. That is, the black workers had little role to play other than solidarity within the white struggle for recognition. Since the Civil Rights movement, this has changed; that is, the character of the boundary has changed, but not its nature or existence.

The socialist call for class unity, which addresses itself to white workers as workers, has had no meaning for white workers as white. It has remained blind to the fact that race is the foundation for the unity of the white working class within a dual and heterogeneous economic structure -- that is, that white working class unity is also white unity, a structural form of class collaboration. When socialists call for working class democracy, it implies the inclusion of black or brown workers, and violates the structure of white solidarity within which white workers valorize themselves as workers. Marxism has always considered racism to be an ideology rather than a cultural structure, a tactic of division rather than a fundamental dimension of allegiance. But race is not the way the working class was divided against itself; it was the way in which the white working class was constructed as a class, in its own class relation to a black working class across incommensurate economic structures. Contravening the socialist call, the very condition for working class unity in the United States is the condition for its disunity.

What kind of a model can we use to make this unusual picture of a class structure intelligible in its heterogeneity and its doubleness -- indeed, in its transcendence of the traditional Marxian description. One source of a model might be colonialism itself. Colonialism takes over a people external to the colonial power through the imposition of an integral governing administrative apparatus, whose role is to preserve a likewise imported social community in which the metropole's class structure remains intact. In the United States case, the colonizer brought the colonized to itself (from Africa), interrupting all cultural traditions for both, and building its own administrative and class structures upon that very interruption. It structured this interior colonial relation through racialization; it constituted whiteness and white solidarity as the integrity of its administrative structure, rather than the nationality that traditional colonists brought with them to the external colony. In traditional colonialism, national identity takes precedence for the colonial worker over unity with the colonized worker. The colonized worker will not trust the colonial worker because the latter comes from a different national culture. The colonial worker will not trust the colonized worker because he knows that he has arrived in the colony as part of an oppressive colonial apparatus. Though both are workers, they have no common interest; they stand on opposite sides of the issue of national liberation. For the United States, national liberation is not the issue. Instead, the issue is de- racializing liberation. But if this is what all non-white people have organized and fought for in the United States, it is an issue that is unintelligible to most white people.

An even starker model of the double class structure described here can be found in the structure of the prison. In a prison, both inmates and guards are treated oppressively by the administration for its own aggrandizement and political power: the inmates in that they are the source of the prison's existence, its political constitution by a state; and the guards in being the disciplinary instrumentality that makes it work. An analogy can be drawn between the prison administration and the plantation class in the 18th century colony, in which the juridical difference between guards and inmates stands in similar relation to the colonial juridical distinction between poor white farmers and workers and African bond-labor. Though the guard/inmate relation is not racial, it functions in a manner analogous to the racial (and is, in fact, becoming racialized under current criminalization campaigns). The guards, when they form organizations, or unionize, do so not to free themselves from the administration, or to transform the prison, but to equalize their standing in prison operations, to gain modes of participation in policy-making in order to more efficiently control the inmates. Though they organize against the administration, it is in concrete solidarity with the administration. The guards will not cross the juridical boundary to make common cause with the inmates; and the inmates will not make common cause with the guards as workers because they are guards and civilians.

One could say that the real class relation, across the "means of production" of the prison, is between the administration and the prisoners. The relation between the administration and the guards is secondary, though also a class relation. The conjunction of administration and guards gets it coherence from the existence of the prisoners (as does white corporate society from non-white peoples), and any class conflict between them is beyond the purview of the prisoners, within that coherence. The first class relation (administration-prisoner) is one of political economy, and the second is a relation of political hegemony incommensurate with the first. A tertiary class relation exists between the guards and the prisoners. From the perspective of political economy, the third can be seen as a production relation, in which the guards ("white") are laborers who work upon the raw material, the inmate population, for which the guards are paid.

Perhaps this model explains another paradox concerning the United States; that is, why, of all industrial countries, its labor history has been the most violent, while never giving birth to a broad working class revolutionary movement. Against mere unionization, the United States has deployed martial law, concentration camps, mass jailings, and torture on a scale seen in Europe only during revolutionary upheavals. In massive campaigns of violent suppression (for instance, the western miners at the turn of the century, the steel workers in the 1890s, Kentucky miners in the 1930s, textile shops in the northeast and south, and the railroads in 1894), hundreds of people were shot, jailed, and tortured. Socialist leaders and thinkers have been assassinated on the streets or in law courts, without there being any extant threat of a revolutionary movement. What the structure of the corporate state explains is how union organization represents, for the ruling class, a breach and betrayal of allegiance with white corporate society. The entity with which the idea of industrial unionism broke faith was that of the white nation. For industrial white workers to strike against corporate society was to step outside it, to place themselves objectively among the colonized, the non-white, and therefore to be treated as such. Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, unions were essentially considered alien entities, even under the New Deal. They sit on the boundary between being inside a control structure, and being outside it. And even after the civil rights movement, black worker participation in the unions of major industries was derogated, leading to such movements as DRUM, or the enormous Local 1199 struggle in NY hospitals.

NOTES

1- Edgar McManus has written two overlapping works on slavery in the north, and the process of abolition in the northern states after the revolution. I rely on both for the synopsis given here. Edgar McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1966); and Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973). References in the text will be to the latter.

2- A discussion of the racial politics of the "free labor" ideology is given by Tomas Almaguer in Racial Fault Lines (Univ. of California Press, 1994). Hereafter cited in the text as RFL. Cf. also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). For an account of the history and use of the "free labor" ideology in California, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensible Enemy (Univ. of California Press, 1971). Hereafter cited in the text as IE.

3- Cf. Saxton. As Saxton shows, the white working class established its identity as a class through the anti-Chinese campaign. While corporate capital turned to the Chinese for cheaper labor, the white working class united against Chinese labor in its fight for recognition as the working class, and for access to the middle class. "The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns humbling a class above it, but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it." (Orestes Brownson, in Eric Foner,23)

4- Harry Haywood, in his work, Black Liberation, posits the black belt as a region of black culture and thus of African-American nationality. But in the party platforms of the CPUSA, or any of the Marxist parties of the 60s, black workers are seen as the most exploited sector of the working class, and racism a tactic of capital to divide workers. The idea that race might be more fundamental than class in the United States does not compute for Marxist thinking.

5- The literature that argues this from both the historical and sociological perspectives is growing. See, for example, the following. Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994). David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1994). Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994). Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Phildelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Ashley Montagu, The Concept of Race (New York: Collier Books, 1969). Ian Lopez, "White by Law"; in Critical Race Theory, ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1995), p. 547. Lopez advances the notion of a double negative definition of whiteness ("White is what is not non-white") in a critique of the apparent on-going need for a juridical definition of race well into the 20th century.

6- Allen, Invention, Vol, II, Chapters 6 and 7.

7- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 24. An instructive account of the early colony is given in Gary Nash, "The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind," in Shaping Southern Society, ed. T.H. Breen (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). See also, Alden Vaughan, The American Colonies in the 17th Century (Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1971).

It is worth noting that John Smith was one of the prime inventors of these narratives of demonization and allegiance. Throughout the colonial period, a succession of charters with different kings all contained clauses demanding allegiance, and defining the conditions of its administration. Cf. William W. Hening, ed., Statutes at Large: a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (Richmond, Va. 1809), p. I:105, II:94, 485. Hereafter cited in the text as SL.

8- Joseph Boskin, Into Slavery: Racial decision in the Virginia Colony (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979), p. 14. Hereafter cited in the text as IS.

9- James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1902), chap 2. Hereafter cited in the text as HS.

10- Alden T. Vaughan, "Blacks in Virginia, the first Decade;" in Roots of American Racism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

11- Whiteness cannot exist without this purity condition. If one has a single black person in one's ancestry, one is black, while a single white person in one's ancestry will not make one white. To say it another way, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child. This discursive standard is the indispensible condition without which neither whiteness nor race could have been developed as concepts; and it points to the fact that they are, in fact, not aspects of human beings, but social relations.

12- Jordan doesn't make this distinction; thus, he falls into the fallacy of considering 16th century attitudes as racialized, because seen through a 20th century lens in which they are racialized. Cf. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (Norton, 1968), chapter 1.

13- The nature of Bacon's rebellion has been widely debated among historians. Much has been written about it, including novels, diatribes, as well as careful researches. The account I give is a rough composite of interpretations from Washburn and Zinn. Cf. Wilcomb Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1957). Two accounts from the period by Ann Cotton and Thomas Burwell (pro and contra) are printed in Peter Force, ed. Tracts and Other Papers (Washington, 1836).

14- Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (Vintage, 1976), Chapter 1.

15- John R. Commons et al, Documentary History of American Industrial Society (A.H. Clark, 1910), vol. IX, p. 145. Hereafter cited in the text as CA.