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Title: Reparations: Cui Bono?
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: August 2004
Language: en
Topics: reparations
Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from http://www.mutualist.org/id9.html

Kevin Carson

Reparations: Cui Bono?

David Horowitz, the leading figure in the anti-reparations movement,

admits that justice would have been done by breaking up the plantations

and dividing the land among freed slaves in 1865. Awfully generous of

him, considering he knows that option is safely out of the realm of

possibility. Horowitz also gets a lot of mileage out of quoting fellow

neoconservatives like Marvin Olasky on the social pathologies of inner

city blacks, and blaming them on the Great Society. In fact, these two

issues are closely related.

If you’ve read Regulating the Poor, by Piven and Cloward, you know that

illegitimacy and other social pathologies don’t date back to the War on

Poverty, but to a decade or more before LBJ. It was after the war, when

the cities were overwhelmed with black sharecroppers who had been

tractored off their land, that the problems really began. Unlike the

Okies who at least had migrated to agricultural areas, blacks moving

into northern cities had no relevant job skills. It was the astronomical

rate of inner city unemployment and the economic irrelevance of fathers

that led to the disintegration of the family, beginning in the 50s.

This takes us back to Horowitz. The land that the black croppers worked

and were tractored off of--for the most part the same land their

grandparents had worked as slaves--should rightly have belonged to them

in the first place.

But what happened to southern blacks was only a harsher form of what’s

happened to the laboring classes of all races since the seventeenth

century. It’s called “primitive accumulation.” Modern capitalism got its

start by robbing the European peasantry of their customary rights in the

land, and then transforming them into a propertyless working class. In

England, the Restoration Parliament’s “land reform” turned copyhold

tenants into tenants at-will, and thus robbed the majority of peasants

of their property rights. From 1750 to 1850, a series of “acts of

enclosure” deprived villagers of their collective rights to something

like a fourth of the arable land in England.

The landlords and industrialists deliberately carried out enclosure

because they saw the commons as a source of economic independence for

the working class. As Arthur Young of Lincolnshire said, “[E]very one

but an idiot knows, that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they

will never be industrious.” The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine

warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer “possessed of more land than his

family can cultivate in the evenings” meant that “the farmer can no

longer depend on him for constant work.”

As if these acts of robbery weren’t enough, the industrial revolution

took place in an England where the combined effects of the Poor Laws,

Combination Acts, laws against vagrancy, Pitt’s various “emergency”

suspensions of habeas corpus, etc., placed the entire working class

under a police state. The vagrancy laws alone, which forbade workers to

move from one parish to another without an official permit, resembled

the South African internal passport system. The so-called

“laissez-faire” capitalism of the industrial revolution depended on

human servitude.

In frontier areas like America, the ruling classes feared the economic

independence that open land would give laborers, and relied on the state

to restrict access to unclaimed land. Even when land was opened to

settlement, as in the much-vaunted Homestead Act, the state gave wealthy

land speculators preference over ordinary settlers. Most of the white

laborers who settled America, through the early nineteenth century, were

indentured servants or convicts. Considering the harshness of punishment

under the indenture system, and the number of minor infractions for

which the term of indenture could be extended for years, it is likely

that most indentured laborers died in service.

We are today forced to sell our labor on the bosses’ terms, because in

the past we were robbed. “Forty acres and a mule”--for all of us--ain’t

just a cliche. It’s JUSTICE.

Which brings me to the point of this article--reparations. The furor

over reparations must really be a hoot for the ruling class. It’s the

oldest trick in the book: keep the producing classes fighting each other

so they’ll be too busy to fight the bosses. For example, for most of the

seventeenth century in Virginia, there was little legal distinction

between black and white servants. Servants of both races often

intermarried, and began to develop a common class consciousness. The

servant class, black and white, fought the planters in Bacon’s

Rebellion. Clearly, this wouldn’t do. The Slave Codes, “white skin

privilege,” and racist ideology on a large scale, were the ruling class

response to this crisis. And it worked pretty well, didn’t it?

The same is true of the reparations movement. Like “affirmative action”

for professional jobs (“black faces in high places”), it is more about

the interests of the black bourgeoisie than those of working people.

Cabinets, legislatures, and boardrooms that “look like America” just

mean everyone can have the pleasure of being screwed by people of the

same skin color. Likewise, although I’ve seen a few people on the

libertarian left, like Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, who genuinely intend to use

the proceeds of reparations for grass-roots empowerment, it’s a fair

guess that most of the civil rights establishment view it as a cash cow

for themselves. For Jesse Jackson, it’s probably just another shakedown

like the Anheuser-Busch distributorship.

At the same time, reparations will not hurt the plutocracy. So long as

the statist roots of class privilege are left untouched, the usurers,

profiteers and landlords will manage to adapt any “reform” to their own

benefit. Monopoly capitalism will just pass the increased cost of

reparations along to consumers, as it does all other forms of

“progressive” taxation. Which means that the descendants of convict

laborers and indentured servants will effectively be taxed to pay

reparations, which in turn will almost certainly be skimmed off by

people like Jackson. Just another example of how identity politics is

being used to disrupt solidarity between working people of all races.

So as an alternative to reparations for slavery, how about reparations

for primitive accumulation instead? Lets make a united front in the

class war, instead of letting class be hidden behind race relations. The

way I see it (I’m a Proudhonian mutualist, by the way, not a Marxist),

all tenants paying rent on apartments, urban tenements, public housing,

etc., should stop. Those of us working for manufacturers and other large

employers should “fire the boss,” as the Wobblies put it, and keep the

fruit of our own labor. Agricultural wage laborers should dispossess the

agribusiness companies and rich landlords whose plantations they work.

Possession, for groups and individuals, should be the basis of

ownership. The land to the cultivator, the shop to the worker, free and

equitable exchange.