The Importance of Interracial Solidarity
The Editors of The Class Struggle Chronicle
7/1/2024
At the heart of the present economic system is the exploitation and oppression of the majority working class for the benefit of the minority owning class. Under this economic system, the international working class is forced to labor for scraps while the owning class grows fat off the profit that each worker's labor produces—a parasitic relationship through and through. The maintaining of this parasitic economic system we live under is of unparalleled importance to the owning class. If the working class is awakened to the realization of their enslavement under this system, they will struggle for their liberation from their exploitation and oppression. In realizing this liberation, the working class demolishes the systems that perpetuated their exploitation and oppression. The result is that owning class loses all the mechanisms they use to extract their wealth and power from each and every worker, leaving them powerless. It is for this reason that the owning class will do anything, say anything, and use whatever means available to protect the status quo.
To this end, the owning class inflames social divisions between sections of the working class to generate animosity, keeping workers focused on one another rather than the present economic system that created that social division and the owning class who benefits from this division. It is for this reason that systemic racism still exists in our society.
Systemic racism has been part and parcel of American society since its earliest days. Under slavery, Blacks endured atrocious lives being used as “free” labor for the benefit of the Southern slave-owning aristocracy. Even the northern industrialists, who grew wealthy by exploiting northern workers, earned a part of their wealth from selling cotton-based products that used the cotton that enslaved Blacks picked in the South.
Even after the Civil War brought an end to chattel slavery and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments offered legal protections for Blacks for the first time, systemic racism continued and, with it, the struggle for Black Liberation. During the Reconstruction era—the rebuilding of the Southern states following the Civil War—systemic racism manifested as former Confederates and their allies across the country waged an unrelenting and often violent war to maintain control over Blacks and their labor.
This fight to maintain control over Blacks and their labor also took on a new form: “work more for less.” Business owners across the country would hire Blacks to work the most manually intensive or hazardous jobs for the lowest pay possible. These bosses understood that profit comes from exploiting the labor of workers, so they happily engaged in these racist practices to accumulate more profit from their Black workers.
Worst still, many of the labor unions that were meant to represent workers proved unwelcoming and even hostile to the presence of Black workers. The result of this was that some Black working people grew apathetic and distrustful of labor unions because of these unions' virulent displays of racism.
Yet, systemic racism doesn’t just harm Blacks and other marginalized racial groups. White workers are also affected by systemic racism. The owning class uses systemic racism and other social divisions to break the potential bonds workers of different backgrounds and identities could make, causing workers to identify with their own grouping over the entire working class. It is for this reason that systemic racism proves harmful to white workers—it weakens and destroys any solidarity they could form with Black workers. This leaves the bosses free to extract more profit from Black workers without worry, and it allows the bosses to keep both Black and white workers from uniting together against the shared exploitation and oppression they both experience as workers. Though white workers are not oppressed by the system for their skin color, they and Black workers are oppressed for being workers.
To combat systemic racism, the working class has to have a deep commitment to interracial solidarity. Interracial solidarity means uniting Black workers and white workers as members of the working class. This means making Black Liberation synonymous with working class liberation—attuning white working people to the struggles of Black working people, and attuning Black workers to the struggles of the working class as a whole.
Interracial solidarity has played a pivotal factor in some of the successes of the Labor Movement and has been instrumental in the fight against systemic racism. While other labor unions were barring Black workers from organizing with them, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) opened their union doors to all workers, regardless of race, as they sought to fight for all workers across industries. Later down the line, and discussed in Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland, the United Farm Equipment Workers of America (shortened to “FE”) promoted and built rigorous interracial solidarity.
The FE’s fight for interracial solidarity was most apparent with FE Local 236, which organized workers at the now-shuttered International Harvester plant in Louisville. Through tireless promotion of interracial solidarity, FE Local 236 secured many gains for its Black members, providing them with opportunities and benefits they never had before the union's existence.
These opportunities and benefits included an unwavering commitment and the routine displays of interracial solidarity between the majority white workforce at the International Harvester plant in Louisville with its Black co-workers. In one episode that is detailed in The Long Deep Grudge, when two Black union leaders were fired from the International Harvester Louisville plant, 3,000 workers walked out of the plant in a show of support and solidarity with the two. The demonstration ended with the Black workers getting their jobs back. This single event epitomizes the power of interracial solidarity and shows that even though the city at large still struggled with systemic racism, the white members of FE saw their Black co-workers as brothers-in-arms that they would stand up for and fight alongside.
In the case of the IWW and the FE, interracial solidarity was a core part of their organizing; however, building interracial solidarity is no easy task. This is why The Class Struggle Chronicle highly recommends Rick Halpern’s and Roger Horowitz’s Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality as it shows the trials and tribulations that the packinghouse workers had to go through to forge interracial solidarity. In Meatpackers, Halpern and Horowitz detail the damaging effects that systemic racism has on unions and the working class and how building interracial solidarity can empower unions and their members.
For example, in 1921, when the packinghouse union, Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), went on strike to protest the packinghouse companies' withdrawal from an arbitration agreement and unilaterally reduced wages, some of the Black members of the AMC chose to remain at work. Why? Because the AMC was enveloped in racism and had proven incapable of fighting for its Black members. Hence, to some of the Black workers, the jobs that the packinghouse companies’ offered were more alluring and economically advantageous than standing on the picket line with a union that didn’t represent them. The result was that the packinghouse companies’ won big against the union.
In contrast to the AMC, the next major packinghouse union to form was the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), which made it their mission that interracial solidarity became a core feature of their union. In an example of the commitment to interracial solidarity, the UPWA successfully fought to remove the asterisk from the timecards of the Black workers at the packinghouse company Armour. Before the removal, Armour had an asterisk placed on the timecards of Black workers for the express purpose of signaling to the supervisors which workers to fire when they were tasked with shrinking the workforce.
In this example, and in others, the UPWA gradually overcame the many obstacles that systemic racism in the company and in past unions had caused, gathering support from formerly apathetic Black workers. These workers would then go on to forge bonds of interracial solidarity with their white counterparts. The result was an interracial solidarity that went beyond just the workplace as the UPWA took its interracial solidarity philosophy into its organizing.
The struggle against systemic racism and the fight for Black Liberation since the time of the IWW, FE, and UPWA ebbed and flowed over the years, sometimes becoming more open and other times more hidden; however, it never went away. In the modern day, the fight against systemic racism has taken on new life, with interracial solidarity having grown exponentially over the last few years as more and more workers become acutely aware of the struggles that Black working people face on a daily basis. The most apparent displays of interracial solidarity in the modern day were the 2020 protests, in which millions of white working people stood in unequivocal solidarity with the Black community to protest police brutality.
The greatest displays of interracial solidarity in American history share one common thread: they were tied to the working class struggle. The issues that each of us experience as working people tie us together as a class, but as highlighted, many sections of the working class have unique struggles. These struggles are tied to the working class struggle because they are born from the present economic system, and they are utilized by the owning class in its exploitation and oppression of the working class. The three unions mentioned explicitly acknowledged this, with each of them understanding that if they were going to win their battles against the owning class, they would need to unite working people. To unite working people, regardless of background and identity, you must tackle the issues most affecting them.
So, these unions tackled the issue of systemic racism by displaying their commitment to interracial solidarity and the shared advancement of all working people. In doing this, these unions earned the trust and support of Black and white working people. Through interracial solidarity, the specific issues affecting Black workers were made part and parcel of the working class struggle, bridging the gap between the issue of systemic racism and class consciousness. In this, the owning class couldn’t use systemic racism to divide workers, allowing these workers to grow stronger as they came to see each other as members of the same class and, therefore, with the same interests.
Without systemic racism to divide the working class, Black and white workers are free to turn their attention to the true source of their problems: the present economic system and the owning class. With their attention squarely on the owning class and on the exploitation and oppression the working class faces, Black and white working people can stand united as a class to fight for the shared goal of working class liberation. Though unity may be found in marches, demonstrations, and other acts of protest, history shows that the best means of defeating racial animosity is to be found with in the class struggle as the diverse working class comes together, setting aside social and cultural differences, to struggle and fight as working people.
