“Women, Race & Class” The Most Important Book You Can Read This Election Season [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

Divide and conquer—that’s what they try to do to any group trying to make social change. I call it D&C. Black people are supposed to turn against Puerto Ricans. Women are supposed to turn against their mothers and mothers-in-law. We’re all supposed to compete with each other for the favors of the ruling class. - Florynce R. Kennedy

Women, Race & Class Sounds like our three candidate Democratic primary, the one that the corporate media does not talk about. Hillary’s supporters boast that they will give us the historic first female president. Obama’s group plans to elect the equally historic first Black commander in chief. And the Edwards’ camp says “The real issue is socio-economic. It’s all about class warfare.”

The Women, Race & Class I am referring to is the book by Angela Y. Davis about the parallel histories of the Black civil rights and Women’s rights movements in the United States, how the two began as one, and how they were divided by forces intent upon keeping the American working class fragmented and oppressed.

The leaders of the Women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related.

Therefore, when Blacks got the vote but women did not, the women’s suffrage movement split from the Black rights movement and even went on to court the vote of white supremacists in the South, arguing that if White women received the vote, they would cancel out or neutralize the votes of minority and immigrant men. Davis notes that in the end this tactic did not persuade southern states to ratify the nineteenth amendment. However, it did manage to divide the two movements.

We’re all supposed to compete with each other for the favors of the ruling class.

Anti-black racism was also a product of class warfare, argues Davis.

(R)acial conflict did not emerge spontaneously, but rather was consciously planned by the representatives of the economically ascendant class. They needed to impede working-class unity so as to facilitate their own exploitative designs. The forthcoming ‘race riots’… were orchestrated precisely in order to heighten the tensions and antagonism within the multiracial working class.

Davis cites a few individuals----such as Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, the Grimke sisters---who understood that sexism and racism were linked and must be challenged together, and she describes one organization, the International Workers of the World, IWW or Wobblies, formed in 1905, as unique among U.S. unions in that it welcomed women, Blacks and immigrants. Davis writes of Lucy Parsons, one of the IWW founders

Sex and race, according to Lucy Parson’s theory, were facts of existence manipulated by employers who sought to justify their greater exploitation of women and people of color.

Violence against Blacks and women, Davis argues---lynching and rape---occur as a means of keeping both groups powerless so that they are more easily exploited economically.

Davis does not discuss the fate of the IWW. Joe Hill was framed and martyred. Mother Jones was persecuted until she became an American Saint herself. The federal government used the organization’s opposition to WWI as an excuse to shut it down and jail its leaders under the Espionage Act. None of this is surprising. Divide and conquer is the corporate executive’s favorite and most trustworthy tool when it comes to keeping a ready supply of cheap, docile labor at hand. The thing that scares him most is any popular organization or group of people or leader who encourages the middle and lower classes to unite across race,ethnic, religious and gender divides. A workers’ union that combined Whites, Blacks, immigrants, women---that threatened the nation’s corporate elite, which in turn did everything it could to divide and conquer.

http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue29/lyman29.htm

Indeed, it was no less keen an observer of labor matters than Friedrich Engels (1820- 1895), who, answering International Workingmen's Association general secretary Friedrich Adolf Sorge's query as to why there was no large socialist party in the United States, pointed to how "American conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties for a steady development of a workers' party." Among these difficulties, Engels emphasized the importance of:“immigration, which divides the workers into two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter into (1) the Irish, (2) the Germans, (3) the many small groups, each of which understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes. To form a single party out of these requires quite unusually powerful incentives. Often there is a sudden violent élan, but the bourgeois need only wait passively and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.”

But of course, the bourgeois does not wait passively. Had Engels been a more keen observer, he would have noted that the powers that be in the U.S. are masters of the art of pitting one group against another. And they are up to their old tricks in this presidential election. Among the corporate media lies, Chris Matthews’ favorite Hillary is a bitch has been used to drive a wedge between her supporters and those of Obama. The executives at GE/NBC, Viacom/CBS, NewsCorp/FOX, Disney/ABC, AOL/Time Warner decide what to put on the news. It is in their financial interest to see a Republican installed as FCC chairman in 2009, so that they can continue their unlimited mergers and acquisitions.

So, they spread the lie that Hillary is some sort of witch, a she devil that will do anything to get elected. Then, the MSM tells stories about Obama's race or religion, always hinting that Hillary is the reason that these stories are appearing as if Hillary owns the corporate media in this country (if anyone thinks this, then ask yourself why the corporate media spent years examining Whitewater, Travelgate and finally her husband’s penis). This is a textbook Divide and Conquer political dirty trick, and it is particularly effective when waged against young people and independents who have not participated in previous political campaigns.


Then there is the threat of the almighty dollar for those who are too savvy to be fooled by media lies. The bourgeois has raised $60 million and threatened to unleash this tidal wave on any candidate that even talks like a populist . What does that mean? It means that John Edwards better not hold his breath waiting for any endorsements from fellow Democratic politicians. A Congressman who throws his support behind John Edwards could find himself faced with millions of dollars of Swiftboat ads of his own to deal with in his next race. And that could be a nightmare for a representative who was not planning on facing any real challenge in a district that has, up until now, been safe. It means that Obama has to clarify that the change he is talking about is Ronald Reagan change not some other kind of scary change that might involve rich people giving up any of their money.

We’re all supposed to compete with each other for the favors of the ruling class.


Important lessons can be learned from history, and the lessons in Davis’s book are particularly important this election season. The energy that was once poured into stamping out the IWW is being directed at the Democratic presidential candidates---for the exact same reason. Having the first woman president or the first Black president seems like such a worthy goal, but let me tell you, neither of those keeps David Rockefeller from sleeping at night. What he worries about is having a president who answers to the majority of the American people.

Maybe it is time to make the ruling class compete for our favors. We can do this if we all stick together. Call it One America Call it Unity . Call it what you will. This is what it looks like.







Solidarity!