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Today the
United States of America has become the leading society in world history to
incarcerate its own population, standing shoulders above Iran, China, and even
Stalin’s monstrous gulags in the Soviet Union, with 2.3 million men and women
warehoused in prison cells and six million under criminal “justice” supervision.
A hugely disproportionate number of these inmates are African American or
Latino. The NY Times reports the conclusions reached by Dr. Becky Pettit in
Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress: “Among
male high school dropouts born between 1975 and 1979, 68 percent of blacks
(compared with 28 percent of whites) had been imprisoned at some point by 2009,
and 37 percent of blacks (compared with 12 percent of whites) were incarcerated
that year,” (10/27/2012). With increased numbers of youth caught in the
school-to-prison pipeline, and with police state tactics like Stop and Frisk and
vile acts of police violence like in Anaheim, CA, we are witnessing a system of
social control, criminality, and cheap, prison-based labor.
Why History Matters
Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age
of Colorblindness has greatly helped the developing grassroots movement to
challenge this system of mass incarceration of working and poor people,
particularly people of color and youth. Published in 2010 and recently released
in paperback with a new introduction from Dr. Cornel West, The New Jim
Crow has brought into focus this new system of incarceration as a deliberate
plan of social control.
Alexander explains how, following the abolition of slavery and the brief
period of reconstruction, a “great comprise” between the Democratic and
Republican parties came about in the 1870s. Federal troops were withdrawn from
the South, and the Democratic Party, allied with the former planter caste,
introduced the Jim Crow system to re-enslave black people.
Alexander shows how the establishment of this Jim Crow caste system was based
on fostering disunity, dividing and conquering poor whites and blacks. Despite
being given a status elevated above that of blacks, white workers and poor
whites still suffered low wages and remained economically exploited by the
ruling white elite.
Alexander explains the Jim Crow system of social control as racial
segregation, political disenfranchisement, judicial racism, an imprisoned black
labor force based on phony criminal charges like vagrancy, and unbridled terror
by the racist Ku Klux Klan. Alexander states, “Convicts had no meaningful legal
rights at this time and no effective redress. They were understood, quite
literally, to be slaves of the state. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery
remained appropriate as punishment for a crime,” (p.31). Despite the formal
abolition of slavery, black labor was enslaved in a system of mass incarceration
cemented by judicial rulings and state and vigilante violence.
Alexander affirms the historic importance of the Civil Rights Movement and
militant social struggle on the street in smashing the Southern Jim Crow system
and in legal victories: Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights
and Voting Rights acts. However, a “law and order” Southern strategy was soon
developed by the rich white elite. This culminated in Richard Nixon’s successful
1968 presidential campaign. Using coded racial language to define the
revolutionary movements and people of color - particularly black youth - as
“criminals,” this strategy politically disoriented and galvanized sections of
white workers and poor not only in the South, but around the country, to the
side of the rich elite.
New War on Communities of Color
Today both parties of big business - Democrats and Republicans - follow
policies that criminalize black and brown youth, using this same strategy of
labeling blacks as “criminals,” “welfare queens,” and “menaces to society.” This
method of social control is so normalized in U.S. society that it’s not even
critically questioned by the mainstream. Crime and drug activity has been
racialized, despite similar crime rates among different ethnicities and whites.
Alexander points out how communities of color became war zones: a highly
militarized police force, millions of dollars allocated to fight “crime,” the
elimination of well-paid union jobs and benefits, and the flooding of drugs to
depoliticize the community. The War on Drugs became a one-sided attack on
working-class and poor communities.
The New N-Word is “Felony”
Under the War on Drugs,
extremely long mandatory minimum prison sentences were established for low-level
drug dealing and possession of crack cocaine. Alexander makes the point that,
while many whites are ensnared in these drug policies, black and brown youth are
disproportionately targeted. Alexander shows how prison population continued to
grow during President Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. Clinton was
responsible for passing the federal “three strikes and you’re out” law in 1994.
Even the first black president has sought to continue the War on Drugs,
despite his rhetoric against the policy. Alexander notes: “Obama is pledging to
revive President Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program
and increase funding for the Byrne Grant program - two of the worst federal drug
programs of the Clinton era,” (p. 240).
The prison label has become a scarlet letter on those entrapped in a system
of incarceration, particularly non-violent drug offenders. Alexander states that
“people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of
drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society
and economy – permanently,” (p. 92). Upon release from prison, these men and
women are denied voting rights, employment opportunities, and federally funded
public assistance and housing, rendering them outcasts in U.S. society. This is
the final nail in the coffin that is the New Jim Crow system of social control,
which has now entrapped tens of millions of mainly black and Latino people – a
system of economic servitude and denial of rights that affects every aspect of
their lives.
Why The New Jim Crow Matters
Alexander correctly calls for a struggle against mass incarceration as part
of a wider struggle against poverty and economic inequality. She invokes the
need to rekindle the radical vision of Dr. Martin Luther King and the need for a
radical grassroots social and political movement to challenge the policies of
big business. Dr. King’s legacy and political work should be instructive to us
all as a great counterweight to the betrayal of the black misleadership class
and the agenda of both parties of big business to criminalize, incarcerate, and
ignore a whole generation of youth of color trapped in the prison system.
In order to make Dr. King’s radical vision a reality, a system change is
necessary to uproot the seeds of racism and mass incarceration. Alexander fails
to show how this New Jim Crow incarceration is a crucial tool of the elite to
maintain the capitalist system by dividing the working class. As Eugene Debs
stated, “Under the capitalist system, based upon private property in the means
of life, the exploitation that follows impoverishes the masses, and their
precarious economic condition, their bitter struggle for existence, drives
increasing numbers of them to despair and desperation, to crime and
destruction.”
The New Jim Crow has raised the consciousness of this present
generation, criminalized and discarded by capitalism. Community organizations
like Cop Watch and activists like 70-year-old Joseph “Jazz” Hayden, a former
prisoner, utilize this book as an organizing tool for study groups and forums,
beginning a process of educating and politically arming the working class, poor,
and youth. A united movement of the working class, poor, youth, and people of
color, and a resurgent militant prisoners’ rights movement, is needed to lead a
struggle to dismantle the New Jim Crow. By combining this with a struggle
against capitalism, we can forge unity among workers - irrespective of color or
race - in the movement to create a truly egalitarian society based on
cooperation, solidarity, and democratic
socialism.
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An interview with Paris Makrides, Xekinima (Greek CWI) 
A powerful momentum is gathering around the trade unions’
call for a European day of struggle against austerity on November 14. In an
increasing number of countries decisions are being made for strikes and protests
on what will be a significant event, the first ever coordinated European strike
action. Millions in different countries will join together in protest against
the international drive to solve the crisis of the capitalist system at the
expense of the working class, poor, youth and many sections of the middle class.