A Displaced and Discarded Labor Force /The New Jim Crow

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Weekend Edition August 9-11, 2013

A Displaced and Discarded Labor Force

The Myth of Prison Slave Labor Camps in the U.S.

by JAMES KILGORE

As Adam Gopkin reminds us, “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” The racialization of this process, popularized by author Michelle Alexander as The New Jim Crow, has meant that African Americans in the U.S. now have more than triple the incarceration rate of Blacks in South Africa at the peak of apartheid.

In the haste to impart some rationality to all this, many activists and analysts have been quick to point to corporations as the sole culprits behind the prison-industrial- complex (PIC).  An important component of this perspective is the notion of prisons as “slave labor camps”.  In this scenario a sea of multinational corporations super-exploit hundreds of thousands of contract prison laborers to heartlessly augment their bottom lines. Late last year researchers Steven Fraser and Joshua Freeman took up this point in a study which they presented in a CounterPunch article,  arguing that “penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.”

Their perspective has resonated with a number of news services, anti-mass incarceration blogsters and activists.  For example, a recent report from Russian news service RT claimed that prisons are “becoming America’s own Chinese style manufacturing line”.  Huffington Post picked up the story, quoting Fraser and Freeman:

“All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.”

The HuffPost went on to name Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, Starbucks and Walmart as major participants  in what they called a “competitive spiral” to capture prison labor at the lowest possible wage levels.  Vicky Pelaez, writing for Global Research earlier this year called prison industry a “new form of slavery” identifying more than twenty corporations involved in contract arrangements.  Her list included IBM, Pierre Cardin, Target and Hewlett Packard. She concluded that, “thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets.”

As appealing as these scenarios are to our sense of moral outrage and the role of multinational corporations as the villains of our era, such assertions about prison labor are off the mark.  I spent six and a half years in Federal and state prisons at high, medium and low security levels.  In all these institutions, very few people, if any, were under contract to private corporations. My memories of prison yards feature hundreds and hundreds of men trying to pump some meaning into their life with exercise routines, academic study, compulsive sports betting, religious devotion, and a number of creative and entrepreneurial “hustles.”  But being under the thumb of Bill Gates or entering a Nike sweatshop was just about the farthest thing from our warehoused reality.

Statistics bear my memories out. Virtually all private sector prison labor is regulated under the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP).  Any prison wanting to publicly markets goods worth more than $10,000 must register with PIECP.  The PIECP statistical report for the first quarter of 2012 showed 4,675 incarcerated people employed in prison or jail PIECP programs, a miniscule portion of the nation’s more than two million behind bars.

Likely the largest single user of contract prison labor is Federal Prison Industries, which handles such arrangements for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Of the nearly 220,000 people housed in BOP facilities, just 13,369, representing approximately 8% of the work eligible “inmates” were employed as of September 30, 2012. However, the overwhelming majority of this production  was for government departments like Defense and Homeland Security, rather than private corporations.

There is an economic rationality to why prison labor is so infrequently used.  While incarcerated people may constitute a captive workforce, in the era of mass incarceration security trumps all other institutional needs, including production deadlines.  A fight on the yard, a surprise cell search, even a missing tool can occasion a lockdown where all activities, including work assignments come to a halt for hour, days, or, in some cases even weeks or months. Multinational corporations accustomed to just in time production systems and flexible working hours don’t respond well to this type of rigidity.

Portraying our prisons as slave labor camps satisfies a certain emotional appeal, but hunting down multinationals that are extracting superprofits from the incarcerated diverts us from the crucial labor issues at the heart of mass incarceration.  Those behind bars constitute a displaced and discarded labor force, marginalized from mainstream employment on the streets by deindustrialization in their communities and the gutting of urban education in poor communities of color.  More than half of all Black men without a high-school diploma will go to prison at some time in their lives.  The school to prison pipeline is far more of a reality than slave labor camps.

Plus, the shift of the prison system’s emphasis from rehabilitation to punishment in the last three decades has blocked opportunities for people to upgrade skills and education while incarcerated.  As the nuns used to tell me in grade school: “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop and idle hands are the devil’s tools.”  The brains behind our prison system clearly had the devil’s welfare in mind when they reoriented our institutions away from rehabilitation into warehousing millions of people while stripping away their opportunities for personal and collective development. As a result purposelessness and excruciating boredom, not overwork, are the dominant features of most prison yards.

For those trying to put an end to mass incarceration, framing the labor issues of the prison industrial complex in this way takes us down a very different road than upgrading the conditions of the minute numbers behind bars who are under corporate contracts (or as some unions are want to do-portraying prison laborers as scabs who undermine hard won working class gains). The chief labor concerns about mass incarceration are linked to broader inequalities in the economy as a whole, particularly the lack of employment for poor youth of color and the proliferation of low wage jobs with no benefits. Employment creation and the restoration of much needed state provided social services like substance abuse or mental health treatment are the measures that will keep people on the streets. Forget about minimum wages for the mythical millions working for Microsoft in Leavenworth and Attica.

But the labor aspect of mass incarceration doesn’t end there. People with a felony conviction carry a stigma, a brand often accompanied by exclusion from the labor market.  Michelle Alexander calls “felon” the new “N” word.  Indeed in the job world, those of us with felony convictions face a number of unique barriers.  The most well-known is “the box”-that question on employment applications which asks about criminal background. Eleven states and more than 40 cities and counties have outlawed the box on employment applications. Supporters of “ban the box” argue that questions about previous convictions amount to a form of racial discrimination since such a disproportionate number of those with felony convictions are African-American and Latino. Advancing these Ban the Box campaigns will have a far more important impact on incarcerated people as workers than pressing for higher wages for those under contract to big companies inside.

However, even without the box, the rights of the formerly incarcerated in the labor market remain heavily restricted.  Many professions, trades and service occupations which require certification, bar or limit the accreditation of people with felony convictions. For example, a study by the Mayor of Chicago’s office found that of 98 Illinois state statutes regarding professional licensing, 57 contained restrictions for applicants with a criminal history, impacting over 65 professions and occupations.  In some instances, even people applying for licenses to become barbers or cosmetologists face legal impediments.

Those with felony convictions face further hurdles when trying to access state assistance to tide them over during times of unemployment.  In most states, those with drug convictions are banned from access to SNAP (food stamps) for life.  Many local public housing authorities bar people with felony convictions even if their parents or partners already reside there.

Lastly, the very conditions of parole often create obstacles to employment. Many states require that an employer of a person on parole agree that the workplace premises can be searched at any time without prior warning-hardly an attractive proposition for any business.  In addition, tens of thousands of people on parole are subject to house arrest with electronic monitors.  All movement outside the house must be pre-approved by their parole agent. This makes changes in work schedule or jobs that involve travel an enormous challenge.  Some basic changes to the conditions of parole could constitute an important step to easing the labor market conditions for people coming home from prison trying to secure and keep a job.

All of this is not to deny that many corporations have made huge amounts of money from mass incarceration.  Firms like Arizona’s Kitchell Construction, which has built more than 40 state prisons and 30 adult jails have made millions.  The Tennessee-based Bob Barker Enterprises is a “household” name among the incarcerated.  With a corporate vision of  “transforming criminal justice by honoring God in all we do,“ Barker has reaped massive profits from producing the poorest quality consumer goods, including two inch toothbrushes,  for people behind bars. Then, of course, we have private prison operators like CCA and the GEO Group. Although the privates control only 8% of prison beds nationally these two firms managed to bring in over 3 billion in revenue last year.

While such profiteering continues, the prison-industrial complex remains driven by an agenda that is more about politics than profits. State-owned prisons and political agendas continue to lie at the center of mass incarceration.  The combined revenue of CCA and the GEO Group for 2012 was less than half of the California state corrections budget. Politicians, with important influence from pro-corporate organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have made the PIC possible by passing harsh sentencing laws, funding the War on Drugs, tightening immigration legislation, and creating isolation units like Pelican Bay, Corcoran, Tamms and Angola.  They have built a base of popular support for the “colorblind” approach of “lock ‘em up and throw away the key.” So while we need to curb the opportunities for corporate profit from putting people in cages, the main target of any campaign against the PIC must be to counter the racist ideology of “punitive populism” and reverse the political processes which perpetuate mass incarceration and the criminalization of the poor.

James Kilgore is a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He writes on issues of mass incarceration with a focus on electronic monitoring and labor. He is also the author of three novels, all of which he drafted during his six and a half years in prison, 2002-09.  He can be contacted at waazn1@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/09/the-myth-of-prison-slave-labor-camps-in-the-u-s/

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Michelle Alexander: Drug War Racism - YouTube youtube.com2010년 2월 19일 - 68분 - 업로더: joefriendly Litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues that we have not ...

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The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration 1. - YouTube youtube.com2010년 3월 12일 - 7분 - 업로더: madashelldude In the 1980s Communist Romania under the most brutal eastern european dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu locked ...

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Revised Edition

Michelle Alexander

$19.95

Available January 2012 in paperback! The "explosive debut" (Kirkus) from a rising legal star in America arguing that we have not ended racial caste in America—we have simply redesigned it

A troubling and profoundly necessary book.

—The Miami Herald

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as “brave and bold,” this book directly challenges the notion that the presidency of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a “call to action.”

Called “stunning” by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, “invaluable” by the Daily Kos, “explosive” by Kirkus, and “profoundly necessary” by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.

Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Formerly the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, Alexander served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor, emeritus, at Princeton University and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary.

Pub Date: Fall 2011
Format: paperback
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 336 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59558-643-8

http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1617

Praise for The New Jim Crow

“Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is such a work.... Alexander considers the evidence and concludes that our prison system is a unique form of social control, much like slavery and Jim Crow, the systems it has replaced.... [She] is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but The New Jim Crow is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing. Her tone is disarming throughout; she speaks as a concerned citizen, not as an expert, though she is one. She can make the abstract concrete, as J. Saunders Redding once said in praise of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history.”—The New York Review of Books, March 2011

“[An] instant classic.... The New Jim Crow is a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable.”—Cornel West

“The New Jim Crow offers a devastating account of a legal system doing its job perfectly well. We have simply replaced one caste system (Jim Crow) for another one (imprisonment, parole, detention) that keeps the majority of minorities in a permanent state of disenfranchisement. Alexander looks in detail at what economists usually miss, namely the entire legal structure of the courts, parole, probation and laws that effectively turn a perpetrator of a crime into a moral outlaw who is unworthy of rehabilitation.... Alexander does a fine job of truth-telling, pointing the finger where it rightly should be pointed:  at all of us, liberal and conservative, white and black.”—Forbes

“[An] extraordinary book.”—Marion Wright Edelman

“Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama’s political success and Oprah Winfrey’s financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that ‘[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.’ Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as ‘a system of social control’ (‘More African Americans are under correctional control today ... than were enslaved in 1850’). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the ‘war on drugs.’ She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates ‘who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits.’ Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: ‘most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration’—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A profoundly necessary book.”—Miami Herald

“For every century there is a crisis in our democracy, the response to which defines how future generations view those who were alive at the time.   In the 18th century it was the transatlantic slave trade, in the 19th century it was slavery, in the 20th century it was Jim Crow. Today it is mass incarceration.  Alexander's book offers a timely and original framework for understanding mass incarceration, its roots to Jim Crow, our modern caste system, and what must be done to eliminate it.  This book is a call to action.”—Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP

“Alexander is absolutely right to fight for what she describes as a ‘much needed conversation’ about the wide-ranging social costs and divisive racial impact of our criminal justice policies.”—Newsweek

 “Michelle Alexander’s brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison  joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools.  With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow.”—Lani Guinier, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

“Invaluable.... The New Jim Crow is a timely and stunning guide to the labyrinth of propaganda, discrimination, and racist policies masquerading under other names that comprises what we call justice in America.”—Daily Kos

“A powerful analysis of why and how mass incarceration is happening in America, The New Jim Crow should be required reading for anyone working for real change in the criminal justice system.”—Ronald E. Hampton, Executive Director, National Black Police Association 

 “With imprisonment now the principal instrument of our social policy directed toward poorly educated black men, Michelle Alexander argues persuasively that the huge racial disparity of punishment in America is not the mere result of neutral state action.  She sees the rise of mass incarceration as opening up a new front in the historic struggle for racial justice. And, she’s right. If you care about justice in America, you need to read this book!”—Glenn C. Loury, Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University

“After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.”—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-prize winning author and professor of history at New York University

“The New Jim Crow is essential reading for anyone who cares about justice, humanity, and the future of our democracy.”—California Lawyer

"We need to pay attention to Michelle Alexander's contention that mass imprisonment in the U.S. constitutes a racial caste system.... Her analysis reflects the passion of an advocate and the intellect of a scholar."—Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project, author of Race to Incarcerate

Excerpt: From the Introduction

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury ser vice—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

I reached the conclusions presented in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago, I would have argued strenuously against the central claim made here—namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the United States. Indeed, if Barack Obama had been elected president back then, I would have argued that his election marked the nation’s triumph over racial caste—the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. My elation would have been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised land of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely similar to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast.

Today my elation over Obama’s election is tempered by a far more sobering awareness. As an African American woman, with three young children who will never know a world in which a black man could not be president of the United States, I was beyond thrilled on election night. Yet when I walked out of the election night party, full of hope and enthusiasm, I was immediately reminded of the harsh realities of the New Jim Crow. A black man was on his knees in the gutter, hands cuffed behind his back, as several police officers stood around him talking, joking, and ignoring his human existence. People poured out of the building; many stared for a moment at the black man cowering in the street, and then averted their gaze. What did the election of Barack Obama mean for him?

Like many civil rights lawyers, I was inspired to attend law school by the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the face of growing social and political opposition to remedial policies such as affirmative action, I clung to the notion that the evils of Jim Crow are behind us and that, while we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy, we have made real progress and are now struggling to hold on to the gains of the past. I thought my job as a civil rights lawyer was to join with the allies of racial progress to resist attacks on affirmative action and to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow segregation, including our still separate and unequal system of education. I understood the problems plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising incarceration rates, to be a function of poverty and lack of access to quality education—the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Never did I seriously consider the possibility that a new racial caste system was operating in this country. The new system had been developed and implemented swiftly, and it was largely invisible, even to people, like me, who spent most of their waking hours fighting for justice.

I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system more than a decade ago, when a bright orange poster caught my eye. I was rushing to catch the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed in large bold print: The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow. I paused for a moment and skimmed the text of the flyer. Some radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, and the expansion of America’s prison system. The meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed, and muttered to myself something like, “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.” I then crossed the street and hopped on the bus. I was headed to my new job, director of the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California.

When I began my work at the ACLU, I assumed that the criminal justice system had problems of racial bias, much in the same way that all major institutions in our society are plagued with problems associated with conscious and unconscious bias. As a lawyer who had litigated numerous class-action employment-discrimination cases, I understood well the many ways in which racial stereotyping can permeate subjective decision-making processes at all levels of an organization, with devastating consequences. I was familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in which racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence of differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe, innate ability. While at the ACLU, I shifted my focus from employment discrimination to criminal justice reform and dedicated myself to the task of working with others to identify and eliminate racial bias whenever and wherever it reared its ugly head.

By the time I left the ACLU, I had come to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

http://www.newjimcrow.com/excerpt.html

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

By Helen Halyard and Fred Mazelis
18 September 2012

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, The New Press, 2010, 2012

The axis of Michelle Alexander’s book is clear from its title. In her view, the basic social divide in the United States is race. According to Alexander, the Jim Crow system of second-class citizenship and racial segregation that governed the lives of millions of African-Americans in the states of the former Confederacy for more than three quarters of a century has morphed into a nationwide system of racial control that is quite similar, even if disguised by an official ideology of “colorblindness.” The “central claim” of her book, she states, is “that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the United States.” Its principal instrument is mass incarceration. Several chapters of the book are devoted to an examination of the explosive growth of the American prison system in the past 40 years. The number of inmates of local and county jails and federal and state prisons has more than quintupled in that period, reaching a total that dwarfs that of every other advanced industrial nation in the world. The number of people in prison, on probation or on parole has grown to more than 7 million.

Within this figure, the minority population is disproportionately represented. The so-called war on drugs has had a devastating impact on black men, who are arrested and imprisoned at a rate 6.5 times that of whites. These figures constitute a searing indictment of American capitalism.

Alexander acknowledges at the outset that her book does “not venture into the long-running, vigorous debate in the scholarly literature regarding what does and does not constitute a caste system.” Given that her entire argument rests on the contention that a racial caste system exists in contemporary America, this playing fast and loose with historical and scientific terminology is a devastating self-exposure. What intellectual or scholarly credibility can be given to an argument that applies the term “caste” to social relations in the US, without even seeking to define the term or defend its use in this context, and then proceeds to build an entire analysis around the use of the term?

Quite simply, what one has here is an empty tautology.

The core argument of Alexander’s book is based on intellectual charlatanry. No attempt whatsoever is made to ground the category of caste in anything that resembles a scientific or historical approach. Caste systems historically arose in the pre-capitalist period of human civilization. They are characterized by rigid and hereditary social stratification, and persist today in much attenuated form only in India and few if any other regions of the world. Alexander admits that she is using the caste label loosely. By her logic, racial and religious minorities in every part of the globe could be redefined as castes.

But this intellectual shoddiness serves an ideological purpose. The aim is to highlight and magnify racial differences. This, in turn, serves to cover up the fundamental division in society, that of class.

Some scholars have made the case that Jim Crow segregation was a caste system, and certainly the kind of proscriptions that barred blacks from using the same schools, hotels, washrooms, drinking fountains and other public accommodations or riding in the same section of buses and trains as whites bore similarities to those faced by oppressed castes in India. Such legally imposed forms of segregation were ended by a series of Supreme Court decisions, most notably Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The forms of social oppression that confront black American workers today—poverty, unemployment, poor housing, education and health care, as well as mass incarceration—have their source not in legally prescribed “caste” restrictions, but in the economic and social relations of the capitalist profit system. As such, they are problems shared in common with many millions of other Americans, and billions of people across the planet. These problems are not amendable to “caste” or racial solutions, but require a revolutionary transformation of the conditions confronting the masses of working people of all races and ethnic backgrounds.

Alexander is a Stanford University law professor and the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California. Her book has drawn much media attention since it first appeared more than two years ago. The paperback edition issued early this year has so far spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The problems she examines provoke justifiable anger, and there are undoubtedly readers who turn to her book looking for answers to the social crisis and inequality that characterize the US today.

They will, however, search in vain. An examination of The New Jim Crow quickly reveals that Alexander cannot explain the horrors of the prison system or any of the related symptoms of the crisis and decay of American capitalism. Nor can she show any way forward in the struggle against them. Her criticisms, because they remain almost entirely in racial terms, remain firmly within the framework of the capitalist status quo.

In common with all analyses of American society based on race, the book contributes to channeling discontent back into the blind alley of identity politics and support for the Democratic Party.

Ms. Alexander has been lionized in some liberal and “left” circles, including pseudo-socialists such as the International Socialist Organization. These layers of the middle class, prominent in academia and elsewhere, play a major role in propping up the Democrats.

Identity politics is their calling card, counterposing the issues of race, gender and sexual orientation to the interests of the working class as a whole. The pseudo-lefts respond with enthusiasm to Alexander’s call for a new civil rights movement, conceived as a vehicle of middle-class protest against what they regard as congenital American racism.

Alexander herself is quite clear on this. The driving force of American history is race, in her view, and certainly not the class struggle. “Since the nation’s founding,” she writes, “African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs of constraints of the time.

“It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the basic structure of American society,” she continues, even more categorically.

From the fact that the US Constitution was based on a compromise with slavery, enshrined in the notorious three-fifths rule defining the slave as three-fifths of a man, she concludes that “upon this racist fiction rests the entire structure of American democracy.”

So much for Jefferson, Franklin, Tom Paine and the rest of the leading figures of the American Revolution and the world-shaking impact of that revolution, which reverberated in France barely a decade after the Declaration of Independence.

For Alexander, it is not a matter of exploring the contradiction between the American Revolution’s proclamation of Enlightenment ideals and the continuation of slavery—a contradiction that did not erase the progressive character of the Revolution—but rather a basis for dismissing the ideals themselves as a “racist fiction.”

The second revolution that followed less than a century later, the American Civil War, barely merits a mention. That hundreds of thousands gave their lives to end slavery and uphold the promise that “all men are created equal” is treated as a momentary interruption in the relentless reassertion of American racism.

The rise of Jim Crow is seen as the inevitable expression‎‍ of an unceasing quest for white supremacy. In fact, Jim Crow was bound up not only with the need to divide the white and black poor in the South, but with the emergence of the working class in the North. The federal government called a halt to Reconstruction in 1877, withdrawing its troops from the South, largely in order to deal with a growing threat from the working class. The great railway strike of that same year saw US troops battling masses of industrial workers and poor in the streets of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis and many other cities.

Alexander repeatedly places the blame for racism on the “lower class whites,” who are portrayed as a popular base for discriminatory policies devised by the ruling establishment. Her aim is to convince sections of the ruling class, along with the upper-middle class layers with whom she clearly identifies, to take remedial action on the issue of mass imprisonment before it leads to a social explosion.

She discusses the prison system in some detail, dealing with racial profiling, the financial incentives for a burgeoning prison-industrial complex to increase the inmate population, the use of prisons to provide jobs in mainly rural areas with high unemployment, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, denial of adequate legal counsel, and legally authorized discrimination against ex-prisoners on such matters as voting rights, jobs and most other aspects of life. There is more that could be added on the increasing privatization of the prison system and the use of prison labor to generate profit.

From these facts, however, Alexander makes the leap—an unscientific and politically reactionary one—to characterize the African American population today, or at least a substantial section of it, as a “racial caste.”

To sustain this theory of mass incarceration as the basis of a “caste” status for blacks, similar to that which existed under Jim Crow or even slavery, Alexander goes so far as to argue that more than one million people now incarcerated in US prisons and jails—i.e., the majority who are not black—are merely “collateral damage.” Their presence behind bars, she suggests, is nothing more than an elaborate ruse designed to conceal the real nature of the prison system behind a veneer of colorblindness.

The minority workers and youth who continue to be ensnared in the “war on drugs” constitute the most oppressed and vulnerable sections of the working class, not a racial caste. The prison system is a class institution, not a racial one. Moreover, despite the severe consequences of the war on drugs, 75 percent of the prison population is there on other than drug-related charges.

The plight of largely inner-city youth and workers who are jailed on low-level drug charges is inseparably bound up with the decades-long onslaught on every section of the working class—deindustrialization and the disappearance of good-paying jobs, the wave of union-busting and the integration of the unions into the structure of corporate management, the growth of poverty and inequality, and the attacks on public services and social programs.

Those presiding over these appalling conditions include many thousands of black elected officials, mayors of major cities and state and local officials. In fact, the criminalization of the poor that has led to the vast expansion of the prison population is only one side of the equation. The past 40 years have seen a historically unprecedented stratification of the African American population alongside the immense growth of social inequality in America as a whole.

Alexander writes about Richard Nixon’s law-and-order demagogy as the genesis of the new “caste” system, but makes no mention of Nixon’s call for “black capitalism” in the early 1970s. This slogan, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, found a receptive audience among figures like Jesse Jackson and others. Jackson is only one of the more prominent representatives of the petty-bourgeois layer that enriched itself over the ensuing decades. Many ran successfully for political office, not to fight for social equality, but to preside over the attacks on the working class, including the minority workers they claimed to represent.

This development was bound up with other forms of identity politics, as an upper-middle class layer was cultivated for the purpose of stabilizing American politics against the threat raised by the growing capitalist crisis and the movement of the working class. Nixon’s “black capitalism” received bipartisan support and was followed by various affirmative action policies all directed to that same end.

Alexander’s discussion of mass incarceration generally ignores this social and political context. But it is not merely incomplete; it is dishonest.

She devotes nearly ten pages of her book, for instance, to trying to explain why the civil rights establishment and the Congressional Black Caucus have been “relative[ly] quiet” on the subject of mass incarceration. She admits that President Bill Clinton escalated the war on drugs, and that Barack Obama has continued these policies, increasing spending for police even as social programs are ruthlessly slashed.

The best explanation she can offer is that “[C]ivil rights organizations—like all institutions—are comprised of fallible human beings.” These organizations became “professionalized,” “top heavy with lawyers,” and so forth.

She cannot mention the obvious fact of the class outlook and class role of these leaderships. They know perfectly well what has happened to black workers and youth over the past several decades, and they share responsibility for it. As social conditions for black workers continued to worsen, these “professionalized” and lawyer-ridden organizations concentrated on the defense of affirmative action programs aimed at benefiting a thin layer of the minority population, while leaving the oppression of the majority untouched.

Alexander is herself part of this privileged layer. She served as a law clerk under Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and received financial support for her writing from a Soros Justice Fellowship, funded by George Soros, the liberal billionaire supporter of the Democratic Party. It goes without saying that this sort of assistance, along with the other opportunities granted to Alexander, constitute recognition not only of her legal and writing talent, but also her utility in defending the profit system.

Acknowledging herself to be a beneficiary of affirmative action, she describes the policy as a “racial bribe” designed to create “‘cosmetic’ racial diversity… in exchange for the abandonment of a more radical movement that promised to alter the nation’s economic and social structure.”

She makes a rhetorical suggestion that civil rights advocates renounce support for affirmative action—which she compares to unspecified “racial bribes” supposedly offered to white workers—on the grounds that it has “helped to render a new caste system largely invisible.” In fact, the emergence of a layer of black CEOs, top government officials, including the US president, and a significant layer of the comfortable upper-middle class, under conditions in which grinding poverty dominates in predominantly black urban neighborhoods, disproves her caste theory and constitutes a facet of the glaring class divide in the United States.

“Let’s talk about race,” says Alexander in her concluding chapter. “Racial differences will always exist among us.” [Emphasis in the original] While admitting that white workers also suffer at a time of mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures and growing hunger and poverty, she insists that, “whites should… be willing to sacrifice their racial privilege.”

For all of the radical-sounding talk of a new Jim Crow, Alexander shows very clearly where she stands when she makes the plea that “there must be a change within the culture of law enforcement.”

She wants the police to be more compassionate toward the urban poor, embracing a “method of engagement that promotes trust, healing and genuine partnership.” In other words, the ruling class must display greater empathy for its victims.

She warns that we will always have a racial caste system as long as there is a “failure to care, really care across color lines.” The book makes no mention of the relentless concentration of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy at the expense of the vast majority of the population, workers of all races, who have seen their living standards steadily slashed.

The call for “caring” is really what one is left with at the end of this book. There is no proposal for any specific program or action to change social conditions. As a means of ameliorating the effects of class oppression, such a proposal is not merely nonsense, but the expression‎‍ of a class outlook that is opposed to the unification of the working class in struggle against capitalism. When pseudo-left groups like the ISO hail Alexander’s book, they are declaring their agreement with this reactionary perspective and underscoring their role as the left flank of the ruling establishment.

The benefit of Alexander’s book is that it reveals the reactionary implications of identity politics and a fixation on race. The real lessons of the history of the civil rights movement lead to exactly the opposite conclusion from the one she has drawn. Jim Crow was vanquished and it has not returned. The gains of the civil rights struggle were real, but limited. The elimination of legal racial barriers in schools and elsewhere revealed all the more sharply the class barriers to genuine equality.

Martin Luther King, Jr. began to consider some of the class issues when he tried to organize his Poor People’s Campaign in the weeks and months before he was murdered in April 1968. King remained a reformist, however. What is needed today is not a new civil rights movement. Indeed, the failure of the Poor People’s Campaign and the betrayal of the hopes of the civil rights struggle over subsequent years show this quite clearly.

The enemy of social equality is not a new Jim Crow, but the capitalist system and its representatives, including the Democratic Party and the advocates of identity politics that are among its most fervent defenders. Today, more than ever, what is needed is revolutionary leadership, a leadership that will not protest and plead for reforms, but mobilize the working class politically in the struggle for socialism.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/09/crow-s18.html