DSA

Madison, right now

Across Dane County, our campaigns against jail expansion, corporate developers, and layoffs at TruStage all run into the same brick wall: a system that divides and disciplines labor along racial lines. Anti-Black racism isn’t an add-on to class struggle—it’s a core method by which exploitation keeps reproducing itself. This piece offers a framework for connecting those dots in our local work.

1) Capitalism’s birth in racial slavery

Modern capitalism was built through dispossession and enslavement—the twin thefts of land and labor. Plantations were early financial instruments linking human bondage to credit, insurance, and global trade.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction showed that enslaved labor was integral to world capitalism, and that the Civil War’s “general strike of the slaves” was the first mass withdrawal of labor in U.S. history. He also named the wages of whiteness: the social privileges that kept white workers tied to their own exploitation.

2) The logic of racial capitalism

Cedric Robinson and Oliver Cromwell Cox argued that capitalism didn’t create racism—it modernized it. Racial hierarchy became a tool for managing labor, marking some workers disposable and others “deserving.” Whiteness functioned as property and as discipline: a counterfeit privilege that fragments the class.

Each transition—from slavery to sharecropping, from industry to mass incarceration—reshaped rather than removed racial rule.

3) Ruling-class strategies of division

From Bacon’s Rebellion to Reaganomics, elites have used racial politics to stabilize profit. After Reconstruction, terror and “Black Codes” rebuilt cheap, coerced labor.

In the industrial North, corporate leaders hired across color lines to break strikes and then incited mob violence to keep unions weak.

The New Deal’s exclusions of agricultural and domestic workers preserved segregation inside the welfare state. Later, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Reagan’s “welfare-queen” myth converted white resentment into a new austerity consensus.

4) Anti-Black racism in the contemporary economy

• Labor: Black and brown workers dominate low-wage logistics and care work; white workers are overrepresented in management and tech.
• Policing and prisons: Incarceration functions as labor discipline under the 13th Amendment exception.
• Finance: Redlined credit and predatory loans siphon wealth from Black communities; the 2008 crash transferred billions to banks.
• Environment & health: Toxic exposure, food deserts, and hospital closures show how profit literally costs lives. Corporate “diversity” rhetoric and right-wing culture wars both mask this structure.

Resistance—from teachers’ strikes to warehouse walkouts—shows multiracial solidarity can still rupture it.

“Anti-racism isn’t a distraction from class politics—it’s how we build working-class power that can actually govern.”

5) What this means for organizers

• Integrate racial analysis into every campaign. Whether the issue is housing, healthcare, or wages, trace how racial inequality shapes the field of struggle.
• Center Black working-class leadership. Leadership development and cadre training should deliberately cultivate Black and marginalized organizers—not tokenism, but strategy.
• Reject false binaries. Universal demands (like Medicare for All) only transform society if implemented through racial justice.
• Challenge whiteness as a relation. Build reflection and accountability—not guilt—into your organizing culture.
• Connect local fights to systemic critique. Show how each campaign teaches lessons about racial capitalism and how collective action can dismantle it.

The goal is not moral reconciliation but power: a unified multiracial working class capable of governing society in its own interest.

6) Political education & collective memory

• Pair readings of Black Reconstruction, Black Marxism, and Hammer and Hoe with local labor history.
• Map your shop or neighborhood: who gets which jobs, services, protections—and why?
• Debrief campaigns not only on tactics but on leadership and racial dynamics. Document lessons so they become chapter memory.

Political education isn’t a classroom—it’s the loop between struggle and understanding.