Southern Labour is the Key to Change in the United States, and hence Canada, and the World
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- Published on Tuesday, 14 April 2020 03:44
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2055 ... April 14, 2020
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Southern Labour is the Key to Change in the United States, and hence Canada, and the World
Michael Goldfield
The South is today, as it always has been, the key to understanding American society: its politics, its constitutional anomalies and government structure, its culture, its social relations, its music and literature, its media focus and their blindspots, and virtually everything else. The South is a distinctive, atypical part of the United States; it is also, however, America writ large.
The bedrock of this understanding begins, not with the culture or social history of the South, but with its economy, and the racial/social relations that have sustained it. W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the most penetrating – and, in my opinion – greatest American social scientist of the 20th century, understood this well. Du Bois argues implicitly that the answer to the old question, originally posed by Werner Sombart of “Why no socialism in the United States?” (by which he meant, why the United States was unique among industrial countries in not having an electorally significant... working class supported labour, socialist, social-democratic, or communist party) really reduces to “Why no liberalism in the South?” The South, according to Du Bois, was inherently reactionary, so there could be “no successful third party movement” in the country as a whole (by which he meant one with a left-wing labour focus), until the South changed dramatically.
And, because of the degree to which the US and Canadian economies are intertwined, and that many of the most important unions (pretentiously and chauvinistically called “international”) have been Canadian and US in membership, this story has direct relevance to Canada as well. Among these “international” unions have been those in auto, coal, steel, metal mining, and wood.
This story, of course, begins in colonial times, first with the development of tobacco and sugar crops, later cotton, all produced largely with slave labour. Here, I wish to probe the somewhat more recent history of the South, especially the failure during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s of organized labour to fully unionize the main southern industries (whose success, I argue, had the potential to radically transform the South, and, thus, the nation, and perhaps all of North America, as a whole), a factor which plays a central role in understanding the nature of North America today. Further the failure of unions to organize the South was not at all predetermined, either then or currently.