arturo castillon

The Immiseration of Labor: Capitalism, Poverty, and Inequality in Philadelphia

By Arturo Castillon

"...the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious."[1]

"...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; …all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers..."[2]




The Theory of Immiseration

How are we to understand the contemporary economic situation of most people, who experience increasingly unstable conditions of employment and life?

This essay analyzes the growth of poverty and income inequality within the context of a developed capitalist [3] economy, using Philadelphia as a case study. Some might think that this city is an extreme example; for many years now Philadelphia has ranked the poorest of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.[4] However, the basic thesis of this essay is that immiseration is not an exception but instead a normal outgrowth of the capitalist economy.

The concept of immiseration is usually associated with Karl Marx, as he insisted that the nature of capitalist production resulted in the devaluation of labor, specifically the decline of wages relative to the total value created in the economy. For Marx, this meant that the proletarian class, [5] or working class, was fundamentally defined by precariousness, i.e. material instability, uncertainty, insecurity, and dependency. This theory stems from Marx's analysis of the changing organic composition of capitalist production and the reduced demand for labor that emerges as technology develops and labor becomes more productive. With increasingly productive machines, less labor produces more commodities at a faster rate, leading to the gradual replacement of labor by machines. Marx observed that the realities of capitalist competition necessitated this tendency towards mechanization and rising productivity. If a factory in the South restructures production to raise its productivity - allowing it to sell more commodities, at a faster rate, and at a cheaper price, while employing less labor-while a rival factory in Philadelphia does not, then after a while the factory in the South will run the factory in Philadelphia out of business. In order to protect their market from more productive competitors, therefore, capitalists must reinvest part of their capital into increasing productivity, or perish in the long run.

As capitalists competed and became more productive, Marx noted that labor became more impoverished: "The growing competition among the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious."[6] In other words, increases in capitalist productivity were uneven in their effects-they benefited the capitalists, not the workers. As capitalism became more productive and labor produced more capital in a given amount of time, economic output increased; but at the same time, real wages stabilized and even declined, because the input of human labor stayed the same or declined relative to the output of capital.

This constellation of ideas would later be referred to by Marxists as "the immiseration thesis." However, this term is somewhat misleading since throughout his life Marx developed several theses about the absolute and relative immiseration of labor under different phases of capitalist development. Nonetheless, Marx always theorized the devaluation of labor relative to the self-valorization of capital, and in this sense, he did posit a general theory of immiseration.


An Uneven Economy

Even accounting for periodic crises and recessions, it seems that the US economy is strong and growing, locally and nationally, from the standpoint of those who rule it- the capitalist class.[7] It is still the largest national economy in the world;[8] the world's largest producer of petroleum and gas [9]; the world's largest internal market for goods and services [10]; and the world's largest trading power, [11] with roughly a third of this trade based in the export and import of international commodities, while domestic trade between regions in the US generates even more capital, accounting for roughly two-thirds of US trade.[12]

The majority of this trade is concentrated in the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US. Those ten metro areas, ordered by largest total trade volume, are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston. All the commodities that move throughout the nation, in freight trains, trucks, and shipping containers, flow through a vast transportation infrastructure made up of rail lines, roads, and ports that link these ten metropolitan areas in an extensive network of "trade corridors." New York and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Riverside, and San Francisco and San Jose are among the largest corridors within the national network.[13] These regional trading networks also provide access to distant markets that allows US capitalists to take part in global commodity chains. Still, the largest single part of capitalist value in the US comes from domestic trade.

Primarily as a result of their complementary industries in energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and mixed freight, New York and Philadelphia are the largest trading partners in the national interstate network, [14] making the New York-Philadelphia trade corridor the most valuable in the nation.[15] Because it serves as a crucial node in the national trade network, Philadelphia is home to the 7th largest metropolitan economy in the nation, [16] generating the 4th highest gross domestic product in the nation, and the 9th highest among the cities of the world.[17]

The Philadelphia metropolitan economy, which includes Camden, Chester, Norristown, and other peripheral cities and towns, continues to generate massive profits for those who own it. Still, for most people-who are not capitalists, but workers-wages are low, jobs are increasingly insecure, and poverty continues to grow.[18] Despite regional economic growth, poverty has increased more rapidly in Philadelphia than any other major city since the 1970s. However, this trend is not isolated to Philadelphia; poverty has steadily increased throughout the nation since the 1970s.[19]

During this same period which people became poorer, the national economy has continued to grow and wealth has continued to concentrate in fewer hands than ever before. After two decades of relative stability following World War II, US income inequality once again began to grow starting in the early 1970s and continued to grow despite rising business cycles in the 1980s and 1990s.[20] By 2013, the top 1 percent of households received about 20 percent of all pre-tax income, in contrast to about 10 percent from 1950 to 1980.[21] By 2017, the income of the top 20% of households in Philadelphia was up by 13% since 2007, while the income of the bottom 60% of households was below 2007 levels.[22]

While a strong national economy in the late 1990s helped drive down the number of people living in poverty for the first time in decades, this trend was short-lived. Not long after the 2000s began, the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent the nation into a recession, a regular occurrence in capitalism. Millions of people lost their jobs and incomes during the early 2000s, and poverty continued to grow even as the economy recovered by the mid-2000s. The onset of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 only accelerated this trend, and the number of people living in poverty grew even faster. Even with the end of the Great Recession, poverty continued to grow throughout the nation, and Philadelphia registered declines in typical worker wages during the first five years of the recovery. By 2010-2014, 14 million people in Philadelphia lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more-5 million more than before the Great Recession and more than twice as many as in 2000.[23]

Although poverty increased among white Americans in the post-Recession period, for Black and Latino Americans poverty rose even more sharply, locally and nationally. [24] In particular, Black Philadelphians today continue to experience record high levels of poverty [25] and low teen employment.[26] This racial disparity is the result of a longstanding pattern in which white workers, allied with capitalists (who are almost entirely white), exclude Black and Brown workers from the better-paying, more-secure jobs.


The De-Industrialization of Labor

How do we explain this disconnect between growing wealth at the top and deepening poverty at the bottom?

It's obvious in retrospect that the rise of poverty in Philadelphia and other former industrial centers is the result of a shift in the capitalist mode of production-from manufacturing industries to service industries, and from city to suburbs. During most the 19th century Philadelphia was a center of craft-based industrial production, well known for its diverse array of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries-textiles, metal products, paper, glass, furniture, shoes, hardware, etc. By 1900, manufacturing workers made up about one-half of the city's entire labor force.[27] However, manufacturing jobs began to decline in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by the 1970s, the service industries came to eclipse manufacturing entirely. Rather than manufacturing, most people now work in the service industries-food service, retail, health service, and logistics sub-industries such as warehousing, transportation, and delivery services. This "de-industrialization" of the economy and workforce resulted in a loss of income for most workers.[28]

The de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the corresponding rise in poverty throughout the region, began earlier than most other cities in the North American Rust-Belt, shortly after the economic upturn that came with World War I (1914-1918), which resulted in growing mechanization, automation, and standardization of production on a national and global scale. In contrast, Philadelphia's manufacturing businesses for the most part continued employing the labor of highly-skilled craftsmen who worked in small and medium-sized firms, known as "workshops," which produced custom goods for niche markets. The "Workshop of the World," as Philadelphia was still known in the 1920s, could not compete with mass industrial production, for mass marketed consumption, by means of the unskilled and disposable mass assembly line workers of the factories in Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The new system of mass industrial production signaled the end of the highly specialized manufacturing processes which characterized most of industrial Philadelphia before World War II.[29]

With the national economic downturn of 1929, major sections of the city's craft-manufacturing base began to collapse. By the 1930s, the only manufacturing businesses that remained in Philadelphia were the few that developed mass production methods-factories along the peripheries of the city in Manayunk, Germantown, Kensington, etc. These were the only manufacturing businesses in the city that could compete on a national level.

Eventually, the demand for manufacturing in Philadelphia would pick up as a result of the revival of the national economy during World War II (1939-1945), when federally-funded factories hired over 27,000 new workers.[30] The wartime economy opened new possibilities for Black workers to join the industrial workforce; while only 15,000 African Americans worked in manufacturing jobs in the city in 1940, their representation rose to 55,000 by 1943. Although this represented an increase in wages and jobs for Black workers, more than half of these jobs were in unskilled positions that offered the lowest wages.[31]

Despite a boost in production during World War II, Philadelphia's manufacturing industries began a steep decline during the peacetime transition. Industrial capitalists continued to face the challenge of superior competition, and this time the competition was increasingly global. International trade grew in the decades after the war, as European and Japanese manufacturers began to compete with US manufacturers. In this context, most factories in Philadelphia either went out of business or left the city. By 1955, fewer than 1,000 workers were employed in the city's formerly expansive textile industries.[32]

Black industrial workers hired during World War II were particularly affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs. A big factor in this process was the seniority system embodied in most union contracts, which meant that when recession, closure, or layoffs happened, those with the least seniority were the first to go. Since Black workers were usually the last hired, they were also usually the first fired.

By the early 1970s, when other major cities throughout the North and Midwest were beginning to experience de-industrialization, most of the manufacturing businesses in Philadelphia had already shut down or relocated to the suburbs, as well as to cities in the South and West of the country. The few industrial firms that remained in Philadelphia were those that invested heavily in automation and raised their standard of productivity.[33]

In the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of de-industrialization became international, as it began to hit most nations in Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the beginning of the 21th century, the Southern and Western cities of the US that once drew manufacturers from the older cities have also struggled with the loss of manufacturing jobs. After the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of de-industrialization only intensified on a global scale, especially in underdeveloped nations in the global South.[34]

Hence, the de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the concomitant rise in poverty, was mostly the result of capitalist market competition. Industrial Philadelphia was mostly composed of craft-based manufacturers that could not compete with highly-mechanized and increasingly-automated factories elsewhere. The manufacturers that kept up their profits in the face of competitors stayed in business by investing in technology that increased productivity. Some also relocated their businesses to cheaper, less-regulated labor markets. In the process, these transformations led to the devaluation and displacement of labor.

Besides the pressures of market competition, another important factor influencing de-industrialization was the militant resistance of the workers who carried out mass strikes and secured higher wages, pensions, health benefits, and better working conditions during the 1930s and 1940s. With the help of the leadership of the major industrial unions (the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations), the capitalist class responded to the workers movement by shutting down or relocating their facilities to the non-unionized South and West in the 1950s. In this way, de-industrialization undermined the power of the unionized working class, and took back the wages and benefits that the capitalists conceded to the workers in previous decades of struggle.


The Growth of Inequality

As capitalism reorganized itself, the service industries came to supersede manufacturing as the primary source of working-class employment. Today, the number of industrial jobs in Philadelphia represents only 5 percent of the total workforce of the city, while service jobs represent 40 percent of total employment, making the service industries the largest sector of the city's workforce.[35] Even within the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the region, they employ increasingly fewer workers, and those they do employ are increasingly part-time, part-year, and paid less.[36]

The social composition of the service industries is much more diverse than that of the manufacturing industries, which are highly unionized and still dominated by white men. Women make up over half of all service workers, while Black workers form a higher-than-average concentration in lower-paying service jobs. While service jobs have grown by 56 percent since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of these jobs are part-time, part-year, require few skills, pay low wages, and offer few to no benefits. At the same time, the number of high-salary professional and managerial jobs has grown by 85 percent since the 1970s.[37] This means that de-industrialization has improved the earnings of those in the top-tier of the workforce, while most workers have seen their incomes shrink or stagnate since the 1970s.

Further exacerbating the livelihood of the urban proletariat, jobs have increasingly shifted towards the suburban peripheries of the city, after the pattern of large cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. This transformation was facilitated by the massive construction of interstate highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While low-income populations in the region concentrate in Philadelphia, Camden, and a number of older urban centers, most jobs are now in the suburbs, often in areas accessible only by automobile, and distant from housing that is affordable to these workers. If city residents do manage to find a job in the suburbs, their wages are effectively lowered because of substantial traveling expenses; if they decide to move to the suburbs, wages are effectively lowered because of higher rent.[38]

The decline of manufacturing jobs was particularly devastating for Black workers, who concentrated in unskilled manufacturing jobs and in service jobs within the city, but were almost completely excluded from professional/managerial jobs and skilled trades. Due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with the suburbanization of the rapidly expanding service industries, Black workers have seen their incomes and jobs decline dramatically since the early 1970s. Although employment rates declined for both white and Black men since the 1970s, the black decline was twice that of whites. Furthermore, while there was an increase of employment for white women in Philadelphia since the 1970s, the employment rate for Black women hardly changed at all.[39] In this way, de-industrialization eroded the gains made by Black workers in the industrial sector in the decades after World War II.


The Immiseration of Labor

As I've shown, the transformation of the Philadelphia economy-from manufacturing to services, and from city to suburbs-has resulted in a deepening of poverty and inequality for most workers in this city. The question remains, why does capitalism develop itself in such a way that results in the immiseration of labor? This much is clear from the outset: nature does not produce, on the one hand, fewer and fewer rich people, and on the other hand, a growing army of workers who own nothing but their labor, which they must sell for an increasingly lower wage. The immiseration of labor results from the contradictions of what Marx called the "capitalist mode of production."

In brief, Marx argued that capitalism was distinct from all other modes of production in its unique aim: the creation of capital. Whereas other modes of production might find their purpose in producing useful things to satisfy human needs (communal production), or in producing a surplus of luxuries to satisfy a class of nobles (feudalism), capitalism, in contrast, produces the abstraction known as capital. Capital is not produced for the private consumption of its owner, the capitalist. If this were the case the aim of capitalist production wouldn't be the creation of capital but the consumption of things (or what Marx called "use-values"). Under capitalism, however, capital is not produced for use or consumption; capital functions as an end in itself-it is the starting and finishing point of production.[40]

Beginning with the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, capitalists made labor more productive by investing a greater part of capital into the instruments of production, introducing newer, more efficient, and more expensive machines. Such an accelerated development of the forces of production did not exist in any other mode of production before capitalism. Theoretically, this heightened level of productivity could raise people's standard of life while reducing the amount of time that they had labor for others. However, Marx was quick to point out that "[capitalist] production is only production for capital and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers."[41] Under capitalism, labor is only an instrument for the valorization of capital, i.e. capital accumulation, and nothing else. Instead of serving the needs of society as a whole, capitalist production serves the specific needs of capital accumulation, which requires the devaluing of labor in order for capital to expand. The immiseration of labor, therefore, is not an aberration, but a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.[42] Thus, Marx concluded: "On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labor-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital."[43] This is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist development: as capitalism becomes more productive, and the means of production become more extensive and technically more efficient, the labor that works up those means of production becomes increasingly devalued and unnecessary.

According to Marx, the drive to accumulate capital at the expense of labor is not based on greed or any other negative psychological trait on the part of the capitalist, but rather survival - in other words, it is in the system's nature to operate this way. If a capitalist does not accumulate capital, if profits are not continually transformed into a further increment of value, then that capitalist is unable to keep up with competitors and eventually goes out of business.[44] This is what Marx refers to as the coercive law of capitalist competition. Workers lose their jobs and their incomes not because of the ill will of particular capitalists, but because the sole aim of capitalism is the valorization of capital, which depends on the maximum extraction of value from labor. In the face of obstacles like market competition and (to a lesser degree) labor struggles, capitalists perpetuate the accumulation of capital by reducing jobs/wages/hours, mechanizing and automating production, and relocating to cheaper, less regulated labor markets.

Marx provided us with the analytical tools for thinking about this internal contradiction of capitalist development-the contradiction between the declining value of labor and rising surplus value, i.e. the basis of capital formation. As capitalist production becomes more productive, the working class can only become more precarious, since the increasing accumulation of capital requires an increasing devaluation of labor. This contradiction is inherent to capitalism-it arises independently of the level of class struggle, fluctuations in wages, state interventions in the economy, or economic crises. At the same time, the relative intensity of the immiseration of labor can rise or drop with the limits set by the accumulation process, depending on the degree of control that workers as a class exert over the economy and the state. At different times in history workers have asserted their interests over and against the drive for capital accumulation, and as a result, have been able to gain a larger share of the total value that their labor produces. Still, for Marx, even if wages and standards of living rise for a time, this does not end the immiseration of labor. That would require the end of capitalism.


Implications for the Future

The story of the immiseration of labor in Philadelphia is particular, but not exceptional; it can serve as the basis for general observations on the dynamics of labor-capital relations within a developed capitalist economy. Capitalists in Philadelphia adapted to the challenges of market competition and labor struggle in much the same way that capitalists did in most mid to large-sized manufacturing centers-by shutting down, relocating, and/or automating production. Over time, the bulk of jobs in most US cities shifted to the services sector and to the suburbs. In every city that these changes took place the results where the same: the decline of wages and regular employment for the urban poor.

After having analyzed the antagonistic nature of capitalist production, we can see that the immiseration of labor is the natural result of capitalist development. Therefore, there is no prospect for a return to a so-called "golden-age" of capitalism characterized by moderate wages, benefits, and full-time employment. The easing of income inequality in the developed nations immediately after World War II was an exception, not the rule, in the history of capitalism. Outside of this brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, capitalism has not delivered on its promise of upward class mobility for most workers, and this promise can only continue to fade as capitalism continues to develop.

Today, most people find themselves within the throes of a drawn-out process of immiseration that shows no signs of reversing itself. Incomes have declined since the 1970s to allow for a greater acceleration of capital formation and accumulation. Even as total economic output continues to increase, and even as the job market continues to grow, working class incomes continue to decline, since most jobs are now in the unskilled, unprotected, low-wage service industries. Under these circumstances, the instability that a developed capitalist system subjects the employment and working conditions of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs.[45] The production process reaches a point of no return, continually reproducing a permanently marginalized mass of low-paid laborers with no hope of a professional career.

Rather than functioning as a site for upward mobility and income growth, the late capitalist megalopolis increasingly functions as a warehouse for low-wage service workers. Over the past fifty years, these structural trends have steadily asserted themselves on global level, especially in the global South.[46] As Mike Davis painstakingly details in his devastating book, Planet of Slums, poverty and occupational marginality are especially prevalent in the cities of underdeveloped nations, where urban existence is increasingly disconnected from mass employment. With unprecedented barriers to large-scale emigration to developed nations, slum populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate in the global South. For Davis, this is the real crisis of world capitalism: the crisis of the reproduction of labor and the inability of capitalism to stabilize (yet alone improve) the livelihood of the proletariat.

The growing division of the workforce into 1) a small, privileged core of professionals and managers that can expect continuous, high-paying employment, and 2) a large periphery of precarious "floaters," to which capitalists provide little more than a low wage, for as long or as short a time as capitalists require these workers-this division will only widen as capitalism continues to develop. To the extent that most workers have access to increasingly irregular employment and smaller wages, the trend toward racial and class inequalities will persist, globally and locally. Black workers will continue to be the "last hired, first fired." White workers will continue to act as labor aristocracy, allying themselves with capitalists to monopolize the professional and managerial jobs, while relegating workers of color-especially Black workers-to the worst paying, least secure, lowest status jobs.

The housing market will continue to reflect the uneven distribution of income and jobs. The white workers who hold the managerial and professional jobs will continue to predominate in the suburbs, or in some comfortable, tree-lined areas of the city like Chestnut Hill, and in the gentrifying neighborhoods close to center city. In contrast, low-income workers will remain in the vast stretches of row houses in Philadelphia and Camden and in the older suburbs like Chester or Norristown.


The Struggle for a Classless Society

Capital seeks to gain the greatest return on its investment in labor and means of production. In pursuing this end, capital has reorganized the production process and with it the realities of working-class existence. This raises strategic questions from the standpoint of class struggle: what forms of struggle are developing today that point to a different future? If industrial production created a particular conception of class struggle, what do the service industries mean for the future of class struggle? What does working class power look like in the context of a service economy?

These are complex questions that must be explored via further research of the class composition and dynamics of class struggle in specific regions. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this essay, which at the most serves as the groundwork for such an investigation. Still, on a general level, this research makes this much clear: as long as capitalism continues as the dominant state of affairs, the contradiction between capital and labor can only become more pronounced. Therefore, it is not enough to reform capitalism or morally condemn capitalists-we must develop a plan to overthrow the structure of capitalism in its entirety.

Of course, the design and implementation of such a plan would take different forms depending on the conditions of working class existence in different regions. Nonetheless, at its core, this plan must entail the abolition of private property in the mode of production and the organization of a system of production that is no longer carried out with the goal of capital accumulation, but instead in a way that is systematically regulated by society-not the capitalists, not the market, not the state, but society as a whole. The members of such a society would have to reorganize the production process in such a way that frees their labor from the constraints of capital-an external, independent force standing above society.

However, given the contemporary circumstances of late capitalism, it is unclear whether workplace-centered struggle is the primary organizational form for building this social project. Even though capital continues to accumulate in industrial production, employment has shifted from the sphere of direct commodity production (agriculture, manufacturing) to the sphere of circulation (services). In such an economy, workplace struggles pose little to no threat to capitalism. Even if workers took over every McDonalds or Walmart, the economy would continue to operate in highly automated essential sectors like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and logistics. If a proletarian revolution were to occur in such a context, the communization of production would not entail proletarian control of workplaces-as conceived by the traditional approach to labor struggle-so much as proletarian expropriation and elimination of workplaces, most of which are nonessential (i.e. most of the services industries) and serve no useful purpose outside of the context of capital accumulation.

The critical period in US mass industrial relations, which began about a century ago and saw a rapid growth in the power of industrial workers' unions in the 1930s and 1940s, was followed by capitalist counter-organization and restructuring. By the early 1980s it was clear that the New Deal order of relatively strong labor unions was over in the US. Today, the material basis for workplace oriented struggles has fallen apart, shattered by capitalist automation, deindustrialization, and decentralization.

Despite these difficulties, there is still no logical argument for why a classless society is impossible. Even when such a society can only be achieved with difficulty and struggle-in light of rising poverty and racial inequality; in light of constant imperialist wars; in light of the ecological destruction brought about by capitalism-in light of all that, there are still good reasons to fight for a world beyond capitalism, where production is carried out by an association of free people who collectively regulate their own labor. To be victorious, however, we must build organizations that correspond to the present circumstances, instead of simply inheriting the idealized and ready-made organizational forms of the past.


Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 793.

[2] Marx, Capital, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 798.

[3] "Capitalism" is the dominant mode of production in the world. It is defined primarily by the production, circulation, and accumulation of capital. "Capitalists" own the means of producing capital.

[4] Alfred Lubrano, "Throughout the country, incomes are rising. In Philly, their falling," http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html

[5] The "proletariat," or "working class," is the largest class in capitalist society. "Proletariats" do not own any means of production ( of their own and therefore must sell their labor-power (their ability to create capital) to those who own means of production (capitalists), in exchange for a wage which is a only fraction of the capitalist value they produce.

[6] Engels, Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 89.

[7] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, "U.S. Economy at a Glance," https://www.bea.gov/news/glance

[8] "Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP)" . IMF. Retrieved 29 December 2017. Digital History; Steven Mintz. "Digital History" . Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved April 21, 2012.

[9] "United States remains the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons" EIA.

[10] "Trade recovery expected in 2017 and 2018, amid policy uncertainty" . Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization. 12 April 2017. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

[11] Katsuhiko Hara and Issaku Harada (staff writers) (13 April 2017). "US overtook China as top trading nation in 2016" . Tokyo: Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 2017-06-22. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, "Trade and Economy," https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/economy-trade

[12] For overall trade patterns, see: Adie Tomer, Robert Puentes, and Joseph Kane, "Metro-to-Metro: Global and Domestic Goods Trade in Metropolitan America" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013). For export statistics, see: Brad McDearman, Ryan Donahue, and Nick Marchio, "Export Nation 2013: U.S. Growth Post Recession" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013).

[13] "Trade corridors" are streams of commodities that flow within and through spaces in regular geographic patterns.

[14] Source: Brookings analysis of EDR data.

[15] Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, "Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States." Global Cities Initiative. A JOINT PROJECT OF BROOKINGS AND JPMORGAN CHASE. November, 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Srvy_GCIFreightNetworks_Oct24.pdf

[16] "Gross Metropolitan Product" . U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. September 29, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.

[17] "Global city GDP rankings 2008-2025" . Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved November 20,2009.

[18] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[19] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," The PEW Charitable Trusts, November 2017, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[20] "US Census Bureau. (2001). Historical Income Tables - Income Equality" . Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html

"Shaprio, E. (October 17, 2005). New IRS Data Show Income Inequality Is Again of The Rise. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities" . Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://www.cbpp.org/research/new-irs-data-show-income-inequality-is-again-on-the-rise

[21] Wiseman, Paul (September 10, 2013). "Richest 1 percent earn biggest share since '20s" AP News . Retrieved September 10, 2013. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130910/DA8NN7U02.html

John Cassidy (November 18, 2013). "American Inequality in Six Charts" The New Yorkerhttps://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

[22] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[23] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, March 2016 https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[24] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[25] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[26] Brookings, "Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: the role of place, race, and education." https://www.brookings.edu/research/employment-and-disconnection-among-teens-and-young-adults-the-role-of-place-race-and-education/#V0G0

[27] The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport, 1980), 141-168.

[28] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, (Temple University Press, 2008) . The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places , (UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Workshop of the World, "Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview,"

http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/overview/overview.html

[30] John Bauman, Public Housing: The Dreadful Sage of a Durable Policy, 57.

[31] Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 99-107, 121-122, 125-133.

[32] Gladys Palmer, Philadelphia's Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), page 37.

[33] Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City, (Temple University Press, 1991).

[34] David Koistinen, Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England (University Press of Florida; 2013)

[35] Larry Eichel and Octavia Howell, "A Key Driver of Poverty in Philadelphia? The Changing Nature of Work," January 2018, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2018/01/08/a-key-driver-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-the-changing-nature-of-work

[36] Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/#sthash.FIcRzwW3.dpuf

[37] Adams, Bartelt, Elesh, Goldstein,Restructuring the Philadelphia RegionMetropolitan Divisions and Inequality, 56.

[38] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region , 37.

[39] Philadelphia , "Economic Erosion," pages 55-56.

[40] Capital , 769.

[41] Capital , vol 3: 358.

[42] Capital , "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 772-773.

[43] Capital , 798.

[44] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 582.

[45] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 580-82.

[46] "Inequality on the Rise?: An Assessment of Current Available Data on Income Inequality, at Global, International, and National Levels," Servio Vieira, December 2012, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2013_svieira1.pdf

Bury Me Not in a Land of Slaves: A Short History of Immediatist Abolitionism in Philadelphia, 1830s to 1860s

By Arturo Castillon (Edited by Madeleine Salvatore)

[The above image is a depiction of the 1851 Christiana Riot, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a slave-owner was shot and killed when attempting to retrieve an alleged "fugitive slave." The subsequent trial took place in Philadelphia.]



I ask no monuments, proud and high,

To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;

All that my yearning spirit craves,

Is bury me not in a land of slaves.


-Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, "Bury Me in a Free Land"




In the 1850s, the author of the above poem, Frances Harper, was part of a network of revolutionaries who made it their mission to abolish slavery in the United States. Known as Abolitionists, these partisans of freedom fought for the immediate emancipation of slaves, and developed a specific approach to Abolitionism known as "immediatism." [1] In the 1820s, the most radical Abolitionists in England and the United States began using this term, "immediatism," to distinguish their strategy for abolition from the predominant, gradualist one. [2]

The Abolitionists that we are most familiar with today - Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown - all fought for the immediate emancipation of slaves, a prospect that most people at the time, even most abolitionists, considered extreme and impractical. Yet in the long term, the immediatist tendency proved to be the most practical and strategic. Instead of miring themselves in legislative strategies or insular sects, the immediatists built organizations to secretly assist thousands of people fleeing from slavery, who in taking the risk of freedom, deprived the southern planters of their primary source of labor-slave labor.

In Philadelphia, black abolitionists like Frances Harper, William Still, and Robert Purvis would rise to the forefront of the immediatist struggle against slavery. Because of the city's proximity to the South, it was an important junction point on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and safe houses that people followed northward when fleeing from slavery. Undeterred by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which legally guaranteed a slaveholder's right to recover an escaped slave, hundreds of escapees made their way to Philadelphia every year, most coming from nearby Virginia and Maryland. With the Compromise of 1850, the Southern slaveholders strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, which now required the governments and citizens of free states, like Pennsylvania, to enforce the capture and return of "fugitive slaves." This compromise between the Southern slaveholders and the Northern free states defused a four-year political crisis over the status of territories colonized during the Mexican-American war (1846-1848). For the immediatist wing of the Abolitionist movement in Philadelphia, the implications of the new Fugitive Slave Law were clear: it had to be disobeyed and disrupted, even if that meant engaging in illegal activities to assist fugitives.[3]

Already by the early 1830s, the Abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania had begun to radicalize, reflecting developments on the national scene, such as David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, and the 1831 Nat Turner slave insurrection. The older, mostly white Quakers, who had led the movement for decades, favored legal, non-violent measures for gradually abolishing slavery, while a growing tendency of mostly black abolitionists demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. [4] This growing dichotomy, between the gradualists and the immediatists, reflected the essential difference between reformist and revolutionary politics in the Abolitionist movement.

As the Abolitionist movement became more immediatist in the 1830s, the Vigilance Committee, as it came to be known, emerged as the principal organizational form for assisting fugitives as well as victims of kidnapping. After black Abolitionist David Ruggles founded the first Vigilance Committee in New York City in 1835, Robert Purvis and James Forten formed the "Vigilant Association of Philadelphia" in 1837. Abolitionists in the rural counties surrounding these cities soon followed suit, becoming part of a regional network between Philadelphia, New York City, and other nearby cities, like Boston. The Vigilance Committees raised money, provided transportation, food, housing, clothing, medical care, legal counsel, and tactical support for people escaping from slavery. [5]

The committee in Philadelphia was a racially integrated group that also included a (predominantly black) women's auxiliary unit, the "Female Vigilant Association." This degree of inter-racial and inter-gender organization was unheard of at the time, even in the Abolitionist movement. [6] The committee also included ex-slaves. Amy Hester Reckless, for example, was a fugitive who went on to become a leading member of the committee in the 1840s. [7]

While providing strategic resources to fugitives, the committee also carried out bold interventions. Members of the committee orchestrated two of the most notorious slave escapes of the 1840s: 1) that of William and Ellen Craft from Georgia, who used improbable disguises to make their way to Philadelphia in 1848, and 2) that of Henry "Box" Brown from Virginia, who arranged to have himself mailed in a wooden crate to Philadelphia in 1849. These daring escapes were widely publicized in the antislavery movement, and these fugitives appeared in public lectures in order to rally support to the Abolitionist cause. [8]

However, by the early 1850s, several waves of repression had left the committee disorganized. These included anti-abolitionist riots, and a string of crippling lawsuits against those who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, including participants in the Christiana Riot of 1851, wherein a slave-owner was shot and killed after attempting to capture a "fugitive." A new organization was needed, so in 1852 William Still and other abolitionists established a new Vigilance Committee to fill the void left by the older, scattered one. [9]

Led by William Still, who had escaped from slavery as a child with his mother, the new Vigilance Committee was even more effective than its predecessor, assisting hundreds of fugitives every year in their quests for freedom. By the mid-1850s, Still and the immediatists had transformed Philadelphia into a crucial nerve center of the Underground Railroad, by then a massive network that spanned the U.S. and extended into Canada. The most prominent "conductors" of the Underground Railroad, people like Harriet Tubman and Thomas Garrett, directed hundreds of fugitives to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee every year. [10]

Although the original Vigilance Committee was a clandestine organization, its reincarnation operated both publicly and in secret. Some of the members of the committee were lawyers who defended fugitives in the Pennsylvania courts, while others assisted fugitives using methods that were unequivocally prohibited by those same courts. Some even published their names and addresses in the Pennsylvania Freeman newspaper and in flyers so that fugitives could easily find them. In order to generate public support for their cause, they used the antislavery press and public lecture circuit to broadcast the success of their illegal activities-without revealing specific incriminating details and only after the fugitives were safe. Carefully documenting the daily operations of the committee, William Still wrote extensively about the hidden stories of slave resistance and the inner workings of their secret network. When he finally published The Underground Railroad Records in 1872, it would be the first historical account of the Underground Railroad. [11]

This delicate balance between secret operations and public activity was dramatically demonstrated in the summer of 1855, when William Still and others organized the escape of Jane Johnson and her children from their owner, John Wheeler, as they were en route to New York, docked in Philadelphia. During the escape, Passmore Williamson, one of the only white members of the Vigilance Committee, physically held back Wheeler, a well-known southern Congressman, while Still led Johnson and her children away to a nearby safe house. [12]

In the legal proceedings that ensued, a federal judge charged Williamson with riot, forcible abduction, and assault. The judge in the case rejected an affidavit from Johnson affirming that she had left Wheeler of her own free will and that there had been no abduction, and Williamson spent 100 days in Moyamensing prison. The case became a national news story, as Abolitionists used the media to trumpet the success of the Johnson rescue, and to expose the southern slaveholders' domination of the federal court system, which the Abolitionists called a "Slave Power Conspiracy." Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and other Abolitionist leaders visited Williamson during his confinement and wrote admirably of his actions in the antislavery press. [13]

The Philadelphia immediatists were fully aware of their strategic role in the national struggle against slavery. At a mass meeting in Philadelphia in August 1860, leader of the immediatist wing, William Still, explained that because they were "in such close proximity to slavery" and their "movements and actions" were "daily watched" by pro-slavery forces, they could do, "by wise and determined effort, what the freed colored people of no other State could possibly do to weaken slavery." [14] By defying the Fugitive Slave Law in a border city, the immediatists in Philadelphia exacerbated the growing conflict between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South to a degree that few other Abolitionists could.

The Vigilance Committee acted as the organizational nucleus of the Underground Railroad in a city that was publicly very hostile to Abolitionism. Most white workers were opposed to the abolition of slavery as well as the legalization of racial equality, while the merchant elites and early industrialists of the city had close economic ties to slaveholders in the South and throughout the Atlantic. There where numerous anti-black and anti-abolitionists riots throughout the 1830s and 1840s in Philadelphia. [15] Even though they were vastly outnumbered, by subverting the Fugitive Slave Law in this border city, the immediatists antagonized the slaveholders and their allies-a much larger and well-established enemy.

As the overall antislavery movement continued to grow throughout the North, the southern slaveholders went on the defensive. With the John Brown attack at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, and the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, who campaigned against the expansion of slavery, the slaveholders in the South became more entrenched and alienated from the rest of the United States. In February 1861 the Lower South region of the U.S seceded, creating a separate country called the Confederate States of America, also known as the Confederacy. The U.S. national government, known as the Union, refused to recognize the Confederacy as a legal government. The Civil War officially began in April 1861, when Confederate soldiers attacked Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. As the Civil War took its course, Abolitionists from Philadelphia, like Octavius Catto, worked to radicalize the Unionist cause from within. Catto and other Abolitionists organized the enlistment of black troops into the Union army and advocated for a coordinated military assault on slavery in the South, for which they were strongly condemned by white Philadelphians. [16]

Before the war, and during its initial years, much of white Philadelphia was sympathetic to the Southern slaveholder's grievances. But with the deepening of the conflict between North and South, most Philadelphians came to support the Union and the war against the Confederacy. A turning point came in 1863 when the city was threatened with Confederate occupation. Entrenchments were built and people fought to defend the city, defeating the Confederate Army at the Battle of Gettysburg. [17] However, even with the shifting of opinion against the South, most white Philadelphians still believed that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Many white Americans continued to believe that the Civil War was a "white man's war" to preserve the Union and nothing more. Abolitionists and black Philadelphians continued to be the targets of mob violence, and some white Philadelphians even blamed the Abolitionists for the war. [18]

With all odds stacked against them, the Abolitionists proclaimed the need to end slavery from the very beginning and identified the structural contradictions that would tear the nation apart. But rather than wait for the gradual disintegration of slavery, the immediatists worked to hasten its destruction. In a society that was for the most part hostile to their cause, the immediatist wing of the abolitionist movement performed the historic duty of following through, with long-term consistency, those revolutionary tactics that alone could save the Union and drive the Civil War to a decisive conclusion. More and more slaves escaping from plantations, the enlistment of black troops into the Union army, the immediate emancipation of slaves throughout the South-these tactics were indeed the only ways out of the difficulties into which the Civil War had descended.

The Civil War stemmed from a breakdown of the structural compromise that developed between two distinct modes of production-northern industrial wage labor, and southern slave labor. The growth and radicalization of the antislavery movement over time made this "unholy alliance" impossible to maintain. In this, the Civil War confirmed the basic lesson of every revolution, which stands the logic of gradualism on its head. Revolution doesn't advance with small increments, with legislative preconditions, but with prompt, uncompromising actions that destabilize the structural limits of the existing system.

The will for revolution can only be satisfied in this way-with strategic, revolutionary activity. Yet the masses of people can only acquire and strengthen the will for revolution in the course of the day-to-day struggle against the existing class order-in other words, within the limits of the existing system. Thus, we run into a contradiction. On the one hand, we have the masses of people in their everyday struggles within a social system; on the other, we have the goal of immediate social revolution, located outside of the existing system. Such are the paradoxical terms of the historical dialectic through which any revolutionary movement makes its way. The immediatists transcended this contradiction by responding to the mass self-activity of the slaves, who in their day-to-day resistance to the slave system offered the Abolitionists a means to realize their revolutionary objectives.

For over three decades, through ebbs and flows, victories and defeats, the immediatists consistently engaged with the everyday struggles of the slave class. They constructed multi-racial, multi-gender organizations that operated both legally and illegally, publicly and secretly, in order to help people emancipate themselves from slavery, to help them stay free, and to help them gain basic legal rights. In doing so, they fostered the development of a revolutionary movement that precipitated the U.S. Civil War and culminated in one of the greatest social revolutions of world history-the emancipation and enfranchisement of millions of slaves and workers in the South during the Reconstruction Era.

By the end of the Civil War, a once-persecuted minority of fanatical Abolitionists were now national leaders. Today we see them as good-hearted activists, or even as moderates. But there should be no mistake about it-all Abolitionists were considered extremists prior to the Civil War, and during most of it. Few people believed that the slave system would fall. The Abolitionists certainly did not believe their revolutionary goal would one day become official government policy. In the end, the Abolitionists recognized the historical crisis in front of them for what it was, and the immediatists responded to it better than any other Abolitionist tendency of their time.


"Lines," Frances Ellen Watkins Harper:

Though her cheek was pale and anxious,

Yet, with look and brow sublime,

By the pale and trembling Future

Stood the Crisis of our time.

And from many a throbbing bosom

Came the words in fear and gloom,

Tell us, Oh! thou coming Crisis,

What shall be our country's doom?

Shall the wings of dark destruction

Brood and hover o'er our land,

Till we trace the steps of ruin

By their blight, from strand to strand?


Arturo Castillon is an independent historian and retail-service worker from Philadelphia, who has participated in movements and struggles against gentrification, police violence, sexual harassment, homophobia, workplace exploitation, and racism.


This article was previously published on the blog of the Tubman-Brown Organization .


Notes

[1] On Harper's and others contributions to the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia, see Still, Underground Rail Road, 740-61; Helens Campbell, "Philadelphia Abolitionists ," The Continent; an Illustrated Weekly Magazine, January 3, 1883, 1-6.

[2] Junius P. Rodriguez, "Immediatism," The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Volume 1; A-K (Santa Barbara, California, 1997), 364.

[3] On the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, see Fergus M. Bordenwich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2005), 49; Carol Wilson, "Philadelphia and the Origins of the Underground Railroad," unpublished essay on file in the archives at Independence National Historic Park, Philadelphia.

[4] On the radicalization of the antislavery movement in Pennsylvania, see Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), chapter 3.

[5] Beverly C. Tomek, "Vigilance Committees," http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/vigilance-committees/

[6] Ibid, Tomek.

[7] Joseph A. Borome, "The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (January 1968); 320-51.

[8] Elizabeth Varon, " 'Beautiful Providences': William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and Abolitionists in the Age of Sectionalism" Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia, 230-31.

[9] Ibid, Varon; Borome, "The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia," 320-51.

[10] James A. McGowan, Station Master on the Underground Railroad: the Life and Letters of Thomas Garret (Jefferson, N.C, 2005); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York, 2004), 122-25.

[11] Varon, "'Beautiful Providences'" Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia, 233- 34.

[12] For a detailed account of the Jane Johnson rescue and its impactions, see Nat Brandt and Yanna Koyt Brandt, In the Shadow of the Civil War: Passmore Williamson and the Rescue of Jane Jane Johnson (Columbia, South Carolina, 2007).

[13] Ibid, Brandt.

[14] National Anti-Slavery Standard , August 18, 1860.

[15] Russel F. Weigley, "The Border City in Civil War, 1854-1865" Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, (New York and London, 1982), 295-296.

[16] Donald Scott, "Camp William Penn's Black Soldiers in Blue-November '99 America's Civil War Feature" http://www.historynet.com/camp-william-penns-black-soldiers-in-blue-november-99-americas-civil-war-feature.htm .

[17] Ibid, Scott, 389-93.

[18] Ibid, Scott.