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4. The CIO's Integration & Imperialist Labor
Policy
The CIO played an important role for U.S. imperialism
in disorganizing and placing under supervision
the nationally oppressed. For the first time masses of Third
World workers were allowed and even conscripted into the
settler trade unions. This was the result of a historic arrangement
between the U.S. Empire and nationally oppressed
workers in the industrial North.
On one side, this limited "unity" ensured that
Third World workers didn't oppose the new, settler industrial
unions, and were safely absorbed as "minorities"
under tight settler control. On the other side, hungry Third
World proletarians gained significant income advances
and hopes of job security and advancement. It was an arrangement
struck out of need on both sides, but one in
which the Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy made only tactical
concessions while strengthening their hegemony over
the Empire's labor market.
So while the old A.F.L. craft unions had controlled
Third World labor by driving us out of the labor
market, by excluding us from the craft unions or by confining
us to small, "seg" locals, the new CIO could only
control us by absorbing us into their settler unions. The
imperialists had decided that they needed colonial labor in
certain industries. Euro-Amerikan labor could not,
therefore, drive the nationally oppressed away in the old
manner. The colonial proletarians could only be controlled
by disorganizing them - separating their economic struggles
from the national struggles of their peoples, separating
them from other Third World proletarians around the
world, absorbing them as "brothers" of settler unionism,
and placing them under the leadership of the Euro-
Amerikan labor aristocracy. The new integration was the
old segregation on a higher level, the unity of opposites in
everyday life.
We can see how this all worked by reviewing the
CIO's relationship to Afrikan workers. Large Afrikan
refugee communities had formed in the major Northern industrial
centers. Well over one million refugees had fled
Northwards in just the time between 1910-1924, and new
thousands came every month. They were an irritating
presence to the settler North; each refugee community was
a foreign body in a white metropolis. Like a grain of sand
in an oyster. And just as the oyster eases its irritation by
encasing the foreign element in a hard, smooth coating of
pearl, settler Amerika encapsulated Afrikan workers in the
hard, white layer of the CIO.
Despite the "race riots" and the hostility of Euro-
Amerikans the Afrikan refugees streamed to the North in
the early years of the century. After all, even the troubles
of the North seemed like lesser evils to those fleeing the terroristic
conditions of the occupied National Territory.
Many had little choice, escaping the revived Ku Klux Klan.
Increasingly forced off the land, barred from the new factories
in the South, Afrikans were held down by the terroristic
control of their daily lives. 85
Each night found the Illinois Central railroad wending
its way Northward through Louisiana, Mississippi
and Tennessee, following the Mississippi River up to the
"Promised Land" of Gary or Chicago. Instead of
sharecropping or seasonal farm labor for "Mr. John,"
Afrikan men during World War I might get hired for the
"elite" Chicago jobs as laborers at Argo Corn Starch or
International Harvester. Each week the Chicago Defender,
in the '20s the most widely-read "race" newspaper even in
the South, urged its readers to forsake hellish Mississippi
and come Northward to "freedom." One man remembers
the long, Mississippi nights tossing and turning in bed,
dreaming about the fabled North: "You could not rest in
your bed at night for Chicago."
The refugee communities were really small New
Afrikan cities, where the taut rope of settler domination
had been partially loosened. Spear's Black Chicago says:
"In the rural South, Negroes were dependent upon white
landowners in an almost feudal sense. Personal supervision
and personal responsibility permeated almost every
aspect of life ... In the factories and yards (of the North) on
the other hand, the relationship with the 'boss' was formal
and impersonal, and supervision limited to working
hours." (31)
While there was less individual restriction, Afrikan
refugees were under tight control as a national group. The
free bourgeois labor market of Euro-Amerikans didn't
really exist for Afrikans. Their employment was not individual,
not private. They got work only when a company
consciously decided to use Afrikan labor as a group. So
that Afrikan labor in the industrial North still existed
under colonial conditions, driven into specific workplaces
and specific jobs.
Afrikans were understood by the companies as
dynamite - extremely useful and potentially very
dangerous. Their use in Northern industry was the start,
though little understood at the time, of gradually bringing
the new European immigrants up from proletarians to real
settlers. Imperialism was gradually releasing the "Hunky"
and "Dago" from laboring at the very bottom of the factories.
Now even more Euro-Amerikans were being pushed
upward into the ranks of skilled workers and supervisors.
And if the Afrikan workers were paid more than their
usual colonial wages in the South, they still earned less
than "white man's wages." Even the newest European immigrant
on the all-white production lines could look at the
Afrikan laborers and know his new-found privileges as a
settler.
The ca~italists also knew that too many Afrikans
might turn a useful and super-profitable tool into a
dangerous force. Afrikan labor was used only in a controlled
way, with heavy restrictions placed upon it. One Indiana
steel mill superintendent in the 1920s said: "When
we got (up to 10% Black) employees, I said, 'No more colored
without discussion. ' I got the colored pastors to send