Let’s consider what actually happened to Black Americans: centuries of slavery, followed by decades of a second sort of slavery in the form of sharecropping, followed by the displacement of automation.

From Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work : The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era”:

> “In 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically; by 1964, it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines. For the first time since they had been brought over as slaves to work the agricultural fields in the South, black hands and backs were no longer needed. Overnight, the sharecropper system was made obsolete by technology. Planters evicted millions of tenants from the land, leaving them homeless and jobless.”

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Millions of Black Americans migrated to the industrialized and industrializing cities of the north, taking up manufacturing jobs in places like Detroit.

This solution to having been automated out of agricultural work, unfortunately, did not last long. From Rifkin again:

> “The number of manufacturing jobs in Detroit fell dramatically beginning in the mid-1950s as a result of the automation and suburbanization of production. Black workers, who just a few years earlier were displaced by the mechanized cotton picker in the rural South, once again found themselves victims of mechanization. In the 1950s, 25.7 percent of Chrysler workers and 23 percent of General Motors workers were African-American. Equally important, because the black workers made up the bulk of the unskilled labor force, they were the first to be let go because of automation. In 1960 a mere twenty-four black workers were counted among the 7,425 skilled workers at Chrysler. At General Motors, only sixty-seven blacks were among the more than 11,000 skilled workers on the payroll. The productivity and unemployment figures tell the rest of the story. Between 1957 and 1964, manufacturing output doubled in the United States, while the number of blue collar workers fell by 3 percent. Again, many of the first casualties of the new automation drive were black workers, who were disproportionately represented in the unskilled jobs that were the first to be eliminated by the new machines.”

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So let’s review: following centuries of slavery, after which Black Americans were rendered a propertyless underclass dependent on wage employment by their former enslavers, Black Americans were displaced first by automation in agriculture and then again by automation in manufacturing.

US society weathered the disruptions posed by these massive changes in production and population movements, in part, by concentrating their effects on this permanent, racially segregated underclass.

Do we really need to point to culture to explain what has been done to the Black community in the US? As Karl Polanyi argued in “The Great Transformation,”

> “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.”

The demolition of society.

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Let’s fast-forward to 2016, when an essay appeared in one of the conservative moment’s flagship publications, National Review, that contained this passage:

> “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too.”

Was the author talking about Black Americans, as was the author of that 1994 Newsweek essay? You’d be forgiven for thinking he was, because the sentiment is so nearly exactly the same.

But no:

> “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

nationalreview.com/2016/03/don…

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Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction

The American white working class is suffering, but what it needs is real opportunity — not Donald Trump.

^{Kevin D. Williamson (National Review)}

These are all of the same complaints—a culture of thuggish criminality, drugs, promiscuity, welfare dependency, and so on—that I had heard for years directed at Black Americans.

When I first came across this essay, I was shocked at how ominous it was. The US chattering class had been employed for years to justify the degradation and ruination of the Black community as entirely the fault of Black people, as distinct from the white majority.

But now, for the first time in my life, here was the chattering class working to justify the degradation and ruination of white Americans—in exactly the same terms that had been used against Black Americans.

There was, in short, no one left who was safe, whom our elites would work to shield from the effects of capitalist dislocation. The creeping effects of immiseration had spilled over their previous reserve among Black Americans and our elites were responding by turning their backs on their previously precious constituents.

The demolition of society.

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I don’t think we can understand the current crisis facing the US without this context: the abandonment of impoverished whites in precisely the same way that the US had previously abandoned Black Americans.

White Americans might be more associated stereotypically with opioids than crack, disability rather than welfare, rural isolation rather than urban ghettos, but the gist is the same. Millions of people made superfluous to the capitalist economy, no longer profitable to exploit under prevailing capitalist processes, are being warehoused in dead-end communities and in prisons, left to wait to die, with no hopes of a better life under the status quo.

This isn’t to pretend that Trumpism will actually help anyone. On the contrary, Trumpist fascism is just capitalism in terminal decline, lashing out and acceleration the ruination of all those Americans, Black and white and everyone else. But we can’t understand why so many people would turn to extremism without first understanding that most Americans have been living for decades or longer in a *demolished society*.

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One of the reasons that *collapse* can seem like such an overly dramatic descriptor for US society is that societal collapse had, until fairly recently, been delegated to particular segments of society to deal with exclusively.

But collapse has been marching steadily on over the years, and US elites can no longer keep the effects of collapse restricted to those sacrificial victims. And when mainstream US society began to confront the effects of collapse, of that demolished society, without any scapegoats left to carry the burden, the US ended up with fascism.

It should come as no surprise. But there can be no fixing that problem without first confronting where it came from.

buymeacoffee.com/HeavenlyPossu…

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