By W. T. Whitney Jr.

It’s true. Too often, in too many circumstances, for too long, the lives of Black people in the United States don’t matter. Black people fill prisons; their children fill terrible schools; too many are poverty-stricken. But at issue here are the killings and the people left to die.

Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that Black people would not matter and that many would die. A thousand or so were killed in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois. Over 2000 more would be lynched during the Reconstruction years, as documented recently by the Equal Justice Initiative. (1) That organization had already documented and memorialized thousands of lynching deaths occurring between 1877 and 1950.

Epitomized by the suffocation death of George Floyd on May 25, police killings of Black people – a matter of lynching under state auspices – brought the Black Lives Matter movement into being. But Black people are dying quite unnecessarily in the United States in other ways.  

Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people. And, as the Covid19 pandemic plays out, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.”

Journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic, adds that, “workers at the front lines of the pandemic … have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.” 

Significantly, even white people viewed as worthless may be in trouble. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, commenting on the Covid 19 pandemic, told a reporter that “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country.” Representative Hollingsworth of Indiana identified Coronavirus deaths as “the lesser of these two evils,” the other being economic collapse. 

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable – if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers do not deal realistically with the near certainty that soon many millions will be dying due to climate change. 

Dan Glazebrook, writing for Counterpunch is a witness. He asserts that, “one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste.” Criticizing Britain’s management of the Covid 19 crisis, he notes that, “Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system [are] the main output of the bourgeois epoch. … [S]urplus Europeans were exiled … to the colonies … to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans.

Glazebrook cites urban theoretician and historian Mike Davis’s observation that up to 3 billion informal workers constitute “the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet.” But this “is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers. [It’s] a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.”

Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield identifies some people as “residues.” “They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work … A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent [and] life itself is contingent.” George Floyd’s live was contingent. The lives of U.S. Black people who don’t matter are residues.

Under capitalism, human beings are valued for their use. Enslaved, Black workers were useful, even essential. Then their agrarian society merged with the larger one embarked upon industrial production and territorial expansion. They acquired a distant master that, like the old one, measured the worth of workers with an economic yardstick. 

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. The violent thugs hovering over them have had free rein. 

Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers an explanation for how the failure of Reconstruction led to limited political rights for Black people and exclusion from real participation in the larger society. Initially, “the reconstructed states were in the power of the rebels and … they were using their power to put the Negro back into slavery.” But the North “united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped …to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty.” 

The northern business class was insecure: “the Republican party which represented it was a minority party.” But “united with abolition-democracy [with its] tremendous moral power and popularity,” the party hoped to “buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry.” Giving Blacks the vote “would save the day.” The Republicans sought to nullify apportionment based on non-voting slaves, as provided for in the Constitution. Southerners had relied on that device to inflate their representation in Washington. 

But poor whites in the South regarded Blacks as wage competitors. Landowners proceeded to “draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests were with the planter class.” Poor whites “thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners, and employers of Negro labor.” They wanted “to check the demands of the Negroes by any means” and were willing “to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties.”

In the North, “Abolitionists failed to see that … the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” And so, “labor control passed into the hands of white southerners, who combined with white labor to oust northern capitalists” and themselves manage a southern-style capitalist economy.  

What resulted remained for decades. Wages for Black people, initially non-existent or very low, stayed depressed. Aspiring Black landowners met resistance, eventually at the hands even of New Deal officials. Because the methods of exploitation available to southern overlords, sharecropping and the convict-leasing system, were less profitable than those available to northern capitalists, the material value of southern Blacks was low.    

Most Black people were barred from occupying a sustainable niche in the productive apparatus of the U.S. economy. They’ve verged on the irrelevant, remaining as a “residue,” at risk of being disposed of. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. political system has been open enough to allow many Black people to find remunerative work, elevate their social-class status, and be safe.  Even Black workers defied expectations: in 1950, 43% of Black men in Michigan were working in the auto industry. (2)

The argument here has centered on social-class difference. But racism, which operates as a means for imposing differentiation among humans, also had a part. The notion of racism elaborated by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is relevant.  Reed explains that racism showed up historically as a tool devised by oppressors for dealing with social conflict. He claims that white settlers and other exploiters configured differences among humans – physical, cultural, and religious plus others fashioned out of upper-class snobbery – into an all-embracing concept of race. They thus gained the ability to weaponize inequalities within human society, the better to enforce oppression. 

One example: southern elites, from Reconstruction on, arranged for Blacks and the white underclass to be at each other’s throats. Their northern counterparts did likewise, leaving it so that Blacks and whites don’t easily unite in common struggle. 

Racism serves as an adjunct to classed-based oppression. Causing pain, racism works for maintaining social-class boundaries. The combination of the two has resulted in Black people being relegated to a generally precarious role within U.S. society and remaining vulnerable to lethal violence. 

Some basic ideas, no less true for being platitudinous, may suffice to conclude this effort. One, an injury to one is an injury to all. Two, ruling class prerogatives and oppression travel in the same lane. Three, dedication to equality, radical or otherwise, does matter.  

Anti-colonialist intellectual and activist Franz Fanon has the last word: “For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” You need to replace “Africa” with “USA.” 

Notes:

1. Reconstruction in America – Racial Violence After the Civil War, 1865 – 1876, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama; pp 118; eji.org  

2. Victor Perlo, People vs. Profits, (International Publishers, NY, 2003), p. 181. 

The police killings of Black people prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter.  But they die unnecessarily in others ways. Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people.

According to journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Specifically, “workers at the front lines of the [Covid 19] pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.” 

Epitomized by the suffocation death of George Floyd on May 25, police killings of Black people – a matter of lynching under state auspices – brought the Black Lives Matter movement into being. But Black people are dying quite unnecessarily in the United States in other ways.  

Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people. And, as the Covid19 pandemic plays out, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic, adds that, “workers at the front lines of the pandemic … have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.” 

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable – if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers seem to be at ease presently with the probability that millions will be dying soon due to climate change. 

The political powers do not deal realistically with the near certainty that soon many millions will be dying due to climate change. 

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. Violent thugs threatening them have had free rein. 

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. The violent thugs hovering over them have had free rein.

By W. T. Whitney Jr. 

Book Review: Don Fitz, Cuban Health Care, (Monthly Review Press, NY, 2020), ISBN paper: 978-158367-860-2, pp.303, monthlyreview.org. 

If they are paying attention, progressives worldwide know that Cuba provides healthcare that saves lives and prevents disease more effectively than does the United States, its major capitalist enemy. They know that Cuban health workers have been caring for people throughout the global South and, during the Covid -19 pandemic, in Europe too. And the word is out that Cuba educates vast numbers of physicians for much of the world. 

Many U.S. fans of Cuba’s Revolution know that, early on, care was extended to desperate rural areas of the island, that large number of new health workers were trained, that disease prevention was prioritized. They may know that healthcare planners pioneered in devising an exemplary primary medical care system. They had tried and abandoned versions of the so-called polyclinics, then arrived at the pathbreaking family doctor – nurse program.

The polyclinics featured general practitioners, pediatricians, gynecologists, dentists, pediatricians, and sometimes psychologists working in one setting. Once the family doctor-nurse teams took responsibility for primary care, in 1984, the polyclinics were assigned consulting and teaching duties. Essential to the family doctor-nurse program was the creation of a new medical discipline, comprehensive general medicine, for which a new post-graduate, multi-year training program was devised. 

Cuban Health Care, written by Don Fitz’ and recently published by Monthly Review Press, explores these developments and more. Fitz explains how healthcare was integrated into the community and how the notion of health itself came to include social, psychological, economic, and nutritional wellbeing. His book surveys Cuba’s highly successful management of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; the role of Cuban doctors – and anti-apartheid troops – in southern Africa; disaster relief and general healthcare provided in countries throughout the world, and medical training for tens of thousands of young people from Latin America, Africa, and even Asia and the United States. Fitz explores the origins and mission of Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM)  that between 2006 and 2019 provided training at no personal cost for 29,749 students from 115 nations. 

Readers of this valuable book learn about difficulties confronted by Cuban leaders as they developed a new kind of health system. These included shortages of medical practitioners and teachers due to emigration in the early 1960s, competing revolutionary goals, frictions with Cuba’s Soviet ally, fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, harmful effects of the U.S. economic blockade, and false accusations of homophobia directed at those responsible for Cuba’s HIV/AIDS treatment program. 

There would have no reformation of Cuba’s healthcare system, the author points out, without revolutionary change in the larger society. He praises Cuban healthcare as emblematic for what a revolution can achieve. His insertion of a chapter on the failings of U.S. healthcare – and a very coherent account it is – conveys the suggestion that Cuba’s model may be useful for healthcare reformers in the United States. 

No specifics are offered – and certainly no call for political revolution in the United States. Fitz critiques U. S. healthcare in terms like “profit-based health care,” or the “sickness industry,” but without explicit reference to capitalism. He finds solutions in a “post-capitalist society” or through “the emergence and consolidation of a new consciousness,” but not through socialist change. 

Cuban Health Care benefits from the author’s first-hand observations and from his interviews with providers, officials, and students – particularly students at ELAM – and interviews conducted by others that he cites. Many of the personal experiences and opinions expressed in interviews convey revolutionary purpose, enthusiasm for change, and hope for a better world. Several former Cuban soldiers who fought apartheid in southern Arica offer reflections that, intentionally or not on the author’s part, lay out the horrors of war.   

Don Fitz’s book brings together information on Cuba’s Revolution and Cuba’s brand of healthcare; it communicates a vision of progressive social change. Clearly written and easily read, it deserves a wide audience. 

One notes, however, that information, opinion, and data contained in some chapters had appeared in earlier ones. Articles the author had written for periodicals found new life as chapters in his book and those articles may have contained repetitions that made their way into the book. Plus, some data in the book is not current, due perhaps to data in the older articles not having been updated for the book.  

This is a wide-ranging book, but significant aspects of Cuban healthcare escaped mention. For example, Cuban healthcare planners are pragmatic. Ready to abandon tradition or an initiative if it doesn’t work, they experiment – as illustrated by their moving from one kind of polyclinic to another, and ultimately to the family doctor-nurse program. And, as reported by Fitz, the prevailing mode of scientific medicine co-exists with community-based healing practices.    

Secondly, healthcare renovation in Cuba made ample provision for complicated and/or unusual illnesses – to be expected of any health system, revolutionary or not, aiming at comprehensive care. Cuba has maintained an expanded corps of clinical specialists and scientists and has supported a variety of specialized care institutions. 

The New England Journal of Medicine reported (December 8, 1983) that, “Cuba has engineered a national medical apparatus that is the envy of many developing nations. For some of these nations, it is not Boston, Massachusetts but Havana Cuba, that is the center of the medical world.” The report describes “National medical institutes [that] carry out highly specialized procedures, such as kidney transplantations and some heart operations … Children are sent to separate pediatric facilities, and almost all newborns (98.9 per cent) are delivered in maternity hospitals. Cuba has a wide range of hospitals offering other kinds of specialized care. [And] most of the drugs (83 percent) used in Cuba are manufactured by its own pharmaceutical industry.” 

For a blockaded, impoverished, and tiny nation over the course of a few years to have prepared and mobilized skilled personnel and to have arranged for supplies, equipment, and appropriate physical structures was an extraordinary achievement. 

Third, Cuban revolutionaries in power embarked upon a many-faceted bio-medical-pharmacological venture with research and production capabilities. Cuban-produced vaccines, drugs and other therapeutic and testing products have benefited Cubans themselves and peoples throughout the world.  Export sales of these products have provided much-needed foreign currency. 

In a recent report, analyst Charles Mckelvey states that, “In the period 1962 to 1973, fifty-three ‘units of science and technology’ were created, including research institutions in the natural sciences, medicine, technology, agricultural sciences, and social sciences. … On October 17, 1962, the “Victoria de Girón” Institute of Preclinical and Basic Sciences was inaugurated. Formed by a group of fifteen university professors of medicine and other teaching and laboratory personnel, its mission was to strengthen education in the medical sciences. However, it soon became evident that it was necessary to considerably expand the facilities for biomedical research.” 

Fourth, a defining characteristic of Cuban-style healthcare is competence.  Measuring competence in such an arena verges on the impossible, but there are indications. In her 1991 report on “the Road to a Family Medicine Nation”, Margaret Gilpin describes an elaborate process toward that end. Advice was sought from other countries and from international agencies.  Multiple planning commissions were involved. The introductory phase was closely watched.  Little was left to chance. 

It must be noted, lastly, that the book devotes little attention to struggle between social classes as contributing to a progressive mode of healthcare. The author emphasizes instead the creativity and initiative of individuals, as with his final chapter entitled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID 19.”  Our idea is that Cuba’s brand of healthcare grew out of social stresses, and out of ideological ferment. The socialist roots of Cuban healthcare are not explored.

The book sporadically mentions adverse effects of the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, which indeed is a manifestation of class conflict in the international sphere. The author missed the opportunity in his hands of systematically condemning the U.S. blockade as he was praising healthcare in Cuba. 

By W. T. Whitney Jr. – June 10, 2020

Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. Some “250,000 teenagers  were on the road.” And how many others? By 1933 one third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25 percent. The lives of working people were devastated. 

The federal government’s New Deal led to political and social reforms. Now the U.S. government once more has a big economic crisis on its hands, this one associated with the COVID 19 pandemic. It’s providing mostly financial relief, with a lot going to big economic players. 

During the Great Depression, people responded at the grassroots level too, particularly in urban neighborhoods. In the midst of another economic crisis, it makes sense that something similar happen again. This report is about a grassroots tool of 90 years ago and about its potential usefulness now. As will be seen, assaults on working people are harmful enough now to provide ample justification for possobly picking up that tool again.   

In fact, workers and their families created their own means of rescue as the Great Depression took hold. Demanding food, housing, and jobs, they organized, agitated, and prodded politicians to provide relief and reform. They did so through the Unemployed Councils. New in early 1930 and organized by the Communist Party USA, the Councils took root in many cities. 

They came into being step by step. In 1929 the Comintern decided that capitalist crisis manifesting as a worldwide economic depression required a “revolutionary offensive.” Responding, the CPUSA formed its Trade Union Unity League. That organization set up “Councils of Unemployed Workers.” According to a Party publication, “the tactical key to the present stage of class struggle is the fight against unemployment.”  

At once the Unemployment Councils organized unemployment protests that swept across the country. March 6, 1930 was designated as “International Unemployment Day,” a day when  one million demonstrators filled the streets of cities. 

Thousands of police violently attacked more than 100,000 workers filling New York’s Union Square. Demonstrations continued over several months in many cities, as did police harassment. New recruits flooded the Unemployment Councils. March 6 became an annual occasion for repeat nationwide demonstrations.

The Unemployment Councils, functioning autonomously in urban neighborhoods, pressured local relief officials to assist individuals and families. They badgered utility companies to restore gas or electricity to non-paying households. The Councils organized rent strikes beginning in 1931. They recruited crowds that, having overwhelmed the police and local officials, allowed evicted tenants to return to their dwellings. Council activists besieging city offices demanded reduced rents and no more evictions.

The Unemployment Councils reached out to Black workers, even in southern cities. Actions of the Unemployment Councils helped provide impetus for New Deal reforms like unemployment insurance, protection of labor rights, and security for elderly Americans and children.  

Hunger marches organized by the Unemployment Councils took place in various cities from 1931 on. The police killed five people marching in the “Ford Hunger March” in Dearborn, Michigan on March 7 1932; 60,000 people joined the funeral procession. At a national hunger march converging on Washington on December 7,1931, marchers demanded unemployment insurance and a “social insurance system to cover maternity care, illness, accidents, and old age.” 

A year later even more marchers, mainly Communist Party members, descended on Washington for a repeat national hunger march. They called forjobs, relief measures, taxation of the wealthy, and an end to racial discrimination. Members of Congress met with march leaders. The Roosevelt administration would soon direct states to expand relief efforts and promote job programs.   

           The CPUSA set up “The Unemployment Council  of the U.S.A.” in 1931 in part to deal with rapid turn-over of community activists affiliating with local Councils. The problem would remain. The national Council provided local Councils with guidance on national and international issues. Even so, individual Councils focused primarily on the hardships and needs of workers and their families, in their own neighborhoods. 

The national organization in 1932 published a 20-page pamphlet titled: “Fighting Methods and Organization Forms of the Unemployed Councils: A Manual for Hunger Fighters.” The introduction begins: 

“The Unemployed Councils base their program on a recognition of the fact that those who own and control the wealth and government are willing to allow millions to suffer hunger and want in order that their great wealth shall not be drawn upon for relief. We know that the living standards of employed and unemployed alike will be progressively reduced unless we organize and conduct united and militant resistance. We know that the amount and extent of relief which the ruling class can be compelled to provide depends upon the extent to which the unemployed and employed workers together organize and fight….”  

The trajectory of the Councils changed. New Deal relief programs took effect, and the Communist Party, following the lead of the Comintern, turned to alliances with other progressive forces. This was the Popular Front. The Unemployment Councils gradually gave way to the Workers Alliance of America, formed by the CPUSA in 1936 and based in Washington. The Alliance welcomed Socialist Party unemployment groups and pacifist A.J. Muste’s Unemployment League. Its activities centered on lobbying for relief measures and worker protection.

Pandemic and sick economy

The Unemployment Councils were new and, within the context of that era, were extraordinary. They attended solely to the needs of workers. They were based in local communities. And they were a creature of the Communist Party. Their time may have come again.

One determining factor is the severity of the current economic collapse and its impact on the lives of working people. Indeed, this crisis looks like it’s going to hurt workers and their families as much as did the Great Depression. The assumption here is that the extraordinary nature of the present danger to working Americans must be appreciated in order to accept the idea that an extraordinary instrument of repair, the Unemployment Councils, is required once more.    

Unemployment – As of early June, 42.6 million U.S. workers had filed unemployment claims. The official unemployment rate was 14.7 percent in April, 13.3 percent in May. In May the official rate for Black people was 16.8 percent and for Latinos, 17.6 percent. However, “a quirk in BLS methodology” (Bureau of Labor Statistics) misclassified people absent from work due to COVID 19. The actual unemployment rate in April was 23.6 percent. According to economist David Ruccio, the total of the underemployed plus the officially unemployed represents 31 percent of the U.S. labor force. 

Significantly, ”39 percent of employed people in households making less than $40,000 lost their job or [had] been furloughed in March.” Official unemployment figures don’t include the chronically non-employed. The Brookings Institute reports that, in 2017, 15 percent of “American men between the ages of 25 and 54” were not working for a variety of reasons, imprisonment and others. 

Housing Loss – That many workers can’t pay rent sets the stage for evictions. Signs of tenant resistance have cropped up. For instance, Rent Strike 2020 is a “disaster relief organization owned and controlled by regular working people.” It demands that states “freeze rent, mortgage and utility bill collection for 2 months, or face a rent strike.” According to the website westriketogether.org, 33 percent of residential tenants didn’t pay rent in May and almost 350,000 tenants have signed a rent-strike pledge. 

Access to Health Care – Many of the newly unemployed have lost their employer-based healthcare insurance. They can’t pay for health care and soon will total 11 million working people. A crisis of access existed already. In 2018, no less than 30.1 million people under the age of 65 lacked health insurance. In 2019, 28 percent of adults with employer-based health insurance were underinsured.  

Food is short – The Brookings Institute recently declared that, “By the end of April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, were food insecure “ In April, “21.9 percent of households with nonelderly adults were food insecure”. 

Dairy farmers are dumping milk. Hog and chicken farmers are killing their animals and growers are plowing crops into the ground. These are “scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression,” and, says the Guardian, “overproduction will sour the market.”  This is a crisis of capitalism.  

Racism – Non-white populations are vulnerable. They are generally sicker than white people from illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, HIV, morbid obesity, and kidney disease. That’s mostly because racial discrimination encourages low-quality health care, reduced access to care, and lack of preventative care. Racism forces a disproportionate number of non-white workers to live in places full of environmental toxins. The stress of living under racism may lead to or worsen  physical illnesses.

These points of vulnerability translate into high risk, plainly evident as African Americans and Latinos people confront the COVID 19 virus. One report has it that “COVID-19 mortality rate [in May] for Black Americans is 2.4 times as high as the rate for Whites and 2.2 times as high as the rate for Asians and Latinos.” Latinos, 18 percent of the U.S. population, in April accounted for 25 percent of COVID 19 deaths. Death rates for Blacks and Latinos living in cities range from two to four times higher than white people living in cities.

At issue here is suffering caused by economic crisis. Resilience helps economically-abused victims survive, and resilience may be in short supply for a class of people hit exceptionally hard by the COVID 19 virus. Besides, most of these victims are members of the working class, and they are more likely than higher-income employees to have been working “in public-facing occupations” and to experience  “inequitable distribution of scarce testing and hospital resources.” 

Women are victims– According to one report, the “hardest hit [during the pandemic] will be the world’s women and girls and populations already impacted by racism and discrimination …  Women are 70 percent of the global health workforce and the majority of social workers and caregivers.” They “deliver 70 percent of global caregiving hours.” The report does not mention that these multitudes of women doing necessary work belong overwhelmingly to the working class, in the United States and elsewhere.

The broad conclusion here is that the impact of this economic downturn has been and will be disastrous for working people, extraordinarily so. The usual governmental remedies seeking to balance worker and business interests won’t adequately serve the working class. Too often what is done ends up pitting the needs of workers against the needs, real and imagined, of those who lack for nothing. And guess who losses out! 

The Unemployment Councils provided an extraordinary boost in their time to workers and their families. A return engagement is in order, in one form or another.  

A peripheral concern must be attended to. The argument may be advanced that this economic crisis will be brief and so why go to all the trouble? No, it will not be brief. 

U.S. delay in preventing spread of the virus allowed the pandemic to build. Lax social-distancing and irregular quarantine will ensure its prolongation. A comprehensive regimen of testing, tracing of contacts, and quarantine would have made all the difference, according to a medical expert. 

The virus has charge of the U.S. economy, said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell: “We are now experiencing a whole new level of uncertainty, as questions only the virus can answer complicate the outlook.” (NY Times, May 21) 

Besides, an already flawed U.S. economy doesn’t rate a quick fix. It was already stumbling due to “stagflation” (inflationary tendencies co-existing with stagnant economic output), unpayable debt, and financialization. The latter signifies diminished productive capacity. 

Correlations

This report on the potential usefulness now of Unemployment Councils is of an introductory nature.  Even so, it does appear that the Councils have great potential to meet the needs of many working people in great trouble now in the United States – but not all of them.  

The Councils’ usefulness would rest on conditions under which they would be applied.  One would be that they deal with unemployment, lack of housing, and hunger. These are problems presenting both now and then in roughly similar fashion. Another would be that Councils of today pay heed to features characterizing their performances then. These included: attention to workers’ most pressing social and economic needs, rapid response, militancy, and long-term revolutionary goals. All were crucial to the Councils’ achievements. 

Other problems of today don’t fit with interventions of the kind offered years ago by Unemployment Councils.  These are: reduced access to healthcare, racial inequalities, and gender inequalities. They were as problematic then as they are now, but society and even worker organizations of that time either accepted the injustices they represented or weren’t prepared to engage with them.  

Those still unmet needs do demand attention now and any version of renewed Unemployment Councils would have to accommodate them. The difficulties in doing so represent a threshold that revived Unemployment Councils would have to overcome. How that would happen without major revamping is unclear.  

A full inquiry into the history and potential use of Unemployment Councils would require study of the feasibility of putting them into effect. However, doing so in the detail that is required and with any sort of comprehensiveness is beyond the scope of this introductory note. Suffice it to say – and in conclusion –that to revive effective and strong Councils today would be no easy task. The precondition for doing so may not yet exist. What’s required, as it seems, is the reality of support now, or the promise of support, emanating from ongoing popular mobilization with a working-class focus.

It was different earlier. Communist organizers in the 1930s drew upon enthusiasms left over from the socialist and workers’ movements that had peaked two decades previously. They also took new encouragement from socialist revolution in Russia in 1917. 

N. B. Historian Roy Rosenzweig’s chapter appearing in “Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present,” edited by James Green (1983) provided much of the information appearing here on Unemployment Councils.