Monthly Archives: June 2020

The Menace of American Fascism (Harold M. Baron, 1969)

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Synopsis by Donald Planey

In the unpublished manuscript “The Menace of American Fascism,” Baron explores the possible historical conditions under which the United States could potential undergo a turn towards fascist politics.  Using and clarifying his approach to radical institutionalism, Baron conceptualizes the U.S. social fabric as a set of class and race formations set against the backdrop of the moving terrain of the post-war labor market.  To explore the future dangers of a reactionary turn in American politics, Baron examines the politics and social base of the 1968 George Wallace campaign, as well as the reasons for Nixon’s ultimate victory over Hubert Humphrey.  Instead of the dominant contemporary approach to radical institutionalism represented by C. Wright Mills, which was dedicated to uncovering the “power elites” within the U.S. business-state nexus, Baron’s institutionalism was dedicated to studying the ways in which different class-race formations attempted to secure their social standing amid an unraveling post-war social contract. 

In Baron’s analysis, post-war growth in inequality is concomitant with an increasing sense of distance from the U.S. political system among Americans.  Due to racial divides within the United States, this alienation has manifested in different ways between the white and Black working classes.  While the Black working class was at the height of its support for civil rights and Black liberation, the white working class was torn between economic populism and white supremacy.  While Baron notes that Wallace’s politics resemble the original European fascist movements in key ways, he views the U.S. bourgeoisie as equally complicit in opening up possibilities for fascist reaction against Black liberations and growing white impoverishment.   

Fascism, in Baron’s understanding, is enabled by structural and institutional conditions at specific junctures in a nation’s economic development, not just the presence of fascist ideology among certain individuals.  The U.S.’s founding mythology valorizes the white yeoman entrepreneur and worker.  However, white conservatism’s free market convictions (embodied by Barry Goldwater) also inhibited the formation of an effective social base for an American fascist movement, by throwing cold water on the desire of more Wallace-type conservatives to construct a supportive welfare state for white Americans.  However, these did not simply reflect different factions of white conservatism.  White Wallace-style populists still viewed themselves as committed to a free market.  But if mainstream elites were to begin valuing “security” over freedom, and white populists were able to square the circle of white-only egalitarianism, a space could open up for a genuine American fascism within the U.S. civil society. 

Building Babylon: A Case of Racial Controls in Public Housing (Harold M. Baron, 1971)

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Synopsis by Briana Gipson

In 1971, Hal Baron published an incredible study on the relationship between housing policy, urban planning, and racism in 20th century Chicago. This study was titled Building Babylon: A Case of Racial Controls in Public Housing, a study completed by Baron during his time as a Research Associate of the Center of Urban Affairs at Northwestern University.[1] Baron used dozens of first-hand accounts, legal proceedings, and peer-reviewed articles and books to vividly recall the ways government institutions and property owners embodied racism in the development of post-World War II Chicago. His study shed an investigative light on the anti-Black practices committed by government officials, housing authorities, and planning agencies engaging in land use planning, particularly community and economic development planning, in the early to mid-1900s.

His study argues that Chicago and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) created one of the most racist public housing programs using several planning and housing controls. These controls included discriminatory segregation, zoning, and public housing site, tenant and management regulations and procedures. He shows that these governance structures were implemented to expand the power of the mostly white ruling class and further terrorize, suppress, and control Black communities in Chicago. He refers to Chicago’s anti-Black housing program as Babylon, a code name used by federal officials to describe the nature of Chicago’s Housing program in the 1960s.[2] Baron provides a telling story of the ways Chicago’s public housing program perpetuated a regelated status of Blacks in and outside of the City’s public housing developments in seven sections.

Baron begins unpacking his story on the racist nature of Chicago’s housing program with a background section on the complexities and gaps of the federal public housing policy. He particularly introduces readers to the Housing Act of 1937. The Housing Act of 1937 was the first legislation to create large-scale, fully funded public housing programs in the United States during the Great Depression. Baron notes that it was not radical legislation as if often believed with New Deal legislation. The Housing Act of 1937 was designed to improve the built environment and housing stock for powerful, higher income groups rather than the poor. Baron identifies three limitations that showed the latter. But he makes it clear that public housing programs were not stigmatized and subsequently, designed to control groups, especially Blacks, in its infancy. He includes quotes from CHA’s first Executive Secretary, Elizabeth Wood, and the United States Housing Authority (USHA) that showed that public housing programs were initially respected and valued among a wide range of racial, ethnic, and class groups. This pattern of social acceptance would continue well into World War II.

It was after World War II Baron notes that resulted in public housing programs becoming stigmatized, racist institutions. Baron unpacks the latter statement by first describing the suburbanization processes that took place following World War II. He hones in on the history of Federal Housing Administration home loans and transportation infrastructure development in the 20th century. He describes that federal home lending and transportation policies along with McCarthyism and the Cold War lead to the weakening of the public housing movement. The movement would be further weakened by the urban renewal of the mid-20th century. Baron notes that federal development policies began to be prioritized over public housing as the public housing movement dwindled. This created the conditions for public housing programs to become subordinate to development pressures and led to public housing being stigmatized as “second-class housing for second-class people.”[3] Baron makes sure to inform readers that public housing projects became predominantly Black and failed due to Blacks’ treatment as second-class citizens.

Baron ends this section noting that public housing critics are recognizing the issues that led to public housing failures. However, he explains that they fail to simply acknowledge that public housing programs are rooted and enmeshed within “the web of urban racism.”[4] This web is made up of interconnected anti-Black urban forms, governance, and institutions that depends upon the repression of Black material conditions to magnify the white bourgeoisie’s power. Baron hints to the fact that the public housing system will remain flawed if critics do not dismantle the web and create social equity. In turn, he shows that his study is significant because it describes and challenges CHA’s position within the web and subsequently fills the gap of public housing critiques. 

Baron would write the next six sections explaining CHA’s inherent and systematic anti-Blackness due to “the web of urban racism.” The first of these six sections was titled “CHA, Creating a Racist Institution.” Baron provides a summary indicting CHA with embodying and enacting racism in this section. Baron used the nation’s most famous public housing desegregation lawsuit, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority—a case he helped initiate—to justify his indictment. In this case, the Federal District Court of Chicago found CHA responsible for suppressing the rights and opportunities of Black communities and intensifying segregation in Chicago. They particularly instituted discriminatory site and tenant selection schemes to separate and regulate Blacks behavior. These racial controls, as Baron identify, resulted in all Black public housing developments in mostly Black neighborhoods.

Baron emphasizes that the CHA did not create predominantly Black spatial patterns alone in his next section, “CHA, Creating a Racist Institution.” CHA was mandated by four major institutions to carry out an anti-Black agenda and practice Baron shows. The institutions consisted of the political system, the ruling class (ie. non-governmental institutions, corporations, and associations), real estate and finance industries, and CHA’s leadership and resources. Baron explains that these institutions organized and implemented economic and political decisions that were not in favor of and excluded Black communities for the ruling class’ benefit. Baron indicates that these decisions resulted in the CHA becoming and being associated with police and police terror in Black communities.

He picks up his discussion on the ways CHA controlled and terrorized the Black community in his second major section, “The Early Days, In the Spirit of the New Deal.” He begins this section with an introduction to Elizabeth Wood. Wood was CHA’s first Executive Secretary. She served in this position from 1937, the year CHA was established, to 1953, the year she was demoted because of her desegregation work. Baron shares that Wood would lead her administration in the liberal reform tradition. However, he notes that the liberal reform philosophy had race-based flaws that the CHA could not escape. For example, the CHA attempted to implement “color-blind” criteria commonly used by reformers to screen and select public housing tenants.[5] Baron thoroughly explains that the criterion used was racist because of federal segregation policy. One of these segregationist policies was known as the “Neighborhood Composition Rule”. This rule required that public housing authorities admit tenants that were representative of neighborhood’s residential racial composition during the era of Jim Crow.

Baron immediately begins describing the horrible impact of the “Neighborhood Composition Rule” on Blacks. It further restricted the limited supply of affordable housing available to Blacks. This was particularly the case in the Jane Addams Homes on Chicago’s West Side, where only a small share of Blacks displaced by the Home were guaranteed apartments. The “Neighborhood Composition Rule” would also empower the police, Whites, and even the real estate industry to commit physical and psychological violence against Blacks needing housing in majority White neighborhoods due to war-work. Baron would briefly highlight the physical violence that took place at the Ida B. Wells Homes site on the City’s South Side. He provided more depth on the mob-related violence that took place at the City’s Airport and Fernwood housing developments.

When the CHA did challenge the “Neighborhood Composition Rule”, Black families were heavily screened and sometimes selected if they met Whites’ standards Baron explains toward the end of this section. At Cabrini-Green, one of CHA’s most infamous public housing developments, more than 250 Black families endured this screening at a point of time during World War II. Yet, they still were not admitted in the Cabrini-Green homes even though CHA had vacancies. They could only move in if a Black family moved out, which would only worsen Blacks’ lower access to affordable housing. Baron notes that CHA continued controlling the number of Blacks admitted into large majority White housing developments to navigate the rule. He explains this contributed to CHA losing its independency as it became the center of public discourse and treated as a political entity. Baron shares that the elite would certainly make moves to control CHA, particularly through urban renewal processes. Baron ends this section by describing the significance of another racial control, urban renewal, and its impact on Black communities in Chicago. He would use this as a transition to his third major section related to the racist nature of CHA: “The Landed Interests Set Priorities.”

In “The Landed Interests Set Priorities” section, Baron describes CHA’s role in urban renewal. Throughout this section, Baron shows that urban renewal was a racist economic and community development planning process that stole and destroyed a significant and disproportionate amount of Black homes and neighborhoods. He begins unpacking the latter by describing the history of urban renewal in Illinois and Chicago. Readers learn that Illinois Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act of 1941 charted the path of urban renewal in Illinois. It provided private benefit corporations with legal and financial incentives to destroy deteriorated areas Baron identifies as slums in his study. Legal incentives included eminent domain rights, which is a powerful land-acquisition power that planners used to clear areas they zoned slums. He credits the development of the Michael Reese Hospital and Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s South Side as the initiator of a massive urban renewal campaign in Chicago. The movement would expand due to the Illinois Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947.

Baron starts explaining the connection between urban renewal and public housing with a speech Elizabeth Wood delivered to the American Public Works Association in the mid-1940s. Wood would denounce the urban planning field for prioritizing economic development at the expense of Blacks’ homes and livelihoods. She noted that their work led to the forced removal of Blacks as their homes were often demolished and unreplaced. She argues that CHA could address these issues by supplying public housing. Baron explains that this sentiment gained momentum among planning and public officials in 1948. They wanted to use public housing to house displaced Blacks. This would become known as ‘Negro relocation’.[6] Baron included a quote from a federal housing official describing ‘Negro Relocation’ as ‘Negro Clearance’, a common term used for urban renewal in the mid to late 20th century.[7] Baron made sure to highlight Blacks’ agency in challenging urban renewal processes and outcomes before describing CHA’s role in Blacks displacement with the Michael Reese Hospital agreement.

Baron notes that the CHA agreed to clear parts of a Black neighborhood for the Michael Reese Hospital in the Michael Reese Hospital agreement. Baron explains that the Michael Reese Hospital was a Jewish owned hospital and research center in a dilapidated area of a Black community. The Hospital determined that they wanted to change the neighborhood for profit and cost-related purposes. They worked with the CHA to gain cleared land by requesting the CHA use it eminent domain powers granted by the Illinois Redevelopment Act of 1947. The CHA would use its powers and later build its Dearborn Homes on the South Side to supply housing for displaced households. Baron explains that the Illinois Institute of Technology would join Michael Reese Hospital development efforts with the creation of the South Side Planning Board. He identifies a number of concessions the Hospital and Board made to show that they were not engaging in ‘Negro Clearance’ after Blacks resisted.[8]

Baron would end this section challenging the idea that urban clearance was designed to produce affordable, decent and safe homes. He suggests that the Michael Reese agreement showcases that urban renewal was centered around economic development interests rather than public housing or community development for Blacks. He describes how medical, educational, government, and economic institutions such as the Chicago Plan Commission treated public housing secondary to their economic interests and practices. Baron uses the next section, “The Battle over Sites” to show the power these institutions gained to pursue their interests and deprioritized housing.

“The Battle over Sites” was the fifth section Baron wrote on racist practices within the CHA. He particularly shows that the ruling class used land-use policy to restrict CHA’s influence on tenants’ housing supply and perpetuate racial segregation. Baron credits the Illinois Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947 as the cause of the latter. This urban renewal act gave Chicago’s City Council Alderman and their White constituents the power to vote on CHA’s public housing development sites. He describes two major battles ensued over this racial control in 1947 and 1950. He showed that the 1947 battle resulted in CHA not being able to develop large developments in profitable, vacant land in White neighborhoods. Instead, the CHA was forced to build nine small developments that would displace Blacks and lower their access to affordable housing.

In 1950, the CHA would lose its battle to develop 20,000 housing units on vacant and deteriorated sites using funds from the Housing Act of 1949. Baron describes the dramatic steps City Council members took to show their disproval of the sites CHA selected including touring the City and selecting “absurd” alternative sites.[9] In the end, City Council leaders and Mayor Kenelley forced CHA to expand racial segregation by only approving 9,000 sites in Black neighborhoods. This would further reduce Blacks access to affordable housing and displaced 7,000 households. Baron thoroughly explains that the City’s housing shortage and mass displacement approval reflected the dying public housing movement that was taking place at all political levels. He particular used anecdotes and quotes from Chicago’s real estate, mortgage, and housing leaders like Elizabeth Wood to show the latter and close out this section.

In Baron’s fifth major section, “Tightening the Bonds”, he describes the havoc urban renewal, public housing developments, and the CHA inflicted on Blacks. He notes that land clearance and redevelopment practices displaced well over 33,000 Black households and destroyed over 25% of Blacks’ housing stock between 1948 and 1965. He particularly highlights CHA impact on Blacks’ displacement and housing stock by describing the significant amount of hardship the Michael Reese agreement created for Blacks. He provides statistics showing that the land CHA cleared for the Michael Reese Hospital resulted in substantial portions of Black families paying more in rent. He includes a table showing that Blacks were often paying more for lower-quality residential units when forced to move. Although those who moved to public housing often paid less and received larger and better-quality homes, Baron mentions that multiple studies have found that the number of Blacks paying high rents increased by 50%.

Baron connects the impacts of the Michael Reese Hospital to public housing data. This development along with others’ contribution to displacement and higher rents resulted in Blacks public housing demand ranging between 65% and 95%. Baron shows that public housing did not often meet the demands of displaced Blacks due to racism. He makes it clear that the CHA restricted Blacks housing by deeming a high rate of Blacks ineligible or imposing longer apartment wait times. Baron explains that the CHA tried to increase Blacks access through integrated projects. However, racial disparities still existed as Whites were given priority to certain units through a race-based coding scheme. In all White public housing developments, Commissioners had to authorized Blacks admittance. Barons end this section with a description of a violent accidental desegregation effort that took place at a White public housing development known as the Trumbull Park Homes in 1953. He used this incident to explain that urban renewal was a less subtle form of the White mob violence that took place at the Trumbull Park Homes.

He would dedicate the sixth major section, “Reservations in the City”, to describing the systematic violence the CHA employed against Blacks in public housing developments. First, he describes how Blacks became segregated. He mainly describes the Kean-Murphy agreement, an informal segregation agreement made between CHA’s Executive Director, General W.B. Kean, and Aldermen William Murphy, chairman of Chicago’s Housing and Planning Committee. It gave the Chicago’s Housing and Planning Committee and Alderman the right to veto CHA housing development sites. It also prompted the CHA to double the number of proposed sites in Black neighborhoods. Baron shows that this agreement led to Chicago’s City Council expanding segregation as 99.4% of approved CHA developments were in Black neighborhoods. This certainly would contribute to Blacks becoming CHA’s largest public housing tenant group Baron shows.

Baron provides a powerful description of the ways CHA constrained its Black tenant base. He highlights unjust housing transfer policies that showed that Blacks were often “stuck in place” in CHA’s housing developments. They could not move between housing developments unless extraordinary circumstances existed. He describes CHA’s failure to maintain their housing developments due to inefficient bureaucratic procedures and the role it played in the death of a three-year-old Black girl. Baron would note that terror would not end there. He describes the ways CHA policed the Black community through eviction, social service elimination threats, tenant council leaders, and inadequate facility design.

Baron discussion of the CHA’s leadership role in carrying out this violence against Blacks suggests that this led to the CHA being charged with racism in the Gautreaux lawsuit he discussed in the beginning of this study. He notes that the lawsuit forced CHA to build more housing units in White neighborhoods and subsequently desegregate. However, Baron ends this section indicating that desegregation will not occur if the racial controls he described in this study are not removed. In turn, he implies that CHA’s racism cannot be undone until the “web of urban racism” is undone. He shows that it is more financially feasible to destroy the web than maintain it a short data analysis that followed this section.

[1] Harold M. Baron, Building Babylon: A Case of Study of Racial Controls in Public Housing (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1971), 1-76.

[2] Baron, Building Babylon, 1.

[3] Baron, Building Babylon, 9.

[4] Baron, Building Babylon, 12.

[5] Baron, Building Babylon, 16.

[6] Baron, Building Babylon, 38.

[7] Baron, Building Babylon, 39.

[8] Baron, Building Babylon, 42.

[9] Baron, Building Babylon, 50.

Race and Status in School Spending: Chicago, 1961-1966 (Harold M. Baron, 1971)

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Synopsis by Chelsea Birchmier

“Race and Status in School Spending,” which appeared in The Journal of Human Resources in 1971, is an empirical study examining expenditures per pupil by race and socioeconomic status in public schools in the city of Chicago and suburban Cook County from 1961­–66. Baron begins by reviewing the existing literature, most of which studied differential education by status while “race was at best relegated to a minor position in these analyses.” It was only, he suggests, the Civil Rights Movement and Black community activity that led to any “extensive study of urban schools as instruments for maintaining racial subjugation.” Baron references sociological studies showing the institutional mechanisms by which status dictated treatment in schools and economic studies showing the inverse relation between expenditures per pupil and status, as well as between expenditures and race. He also points to a more hidden spatial form of race and class difference in school spending: the monetary advantage of the suburbs over the central cities, which predominated by 1960, precipitated by middle and upper class white flight to the suburbs. In the few studies that compared spending in individual schools within a city, expenditures were negatively related to race and socioeconomic status. Looking at education spending as an investment in human capital, institutional racism in and out of school meant a lower rate of return for Black people. When the relation between per pupil expenditures and test scores, a measure of rate of return, was measured, for the most part, achievement increased with expenditures. An exception to this finding was the Coleman Report from the U.S. Office of Education, which found little to no association between educational expenditures and achievement. Baron notes, however, several methodological critiques and contrasting findings using Coleman’s own data. Finally, Baron writes that financial resources limited what could or could not be done, but the decisive factors in education (in)equality were processes of education and socialization in individual schools. Schools preserved intergenerational privilege by training white students to be racist and Black students to accept racism; they effectively acted as “instruments of social control.”

Baron’s study breaks down educational spending by race and status in Chicago and Cook County public elementary schools in 1961, 1963, and 1966. While there were protests against school segregation and inequality in prior years, it was in 1961 that these became sustained through the Civil Rights Movement, making 1961 “the last year during which the Chicago Board of Education was able to administer without challenge a system of racial and class favoritism.” Prior to this, the Black community was not prioritized as stakeholders by the Chicago Board of Education, unlike business and political interests and “middle-class good-schools” organizations.

In 1961, school spending was on average $77 more per pupil in white schools than Black schools and $67 greater in high status than low status schools. The expenditures for biracial schools fell midway between white and Black schools. The greatest racial disparity in spending was in low status schools, and the greatest status differential in spending was in biracial schools. Within each racial group, spending increased with status. This bias in funding was driven by a pattern of teacher assignment such that more experienced teachers with higher salaries were assigned to white and higher status schools, the number of teachers per pupil (greater for white schools), classroom size (with white high status classrooms being the least crowded and Black and biracial schools being the most), double-shift schools in which students, 90% of whom were Black, were forced to attend school in shifts due to overcrowding, and a wide range of administrative practices. Chicago’s centralized city education system did limit differentials when compared to the decentralized municipal suburban school districts. The $155 differential in spending between low-status and high-status schools alone in the suburbs was greater than the difference in spending between low-status Black and high-status white schools in the city. In the suburbs, the gap between medium and high status schools was larger than that between low and medium status schools. Overall, spending in Chicago schools fell between spending for low and medium status schools in Cook County.

Between 1961 and 1963, “the Chicago Board of Education was the target of the most hard-fought and extensive protest campaign that had taken place in Chicago since the end of World War II” and faced mass demonstrations and civil disobedience locally in tandem with a rising national movement. The response of Superintendent Benjamin Willis to build more de facto segregated schools in Black neighborhoods reduced classroom crowding somewhat. Additionally, some changes in teacher assignment and compensatory programs for Black schools led to a reduction of disparities such that in 1963 school spending was $48 more per pupil in white schools than Black schools and $41 greater in high status than low status schools (compared to $77 and $67 in 1961, respectively). While appropriations remained greater for suburban schools, the gap in spending declined in suburban schools relative to Chicago schools.

By 1966, racial inequality in education had gained national attention. In 1965, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provided funds for special programs in school districts for children from low-income families and children with disabilities. Baron analyzes the change in expenditures without and with ESEA funds. When ESEA funds were not taken into account, the racial gap in spending remained the same as it was in 1963. In other words, the Chicago Board of Education did not continue its attempts to equalize expenditures across race and status. When the ESEA funds were taken into consideration, the racial and status disparities significantly narrowed or disappeared. Baron points out that the ESEA funds, which were meant to compensate for social inequalities and discrimination in the larger system beyond the schools, really only compensated for the inequalities still perpetuated by local and state school budgeting. These funds then served as an attempt to placate the demands of the Civil Rights and Black community organizations. In suburban schools, stratification by status and race continued with little impact from ESEA funds, which few Cook County schools were eligible for since most extremely poor families receiving public assistance lived in Chicago. The gap between medium and high status schools in the suburbs continued to widen. While in 1966 the gaps between low and medium status schools in Chicago reversed and disappeared relative to low and medium status schools in the suburbs, respectively, the high status, almost entirely white, schools in the suburbs increased or maintained their advantage relative to all status groups in the city and to the low and medium status schools in the suburbs. Baron argues that the advantage of high status school districts in the suburbs was not primarily due to taxes but rather to the higher property values per pupil in the high status suburbs.

Baron concludes that “protest paid off—somewhat.” In 1963, the Chicago Civil Rights Movement won a decrease in discrimination in school spending, although they did not achieve desegregation, their main goal. They also, as part of a national movement, won funding from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Racial oppression continued despite changes in school spending, however, via the socialization processes in Chicago schools; “a school program imbued with the general racism of the society is culturally oppressive of black children, regardless of the sums spent.” Additionally, funds were not necessarily spent on resources that improved educational quality, such as high quality staff or programs. Instead, many ESEA funds were spent in the form of “conspicuous consumption” which was more symbolic than beneficial to Black students and families. Finally, Baron concludes that high status suburban schools were able to maintain their advantage in school expenditures from 1961 to 1966 despite the changes wrought by the Civil Rights Movement and ESEA funds. Quoting Charles Benson in The Cheerful Prospect, he writes:

There is good reason that discussion about educational inequalities is muted. After all, the handsome couples in the suburbs who deplore de facto segregation in the large cities and who are so daring as to form local committees on fair practice in housing, are the ones who have a major stake in preserving the lifetime advantages that their privileged, though tax-supported, school offers their children (p. 20).

Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism: A Theory of Nationalism and Divisions in the Labor Market (Harold M. Baron, 1975)

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Synopsis by Kurtis Kelley

In the essay Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism: A Theory of Nationalism and Divisions in the Labor Market, Baron courageously seeks to provide both researchers and activists with a more detailed analysis of the relationship between different forms of nationalism and the capitalist economy. For Baron, Marxist theory had not yet taken up the concept of nationalism with enough depth—certainly not enough depth to sufficiently explain the non-integration of the Black working class into the American mainstream and the enduring influence and solidarity found within Black Nationalism. What role does both Black and White nationalisms play in regards to divisions in the labor market? How have Black and White nationalisms affected the assimilative efforts of the white capitalist superstructure on the Black community? Baron’s theory of racial domination in advanced capitalism helps us in answering these questions.

Three major features of U.S. American society provide “theoretical clarification of the unique position of the Black community”: the capitalist economy, racism within domestic and international spheres, and nationalism as a form of organization for both Black and White communities respectively. Through this analysis, Baron argues that racial nationalism and the relations of production are codependent, and that the Black working class remains a distinctive, non-assimilated national group whose position is largely determined and restricted by the three features of US society mentioned above.

To support his analyses of the racial domination of the Black working class, Baron employs the Marxist concepts of base and superstructure to help constitute the skeleton of his theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between nationalism and economic exploitation within advanced capitalism. Within U.S. society, the base refers to the capitalist economy and the superstructure refers to the culture and the social, political, and intellectual institutions that reinforce and reflect the capitalist economy.   Baron furthers traditional Marxist theory here by showing the inextricable link between base, superstructure, and nationality.

On the relationship between capitalism and nationalism, Baron is direct: “All capitalist societies have had a national form which conditioned, through boundaries, a set of cultural, ideological, social, and territorial elements that regulate the relationship between the base and superstructure.” Nationalism acts as a “regulator” of some of the most important relationships that people and groups form, which in turn often produces mass cohesion, loyalty, and sometimes autonomous, self-sufficient nations in the classic sense.

Thus, for Baron, nationalism refers to the “ideological, cultural, and political movements that agitate for the establishment of a nation or modifications within an established nation,” and not all nationalisms achieve a nation. Baron notes here that he shares the view that nationalism is a potential and demonstrable anti-colonial force with Lenin and Mao, and pushes for a greater appreciation of this within contemporary Marxist theory. The nationalism of colonial, imperialist nations is also under-theorized within traditional Marxism, which instead focuses too heavily on the political structures of the state itself instead of the superstructural elements which nationality as a concept better captures for our comprehension.

Within this discussion of Base-Superstructure-Nation, Baron also defines the concept of “relative congruency” to help readers understand the simultaneous and autonomous operation of major elements within society. While the superstructure of our capitalist society seeks to establish higher levels of “congruency” to aid in the predictability of an increasingly technocratic advanced capitalist system, many ideological/political/intellectual/religious movements will support the mainstream of society, while others will continue to have a conflictual relationship with the dominant society. For Baron, it is vitally important that we pay close attention both to reinforcing movements, such as Reformation Protestantism and early capitalism, and conflictual movements such as many of those that comprised the Black Power movement.

In seeking to contrast the difference between Black and White nationalisms in the United States, Baron notes that he isn’t claiming that either one of these nationalisms have a completely autonomous nation such as other internationally recognized countries, but that their institutional and social relationships “comprise nationalities that exist as significant formations within an overarching American nation.” Baron also resists the trend to downplay the Black and White racial tension, instead saying this conflict is now, “grounded in the nationality conflict between the dominated community and the dominating community, making the antagonism a deeply rooted one.” The concept of U.S. citizenship itself, Baron demonstrates, emerged being closely linked with the control of enslaved Africans. The superstructure these relationships produced helped to ease the class conflict between the white working class and the ruling white elite—all in an effort to maintain domination over Black Americans for economic, political, and social benefit.

Following the Civil War, the possibility of an autonomous Black nation in that era was defeated alongside Reconstruction policies that could have protected Black Americans from the quasi-colonial status they have maintained since. As Black Nationalist movements have sought self-determination since that time, most notably with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the state has had to take a less central role as an “organizer of racism”. In the contemporary moment, two strategies of White nationalism remain within US politics—the first being the Conservative view which seeks to maintain the status quo. The second is the liberal viewpoint, which seeks to assimilate certain Black people who will do so into the dominant society. Baron notes that neither has anything to say about the Black people who wish to maintain a level of autonomy and not assimilate into the white American mainstream.

Base and superstructure of society have operated alongside White nationalism to restrict the flourishing of Black nationality in such a way that its major manifestation lay outside of independent economics and national political structures, instead being found within Black social cultural and ideological formations.  To maintain cultural and political control over the Black nation, white institutions “have to promote the prestige of certain Blacks who can perform” as their surrogates. Booker T. Washington stands out as a white-funded surrogate for dominant economic interests that maintained a close relationship with the Black community. In contrasts, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement promoted a more conflictual relationship with White nationalism and the U.S. state.

Disturbances in the racial balance, a balance that the ruling class relies on for a predictable market, can come from three forces: economic shifts, Black Nationalist calls for self-determination, and White Nationalist backlash and reactionary politics. To support the maintenance of their hegemonic position in times of civil unrest, the ruling elite will deftly utilize temporary concessions to stave off revolution and other disturbances that could affect the predictability of the capitalist market. These concessions can also act to blur racial distinctiveness, which can lead to cultural cooptation by the white community of Black cultural artifacts, a process that is often viewed by white institutions as positive cultural exchange and evidence of integration, thus strengthening calls for gradual, non-revolutionary change.

For Baron, the implications for this theoretical inquiry lie in its ability to guide future action, in part by helping us avoid simple analogies for the situation faced by Black people in the US.  The racial domination of Black people in the United States is not analogous to other, more “classically” colonized nations, but must be considered in the specific context of “all three relevant national frameworks”: “Black and White nationalities and the inclusive nation-state.” Baron ends his essay with a call for white anti-racists to take a sober account of Black Nationalism as more than just a “cultural expression”, and of White nationalism as an “inclusive force” whose dynamics “impose conditions of operation that cannot be willed away through moral condemnation.”

The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism (Harold M. Baron, 1978)

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Synopsis by Kurtis Kelley

In The Demand for Black Labor, Baron expertly guides the reader through a historical narrative of Black Americans’ relationship with the ‘economic base of racism’ to provide insight into their oppression within the modern capitalist system. For Baron, the position of Black workers and trajectory of Black labor is governed by two major forces: ‘the laws of capitalist development, and the laws of national liberation’. While Baron focuses his analysis on capitalist development and its effect on the historical demand for Black labor, his acknowledgment of the saliency of Black Nationalist politics and liberation is a vital thread of Baron’s essay. From slavery into the present, the demands on Black labor by capital have brought about momentous shifts in U.S. culture and policy, the economic power of the US elite, and the autonomy of Black Americans.

To provide the ideological legitimacy needed to sustain such a system, Baron displays how a culture of control fermented within U.S. and beyond. This cultural system was fostered by white elites to both maintain dominance over enslaved Africans and to keep the white population that did not hold slaves from rebelling against a system they could not control. Unique to the United States, compared to other places within the Americas, was the creation of “rationale regarding the degradation of all blacks”, which Baron argues was vital for the continued enslavement of “some” of the US Black population. For Baron, these attributes of Black chattel slavery set it apart from other forms of slavery and indeed constituted a “new type of social formation,” entirely.

Shifts in the demand for Black labor during slavery brought about a more “self-contained operation” as capitalism matured and the international slave trade slowed. Baron notes that after Independence from Britain, cotton came to dominate the aims of the southern planter class and slave owners in the Upper North were more than willing to sell their slaves southward given their increased value as new imports of Africans were nearly halted. The North supported slavery as well, by sponsoring European immigration despite the presence of Black workers and the enforcement of federal slave laws.

According to Baron, the position of the “quasi-free Negro” provides readers with vital insight for future transformations in the demand for Black labor. Still victims of a vicious anti-black society, non-slave Blacks were subject to many of the same systems of control that the enslaved were, albeit from a different position. These oppressions combined to restrict Black people from securing a stable position within society.   Just before the Civil War, Baron notes that around 89% of Black people were enslaved within the US. Thus, quasi-free Negroes had their position “ascribed from that of the mass of their brothers in bondage.” According to Baron, as economic competition increased in urban areas with the maturation of capitalism, many non-slave Blacks lost what skilled positions they had and left large cities altogether.

Baron concludes the section on the slave period by stating simply that there was not a significant demand for non-slave Black labor. The theft of Black labor within the South that took place outside of the plantation system simply augmented the system of slavery to fit the desired setting. Furthermore, the racist, anti-black logic that produced these oppressions would carry over within American culture and politics long after slavery ended with the defeat of the Confederacy and their gradual federal re-integration that followed.

The Reconstruction era, which heralded massive advances in the lives of formerly enslaved Africans (now US citizens), was short-lived and its conclusion ushered the white Southern elites back into power after their defeat during the Civil War. With this power, they once again sought to maintain control over Black labor through political pressure and outright physical violence. The agrarian system that was established in the post-Reconstruction South created a class of Black workers that had less power and autonomy than any group of white workers, whom they came into increasing competition with during this period.   According to Baron, the “abolition of slavery did not mean substantive freedom to the black worker”, which was demonstrated by the fact in both eras the Black peasantry only received only enough to subsist on. This low position, combined with a viciously anti-black American culture, created conditions in which the Black worker was increasingly tied to the bottom rungs of the white-controlled US agrarian economy.

The increasing competition between Black and White workers during post-Reconstruction era brought about several important shifts for the demand for Black labor. Much of this competition was centered on land rivalries, with emancipated Black families seeking to secure land having to confront an overtly racist system of Southern politics. With the increasing numbers of poor white farmers in the south, the Southern political elite sought to further cement their hegemonic control over both Black and White workers through shoring up gaps within their “color-caste distinctions”. Baron also notes that massive shifts were also taking place within the Southern ruling class, which saw much land trade hands away from former slave masters into the possession of merchants and lawyers. This transformation saw decision-making amongst the Southern elite shift from a more paternalistic approach to “land-owners’ making their decisions more nakedly, on the basis of pure entrepreneurial calculations.” In such a position, Black workers faced oppression from both the Southern elites’ decision making and the competition from landless whites.

During the Reconstruction era, the Black workers desire for land was inseparable from their quest for self-sufficiency and autonomy. With the temporary defeat of this quest by the forces that conspired to end Reconstruction, this momentum faced a massive setback. While movements for Black national liberation wouldn’t renew themselves until more northward migrations brought Black workers into urban centers in higher numbers, the “embryonic nationalism” and quest for racial unity held by these workers were captured in the movements surrounding Booker T. Washington and other smaller “exodus groups” which set up independent Black settlements throughout the lower-Midwest and southwest in particular.

With the oncoming of the World War I, the position of Black workers again faced major transformations. With the precarious relationship between the US and European nations, immigration from Europe was curtailed—opening up sectors of the labor market to Black workers at unprecedented levels. Baron identifies three key developments that arose from these events: First, the outmigration of millions of African Americans from the South to urban centers in the North; Second, the development of a Black proletariat in these urban centers; and third, the shift away from tenancy farming in the South. According to Baron, while World War I started many of these societal shifts, “World War II was to repeat the process in a magnified form and to place the stamp of irreversibility upon it”.

In these urban centers, Black workers remained more vulnerable to unemployment and the racist white working class, with help from city and state institutions, carried out violent campaigns of “race riots” throughout urban Black communities in the North. Often, white management would utilize the inclusion of Black workers to divide the work force—causing white workers to draw focus away from inter-class conflicts to confront the Black worker menace they were becoming more confronted with. Furthermore, Black workers were nearly always kept from skilled positions or managements positions. These issues were exacerbated by the tactic of white company owners attracting the subservience of a Black managerial class, made up of Republican anti-union “leaders”, to gain influence in the Black community. In the south, Black workers had little opportunities in southern Industries like mining & lumber, and remain largely restricted to agrarian work throughout the inter-war period.

By the 1970’s, only one-fifth of Black people lived in the South, and the percentage of Black agrarian workers fell to 4% of the Black labor force. The increasing urbanization of Black people brought, among other things, massive changes for the superstructure of racism within the US. For Baron, “it meant the disappearance of the economic foundation on which the elaborate superstructure of legal Jim Crow and segregation had originally been erected.” As monopoly state capitalism matures, economic shifts have caused Black workers in the US, like “non-citizens” from Southern Europe and Northern Africa that fill up the gaps of Western Europe’s labor market, to maintain a marginal status due to their race.

According to Baron, the endemic subordinate status of Black workers amounted to a “system analogous to colonial forms of rule”. Unmoved by the potency of Civil Rights Era protest to alter the demand for Black labor, Baron suggests that the racist institutions of this country can only be altered by a “earthquake in the heartland.” Unable to de-colonize the Black community due to its attachment with major urban centers, the American capitalist relies on the hegemonic control of Black labor to retain its hegemonic position.

Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s (Harold M. Baron, 1982)

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Synopsis by Kurtis Kelley

This essay was originally delivered as a paper at the 8th Annual Third World Conference in the March of 1982 in Chicago, Illinois and first appeared in print in the Review of Radical Political Economics, in 1985.

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In his essay “Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s,” Harold Baron explores the relationship between transformations occurring within the U.S. political economy, system of racial control, and black people’s quest for self-determination. For Baron, the new racial formation, or “distinctive position of the Black community,”[1] that emerged at the time signaled a shift as pivotal as that which occurred following the emancipation from plantation slavery. Along this path, Baron maintains the central role that Black agency played throughout US history, while also demonstrating the severe restrictions placed on national Black self-determination and the similarly endemic limitations placed on Black integration into the U.S. mainstream by a political economy defined as advanced capitalism, and a system of racial control Baron defines as advanced racism.

For Baron, the history of black/white race relations can be summarized as a “succession of different racial formations.” The first racial transformation, or period of major transition in regards to the U.S. racial formation, was the selection and solidarity around Black chattel slavery by white colonists. Not only did this racial transformation entail many different processes enacted within various institutions, it also was preceded by shifts within the dominant mode of production. In a time of merchant capitalism, these shifts saw the demand for tobacco grow, which created the need for more agricultural laborers and more crops planted. For the white planter class to maintain control, they empowered the non-slaveholding whites to become invested, socially and politically more than economically, in the domination of black people. This interclass pact amongst white Americans acted to dehumanize black people in all aspects of life as a bulwark: for slaveholders to protect their elite status and for white laborers to ensure domestic economic and political stability. This fledgling white solidarity around racial terrorism in the face of potential Black (and poor white) rebellion during the colonial era has provided the skeleton of all successive racial formations.

The next major shifts that occurred within US society was the ascendancy of northern capital over the slaveholding south during the Civil War, the brief national movement for Black civil rights and reparation during the Reconstruction Era, and the viciousness by which black people were forced into the southern-based sharecropping economy and apartheid-like racial system dominated by Jim Crow laws and customs. With the Union’s victory over the confederacy, the pace at which industrial capitalism (already more entrenched in the North) matured into the dominant mode of production increased.

Here Baron asks readers to consider the implications that the rhetoric of “civil rights” had for not only political action but also for the popular understanding of black national politics and notions of freedom. Because of the structure of oppression faced by black people in the years following emancipation, the quest for “civil rights” included notions of protections against “unwarranted encroachment” by individuals or the state.[2] For Baron, these differ from “political rights” which involves “claims to be involved in governmental decision making or to receive benefits from government action”.[3] Following the end of Reconstruction, these two forms of rights were often condensed into “civil rights.” With the Northern retreat from involvement in southern states’ racial policies, black politics turned towards protecting the civil rights legally won with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, expanding them, and also organizing for survival in spite of restricted rights. As Baron points out later, however, political arguments “relying on the doctrine of equal protection under the law framed the discourse on race more in terms of the formal aspects of civil rights than in terms of power and capacity.”[4]

The agrarian ascendancy, the term Baron uses to define the racial formation typified by white southern dominance over the black community, did not undergo transformation until nearly a century after its emergence following plantation slavery. Baron outlines several historical developments which brought about shifts in the dominant modes of production and contributed to another racial transformation, such as: technological innovations related to agricultural production, the tradition of African American northern migration, the shifting labor market as a result of mass war mobilization during World War II, and anti-communist hysteria resulting in the repression of popular democratic sentiments. By the 1950s, these developments resulted in “a number of profound contradictions” within the racial control system. The effort of both elite whites and the black community in the following decade would decide the parameters of the resulting racial formation.[5]

The Supreme Court victories of the NAACP during the 1950s, and the massive resistance of white society against those federal policies, conditioned the emergence of Black mass mobilization. As integrationist civil rights politics waned midway through the 1960’s as it met this massive resistance, the “cultural-denial implication of integration became clear,” and black nationalist politics, with their focus on independent institution building to protect black culture and sustain black survival, came back to the forefront and remained until the mid 1970s. According to Baron, Black Nationalism’s relationship with civil rights is a strained one: “Since nationalism is about the sources and boundaries of political power and civil authority, the concept is by its nature not comprehensible under the categories of civil rights, which assume a unified and over-arching structure of legitimacy,” within the rights-granting U.S. state.[6]

For Baron, an implication of the Civil Rights Movement for Black Nationalist politics was a recognition that, for black communities, civil rights “was necessary but not sufficient for their survival and viability.” In reaction, white elites gave concessions such as War on Poverty programs and a degree of institutional desegregation. The dominant mode of production matured into advanced capitalism, defined as dominance through large global corporations, the larger role of the state in everyday life, and the growing influence of consumer culture. Advanced racism, the new racial formation that emerged following the civil rights era, defined so-called post-racial hidden forms of institutional racism, restrictive labor markets that keep black people in marginal jobs, and a paternalistic state that keeps black people dependent on a “bureaucratically-ordered system of supervision.”[7]

Due to the failure of the civil rights movement to bring about the realization of equalitarian treatment, Baron writes that in the early 1980’s Black politics must move beyond the notion of an “unfinished agenda” towards a larger focus on Black institutional survival and a greater recognition of the changing implications of “racism within advanced capitalism.”[8] He also warns activists against a wishful expectation of a return to the explosive and fertile political moments of the 60’s bearing similar changes, and to expect an extended “war of position” rather than a “war of maneuver.”[9]

With the turn of advanced capitalism towards widespread long-term planning, Baron urges activists to pay closer attention to the “implicit investment and planning policies” of the elite. The future of Black political mobilization must counter the “steering away from situations or strategies that involved the mobilization of the black community, especially those outside the newly-negotiated channels of legitimacy.” Only by engaging in long-term organizing of the black working class can a sustainable attack on advanced racism be mounted.

[1]Baron, Harold. Racism Transformed pg. 4

[2] pg. 14

[3] Ibid.

[4] pg. 20

[5] Ibid. 19

[6] pg. 23

[7] .pg. 30

[8] pg. 34

[9] pg. 35

Report from Chicago: Politics Transformed: Harold Washington Goes to City Hall (Harold M. Baron, 1985)

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Synopsis by Donald Planey

Politics Transformed is the empirical counterpart to Baron’s Racism Transformed. Drawn from his own experience in the Washington mayoralty as well as early journalism about the Harold Washington campaign, Baron uses the Chicago context to explore how the Washington movement and mayoralty asserted Black political power while grappling with the profound rightward-turn in U.S. politics. Baron characteristically lays out the political history of Black Chicago, from the New Deal through Black Power era, leading up to Washington’s campaign. He compliments the Chicago context with a history of national-scale Black politics, and its struggles against the rise of Reaganism.

The next part of the essay details the process by which Harold Washington stitched together a constituency and progressive political apparatus, as well as the means by which different factions of opposition-the old white machine guard, business interests, and bureaucrats-reacted to the campaign and mayoralty. Baron concludes with an analysis of the institutional bottlenecks encountered by the Washington mayoralty, and how they represent teachable lessons for grassroots organizing under “advanced” capitalism and racial stratification.