Income inequality or excessive wealth and poverty or economic exploitation isn't something that emerged under conditions of racial bigotry or that just occurred; there have been various people concerned with what Henry James in his only overly political novel, The Princess Casamassima, (1886) referred to in the language of his day as the "social question" for at least two or three centuries. In this novel a not-so-motley crew of French émigrés and London workers--James's main character is Hyacinth, a twenty-something, dissatisfied, bookbinder who dies in his own morally complicated if impulsively driven terrorist, bombing attack on the rich--James claims that the various French Revolutions were only "periodical swoops of despotism" that had, in spite of some progress--the French at least started keeping track of wealth and inequality after the revolution in 1789 and as such have the longest detailed statistics on income inequality in the world; America had no comparable or accurate statistics on income until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment establishing the income tax in 1913, that the French revolutions including the tragically ill-fated Paris Commune of 1870 in which at least 20,000 were slaughtered and which sent thousands of refugees into England--only "changed its buttons and postage stamps [and] kept alive the sacred spark that would someday become a consuming flame" (and some of us are still waiting for validation of this so far false prophesy).
The lack of any recording or even recognition of the problems of income inequality in the early dominant American consciousness demonstrates once again that the American revolution was, as Eric Hobsbaum believes, not a real revolution at all because it only ensconced and enhanced the established capitalist order; it didn't overthrow or overturn anything. It was a quite simply, no matter how conflicted the political atmosphere at the time of the revolution so-called, a revolt of the rich who didn't want to pay taxes against the rich in another distant location, who wanted to tax them to alleviate some of their own tax burden. In other words a colonial war like the Algerians fought against the French 150 years later. The people who rose up were not the poor and downtrodden of America, George Washington owned hundreds of Black slaves (Were there any other kind? Not by the time of the revolution, white people were "indentured servants" meaning their servitude had a definite end date) and was widely believed to be the richest man in America at the time he assented to the presidency (but like all rich of that period he believed that he should have the right to a gun to protect himself in the event his slaves revolted, which is enough to redeem him in the eyes of some). And of course Marx knew all this shit at least 40 years before James published his novel. Although he hadn't quite articulated just how it all worked yet. And W.E.B. DuBois, had already made the connection between economic exploitation and bigotry by 1903 when he wrote what is perhaps the first, certainly one of the first, and arguably one of, it not the most important document of cultural criticism, his magisterial The Souls of Black Folk in which he articulated the "problem of the twentieth century" as that of the "color line." DuBois, who, like so many other Black artists and critics, finally in 1960 chose exile rather than spend more time in America, wrote what in my view is his most important statement on these issues in his unmatched and unsurpassed work of criticism and history from 1935, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Here is a small sample from DuBois, who in my mind is still unsurpassed, and here speaks nostalgically of missed opportunity after the Civil War for a more rational distribution of wealth and property under the failed military dictatorship of the Northern Army in the period immediately after the war ended:
"The machinery [the abolition-democracy of the North] were compelled to set up, with the cooperation of Northern industry, was a dictatorship of far broader possibilities than the North had at first contemplated. It put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligence and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men. When the South realized this they emitted an exceeding great cry which was the reaction of property being despoiled of its legal basis of being. This bitter complaint was all the more plausible because Southern labor lacked sufficient intelligent and unselfish leadership...But [the Southern labor leadership] failed because the military dictatorship behind labor did not function successfully in the face of the Ku Klux Klan and especially because the appeal of property in the South [or what Richard Wright referred to in his own magisterial work 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941) echoing Marx's own "lords of the soil" in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte referred to as "the Lords of the Land"] got the ear of property in the North."
I also recommend a more than passing acquaintance with Theodor Adorno's master work Negative Dialectics (1966) for starters. In this work which is overlooked by so many Adorno gets to what Frank Zappa refers to as "the crux of the biscuit" and that is the power of the system. Adorno pulls no punches here in articulating the primacy of thought and the problem of systems:
Thought as such, [that is "thought...rendered succinct in language (for) what is vaguely put is poorly thought"] before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity. The effort implied in the concept of thought itself, as the counterpart of passive contemplation, is negative already--a revolt against being importuned to bow to every immediate thing....When we contemplate philosophical history, the virtue of partisanship should not keep us from perceiving how superior the system, whether rationalistic or idealistic, has been to its opponents for more than two centuries. Compared with the systems, the opposition seems trivial. Systems elaborate things; they interpret the world while the others really keep protesting only that it can't be done. The others display resignation, denial, failure...In the philosophy of history, the history of the seventeenth century especially served a compensatory purpose....[F]ear of chaos...shaped the beginnings of a mode of conduct constitutive for bourgeois existence as a whole: of the neutralization, by condemning the existent order, of every emancipatory step. In the shadow of its own incomplete emancipation the bourgeois consciousness must fear to be annihilated by a more advanced consciousness; not being the whole freedom it senses that it can produce only a caricature of freedom--hence its theoretical expansion of its autonomy into a system similar to its own coercive mechanisms.
There is a sense when reading Adorno that even though he is talking about critical philosophy here it is philosophy criticizing the existing philosophy as an underlying structure on which the current economic and political system is based. That is the philosophical basis or what later Marxists will term the superstructure, after a classic and now famous assertion by Marx in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) in which he wrote,
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society [the base], the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (my emphasis).
This is an elaboration of an idea first expressed in 1852 in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in which Marx describes what occurred in words that Wright echoes nearly 80 years later,
Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenues. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions modes of thought and views of life (my emphasis). The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity.
In addition to those from the Frankfort School, other more contemporary authors like Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams will take Marx's early ideas to new levels of understanding and application under more current conditions. I could go on to elaborate some of that but it will have to wait for another time when I feel like contributing to a forum whose form and workings, by which I mean the actual mechanical workings of the site itself are designed to restrict and make more unlikely the kind of work I have contributed here.
Good luck to all and to all a good night!
