How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society

Marable does it again. Everyone interested in Black political economy in the US needs to read this book!!

I read this book 1 year ago and has since then enhanced my knowledge of black society here in America. At the end of his book (Towards a Socialist America) Manning pulls all the punches and fortells that the only way blacks and quite possibly other oppressed ethnic groups can get out our situation is through working together and defeat the ruling elite that now has its foot on our backs !!!!!!!!!!! This book is a must read.

This at times slightly difficult to read book is very relevant even if the text of the book was published in 1983. Let me give you an idea of the discussion in the book below. This January 2000 edition contains a new intro by the learned professor. He tries to correct in it a few observations and predictions he believes he got wrong in the original addition. He points out that spectacular growth of the prison-industrial complex since 1981 with an increase of the prison population from 500,000 in 1981 to almost 2 million today. He points out that as jobs with livable wages continue to disappear and with the stock market casino which drove the economy of the 90's getting wrecked, thousands more poor and even middle class whites along with blacks and other minorities will turn up in the prison system. One in five Americans, he writes, now has a criminal record. In any case, this book is about how Capitalism is black Americans greatest enemy. Racism is an integral part of American capitalism, he stresses. Blacks enslaved because of their race created the wealth which gave this country its economic foundations. Blacks in the South, imprisoned justly or unjustly, provided an ultra-cheap source of labor in the convict-work system under conditions not too far from Nazi concentration camps. He writes that in the 1880's, the mortality rate for blacks in prison in Mississippi was 11 percent. In Arkansas it was 25 percent. he notes that blacks and white workers combining their power could have made great gains. That they did not is perhaps he says why the standard of living has been so low in the South relative to the rest of the country. White workers apparently were more comfortably keeping blacks down to maintain their status in the white supremacist culture. One interesting thing the author notes about Southern whites is their widespread ownership of firearms. He quotes C. Vann Woodward as saying that Alabama Whites spent more combined on firearms than on farm equipment and tools combined. Firearms were a unique part of the Southern culture and whites carried them everywhere they went and never avoided a chance to use them. He gives interesting statistic that while the national homicide rate of 1926 was 10.1 per 1,000 in Jacksonville Florida it was 75.9, in Birmingham 58.8, Memphis 42.4, Nashville 29.2. He writes extensively about the idea of "black capitalism" empowering black progress. He spends alot of time writing about Booker T. Washington. Washington is portrayed as an opportunist politically with some bad ideas though he did give covert aid to civil rights activists while he was preaching accomodation with white supremacy in public. Marable says that the black so-caleld conservatives of today like Thomas Sowell are not even fit to carry his mantle. The latter are simply vulgar apologists and obfuscators of the racist/capitalist order. The problem with black capitalists, the author writes, is that they are capitalists. That means they have to maxim

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is an updated edition of Manning Marable's classic in black literature, and has received a new introduction and an update to the book's tables and charts to reflect the latest new data on Afro-American statistics. Marable's cogent and comprehensvie analysis of race and class in the United States down through the country's political and economic history to modern times continues to provide important food for though for a contemporary readership.

Top-notch Marxist analysis of the economic situation of black America. My first exposure to Marable and still my favorite of his works.