Dependency Part One: Slavery

A history lesson for all the tea partiers, authoritarians, and dupes of the right-wing media entertainment complex. I know how hard you guys try to discern the intent of the Founders without ever opening a book with, you know, actual words they wrote. I have news for you, this "government dependency" you all seem so concerned about is almost exactly the opposite of what Americans of the early republic were concerned with. The public assistance programs that exist in the US, already some of the stingiest in the industrialized world, have been under attack for decades now. What is the excuse this week? "Welfare" is a dirty word, and words like "lazy" or "parasite" inevitably precedes any mention of the poor people using any sort of public assistance. And this is before we get to any of the more vulgar racial characterizations. The trouble is, public assistance programs are actually providing a cushion against what the founders really worried about, private dependency.

One of the sad truths about human history is that most people, most of the time are dependent on another person for their lives and livelihood. Most of history is the story of the majority held in a state of unfreedom to one degree or another. The sociologist Michel Foucault differentiated "power" from the concept of "power over" where the former is the ability to force someone to do something against their will, while the latter binds a subordinate to his master through the provision of something important that can be revoked. Slavery, the most apparent form of unfreedom, was defended prior to the Civil War as a symbiotic relationship where the master provided for the slave's welfare. Planters imagined themselves as benevolent patriarchs with their slaves dependent upon them for all their needs. This fantasy led most Southern whites to foresee the extinction of freedmen after the war because "obviously" blacks cannot take care of themselves and will starve without coercion to work. However, like so many right-wing fantasies, this was exactly the opposite. Slavery was a simple power relationship, withhold the lash and the master had no actual power over the slave. In fact it was the masters who were dependent on their slaves, and much of Southern history since Emancipation has been the attempts of landowners to bind workers to themselves.

Sharecropping, convict lease systems, vagrancy, black codes, labor contracts, and Jim Crow segregation were all attempts by Southern whites to create a 'power over' situation with African-Americans which would be exploited. For good measure, the whites projected the words "lazy" and "parasite" onto their former slaves to perpetuate their preferred stereotypes. What a surprise that former slaves might be unenthusiastic about working for their former masters, even through generations. Then we have the criminal stereotype. It should be self-evident that people sentenced to a life of hard labor and inadequate provisions through no fault of their own might not feel too badly about stealing from their oppressors.

With these historical concepts in mind, it is easy to see why prejudice against African-Americans is so all-pervasive on the right. African-Americans are an easily differentiated minority that refuses to submit to oppression. That makes African-Americans an obvious out-group with cultural values inconsistent with the majority's. Yes, I said it; to participate in the corporate capitalist system is to internalize dependency. Your livelihood depends on the whim of others to whom your best interests are likely not of prime concern, other things like bonuses and profit margins take precedence over whether you have a job. Public assistance programs that prevent you from starving if the whim of your masters finds you out on the street are a threat to maintaining a "power over" relationship between bourgeois and proletariat for lack of better terms. It sure is convenient that the propaganda of masters lines up so neatly with the prejudices of right-wingers, isn't it?