The sick man is not abnormal because of the absence of a norm but because of his incapacity to be normative.
—Georges Canguilhem, 1943Footnote 1Introduction
Aimé Césaire argued in 1950 that the horrors that unfolded throughout Europe during World War Two constituted a markedly belated continental manifestation of various long durée colonial humanisms.Footnote 2 The institutionalized filiations of thought, which emerged in partial response to this monstrosity—namely, those continental theories that increasingly positioned life as the object of politics par excellence—are similarly belated.Footnote 3 At the helm of this genealogy is typically the scientist Georges Canguilhem.Footnote 4 His 1943 book The Normal and the Pathological, based on both his clinical training as a physician and his studies of the history of science, forwarded the distinction between sickness as a lack of a particular norm and sickness as an incapacity to generate norms within one's historical milieu. Notably under this schema, one mode of becoming “well” is to generate one's own apparent lack as a norm vis-à-vis one's environment. When generalized into the realm of political economy, this understanding of limits, debts, and injuries as inherently innovative life phenomena offered one mode through which to eschew the teleological inclinations of dialectical reason at a moment when the machinations of its brutality had begun to reverberate within the European continent.
I argue that this urtext of biopolitics is critically anticipated by persons writing from one facet of the afterlife of slavery in the United States as it unfolded during World War Two: the sharecroppers of Local 313 in Southeast Missouri.Footnote 5 “Down with Starvation-wages!” is the most well-known surviving document produced during the rank-and-file strike of fifteen hundred Local 313 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAW) sharecroppers. It was written by seven, black striking sharecroppers, and the process of its drafting and the surrounding strike would become the object of C.L.R. James's ethnographic reporting on the strike for Labor Action, the main publishing organ of the New York-based Socialist Workers Party. The Local 313's pamphlet critically diagnosed the earlier 1939 break-up of a local sharecropper sit-in as part of an emerging shift in American racial governance concerned with the purported political-economic and physiological “health” of black sharecroppers. The final dissolution of the sit-in was led by the newly formed St. Louis Committee for the Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers (SLCRS). In response to the more explicitly brutal responses to the strike—mass displacement, resettlement, and functional state-sanctioned quarantine—this proto non-profit led the creation of the cooperative tenant farming community Cropperville. Here, destitute sharecroppers were provided nutritional and physical rehabilitative programming, with the latter being delivered in the form of manual labor. The Local's pamphlet subsequently outlines the SLCRS's attempts at material-historical repair as part and parcel of the starvation-wage: an assemblage of the increasingly diverse circuits through which black persons’ organized social protest is curtailed or criminalized in order to preserve white sovereignty.
In the section “1939 and the Rehabilitation of Political Protest,” I set the grounds for my analysis of the 1941 pamphlet by arguing that the formation of the SLCRS and their subsequent invention of sharecropper rehabilitation was an attempt to conserve cotton landlords and white homesteading families (hitherto the primary recipients of New Deal Rural Rehabilitation aid) as the proper subjects of rehabilitation and rights in the face of potential historical reckoning. Panicked by the 1939 roadside sit-in assembled by an organized mass of evicted sharecroppers, the SLCRS established Cropperville in order to divert the energy of this radicalized transient population towards rehabilitative domestic training and manual labor. In the section “1941–1942: ‘Down with Starvation Wages!’,” I argue that the Local's 1941 strike elaborated the starvation-wage's subsequent proliferation of white mobility at the expense of black debility not as a historical disparity destined to be transcended but as a resource in elaborating potentially novel norms of life. This historically produced disparity in mobility, along with the contingent convergence of white and black sharecroppers’ opposition to the landlord, formed the grounds through which disproportionate white mobility might be instrumentalized to camouflage black sharecroppers whose organized political action would be typically met with landlord terrorism.
It is on the historically contingent position of labor in the Local's politics that my reading of the pamphlet diverges from James's reporting of the strike. James shares with the pamphlet writers the position that the SLCRS's construction of Cropperville is an attempt to assuage sharecropper unrest. Unlike the pamphlet writers, he positions the sharecroppers’ laboring over the land as both the means and the end of the strike. James describes the position of the “most advanced” sharecroppers in Labor Action as follows:
In reality, [the utopian promise of Cropperville] is one of the greatest pieces of humbuggery that you can find. For, of the 20,000 Negroes who work in southeast Missouri, there are about 60 families on the La Forge [Cropperville] project…Maybe when Roosevelt is finished with the war he will think about extending the project, but if the croppers all get farms, where will the landlord get labor? The croppers will get farms when they take them…They know what they want. They want sixty acres of land. They want the government to supply the livestock and the tractors and the other machinery to work, to “co-operate” as they phrase it. They want the school and the co-op store. It is a complete social program and it is a socialist program.Footnote 6
James thus identifies Cropperville as a technique of absorbing social unrest not because of its implementation of state-mandated labor as a productive technique of normalization but because of its inevitably insufficient and bad-faith execution. In this formulation, the ultimate aim of sharecroppers’ organized withdrawal of their labor is to mend their alienation from both the process and the products of that labor. As I demonstrate in the section “1939 and the Rehabilitation of Political Protest,” landlord members of the SLCRS initially suggested extending to the demonstrating sharecroppers existing Great Plains Rural Rehabilitation programming, which resembled the aforementioned demand of co-operative land grants. The Local's theory of starvation-wages, which I elaborate on throughout the section “1941–1942: ‘Down with Starvation Wages!’,” thus cogently posits the mending of such alienation on one political-economic plane as the condition for its redoubled expansion in another form: the proposed provision of land and capital to the remaining twenty thousand sharecroppers would have made way for the landlords’ planned mass importation of more flexible contingent day laborers.
Although James notes that the struggle around starvation, and thus around the regulation of life itself, is a component of the sharecroppers’ strike, he considers the fact of starvation to be mainly an accelerant in awakening their conscious desire for the outlined comprehensive socialist program. Starvation thus accelerates the struggle that moves sharecroppers towards a pre-figured—and according to Marx, primordial—future norm of life.Footnote 7 New Deal scientific and bureaucratic diagnoses of sharecroppers’ starvation position it as a source of social risk; and posited their eventual entrance into industrialized labor via rehabilitative labor camps as the normative response to the problem of starvation's attendant forms of protest.Footnote 8 Though narrated using different means, these generically Marxist and liberal responses to sharecropper starvation share a common investment in history (whether moved by struggle or co-operative charity) as the agent of repair and replenishment. Local 313 sharecroppers, on the other hand, diagnose the problem of starvation not as the problem of failing to return or ascend to a particular norm but of their historically enduring incapacitation from exerting normative force within their social milieu—in this case, their systematic debilitation from articulating demands otherwise to rehabilitation and entrance into various ameliorated labor arrangements.
It is likewise on the function of labor's contingency where the Local's conception of normativity troubles that of Canguilhem's. The Local's pamphlet outlines that the withdrawing of labor with the aim of expanding the land allotments of Cropperville would fundamentally leave the macroscopic arrangement of life that produced sharecropper starvation intact. Labor's political usefulness as a normative force—its ability to create strategically manipulative forms of mobility and immobility—is a deeply contingent component of the Local's politics, because its function is always relationally determined in a global frame. In other words, their theory of the starvation-wage as a source of potential political force necessarily requires social struggle that impinges upon the proliferation of the norms that precede it. Although the strength of norms are likewise relationally determined for Canguilhem, their proliferation is largely quarantined from the purview of those relations or their history. For life to generate new norms, these norms must first arise as error, which for Canguilhem is intrinsic to life in general and does not necessarily entail the displacement of preceding norms.Footnote 9 For Canguilhem, the contingencies which produce norms in the world are characterized by a more or less indefinite form of pluralization—requiring neither ethical reflection nor upheaval. The contingent coalitions taken on between black and white sharecroppers by definition entail ambivalence, internal conflict, and mortal risk. The Local's theory of normativity entails a theory of social struggle because it is theorized from a material context in which their inseparability is viscerally unavoidable.
Throughout the section “1939 and the Rehabilitation of Political Protest,” I examine why and to what ends the rehabilitation concept, hitherto used by U.S. state organs in describing the forms of clinical biomedical care to which returning war veterans were obliged, temporarily became the prevailing interdisciplinary rubric through which to manage black sharecropper protest in the Bootheel. Although the term itself would no longer be used by state and para-state organizations to describe such macroscopic forms of social management, I take its relatively brief but notable use in Missouri to be symptomatic of what Gunnar Myrdal described as the newly “prophylactic” mission of US social policy vis-à-vis racism during and after the New Deal.Footnote 10 This generally prophylactic state mission came with a number of non-state and para-state iterations of liberal anti-racism, which, by varying methods and to varying effects, reterritorialized “race” as a province of culture rather than biology—and thus resolutely disaggregated it from history.Footnote 11
Later in American Dilemma, one watershed text of Cold War liberal anti-racism, Myrdal himself famously concluded that “American Negro culture … is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture” to which it ought to be restored.Footnote 12 In positing the SLCRS's use of the rehabilitation concept as symptomatic of this historical shift in the management of difference and struggle, I do not aim to produce generalizations about the bureaucratic and material texture of specific, liberal anti-racist social engineering projects. On the contrary, I analyze how and to what effects “rehabilitation,” as one emergent form of self-avowedly prophylactic liberal anti-racism, was contested and theorized by sharecroppers who were taken up as the intended beneficiaries of such rehabilitation. The section “1939 and the Rehabilitation of Political Protest” examines the recalibrations of this social world as a number of governmental and non-governmental agencies worked to transform a multiracial coalitional sharecropper protest into first a humanitarian crisis, then a public health threat, then a quarantined refugee camp, and finally into a rehabilitative farming cooperative.
In the section “1941–1942: ‘Down with Starvation Wages!’,” I turn to the text of the 1941 pamphlet. Therein, I outline the Local 313 pamphlet writers’ locally produced diagnosis of the rehabilitation rubric as complementary to the unconditional criminalization of mobile black persons as part and parcel of post-Progressive social welfare initiatives.Footnote 13 The Local 313 writers posit both of these historical modes of pathologizing black life as conforming with the starvation-wage. The starvation-wage consists of the oscillating modes of life-attrition and life-repair, which together work to invent the fantasy of the upwardly mobile black sharecropping subject, denuded of the long durée historical struggles that produce her physiological experience of starvation. The starvation-wage is doubly exploitative in the old Marxian sense in that it entails the extraction of surplus-value, both in the very scene of sharecroppers’ labor and in their general life as it is conditioned upon the accumulation of debt. The conditions necessary for these two forms of extraction are reproduced in those moments staged with the intention of curing sharecroppers of their physical symptoms—when they are provided charitable forms of subsistence on the condition that they cease political agitation and enter one or another ameliorated labor scheme.
1939 and the Rehabilitation of Political Protest
To understand the particular stakes of the eventual dissolution of the sit-in via the SLCRS's establishment of Cropperville, a brief overview of the history of rehabilitation as both discourse and procedure is in order. Rehabilitation first emerged as a consolidated American biomedical discourse at the beginning of World War One. Leading up to the decision regarding the United States’ entrance into the War, increasing amounts of private and public funding were funneled into the developing fields of orthopedic surgery and physical therapy. These new rehabilitative sciences thus rose in prominence in concert with governmental programming that promised to mitigate the costs of the War by individualizing and privatizing veteran treatment. This development followed a more than two-century long policy of providing veterans unconditional life-long pensions.Footnote 14 The life-long pension constituted a fundamentally relational response to the aftermath of war for its white beneficiaries, insofar as it placed no burden of proof upon its potential subjects and insofar as it posited no particular aspiration of return to or perfection of a life-norm. World War One's invention of rehabilitation as the private right of citizens to the individual transcendence of their historical milieu was one attempt to absorb the relationality of life-history at both the level of bureaucratic practice (in the dissolution of the pension) and daily psychic life. Furthermore, this newfound investment in the rebuilding of American veterans served as a metonym for the self-regenerating nature of US political power.
The first form of mass-scale federal programming to explicitly deploy the rehabilitation concept outside this initial biomedical context was the division of Rural Rehabilitation programs established by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1934 and later transferred to the Resettlement Administration in 1935 and to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. These programs were administered among white homesteading families living in the Great Plains. Their establishment was prompted by the overwhelming number of Great Plains farmers—approximately 1.15 million families by the fall of 1933—who were receiving federal relief funding with no foreseeable end. The scale of this federal relief funding posed both a budgetary strain and the risk of a massive transient population. This population was critically disenchanted by the fantasies of indefinite growth and expansion, which both spurred their prior generation's dispossession of indigenous land and which, ironically, produced the ecological devastation to which they were now subject.Footnote 15 On this latter point, I specifically refer to the exponential intensification of industrialized agriculture taken on by homesteaders in production for America's entry into World War One. Rehabilitation was described by its various bureaucratic practitioners as consisting of the rebuilding of homestead farmers into “self-respecting citizens” and, more specifically, into their transformation into fully self-sustaining economic actors.Footnote 16
The initial discursive and procedural emergence of Rural Rehabilitation took as its explicit aim the transformation of white dependents of the state, critically disenchanted by the failure of US empire to deliver to them its promises to turn them into political and economic self-sovereigns. Rural Rehabilitation consisted of massive supervised credit programming that distributed loans with little to no interest to Great Plains farmers for use towards resettlement. The primary condition for receiving these loans was the agreement to regularly update a household record of accounts specially designed and monitored by FSA social scientists to gauge these families’ path towards effective responsibilitization.Footnote 17 Like its earlier biomedical counterpart, Rural Rehabilitation attempted to absorb the belated side effects of specific forms of US imperial expansion, whose lightly encroaching reverberation at “home” threatened to transform many of its imagined beneficiaries into permanent dependents of the state. What's more, it threatened to expose the key pillar undergirding the original and ongoing dispossession of indigenous land as thoroughly ideological, even from the standpoint of its beneficiaries. This pillar consisted of the varyingly formulated notion—engaged by Marx as much as Locke—that the upward arc of both history and the human was bent first and foremost through the “productive” use of land.Footnote 18 Both forms of rehabilitation did so through scientific procedures, whose promise of individual or familial mobility prompted their participants to fix their gaze upwards and away from the only partially observed, but still grounded, historical contradictions, which their newfound physical attrition was beginning to reveal.
The 1939 emergence of the SLCRS is thus historically novel because New Deal policies of rehabilitation had hitherto been concertedly and precisely premised upon the exclusion of black tenant farmers both in their bureaucratic implementation and in their stated ideological aims. Economic planners collaborating across the FSA and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) forecasted that Rural Rehabilitation's exceptionally-generous supervised loan program would only be sustainable in conjunction with the massive reduction in crop cultivation across the Cotton Belt.Footnote 19 In light of the FSA's disproportionate subsidization of Great Plains farmers’ own holistic spiritual-economic recovery, the AAA was given the task of convincing sharecropping landlords to constrict their production—and thus mitigate inflation—through the county-administered distribution of parity checks.Footnote 20 Although a small portion of these checks was nominally intended to be distributed by landlords to sharecroppers, the AAA's reliance on landlord cooperation in manufacturing this scarcity in cotton production incentivized the total absence of this check distribution's enforcement.Footnote 21 The criminalization of black vagrancy along with the predominance of absentee landlords assuaged New Deal reformers’ fears that a newly radicalized population of displaced persons produced by this firing of “surplus” sharecroppers might pose a direct threat to the landlord's person. The intensified starvation and displacement of sharecroppers brought about by the AAA's collaboration with landlords constituted Rural Rehabilitation's procedural and ideological condition of possibility. The debilitation of sharecroppers was in literal terms the cost of homesteader rehabilitation.
The January 1939 sharecropper sit-in represented one boiling-point of this particular form of debilitation. Following the arrival of that month's parity checks, a number of landlords decided to evict sharecroppers en masse in order to replace them with more flexible and contingent day laborers.Footnote 22 Over fifteen hundred evicted sharecroppers began to occupy, alongside the belongings they could transport, Highway 60 of New Madrid County. Eleanor Roosevelt, upon seeing the dramatic FSA-produced photographs of the sit-in, proclaimed these images on her radio broadcast as proof that “human suffering was no longer confined to Europe.”Footnote 23 Shortly after this announcement of the demonstration as a humanitarian crisis, the Red Cross was commissioned to create a report on the conditions of the encampment. This report prompted the Federal Surplus Commodities Commission to deliver a shipment of food supplies to the New Madrid County Police, who then conditionally distributed these to certain protestors.Footnote 24 These conditions included the agreement to depart the demonstration and the submission of identification forms that would allow police to verify that the departed sharecroppers had ceased collaboration with remaining demonstrators.Footnote 25 The agreement to submit this identification did not offer respite from criminalization for black sharecroppers choosing to depart the encampment, many of whom were immediately arrested for vagrancy.Footnote 26 Anticipating arrest and retribution upon leaving the demonstration, 150 participants refused the FSCC's offer and remained on the highway through January. Local police requested that the Missouri Health Commissioner inspect the sit-in, where he declared it a “public health threat.”Footnote 27 State police took this declaration as justification to forcibly relocate the demonstrators to a refugee camp functionally located in the New Madrid Spillway swamp.Footnote 28 Eight months into the forced habitation of this encampment, the SLCRS relocated the sharecroppers to Cropperville, the committee's newly established cooperative farming community. The committee was led and funded by a mixture of prominent Missouri philanthropists (including the sharecropping landlord Thad Snow), social workers, members of the St. Louis branch of the FSA, as well as some prominent members of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU).Footnote 29
The committee had, in fact, first formed at the very beginning of the sharecroppers’ sit-in out of an attempt to petition President Roosevelt to extend the FSA Rural Rehabilitation programs to the sharecroppers of the Bootheel. Although the core leadership of the committee was restricted to about a dozen people; this first meeting was attended by over five hundred persons, including the majority of the landlords who had evicted the demonstrating sharecroppers.Footnote 30 Snow described the landlords’ participation in calling for the extension of Rural Rehabilitation to sharecroppers as symptomatic of their “mass hysteria” precipitated by the demonstrators’ rapid mobilization.Footnote 31 The attempt to extend this Rehabilitation programming to Bootheel sharecroppers was ultimately unsuccessful, under the pretext that sharecroppers did not “meet the qualifications of moderate intelligence, health, and initiative set by Farm Security Administration officials” necessary for procuring such loans.Footnote 32 If the Rural Rehabilitation loans had been extended to sharecroppers, however, then they would have, in fact, likely received a higher monthly payment from the FSA than the landlords received from the AAA.Footnote 33 Landlords’ immediate willingness to advocate the extension of such federal programming demonstrated that their most potent anxieties regarding the sit-in stemmed not from the possibility of certain individual sharecroppers’ socioeconomic ascendance, but from the possibility that the self-sovereign subject of that ascendance could no longer be quarantined from the purview of history or struggle. The anxiety which precipitated the invention of sharecropper rehabilitation, then, was precisely the anxiety that sharecropper mobilization might threaten the existence of the proper subject of rehabilitation and rights.
The SLCRS's eventual decision to raise funds towards the construction of Cropperville was itself an effect of the committee's initial failure to expand this subject of rights so as to include black sharecroppers. The SLCRS members and landlords Snow and Rockwell both noted that the mass dispersal of the highway protesters would result in one or a combination of two possible courses of action.Footnote 34 In the wake of the FSA's and Roosevelt's spectacular coverage of the protest, it brought the possibility that the continued use of vagrancy laws would too become a national spectacle and cause for humanitarian intervention. Conversely or concurrently, it would result in the FSA's intensive escalation of its then-minimal funding of relief agencies throughout the sharecropping economies of the Cotton Belt.Footnote 35 Both of these outcomes posed a threat to landlords’ attempts to vacate this prior politically radicalized surplus population to make way for a differently configured surplus population of contingent labor. The case of the latter outcome, furthermore, posed a significant risk of rerouting the AAA-led fiscal subsidization of these landlord's continued existence.
For this reason, the SLCRS had to settle, instead, for expanding the theaters of political life through which the life-reform of sharecroppers might be funded. The subsequent houses of Cropperville were constructed using funding from a combination of landlord donations, FSA funds, and diverted Southern Tenant Farmer Union strike funds. This life-reform might have initially aspired to serve the same political function as official Rural Rehabilitation: namely, the intensified reification of the sharecropper at both the level of the family unit and at the level of the individual agricultural sub-proletarian. Indeed, one of the stated aims in the design of Cropperville's physical design and daily activity was to train sharecroppers into “mak[ing] a house a home.”Footnote 36 It is for this reason that each Cropperville family unit would be mandated to keep a small plot of decorative flowers. This practice is notable first because the existing aridity of the land made the cultivation of even those subsistence crops that required relatively little water, to completion a game of chance—one which required the maximized use of land in order for its products to suffice for subsistence. And furthermore, sharecroppers were restricted by the town's administrators from selling these flowers in the case that they did successfully grow.Footnote 37 While these practices, like the accounting training of Rural Rehabilitation programs, were both broadly pedagogical in nature, they differed fundamentally in their motive force. While homesteaders receiving Rehabilitation were taught to account for and thus restrict their caloric intake in order to actualize their own sovereignty, sharecroppers receiving rehabilitation were prompted to divert that caloric intake in order to occupy the space between sovereignty and its potential disaggregation in the form of organized debility.
1941–1942: “Down with Starvation-Wages!”
The 1941 pamphlet's writers formulated the above attempts to remedy sharecropper debility—and thus sharecropper protest—as constitutive of the starvation-wage relation rather than the state of starvation itself. The Local 313 sharecroppers chose not to draw a distinction between themselves and those sharecroppers engaged in an ameliorated labor-debt scheme (such as the inhabitants of Cropperville) in order to critically diagnose such social welfare programs as themselves internal to the starvation-relation of which sharecropping was a part. To this end, they developed a conception of the starvation-wage, which emphasized the multimodal extractive component of what W.E.B. DuBois theorized as the wages of whiteness.Footnote 38 This wage refers both to the literal physiological state of starvation produced by the sharecroppers’ wage (which was always also a fairly unmediated form of debt), as well as to the various forms of political attrition produced by starvation's variously positioned opposites: nutrition, rehabilitation, repair. The pamphlet's writers thereby reconfigured labor struggle as that which entails the rearrangement of the circuits of exhaustion and replenishment that constitute the general starvation-bondage relation. This struggle is united neither in content nor in value, but in its functional withdrawal of one fuel (white and black labor) that allows the starvation-bondage relation to maintain normative force.
The Local began by outlining the coeval entanglement of New Deal agents, the Rehabilitation Committee, landlords, and the police function that undergirds all three of these schematic parties. They wrote:
THE GOVERNMENT SAID IT WOULD HELP the croppers through the AAA. The landlord made us into day laborers and stole the money we should have got. Now they give us a little crop of six acres. We can't live on it, but by that they hope to tie us down so that we can do day labor for them. They are fooling themselves if they think that they are fooling us. Long ago we used to make a little corn on the side. They stopped that. Little by little we are starving to death…Year after year it's the same thing, only worse. Now when at last we start to organize, they tell us to sacrifice for the war. We have nothing to sacrifice with.Footnote 39
Elsewhere in the pamphlet, the term “government” is outlined as including both formal state employees (including FSA agents) and all those who work to take on their rehabilitative function.Footnote 40 If we are to read the first three sentences of this passage with the well-established chronology of the 1939 sit-in, “THE GOVERNMENT” [AAA, FSA, and SLRSC] and the landlord are rhythmically outlined as the conjoined agent of the sharecroppers’ demotion to day laborers and their functional eviction. The referent of the “they” tying down the croppers to the land includes at least one agency that did not exist before the croppers’ eviction—one that was, in fact, only brought into existence through the 1939 sit-in itself. The SLRSC's participation in the above triad indicates that the “six acres” being used to shape sharecroppers’ material dependence on and exploitation by the “they” in question includes those effects as they manifested in the construction of Cropperville.
The aforementioned critique thus demonstrates that the balance of racial capitalism rests on not only the extraction of black sharecroppers’ surplus-value but of increasingly diversified modes of virtual value. The workers of Cropperville, though not producing any particular commodity-goods for either public or private entities, are likewise having a “wage of whiteness” extracted from their person. Following Du Bois's famous formulation, this wage is both psychical and thoroughly material.Footnote 41 It shapes sharecroppers’ caloric intake, hydration, and rest, while also making their provision of social welfare contingent upon the laborious repair of that which had been historically decimated by the ecological wages of whiteness.Footnote 42 This repair consists first and most obviously of their required labor towards the rehabilitation of Cropperville land. It also consists of the fact that their eviction, demonstration, and eventual relocation to Cropperville was largely catalyzed by the AAA's attempt to stabilize the ecological wages of whiteness, which first spurred the intensification of settler expansion into the Great Plains and eventually created its spectacular uninhabitability. Hence “[y]ear after year it's the same thing, only worse” works to highlight that it is the precise increasing multiplicity of extractive and exhaustive technologies available to racial capital (not their uniformity) that formed the Local's grounds for political organization.
This increasing heterogeneity of the means through which the starvation-wage maintains its force is met with an equally heterogeneous set of counterforces. Shortly after the above passage, the writers addressed other sharecroppers: “YOU REMEMBER THE GREAT DEMONSTRATION in 1939. In 1940 Governor Stark heard that we wanted to make another one. He offered us 10,000 houses. But it was only to fool the workers. We only got 800, but we got SOMETHING because we struggled.”Footnote 43 Here, struggle unfolds through diagonally moving confrontations between the sharecroppers and the forces with which their lives are entangled, including the FSA agents who both helped to administer Cropperville on the one hand and then provided material assistance in funding the 1942 strike on the other. The Local 313 strikers described these confrontations as unfolding diagonally (both getting worse and achieving minimal gains) in order to mark that with each expansion of immobility, there is an attendant response to that expansion of immobility that is not immediately reducible to or by the technologies available to that expansion. The “800 houses” provided—though not a part of the demonstrators’ original demands—represent a geographic expansion and technological innovation in the control of black mobility, but they also represent a marked restriction in the grammar available to read militant social protest, which takes other less visible forms.
More specifically, the pamphlet writers argue that the demonstration of 1939 allowed the rehabilitative-bondage function to expand its tools in reading and dispersing physically locatable acts of protest. In the section entitled “HOW TO STRUGGLE,” they wrote:
White and colored together, like one race, the race of labor. Together we stand, divided we fall. Every man pledges himself not to lift a stroke until he and all the others with him get 30 cents an hour. If the landlord offers 29 ½ cents, don't take it. If he offers 30 cents an hour to 99 workers and leaves out one, don't take it. That will divide us and if we are divided we are lost…The landlord will try to start race riots. They will provoke us. They will spread lies and rumors about Jap agents and Reds. Pay no attention…It is better we die than live as we have been living.Footnote 44
The first sentence of the passage re-enacts one of the most iconic tropes of white organized labor's indefinite deferral of the specific demands of black labor to the waiting room vestibular to the world-historical stage. As the specific contingencies of the trope unfold, however, the writers effectively demonstrate the vestibular as the very ontological pre-condition for the dialectical struggle that occurs on the “main stage” of world history.Footnote 45 At any moment during which the “one” out of one hundred is excised from struggle in order to negotiate, the scene of “labor struggle” unfolding on said stage is no longer a scene of struggle but one of atomized bargaining. This narrative follows perfectly the incentives used in the distribution of humanitarian and state aid to, and subsequent uneven arrests of, the participants in the 1939 sit-in. To prevent the fragmentation upon which the above invention of the curable/incurable demonstrator revolved, the writers emphasized the need for unity in functional practice (the cessation of labor) rather than physical or political-economic location. The demonstration's central reliance on its participants’ occupation of a particular delimited public space of the highway—though generating a claim about an omnipresent condition of domination and limited mobility for black sharecroppers—also relied on an optic that provided various parties the very physical means through which to spur the demonstration's dissolution from within.
This “division,” which results in the sharecroppers being lost, then, is not the one that fragments the black from the white (the “one” from the “ninety-nine”), but the one that fragments the “one” so that an elaborate taxonomy used to adjudicate the one's proximity to the ninety-nine is made to proliferate. The “one” who is initially excluded itself is broken into ninety-nine different constituent parts, whose proximity to becoming whole is the endlessly deferred gift of escaping one form of the sharecropping relation. The expansion of this internal hierarchy likewise forges the impression that the expansion associated with the unfolding of world history is effectively working in its dissolution of difference and contradiction. By intensifying the economy of debts and excesses, which both endure from the past and are perpetually added in the present, the pamphlet writers forward a political ethic in which the uneven visitudes of historical value provide the very fuel that might engender an undetermined future. It is through this ethic that their conclusion, “It is better we die than live as we have been living” takes on multiple orders of meaning. Though this statement, in form, thematically echoes the STFU organizer and former sharecropper Owen Whitfield's contention during the 1939 sit-in that “[i]f we gonna starve, let's starve where people can see us,” it, in fact, refuses the tactic of unveiling as visible the conditions of one's domination as the instinctual mode of engaging in politics.
This conclusion furthermore refuses to posit the homogenous unity of that domination as one which produces either a schematic and spectacular form of human suffering, or a single clinical space in which that form of suffering is both managed and counter-managed. Under Whitfield's formulation, for example, the “mobility” achieved by sharecroppers from their refugee camp to receiving bonded-social welfare in Cropperville is a progressive departure from the starvation showcased in the event of human suffering. Elsewhere in the pamphlet the strikers notably outline that their demands are actually below the pay of social welfare relief to which many white workers had long been entitled and to which the residents of Cropperville had been partially and conditionally made entitled.Footnote 46 Thus when they outline the value of death relative to the way they “have been living,” they are not outlining the political value of death relative to the state of starvation in and of itself. Instead, the Local outlines the fact that various forms of physical and social attrition are already a historically mediated but constitutive condition of life. To risk death through this particular form of social struggle is not ontologically of a higher value than any other form of struggle in which the Local had previously been engaged. Its value instead comes from the fact of its contingent, diachronic innovation in response to the present technologies engaged in reproducing the rehabilitation-bondage relation.
Here, the internal volatility of the alliance that the strikers propose with white sharecroppers is made clear, as the black sharecroppers risk various modes of death, whether they are to organize alongside them or separate from them. In the section “TO THE WHITE WORKERS ESPECIALLY” they write:
We must join together. We Must. If we don't join we will continue to be as we are…All the troubles we have had in the past we must forget. This is no time to remember them. There was a lynching in Sikeston the other day and the Negroes are bitter about it, but the lynching was a landlords’ trick to divide us. All our brothers in Sikeston are ready to join with you in the most important thing before you and us—the fight for 30 cents an hour.Footnote 47
The lynching to which this passage refers was the lynching of Cleo Wright by a mob of three hundred whites on January 25, 1942. Given the fact that Sikeston harbored a population of six thousand white people (including children) at the time, it is not unlikely that the members of the mob included white sharecroppers, especially since Sikeston was a local hub for tenant farmer-fueled cotton production.Footnote 48 The members of the Local no doubt knew that the dangers of lynching were present in encounters with whites of all classes; and thus their description of the lynching as a “landlord's trick” ought to be read carefully. Recall here the Local 313 strikers’ argument that the landlord was merely one node in a more insidious and expansive assemblage of political organs that constituted the rehabilitative-bondage function. The theory of historical causation undergirding the conjoining of the landlord-FSA-SLCRS triad is one in which the cumulative effects of a given phenomenon (rather than its narrated intentions) are used to measure its alignment with or opposition against the rehabilitative-bondage relation elaborated within racial capitalism. Thus the Local's description of this lynching as a “landlord's trick” is not indicative of lynching as a form of sovereign power exercised by select members of the white bourgeoisie, but of lynching as a form of white violence, which—regardless of its class composition—circumstantially helps the class interest of the landlord by maintaining black persons in positions of subjection. The Local 313 strikers choose to describe this as a “landlord's trick” not because of the landlord's heightened investment in black subservience relative to the white tenant farmer but because of the latter's own circumstantial and historically contingent desperation to oppose the planter, which would otherwise be an aspiration to become the planter. By 1942, the remaining white sharecroppers in the Bootheel had accumulated too much debt to either have been bestowed any more of the already-lenient FSA micro-loans, or to have accumulated the capital necessary to migrate towards industrial labor.Footnote 49
Thus this attempt to ally with white sharecroppers was taken on because of the circumstantial convergence of two incommensurate historical economies of value. One economy's geographic immobilization of black laborers accumulates multiple forms of their (metaphysical, historical, social, financial) potential value as perpetually unrealized and, thus, as a debt perpetually owed to them. The retroactive recognition, reification, and payment of this debt is then what produces the sense of a balancing of historical accounts. The other economy's geographic mobilization of white sharecroppers and homesteaders through the lenient distribution of financial, psychic, and social credit made possible their very rapid accumulation of debt. This historically contingent convergence of white and black sharecroppers’ schematic interest in leveraging bargaining power over the landlord was subtended by the divergence of their subjection vis-à-vis the starvation-wage. This meeting of excessive immobility with excessive mobility thus created the material basis for the latter to camouflage those persons subject to the former state.Footnote 50
With this context in mind, the Local 313 members’ argument that lynching was a “trick” to “divide us,” pertained neither to the ill intent of the white planter nor to the benevolent alliance of the white sharecropper. Rather, this passage outlines that forms of endurance could be innovated through the treatment of this circumstantial convergence as a technology through which to reconfigure political protest outside the (current) capture of rehabilitative bondage. If the SLCRS's early attempts at scientific philanthropy aimed to cure black sharecroppers of their potentially volatile political-economic position, then the Local's call for organizational unity was not a positivist claim about black and white sharecroppers sharing the same historical horizon, but instead a counter-diagnostic made to rob this scientific-philanthropy of its managerial force. It would thus also be misguided to conceptualize the call to become other than how we are as simply a rejection of normativity, since the arrangement of “how we are” already includes within it both a particular norm (rehabilitation) and its transgressions (starvation and bondage). Rather, to struggle towards becoming other than how we are represents an experiment in making a symptomatic unity exert normative force in the world: to, for example, make it increasingly less possible for anti-racist protest to be positioned as an object of scientific-philanthropic speculation.
The Local's strategic blurring of these distinctions was itself met with various corresponding material effects. First, public demonstrations associated with the strike were not taken on without the presence of a substantial number of white persons (either other striking sharecroppers or white social work and government agents, not unlike Miss Williams) in tow.Footnote 51 Second, the public demonstrations that were orchestrated were kept on the move such that the ability to identify participating protestors was minimized.Footnote 52 The material anchors to which this theorization of provisional coalition corresponded were not unlike the very form of the textual critique: They were quick and mobile, and they were shaped in order to make the differentiation between participants and the attendant execution of police and vigilante force against black participants as unlikely as possible. If the gradated inclusion of black demonstrators into social reform programs was aimed at mitigating the risk of united black and white sharecropper protest, then the Local's call for unity with white sharecroppers sought to instrumentalize the failures of Reconstruction towards mitigating the risk of their engagement in social protest.Footnote 53
Conclusion
In my analysis of the Local 313's pamphlet, I have highlighted their critique of black sharecroppers’ selective incorporation into the category of rehabilitation by various state and philanthropic agencies during the 1939 sharecropper sit-in. The SLCRS's attempt to expand a generally historically rights-based rehabilitation discourse, as well as the specific responsibilitizing policy of Rural Rehabilitation, was catalyzed by the fear felt by its landlord-members in the face of tenacious mass sharecropper protest. In preparing for their 1941 strike, the Local would argue that Cropperville, as the negotiated outcome of this aforementioned attempt at expansion, is one constituent node of the starvation-wage. The starvation-wage consists of racial capitalism's increasing modal diversification of extraction through the emergence of various economies of repair fixated upon the perpetual unrealization of black workers’ virtual value.
The Local's eventual call against “continuing to be as we are,” doesn't assert the strike or its subsidiary volatile collaborations as moving beyond this particular elaboration of the wages of whiteness. Rather, this call represents a tactic by which the wages of whiteness might be used as a resource towards the partial dissolution of the economy, which produces them as such. This tactic stakes out a politics in which the gradual struggle to transform the daily capacities of existence holds a value in excess of what the rehabilitation-bondage relation could extract from Local 313 organizers’ person at any given moment. That various technologies of racial capitalism would emerge and transform themselves in order to adapt their extraction towards that excess in value was certainly expected. However, this fact wasn't considered by the Local to be a “failure” of the strike, but the very pre-condition of engaging in politics in the first place—a continuous and contingent effort to rearrange the circuiting of power to which one is subject precisely because there is no promise of what might become of that still-unborn rearrangement.
