Alex Lichtenstein

Writing a Global History of Convict Labour

This bibliographic essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of convict labour from a global and long-term perspective. First the conditions conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour are addressed by framing this coercive labour form within broader classifications of labour relations and by discussing its connection with the problem of governmentality. Subsequently, an overview of the literature is undertaken in the form of a journey across time, space, and different regimes of punishment. Finally, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, the possibility of a longer-term (pre-1500) and global history of convict labour is considered, and some theoretical and methodological approaches are suggested that could favour this task.

A “Labor History” of Mass Incarceration

A quarter century ago, when I began researching a dissertation on convict labor in the American South, I professed astonishment that the number of prison inmates in the United States had reached a half million; by the time I finished my thesis, in 1990, that figure had climbed another 50 percent to 750,000. When my book appeared some years later, the number of incarcerated Americans had long surpassed a million. I hardly need to rehearse the figures, but in this new century, the number of people in prison stands at more than 1.6 million; those in jail total another 800,000; and those under “correctional supervision” (prison, jail, probation, parole, etc.) are an astounding 7.3 million — in 1980, the comparable figure had been a mere 1.8 million, regarded then by many critics as troublingly large (see fig. 1). A whole series of studies have shown that this “mass incarceration” might better be termed hyperincarceration, as Loïc Wacquant calls it, because it falls on certain populations very unequally. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, although the total incarceration rate in the United States is 754 per 100,000 — a worldhistorical rate, by the way — at the midyear point of 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates held in state and federal prisons and local jails per 100,000 black males, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males. Let me repeat that another way — nearly 5 percent of all black men in the United States are incarcerated as you read this, and the rate is much greater for young black men in the prime of their working life. When one spins out numbers to encompass all those who have ever been confined to a jail or prison cell . . . well, we know that for young African American men in some urban areas, the correctional state is by far the state they know best. It is the very essence of the contemporary American state as far as their lives are concerned. The Sentencing Project calculates that onethird of black men will serve time at some point in their lives.1

Global Convict Labour

In Global Convict Labour, nineteen contributors offer a global and comparative history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from the Antiquity to the present.

Consensus? What Consensus?

One of the many pleasures of reading anything Eric Arnesen writes is found in the footnotes. So comprehensive are his citations that one can often discover an entire, parallel article within them. In this case, however, the referential text contradicts much of what appears ‘‘above the line’’ and demonstrates the artificiality of the very ‘‘consensus’’ he claims to challenge. Far from launching a pre-emptive strike on a historiographic monster dominating the field, judging from his footnotes, Arnesen really performs more of an autopsy over its corpse. What scholarship does Arnesen use to demonstrate the alleged ‘‘consensus’’ about the impact of Cold War anticommunism on the left–labour–civil rights coalition of the 1940s? Appropriately enough, he cites Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s important 2005 essay on the ‘‘long civil rights movement’’ (LCRM), where she writes that ‘‘civil rights look less a product of the Cold War than a casualty’’. Arnesen also traces what he sees as the supposedly deleterious effects of the LCRM consensus to several other works: biographies of Walter White and Duke Ellington; Martha Biondi’s history of post-war New York City; Tom Sugrue’s history of the ‘‘other civil rights movement’’ in the North; Penny von Eschen’s history of black anti-colonialism; Nancy MacLean’s study of the battle for equal employment; Glenda Gilmore’s account of the ‘‘southern front’’; and David Lewis-Colman’s history of the UAW in Chicago, to name a few. All are charged with whitewashing the importance of the ‘‘Communist Party’s (CP) line’’ to the evolution of the labour–left–civil rights coalition, but also, somehow, with overstating its influence. Readers should revisit these works in light of Arnesen’s critique and judge for themselves the degree to which these scholars downplay or misconstrue the politics of the CP in this era. In many cases, they may conclude that he has a point. Yet, the LCRM paradigm, as Arnesen himself demonstrates, hardly rests on the role played by the communists. Indeed, Arnesen also cites numerous scholars of labour and civil rights who do not share the view that the Party and its allies were the central players in this coalition, including Adam Fairclough, Steven Lawson,

‘A Measure of Democracy’: Works Committees, Black Workers, and Industrial Citizenship in South Africa, 1973–1979

Abstract By the early 1970s the permanent, urbanised African working class in manufacturing had reached a critical mass. Frustrated by poor wages, pressed by an inflationary economy, and barred from state-sanctioned trade unions, African workers engaged in a series of explosive, spontaneous, strikes in Natal in 1973. Faced with this shop-floor turmoil, the South African business class recognized a looming crisis in the labour field, bemoaning a shortage of skilled labour, poor productivity, and a lack of mechanisms for negotiating with an increasingly restive African working class. Nevertheless, they did not want to accept fully recognised trade unions for Africans. Instead, in response to the strike wave, employers and the state expanded the existing system of works and liaison committees, which pretended to give official voice to African workers’ shop-floor grievances while refusing them the right to state-sanctioned unionisation and collective bargaining mechanisms. South African nationalist historiography regards these committees as collaborative structures, designed to co-opt workers. This article rejects that notion, and argues instead that Black workers and their allies used the committee structure to build a shop-floor infrastructure that emerged in the independent Black trade union movement in the 1980s.

Ned Cobb's children: A new look at white supremacy in the rural southern US

Many scholars regard segregation in the US South as part of urbanization and modernization. Yet few have examined race relations in the countryside. The Rural Face of White Supremacy shows that absolute separation based on race proved poorly adapted to rural life. Inspired by the sociological studies of the rural South done in the 1930s and the 1940s, this book uses oral history to show that interracial social life in mid-twentieth century rural Georgia was ‘marked by intimacy as well as white supremacy.’ Race relations reflected the paternalism and dependence of an agrarian labour system that reduced black workers to the status of a peasantry.

‘The hope for white and black’? race, labour and the state in South Africa and The United States, 1924–1956

This article compares US and South African labour relations from 1935 to 1956, a period that saw the rise and decline of left‐led trade unions, significant initiatives of independent black trade unionism, and a new receptivity on the part of some white trade unionists to cooperation with the black working class. However, interracial unionism in both the US and South Africa fell victim to a post‐war anti‐left purge, unfavourable legal structures and right‐wing trade union factions. Consequently, blacks in the US looked to the racially liberal state to attack racism, but the civil rights movement lacked the mass participation of black workers. In South Africa, the state offered white workers protection against black encroachment and denied black workers a place in the trade‐union movement. As a result, black workers played an integral part in the liberation movement. In both cases, the defeat of interracial unionism can be attributed primarily to state action, not working‐class racism.

‘We do not think that the Bantu is ready for labour unions’: Remaking South Africa's Apartheid Workplace in the 1970s

Abstract This article explores the response of employers and the apartheid state to the Durban strikes of 1973, as they sought to remake industrial relations while preserving racial capitalism. After 1970, South African manufacturers faced a new set of challenges. Export markets shrank, while the domestic market remained severely limited because of dependence on low-wage black labour. Low productivity made it hard to compete globally, yet growth based on import substitution remained blocked by black poverty and low consumption. Finally, in 1973, manufacturers faced a mass revolt by underpaid African workers. Apartheid planners faced a dilemma: how to increase black labour productivity and domestic consumption, without emancipating the African working class and eroding the privileged position of the white working class in the labour market? Faced with this impasse, employers and the state sought to stabilise industrial relations by creating lines of ‘communication’ with black workers, enhance productivity by improving personnel relations, and boosted some wages, without promoting black unionisation. Despite these efforts to ‘reform’ industrial apartheid and to contain the black workers on this narrow terrain, by the end of the decade black workers took advantage of these changes to lay the groundwork for an independent union movement.

Introduction: Rethinking Agrarian Labor in the US South

This special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies seeks to broaden discussion of the history of rural labor in the post-Civil War US South beyond the confines of the cotton plantation, studies of sharecropping, and black-white race relations. This introduction summarizes the contributions to the special issue, highlighting their most significant points. Collectively, five interrelated issues emerge from the essays: the role of the state in mediating agrarian labor relations, the importance of paramilitary or vigilante violence in the reassertion of the social power wielded over rural laborers, the significance of access to land and other resources of rural self-sufficiency, the ongoing struggle over labor mobility, and the recomposition of agrarian households as units of production.

In the shade of the Lenin Oak: "Colonel" Raymond Robins, Senator Claude Pepper, and the cold war

George Smathers, in the opening speech of his 1950 Senate primary campaign against Florida Senator Claude Pepper, sounded a note that he would repeat relentlessly for the next four months, by calling on “loyal Americans, who believe in free enterprise, who want to preserve their right to think, to work, and to worship as they please” to defeat the incumbent. “Standing against them,” Smathers warned ominously, “will be certain Northern labor bosses, all the communists, all the socialists, all the radicals, and all the fellow travelers.” In the anticommunist climate of 1950, this proved a successful strategy for defeating a popular Democratic Party incumbent, especially in a southern state like Florida. Like Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, defeated by Richard Nixon later that year, Pepper was an exceptionally vulnerable target in the early years of the Cold War. An unusually liberal Senator for a southerner and an avid defender of the legacy of the New Deal, he found himself tagged with the label “Red Pepper” because of his insistence on the possibility of peaceful negotiations with the Soviet Union after World War II, as well as his pro-labor and civil rights sentiments. In the election, Smathers effectively used Pepper’s anti-Cold War stance, left-wing associations, moderate civil rights sympathies, and support for labor to tar him as “the leader of the radicals and the extremists.”