Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Capital is onlythe fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.

hey are organizational devices for the exploitation of labor and ac-cumulation of capital.

f wages did represent the total value created by labor (after expensesand improvements), there would be no surplus value, no profits for the owner,no great fortunes for those who do not labor

orkers endure an exploitation of their labor as certainly as do slavesand serfs. The slave obviously toils for the enrichment of the master and re-ceives only a bare subsistence in return

Workers’wages represent only a portion of the wealth created by theirlabor

What transforms a treeinto a profitable commodity such as paper or furniture is the labor that goesinto harvesting the timber, cutting the lumber, and manufacturing, shipping,advertising, and selling the finished product—along with the labor that goesinto making the tools and whatever else is needed for production anddistribution.

Adam Smith, one of the founding theorists of capitalism, noted in 1776that“labor...is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value ofall commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It istheir real price; money is their nominal price only.

his explains whyworkers who spend their lives toiling in factories or offices retire with rela-tively little if any funds to speak of, while the owners can amass considerablefortunes.

You are a member of the owning class when your income is very largeand comes mostly from the labor of other people, that is, when others workfor you, either in a company you own, or by creating the wealth that allowsyour investments to give you a handsome return. The secret to great wealth isnot to work hard but to have others work hard for you.

Everyyear over thirty thousand of them get trampled and go out of busines

he very rich families and individuals who com-pose theowning classlive mostly off investments, which include stocks, bonds,rents, mineral royalties, and other property income. Their employees live mostlyoff wages, salaries, and fees.

n less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000

Governments decide how much punishment they want

These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are signifi cant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.11 That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are over-fl owing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fi fty times greater than those of white men.12 And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have crimi-nal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.13 These young men are part of a growing undercaste, perma-nently locked up and locked out of mainstream socie

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minori-ties. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

The CIA admit-ted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine.

he mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown

e timing of the crack crisis helped to fuel conspiracy theories and gen-eral speculation in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States. From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA

he media campaign was an extraordinary success

minority neighborhoods.

racial disparities in drug convictions and sentences, as well as the rapid explosion of the prison population,

War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhood

rime and punishment

Most people assume

the media

There is at least one concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive and insidious nature of the drug problem for the African American community. Though diffi cult to accept, that is the concept of genocide.

War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy to put blacks back in their place.

President Ronald Rea gan offi cially announced the current drug war in 1982,

edia coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply wrong

economic interests

Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became central components of the debate.

votes against major educational bill

antipoverty programs were, in effect, anticrime pro-gram

42the new jim crowconduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about po-lice brutalit

jus-tice for all.

Activists or ga nized boycotts, picket lines, and demonstrations to attack discrimination in access to jobs and the denial of economic opportunity

blacks became more indignant over their condition

locked in poverty.

n Alabama the rate leaped from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent; in Louisi-ana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent.33 Suddenly black children could shop in department stores, eat at restaurants, drink from water fountains, and go to amusement parks that were once off-limits. Miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, and the rate of interracial marriage climbed

ivil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of dis-crimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally fi nanced activities.

61 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested.

Once again, federal troops were sen

he Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself as a powerful terrorist or ga ni za tion, committing castrations, kill ings, and the bombing of black homes and churches

The Supreme Court seemed to agree. In 1944, in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court ended the use of the all-white primary election; and in 1946, the Court ruled that state laws requiring segregation on interstate buses were unconstitutional. Two years later, the Court voided any real estate agreements that racially discriminated against purchasers, and in 1949 the Court ruled that Texas’s segregated law school for blacks was inherently un-equal and inferior in every respect to its law school for whites

American Creed

Jim Crow system

Jim Crow ended and the Civil Rights Movement

another racial caste system was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by white elites to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people.