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Principles of Black Political Economy

by Lloyd Hogan

200 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #99-0022; ISBN 1-55212-253-0; US$19.81, C$30.47, EUR19.90, £13.80

The central theme of the book is that black Americans are fundamentally no different from any other people. Indeed, their history reflects a pattern of economic development which is quite consistent with the changing social-economic fortunes of all peoples throughout human history. Moreover, during the last five and a half centuries those people who are now identified as black Americans have played a most decisive role in the origins of capitalism as well as the rate and geographic extent of its development in the world.

The dominant factor in their history to date has been the exploitation of their labors by an alien people under three distinct historical modes of social-economic organization--slavery, sharecropping, and wage laboring. During the interval of real time during which blacks experienced each of these three historical epochs, members of the general American working class were exploited under a different form of political economy. Thus, it has come to appear that there is some inherent "racial" character which sets black Americans apart from non-black workers in the American social setting.

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about the book      about the author      table of contents      sample chapter      catalogue info

About the Book A new framework for analyzing the role of blacks in the U.S. economy The book is a heroic attempt to organize the relevant facts about black economic involvement in the U.S. economy. Its major objective is the construction of a theoretical framework for explaining the mechanisms by which the black population of the United States reproduces itself as a black population. Who they are today and what survival strategies keep breath in their bodies are consequences of a set of historical forces which have generated them out of some primordial earth matter about three million years ago, propelled them through many and varied social-economic formations, and finally solidified their present defining characteristics as well as their physical location within the bowels of the most powerful capitalist nation that the world has ever known. Previous economic-theoretic works in this field have concentrated on a set of isolated data, mainly centering around black-white differences in various measures of economic performance or rewards. This book, on the other hand, develops a systematic framework for understanding black people as a distinct population in historical transition from primordial beginnings in Africa, through slave labor in North America, thence undergoing a sharecropping existence, and finally being transformed into a full-fledged wage-working population. The method exploits the rich and changing history of blacks as a people. At the same time, it emphasizes their survival activities which are peculiar to each historical epoch in their development. A major conclusion of the book is that black people have been locked in an historical embrace over the centuries, reproducing among themselves to the exclusion of all other people, undergoing a set of transformations which brought them from slavery through sharecropping and thence into the American wage-working class. This perspective makes for a deeper understanding of the racial oppression which they have experienced. At the same time it provides insights into the progressive elimination of the racist malaise over time. The book ends with some interesting speculations about the future of blacks in the U.S. "There is no single source available which attempts to establish fundamental theoretical principles for approaching the new discipline of black political economy with the same skill and methodology presented here," said Manning Marable, author of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983) "I think that the book is a tremendous advance over the entire body of literature currently availble on the subject."

About the Author Lloyd Hogan studied economics at The University of Chicago. He has taught economics and statistics at a number of black colleges in Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. He has also served as visiting faculty at Harvard University, Cornell University, Amherst College, and Gettysburg College. He is a retired Associate Professor of Economics at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is editor of Black Community Revitalization (Transactions Books, 1980) and Government Subsidies for Low Income People (Transactions Books, 1981). He also served as editor of The Review of Black Political Economy (vols. 8-12, 1974-1982). He is currently completing research for a book on human population dynamics.

Table of Contents

Sample Chapter

The object of our endeavors is ultimately to form a clear understanding of the historical forces which have transformed the black American population. We cannot even begin to approach this task without commenting on the concept of "race."

This concept has been used in the literature for a number of centuries. Particularly during the period of the Atlantic slaving operations, Europeans and their offshoots in the Americas have proclaimed distinctions among peoples based on different racial stocks. Africans were different from Europeans.

If it stopped there, no more need be said. But wherever the racial distinction is proclaimed it is very curious that it is always done effectively by popular writers and scholars of a group of people who dominate over another group. The subordinate group is not only a different racial stock, but it is an "inferior" racial stock; superiority-inferiority syndrome is endemic to the concept.

It is also quite curious that the popular writers and scholars who proclaim racial hierarchies are generally in the pay of a yet smaller group among the superior race who dominate the political economy through their ownership and control of the most important materials of wealth. Thus, the inferiority of one race is demonstrated conclusively at two levels of proof.

The ruling class within the dominant group exploits the inferior racial groups at such levels of intensity as to leave them with only the barest material means of survival. A significant portion of the fruits of their labor is expropriated by the ruling class. Thus, their materially deprived condition emanating from the inhuman theft of their labor, is positive empirical proof of their "inferiority."

On the second level, the working-class members of the dominant group are exploited by the ruling class at rates significantly below those of the inferior race. These working-class members of the dominant group are moreover employed as the civil servant "policemen" who directly apply the physical force of the Political State to whip the inferior race into line to accept the legalities of their own exploitation. In some cases they wear official uniforms; in other cases they wear white bed sheets; in still other cases they join together as riot mobs. In all cases, however, they are the instruments of ruling-class brutality against the will of the inferior race. In this role the working-class members of the dominant group are empirically observed to be materially better off, and, therefore, superior to the inferior race. Never mind their status with respect to the ruling class. Such status is blurred in the literature under the guise that it is only a matter of time or individual initiative before some working-class members of the dominant group will move into the ranks of the ruling class. The route to that end may come from marriage, exceptional scholarship, great military prowess, undetected criminal activity, and the like. In general, it comes from a small group of those who commit themselves to be the unbending, true and loyal servants of the ruling class, serving them in positions of trust and responsibility -- overseeing the counting and the preservation of their wealth.

The serious student who seeks truth and clarity cannot debauch her/his studies by using the concept of race. It is too contaminated with the filth of deceitful scholarship. It is analytically empty, devoid of the elementary canons of scientific methodology. When applied to black people its vicious consequences are quite obvious.

If race is an empty concept, then what is a black person? Surely, if we try to identify blacks by race we have to resort immediately to their skin color as a possible criterion. No success can be achieved here. Black people spawn all the colors of the rainbow and much more besides. Their blood has been tainted with the venom of the vermin slave masters who forcibly injected their polluted seeds into slave women's wombs. The rape of black womanhood now appears visible in the panorama of colors among black people. But the power of blackness is such that just one droplet of black blood still marks the offspring as black.

The only way to identify black people in the United States is to use criteria which unambiguously distinguish them from other people. No one criterion will do. Indeed, we think that a combination of a certain five criteria are necessary, even if not sufficient. These are (1) common origins on the continent of Africa; (2) common history of exploitation as a homogeneous slave working class in North America for more than two hundred and fifty years; (3) common exploitation as a more or less homogeneous class of landless peasants for approximately one hundred years in the southern United States; (4) common experience of exploitation as a homogeneous wage laboring class since the last decade or so of their history; and (5) conscious individual acceptance of being black.

Using these criteria it becomes obvious that we are looking at a people who have been bound together in a socially reproducing embrace throughout the centuries. They have been linked in a stable and continuing bond of producing and consuming their material means of survival; simultaneously they have been linked in a family mode of dying and borning and socializing their young to perpetuate themselves as a people. And all of this has been done with each other, to the general exclusion of all others.

On the other hand, they have been exploited by aliens throughout their history in America. They have been a working class in three distinct historical epochs. They have been slaves, landless peasants, and wage laborers. In each epoch they have maintained their identity as a people apart.

In the rest of the book we shall try to analyze black people in these terms - how they originated, how they have survived as a people apart, and how they have been transformed from one epoch to another in their continuing saga.

To read the introduction chapter, or read additional excerpts, please visit the author's web site.

Catalogue Information