Power concedes nothing without a demand

Power Concedes nothing without a demand

Frederick Douglass' advice to us at this critical inflection point

For those who thought that some political figure would save us and are now deeply disappointed, despondent either because Kamala Harris lost, or because Jill Stein did not go far enough, or because Donald Trump, instead of battling the deep state, is appointing swamp creatures to key cabinet posts, I want to suggest that looking back on the best of America’s political tradition for inspiration and direction is critical.

Let me introduce today the central passage treating politics in the purest sense of that word from the most critical speech of Frederick Douglass who stood at the middle of the anti-slavery movement. That movement to end chattel slavery drew an enormous numb er of previously unengaged Americans in the 1850s and thereby transformed the United States.

Douglass words were addressed to those still under the yoke of slavery, granted that the speech was read around the world. He argues that the success of some in obtaining freedom in the Caribbean through a brave struggle, which forced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 on the brutal British Empire, was the way forward for those who yearned for freedom in the United States. He was blunt, asserting that slaves must free themselves through struggle and could not depend on messiah figures to do the heavy lifting for them.

No speech could be more relevant to us at this historical moment. Douglass’ words are apposite because we face precisely the same battle against slavery that his audience did in the 1850s.

If the similarity between then and now is not obvious, that is perhaps because one does not understand what slavery meant at that time, or that one does one does not grasp how we are being walked, back and forth, with sweet pats on the head from time to time, like cattle led towards chattel slavery with I-phones, WIFI and Netflix.

The battle against slavery then is currently described in popular culture as the oppression of African Americans by racist whites which was put to an end by the Union Army under Abraham Lincoln.

That narrative is not entirely wrong, but it is misleading.

First, slavery was justified using racist pseudo-science and arguments about the inferiority of Africans before the Emancipation Proclamation, but much of the racist ideology which contemporary writers condemn is a product of the eugenic and social Darwinism of the 1890s, and not of the oppression of age of slavery.

Slavery was based on the color of one’s skin to some degree, but many who were treated as slaves had fair skin, and there were many black free farmers in the South. Moreover, the expansion of slavery in the 1850s, which led to low-scale conflicts in Kansas and elsewhere between those who favored, and those who opposed, this effort to turn humans into products that could be bought and sold, and then worked to death for profit, revealed to Americans that slavery could not be eliminated progressively, not slowly ended state by state, but that slavery was expanding and becoming the key element in an industrial, large-scale inhuman economy. The result in the South was that the rights of free farmers were increasingly limited and that they were slowly reduced to slaves themselves.

Equally important was the role of the slaves themselves in their own liberation. Of course, it was true that the armies of Grant and Sherman liberated many slaves and enforced new rules that protected civil rights. At the same time, however, much of the battle against slavery was taken up by the slaves themselves, through rebellions, sabotage, and a variety of covert actions that undermined the plantations, and the Confederacy, and thus turned the tide in the war, even though almost none of the actual players are recorded in the history books. I am referring to figures like “the other Abraham” Abraham Galloway, a leader among those fighting the planter class from below who only agreed to work with the Union Army on his own terms.

Fast forward to the present day: Humanity, from forced vaccinations, to digital control of food, money, transportation, and information, to universal surveillance and unaccountable punishment of targeted individuals, is being nudged towards slavery. Moreover, a large part of the population incarcerated in prisons (the largest in absolute terms in the world), on parole or in debt, trapped in sexual or forced labor slavery, is already effectively enslaved—granted few indeed of the liberal class are willing to call slavery out for what it is.

The current attack on the right of the citizen to bodily autonomy, the push for automation in the workplace, the demand for digitalization, the dumbing down of the population using social media, entertainment and pornography, and the slow-motion controlled demolition of liberty are all operations aimed at creating a slave class. In fact, it is entirely natural and even inevitable that permitting this level of concentration of wealth will lead to the institution of a slave society.

The current process of enslaving working people, much like the expansion of slavery in the 1850s, is sophisticated and subtle, invisible for those who refuse to open their eyes. The process follows a complex path, one designed using super computers, that is gradual, punctuated with incidents that induce psychological trauma so as to render us passive and receptive. Although the forced march towards slavery is not a straight line, and occasional short turns for the better are purposely included so as to discourage us from hardening our will, the goal of enslavement is clear.

Douglass calls out to us across the years to tell us the most fundamental truth:

We will not be saved from slavery by messiahs or heroic leaders, but rather through a struggle in which each individual commits to a dangerous battle for his or her own freedom.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing.

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

“In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted in the North and held and flogged in the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical.

“Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by our labor, by our suffering, by our sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

 It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. The poet Lord Byron was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said,

‘Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.’ ”

Frederick Douglass

August 3, 1857

“West India Emancipation” Speech

Delivered at Canandaigua, New York

On the twenty-third anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean (West India)