RACE RIOTS

by
Daniel DeLeon

The Daily People
July 30, 1900

A flood of ignorance is pouring out of the papers regarding the slaughter of the Negroes in New Orleans by the mob.

Various explanations are given, all silly, and many “remedies” are suggested, each one vying with the other in craziness.

The war in New Orleans is not between black and white. It is a war between workingmen, and the prize they battle for is a “job"; and that job means the same to them as the carcass of the animal, over which two savages fight, means to the savage: life or death.

When the vulgar editors prate about “racial hate” and ascribe the riots to that, they merely display their crass ignorance.

We are living in a time when the comforts of life, and all the material wealth needed to bring happiness to every human being, can be produced in abundance. There is no need whatever for one human being to go hungry, homeless or naked. Man’s inventive genius has developed the tool to that point, and guided the natural forces to that degree, that abundance is possible to all.

But between that abundance and its enjoyment by the children of men an obstacle is interposed. That obstacle is the modern social system, capitalism, and its defenders and beneficiaries are the capitalist class.

Balked and baffled by this obstacle, eyeing wistfully that abundance of wealth which the capitalist class forbids them to touch, the ignorant workingmen, black and white, instead of fighting the capitalist, with wealth and freedom as the prize at stake, fall to fighting each other; and the stakes in that conflict are: death to the loser; poverty, misery and wage-slavery to the winner.

More horrible than the battle of the savages who fought for the meat, is this fight between workingmen. This has for a result the survival of the slave. A more brutal and demoralizing spectacle cannot be conceived.

How strong becomes the desire to forever end a system and a class responsible for this manifestation of social atavism! What bitter hate must fill the breast of the class-conscious proletarian for the real authors: the capitalist class!

To the work, then, of organizing and educating the proletariat, to fight for wealth and freedom, and not for poverty and slavery; to fight their masters and not their fellow slaves, and to win that victory in the class war which will forever put an end to race riots.