I'm just posting this up as a way of somehow systematising my jumbled thoughts on this subject. Your criticisms would be most welcome.

First of all, the two major growth industries in the South in the period 1945-65 are the textile and oil industries. These are also among the most segregated, though in different ways. In textiles, segregation was mainly felt through exclusion, as African Americans tended to be hired for low-key menial labour, away from the shop floor where possible. In the oil industry, it was expressed through different payrolls, in which black workers were denied access to more skilled, better remunerated work. In response to Title VII (1964 Civil Rights Act) suits, employers sought to re-code these forms of discrimination as meritocratic, following market logic.

While the Southern oil industry was internationally oriented, and thus tended to export its labour structures, the textile industry tended to be more regionalised and when it did grow it sought to do so while maintaining local managerial control of the labour system. Similarly, while the oil industry was susceptible to national political pressure, because most of its contracts were with the federal government, the textile industry was far more capable of resisting such pressure. Lastly, there was a status differential in the two industries. White workers in oil were better educated and well-paid, while in the textile industry they tended to be refugees from failing farms, were poorly educated and had low status.

In both industries, white supremacy was complementary to the strategy of paternalism. The bosses, by providing amenities and services for their white workers, also exerted a degree of influence and control over their lives, promoting a kind of folkish cross-class solidarity that undercut unionisation and contributed to the failure of the CIO's organising drive, Operation Dixie. Black workers' lives were controlled but less intimately regulated by the bosses, and thus they tended to be a lot more open to unionism. That, alongside an exaggerated fear of communist influence in the CIO unions, was used to arouse hostility toward unionism among white workers.

The textile industry's racially exclusive practises tell against the expectations of split market theorists, in which employers would be expected to source the cheapest labour, and thus to employ more African American workers. Given that employers were not compelled by law, except in Southern Carolina, to impose segregation in the same way that restaurants, schools and public transport were, one obvious conclusion would be that these employers believed in the racial system on grounds besides those of efficient capital accumulation. But while is true, it cannot be disarticulated from the wider effort by capital to suppress and contain the labour rebellions that had swept the South first in the period from, and then in the 1930s. Incorporating white labour was a key strategy for capital as a whole, and it was by far preferable to those systems of welfare and social democracy which obtained in Europe.

This was a real terror among the Southern capitalists. The Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC) represented a broad cross-section of that class, formed precisely in response to the labour rebellions of the early 1930s, the better to devise appropriate political and managerial responses. Its research director and prolific writer, Thurman Sensing, visited the UK in 1950 to get a sense of how 'socialism' was working out in Britain, and reported to his fellow industrialists that things were as bleak as could be - diets worse than in the wartime, than in Germany even, unproductive industry, nationalised utilities running up deficits, crippling rates of taxation, and a free NHS that left hospitals crowded and doctors overworked. Indeed, such was the absurd state of British socialism that in addition to free medicine, the people could expect "free wigs, free hot bottles, free corsets for the ladies even. If her doctor will certify that it's for her health and well-being, an English lady can get a free corset". This appalling state of affairs was in stark contrast to the South's can-do bootstrap-pulling after its defeat in the Civil War, where people never dreamed of going communist despite their immense poverty, but rallied all the more fervently to free enterprise.

Indeed, the SSIC consistently positioned itself as a beacon of 'free enterprise', of true Americanism. It tended to avoid taking an explicit position on race matters, beyond opposing "civil rights propaganda" and declaring that the issue was a "temporary and typical national vagary". In part, this was because some sections of southern industry and finance were sympathetic to Northern Republicanism, conservative and racist but uninterested in explicit supremacism a la the White Citizens' Council. There was strong support among some layers of capital for the more 'pragmatic segregationism' of politicians like Mississippi's JP Coleman, which sought to conserve the basic racial structure without provoking a social conflict or wasting energy on a futile battle with the federal government.

Among the SSIC's lesser known products was its one time vice president Anthony Hart Harrigan, a conservative 'free market' activist who did much to promote the ideas of Milton Friedman and connect different elements of the American right in a broad coalition against the Keyenesian consensus. His blend of 'free market' conservatism, Cold War anticommunism and 'practical segregationism' - wherein he consistently extolled the southern way of life, linking its conservatism and racial hierarchy with free market cosmopolitanism in a key National Review article in 1958 - was typical of a major pole in the SSIC.

Thus, the SSIC's attacks were focused primarily against the 'socialists', the 'liberals', and the 'welfare staters'. Other sectors of business, such as smaller agrarian capitalists represented by bodies such as the National Cotton Council, the American Sugar Cane League, the Peanut Growers Association, the Peanut Shellers Associations, the Tobacco Growers Associations and industry journals like 'The Farm and Ranch', were just as explicitly hostile to socialism, were not altogether fond of 'Big Business', but reserved their greatest contempt for big government, big spending and most especially 'Big Labor'. In practise, small agrarian capital was heavily dependent on big government in the form of federal subsidies and quotas, so that the commitment to 'free enterprise' mainly took the form of opposition to unions driving up the wage bill.

Anticommunism helped bind the different fractions of capital in the Southern states together in a shared political project, so that differences over the handling of race and the civil rights challenge were subsumed into a broader hostility to federal government intervention and unionism. Anticommunism also overcame the cleavage between the dying 'isolationists' of the Old Right and the aggressive Cold Warriors of the New Right, the latter represented most vociferously in the National Review. The 'isolationists' were not, it should be said, in any sense 'anti-imperialist'. They supported the colonial powers, and tended to cite the 'chaos' of post-colonial rule to justify their Jim Crow structures.

But empire was most problematic in situations where imperialism might involve the extension of institutions of self-rule to races deemed 'unfit' for it. Just as some segregationists had opposed imperialism in the Philippines on the grounds that it would logically lead to the Philippines being ruled as US territory and thus subject to the bill of rights and the constitution, the incorporation of Hawaii and Alaska into the US was opposed for bringing non-white people into the polity and thus risking "mongrelization". Indeed, the campaign against Hawaii's annexation spread well beyond the 'isolationists'. The SSIC, the southern Democratic leadership, and a number of mainstream right-wing organisations campaigned against annexation on the grounds that it would create an "Asiatic state" in America. Opponents of annexation also mobilised anticommunist fears, tying their belief that "Asiatics" were predisposed to despotic forms of government with the claim that communists already effectively ruled in Hawaii, and that the ILWU leadership ran the place like a dictatorship.
There was also unity on wider dissatisfaction with some of the institutions of Cold War liberal internationalism. The SSIC was not isolationist. It was supportive of the anticommunist struggle in Korea and Vietnam, and vociferously joined the attacks Senator Fulbright who supported peaceful coexistence with the USSR, and who had written a memo attacking the military elite's conniving with the far right to produce a more reactionary , and calling for the military to be forced to accept civilian control. But it vehemently opposed other aspects of US imperial stategy, such as the Marshall Plan for Europe. It also favoured withdrawal from the UN, and engaged in some of the more febrile scaremongering about UNESCO attempting to "destroy the patriotism and influence the homes in the lives of American youth", due to its campaign for equality in education. The SSIC would also throw its weight behind a conservative campaign against Nixonian overtures to the PRC.

Post-segregation, it was southern industrialists and their political allies who would be decisive in leading a New Right to power, defeating the old Keynesian class compromise. Uncovering the intersection between specific regional patterns of capital accumulation and differing global orientations of various southern capital fractions would help account for the stances taken by businesses and their right-wing allies on domestic Jim Crow structures, the integration (or not) of labour unions, and the global struggle against communism. It would also help explain the peculiar intensity of what Joel Kovel calls 'black hole' anticommunism in the South ('black hole' because everything that is not aggressively American and free market is crushed into a single communist entity), and its role in conserving segregation.

The 'Tea Party' has its origins in a particular ideology of American capitalism which comes from the South. We hear about the 'southern strategy', in which the Republican right has used race and 'culture wars' to build support in the formerly Democratic South, and used the Christian Right to mobilise a mass base from the South behind policies that favoured elites. But in fact, it would be more accurate to think of this process not as a cooptation by a traditionally Northern Republican Party, but rather as the successful bid for national political hegemony by the southern right. The cognitive habit of identifying Reaganite neoliberalism with East Coast elites, and with Wall Street in particular, has impeded understanding of this. By seeing neoliberalism as something springing from the economics departments of mid-Western universties or from the New York financial district, we miss how the Southern right was strongly behind the doctrines known as neoliberalism long before the rest of the United States did. The emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant solution to capital's accumulation problems in the 1970s was bound up with the emergence of an increasingly powerful Southern capitalism and a nationally dominant Southern political leadership.

This is hard to square with the image of thwarted segregationists, a South politically defeated and forced to accomodate to national norms. But that image rests on reducing the South to the most violent and uncompromising expressions of 'massive resistance'. It's true that for some Southern whites, having to sit next to a black person in a restaurant or on a bus was something to fight to the death over. But Joseph Crespino, Anders Walker and others have shown that this didn't characterise the more sophisticated ('moderate') southern political leaders who fashioned a more 'Northern-friendly' approach to defending the basic contours of segregation without express supremacist dogmas attached, and would go on to become powerful in federal courts and legislatures. They used the reforms initiated by Brown vs the Board of Education to restructure Southern society in ways that often had little to do with the direct constitutional issues involved. They centralised the state apparatus, modernised family law, changed their welfare system, and at the same time worked to preserve the essence of segregation through district lining and other means. They were using the crisis of Jim Crow to modernise the southern state structure the better to facilitate effective capital accumulation, in an era in which the old rural economy was shrinking rapidly and being replaced by advanced services and financial sectors. And while they would have preserved the formal structures of segregation if they could have, they understood that those old technologies of rule were not adequate for the post-war American empire. By adjusting their discursive strategies they were able to help the Southern Right rebound in time for the global crisis of capitalism, building a mass campaign behind Christian schools and traditional moral issues, the materials of which would form the basis of the 'culture wars' for years to come.

The neoliberal factions that emerged in both dominant parties in this period were based strongly in southern capital and politics. There, the conservative elite had long been about much more than white supremacy. They perceived themselves to be a bulwark against the disintegrative impact of egalitarianism, trade unionism, and welfare liberalism. They had long enjoyed a comparative advantage against employers in the North, because their anti-union policies and racialised class system meant that they kept wages below national levels. Their emergence as the most powerful national political faction enabled them to work through Congress and supreme courts to eviscerate the New Deal and protect the gender and racial politics that were the basis of their power. As Nancy MacLean has argued, the progress from Goldwater, defeated, to Reagan, victorious, tells of the emergence of a southern-western coalition in US politics, which united with pro-business politicians in the North to overturn the old 'New Deal' consensus.

The emergence of a neoliberal-reactionary hegemonic bloc, one of whose current, morbid expressions is the Tea Party, is thus not novelty or an alliance of convenience between potentially antagonistic and separate political layers, but the logical result of the ascendance of a particular geographical, sectoral and political bloc based on southern capital.

“The Vanguard of Anti-Imperialism...”
Gerald Horne is an historian who has been revealing neglected aspects of African American history for several decades, particularly those relating to class struggle, communism, and what W E B Du Bois referred to as the global ‘colour line’.

In The Deepest South, he disclosed the efforts by Deep South slavers to form a pact with Brazil and build a southern empire that would protect white supremacy. At the same time, he revealed, Lincoln and the northern establishment looked toward schemes that would result in the removal of former slaves from the United States, perhaps to indentured plantations in the British Empire. Again, in The White Pacific, he followed the trail of former slave-owners as they set out across the Pacific, to Australasia and the Pacific Islands, where they engaged in a form of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’. In Cold War in a Hot Zone, he demonstrated the links between African American struggles during the Cold War and militancy in the Caribbean as the British empire was replaced by American dominance. And in Black and Red, he anatomised the African American response to the Cold War, noting that “US Blacks have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism”.

In this, his penultimate volume, African American anti-imperialism is at the fore again, as Horne assesses the relationship between the Indian struggle for independence from the British empire and the African American struggle against Jim Crow. It is reasonably well known that Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), and perhaps less so that Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Pauli Murray and others also drew on Gandhi’s doctrines. Nehru’s speech at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states paid moving tribute to the struggle of Africans, and particularly of African Americans, whose liberation he pledged India would support. A more recondite affinity drawn out by Horne is the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement of Indian Muslims on African Americans in the early 20th Century – an influence that would later be felt through the Nation of Islam.

Horne traces these connections, from prehistorical origins to the twentieth century, with the overwhelming focus on the decades leading up to Indian independence and the culmination of the civil rights struggle. The shared historical destinies of black America and India arguably began with the American revolution, when some revolutionaries looked to India as a potential anti-colonial ally. Their fate was subsequently bound together through the production of cotton and the circulation of slaves between south Asia, Africa and the United States. Opposing antebellum slavery in the United States, abolitionists in England deplored the country’s manufacture of cloths from slave-produced cotton when it might just as well have been obtained using free labour from the banks of the Indus, at less cost. The Indian rebellion of 1857 carried grave race warnings for the United States. For some, it showed the madness of trying to permanently rule over non-white people. Andrew Carnegie, visiting Lucknow in 1879, fretted that “these bronzed figures which surrounded us by millions” may once again “in some mad moment catch the fever of revolt”. It showed what a “dangerous game” it was for the US to try to conquer neighbouring islands populated by black majorities. Carnegie would go on to become a generous benefactor of the Anti-Imperialist League when it was founded in opposition to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Similarly, the Civil War of 1861-65 which was to end in the abolition of slavery (quite against the original intentions of the North) was closely determined by the availability of cotton from India, not least because it dissuaded English capitalists from throwing their weight behind the Confederacy to defend their cotton access.

Interwoven destiny
African American activists, cognisant of such an interwoven destiny, sympathised with the plight of Asia. Booker T Washington and Jawaharlal Nehru both sympathised with Japan in its 1905 war with Russia, hoping that victory for the former would boost Asian chances of independence from would-be racial oppressors. African American journals considered that a victory for the Tsarist empire would be a “triumph for color prejudice”. The grounds for direct solidarity with Indians were enhanced by the treatment of Indian labourers who migrated to the United States and were treated by racist politicians, including the presidential contender William Jennings Bryan, as a great “peril” to the American way of life.

As a result of this oppression, Indian labourers tend to live among and associate with African Americans. But the first sign of a direct political connection between India and black America was the emergence in 1889 of the Ahmadiyya movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Early on, the movement despatched a mission to the United States, just as African American Christian missionaries had – with less success – visited the Indian subcontinent to find converts. The movement hinted at a new racial synthesis that was also increasingly emerging in the thoughts of Islamic modernists such as Jamāl-al-dīn al-Afghani: a pan-Islamic alliance that would unite Indian anti-colonialism with Pan-Africanism.

Marcus Garvey had direct links with the Ahmadiyya movement, which would go on to win up to 10,000 African American converts by 1940. Certainly, the critique of Christianity as a primary motive force in racial oppression had a profound influence on Garvey’s movement, though Garvey himself remained a Christian. The movement’s influence was not uncomplicatedly positive, for its leadership forbade revolt against London, and was seen by many in India as a British tool – and there is some evidence for the idea that Britain, as part of its traditional divide-and-rule strategy, promoted the Ahmadiyya movement among Indian Muslims. Nonetheless, Islam gripped the imagination of a minority of African Americans in part because it added to the political struggle a spiritual dimension, a war against Christian ideas, which were seen as the ideas of the slave masters. African Americans who were forming the most exploited layer of the working classes, and experiencing racism not just from their bosses but from white workers as well, were offered the option of a spiritual alliance with an East that, Ahmad said, had never seen the kinds of racial evils that were practised in America because “Islam knows nothing of segregation and discrimination”.

Revolution and anti-colonialism
However, more militant and leftist forms of international solidarity arose through the early decades of the twentieth century. Ideological sympathies were given some expression in, for example, the comradeship between the Indian socialist intellectual L L Rai and W E B Du Bois, himself a member of the National Council of Friends of Freedom for India. And as migration from south Asia to the United States increased in the 1910s, Indian migrants expressed astonishment at the severity of white supremacy as practised in the United States, particularly the treatment of African Americans. Rai himself, comparing India and the United States, considered the forms of oppression in both countries to be remarkably similar, arguing that America was “doubly caste-ridden”.

The combined experience of racial oppression in the United States and British colonialism led to the formation of the California-based movement, Ghadar. It was a revolutionary movement for Indian independence which proclaimed socialism as its ideology and supported military actions against the British, which the latter invariably described as ‘terrorism’. It was influenced in part by the anti-racist leftism of the International Workers of the World, and among its founders was the anarchist Indian intellectual Har Dayal. The organisation was implicated early on in its existence in an alleged Kaiser-funded plot to time an Indian rebellion against British rule with Germany’s campaign in Europe. That such allegations touched on American anxieties about its own developing imperial role was indicated by Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s complaint that German Americans and British Indians intent on stirring revolt in India had arrived in the Philippines, the base of US colonialism in the region.

The Ghadar case aroused sympathy among African American journals, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and A Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, especially as the suspects were convicted and deported to their fate at the hands of the British authorities. The Messenger also noted, with approval, the refusal of West Indians called on by the British to help quell growing Indian revolt, to raise arms against “the Hindu people in their struggle for freedom”, and referred to Haiti as “America’s India”. India and its emerging generation of Marxist intellectuals exerted a profound influence on African American militants such as Alain Locke. And while Tokyo had once been the lodestar of resistance to white world supremacy, the emergence of an anti-imperialist, socialist Russia came to unite south Asians and African Americans in opposition to racial oppression of all kinds.

The new anti-imperialist pole of opinion was given expression at the 1927 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism. Nehru, in attendance, was impressed by the presence of both black and white Americans at the congress. The NAACP, surveying the new world situation created by the Russian revolution and the growing anticolonial revolts, exulted that the African American struggle now had two major allies in Russia and India. An African-American publication known as The Crusader, allied with the nascent communist movement, foresaw an “Afro-Asiatic League” which would oversee a coordinated response to imperialism. The forces of white domination could win, the publication argued, when rebellions broke out separately. But with “coordination and simultaneity of revolution”, “not all the might of Europe or the League of Damnations will be able to stop the onslaught for Freedom”. It urged African Americans to show solidarity with the Indians, where it saw soviets developing in opposition to an increasingly desperate imperial power. The same sense of the importance of global solidarity had led to the formation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, in Chicago in 1920, with Indian delegates in attendance.

It was not just the left that was inspired by the new era of militancy. Garvey’s pan-Africanism drew on the example of Ghadar and its anti-sectarian approach to resisting white domination. “If it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India,” he averred, “it is possible for Negros to come together everywhere”. In general, the Garveyites focused considerably more attention on the fate of the British Empire and its consequences for African Americans, than most others. They also expressed profound admiration for Gandhi whom they, in the greatest compliment they could offer, compared to Garvey himself.

However, it was Du Bois and the NAACP that led the campaign to forge solidarity between African Americans and India. These relations were sometimes strained by the red-baiting of prominent members such as the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, who supported Indian independence but was deeply hostile to all communist influence in a way that was not true of the mainstream Indian anti-colonial movement. Nonetheless, the inspiration was reciprocated. Reading Du Bois’ work from London, the Indian activist A K Das wrote to ask why it was not possible to unite “what is called the coloured races”. A R Malik, writing from Punjab, saw Du Bois’ struggle to liberate “the Negroes from the bondage aristocrats and capitalists” as analogous to India’s struggle, declaring that Indians “naturally view the struggle of the Negros with great sympathy”. The NAACP provided information for Indians seeking to rebut myths of their racial inferiority, and Du Bois’ journal, The Crisis, became a sought after source of polemical nourishment in Punjab and elsewhere. Throughout the 1930s, a growing number of African Americans travelled to India to study its difficulties and draw lessons from its intricate race and caste order, and found an audience interested in the struggles of African Americans. And when India was traduced by the American writer Katherine Mayo, in a number of popular books rationalising British colonialism, Indian writers responded by pointing out the barbarism of the American racial order. America, they noted, claimed the right to independence from Britain despite maintaining a gruelling system of oppression – why should India, which did not have this flaw, be denied the same right?

A free and independent nation “of dark people”...
The perspective enjoining the unity of ‘coloured’ peoples faced a particular challenge during World War II. The African American left had largely been critical of Japan in the years prior to 1941, while Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement extolled a pro-Tokyo line, noting the implications of Japan’s rise for European control of China and India. Yet, much of the left, including Langston Hughes who had criticised Japan’s policies in China, sympathised with Japan’s unique status as a free and independent nation “of dark people”. Similarly, Indian journals such as The People and The Independent had covered Japan sympathetically, as part of the broader resistance to white world supremacy.

As Horne has previously covered in his Race War!, London and Washington were deeply concerned to counter this sympathy, and particularly the charge that a ‘war for democracy’ was hypocritical when India was not allowed to be free. Powerful voices in both capitals thought the best way to do this was to make some concessions to African Americans and to consider independence for India, but they were ranged against entrenched lobbies. At the very least, though, statesmen had to attenuate the force of any public sermons on behalf of white supremacy. Sensing the possibilities opened up by the war, African American leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP lobbied for Indian independence. White met personally with Lord Halifax to request a commission be set up for the purposes of determining the future of India, a proposal that did not amuse Halifax. He also urged the United States to support independence for India, noting that racial inequality was driving sympathy for Japanese propaganda and would potentially lead to Japan acquiring the Indian subcontinent. White also gave London headaches with his visit to India, and his expressed desire to see Nehru and Gandhi, at a time when Britain was jailing the Indian leadership. Throughout the war, African Americans and Indians pressed their demands in growing coordination. Thousands of African Americans applauded Paul Robeson and Kumar Goshal in the Manhattan Center in 1942 when they demanded a free India as the best condition for defending India against Japan. Goshal went on to write regularly for the Negro Quarterly, a journal for which Ralph Ellison was the managing editor, advising readers in the indissoluble link between the fate of African Americans and Indians, especially as the former defended the latter from Japanese conquest.

The US was sometimes capable of responding pragmatically to this situation, as when military top brass noticed that African American soldiers fighting in India demonstrated an ability to relate to Indian civilians that surpassed that of white soldiers, and were thus an asset – despite the generally racist perception of black soldiers as incompetent, lazy, and so on. Nonetheless, with a segregated army and a war in the name of a ‘freedom’ most African Americans did not receive, such understandings were of limited use. The situation of both India and African Americans would have to change if the dominant position of the US was to be secured. According to Horne, whatever the reality of Japanese policy, the perception that it was waging a ‘race war’ against the white world made conditions more favourable for Indian independence and improvements for African Americans.

From race war to Cold War
While the Cold War that followed WWII proved unfavourable for the African American Left, the NAACP emerged the strongest African American organisation in the US. The NAACP has often been belaboured for aligning with Cold War ideology, its leadership arguing that race reform was an integral part of the struggle against communism. Some historians, such as Penny Von Eschen, have argued that the NAACP’s decision shut down possibilities for raising more radical conceptions of social and economic justice that would later come to the fore, and limited the scope for international anticolonial solidarity. Manning Marable argued that the NAACP effectively acted as the “left-wing of McCarthyism” in the early Cold War period.

Horne has been known to share this broad line of argument, and here he acknowledges the limits placed on the NAACP by Cold War ideology, lamenting the decreasing internationalism in the African American movement at just the time that the Indian anti-colonial movement was denouncing apartheid, launching the Bandung Conference to give Africa and Asia a global voice, and founding the Non-Aligned Movement, to escape the restrictive embrace of anticommunism. The anticommunist leadership not only refused to show solidarity with those being put on trial by the state for communist activity, which included many African Americans. Its stance also meant that it had to depart from any idea of an independent foreign policy which would challenge the very global order that Washington was seeking to conserve and reform in its own image. The leadership rarely deigned to express a view that differed from established Washington opinion, and Walter White ended up effectively counselling President Truman on India, steering the NAACP toward a position of trying to influence India in favour of anticommunism. The old internationalism reached a nadir when W E B Du Bois was expelled from the NAACP for attempting to persuade an Indian delegation to the UN to raise the plight of African Americans before the body’s general assembly, a move that would have reflected poorly on Washington’s new stance as a global protector of human rights.

Still, the relationship to India did not vanish overnight. In the year preceding Indian independence, the NAACP was capable of a vigorous campaign on India. Outside the NAACP, African American missionaries to India tried to use their experiences to help overcome the communal divisions that ripped through the subcontinent at a cost of millions of lives as the British opted to ‘divide and quit’. The African American left was profoundly critical of the British division of India, and Congress militants themselves pointed to the evil of racial hierarchy in the US to warn against any attempt to exclude or subordinate Muslims in an independent India. Some worked through YMCAs to develop contacts with Indian militants. Bayard Rustin made contact with local capitalists the better to forge allies among India’s newly independent ruling class.

And there was still a profound awareness of the fact that thousands of Indians lived in the US and suffered racial oppression alongside African Americans. But even here, potential problems arose. A minority of Indian residents of the US chose to argue that their legal rights should be respected on the grounds that they were properly categorised as Aryans, which raised the question of whether anti-racist organisations should campaign for people of South Asian origin to be respect as ‘white’. The major barrier to sustained solidarity, though, was the atmosphere of anticommunism, a political perspective that did not bode well for relations with a country that had pioneered non-alignment, and which had two mass, influential communist parties. The fear of being charged with being communist sympathisers drove many internationally oriented African Americans away from even discussing global affairs. The era of internationalism would return with the next upsurge of the civil rights struggle, but it would come with the breakdown of the liberal Cold War consensus.

The fact that the African American struggle for liberation was compromised in the way that it was by Cold War repression does not mean that it was no longer dependent on global struggles. The very fact that millions of newly free Indians (and Asians of all backgrounds, and Africans) were open to the idea of a systemic alternative to Washington-dominated capitalism was, as Horne’s narrative makes clear, one of the main reasons that the destruction of Jim Crow became a political goal of the liberal wing of US power. America’s global standing became far more important to its long-term advantage than the preservation of its peculiar institution of white supremacy.

In keeping with his long-standing efforts to revive the forgotten international contours of African American history, Horne has done an enormous service in illuminating the anti-imperialism at the heart of black America’s struggle. He has also, in the course of this, brought to light a myriad of class, gender, national and caste issues that intersected with this story. There are times when one would wish for a more critical appraisal of the role of the USSR, whose conduct gave much succour to the anticommunists Horne berates, and whose international stance was often profoundly conservative – its long support for French colonialism in Algeria and Zionism in Palestine, for instance, suggests that it could hardly be depended on as an ally of the victims of white supremacy. At other times in the narrative, it is more evident that African Americans and Indians had a shared destiny, than that substantial political forces among either understood this. And it would have been useful to have an engagement with critics, such as Manfred Berg, who have mounted a defence of the NAACP’s position in the Cold War period. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms. Horne has written another powerful ‘history from below’, as it were, in which the main agents of liberation are the oppressed themselves. Their stories, and their ideas, are so infrequently told that one can only welcome the fact that such a gifted historian as Horne has chosen to relate them.

These are some loosely connected reflections. There might be something worth watching on Youtube if this gets a bit tortuous or boring.

Race is class - this is the point that won't go away. My cursory look at how the American race 'question' presents itself has always taken me toward two topics: class, and anticommunism. One cannot talk about class without talking about labour, and therefore about how labour is managed, stratified, waged, etc. Therefore, one cannot talk about race, in a Myrdalian way, as if it was just a set of dogma rather than a socially constructed institution with decisive implications for the class structure. How can one talk about the suburbanisation of 'blue collar' labour without considering 'white flight'? And how can the decline of 'blue collar' manufacturing labour be considered apart from 'globalisation', or rather the global stratificaton of labour created by capitalism in the era of white supremacy? Equally, any history of anticommunism is incomplete without at least discussing how it was initially conceived as a racial counter-conspiracy: against the Jews, against Germans, against African Americans, and finally against Russkies plotting to have unfit countries achieve "premature independence". The liberal and social democratic variants of anticommunism did not perform any better in this respect than the conservative variants.

The thread that ties anticommunism and racism at a conceptual level, I think, is the issue of "self-government", ie democracy. In American racial thinking, self-government is a cultural state attained by Anglo-Saxons and Teutons, a condition in which people are able - on account of god-chosenness, race experience, and fine blood lines - to control their primitive urges toward sin. This was not just a conservative position, but a staple of turn-of-the-century progressivism. In contemporary discourse, one doesn't speak of Anglo-Saxons and Teutons but one may, with a certain respect for racial propriety, discuss the prospects for self-government in similarly culturalist and mystifying terms. This is an art that the neoconservatives refined, but it is not just reactionaries who hold to such views. In a very contemporary parlance, the liberal religious philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams has expressed the belief that the persistence of evil proves that people are no more equipped for self-government than they ever were: she, perhaps unreflectively, referred to the spectre of sometimes genocidal 'failed states' as examples of what she meant. Communism, being in theory the most advanced state of self-government available to humanity, represents for such thought both an unrealisable utopia and a recognisable dystopia. For southern segregationists, self-government for African Americans was unrealisable (utopia), and the attempt to impose it would inevitably result in such disorder that some possibly 'totalitarian' dictatorship would emerge to keep order (dystopia).

A notorious image from the history of the segregated south is that of white conservative protesters bearing placards that read: "Race Mixing Is Communism". This image was chosen for the cover of Jeff Woods' Black Struggle, Red Scare (Louisiana State University Press, 2004). I think there is a commonsensical reaction to this, which is to conclude that the protesters were either hysterical and deluded, or instrumentalising a much more widely accepted anticommunist discourse for the purposes of promoting an unpopular racial agenda (I think Woods' case is a mixture of these two). Given the alarmist tone of reactionary propaganda in the US, and given the fact that American southerners have, since the Wilson era at least, represented themselves as the most patriotic Americans of all, these commonsensical conclusions seem to be more than justified. But I think they are wrong. My suggestion is to take the reactionaries seriously. When they said "Race Mixing Is Communism", they meant something important and relevant by it. It is manifestly wrong to think that 'race mixing' is identical with communism, but the claim was not just a ruse, nor was it blind panic. For such people, white supremacy was meritocratic. It reflected the innate, natural differences between people (and, as a corollary, the difference between the white labourer and the white owner was just as natural, if mitigated by blood solidarity). To attack the race system was to introduce a principle that was, to them, a state-sponsored attack on a well-maintained, meritocratic free enterprise society.

In the same way, you'll notice, when bourgeois ideologues want to mystify class relations without reference to race, they reach for the same combination of naturalising and culturalist tropes. Either the allocation of rewards and punishments reflects some innate biological differences between people, or it corresponds to a kind of ethnicity in which class itself is spoken of in 'native' or 'tribal' terms - one's "roots", "tradition", the signature cloth cap, the pub, the East End argot and lifestyle (as described in various sentimental best-sellers), etc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously attributed to African American culture a "tangle of pathologies", which he held responsible for inhibiting their social advancement and maintaining them in a state of disproportionate poverty. Similarly, UK politicians are inclined to interpret the polarisation of wealth within Britain's class structure as a result of the unchecked laziness, decadence and sexual promiscuity of the 'underclass'.

One could conclude from this that race overlaps with class in mainly discursive ways, but this would be to miss the point. The point about the "colour bar", whether it operates formally or de facto, is that it excludes non-white labour from certain positions, or substantially reduces their participation in those roles. These positions are sought after for the levels of skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards entailed in them. But those social facts about the job - skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards - are interpreted by racist institutions as natural or cultural facts. Thus, 'whiteness' = skill, responsibility, self-government and the rewards those qualities deliver. In much the same way, the socially produced imperative to drive workers harder and extract more free overtime labour is interpreted as a particular expression of one's culture and personality, ie. as a reflection of one's 'flexibility'. So, what race does is not just overlap with class, but constitute it, rendering its demarcations more intelligible in the terms of bourgeois ideology. The imperative of anticommunism in such a system being to defend, with greater or lesser reservations, the balance of wealth and power in capitalist societies, it follows that the disproportionate distribution of non-whites among the unemployed, poor and imprisoned - however lamentable it may be for liberal anticommunists - is not too far from meritocratic justice.

There are other ways to come at this topic, but the basic relationship is as crucial to understand today as it ever was. After all, as Tim Wise has pointed out, the delirious charges of socialism against the Obama administration are not neutral with respect to race - neither Clinton nor Bush faced similar charges over ambitious programmes of government spending, whether on healthcare or on the military. There is surely a sense in which socialism, for some people, "is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them". If it's not the DVD player, it's nothing less than the country itself that "black folks" are supposed to be eloping with. And a good white conservative meets such a threat as he would any common burglar: gun in hand, trigger happy, fully convinced that the life he is about to annihilate is worth less than a toaster. The defence of property is, in American politics, cosubstantial with the defence of the prevalent racial order. The 'American dream', (a PR initiative floated in the 1930s but really taking hold during the anticommunist hunts of the 1950s), was always white, and so it largely remains.

During the 2008 US presidential campaign, liberals rightly pointed out the hypocrisy of attacking Reverend Wright while failing to take note of the nutcases that McCain was hanging around with. Pastor John Hagee didn't really have too much explaining to do over his rabid racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. Evidently, his flock had no trouble with his ideas: when it came to such matters, he was preaching to the converted. This moment occurred to me while reading up a bit on the way in which the Right responded to the defeat of segregation.

Joseph Crespino has done some of the best work on this, particularly in In Search of Another Country, in which he notes that the most effective segregationists, the ones who kept it going for longest and were most successful in countering the effects of desegregation, were those who advocated in a 'colour blind' fashion. (You know the drill - states rights, liberal elites, bureaucrats, federal dictatorship, etc.) This was not a novel strategy - Crespino points out that the Jim Crow legislation introduced in Mississippi in the 1890s made no explicit reference to race. And, as Ira Katznelson has shown, racism in the 'New Deal' operated through 'racially laden' provisions rather than exclusions explicitly aimed at African Americans. But it was effective and by 1980, the seeds of a counterrevolution were bearing fruit. In another essay, 'Civil Rights and the Religious Right', Crespino dealt with how the Christian Right emerged substantially in response to desegregation measures. It's an important story, because while the 'new atheists' grapple ineptly with the finer points of theology, surely the point about such movements is the social interests they express.

Richard Viguerie, one of the pioneers of the Christian Right's direct mailing strategy, observed of the movement that what really "kicked the sleeping dog" was the efforts by the IRS to remove tax exemptions from "segregation academies". These were the hundreds of Christian schools set up across the states of the old Confederacy in response to desegregation laws, to enable white people to send their kids to private schools from which black students were effectively excluded. They didn't always make their exclusion explicit. The Briarcrest Baptist schools system in Mississippi proclaimed that it accepted and encouraged black enrollment but, dang it, there just weren't any black students ready to give it a try. White enrollment in public schools collapsed in some areas in the first year of desegregation and by 1970, 400,000 children had been enrolled in "segregation academies". By 1976, Christian academies outnumber the old secular schools across the South. The Nixon administration couldn't offer much but promises and comfort to segregationists. Nixon was personally sympathetic: "Whites in Mississippi can't send their kids to schools that are 90% black; they've got to set up private schools." But there was sufficient pressure to ensure that the administration grudgingly obliged the IRS, initially with some latitude as to how to enforce the policy, to remove tax breaks from said 'academies' (usually low rent affairs with inexperienced teachers and rote learning from antiquated sources). The IRS initially accepted the school's own say-so that it didn't discriminate, but by 1978 had to draw up guidelines, based on demographic formulae, by which schools could be deemed 'reviewable' and subject to further investigation. If the number of black students was substantially below what it should be, the case for tax exemption could come under review.

And this was what decisively galvanised the Christian Right. They called it 'racial quotas', and 'reverse discrimination'. It was an attack by big gummint. That was when Bob Billings and Paul Weyrich founded the National Christian Action Coalition. Their stance was simple: they had nothing to do with those old reactionary zealots of the segregationist era, and certainly didn't advocate the state subsidising racial oppression. They simply objected to the federal government using its fiscal power to discourage legitimate cultural and political choices. They were supported in this stance by neoconservatives writing in The Public Interest. In the Senate, their cause was championed by Jesse Helms, who had used similar language in defence of southern segregation. By 1980, the GOP was pledging to "halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta" against the segregation academies. Bob Billings joined the Reagan campaign and became its advisor on religious matters. Reagan himself made a point of addressing students Bob Jones University, one of the most notoriously segregationist academies in the south, which had banned interracial dating and lost its tax exemptions. He recycled the mytheme of 'reverse discrimination', arguing that the IRS policy was tantamount to 'racial quotas' and that: "You do not alter the evil character of racial quotas simply by changing the colour of the beneficiary". No subtlety there: the blacks, he affirmed, had the run of the place - and he would do something about it. Which he did by 1982, when the University briefly regained its tax exempt status, before the Supreme Court slapped it down.

Of course, the channelling of the old segregationist spirit was a crucial part of the Reaganite campaign, and this wasn't just in the language of the Christian Right. At the Neshoba fair in Mississippi, in 1980, Reagan had championed "states' rights", while his local campaign director confirmed that they were reaching out to "George Wallace voters". Trent Lott, who headed Reagan’s Mississipi campaign, lauded Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948: "If we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today". And the Christian Right had other concerns, bearing on the social and moral order - they had homophobia and misogyny to attend to, for example, and they generally disapproved of communists and troublemakers. But, the issues that were to so exercise the Christian Right in later years - school prayers, and so on - had done nothing to electrify them as the segregation academies had. It has been argued that the Republicans incorporated the Christian Right because it was the only potentially popular component of their coalition, when their main goals would only benefit a narrow sector of corporate power. This is probably true, but it is just important to notice that this was part of the broader 'southern strategy' adopted by the Right. It showed that counterrevolution was still on the table, that the gains of the Sixties open to challenge and subversion, and that the working class could still be powerfully divided by race. The furious race-baiting of the McCain campaign last year presumably worked on the assumption that this old spirit was still alive.

Today's imperial frontiers are characterised by lavish 'reconstruction' efforts. The waste and fraudulence of these projects has been anatomised, if not necessarily in great detail, and it is hard to miss the gaping chasm between the effort put into creating appropriately opulent surroundings for the occupiers and that put into creating liveable conditions anywhere outside the administrative hubs. In downtown Kabul, you can sip a Starbucks coffee while browsing teh internets, but beyond, in the vast rural hinterlands, the best technology you see will probably be whizzing toward your house courtesy of an American jet. In Baghdad, American advisers, technocrats, military officials, spinners, aid workers and others can secrete themselves within a gargantuan alien compound, attended by imported serfs, if not outright slave labour. Beyond those confines, lucky are those who get electricity for 12 hours a day, and have drinkable water, or can get medicine when they need it, or find the tortured corpse of a recently kidnapped relation. This is the utopianism of Manifest Destiny.

But green-zoning, as elaborate and other-wordly as it seems, is hardly new. The Third World was built on the basis of such topographical entities, informed by bodies of racial knowledge. The outposts of formal empire replicated European town structures, the better both to provide settlers with a familiar environ and to exclude 'natives'. Both states and companies accumulated considerable expertise in this practise, just as in general they were adept in devising the appropriate geographies for managing labour. Although this was often part of a genocidal process (in Australia and North America), colonists in 19th and 20th Century Africa usually practised segregation the better to super-exploit the locals, either tacitly or explicitly. This was particularly the case in those urban areas which the colonists made their headquarters. As Ambe J. Njoh describes it ("The segregated city in British and French colonial Africa", Race and Class, 2008; 49; 87), colonial town planners sought to develop spaces environments that were fit for capital accumulation and which reflected the perceived cultural superiority of the colonists. The very fact that the colonisers and the indigenous lived in such different conditions was then ascribed to an insurmountable cultural gulf, as well as to pathological factors (as when British planners in South Africa or Sierra Leone denigrated the native population as vectors for deadly diseases). Urban African dwellers were maintained in carefully charted segments of the urban environment where they could be kept under surveillance. Such segregation was not only racial, of course: it also maintained the white proletariat in separate, inferior living quarters.

Segregation was also a norm when the American state (in the Panama Canal Zone, for example) and American companies (Fordlandia in Brazil, the working environments for oil companies in Dhahran, the Niger Delta, Jakarta and so on) set about devising new urban environments appropriate to its mode of imperial dominance. Congruent with the paternalism of the 'Progressive' era and beyond, these Arcadian developments in the Canal Zone reproduced islets of suburbia for a white labour aristocracy (those on the 'Gold Roll'). A complex of townships and military installations asserted America's colonial possession. Every asset was owned by the state, and white American workers - in contrast to the enormous West Indian and African American labour stratum - were provided with every amenity, including free housing and healthcare, and superior schools, for which they paid no taxes. West Indian and African American workers, of course, received none of these perks, being on the 'Silver Roll'. All urban facilities were organised along racial lines, much as they were in the Jim Crow south. The same was true of the banana producing enclaves in Central America, where white Americans resided in airy bungalows secluded from the local workforce, whose wooden shanties often had mud floors.

Robert Vitalis, writing on the global oil frontier, notes that American companies such as Texaco, Chevron, Exxon and Mobil, the major partners in Aramco and thus central to America's 'special relationship' with the House of Saud, had accumulated decades of experience in developed segregated practises in the Jim Crow south and applied precisely the same techniques of segregation, wage differentials, and race management wherever they went. In these cases, white workers comprised the more skilled, managerial and privileged sectors of the workforce, and were provided with modern housing and facilities. Arab labour was put up in huts, and remunerated poorly. As Vitalis also notes, when Aramco had to eventually abandon its explicit segregationist policies, under pressure both from Arab labour struggles and from liberal capital represented by Nelson Rockefeller, it sought to bury its racism, and redescribe its differential treatment in market terms. But the means by which segregation was effected and rationalised were frequently market-based, enforced through 'racially-laden' policies rather than openly exclusionary directives. Thus, for example, it was possible to retard indigenous development by legislating that the best land be developed exclusively with imported European materials, driving up the market price. Similarly, segregated labour in turn-of-the-century south Africa was initially based on the migrant labour system. Having created the conditions by which certain segments of labour are subordinated, it is always possible to reproduce these effects through market transactions. Indeed, barring massive intervention into the labour market, the rule is that they will be. And much the same geographies will persist, as they do in post-apartheid south Africa.

That the evil paradises of yesteryear were explicitly racialised, and that today they are not, hardly means that the effects of that ascriptive hierarchy are no longer discernible in the geography of capital accumulation, as a quick perusal of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums would suggest. It is no accident, though, that the residents of gentrified (class-upgraded) zones across the world resemble a colonial elite themselves. In the cities of advanced capitalist societies the rich, having 'discovered' groovy niches in the metropolitan landscape, convert them into colonies of the upper bourgeoisie, drive up mortgage costs and rents, and send working class residents fleeing to other densely populated locales that have not yet had the misfortune to arouse the desire of hipster capitalists. Either that, or they get pushed out into overspill areas. In the cities of the very Third World that was created by colonialism, as well as in formerly Second World countries, the presence of Western (or Westernised) social elites generates its palatial green zones, carefully secluded and robustly secured from the slums that provide the labour force. These lifeworlds seem 'natural' to us when we grow up in them. They become alien, and alienating, when such colonial restructuring makes it obvious just how much intelligence has gone into creating them, and just how much they seem designed to keep us in our place.