Workshop Talks
January-February 2000

Struggles make history come alive

by S. Hamer

You can really see what capitalism is all about when you are in the factory. It is anti-human. Karl Marx wrote that in production "the machine dominates man, not man the machine." That is true. I relate that to our work force at the Delta Pride Catfish processing factory in Indianola, Miss. It is owned by 178 white farmers. They dominated the workers totally, practically owned the people, for the first five years of that plant. When we first started there, they worked us from sunup to sundown. In 1986 we stood up as Black women and challenged them. After we voted for a union, they wanted to figure out a way to dominate us even though we had a contract. They paid over a million dollars for these automation machines to replace many workers, especially on the kill line. They downstaffed and said there wasn't room for all the workers due to this machinery. They ran those machines for so long and, after running them like that, they wouldn't work. So in the end they had to throw the machines out. But they never stop trying to get faster and faster machines to do the work of workers. They put those machines in to dominate us, keep us down and stop us from progressing.

TREATED LIKE A MACHINE

Marx also wrote that "the capitalist mode of production produces, thus, with the extension of the working day, not only the deterioration of human labor power, but also the premature exhaustion and death of this labor power itself." When a machine runs so long, you are going to have to add new bolts and screws. It will produce for a while, but eventually it will break down. If you are a person and you don't get the proper care, you are going to break down even faster.

Once your hands wear out with carpal tunnel syndrome and you break down, they are going to replace you. It's all about making money, an easier way and a faster way to make money. We as human beings didn't matter to Delta. It was just producing catfish, making money, paying us a low wage and mistreating us.

So I began to understand, and many other workers at Delta Pride began to understand, that the way the company organized production was anti-human. They didn't care about our development or our dignity. They disrespected us as Black women when we took breaks to go to the bathroom. They didn't care about our lives.

We organized a union together, we went on strike together, we fought the company together. A lot of what we learned about a philosophy of liberation we learned because we went through the fire of experience. But not every worker has this kind of experience. I was fortunate to have it. That is why it is so important for all Black workers to know their own history. When I was in high school, we had Black History Month. They would usually give us sheets of paper, like information on Dr. King or Rosa Parks, a little history about them, or they would let us go to the encyclopedia and pick our favorite Black person. What Dr. King said and did, especially in Memphis, was important to me, but I never hooked it up to unions. When I started working at Delta Pride Catfish, I got the concepts Dr. King and Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth talked about, and they helped me to know how to defeat a company like Delta. Before then it never dawned on us that a union was the key to making a difference. All we knew was that if you spoke out like Dr. King, if you spoke out like Fannie Lou Hamer, you were just a fired turkey-or killed.

After I met News and Letters Committees, I began reading Black history a different way. I read AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL and learned about how you can trace a philosophy of liberation in Black people from the earliest times of America all the way up to the present.

SHARING FREEDOM

I liked it from the subtitle: "Black masses as vanguard." It made me think that what we did at Delta Pride was the kind of thing that could begin to make a change for this country. This pamphlet says right on the first page that "at each historic turning point of development in the U.S., it was the Black masses in motion who proved to be the vanguard."

To me this means that we have to understand, really and fully understand, what we did in the 1990 Delta Pride strike, the biggest victory Black workers have ever experienced in the Mississippi Delta. If we understood that, we would really begin to know the philosophy of liberation within ourselves, and we would be able to share it with other workers to bring about a turning point in the South.

There is so much we have to learn from AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL, because our history and philosophy have been taken from us. I learned about a million "forgotten Negro Populists" and how white populists let racism destroy their movement. I learned about how Karl Marx said that Black soldiers in the Civil War would be the end of the Confederacy. I learned about how the CIO was built by Black workers joining whites in sit-down strikes.

We never learned any of this Black history in school, and we need it to develop the Idea of Freedom.