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FREEDOMWAYS  
SECOND QUARTER 1972

working class of Afro-Americans, eight million strong in the U.S. labor force, is the political and economic backbone of our Freedom Movement. Employed in the mines and steel mills, in the shipyards and on the docks, in the auto plants, urban transportation and the social services (post office, sanitation and public school system), in the construction crafts, particularly in the South, it is their wages and salaries that determine "the Negro market." Nearly one and one-half million of these are in trade unions. Out of these earnings the black community pays out billions of dollars in taxes each year to a government which has rarely guaranteed them even elementary human rights. Our economic history as a people under capitalism in these United States covers a range of exploitation from having been slave labor for several generations in this Republic to being super-exploited, ghettoized labor in an economy of stagnation today.

A case in point is the 1970 figures which show that the average Black family has 60% of the income of the average white family. After 200 years of this society, whose chief spokesmen have styled it "the world's leading democracy," the average Black family is required to live on 40% less income than the average white family. The collective total of this deprivation of personal income amounts to about 40 billion dollars a year. The pattern is most revealing however when we examine this 1970 census figure against a background of the last two decades.

[[2 Columned Table]]
|YEAR|BLACK FAMILY INCOME AS PERCENTAGE OF WHITE FAMILY INCOME (AVERAGE)|
|1952|57%|
|1962|53%|
|1969 (i.e., 1970 census)|60%|

These figures show that Black family incomes have improved only three percentage points over an 18-year period. The key to this, of course, is the decline of relative income in the ten year period 1952-1952. This period includes the 1953 recession, the 1957-58 recession and the 1961-62 recession. In other words, today we have approximately 60% of the income of the average white family yet we had achieved a 57% level in 1952. Obviously, an improvement of three percentage points over a period of 18 years is a description of economic stagnation. Furthermore, the fact that we are now in the third year of another recession may mean that the 60% figure we are now working with is somewhat inflated. The economic condition of the ten million Puerto Ricans and Chicanos throughout the country, most of whom
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THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM
O'DELL

are industrial workers, small farmers or migratory labor, as a community is even worse.

In all important spheres of the life of society in the United States today, the process of deterioration, the tendency towards general stagnation and social ruin continue to proceed at an accelerated pace, as they have since the Nixon-Agnew Administration took office. At the same time that this crisis in the capitalist social order in our country, matures, so does the crisis in the Democratic Party as the party upon which so many depended for social progress in our country. There was an all pervading impotence which all but paralyzed the Democratic Party, immediately arising out of the spectacle of the 1968 Convention. This embarrassed it into adopting some significant reforms in the area of delegate selection in 1972. These reforms were designed to increase the amount of representation given Blacks, women, Latins and youth in the composition of the delegates attending the Democratic National Convention. The net result is that many people who have never participated in the process by which delegates are elected are doing so for the first time in their respective states this year. This will be particularly true of those delegates elected on the Chisholm and McGovern states. These reforms, however imperfect, have been resisted by the old-line political machines in both open and covert ways. In a number of Southern states, the percentage of Blacks in their respective delegations has been reduced in size by taking advantage of loopholes and weaknesses in the new reform rules. The Daley machine in Chicago is openly contesting the court case brought by Reverend Jesse Jackson and other reformers and is seeking to get the case thrown out of court. This would obviously have the effect of nullifying enforcement of the reform rules throughout the country. Nevertheless, so far one can see a substantial increase in the number of Blacks, women and youth in the delegates elected and these new political forces are beginning to coordinate their efforts in order to be more effective at the Convention. The greatest resistance to these reforms in practice is coming not from George Wallace and the right-wing conservatives in the Democratic Party but from some of the established political machines supporting Humphrey who allegedly represent "the progressive center" of the political spectrum. They are accustomed to a controlled delegation, one they can manipulate even beyond the first ballot just as it has been a machine principle to even limit voter registration in some areas in the interest of keeping machine candidates in power.

One of the sharpest expressions of the polarization within the
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