Juneteenth: Realizing Liberation
Juneteenth is the celebration of the declaration of liberation for people in America who had been enslaved. We celebrate the declaration of liberation so that we remain committed to the work of realizing it – in our institutions, our economy, and our shared life. For as the history of people enslaved in this country would attest, there is an arduous journey between the declaration of freedom and its true, complete realization.
On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed an executive order which granted freedom to all enslaved people... within the rebellious Confederate states. This geographically-limited emancipation only applied to states that seceded from the Union and remained in active rebellion (it did not apply to areas controlled by the Union military, nor did it apply to border states). Elsewhere, chattel slavery was still permitted. The proclamation was a wartime tactic designed to cripple the Confederate labor force while boosting the Union manpower with the newly “liberated” enslaved. Thus, the journey to true, realized liberation continued.
Then on January 31, 1865, the 13th Amendment was enacted by Congress and while awaiting ratification by the states, Freedom Day was declared when, on June 19, 1865, General Order No. was announced in Galveston, Texas:
“...all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between an employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Although this was a very momentous step forward on the journey to liberation, the celebration is not that we have reached a destination, but that the journey has begun. For without access to the resources which would allow one to live free, only the degree of oppression and exploitation has changed. Enslavement has merely received a makeover, as the journey was preordained to endure new iterations of economic servitude – which most immediately included sharecropping, to be later joined by prison labor as the 13th Amendment (which outlawed forced labor, except as punishment for crime) incentivized “black codes” (presently referred to as “_______ while Black” laws) which criminalized a bewildering range of newly found o]enses. This country’s incarceration of Blacks became normative and has left a legacy of disadvantage and deprivation even today. In other words, freedom was declared into a labor market and property system that the formerly enslaved did not own. The journey ahead is about transforming the underlying system, not simply reforming the surface.
The morphing of new forms of enslavement continued, and with each new iteration, a wider net was cast to include a growing number of workers as we entered the industrial age. Reverend James Lawson referred to it as “plantation capitalism” and it expanded as the industrial revolution transformed what was a rather agrarian society to an industrial, capitalist one.
Yet, the commodification of labor remained just as effective as during chattel slavery (commodification’s most extreme and cruelly-grotesque form), for the latest subordination of labor (people) to capital (profit) is just a softer veneer stained with the admonition to quietly accept the wages paid for labor, acquiesce to the management edict of Fred Taylor’s misguided reductionist view of human needs. Taylor promoted that the only relevant need of workers was an economic need – and capital, determined to maximize profits, still fails to even adequately meet that one need, and leaves the higher human needs entirely unaddressed.
People and their labor could very easily be commodified in subordination to capital when workers (the people) are divided. Labor solidarity proved resistant to the oppressive exploitation of capital in its pursuit of its supreme priority, profits. The wealthy elites learned this early in this country’s history, when their extractive stranglehold was threatened by the unity of the working people. It was here, during the Bacon Rebellion, that the elites first constructed racism to be used as a means of dividing working people. It has proven a sturdy construct, only to be joined later by variant other means of inciting division. Then, as now, racialized and other manufactured divisions function to protect concentrated wealth by preventing workers and communities from building durable, shared power.
People are also more readily vulnerable to labor commodification when they are deprived of the commons (shared resources like land, food systems, community networks). When provisional resources are accessible, people can subsist free from the confines of the plantation (the requirement to accept labor commodification). The deprivation of resources and individuations of capitalism are pages from the history of England’s Enclosure Acts (when the states allowed landlords to fence off and privatize common lands, peasants had no choice but to sell their labor on buyer’s terms in order to survive).
Today’s commons is the infrastructure we need to live: affordable housing, education, healthcare, clean water, energy, and social networks. The privatization and financialization of these, is today’s enclosure forcing economic servitude by making basic survival contingent on participation in extractive markets.
To escape the exposure to this vulnerability of enclosure and its resulting plantation capitalism, the solidarity economy must rebuild the commons. The solidarity economy of housing cooperatives, community land trusts, worker cooperatives, and the ecosystem which supports these is how we de-commodify our existence. Practically, this looks like tenants collectively owning their buildings, workers co-owning their enterprises, congregations repurposing their properties into community assets, and communities governing their own financial institutions. This is how we reclaim the commons and find true liberation.
The solidarity economy is not an endpoint; it is the floor upon which communities may climb and dwell in the higher levels of human possibility. For it is in the destination of the commons, finally reclaimed, we will find the vision provided by Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It is here that our journey, begun on Freedom Day - Juneteenth, will finds its fulfillment. Here in Maslow’s Transcendent level, we reclaim our collective, liberated self. Here in the solidarity of the commons and its relational, interdependent ecosystem of collective care and shared prosperity; where the resources denied the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas are treated as indivisible, collectively governed, and value led.
Liberation truly realized! Happy Juneteenth! Let’s get free!