As I alluded to, the production relations in society, as important and as fundamental as they are, are of course not the only important relations in society, and it would be wrong to reduce everything to those production relations. There are also very definite and significant social relations, which are also objective and not just arbitrary categories or things in the minds of people. For example, there is the social relation—an unequal relation of oppression—between men and women. There is the relation between oppressor and oppressed peoples or nations within this society (as well as on a world scale). For example, if you’re white, you’re in one position in this society, objectively; and if you’re not white, if you’re part of what is popularly referred to as “people of color”—Black people, Latinos and others—you are in a different position, you are objectively maintained in an inferior and oppressed position. It is not that you are inferior as a human being, of course, but you are part of a category of people that exists objectively in terms of the social relations in the society, and is treated and maintained in an inferior position, even though you are in no way inferior as a human being. And there is an ideology developed to rationalize this which says that you are part of a group of people that is inferior. Such oppressive social relations correspond to the exploitative production relations.

It is very interesting: when these dark ages reactionaries started directing their attacks in the realm of education recently in Arizona, for example, one of the things they did was to move to get rid of Chicano studies. And I heard one of the people in the state education institution responsible for this decision declaring: We can’t have education that tells people that they’re part of a group in society that’s oppressed; we have to have education that tells people that they’re all just individuals.

Now, life would be much simpler if you could actually eliminate social oppression by refusing to talk about it. But, in the real world, these categories of people—these social relations, to put it a better way—exist objectively. They are part of the historically evolved relations in this society. You can’t just wish them away, and you can’t eliminate them by refusing to allow anyone to talk about them. (Of course, the purpose, and certainly the effect, in refusing to allow people to talk about these things is not actually to eliminate them but, on the contrary, to perpetuate and reinforce them.)

Understanding scientifically the character of society and the need for revolution obviously involves an understanding of the limitations of someone like Martin Luther King, but it’s very interesting to see how right-wingers, and even some liberals, treat his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. To paraphrase, Martin Luther King said, I have a dream where one day the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners will all be able to get together and treat each other just as individuals and they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Remember now, Martin Luther King says, “I have a dream”—it’s a dream, or a hope, or a goal—that one day this will be the reality. And then these right-wingers and some liberals come along and say: “Martin Luther King said this is a society where everybody is judged not according to the color of their skin, but according to the content of their character, so quit complaining about being oppressed as Black people.”

Well, this is another attempt, in line with what was declared by that fascist Arizona education official, to obliterate relations of oppression (or, rather, to obliterate recognition of these oppressive relations) by not allowing people to talk about them, or to distort what they say when they do talk about them. The aim is obviously to maintain that oppression and intensify it. So, this is very important, the question of social relations. Obviously, these social relations are interconnected with the fundamental production relations in society, but they also have a life of their own, and have tremendous consequences. And, once again, the important point here is that these relations are historically evolved and exist objectively. You couldn’t have a United States of America without white supremacy. That is another simple and basic fact.

To go back to what I said earlier, look at how they put together the country, the “great founding fathers”—and, yes, they were fathers. They put the country together on the basis of a “principled compromise”—a “principled compromise” to institutionalize slavery. That is built into this society, and it has a real consequence. Slavery is not just an abstraction. Slavery is a real thing that affects real people. It’s a mode of life: it’s a way of producing things; it has its own dynamics, it interacts with production and exchange in other parts of the society and on a world level—it’s a real thing. And then, when they had the Civil War, and the North defeated the South, as a necessary part of defeating the South, the North had to abolish slavery, first in the Confederate states, and then overall—that’s what they were forced to do, Lincoln and the rest.

But then, how did they put the country back together? They weren’t willing to have half a country. That’s why Lincoln went to war in the first place. He said: We can’t allow half the country to secede, you can’t have a country if half of it can walk away. So they weren’t willing to have half of the country and have all these European powers making alliances with the other half of the country that broke loose, seceded. So they had to put the country back together as a whole country, and the only way they could do that, given the prevailing production relations and social relations, was to make all kinds of “principled compromises,” once again, with the Southern aristocracy, the large landowners, who were, to a very large degree, former slaveowners. So this is why Reconstruction was reversed, before very long after the Civil War, and the masses of Black people were betrayed again.

What all this reflects and illustrates is that these are historically evolved relations. If they had attempted, let’s say, to completely suppress the former slaveowners who led the Confederate revolt—who had tried to secede and waged a war in the attempt to do so—if they had come down fully on them, they could not have put the country together again as a capitalist country. It would have torn the whole country apart, and they would probably have been unable to maintain little, if any, of it in the end. So these social relations and their interconnection with the prevailing production relations have real meaning and real effect.