The United States was in effect protecting the rest of the world militarily from
communism at the same time it had to try to exert moral leadership, consent, to its dominant
position in the world. In other words it had to somehow rather find a way of saying US culture
is the epitome of human culture. In other words the US was not only a military leader but it had
to be a leader in terms of consumerism in terms of cultural forms and all the rest of it. And
the US did this very consciously after 1945. For instance, if you've been around universities you
know that in many universities there is an area called American Studies. Well, American Studies
didn't exist prior to World War II. It was something that was invented in the 1950s as the
necessity came for something saying something distinctive about American culture.
And American studies was supposed to celebrate US culture and supposed to promote US cultural values
around the world. And in that regard the promotion that went on around the world
was about what things in the United States were were really major contributions to global culture.
And one of the things that came out of this was of course American musical traditions,
and particularly folk and all the rest of it, but of course jazz. So you found the United States
State Department sort of subsidizing jazz groups going to Paris and, you know. Well, this raised
the question of race. In the same way that the US wanted to be a leader amongst all those African
nations which were coming on board through decolonization, and therefore had to you had
to have a situation where the United States could not itself be racist at the same time as somehow
rather asserting its moral leadership over Ghana and Nigeria and and the like. So, all of that
was leading into a sort of situation in which a segment of the bourgeoisie realized that
the racial issue was a very important one for the US reputation around the world. And if it was
going to be involved in a struggle over communism in Africa then it had to have credibility with
African politicians. And you couldn't have a credibility if you maintain racial segregation
inside the United States. Now, when the Kennedy's started to turn, as it were, towards the
African-Americans as a support base you can say it was for moral reasons (and maybe it was for some
degree, who knows) but there were also practical, geopolitical reasons why the United States could
not continue to be racially segregated internally at the same time as it was posturing as somehow
or other it was the global leader in creating a civilized society, and a decent society, in
which all people could come together. I mentioned earlier this kind of reform of the Immigration Act
of 1965, where a lot of people could come from all over the world. And so there was a real kind of
question there. And at the same time, the problem was emerging inside of American society of what
we come to call "relative deprivation." Now the thesis of relative deprivation
goes like this. If you are in a condition of absolute poverty and everybody else is
in condition of absolute poverty, you feel okay. You're all in the same boat.
Relative deprivation comes when you're in a situation of poverty and somebody else
is in a position of affluence. And the bigger the gap between where you are and where they are, the
more relative deprivation you feel, and you become pretty agitational about it. You start to say:
this is not right. Relative deprivation is a powerful political force. And one of the
things that really happened, as I've mentioned, is that we had this kind of affluent worker
syndrome. They were being celebrated and and at the same time television was coming on board.
And what television did was to raise the sense of relative deprivation
because black people watching television could see the lifestyle of the affluent worker and say
basically, "Why are they privileged in the way they are? Why am I working 80 hours a week
for almost nothing?" So this division in a society between the affluent workers (predominantly white,
although there was a smattering of African Americans and Latinx and Puerto Ricans and so on),
that that started to become a real a real problem. And so the sense of relative deprivation fueled a
civil rights movement, which which was partially fueled by also the support from certain segments
of the US bourgeoisie who valued the fact that the US was going to be the cultural leader of the
world, and it couldn't be a cultural leader of the world if it was overtly racist and segregationist.
So the the US realized it had a global role and a certain segment of the US capitalist class
realized it had this global role and it couldn't sustain this global role without at the same time
engaging in internal reform. So the blot of racism was seriously addressed somewhere at some point
during the 1960s. And there was a lot of fighting going on over that, obviously, and so I'm not
going to say that this wasn't. There was a segment of the American corporate capitalist class that
didn't care about this and didn't want this. And so a lot of wealth in the United States which was
going the other way. So it was a divided thing, but the economic model was working quite well.