“Struggle & Progress –
Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Union Victory and
Emancipation,” Jacobin, Issue 18, Summer 2015.
The Civil
War is still going on, in both an ethnic and a class sense. That is why the anniversary of the bloodiest
conflict in U.S. history is worth understanding and not forgetting. It is still going on in the sense that the
South still acts as a reactionary political drag on the rest of the
country. It is the homeland of some of
the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class – in defense; in oil; in
coal; in retail; in construction. These
people are the spawn of the landed planter aristocracy that was expropriated at
the end of the Civil War. It is still
going on in the sense that minorities and immigrants are still persona non
grata in that region in a more intense way than elsewhere - though institutional racism elsewhere is no slouch.
 |
| Black soldiers in the Civil War |
Conditions in the South for black and Latino
peoples are below most other parts of the country – in healthcare, education,
wages and working conditions, government services, policing and ‘justice’
issues.’ It is still going on in the
sense that even white workers in the South are also spat upon – suffering in
less degree the same conditions as black and immigrant workers. They take on a servility to the new southern capitalist
aristocracy in exchange for their ‘higher’ standing vis a vis minorities, but
this only prolongs their own oppression.
The official southern State antagonism to unionism is just one example. It
is still going on in the sense that the same Southern bible-thumpers that justified
chattel slavery now justify wage slavery and adoration of the market.
What is
clear is that constant talk that ignores class in favor of only ‘race’
discussions avoids the centrality of economic roles in the nation and
especially in the South. Ethnicity is many
times a dimension of class; it stamps those with different skin colors or
languages as fit for certain jobs, certain wages and certain treatment, in
spite of the ‘talented tenth.’ The
constant liberal prattling about ‘diversity’ alone hides the economic component
and imperative of profiteering that
underlies racism. If ‘race’ is merely a
political category, then why does it endure?
Just that people are ‘stupid’ or ‘mean?’
After all, the much heralded ‘Second Reconstruction’ during the 1960s
has also failed to bring equality to the black strata of the working
class even now.
Anarchists
and other ultra-leftists believe that the Civil War changed nothing. Jacobin begs to differ. They, like many Marxists before them, consider
it to be a ‘2nd American Revolution’ which destroyed chattel slavery
uncompensated. Jacobin interviews Eric
Foner, son of the famous left historian Phil Foner, who first gave this real
understanding to Reconstruction. Here
Eric Foner carefully shows how the northern Republican capitalists under
Johnson refused to alleviate the debts of southern small farmers and working
men, which helped turn them away from Reconstruction. The northern Republicans also instituted land
taxes on small holdings for the first time, which increased the financial
burden on poorer whites. Foner says that
the Abolitionist movement was small, and only increased in power as its views
became confirmed by events. Yet it ignored
the plight of working men in the North, such as Irish textile workers, so he
considers its leaders to be mainly moralists.
Foner points out that ‘love’ is not the basis for a real politics, as you do not need to love people to work with them, you only need to have similar goals. Foner has a ‘Let a 100 Flowers Bloom” approach to class struggle, but then points out that the myriad political groups and causes fractionate the left in the U.S. He points to the role of the Socialist Party in the early part of the 20th century that acted as a ‘big tent’ for every force – suffragettes, labor agitators, anti-war activists, anti-lynching partisans and socialists of every stripe. Nothing like it exists today, and in my opinion, that is the reason the left is so weak.
This
discussion leads into Jacobin’s main point about the war, expanded on in
several articles – that the Southern planter elite saw the anti-slavery
movement as part of wedge to bring broader progressive changes that they
understood as a ‘socialism’ of some type.
Jacobin calls it “America’s First Red Scare.” Abolitionists or Republicans or free blacks were
called ‘red Republicans,’ labor anarchists, Communards, even ‘communists’ by
more astute Confederate polemicists.
Their point was that first you get rid of slavery – pretty soon you are
going to have unions and labor strife! They thought that slavery would keep blacks
and whites separate – and hence easier to rule. The anti-slavery role of socialist and labor
radicals who had emigrated after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe
confirmed this. German socialists chased
pro-slavers out of St. Louis. German
socialists in east Texas kept that area loyal to the North. Marx himself supported the Northern side in
the war. Later the black vote in the
South allowed the Populist movement to challenge southern businessmen and
landed gentry. This was intolterable to the KKK and the White Leagues.
Two articles
talk about the agency of black slaves in the struggle for their own freedom –
200,000 black soldiers who joined the Union army, participating in 450 military
engagements, providing 120 infantry regiments, 22 light and heavy artillery
regiments and 7 cavalry regiments. At
Petersburg, 1 in every 8 soldiers besieging Richmond was black. Or black women who organized for the right to
marry their husbands in the army, which sounds trivial until you understand
that slaves were forbidden to be married.
Jacobin also has articles in this issue on why there are so many
pro-Confederate films about the Civil war and also one about Populist labor struggles in the South
after the civil war that united blacks and whites.
Adolph Reed
corrects the black-nationalist myth that slavery was solely destroyed by black
people themselves through a look at film.
This argument seems false on the face of it based on the numerous facts
of the Civil war and Reed calls it the ‘James Brown’ theory of black liberation. I.E. it is just up to individual black
action, as expressed in fantasies like “Django Unchained.” In the process Reed deconstructs various
films that deal with the Civil War, like ‘Glory,’ ‘Lincoln,’ ‘Cry Freedom,’ ‘Mississippi Burning,’ ‘Driving Ms. Daisy’
and ‘The Help.’ Reed is tough on
‘psychobabble’ and multiculturalism.
Ultimately the Civil War was a joint white and black military project to
end slavery and that cannot be ignored. Reed
was a supporter of the Labor Party in the 1990s.
Another
author, Kenneth Warren, takes black elites to task for only focusing on ‘race
relations’ rather than inter-ethnic worker alliances as the best way to
overcome institutional racism. Ultimately
at the time Booker T Washington became the standard bearer of integrating black
labor into capital. He also criticizes
Michelle Alexander, writer of “The New Jim Crow,” for partially following a
goal of ‘improving race relations’ instead of a broader social justice approach. Warren makes the point that it was only after
Populism was defeated that Jim Crow could rule unhindered in the South, as
Populism motivated both black and white workers and sharecroppers in the South
to oppose the southern oligarchy.
The only
real missing piece of information in this issue of Jacobin is how many white
southerners actually opposed the war or supported the union. This alone was a significant political fact
which underscored the failure of Confederate ‘nationalism’ and provided a ready
base for the subsequent Readjuster and Populist movements after the war.
Jacobin ends
with a look at how Reconstruction was killed by Southern violence and Northern hostility,
starting with President Andrew Johnson – reflecting the renewed economic links
between the southern capitalists and landowners and the northern bourgeoisie. There was no widespread “Homestead Act” in
the south and plantation properties seized by former slaves were returned to
their original owners. So most black
people were deprived of land and ultimately after 30 years (and perhaps
consequently) the vote. This article
points out that the myth of the lazy ‘welfare queen’ originated during
Reconstruction as a weapon by southern racists to take back the South. In 1875 the U.S. Supreme court even ruled
that citizenship did not guarantee the right to vote. By the turn of the century, Jim Crow was
fully in control and black people had for the most part lost any power in the
South. Both black people and ‘socialism’
had been stopped.
What is
significant in all this is that the struggle against any form of ‘socialism’ in
the U.S. has been going on far longer than the cold war that ended in 1989, the
Red Scare of the 1950s, or the Palmer raids of 1919. It is a target not connected to any nation,
like China or the USSR, but ultimately aimed at the American and world labor
movement.
And I bought
it at Mayday Books’ excellent magazine and newspaper section.
(“The New
Jim Crow,” and books that challenge the myths of Confederate nationalism,
reviewed below.)
Red Frog
October 31,
2015
No comments:
Post a Comment