Defeat of Reconstruction and the Great Rail Strike of 1877
The Shaping of Racist American Capitalism
As Marxists, we understand that racism is not a question of "bad ideas."
Rather, there is a material I,' basis for racial oppression. It is
necessary to understand how this material basis was shaped by the history of
this society. And that means understanding the pivotal events of 1877. That
year saw the final defeat of Reconstruction, as the bourgeousie withdrew the
last federal troops from the South, where they had been stationed to
suppress the slavocracy defeated in the Civil War and defend the rights of
the emancipated black slaves. At the same time, federal troops-including
troops withdrawn from the South were sent to break a strike by thousands of
rail workers, the first national strike in this country.
The fight for black liberation is central to the fight of the working class
in the U.S. to smash this capitalist system of exploitation, oppression and
misery and to create a truly egalitarian socialist society. We call to
finish the Civil War through a socialist revolution which places the working
class in power. As we wrote in the International Communist League's
Declaration of Principles (Spartacist {English-language edition} No.54,
Spring 1998:
"The U.S. black question is defined by the particular history of the United
States: slavery, the Civil War defeat of the Southern slavocracy by Northern
industrial capitalism and the bourgeoisie's betrayal e of Radical
Reconstruction's promise of equality, leading to the racist segregation n
of black people despite the economic a integration of black toilers into
the proletariat at the bottom. The forcible segregation of blacks, integral
to American capitalism, has been resisted by the black masses whenever a
perceived possibility for such struggle has been felt. Hence our program for
the U.S. is revolutionary integrationism the full integration of blacks
into an egalitarian, socialist America-and our program of 'black liberation
through socialist revolution'."
An "Irrepressible Conflict"
In the years after its founding, the American republic was divided between
two social systems, slavery and capitalism. In the fight for independence
from Britain, the first American Revolution drew on the ideas and even some
of the institutions of the parliamentary side of the English Civil War of
the mid- 7th century, such as the right of citizens to bear arms, as
codified in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the 19th
century, the developing Northern system of large-scale industrial capitalism
required "free" wage labor to exploit-this is how the capitalist class makes
its profits-as well as a mobile and somewhat literate working class. In
order to grow, capitalism needed to create an expanding home market for the
goods that it produced.
On the other hand, the South was ruled by a narrow slavocracy, and most
productive labor was dQne by enslaved blacks who were legally nothing more
than chattel-property. The Southern plantation economy was based on growing
great amounts of cotton to sell to the world capitalist market, primarily
the British textile mills. At the same time, the slave system was based on
very primitive and inefficient agricultural production. So the slaveowners
continually wanted to expand their system to virgin soil which had not been
depleted by cotton farming and to increase the highly profitable slave
trade.
The inherent conflict between these two social systems gave rise to a series
of clashes over whether new territory in the West would be slave or free.
The inevitable battle was always delayed through some sort of "compromise,"
in which the Northern bourgeoisie allowed the slavocracy to remain dominant
in the weak federal government: for example, the Missouri Compromise of
1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state; or the Compromise of 1850,
which admitted California as a free state while enacting a fugitive slave
law, enabling slaveowners to pursue escaped slaves throughout the country.
In the 1850s, this "irrepressible conflict" reached a boiling point. An
indication of this was the founding of the Republican Party in 1854, in the
course of the fight for a free Kansas. During that struggle over "bleeding
Kansas," free-soilers, including the heroic John Brown, bravely fought
pro-slavery marauders. The most radical representatives of the strong
abolitionist movement which developed-such as Brown, Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Tubman and Thaddeus Stevens-foresaw that only armed action would end
slavery. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend the fifth issue
of our pamphlet series Black History and the Class Struggle, titled "Finish
the Civil War!"
The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate, for the 1860
presidential election, seeing him as able to win more votes than a more
radical candidate. Lincoln did not call to immediately end slavery where it
existed but merely opposed its extension. But the Southern slavocracy
opposed any constraints on the slave system. Following Lincoln's election,
eleven states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of
America, which guaranteed the "right" to own slaves in its constitution.
The North did not go to war specifically to emancipate the slaves but to
suppress the Confederacy and restore the Union. Nonetheless, it was clear
from the beginning that the war was about slavery. Karl Marx, who followed
American developments closely, wrote at the time:
"The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question.
Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states
should be emancipated outright or not, but rather whether the 20 million
free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000
slaveholders."
-Karl Marx, "The North
American Civil War" (1861)
As Frederick Douglass had argued from the start of the war, whatever the
intent of the Union leadership, the North would have to emancipate the
slaves in order to win the war. Thus on 1 January 1863, Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, ordering that slaves in the Confederacy (but not
in Union slave states such as Maryland) be freed, and soon after authorized
the enlistment of black soldiers. Some 1 80,(}OO black troops-emancipated
slaves in the South and free blacks in the North such as the heroic
"Massachusetts 54th" led by Robert Gould Shaw-demonstrated before the eyes
of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers and helped turn
the war's tide.
Reconstruction and the Compromise of 1877
The Civil War was the shaping event of American history-the last great
bourgeois revolution, the second American Revolution-finally and firmly
establishing the rule of the bourgeoisie throughout the U.S., with a strong
central government and a national political economy. After the war, the
question of what to do with the South was debated heatedly. The question of
the freedman was central: would he become a full, enfranchised citizen, or
would he be confined to second class status, not slave but not free.
Lincoln wanted to assimilate the South back into the union as quickly and
painlessly as possible. But the defeated slavocracy would have none of it
and acted as though it hadn't lost the war, sending former Confederate
leaders to Congress and enacting "Black Codes" which all but re-enslaved
blacks. When Lincoln was assassinated less than a week after the South
surrendered in 1865, the former slaveowners were encouraged by his
successor, Andrew Johnson, who threw his lot in with white supremacy during
the brief period known as Presidential Reconstruction.
In response, the policies of radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles
Sumner attained great influence within the Republican Party, the main party
of the Northern bourgeoisie. The central goal of Radical
Reconstruction-carried out on the ground by the freedmen and sympathetic
whites who were slanderously labeled "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags"-was to
reconstruct the South on a bourgeois-democratic basis, with the integration
of blacks (who comprised the majority in much of the South) into capitalist
society. With the 14th Amendment granting citizenship to "all persons born
or naturalized in the United States" and the 15th Amendment extending the
right to vote to all men, black Americans went from being chattel to
citizens. What made this possible were the federal troops, many of them
black, stationed in the South to suppress resistance by the former
slavocracy-which was organized in the Democratic Party-and its Ku Klux Klan
terrorist auxiliary.
Blacks not only voted at rates as high as 90 percent but were elected to
state and national offices in large numbers. More than 600 blacks, mainly
ex-slaves, served as legislators. Millions of freedmen, aided by the
Freedmen's Bureau but largely through their own initiative, learned to read,
a right denied under the slave system. Some became skilled tradesmen and
professionals. Poor whites also benefited. Massive public spending on
education created some of the first real public schools in the South, for
whites as well as blacks. While women-both black and white-were denied the
vote, they began to participate in civil society in great numbers.
For Reconstruction to succeed would have required not just the defeat of the
plantation class, but that the plantations be seized and redistributed to
those who toiled on them, the freedmen. In ~865, the Union government
promised freedmen 40 acres each to farm. In fact, many plantations,
including the family plantation of former Confederate' president Jefferson
Davis in Mississippi, were already being run collectively by the former
slaves as the landowners fled after the war. But as we wrote in a founding
document of the Spartacist League in 1966, "Black and Red-Class Struggle
Road to Negro Freedom": "Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the
suppression of the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common
interests."
The American bourgeoisie was not interested in a thoroughgoing social
reconstruction of the South. Northern capitalists looked at the devastated
South and saw an opportunity not for building a radical democracy but for
exploiting Southern resources, and the freedmen, profitably. Dividing the
plantations into small plots would not have facilitated this. Rather the aim
was to restart Southern agriculture, which meant getting the agricultural
workforce-blacks-to work again, to the advantage of the landowning class,
now dominated by mercantile interests with ties to the Northern capitalists.
Such demands as "land to the tiller" are not anti-capitalist per se-they are
in fact the quintessence of the bourgeois revolution. But especially after
the 1871 Paris Commune-the first, short-lived example of what Marx called
the "dictatorship of the proletariat"-the bourgeoisie saw the expropriation
and redistribution of private property as a threat. In return for having
Republican Rutherford Hayes declared the winner of the 1876 presidential
election, the Republicans agreed to pull the last troops out of the South in
yet another "compromise," the Compromise of 1877. This final compromise was
largely just a codification of the actual defeat of Reconstruction several
years earlier.
The post-Reconstruction period-called "Redemption" by racists-was marked
by a political counterrevolution aimed at black people and enforced by Klan
terrorists. Blacks were disenfranchised and brutally exploited in the form'
of sharecropping and tenancy, while being driven out of the skilled trades.
Jim Crow segregation was formally codified in Plessy V. Ferguson, the 1896
Supreme Court ruling which gave the official stamp of approval to "separate
but equal."
I want to underscore the point that during Reconstruction the general thrust
of black struggle was toward integration and equality in American society.
In fact, it was only after the defeat of Reconstruction and the
consolidation of Jim Crow segregation over the next 20 years that the
accommodationism of Booker T. Washington and, later, utopian separatist
schemes gained prominence.
The Birth of the American Labor Movement
As I mentioned earlier, the Civil War laid the basis for a national economy
in the United States, based on industrial capitalism and "free" wage labor.
Integral to the development of this capitalist system were the railways. In
1850, there were only 2,201 miles of track in use; in u 1877, over 79,000
miles. The concentration of railways in the North helped the Union win the
Civil War. The extension of the railways throughout the West unified the
country. And the convergence of railways here in Chicago made this city the
epicenter of American capitalist de- velopment in that period. Railway
barons amassed huge profits in the "Gilded Age" of the late
1800s, which was marked by tl rampant speculation. It was the president of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas A. Scott, who actually drew up the
Compromise of 1877 in order to guarantee the development of a Texas Pacific
Railroad.
A unified capitalist system also laid the basis for a unified working class.
There is a famous quote by Marx in the first volume of Capital:
"In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the
workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.
Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is
branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first
fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, that ran with the
seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from
New England to California."
Expanding on Marx's understanding, American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser,
who first laid out the perspective of revolutionary integration, wrote in
his 1955 document "For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question"
(reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No.5 [Revised]):
"There were, of course, labor struggles during the pre-Civil War period. But
they were dwarfed in importance beside the anti-slavery struggle, because
the national question for the American people had not yet been solved....
"The whole future of the working class depended, not so much upon
organizational achievements against the capitalists, as upon the solution to
the question of the slave power ruling the land.
"This is the fundamental reason for the belated character of the development
of the stable labor movement in the U.S."
The expansion of railway transport led to one of the first working-class
movements in the U.S. based on industrial unions-made up of all workers in
an industry-as opposed to craft unions which organize each skilled trade
sepa:rately. Railwaymen were extremely exploited, as the rail magnates
continually sought to increase profits and dividends at the expense of the
workers. The elimination of safety equipment was common, and workers who had
run trains hundreds of miles were forced to pay for their return trips.
Speculation and overdevelopment by the railroad barons, who engaged in what
were literally wars-pitched battles-with their competitors, helped
precipitate the depression of 1873, which until the 1 930s was referred to
as the "Great Depression." Many railway lines were placed under court
management when their owners defaulted. As unemployment soared and wages
were slashed, railroad workers struck and began to organize in the
industrial Trainmen's Union, a move strongly opposed by the capitalists, who
sought to destroy any form of unionism.
In May 1877, representatives of four large railroad companies met and
corispired to slash wages by a further 10 per-cent, and other railway
companies soon followed suit. In mid-June, workers on the Baltimore & Ohio
line walked out, demanding the restoration of their past wage rate. For more
than a month, the strike spread throughout the U.S. and even to Canada.
Increasingly, federal troops were used to break the strike; the bourgeoisie
deemed the National Guard unreliable in a confrontation with strikers. As a
pretext to call in the troops, mail cars were attached to the struck trains,
and the strikers were then charged with obstructing the mail. In Pittsburgh,
troops killed ten workers and wounded eleven, causing angry strikers to burn
the railroad's property, including 39 buildings and 1,200 freight cars.
In Chicago, militants called a general strike, which was prevented only by
the threat of bloody state repression. One of the strike leaders there was
Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier who E had become a staunch
Republican during Reconstruction in Texas. After being driven out of the
South by racists as a so called "scalawag," he joined the socialist movement
here in Chicago. In 1886, Parsons was a leader of the Haymarket strike which
fought for an eight-hour day. He was framed up by the police and hanged for
his role in that strike, which is
commemorated by May Day, the international labor holiday.
In St. Louis, the strikers' executive committee, led by members of the
Workingmen's Party of the United States (WPUS-American section of Marx's 5
First International), essentially ran the
city and established what was called the "St. Louis Commune." As Philip S.
Foner wrote in his book The Great Labor Uprising of 1877(1977):
"The executive committee ruled the city. Nearly all the manufacturing
establishments in St. Louis had been closed. Sixty factories were shut
down.... Such economic activities as continued did so only with the
permission of the executive committee."
Only the threat of state repression ended the St. Louis general strike.
By August, the rail strike had been crushed, largely without any economic
gains. But it was apparent that the U.S. was no longer the same. The rail
strike gave birth to the modern American labor movement. It was the first
major strike to face the use of government troops and the first to see the
major use of strikebreaking court injunctions. It illuminated the class
nature of the state-what Marx and Engels called the "committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"-as an armed force which
safeguarded the property, profits and class rule of the bourgeoisie. The
armories today present in most major cities are a result of this strike-or
more precisely, of the bourgeoisie's fear generated by this strike.
Racism: Poison to Class Struggle
Above all, the strike signified that the American working class had entered
the scene as-a force in itself. Especially since it came only six years
after the Paris Commune, the capitalist class saw in the rail strike the
spectre of "Red Revolution" coming to America. The American proletariat had
not become what Marx called a "class for itself"-consciously struggling for
its own class rule-but it had achieved some sort of critical mass. In a
letter to Friedrich Engels in London during the strike, Marx stated:
"This, the first outbreak against the associated capital oligarchy that has
arisen since the Civil War, will, of course, be suppressed, but may well
provide a point of departure for the constitution of a serious workers'
parly in the United States. There are two favourable circumstances on top of
that. The policy of the new President will turn the negroes, just as the big
expropriations of land (exactly of the fertile land) for the benefit of the
Railway, Mining, etc., companies will turn the peasants of the West-whose
grumblings is already plainly audible into militant allies of the workers."
Engels replied with a letter expressing his "delight" at the level of
struggle attained by the American working class: "The way they throw
themselves into the movement has no equivalent on this side of the ocean."
The first Marxist party in the U.S.-what later became the Socialist Labor
Party (SLP) led by Daniel De Leon-did develop out of the intervention of the
Workingmen's Party into the strike. But the SLP remained essentially a small
propaganda group. A "serious workers' party" was not founded in the U.S.,
either then or since. There are a number of reasons why the American working
class has never achieved even a rudimentary level of political
consciousness, including the availability of land and large-scale
immigration. But the main reason lies in the defeat of Reconstruction and
the way in which the American capitalists, abetted by the trade-union tops,
have succeeded in using racist poison to divide the working class.
The militant alliance projected by Marx never happened, largely because the
labor leaders-including the "Marxists"-did not attempt to find a bridge to
the freedmen. This is clear in the case of William Sylvis, leader of the
National Labor Union (NLU), which was founded in 1866 as one of the first
national union federations in the U.S. and was affiliated with the First
International for a while. As Michael Goldfield put it in his recent book,
The Color of Politics (1997):
"Though Sylvis was among the white leaders who spoke in favor of admission
of Blacks to labor unions and supported equal pay for equal work, he was
especially obtuse about the importance of the struggles of southern
freedmen. He never indicated any sympathy for their demands in the South for
land, education, and the vote. He denounced the Freedmen's Bureau as 'a huge
swindle' and called for its closing."
In 1869, the National Colored Labor Union (NCLU) was formed and its leaders
sought joint work with the NLU. But the issue of Reconstruction kept the two
apart. While blacks supported the Republican Party, white labor leaders and
immigrant workers supported the Democrats. In 1863, Irish workers in New
York City had staged draft riots against the Civil War and carried out a
pogrom against blacks. Yet Irish immigrants were themselves despised by the
predominantly Protestant bourgeoisie and were later targeted by the
virulently anti-Catholic KKK.
At the time of the 1877 rail strike, there were not many blacks in the
industrial working class, which was centered in the Midwest and Northeast
and composed largely of immigrant workers. Instead, most blacks lived in the
South and worked in agriculture, usually as either sharecroppers or tenant
farmers. In St. Louis, where the strike was strongest and the WPUS largely
controlled the leadership, the strike leaders at first welcomed the
participation of blacks. But as the strike continued and the media attacked
the strikers as combatting not only economic but racial inequality, the
Working-men's Party eschewed black participation. One WPUS leader recalled
that black workers, whom he disgustingly called n 5, sent word that they
wanted to join our party. We replied that we wanted nothing to do with
them." In order to discourage black participation, the. WPUS. even stopped
calling strike rallies.
While avowed Marxists and other veterans of the Revolutions of 1848 in
Europe played a prominent role in the Civil War and the fight against
slavery, racist hostility to blacks figured heavily in the early American
socialist move-merit. For example, several leaders of the Socialist Party in
the early 1900s were viciously racist. The American Federation of Labor
(AFL) founded by Samuel Gompers pushed lily-white craft unionism. Even
Socialist leader Eugene Debs, a railway union leader who was one of the best
of the early American socialists on the black question, argued: "We have
nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to
all the races." The prominent exception to this outlook was the syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World, which fought for integrated labor struggle
and opposed anti-Chinese racism. But it was not until the young Communist
Party examined the black question in the early I 920s, at Russian Bolshevik
leader V.1. Lenin's urging, that American Marxists actively took up the
fight for black liberation as part of the fight for communism.
Until the substantial entry of blacks into the industrial workforce during
World War I, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic racism were the chief weapons
of the capitalist rulers in dividing and holding back the working class. In
the I 870s, almost all labor leaders-including the NLU and NCLU-pushed
anti-Asian bigotry. The year 1877 also marked an increase in anti-Chinese
and anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast, as strike support rallies in San
Francisco degenerated into pogroms against Chinese immigrants, many of whom
had helped build the railroads. This was followed by the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882. AFL leader Gompers and the right wing of the Socialist Party
were also virulent opponents of Chinese immigration. Today as well, the
pro-capitalist union bureaucrats, with their anti-immigrant racism together
with appeals for protectionist measures against workers in Japan, Mexico and
elsewhere, exude poisonous chauvinism. Meanwhile, petty-bourgeois black
nationalist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan spew vile racist diatribes
against Korean and Arab shopkeepers, Jews and others. We oppose chauvinist
protectionism and call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Labor's fight is international-workers of the world unite!
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The legacy of the betrayal of Reconstruction is that blacks in the U.S.
constitute a specially oppressed race-color caste, segregated at the bottom
of this society. At the same time, unlike the Reconstruction era, blacks are
today overwhelmingly part of the proletariat. During World War I, blacks
began to move to Northern and Midwestern cities and became industrial
workers. Today, even the South is increasingly urban and industrialized, a
factor which contributed to the development of the civil rights movement of
the 1950s which led to the end of formal Jim Crow segregation. Black workers
are not only integrated into the American economy but form a strategic
component of the multiracial proletariat, especially in key sectors like
auto and transit. So that the question is posed even more starkly: union
rights and black rights will either advance together or fall back
separately.
The combination of economic militancy and political backwardness has been
characteristic of the American working class since 1877. The history of the
American workers movement is one of the bloodiest in the world. Yet the U.S.
remains the only industrialized country in the world where the workers have
not had their own independent political party reflecting in some way the
conflicting interests of labor and capital. The chief obstacle to the
development of such consciousness is the trade-union bureaucracy, which
chains the working class to the Democratic Party. We fight to forge a
revolutionary workers party which champions the cause of all the oppressed,
modeled on the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the workers of
Russia to state power in October 1917. Break with the Democrats-For ~
workers party that fights for socialist revolution!
Key to the fight for socialist revolution is the understanding that black
oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism. The American
bourgeoisie has very consciously used racism and racial oppression to divide
the working class and to derail militancy. The struggle for black equality
is a driving force in the fight against racist American capitalism. But
complete social and political equality can only be realized in an
egalitarian socialist society in which those who labor rule. Achieving that
goal requires the building of a revolutionary vanguard party which can lead
the multiracial working class in a third American Revolution, a proletarian
revolution. For black liberation through socialist revolution!
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