Workers Vanguard No. 1118
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22 September 2017
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For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Race, Class and American Populism
Part One
We print below the first part of an article based on a March 5 Spartacist League Black History forum presentation by Brian Manning in Oakland.
The term “populism” commonly means hostility to elites and the status quo. Taking issue with income distribution, populists protest against economic privilege, looking to “the people”—that is, the petty bourgeoisie, or so-called middle class. Populism, which rejects the mobilization of workers as a class, has always gotten a lot of play in the U.S. This is due in large part to the historic lack of class consciousness among workers, which is a product of the racial and other divisions sown by the capitalist rulers in order to divide and weaken the working class.
A few years ago, you had the populist Occupy movement. Its ubiquitous slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was based on a notion of “the people” against the “1 percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people, and religious leaders who preach obedience and docility in the face of authority. Last year, the Bernie Sanders campaign drew on widespread anger against economic inequality in America with its rallying cry for “political revolution against the billionaire class.” Sanders is in fact a capitalist Democratic Party politician who has long served the interests of the ruling class, particularly with his support to the bloody wars, occupations and other adventures of U.S. imperialism.
That Bernie Sanders is not a socialist of any stripe has not stopped reformist organizations like the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative from fawning over him. Sanders promoted the fraudulent idea that the people can vote into office a benevolent capitalist government that will defend their interests against the big corporations and robber barons of Wall Street. Such illusions, which have long been promoted by the pro-capitalist trade-union misleaders, have served to tie the working class to the rule of the exploiters.
Then there’s Trump, who ran a campaign of right-wing populism. Populism isn’t inherently right-wing or left-wing; it can span the bourgeois political spectrum and is conditioned by the level of class struggle. In his inauguration address, Trump said, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth.” Playing on economic insecurities, Trump sometimes postured as a defender of the “little man.” Of course, Trump is an open representative of big capital and racist, union-busting reaction. His brand of right-wing populism represents a direct attack on black people, immigrants and the working class as a whole.
As Marxists, we struggle to impart the understanding that the barbaric capitalist system cannot be reformed to benefit working people and the oppressed but must be overthrown. The only way to ensure jobs and decent living standards, including free, quality health care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting it in the hands of those whose labor makes society run—that is, the working class. This is also the only way to put an end to the racial oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of American capitalism. The multiracial working class cannot liberate itself from wage slavery if it does not take up the fight for black liberation. Our aim is to forge the revolutionary multiracial workers party that will fight to realize the goals of black freedom and equality. Black workers are slated to play a leading role in such a party.
The fundamental class division in capitalist society is between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which owns the banks and the means of production, such as the factories and the mines. The bourgeoisie is a very small fraction of the “1 percent.” The interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie are irreconcilable. The international working class uniquely possesses the social power to overturn capitalism, deriving from workers’ ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding their labor. The workers have an objective interest in expropriating the bourgeoisie and reorganizing society on a socialist basis internationally.
The heterogeneous, intermediate social layers between the workers and the capitalists constitute the petty bourgeoisie, which encompasses students, professionals and shopkeepers, among others. These layers have no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power and a common class interest, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism. If the working class, under a revolutionary leadership and program, shows that it has the resolve to lead society out of its economic and social crises, sections of the petty bourgeoisie will line up behind the workers in struggle. The upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie will gravitate toward the capitalists against the workers.
Early Populism and Black Oppression
The best-known populist movement is the one that emerged in the late 19th century, centered on poor farmers in the South. American populism, however, goes back to the slaveowner Thomas Jefferson and his glorification of the yeoman farmer. Shays’ Rebellion of 1787, a revolt by debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts against taxes, prefigured later battles fought in the populist tradition. At the time, Thomas Jefferson said, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Of course, when it came to black slaves rebelling, as in the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, the prospect of slave masters losing their heads to the slaves was a little too close to Monticello for Jefferson. He opposed the new black republic established in Haiti in 1804.
Andrew Jackson is also viewed as an early populist because he warred with banking and business elites in the name of “the people,” that is, white people. Like Jefferson, Jackson was a wealthy slaveowner who held hundreds of human beings as chattel on his cotton plantation. He also slaughtered Native Americans and orchestrated their forcible removal from the southeastern United States, such as the horrific 1838-39 Trail of Tears from Georgia to present-day Oklahoma. It’s entirely fitting that Trump admires Jackson.
Later expressions of American populism were conditioned by the outcome of the Civil War of 1861-65. Waged by the Northern Union Army against the slaveowners’ Confederacy in the South, the Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, with all its inherent contradictions. It was one of the most progressive wars in modern history in that it smashed black chattel slavery. The Northern capitalists overthrew and abolished a barbaric and archaic social system of exploitation, paving the way for the full development of capitalism in the United States.
During the period of Radical Reconstruction beginning in 1867, the federal government for the first time extended the rights of citizenship to black people through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. For a time, it used the power of Union Army troops in the South to protect the former slaves. In 1865, the federal government also established the Freedmen’s Bureau, which oversaw the establishment of public education for black people (as well as poor whites) in the South, where previously it had been a crime to teach black people to read and write. Some Radical Republicans even mooted land reform.
But the Northern bourgeoisie was not committed to fulfilling Reconstruction’s promise of social equality for the former slaves. The temporary alliance of the Northern bourgeoisie with the black slaves in the South against the slaveholders was just that—temporary. By the 1870s, it was no longer in the bourgeoisie’s interest to maintain that alliance. The Northern capitalists eyed the devastated South not as a laboratory for a radical, interracial democratic experiment but as an opportunity to profitably exploit Southern resources and cheap labor. The 1871 Paris Commune, in which the working class briefly held power, helped to cohere the class consciousness of the U.S. bourgeoisie, whose prewar ideology of “free labor,” premised on an identity of interest between labor and capital, had quickly dissipated after the Civil War. The bourgeoisie began to see—and fear—the intertwining of the fate of the freedmen in the South with that of the overwhelmingly white working class in the North.
Men from mercantile, banking and industrial backgrounds as well as some from the old planter families became the new rulers in the South. The Union Army’s practice during the last year of the Civil War of turning over “40 acres and a mule” to freed slaves in some parts of South Carolina and Georgia had nurtured the hopes of emancipated slaves across the South that they would get their own piece of land. But such land reform was a dead letter almost from the start of Reconstruction.
At the same time, Reconstruction faced a sustained, bloody offensive by Southern white-supremacists. The federal government increasingly gave these racists a free hand in terrorizing black people and whites who supported the Republican Party and Reconstruction. With the Compromise of 1877, the new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, ordered the last of a dwindling number of federal troops in the South to remain in their barracks, ending their role in Southern political affairs. With this act, the American bourgeoisie killed what remained of Reconstruction.
Racist American Capitalism on the Rise
With the defeat of Reconstruction, the former slaveowners and other supporters of the Confederacy, organized by the white-supremacist Democratic Party, took control of local and state governments, the courts, militias, sheriffs and newspapers. The pro-slavery forces had, from the time of Reconstruction, formed their own paramilitary organizations, such as the Red Shirts and Ku Klux Klan. The Democrats who overthrew Republican governments in the South dubbed themselves “Redeemers” because they had supposedly redeemed the South from black rule, fraud and corruption. They accomplished this by violently driving blacks from the polls with nightriding attacks, lynching and bloody massacres.
New labor systems developed in the South. In the absence of land reform, various forms of peonage developed, subjugating the bulk of the Southern black population, as well as poor whites, to the white landowners and merchants. There was sharecropping, whereby the farmer had to give a certain share of his crop to the landlord when he harvested it. There was the crop lien system, whereby the merchant who furnished seeds and supplies, or the landowner, took a lien on the future crop. And there was tenancy, in which the farmer paid the landowner to farm on his land. The farmers had no claim to the crops they cultivated. Interest rates were astronomical, frequently 100 percent a year, and sometimes as high as 200 percent. Year after year, decade after decade, these farmers had to sign over their crops to merchants or the landlords.
Another trap for former slaves was the system of convict labor. The Thirteenth Amendment, which codified emancipation of the slaves, also contained an exception that served to forge new chains for freed blacks: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added). To undermine the new citizenship rights won by black people, every former slave state passed a plethora of laws that criminalized all kinds of minor offenses like vagrancy, loitering, gambling, etc. These were punishable by a long sentence or a fine so high no poor person could pay it. The convict was leased out for a term of labor to pay off the fine. The savage abuse of convict laborers enabled the bourgeoisie to lay the foundations of industry in the South without having to pay for “free labor.” As barbaric as slavery was, the chattel slave represented an expensive piece of property for the slaveowner. Not so the convict laborer.
In the U.S. as a whole, the overthrow of slavery led to increasing industrialization, and the working class entered the scene as a potentially immensely powerful force. Workers waged militant struggles against exploitation, such as the Railroad Strike of 1877, the eight-hour-day movement of the 1880s, the Homestead and Pullman strikes of the 1890s. The working class had gained the social power to carry out a revolution not only to end capitalist exploitation but also to achieve equality for black people and save the poverty-stricken farmers in the South and elsewhere from economic ruin and destitution.
The problem was not that the working class lacked social power but that it lacked the political leadership and consciousness to fight for its own rule. The working class was divided by ethnicity, language, religion and race. Furthermore, the leaders of the workers movement would soon tie the workers politically to the Populists, whose program was to reform, not abolish, the capitalist system. What was needed then, as today, was to break the working class politically from the idea that the bourgeoisie could be a progressive class.
The Farmers’ Alliances and Southern Populism
After the Civil War/Reconstruction period, the U.S. bourgeoisie ceased to play any historically progressive role. Its Republican wing increasingly adopted the racist outlook of the Democratic Party, with the Republicans developing a “Lily White” faction in the late 1880s that aimed to drive black people out of the party leadership and elected posts. By the 1890s, the U.S. bourgeoisie had become a bloody, imperialist ruling class, going to war with Spain in 1898 under Republican president William McKinley in order to take over as the colonial oppressors of the Philippines, Cuba, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Manufacturing and financial interests in the North had almost unchallenged control over policymaking following the Civil War. Agriculture, which was made to shoulder the burdens of industrial development, was in a perpetual crisis in this period. Farmers were forced to buy all the manufactured goods they needed at artificially high prices on a market protected by tariffs. Meanwhile, farmers were forced to sell their goods in a largely unprotected market at depressed prices because of a glut of agricultural products and foreign competition.
In the 1870s, the federal government withdrew from circulation the paper money issued by the Union during the Civil War, known as greenbacks. It also returned to the gold standard—paper currency became exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. Confederate money was of course worthless, so there was hardly any money in circulation in the South. This situation spawned the Greenback-Labor Party in 1876, which called on the government to issue unsecured paper money—i.e., not linked to the gold standard—to help farmers repay debts. By the 1880s, the movement for unlimited silver coinage into money had taken the place of the Greenback movement. Along with agrarian organizations like the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel and other cooperative organizations, the Greenbackers were the precursors to the Populist movement.
In the South, under the reign of various factions of the Democratic Party, the party of the former slaveowners, the Republicans were hemorrhaging members and supporters as black rights became increasingly circumscribed. By the late 1880s, a movement of farmers was consolidating into a broad network that came to include thousands of chapters of black and white farmers’ alliances. This was the ground on which the Populist movement arose. The Populist movement in the American South had a wide scope and impact as a third-party movement. It also played a role in how the black population was consolidated as an oppressed race-color caste, the majority of which remains forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.
White small farmers were driven in some cases to join hands with their black counterparts in defense of common interests against the new cabal of masters ruling the post-Reconstruction South. The Populist program was radical-sounding: public ownership of railroads and utilities, a graduated income tax, debtor relief, increased monetary supply, a federally funded system of nationwide cooperatives, popular election of Senators. They were attempting to construct some variety of a cooperative commonwealth within the framework of American capitalism. Nonetheless, these attempts represented a significant challenge to the Republicans and Democrats, who had consolidated their position as parties of unbridled capitalist expansion and exploitation.
At the same time, as we wrote in one of the Spartacist League’s founding documents, “This tentative union—the Southern Populist Movement—was doomed to failure” (“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” May-June 1967, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League”). The document continues:
“The small farmer class itself could not be a real contender for political power in a capitalist society, while the dynamics of private farming inevitably brought about sharp competition among the farmers. This competition was exploited by the new political alliance of big planters, Southern capitalists and certain Northern financial interests, in particular, investors in Southern railroads, land, mining and timber. This bloc initiated a campaign of violent race hatred among their political opponents which succeeded in destroying the developing black-white unity.”
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance
Two separate farmers’ groups were formed nationally—the Colored Farmers’ Alliance (CFA) in 1886 and the National Farmers’ Alliance (NFA) in 1887. The Southern branch of the NFA was segregated. The NFA’s ranks were for the most part small farm owners and tenants, mostly from the hill country. The leaders, who tended to be bigger landowners, were deeply enmeshed in commercial agriculture and were often small exploiters in their own right. These forces wanted higher prices and lower shipping costs for goods and to drive down the wages of agricultural workers. Many were supporters of the racist Democratic Party. As likely as not, NFA members in the South had ridden with the Red Shirts, the White Leagues or the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
In contrast to the NFA’s segregationist policy in the South, the CFA did not exclude whites willing to help build the organization. In fact, white leadership was welcomed because whites had the advantage of being able to reach out to leaders of other organizations and the government. R.M. Humphrey, a former Confederate officer turned Baptist missionary, became head of the CFA. Initially the colored alliances were non-partisan social organizations and economic cooperatives trying to provide some relief to impoverished farmers. There are few surviving CFA newspapers. But there are written accounts from the CFA’s white organizers, as well as references to the alliance in the white Populist newspapers.
Black Populist organizing methods were secret, based largely in the black churches. Within the Southern caste system, black people could not just go out and have picnics and rallies like the white Populists. Heroic CFA organizers often paid for their activism with their lives. Black people risked being driven off their land or lynched just for standing up to the landlord, showing signs of literacy, ignoring racial “etiquette” or doing anything non-submissive, or doing nothing at all. Lynching was commonly the result of disputes over land and livestock or of confrontations with landlords and employers.
In 1889, Oliver Cromwell, a black CFA organizer, was recruiting black farmers in Leflore County, Mississippi. Having organized black men into a militia group in Clinton, Mississippi, during Reconstruction, he was described in the press as a “notoriously bad Negro.” He organized a boycott of local white merchants, encouraging farmers to trade with the co-op store instead. When Cromwell’s life was threatened, armed black men rallied around him. Whites organized posses, and the state militia suppressed Cromwell and his supporters in a sea of blood. The lynching went on for days, and dozens of black people were murdered.
By 1891, the CFA claimed a membership of 1.25 million. The CFA was largely composed of black tenants and laborers who supported the Republican Party. They wanted higher wages and an end to convict labor and lien law. Both the CFA and the NFA wanted cheaper credit and more money in circulation.
In 1891, the CFA organized a cotton pickers strike. Planters in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the Arkansas Delta refused to pay more than 50 cents per 100 pounds of cotton picked. Some members of the CFA persuaded R.M. Humphrey that the organization should protect them. But there was a conflict: some members thought that it was too dangerous for the black pickers to go on strike. Others opposed the strike for economic reasons—either they owned their own land or hired help to pick cotton. So Humphrey organized the Cotton Pickers League as a subgroup within the CFA. Practically nothing is known of the Cotton Pickers League. It was a secret organization, and its members were mostly illiterate.
The Cotton Pickers League tried to use the strike as a means to improve the lot of landless black people. The strike only materialized in a couple of places—in East Texas and in the Arkansas Delta near Memphis. In Arkansas, planters organized a large posse to hunt for strike leaders, which took on added urgency when the strikers killed a plantation manager. Strike leaders were hunted down and murdered. After the strike, the CFA lost members and passed from the scene as an independent organization. The brutal suppression of the CFA showed the determined and violent opposition that black laborers were up against when they challenged the white landowners.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1119
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6 October 2017
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For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Race, Class and American Populism
Part Two
We print below the conclusion of an article based on a March 5 Spartacist League Black History forum presentation by Brian Manning in Oakland. Part One appeared in WV No. 1118 (22 September).
Up until the aftermath of the Civil War, trade unions in the U.S. had been very weak. In 1869, some four years after the war ended, a group that became known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded, one of the country’s earliest national labor organizations. Unlike the farmers’ alliances and other populist groups, the Knights of Labor was a proletarian organization. In addition to white male workers, it organized women and black people, including in the South.
The Knights of Labor’s membership pledge stated that it meant “no antagonism to capital.” At the same time, its founding leader, Uriah Stephens, also called for the complete emancipation of working people “from the thralldom and loss of wage slavery” and placed great emphasis on solidarity. Their motto was “An injury to one is the concern of all,” a slogan later adapted by the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) in the early 20th century.
The Knights’ leadership under Terence V. Powderly, who succeeded Stephens in 1879, was opposed to strikes. But as is often the case, the rank and file thought differently. In 1885, the Knights of Labor won a strike against the Wabash Railroad, part of the southwestern system controlled by the railroad baron Jay Gould. Union members on other railways refused to operate any train with Wabash cars. The union men won a surprising and unprecedented victory, leading to a major increase in the membership rolls of the Knights. By June 1886, the national membership had increased from about 100,000 to over 700,000. Gould then provoked a strike and crushed the Knights on his railroads the next year. But the 1885 victory enhanced the union’s authority.
In this period, the South experienced rapid development in cotton, tobacco, iron and steel production, textile and furniture manufacturing, coal mining and lumbering. The workforce was mostly composed of native white Southerners, but particularly in coal mining, lumbering and iron and steel production there was a large component of black workers. The Knights originally established a foothold in urban areas but eventually spread out to more rural areas.
Knights of Labor and Black Workers
The leadership of the Knights was derived from Northern (anti-slavery) abolitionists. Powderly thought that both the abolitionists and organized labor were “revolutionary in their character...[their] ends in view were the same, viz.: The freedom of the man who worked” (quoted in Melton Alonza McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South [1978]). The Knights of Labor leadership had several ways of dealing with the race question in the South, sometimes trying to circumvent it, saying it was just an economic issue, and at other times directly confronting it. These positions were outlined by historian Philip S. Foner in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker: 1619-1973:
“Two tendencies were apparent in the attitude of the Knights of Labor toward the Negro. One was reflected in the widespread evidence of unity in strikes, labor demonstrations, picnics, assembly halls, and the election of blacks to office in predominantly white locals. Nothing like this had ever occurred before in the American labor movement. The other tendency was the reluctance of the leadership to antagonize Knights who were not prepared to grant equality to black members and its unwillingness to take steps to eliminate restrictions barring Negroes from entrance to industry and apprenticeships.”
In 1886, there were 60,000 black members of the Knights, mostly in the South. Most of them were in all-black locals, but there were a few integrated ones as well. All told, there were nearly 2,000 Knights of Labor assemblies or locals organized in the South. They were organized, as the Knights said, “irrespective of party, race, and sex.” But as much as the Knights sought to recruit black and women workers, they had a reactionary position against Chinese workers, and sometimes expressed that position in violent actions.
One story captures the contradictory quality of the Knights and Powderly on anti-black racism. During the Knights’ 1886 General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia, the New York delegation left a hotel when one of its black members was refused admittance. When Powderly heard of this, he had the black member, Frank J. Ferrell, introduce him on the stage of the convention. Ferrell said that the Knights sought the “abolition of those distinctions which are maintained by creed or color” and that Powderly was a man “above the superstitions which are involved in these distinctions.” After the meeting, the New York delegation went down the road and integrated a theater. At the same time, Powderly wrote a letter to the Richmond Dispatch in which he sought to mollify his Southern critics: “I have no wish to interfere with the social relations which exist between the races of the South.... There need be no further cause for alarm. The colored representatives to this convention will not intrude where they are not wanted, and the time-honored laws of social equality will be allowed to slumber undisturbed.”
Nonetheless, many Southern blacks rushed into the Knights of Labor because they were landless and barred from many industries and sought the dignity that membership in the Knights provided. But even within their organization the Knights were not always able to overcome racial divisions. In 1887, black iron workers in Birmingham went on strike, but their white counterparts refused to support them. The state organization of the Knights ordered the white iron workers to go out on strike, which they reluctantly did. But there was so much disgruntlement that the Knights had to call off the strike.
The bosses especially targeted militant black workers for deadly violence. By 1887, the Knights had organized 10,000 cane workers in what was known as the Sugar Bowl of southern Louisiana—9,000 were black and 1,000 were white. That year sugar workers went on strike, demanding payment in cash (not scrip redeemable only at the plantation store) as well as an increase in their daily wages and payment every two weeks. The governor called in the militia—which was headed by former Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard—to drive the workers from their cabins on the plantations. Corralled into the black part of the town of Thibodaux, as many as 300 black strikers and their families were killed by white vigilantes. This was one of the deadliest attacks on a strike in American history. There was not another attempt to organize workers in Louisiana cane country for decades.
As more radical workers entered the Knights, the conservatism of the leadership, including its opposition to class struggle, hardened. The opposition of Powderly and other Knights leaders to “radical anarchists” became especially vehement after the 1887 execution of the Haymarket martyrs—anarchists and labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day. As radical white workers left or were expelled from the Knights, the influence of those who held racist, anti-black views became more prevalent. In 1894, shortly before its final demise, the Knights of Labor, the same organization that had earlier fought to organize black workers, called for the deportation of black people to Liberia “or some other parts of Africa.”
In addition to the bosses’ concerted offensive against labor struggles, white prejudice played a big part in the downfall of the Knights of Labor. At bottom, this reflected its inability to counter the rise of racist reaction in the post-Reconstruction period. Nonetheless, militant labor struggles continued through the 1890s. A number of veterans of the Knights of Labor went on to support the formation of the People’s Party in 1892.
The People’s Party
Blocked in their attempts in the 1880s to win gains through social struggle, populists from the farmers’ alliances and other organizations turned toward the electoral system. Black and white Alliancemen joined in forming the People’s Party. The case for doing so was made most strongly by black people in the South who were desperate for some kind of relief—anything to undermine the Democrats. At People’s Party conventions, black members insisted on respectful treatment by white delegates, many of whom were their landlords. This alliance between the small exploiters and those they exploited reflected the irreconcilable class interests that would lead to the demise of the People’s Party.
In 1892, People’s Party delegates nominated James B. Weaver as their candidate for president and ratified a platform calling for government ownership of railroads, telegraphs and steamships; a progressive income tax; an eight-hour workday; paper money; a loan program. Most significantly, the People’s Party became an electoral vehicle that threatened to break up the Democratic Party’s political monopoly in the South. Weaver, who had been a brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War, was the target of all kinds of abuse by the Populists’ opponents in the South.
The contradictions that would eventually tear apart this populist alliance of black and white farmers were perhaps best illustrated in the person of Tom Watson. Watson was a white large landowner whose majority-black Tenth District was the center of Populist voting strength in Georgia in the 1890s. In his essay “The Negro Question in the South” (1892), Watson expressed racist views about black people. But the essay also showed that Watson had a pragmatic rationale for enlisting the support of black voters to defeat the Democrats. It was in this context that he pointed out that both Republicans and Democrats exploited racial antagonisms to maintain their rule. Referring to poor blacks and whites, Watson wrote:
“Now the People’s Party says to these two men, ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both’.”
Watson ran for Congress in Georgia in 1892 and had a black Populist organizer, H.S. Doyle, who gave 63 speeches for him. When Doyle was threatened with lynching by a mob of Democrats, he fled to Watson’s house. Watson called out 2,000 armed white farmers to protect him. At the same time, Watson was no supporter of black equality; he told Doyle to sleep in the shed out back.
When the People’s Party repeatedly failed to unseat the Democrats in the South, Watson came to believe that the Democrats’ use of the bugaboo of black domination to scare whites away from the Populists could best be overcome by eliminating the black vote. In 1904, Watson offered to support Democrats seeking to amend the Georgia constitution to uphold white supremacy, in line with other Southern states that had disenfranchised black people. Watson went from defending the black vote and opposing lynching in the early 1890s to becoming a white-supremacist by the early 20th century—promoting anti-Jewish, anti-socialist, anti-Catholic and pro-KKK views in his magazine, The Jeffersonian.
Demonstrating the subordinate position of black people in the People’s Party, the 1892 ticket included no blacks, and only two of the 160 delegates to the Georgia state Populist convention were black, a far cry from the radical Republican regimes during Reconstruction. The white Populist leaders never stood for black social equality. Nonetheless, their appeals to black voters, who still could tip the vote in one direction or the other in the South, led to the People’s Party being disparaged as the “Negro Party,” much as the Republican Party had been known as the “black Republicans” a generation before.
The Defeat of Populism and Consolidation of Jim Crow
In the face of burgeoning support for the Populists, the Democrats tried different strategies. Some politicians co-opted the rhetoric of the People’s Party. In other places the Democrats openly stole votes, stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated voters. And as always, the Democrats played the race card, conjuring the specter of black domination to scare white voters away from the Populists. In the 1892 election, the Democrats carried the South and won the U.S. presidency. The People’s Party got only 8.5 percent of the national vote but carried five western states and won three governorships.
However, by 1896 the Populists had fused on the national level with the Democrats and did not run a presidential candidate that year. They supported the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who gave his famous “Cross of Gold” speech calling for an end to the gold standard, which was a key demand for the Populists. This fusion was fatal for the Populists, leading to the decline of the movement. Black Populist delegates had opposed the fusion because they recognized that it would cement white racist hostility.
The prospect of a black-white alliance undermining their rule impelled Southern Democrats in the 1890s to further extend segregation into every aspect of life. Black people were increasingly disenfranchised through the amendment of state constitutions. In 1890, Mississippi established a lengthy residency requirement, a poll tax and literacy tests to be eligible to vote. Within two years, the number of black voters dropped from 190,000 to 8,615. The Mississippi Plan of constitutional disenfranchisement, including through outright racist terror, swept across the South. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court placed its imprimatur on the racist policy of segregation with its ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding the segregation of railway cars in Louisiana.
By the opening of the 20th century, black voting rights had been virtually eliminated in the South, and legally sanctioned Jim Crow segregation was fully consolidated. For the next 50 years or more, the South remained this way under one-party, Democratic rule. The Northern bourgeoisie and Republican Party had by the turn of the century thoroughly embraced the white-supremacist ideology of the “white man’s burden,” which served as justification for the subjugation of the darker races in the U.S.’s new colonies. Ben Tillman, a racist Democratic politician from South Carolina, wrote at the time of the Spanish-American War of 1898:
“No Republican leader, not even [New York] Governor [Theodore] Roosevelt, will now dare to wave the bloody shirt and preach a crusade against the South’s treatment of the negro. The North has a bloody shirt of its own. Many thousands of them have been made into shrouds for murdered Filipinos, done to death because they were fighting for liberty.”
— quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974)
Working-Class Power Is Key
A powerful example of the working class overcoming racial divisions was the New Orleans General Strike of 1892. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), which had been formed in 1881 and largely organized skilled, white, native-born workers, was compelled to lead the general strike, uniting skilled and unskilled, black and white workers, who were largely organized in segregated locals. The strike served to break down race prejudice among white workers.
In October, the Triple Alliance of scalesmen, packers and the largely black teamsters, numbering somewhere between two and three thousand, went on strike for a ten-hour day, overtime pay and a union shop. The bosses tried to break the strike by publishing stories about attacks by black strikers against local whites, but by November a general strike had begun. Forty-nine AFL unions went out, demanding union recognition, a closed shop, wage increases and shorter hours. While the unions did not attain a closed shop, they won other demands.
The general strike was a great demonstration of interracial labor solidarity in action. It showed that thousands of workers in the increasingly segregated Deep South could unite in common struggle, despite the efforts of the bosses to divide them by using anti-black prejudice. This was possible because workers have a common class interest in their struggles. However, economic struggles in and of themselves cannot achieve racial unity on a longer-term basis. For that it is necessary to have a class-struggle leadership that takes up the fight against black oppression and women’s oppression, and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Such a leadership would be based on the understanding that the workers and bosses do not share a common interest and that the capitalist system ultimately needs to be swept away through workers revolution.
A number of socialist leaders came out of the populist movements of the late 19th century, including Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs. Many of the activists who went on to form the Industrial Workers of the World had also been populist activists. These leaders came to recognize the social power of the working class as key. However, the SP and, initially, the Communist Party (CP) did not see the need for a program to address the dual oppression of black people as both workers and the victims of all-sided racism. In the case of the SP, some of its leaders were openly racist. And despite being an opponent of racism, Debs remained in the SP because he believed in building a party that encompassed all political currents in the workers movement, no matter how politically backward.
It was not until the intervention of the Communist International, established after the Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky in October 1917, that the early American Communists took up the struggle for black freedom. The Bolsheviks had developed their party in intense opposition to the Great Russian chauvinism of the tsar’s empire, and they understood that the struggles against national and other forms of special (i.e., non-class) oppression could be powerful levers to advance socialist revolution. They had built a vanguard party of workers of different nationalities with the most advanced, revolutionary consciousness.
The idea of the fight against special oppression as an impetus for revolution changed how American Communists thought about their work in a country founded on black chattel slavery. This was captured by James P. Cannon, a CP leader who was later won to Trotskyism, i.e., authentic revolutionary Marxism. Cannon noted that American Communists learned “to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it” (“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” in The First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]).
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, a wave of popular discontent over economic devastation spawned a number of populist demagogues who tried to deflect this anger away from the capitalist profit system. Among these was Democratic Party politician Huey Long, who had served as governor of Louisiana. After Long became a U.S. Senator, the KKK said that it was going to campaign against him in Louisiana. This prompted Long to get up in the Senate press gallery and say, “Quote me as saying that that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana.” And if he did, he risked leaving with “his toes turned up.” Long was certainly no anti-racist, but his stance against the Klan won him much sympathy among black people in Louisiana.
In 1934, Long launched a “Share Our Wealth” campaign with the slogan “Every Man a King,” promising $5,000 to every family. Initially a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Long claimed that his populist proposals came from Roosevelt’s unfulfilled promises. Long said:
“When one man decides he must have more goods to wear for himself and family than any other ninety-nine people, then the condition results that instead of one hundred people sharing the things that are on earth for one hundred people, that one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part for the ninety-nine.”
— Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long (1933)
The Occupy Wall Street movement came full circle from movements like Long’s, proving that there is nothing new under the sun as far as these populist shibboleths are concerned.
The U.S. Trotskyists of the time, organized in the Workers Party, sought to expose the pretensions of Long. In an article titled, “Huey Long—Workers’ Enemy,” the New Militant (27 April 1935) wrote: “Huey Long proclaims in grandiose style for the redistribution of wealth; but he is equally vociferous in his proclamations for the maintenance of the present social relationship.”
For Revolutionary Integrationism!
Starting with World War I, the great migrations of black people from the rural South to the North led to the entry of large numbers of black people into the industrial working class, giving black workers enormous potential social power. This development underscored the need for a revolutionary program to address the special oppression of black people. The black population in the U.S. is an oppressed race-color caste, an integral part of American class society since the time of slavery while at the same time forcibly segregated in the main at the bottom of this society. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s did away with de jure segregation, but de facto segregation is built into the economic order of American capitalism.
The entire history of mass black struggle—from the anti-slavery abolitionists through the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction to the civil rights movement—has been in the direction of integration, not separation. Black workers in the 1930s participated in and often played leading roles in the labor battles that created powerful, racially integrated industrial unions. Our program as Marxists in the U.S. is one of revolutionary integrationism—fighting against all instances of racial oppression, we stand for a working-class socialist revolution that sweeps away the capitalist economic order in which segregation and racial oppression are entrenched. Separate will never be equal! Only a socialist society based on production for social need and not private profit can provide the decent jobs, education, housing and health care that are denied to those left to fight for survival in the ghettos.
The liberal populists of today, no less than the populists of the 19th century and their 20th-century successors, are incapable of offering a program to resolve the profound economic and social inequality faced by black people. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation and oppression; a proletarian, revolutionary perspective is needed. Despite the increasing destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength in recent decades, black workers continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat, such as urban transit, longshore, auto and steel.
Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section of the proletariat, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat, and will be leading cadres of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party.
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