Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedi" entry for the early 19th century, pre-Marxist utopian socialist mentioned in the article below, Charles Fourier.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Additionally, when the issue of sex comes up, as it does in various disguises even in the left labor movement, I like to remind militants of the following. The left labor movement has set its main task among the three great human tragedies: hunger, sex, and death as the struggle against hunger. I like to remember the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, and his words about his hope that once the struggle against hunger is victorious and that condition is overcome in our communist future sex and death will be less frightening and perilous. From personal experience, I sure hope so.
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Fourier's Phalanx, Reich's Sex-Pol:
The Trouble with Sexual Utopias
By Jack Shapiro
"It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes in to the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman," Frederick Engels noted in an article on the biblical "Book of Revelation" (printed in Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought, Vol. 1.2, 1883). Certainly the early, pre-Marxian socialists projected in elaborate detail what life, including sexual life, would be like in their ideal society of the future. The New Left of the 1960s, too, revived a radicalism centering on changing lifestyles. Herbert Marcuse, for example, criticized Marx as insufficiently radical for not directly linking the overthrow of capitalism to individual sexual fulfillment. Marx and Engels adamantly refused to engage in speculation on this question, however, insisting that their position was essentially negative, aimed at eliminating economic and social coercion in personal relations. As Engels stated in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884):
"Thus, what we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending efracement of capitalist production is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman's surrender either with money or with any other means of social power; and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual—and that's the end of it."
This position was not a matter of intellectual modesty on Marx's or Engels' part. Rather it flowed organically from the dialectical materialist outlook. Under communism people will be genuinely and truly free to reshape their interpersonal relations. Of course, this freedom is not absolute. Man cannot transcend his biological make-up and relation to the natural environment. Communist man, too, will grow old and die. Neither can mankind sweep the slate totally clean and build society anew. Communist humanity will inherit for good and ill the accumulated cultural heritage of our species:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and trans¬mitted from the past.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851)
Nonetheless, men do make their own history, including the history of their sexual practices. We cannot know the sexual practices of communist society because these will be determined in the future. Any attempt to project, much less to prescribe, such sexual practices is an expression of attitudes, values and prejudices shaped by a repressive class society.
Consider two representative figures who sought to combine socialism with a positive program of sexual libertarianism: Charles Fourier and Wilhelm Reich. One of the greatest of the early socialist thinkers, Fourier developed a program for an ideal community— the phalanx—which would gratify all human passions. Wilhelm Reich, as a member of the Austrian and then German Communist parties in the late 1920s-early 1930s, attempted to fuse Marx and Freud both in theory and in practice.
Fourier and Reich were passionate and often insightful in denouncing the sexual repressiveness of bourgeois society. Yet as soon as they sought to positively prescribe codes of presumably liberated social/sexual relations, they went off the rails. They believed they knew what "human nature" is, but their efforts to establish lifestyles appropriate for free men of the future only shows that Fourier and Reich each brought to the notion of "human nature" a lot of the ideological baggage of his own particular time and circumstances, shaped by repressive, class-divided society. Fourier's phalanx, to eliminate sexual frustration, would institute mechanisms of sexual slavery. And Reich's "non-repressive" society would have sexual activities monitored by a central agency of bureaucrats.
Fourier: A Utopia Based on Passionate Attraction
Fourier described himself as being "born and raised in the mercantile shops." He existed in the netherworld of French commerce (traveling salesman, correspon¬dence clerk for an American firm, unlicensed stock¬broker). While never absolutely destitute, Fourier knew poverty. He lived in cheap travelers' pensions, boarding houses, dingy apartments. He was a recluse and may well have been a life-long celibate. Added to his personal isolation was his political isolation. His first work calling for the total reorganization of society was published in 1808. For the next 20 years he was totally ignored, a prophet unhonored and unacknowledged. Only in the last decade of his life did Fourier attract a small band of devoted followers. Fourier's was a lonely and miserable life. In his ideas of Utopia one sees the pent-up longings of this deeply frustrated man. This gives to his vision its passionate force and imaginative vividness. It also accounts for his fantastical and often downright weird ideas.
In this age of Penthouse and "adult" home videos, it is easy to be condescending toward old Fourier. Yet this neurotic dreamer was a towering figure in the struggle for social and sexual emancipation. Early in the 19th century it became apparent to those still committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market economy. Fourier, the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, noted, "Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations" (quoted in Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier [1971]).
The status of women represented the most acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. The importance Fourier gave to women's liberation is exemplified in his famous statement:
"Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a
diminution in the liberty of women In summary, the
extension of the privileges of women is the fundamen¬tal cause of all social progress." —Ibid.
At a time when women were universally regarded and treated as nothing more than babymakers, Fourier championed not only complete social and political equality for women but also their right to sexual fulfillment. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women from the oppressive nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program, a penetrating insight which the young Marx and Engels embraced. At a time when fathers exercised total authority over their families, especially their daughters, Fourier spoke for the freedom of children.
Even today reading Fourier would give Jerry Falwell or Pope John Paul Wojtyla apoplexy. He exposed the sexual boredom of monogamous marriage with a hitherto unheard-of savagery:
"This is the normal way of life among the mass of the people. Dullened, morose couples who quarrel all day long are reconciled to each other on the bolster be¬cause they cannot afford two beds, and contact, the sudden pin-prick of the senses, triumphs for a moment over conjugal satiety. If this is love it is the most material and the most trivial."
—quoted in Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (1962)
He flayed the petty tyranny of the patriarchal family, especially the stifling of the sexual needs of children and adolescents:
"The children at the age of puberty think only of escaping the insipidity of the household: the young girl lives only for an evening when she is at a ball; the young man, preoccupied with parties, returns to his paternal home as to a place of exile. As to the children below the age of puberty, they are not satisfied except when they manage to escape the eye of the father and the eye of the tutor to enjoy everything that is forbidden to them."
—quoted in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Teaching of Charles Fourier (1969)
Fourier's Phalanx: Outlawing Sexual Frustration
Fourier's answer to the repressiveness of bourgeois civilization was a system called Harmony, based on the phalanx. The phalanx was a basically self-contained social and economic unit of approximately 1,700 people. It would contain roughly two each of 810 basic psychological types. This would insure the necessary variety and complementarities. Life in a Fourierist phalanx is attractive. All work is voluntary and not for monetary reward. There is a great deal of sexual freedom and variety. Children especially are intended to enjoy life in a phalanx. They would be subject to little parental or other authority, and would spend most of the day with peer groups (the Little Bands and Little Hordes). Returning to the bosom of his parents at night, the child is overwhelmed with love and affection.
Yet Fourier's Utopia has oppressive and sexually abusive features. Fourier believed that homosexuality, both male and female, would disappear under his system of the phalanx. In the phalanx, "harmonious armies" of young men and women would engage in nonviolent warfare. The losers would for a brief time serve as slaves to the victors. These youthful captives would be expected to meet the sexual needs of older members of the phalanx so that "no age capable of love is frustrated in its desire." Fourier's difficulties arise from two interrelated factors: the problem of work and the guarantee of sexual satisfaction, not merely the pursuit of such happiness as Thomas Jefferson (Fouri¬er's older contemporary) put it in the American Declaration of Independence.
In the Fourierist phalanx, work is not only voluntary but positively pleasurable as well as more productive than under capitalism: "in a societary state varied work will become a source of varied pleasures."Yet this work is crude manual labor, mainly agricultural. One of the great advances of scientific socialism (Marxism) was the understanding that technological progress, which under capitalism is used by the ruling class to further enslave and immiserate the working people, will when freed from the fetter of private property provide the material basis for human freedom.
Fourier, with his passion for mathematical exactitude, projects that the phalanx economy will be four-fifths agriculture and one-fifth manufacturing. And by manufacturing he means literally production by hand: "The industrial revolution passes Fourier by; he failed completely to appreciate its significance.... [Division of labor meant to him the simple form well illustrated in market-gardening, not the complex form associated with the machine technique" (E.S. Mason, "Fourier and Anarchism," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1928).
The pre-industrial nature of Fourier's Utopia is not simply a reflection of the relative economic backward¬ness of France in his day. His great French contempo¬rary Henri de Saint-Simon projected a socialized system based on continual technological progress. Fourier, however, deliberately rejected this program: "The Saint-Simonian vision, as well as the subsequent Marxist dream, of mechanized socialist mankind wresting a bountiful living from a stingy and hostile environment would have seemed a horrible nightmare of rapine to Fourier, for he knew that the natural destiny of the globe was to become a horticultural paradise, an ever-varying English garden" (Introduction to Beecher and Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier). In addition Fourier feared that, scientists and technical experts would exercise a new guardianship over society, establishing a new theocracy.
Given the primitive nature of work in the phalanx, Fourier could only offer variety, satisfying the "butterfly passion" to flit from one thing to another. In a typi¬cal day a member of the phalanx would care for the animals, engage in forestry, vegetable gardening, beekeeping and so on. Nicholas Riasanovsky, himself a sympathetic student of Fourier's doctrines, has nonetheless pointed out: "In general Charles Fourier's promise of most enthusiastic and most fruitful work by all in Harmony has aroused much skepticism— [Sjwitching in rapid succession from one unpleasant job to another would hardly improve anyone's productivity."
Marx's view of work is directly counterposed to Fourier's. For Marx, socialist economic planning would lead to a fully automated economy in which the "human factor is restricted to watching and supervising the production process" (Crundn'sse). Work then becomes increasingly creative artistic and scientific activity. At the same time, Marx insisted: "This does not mean that work can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free work, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort" (ibid.). We see here the difference between the Rousseauian and the Marxist outlooks. For Fourier, happiness meant a return to the spontaneous playfulness of childhood. Marx recognized that mankind had developed a real need to fully utilize and extend all its capacities. Artistic and scientific work is not and cannot be made fun in the sense that sex, eating good food and playing games are fun. But this kind of work has also become an object of passionate attraction.
It is not true, as Riasanovsky implies, that Fourier offered no motivation for enthusiastic work effort in the phalanx. In part, he solved this problem in his usual manner: by asserting that there is a psychological type in sufficient numbers to perform any and every needed social role. Who, for example, would do dirty work like collecting the garbage and spreading manure on the fields? Fourier's answer—little boys:
"Two-thirds of all boys have a penchant for filth. They love to wallow in the mire and play with dirty things— These children will enroll in the Little Hordes whose task it is to perform, dauntlessly and as a point of honor, all those loathsome tasks that ordinary workers would find debasing."
—Beecner and Bienvenu, op cit.
Fourier himself was city born and bred and so sentimentalized rural life. Children actually raised on farms, who have milked cows at 4 a.m. and slopped the pigs, can hardly wait to escape to urban civilization.
More fundamentally and generally, Fourier replaced money with sex as a reward for work effort. Sexually integrated work groups (the series) were to be an occasion for amorous dalliance. The connection between sexual fulfillment and work effort is especially clear and important in the recruitment and maintenance of industrial armies, huge bodies of tens of thousands which would clear new land, drain swamps, build dams and the like. Accompanying these industrial armies would be beautiful virgins (!) (the Vestals) of both sexes. Work performance in the industrial army would be the primary form of courtship: "the female Vestal is surrounded by her suitors, and she can watch them displaying their talents in the work sessions and the public games of the army." One can hardly imagine work conditions better designed to create anxiety and frustration than this intense, public sexual competition.
Nonetheless, Fourier assures us that the rejected suitors would not suffer sexual frustration. Indeed, eliminating sexual frustration is a basic principle of Harmony. Also accompanying the industrial armies are young women and men (the Bacchantes and Bacchants) who freely give their sexual favors to those wounded in love. Thus this passionate believer in women's equality is led by the logic of his system to project a class of free whores to meet the sexual needs of men. Fourier of course insisted: "Most women of twenty-five have a temperament suited to this role, which will then become a noble one." At the same time, he chastises attractive women who want a life¬long monogamous relation with their loved one:
"What is reason in the state of harmony? It is the employment of any method which multiplies relationships and satisfies a great number of individuals without injuring anybody. A beautiful woman operates in contradiction of this rule if she wants to remain faithful and to belong exclusively to one man all her life. She might have contributed to the happiness of ten thousand men in thirty years of philanthropic service, leaving fond memories behind among these ten thousand."
—quoted in Manuel, op cit.
Sexual libertarianism here becomes its opposite: social pressure toward promiscuity in the name of satisfying everyone's desires.
Sexual coercion outright enters Harmony through the problem of old people, something Fourier felt keenly. He once wrote, "life, after the end of love affairs, is nothing but a prison to which one becomes more or less adjusted according to the favors of fortune." Fourier was realistic enough to recognize that while old people still sexually desired the young, the reverse was not usually the case. His system therefore contains elaborate measures to solve this problem. As we have seen, the youthful captives in the nonviolent war games serve for a short while as slaves to older members of the phalanx. Sexually servicing the aged was also a penalty for transgressing the rules of Harmony. While Fourier's Utopia contains what we would call open marriage, there are also by mutual consent monogamous relations. If one partner in these engages in secret infidelity, he is brought before a "court of love." To expiate this transgression, he orshe may be sentenced to a few nights with older members of the phalanx.
Fourier's "ideal" society was certainly shaped by his own neurotic idiosyncracies. But his views also directly reflect the assumptions of his time. Fourier (and Reich)held that human passions or, in Freudian terms, instinctual drives, were unchanging and unchangeable. Fourier and, more narrowly and dogmatically, Reich believed they knew what was natural and healthy sexuality and what was depravity and perversion. Their program was to adjust social institutions around an emotional make-up conceived as unvarying. Fourier wrote to his disciple Victor ConsideVant: "I am the only reformer who has rallied round human nature by accepting it as it is and devising the means of utilizing it with all the defects which are inseparable from man."
Fourier and Reich belong to the intellectual tradition of Enlightenment naturalism, whose greatest represen¬tative was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Late in life Rousseau wrote that all his doctrines were based on the "great principle that nature made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and makes him miserable." Fourier constantly counterposes the happy and natural man in the phalanx society to the artificial and miserable creature of existent civilization. For Reich, the Freudian concept of id corresponds to Rousseau's "state of nature," man not yet depraved by repressive civilization.
Social Utopias based on Rousseauian naturalism have an inherent tendency toward totalitarianism. If man is naturally good, then "unnatural" social orders can be maintained only through false ideas and ideologies (e.g., religion). Fourier insisted that a society based on the phalanx could have been established any time in the past two millennia—if only someone had thought of it before. Social liberation thus becomes a struggle against bad ideas—rooting them out and preventing recontamination.
The first attempt to establish a Fourierist phalanx was made in what is now Romania in the 1830s by a noble landowner for his serfs. Local Moral Majority types were outraged and launched an armed attack to destroy the phalanx. The peasants valiantly defended their "free love" commune though in the end they were overwhelmed by superior force. The Socialist Republic of Romania has built a historical monument to commemorate the last stand of the Fourierist peasants of Scani.
Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol
Wilhelm Reich died in 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal penitentiary. He was imprisoned for violating a court order on a charge brought by the Food and Drug Administration that he had transported an empty box, the Orgone Energy Accumulator, across state lines. Medically, Reich had become a quack. Politically he was a rabid red-baiter, an outspoken supporter of McCarthyism.
Yet a quarter century earlier, Wilhelm Reich had attempted to fuse Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Reich was simultaneously a member of Freud's inner circle of followers and of the German Communist Party, a mass workers party, at a critical moment in modern history: the rise to power of Nazism. In the 1960s the New Left rediscovered the early Reich and made him into a minor cult figure. A selection of his writings between 1929 and 1934, entitled Sex-Pol, was published in English in 1966, edited by Lee Baxandall of the defunct Studies on the Left. An introduction by Marxoid academic Bertell Oilman declared: "The revolutionary potential of Reich's teachings is as great as ever—perhaps greater, now that sex is accepted as a subject for serious discussion and complaint virtually everywhere."
Many of the activities of Reich and his supporters (who called themselves the Sex-Pol movement) within the Austrian and German Communist parties were entirely commendable. They agitated against sexually repressive legislation and campaigned for the greater economic independence of youth. The Reichian clinics in Vienna and Berlin provided working-class youth with information about contraception and preventing venereal disease, and doubtless performed useful individual counseling. Some of his early writings on character analysis and "body language" remain today standard texts for practicing analysts. Reich became attracted to Marxism by his work in the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna, where he became convinced that poverty and oppression contributed to neuroses, and thus that their cure demanded the restructuring of society.
In a 1932 work written for the German Communist Party's youth group he concluded: "In capitalist society there can be no sexual liberation of youth, no healthy, satisfying sex life; if you want to be rid of your sexual troubles, fight for socialism. Only through socialism can you achieve sexual joie de vivre.... Socialism will putan end to the power of those who gaze up toward heaven as they speak of love while they crush and destroy the sexuality of youth." This bouncy, bombastic rhetoric endeared Reich to the New Left. Rejecting the Marxist understanding that sexual life is essentially a private matter, Reich insisted that the Communist movement must struggle for a "satisfying sex life" both for its own members and for society at large.
Reich's basic message can be baldly stated as follows. The sexual repression practiced by the patriarchal, nuclear family (e.g., preventing children from masturbating) produces submissive adults, fearful of bour¬geois authority. Thus the struggle against sexual repression—itself a deep-felt source of discontent throughout society—is of strategic importance in releasing the revolutionary energy of the masses.
In opposition to orthodox Freudianism, Reich refused to accept the patriarchal, nuclear family as a cultural given. The Oedipus complex, the frustrated desire of a child to possess the parent of the opposite sex, he wrote,
"must disappear in a socialist society because its social basis—the patriarchal family—will itself disappear, having lost its raison d'etre. Communal upbringing, which forms part of the socialist program, will be so unfavorable to the forming of psychological attitudes as they exist within the family today—the relationship of children to one another and to the persons who bring them up will be so much more many-sided, complex and dynamic—that the Oedipus complex with its specific content of desiring the mother and wishing to destroy the father as a rival will lose its meaning."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" (1929)
Reich's particular recipe for "a satisfying sex life" was rigid and bizarre. At the core of his psychoanalytic theory was the function of the orgasm as the sole release for dammed up sexual energy. The failure of the orgasm to perform this function produced mental illness. He maintained that orgastic impotency was the sole cause of all neurotic and psychotic behavior.
Reich's fellow psychoanalysts objected that many neurotics had quite normal sex lives. But, to paraphrase George Orwell, for Reich some orgasms are more equal than others. To fulfill its function an orgasm must be heterosexual, without irrelevant fantasies and of sufficient duration:
"Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the damned-up [sic] sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.'
—The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
In 1939 Reich invented the Orgone Energy Field Meter to measure sexual energy and its discharge. He had long since abandoned both Marx and Freud for the realms of science fiction.
Reich's reasoning is circular. He hypothesizes that mental illness is produced by undischarged sexual energy. But, since the latter is unmeasurable, he then deduces genital incapacity from psychological distress: "Not a single neurotic is orgastically potent, and the character structure of the overwhelming majority of me'n and women are neurotic." The psychoanalyst thus becomes the supreme arbiter of sexual health and unhealth. This opens the door to subjective arbitrari¬ness and outright bigotry.
For example, Reich maintained the orthodox Freudian position that homosexuality is arrested development, the failure of the child to overcome primary narcissism and develop love objects outside himself. He went further than Freud and also identified homosexuality with political reaction:
"The more clearly developed the natural heterosexual inclinations of a juvenile are, the more open he will be to revolutionary ideas; the stronger the homosexual tendency within him and also the more repressed his awareness of sexuality in general, the more easily he will be drawn toward the right."
—"What is Class Consciousness?" (1934)
His New Left admirers understandably turn a blind eye to this aspect of Reich's sexual theories. (To its credit, the Sex-Pol movement continued to call for an end to state laws against homosexuality.)
Like Fourier, Reich's view of what people are "really" like was shaped by the particularities of his time. Reich's brief career in the Communist movement coincided with the greatest defeat for the world proletariat in modern history: the triumph of fascism in Germany, then the strongest industrial power in Europe. Reich's analysis of Nazism was his only effort to apply his theories to a contemporary political problem—and the results are revealing.
Reich's response to Hitler's coming to power was the direct cause of his break with both Marxism and Freudianism. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published a few months after Hitler became chancellor in early 1933, was denounced by the official Communist leadership as "counterrevolutionary." The official psychoanalytic movement likewise disavowed this work, and Reich was secretly expelled from the German Psychoanalytic Association in 1933.
Everyone in Germany recognized that the social base of the Nazi movement was the lower middle classes— small tradesmen, farmers, civil servants, white-collar workers. The German industrial proletariat remained loyal to the Social Democracy and, to a lesser extent, the Communist Party right up until and a good while after Hitler was appointed chancellor by the old Prussian aristocrat von Hindenburg.
Reich thus begins his famous The Mass Psychology of Fascism with an attempt at a class analysis. He maintains that children from a petty-bourgeois background are subject to a more authoritarian and sexually repressive upbringing than proletarian children. A typical German petty-bourgeois family—on the farm or running a small shop—was also an economic unit. The father was literally a boss who directed and supervised his children at work. Subjectively, a proletarian father might be as authoritarian and sexually repressive, but he had far less control over his children. He left the home for work while they went to school. In adolescence working-class children escaped into the factory, exchanging the tyranny of the family for the rigors of wage-slavery. Obviously such an analysis, even if valid, produced no useful course of action. The millions of Nazi supporters could hardly be psychoanalyzed to remove the neurotic character structure imposed by their upbringing.
A socialist revolution—if it is to be made at all—has to be made by people as they are shaped by an oppressive class society with all its deforming effects. Rejecting the possibility of progressive social struggle by such people, and positing individual psychic health as the precondition for collective political struggle for liberation, Reich was profoundly fatalistic.
In the critical year of 1923 the German petty-bourgeois masses veered sharply to the left and would have followed an aggressive Communist leadership. At that time fascist influence was marginal. Witness the almost comic-opera debacle of Hitler's "beer hall putsch" in Munich. The failure of the German Communist Party to provide genuine revolutionary leadership during the stormy years of the early 1920s left a strong residue of distrust among both the more conservative workers who supported Social Democracy and the petty-bourgeois masses, who turned to fascism under the catastrophic impact of the Great Depression.
That is not to imply that the German Communist Party in the early 1930s was helpless to prevent Hitler's eventual triumph. While Reich is highly critical of the official Communist leadership in many respects, he has little to say about the insane and suicidal policies of the so-called "third period" as laid down by Stalin. The German Communists not only opposed united-front actions with the Social Democrats to combat the fascist terror squads; they labeled the mass reformist party of the German proletariat as "social fascist" and at times treated the Social Democrats as the main enemy.
In 1934 Reich did retrospectively criticize the Communists' refusal to engage in united actions with the Social Democrats against the fascists, but he treated this as a question of third- or fourth-rate importance. One gets no sense reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism that there were millions of German workers, Social Democratic as well as Communist supporters, who were prepared to resist Hitler by civil war if necessary. On the contrary, Reich is obsessed with the "submissiveness" of the working class no less than of the petty bourgeoisie, with its respect for authority and fear of revolt:
"From (he standpoint of the psychology of the masses, Social Democracy is based on the conservative structures of its followers. As in the case of fascism, the problem here lies not so much in the policies pursued by the party leadership as it does in the psychological basis in the workers." (emphasis in original)
Within months after Reich wrote this, the Austrian working class, overwhelmingly supporters of SocialDemocracy, rose in armed insurrection against the clerical-fascist regime of Dollfuss.
In the course of writing and constantly revising The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich moved further and further from any kind of Marxism. Increasingly, a class analysis gives way to a mass-psychological approach. The terms worker and petty bourgeois are replaced by "the average unpolitical person," the proverbial man-in-the-street:
"Experience teaches that the majority of these 'nonpolitical' people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. How is this to be explained? It is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility."
At every level Reich shifts historic responsibility from political leaderships and social elites to the neurotic character structure of the masses. Paul A. Robinson, who is,generally sympathetic to Reich in his Marxist perio'd, observes that his view of fascism dovetails with that of certain German bourgeois rightists: "Ironically, Reich's mass-psychological analysis of the German problem bore a striking resemblance to the apologies of such German conservatives as Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, who, in their anxiety to excuse the German e"lite (whether cultural, political, or military), were quick to put the blame on the hoi polloi" (The Freudian Left [1969]). In a 1942 preface to The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich accepted fascism as essentially inevitable: "'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life." In fact, Reich's prescription for a supposedly nonrepressive society provided his own version of totalitarian Big Brother: "sexologically well-trained functionaries" to supervise sexual life "in conjunction with a central sexological agency."
Freud and Marx on Work and Love
Paul Robinson, in The Freudian Left, has stated that there was an underlying logic to Reich's break with both Freud and Marx in the mid-1930s. Freud believed that socialized man was beset by basic instinctual conflict; Marx saw civilization as it existed as funda¬mentally riven by class conflict. Reich, says Robinson, tended to regard man as naturally both sociable and productive, and therefore came to view both psychological distress and social conflict as easily and immediately solvable. Robinson concluded, "Freud and Marx may indeed have been fellow-revolutionaries, as Reich had argued in 1929, but they were also realists. Reich, on the other hand, was a romantic, as much in his politics as in his psychology."
While Robinson is probably correct about Reich, his coupling of Marx and Freud as fellow revolutionary realists is misleading. Freud was a historical pessimist; Marx was not. To understand the difference it is necessary to consider Freud's theory of instinctual conflict, or, rather, his two different theories of instinctual conflict.
Freud's original theory was the conflict between the pleasure and the reality principles. A child's striving for the immediate gratification of his needs and wants is blocked by social reality, initially represented by his parents. His desire to monopolize the affection and attention of his parents is frustrated with the birth of a sibling. His desire to defecate whenever he feels like is suppressed through toilet training. To live in society a child is taught to postpone immediate gratification. The socialized human being has learned to pursue by roundabout paths the satisfaction of his needs, especially his sexual needs.
The Marxist response to this Freudian concept is twofold. To a considerable extent we can change social reality to accommodate instinctual gratification. And to the extent there is an ineradicable tension between instinctual gratification and organized social life, why should this be a barrier to psychological well-being? Marxists have never believed that this is or can be made into the best of all possible worlds. But neither do we assume that the price of civilization is universal neurosis.
In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he posited the existence of innate aggression or "the death instinct." The dating of this work is anything but accidental. A mood of profound historical pessimism swept over European bourgeois intellectuals in the wake of the First World War, which shattered their seemingly stable civilization. This was especially pronounced in German-speaking Central Europe which had lost the war. Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written in the same intellectual climate as, for example, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Writing several years later to Albert Einstein, who was a pacifist, Freud maintained that a major cause of war was "a lust for aggression and destruction," that is, "the death instinct."
Freud's "discovery" of a death instinct in man was thus not simply, or even primarily, based on clinical experience with individual therapy but was rather an attempt to explain mass destruction on a political and historical plane. For Marxists, the explanation is class and national conflict ultimately rooted in economic scarcity. We thus do not accept that the human species has an inner drive toward self-destruction. Reich, incidentally, never accepted the death instinct and squarely based his own theories on the original Freudian concept of the pleasure versus reality principles.
Freud's most developed and comprehensive statement of historical pessimism is Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930. Reich maintained this work was a direct response to his own views. Whether or not this is the case, it does contain a polemic against communists, to whom Freud attributes the view that "man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature." In opposition to this he insists "that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man...."Therefore he concludes that even the most radical and far-reaching changes in social institutions cannot alter the human psyche:
"If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there."
However, even if we set aside the concept of innate aggression and "the death instinct," Freud still remains a historical pessimist toward the goals of communism. He was convinced there was a fundamental conflict between the enjoyment of sexual love and the work effort needed to create and sustain civilization. "When a love-relationship is at its height," he wrote, "there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy." By contrast, he maintained:
"... as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems."
What kind of work is Freud here talking about-plowing a field in the broiling sun,operating a machine on an assembly line, typing business letters at a hundred words a minute? Naturally people don't strive after this kind of work as a path to happiness.
The debate between Reich and Freud in the late 1920s over love and work was scholastic in the sense that the vast majority of people have neither the option of a rich, fulfilling sexual life nor of creative, self-expressing work. Most people have to do dull, tiring and often body-destroying labor. It is entirely illegitimate to speculate about communist man on the basis of the few, exceptional, creative individuals—a Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud—in oppressive, class-divided society. At the same time, most people cannot lead a gratifying erotic life. This is prevented not simply by repressive laws, ideologies (e.g., religion) and mores but also by basic economic factors—being physically exhausted after long hours of labor; youth forced to live with their parents long after puberty; the practical burdens of raising children.
For the Communist Future
Marx and Engels did not counterpose human nature to civilization, the individual to society. The individual's capacity for gratification and fulfillment is based upon the development and wealth of society. The oppression and degradation of the individual in class society has its roots in economic scarcity, ultimately in man's lack of sufficient control over nature, including his own nature:
"...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act—"
—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46)
It is this understanding which separates Marxism from the radical advocates of sexual liberation here and now.
Only under communism, when people have access to creative work and a rich erotic life, will it be possible to determine the relation between these two spheres of human activity. Is work always and necessarily a deflection of sexual energy as Freud believed? Or is a satisfying love life in the long run a necessary condition for work capacity as Reich insisted? Let's create a society in which we can find out.
The great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui had little patience for the disputes among the Utopian radicals of his day. He once wrote that the debate between Cabet and Proudhon over the future ideal organization of society is like two men who "stand by a river bank, quarrelling over whether the field on the other side is wheat or rye. Let us cross and see."
Monday, March 27, 2006
Monday, March 20, 2006
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
IMMEDIATE U.S. WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
COMMENTARY
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM IRAQ!!
Break with the Twin Parties of Capitalism—For a Workers Party that fights for a workers government!
This an article of interest from Workers Vanguard the newspaper of the Spartacist Laegue/US
March 19, 2006 marks the 3rd Anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq now is the time to renew our efforts to get out of that quagmire. Enough is Enough! ANYONE who reads this statement knows that the occupation of Iraq is not going well for U.S. imperialism. More than 2,000 Americans have forfeited their lives in Iraq, while over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the war and occupation. Most Americans are now aware that the expressed reasons for the occupation were lies concocted by the Republican administration. As a result there is a mood of defeatism in the air reminiscence of the Vietnam era, especially among Democrats politicians, as a way to hide their complicity in the destruction that rained down on the peoples who inhabit Iraq. The Democrats would have us believe that they were at the tender mercies of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and one Karl Rove. Believe this at your peril.
The bitter truth is that to date the main imperialist executioner of the Iraqi peoples was Democrat Bill Clinton, backed by a United Nations embargo. The starvation blockade, mainly during his eight years in office, killed a million and a half Iraqis. Furthermore, in the lead up to the current war the hundreds of UN monitors of Saddam Hussein's military capabilities assuredly communicated to both Democratic and Republican leaders, that Iraq was incapable of any coherent military action against the U.S. Additionally, the Bush administration created the myth of the link between Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. The press was aware of the reality, as were these selfsame Democrats, who nevertheless voted overwhelmingly for the war.
As a capitalist party, the Democrats are dedicated to the fundamental interests of U.S. imperialism, which launched the Iraq invasion to assert its unchallenged domination over this oil-rich region and the globe. The reformist and liberal left that dominates the antiwar coalitions hangs on to the coattails of the liberal imperialist opposition, searching for more rational ways of maintaining this profoundly irrational system. As advocates of class struggle against the rulers of this society, our standpoint is the need to mobilize the multiracial working class in a fight against the imperialist rulers, both Democratic and Republican. We must take a side for the military defense of Iraq against the U.S. and allied imperialists, at the same time standing in irreconcilable political opposition to the reactionary puppet regime. To that end we must fight for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. This is the burning issue of the times.
Ruling Class War Against U.S. Workers
Ordinary working people are being hammered by draconian cuts in health benefits and the disappearance of pensions. Despite these declines U.S. workers are prone to see themselves not as members of the working class, with interests that are counterposed to the capitalists, but as part of a "middle class" that lies somewhere between abject poverty and unimaginable wealth. The American ruling class, who know there is a working class from whose exploitation they derive their profits, and who seek to increase profits through speed-up, layoffs and wage cuts do not share such illusions. There are a number of historical sources for the political naiveté of the U.S. working class, that is, for its inability to recognize its class identity in opposition to the capitalist class. The primary and day-to-day barrier to the forging of a working-class party is the special oppression of black people as a race-color caste. If the good industrial job has gone, it is to no small degree black workers who are thrown into unemployment and the grinding poverty of the ghetto. If education and health care are going down the drain for most everyone, it's been this way in the ghettos for decades. What Karl Marx said almost 150 years ago is every bit as true today: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."
For Working-Class Power!
Now that it clear that Bush’s regime is incompetent the Democratic wolves are gathering. For decades, it was the norm that the Democratic Party, as the capitalist party that sought the votes of working people, at least pretended to address their concerns, promising a less savage and heartless social contract. This was the legacy of the 1930s New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt, which proposed a set of palliative reforms in an attempt to deflect an upsurge of class struggle. Instead of leading to the formation of a workers party, the titanic labor battles of the time were channeled by most leftist political organizations, notably the American Communist Party and most of the union leaders into support for Roosevelt's Democratic Party. Since that time, it has been primarily through the instrument of the Democratic Party that the trade-union officialdom has chained the workers to the capitalists and their state. Let’s be clear about this. The Democratic Party has the same class interests as the Republicans. The Democrats may still wrap their program differently to appeal to their voters, for example over social issues such as abortion rights. Whereas the Republicans are open in their contempt for labor and blacks, the Democrats continue to posture as "friends of labor," the better to position themselves to contain outbreaks of class struggle. But given the low level of class and social struggle, there is simply no current motivation for the Democrats to offer up the New Deal rhetoric that some of their liberal ideologues demand. Furthermore, ruling-class politicians, Democrats included, will not lightly tamper with the imperial presidency. Nevertheless, increased parliamentary opposition to the Bush administration may well deepen if, for example, the Iraq occupation gets further bogged down or the domestic economy worsens.
Damn It! Any labor movement worth its salt would use the unraveling of the White House to mount a fight back against the massive assault on working people. Why, for example, given the attacks on health benefits and the declining number of those covered by any such insurance, are the unions not fighting for some form of national health insurance? This directly raises the question of labor's leadership. We must understand that the existing leadership of the trade unions is the representative of the capitalist order within the working class. Residing in the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, this labor bureaucracy not only concedes the "right" of the capitalist rulers to a profit but supports their aspiration to dominate their imperialist competitors. This is just as true of Andy Stern's Change to Win Coalition as it is of John Sweeney's AFL-CIO officialdom. Both seek "partnership" with the American capitalists. The labor tops' class collaboration is exemplified by their "America First" protectionism, pitting the U.S. proletariat against its class brothers and sisters overseas, and their role as lieutenants of U.S. imperialism in subverting struggles of working people in the semi-colonial world. The burning need for class struggle is inextricably linked to fighting for the political independence of the proletariat from the capitalists' political parties and governmental agencies. What is required is a new, class-struggle leadership of labor. The crucial task is to break labor from the Democrats and to forge a working-class party that shares no interest with the bosses but rather seeks the overthrow of their system and the establishment of workers rule.
The fight to forge an American revolutionary workers party requires the exposure and denunciation of those who lead the workers onto the path of reform of the murderous and anarchic imperialist order. This includes those leftist organizations whose efforts center on pleading with the Democrats to beat imperialism's guns into the plowshares of jobs and social benefits.
The groundwork for the current attacks on the well-being of all was prepared with a frontal assault on black people. This is graphically highlighted by the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, the deindustrialization of the Northeast and Midwest has been especially devastating in this regard, since unionized industrial jobs were central to the fragile economic base of the segregated black communities. Budget cuts slashed social welfare programs, capped by Clinton's 1996 "reform" all but eliminating welfare, and hit particularly hard at black workers in public services. In short, anything that could be characterized as addressing the needs of the black population became a target. The loss of jobs was accompanied by skyrocketing incarceration of young black (and Latino) men, largely under the banner of the "war on drugs." The intensification of state repression included a speedup on death row, campaigns for draconian mandatory sentencing and the construction of myriads of prisons.
Black oppression, with its profound and pervasive ideological effects, is fundamental to the American capitalist order. Obscuring the class divide, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist masters with the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color. A workers revolutionary party simply cannot be forged in the U.S. without linking the fight for black freedom to the fight against all exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to recruit those who recognize the depravity of U.S. imperialism to become fighters for the forging of a multiracial working-class party to fight for a workers government linked to other workers governments internationally. Forward!!
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM IRAQ!!
Break with the Twin Parties of Capitalism—For a Workers Party that fights for a workers government!
This an article of interest from Workers Vanguard the newspaper of the Spartacist Laegue/US
March 19, 2006 marks the 3rd Anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq now is the time to renew our efforts to get out of that quagmire. Enough is Enough! ANYONE who reads this statement knows that the occupation of Iraq is not going well for U.S. imperialism. More than 2,000 Americans have forfeited their lives in Iraq, while over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the war and occupation. Most Americans are now aware that the expressed reasons for the occupation were lies concocted by the Republican administration. As a result there is a mood of defeatism in the air reminiscence of the Vietnam era, especially among Democrats politicians, as a way to hide their complicity in the destruction that rained down on the peoples who inhabit Iraq. The Democrats would have us believe that they were at the tender mercies of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and one Karl Rove. Believe this at your peril.
The bitter truth is that to date the main imperialist executioner of the Iraqi peoples was Democrat Bill Clinton, backed by a United Nations embargo. The starvation blockade, mainly during his eight years in office, killed a million and a half Iraqis. Furthermore, in the lead up to the current war the hundreds of UN monitors of Saddam Hussein's military capabilities assuredly communicated to both Democratic and Republican leaders, that Iraq was incapable of any coherent military action against the U.S. Additionally, the Bush administration created the myth of the link between Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. The press was aware of the reality, as were these selfsame Democrats, who nevertheless voted overwhelmingly for the war.
As a capitalist party, the Democrats are dedicated to the fundamental interests of U.S. imperialism, which launched the Iraq invasion to assert its unchallenged domination over this oil-rich region and the globe. The reformist and liberal left that dominates the antiwar coalitions hangs on to the coattails of the liberal imperialist opposition, searching for more rational ways of maintaining this profoundly irrational system. As advocates of class struggle against the rulers of this society, our standpoint is the need to mobilize the multiracial working class in a fight against the imperialist rulers, both Democratic and Republican. We must take a side for the military defense of Iraq against the U.S. and allied imperialists, at the same time standing in irreconcilable political opposition to the reactionary puppet regime. To that end we must fight for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. This is the burning issue of the times.
Ruling Class War Against U.S. Workers
Ordinary working people are being hammered by draconian cuts in health benefits and the disappearance of pensions. Despite these declines U.S. workers are prone to see themselves not as members of the working class, with interests that are counterposed to the capitalists, but as part of a "middle class" that lies somewhere between abject poverty and unimaginable wealth. The American ruling class, who know there is a working class from whose exploitation they derive their profits, and who seek to increase profits through speed-up, layoffs and wage cuts do not share such illusions. There are a number of historical sources for the political naiveté of the U.S. working class, that is, for its inability to recognize its class identity in opposition to the capitalist class. The primary and day-to-day barrier to the forging of a working-class party is the special oppression of black people as a race-color caste. If the good industrial job has gone, it is to no small degree black workers who are thrown into unemployment and the grinding poverty of the ghetto. If education and health care are going down the drain for most everyone, it's been this way in the ghettos for decades. What Karl Marx said almost 150 years ago is every bit as true today: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."
For Working-Class Power!
Now that it clear that Bush’s regime is incompetent the Democratic wolves are gathering. For decades, it was the norm that the Democratic Party, as the capitalist party that sought the votes of working people, at least pretended to address their concerns, promising a less savage and heartless social contract. This was the legacy of the 1930s New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt, which proposed a set of palliative reforms in an attempt to deflect an upsurge of class struggle. Instead of leading to the formation of a workers party, the titanic labor battles of the time were channeled by most leftist political organizations, notably the American Communist Party and most of the union leaders into support for Roosevelt's Democratic Party. Since that time, it has been primarily through the instrument of the Democratic Party that the trade-union officialdom has chained the workers to the capitalists and their state. Let’s be clear about this. The Democratic Party has the same class interests as the Republicans. The Democrats may still wrap their program differently to appeal to their voters, for example over social issues such as abortion rights. Whereas the Republicans are open in their contempt for labor and blacks, the Democrats continue to posture as "friends of labor," the better to position themselves to contain outbreaks of class struggle. But given the low level of class and social struggle, there is simply no current motivation for the Democrats to offer up the New Deal rhetoric that some of their liberal ideologues demand. Furthermore, ruling-class politicians, Democrats included, will not lightly tamper with the imperial presidency. Nevertheless, increased parliamentary opposition to the Bush administration may well deepen if, for example, the Iraq occupation gets further bogged down or the domestic economy worsens.
Damn It! Any labor movement worth its salt would use the unraveling of the White House to mount a fight back against the massive assault on working people. Why, for example, given the attacks on health benefits and the declining number of those covered by any such insurance, are the unions not fighting for some form of national health insurance? This directly raises the question of labor's leadership. We must understand that the existing leadership of the trade unions is the representative of the capitalist order within the working class. Residing in the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, this labor bureaucracy not only concedes the "right" of the capitalist rulers to a profit but supports their aspiration to dominate their imperialist competitors. This is just as true of Andy Stern's Change to Win Coalition as it is of John Sweeney's AFL-CIO officialdom. Both seek "partnership" with the American capitalists. The labor tops' class collaboration is exemplified by their "America First" protectionism, pitting the U.S. proletariat against its class brothers and sisters overseas, and their role as lieutenants of U.S. imperialism in subverting struggles of working people in the semi-colonial world. The burning need for class struggle is inextricably linked to fighting for the political independence of the proletariat from the capitalists' political parties and governmental agencies. What is required is a new, class-struggle leadership of labor. The crucial task is to break labor from the Democrats and to forge a working-class party that shares no interest with the bosses but rather seeks the overthrow of their system and the establishment of workers rule.
The fight to forge an American revolutionary workers party requires the exposure and denunciation of those who lead the workers onto the path of reform of the murderous and anarchic imperialist order. This includes those leftist organizations whose efforts center on pleading with the Democrats to beat imperialism's guns into the plowshares of jobs and social benefits.
The groundwork for the current attacks on the well-being of all was prepared with a frontal assault on black people. This is graphically highlighted by the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, the deindustrialization of the Northeast and Midwest has been especially devastating in this regard, since unionized industrial jobs were central to the fragile economic base of the segregated black communities. Budget cuts slashed social welfare programs, capped by Clinton's 1996 "reform" all but eliminating welfare, and hit particularly hard at black workers in public services. In short, anything that could be characterized as addressing the needs of the black population became a target. The loss of jobs was accompanied by skyrocketing incarceration of young black (and Latino) men, largely under the banner of the "war on drugs." The intensification of state repression included a speedup on death row, campaigns for draconian mandatory sentencing and the construction of myriads of prisons.
Black oppression, with its profound and pervasive ideological effects, is fundamental to the American capitalist order. Obscuring the class divide, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist masters with the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color. A workers revolutionary party simply cannot be forged in the U.S. without linking the fight for black freedom to the fight against all exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to recruit those who recognize the depravity of U.S. imperialism to become fighters for the forging of a multiracial working-class party to fight for a workers government linked to other workers governments internationally. Forward!!
Sunday, March 05, 2006
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
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