Markin comment:
As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.
Workers Vanguard No. 930
13 February 2009
Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom
(Young Spartacus pages)
(Black History and the Class Struggle)
Correction Appended
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an edited version of a public class given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour on 16 August 2008 for the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club.
The subject of this educational, the black question and revolutionary integrationism, has a special significance for me personally. The program and especially the strategy of revolutionary integrationism was the single most important reason why I joined the Spartacist tendency (it was not yet a league) in 1965 at the age of 21. Like most young leftist radicals at the time, I started out as a liberal idealist. I was impelled ever further to the left by the contradiction between my liberal democratic ideals and the actual policies and practices of the U.S. government both at home and abroad, under both the Republicans and Democrats.
When I graduated high school in 1961, the American South was still a white racist police state in which blacks were deprived of all basic democratic rights and freedoms. In the North, blacks were concentrated in the impoverished inner-city ghettos. Internationally, the U.S. government was supporting right-wing dictatorships, for example, in Latin America; reactionary feudalist regimes like the Saudi Arabian monarchy; and European colonial rule, for example, the French in Algeria.
I was a member of the political generation called the New Left. Unlike the “Old Left,” the New Left viewed the basic conflict in the world, including in the U.S., not as one between the working class and the capitalist class but rather between the oppressed non-white masses—peasants, workers, the urban poor—and the white American ruling class. This worldview was conditioned by the major events and struggles in the world at the time, including in the U.S. American society was being disrupted and polarized by the civil rights movement, first in the South and then extending into the North. The Cuban Revolution had occurred a few years earlier. Algeria had just won its independence from the French after a prolonged and especially bloody national liberation struggle. And in South Vietnam, a Communist-led, peasant-based insurgency was threatening to overthrow the U.S. puppet regime.
During the early-mid 1960s, there was a widespread leftist radicalization among black youth, not only college students but also young black workers and lumpenized ghetto youth. In 1963 I was, for a few months, a member of the youth group of the Progressive Labor Movement, a recently formed Maoist-Stalinist organization. On one occasion I was selling its journal, the Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, and I approached a couple of young black guys. They waved me off, saying: “Man, we know all that. When the shooting starts, call us, we’ll be there.” In one sense they were just being smart alecks. But they were also in their own way expressing hostility to the racist capitalist-imperialist system as they understood it. At the time most blacks, especially young blacks, opposed the war in Vietnam while most whites, including white workers, supported it out of anti-Communism. The prevailing attitude toward the war among black youth was expressed a few years later by the boxing champion Muhammad Ali when he refused to be inducted into the armed forces. He said: “No Viet Cong”—that’s what the South Vietnamese Communists were usually called—“ever called me n----r.”
Insofar as New Left radicals had a strategy for establishing socialism on a world scale, it was by increasingly weakening and isolating American imperialism through mainly peasant-based revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This idea was expressed a few years later by Che Guevara in the slogan, “Two, three, many Vietnams.” Unlike most New Leftists, I didn’t see how it was possible to build socialist societies in Latin America, India and East Asia as long as the U.S. remained a capitalist-imperialist state. If the American ruling class felt its existence was seriously threatened by Communist-led revolutions and states in those regions, it could resort to nuclear weapons. At the same time, I couldn’t see how a socialist revolution was possible in the U.S. in a historically meaningful time period. The large majority of the working class was white. And most white workers had racial prejudices to some extent; they supported U.S. imperialist militarism out of anti-Communist sentiment and, in some cases, out of racist disdain for the peoples of what was later called the Third World.
I wrestled with this problem for a year or so. And the concept of revolutionary integrationism as put forward by the Spartacist tendency provided a solution, a key to unlocking the potential for a proletarian socialist revolution in the bastion of world imperialism. Black workers, with their generally higher level of political consciousness and greater opposition to U.S. imperialist militarism, could act as a lever to move the mass of more backward white workers toward a class-struggle program and outlook.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
As Richard S. Fraser stated in his 1955 document, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question”:
“One of the main factors which prevents the development of class consciousness in the American working class is race prejudice. Specifically: white chauvinism….
“Segregation is the foundation of prejudice. The Negroes, in their struggle against segregation are constantly clearing the ground for the emergence of class consciousness in the working class as a whole.
“It is the historical role of the Negro struggle to break down race prejudice in the working class and thereby to lead white workers toward class consciousness.
“If the Negro struggle should change its course and strike out for racial independence, it would deprive the working class of its most class conscious, and advanced segments.”
—reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)
This was restated by the early Spartacist League in our basic document on the black question, “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”: “Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section [of the American working class], revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution” (Spartacist supplement, May-June 1967). Concretely, we put forward as a transitional demand directed at civil rights activists the formation of a South-wide Freedom Labor Party. Such a party would combine the struggle for black democratic rights and social equality with the struggle of labor against capital, for example, by promoting the unionization of the multiracial working class in the South.
Unlike in the 1960s, today there does not exist a mass black movement and there is relatively little working-class struggle of any kind. Nonetheless, black workers are generally politically to the left of the mass of white workers, for example, in their attitude toward U.S. military adventures abroad. Consider the current issue of Workers Vanguard with the headline “U.S. Imperialists Out of Afghanistan, Iraq!” (No. 918, 1 August 2008). In selling this to a group of mainly black workers, you would get a more positive or, at least, less negative response than in selling it to a group of predominantly white workers.
We describe blacks in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste integrated into the American capitalist economy while segregated at the bottom of American society. However, the idea that blacks are an embryonic nation was long discussed and debated within the American Trotskyist movement. Trotsky himself tentatively advanced this position in the 1930s. What is a nation and how is it different from a caste? What programmatic conclusions follow from recognizing that an oppressed people are a nation? These are the central themes addressed in Fraser’s 1955 document. Although he does not describe American blacks as a caste, that is the substance of his analysis.
A nation is a group of people who usually share a distinct language, culture and also territory. But the most basic character of a nation is the capacity to form a separate political economy, an independent system for the production and circulation of commodities. A nation can, under certain historical circumstances, become an independent bourgeois state with its own propertied and exploited classes. Our basic program with respect to an oppressed nation is the right of self-determination, that is, the right to secede from the state of the oppressor nation and form its own nation-state.
A caste is a group of people—who may be demarcated by race, ethnicity or some other factor—who occupy a certain position within the hierarchical structure of a given social and economic order. The concept of caste derives from Hindu society in India. All Hindus are born into castes that determine their future place in the social hierarchy. At the bottom of Hindu society are the so-called “untouchables.”
How many of you know who C. Vann Woodward is? He was a well-known white left-liberal historian of the American South. In his memoirs, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986), he recounted:
“A new and extraordinary foreign perspective came my way during the Second World War while I was on duty as a naval officer in India. With a letter of introduction in hand, I sought out Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, acclaimed leader of India’s millions of untouchables and later a figure of first importance in Indian constitutional history. He received me cordially at his home in New Delhi and plied me with questions about the black ‘untouchables’ of America and how their plight compared with that of his own people.”
As Fraser emphasized, blacks have always played an integral and important role in the American capitalist economy since its beginning as a British colony in the 17th century. Racial oppression has always been directly bound up with class exploitation—first for slaves, then for tenant farmers and then for a component of the industrial working class. Historically, the basic thrust of mass black struggle has been to remove the obstacles separating black people from the rest of American society in order to achieve social and economic as well as political equality with the white majority. But that equality can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a planned socialist economy under a multiracial workers government. This is the crux of revolutionary integrationism.
Black Oppression: Bedrock of American Capitalism
Blacks were originally brought to this country from Africa as slaves to work the agricultural plantations of the Southern colonies of British North America. They became the main labor force producing the country’s major agricultural exports—tobacco, sugar and later cotton—during the colonial era and under the American bourgeois state until the Civil War in the 1860s. Thus black chattel slavery in the South was a central factor in the development of mercantile, financial and later industrial capitalism in the North.
However, eventually the conflicts of interest between the Northern capitalists and Southern plantation owners, mainly over control of the national government, led to the Civil War, which, when the North won, resulted in the abolition of slavery. Here I want to emphasize that blacks played an important role in their own emancipation. During the war, hundreds of thousands of blacks fled from the plantations and took refuge behind the lines of the Union Army. At first they served the Union forces mainly as laborers. But by the war’s end, nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors served in the Union Army and Navy.
In the decade following the war, the Northern ruling class carried out a policy called Radical Reconstruction in the South under the occupation of the Union Army. Black men (all women were disenfranchised at the time) were given the right to vote and played an active role in political life. There were black judges, state legislators, even U.S. Congressmen. However the Northern capitalists, given their basic economic interests, did not expropriate the land of the former slave plantations and distribute it to the black freedmen. Most blacks therefore became tenant farmers on land owned by whites and were exploited through sharecropping arrangements, debt peonage and other mechanisms. This formed the economic basis for the restoration of white-supremacist political rule in the South when the Union Army was withdrawn in 1877 to cement the renewed alliance between the Northern and Southern propertied classes. Blacks were subjected to legally enforced racial segregation and stripped of all democratic rights. They were held down by savage state repression reinforced by the racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan.
Prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the large majority of blacks lived in the rural South. During the war there was a substantial migration of blacks to the Northern cities where many found employment in major industries like steel and meatpacking. Racial prejudice among white workers therefore became a major obstacle to working-class organization and struggle even at the most basic trade-union level.
At the same time, the black question was posed for the early American Communist Party. The impetus for this came from Communist leaders in Russia like Lenin and Trotsky. The founding leaders of the American Communist Party like James P. Cannon had come out of the left wing of the Socialist Party and/or the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. The position of these tendencies on the black question can be characterized as color-blind workerism. This was clearly expressed by prominent Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.”
The position of the Bolsheviks toward the many oppressed nationalities in tsarist Russia was very different. In order to combat and partly overcome the national divisions within the working class in the Russian empire, the Bolsheviks actively championed the rights and interests of the oppressed non-Russian peoples. And Communist leaders like Lenin and Trotsky applied similar principles to blacks in the U.S. They recognized and insisted that American Communists must actively fight against the oppression of black people in all its aspects. Not to do so would passively reinforce racial prejudices among white workers. And if the Communists did not fight against racial oppression, the mass of blacks would support liberal bourgeois parties that claimed to stand for their rights and interests.
The Revolutionary Tendency and the Civil Rights Movement
James P. Cannon, in an essay on the black question and the early Communist Party written in the late 1950s, emphasized:
“After November, 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes —began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community….
“The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement.”
—“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)
Not coincidentally, when Cannon wrote this essay the Southern civil rights movement, struggling against legalized segregation and for democratic rights, was agitating and polarizing American society and dominating the country’s political life. As it developed, this movement offered a short-lived opportunity for even a small revolutionary party to make a historic breakthrough. By the early 1960s, a large and growing current of young black militants was breaking to the left of the liberal reformism and pacifism of Martin Luther King but had not yet latched on to separatist ideology. These young militants were experienced in struggle and were leading and organizing a mass movement that included large numbers of black workers. And many of them could have been won to a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party on the programmatic basis of revolutionary integrationism.
That was the perspective that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT, the forerunner of the SL) fought for at the time within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the historic party of American Trotskyism. However, by then the SWP had moved sharply to the right. Its leadership willfully abstained from the civil rights movement while cheerleading from afar for both the liberal reformism of King and the reactionary separatism of the Nation of Islam. Against this, a 1963 RT document stated:
“The rising upsurge and militancy of the black revolt and the contradictory and confused, groping nature of what is now the left wing in the movement provide the revolutionary vanguard with fertile soil and many opportunities to plant the seeds of revolutionary socialism. Our task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in the broad left wing of the movement, while building that left wing…. We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.”
—“The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised)
Over the next year or so the leaders and members of the RT were expelled from the SWP. The early Spartacist tendency then actively intervened in the civil rights struggles in the South as well as the North, raising demands such as for a Freedom Labor Party, for a Southern unionization drive backed by organized labor nationwide, and for armed self-defense against the Klan and other racist terrorists. This important chapter in our history is well documented in the early issues of Spartacist. Our forces, however, were very small and predominantly white. And the main body of young black activists was rapidly moving toward separatism.
To understand why that happened it’s necessary to consider the civil rights movement when it came North in the mid 1960s and how it differed from the Southern movement. The core demands of the Southern movement were for an end to legalized segregation and for democratic rights, centrally the right to vote. By the early 1960s, the dominant sections of the American ruling class were moving to bring the legal and political structure of the South into line with the bourgeois-democratic norms in the rest of the country. An important underlying factor was the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. Legally enforced white supremacy and racial segregation in the South had become an increasing embarrassment for American imperialism internationally, especially in the countries of Asia and Africa, most of them former European colonies.
The Civil Rights Movement in the North
As it happened, in 1956 at the age of 12 I spent three or four months in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I attended a legally segregated, white junior high school. At the time federal courts had ordered school integration in Arkansas and other Southern states. And many of my classmates, knowing I was from New York, asked me what it was like to go to school with blacks. I said I didn’t know because there were no blacks in the school I went to in Queens.
The North was just as segregated as the South, at a personal level maybe more so. But the main basis of that segregation was the atomized workings of the capitalist economy. Blacks were, proverbially, the last hired and the first fired. Reinforcing these basic economic factors were certain laws, which, though they did not explicitly refer to race, in fact enforced segregation. Most blacks who lived in the ghettos did so out of economic necessity. However, their children then went to segregated public schools because the law mandated that students attend schools in their neighborhoods. In addition, there was white racial prejudice that could and did express itself in mass violence. For example, when in 1966 Martin Luther King led a march for “open housing” into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero, it was met and driven back by a racist mob.
A major demand of the civil rights movement in the North was for “open housing.” But even if realtors could have been compelled by law to sell homes in better-off white suburbs to black families from Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, how many black families could have afforded such homes? The everyday conditions of life facing the mass of blacks—widespread and chronic unemployment, rat-infested slums, rampant police brutality—could not be eradicated by Congress passing another Civil Rights Act. What working-class and poor blacks hoped to achieve through the civil rights movement in the North would have required a radical restructuring of the American economy and a massive redistribution of wealth. And that the American ruling class was not going to do.
Consequently, civil rights agitation generated a rapidly rising level of frustrated expectations, especially among lumpenized black youth, which exploded in what came to be called the ghetto rebellions in the mid-late 1960s in major Northern cities. Black youth took to the streets, battled the cops, looted and trashed stores. We wrote at time:
“As the struggle against the police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expended and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give these outbursts political direction.”
—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom”
In line with this policy, at the time of the 1967 ghetto rebellion in Newark, New Jersey, we put out a very short agitational leaflet written by Jim Robertson, titled “Organize Black Power!” Incidentally, during the first years of our existence our name, Spartacist League, was obscure to most people, especially black ghetto youth. However, in 1967 Hollywood re-issued the film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, about the great slave rebellion in the ancient Roman Empire. So when we distributed the leaflet, blacks would say, “You’re the Kirk Douglas group, you guys kicked the butts of the Romans.” And we’d reply, “Yeah, that’s our historical tradition.”
While the ghetto revolts were suppressed with murderous savagery by the police and National Guard, the ruling class also sought to dampen black unrest by offering certain reforms. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” that is, federally funded programs that were supposed to alleviate the horrific conditions of ghetto life. Busing black children into white neighborhoods was supposed to increase the level of school integration. Affirmative action for blacks in college admissions was supposed to increase racial integration in higher education.
Not only were these policies totally inadequate to improve the conditions of the black masses, but almost all were subsequently reversed by racist reaction. Busing, for example, was effectively killed in Boston in 1974 when white racist mobs attacked black school children. We actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor-black defense guards to protect the black children in South Boston. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing, for quality, integrated education for all, and for the implementation of busing and its extension to the suburbs as a minimal step toward black equality. However, the local Boston labor bureaucracy passively tolerated racist mob violence against black school children. (See “As Racist Mobs Rampaged, Liberals and Reformists Knifed Busing,” WV No. 921, 26 September 2008.)
The Bankruptcy of Black Nationalism
But let’s shift back in time to the mid-late 1960s and talk about what was called black nationalism. I say what was called black nationalism because it really wasn’t. The central demand of Basque nationalists in Spain is for an independent Basque state. Likewise for Québécois nationalists in Canada. While some of the self-styled black nationalist groups included in their formal programs the call for an independent black state, that was not what they were really about. No one took that seriously. I and other comrades had many arguments with black nationalists at the time and they never focused on carving out an independent state from the existing U.S. These groups are more accurately described as pseudo-nationalists or separatists. What differentiated them from liberal black groups and from racially integrated leftist groups was that they were exclusively black and advocated exclusively black institutions—schools, government agencies, cops—within the framework of the existing American capitalist state.
Despite their radical and often white-baiting rhetoric, most of these black nationalists quickly re-entered the fold of mainstream bourgeois politics. They offered themselves to the white ruling class as overseers of the ghetto masses. They became administrators of the various poverty programs and members of the entourage of local black Democratic politicos. For example, well-known black nationalist and white-baiting poet Amiri Baraka became an aide to the black Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. In that role he tried to break a strike by the racially integrated teachers union that, moreover, had a black leadership. The Black Panthers described such political operators as “pork-chop nationalists” and dashiki Democrats (dashikis being a garment worn by men in Africa).
So what about the Black Panther Party, which described itself as “revolutionary nationalist” and “Marxist-Leninist”? Formed in 1966, the Panthers consisted mainly of lumpenized ghetto youth led by a small number of young black leftist intellectuals. In fact, they had a doctrine of lumpen vanguardism. Initially the Panthers attempted to build a black paramilitary organization in the ghettos that would coexist with and restrain the police—sort of an armed version of “community control of the police.” And for a short time they actually got away with it, especially here in Oakland, their original and strongest base.
But by 1968 the FBI and local police had launched an all-out campaign to destroy the Panthers. Thirty-eight Panther militants were killed outright and top leaders were imprisoned on capital charges. A few managed to flee the country and gain refuge, for example, in Algeria. The Panther leadership responded to the murderous repression by turning sharply to the right in an effort to gain liberal support for their legal defense. In 1970-71, the organization was effectively destroyed by a violent factional struggle.
As we later wrote about black nationalism in general, in all its diverse political expressions: “At bottom black nationalism is an expression of hopelessness stemming from defeat, reflecting despair over prospects for integrated class struggle and labor taking up the fight for black rights. The chief responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which has time and again refused to mobilize the social power of the multiracial working class in struggle against racist discrimination and terror” (Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S., November 2000).
At the same time, the failure of the labor bureaucracy to improve the condition of the working class in general and to expand the scope of union power in the labor force as a whole conditioned what was called the “white backlash” in the mid-late 1960s. This was a widespread racist reaction against the black movement and minimal reforms like busing and affirmative action. Right-wing demagogues appealed with some success to the economic discontents and insecurities of white working-class as well as petty-bourgeois families. They said that the gains made by blacks, which they enormously exaggerated, had come at the expense of white working people, that their tax money was going to support black welfare mothers and “poverty hustlers,” that their children did not gain admission to the better colleges because colleges were giving preference to blacks.
The “white backlash” deepened the racial divisions and antagonisms within the working class, including in its unionized sector. And this helped set the stage for the effective union-busting offensive launched by the ruling class beginning in the late 1970s. The basic point is that labor and blacks go forward together or they will be driven back separately.
So what about today? First, it’s important to recognize that as a result of large-scale immigration from Latin America in recent decades the ethnic composition of the U.S. working class has significantly changed since the 1960s and ’70s. We are a small revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. As such we don’t have the capacity to lead the kind of labor, anti-racist and immigrant rights struggles that will raise the political consciousness of large numbers of workers whether white, black, Latino, native-born or immigrant. What we can and must do is develop a multiracial and multiethnic cadre that can lead such struggles in the future. And here I want to emphasize the importance of a multiethnic cadre. Racial and ethnic divisions cannot be fully and permanently overcome among the broad mass of workers under capitalism. At times of direct struggle, such as during strikes against the employers and government, these divisions are in one sense overcome. But then they subsequently reappear and are exploited and aggravated by bourgeois politicians. Look at the recent Democratic primaries where the overwhelming majority of blacks voted for Obama and most Latinos for Hillary Clinton.
Black communists will generally speak with greater political authority to black workers, and Latino communists to Latino workers. We need all kinds in the party. The unity of the working class in an all-sided and durable sense can exist only at the highest level of political consciousness organizationally embodied in a revolutionary vanguard party. And that’s what we seek to create.
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Letter
March 3, 2009
Dear Young Spartacus,
I noticed an error in Seymour’s talk on the black question (WV930) [“Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom” (13 February)], when he says that “King led a march for ‘open housing’ into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero.” In fact King cancelled the march to appease [Chicago mayor] Daley; it was others like SNCC and CORE who went ahead with it.
Is a correction already in the works? A useful book on this question is Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago by Anderson and Pickering.
What Seymour said is actually a widely held myth, and correcting it would be an opportunity to illustrate how the Democratic Party smothers the fight for black freedom.
Keith
(From WV No. 945, 23 October 2009.)
Friday, February 13, 2009
Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget
Commentary
Today the gloves can come off. This is the first ‘wake-up’ call in the fight against President Obama’s slippery road to escalation in Afghanistan. Get ready. I also note that some leftist intellectuals share my concern. They have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. While I might disagree with the thrust of the letter to the President as a tactic I stand in solidarity with their call for withdrawal. Below is a proposal for a more concrete form of opposition.
Down With The Afghan War- Down With The Afghan War Budget- For Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan (and Central Asia)! Hands Off Pakistan!
Praise be. Finally we can get down to brass tacks on this Obamian imperial presidency. As regular readers of this space will know last fall in the American presidential elections, as befits an anti-capitalist labor militant, I called for a NO vote on Obama, McCain, Nader (“Independent”?) and McKinney (Green) as an expression of opposition to the pro-capitalist parties, large and small. I at the same time, nevertheless, recognized that the immense popularity of the Obama victory would give him, if not from me, then from the masses of youth, blacks, Hispanics and old time ‘soft’ lefties from my “Generation of ‘68”, a protracted “honeymoon”. That possibility seemed all the more likely as the wreckage of the truly obscene and incompetent Bush administration, an administration that even by loose bourgeois political standards was a disaster, came to light after he left office. But now, as if to mock the wisdom of the political gods, even that supposedly protracted “honeymoon” is to go by the boards, at least for thoughtful political types.
Why is that honeymoon over? Well the money season, especially the military money season, is upon us as the political calendar churns on. That means, in practical terms, also money for Obama’s Afghan war funding. Politics is about careful selection of issues and timing. That little nugget of political wisdom is true whether you, like Obama, have been empowered by a 600 million dollar plus electoral campaign or, like me, are out in the “wilderness” as a left-wing political propagandist with a budget of six dollars. Obviously, thoughtful militants, and I like to include myself in that category, have been frustrated over the past few weeks looking for a cutting edge issue in order to gain some political leverage.
After the aura of the Inauguration festivities dissipated what did we have for an edge? The muffed Obama Cabinet selections? That was a yawner, except for ‘insiders’ and truly desperate political junkies. The fight around the bailout of capitalism by the ‘second-handout’ governmental actions generically called the “stimulus package”? Frankly, there is no leverage in those issues for leftists today. Sure we can furtively rail about the “bum of the month” club now known as Wall Street but that is tempered as an issue by some of the ‘goodies’ in the package that might actually help working people. Times are desperate enough that we cannot get a reasonable hearing on that one, at present. But now, with military appropriations coming up over the next few weeks, we have a banner to fight under.
And, moreover, we apparently are not alone here, at least among those few left-wing parliamentary Democrats that fought a losing battle against the various Bush Administration Iraq/Afghan war appropriations. Very early on in the fight against the Iraq war build-up I noted that, on the parliamentary playing field, the only serious question is YES or NO on war appropriations in the fight against any particular imperialist war move. That is as true today as it was then. I do not know where ex-Democratic presidential contender Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, one of the few consistent “anti-war horses” (excuse the turn of phrase) on Iraq/Afghan war appropriations stands on opposition to Afghan war appropriations now but fellow “anti-war horse” Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern has, according to a recent article from the Associated Press (“Antiwar lawmakers wary of adding troops in Afghanistan” by Anna Flaherty, dated February 9, 2009), some ‘jitters’ about where things are heading there.
Well, Congressman McGovern here is the ‘skinny’. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!
Note: In my introduction to this entry I noted that some leftist intellectuals shared my concern about Obama’s slippery slope in Afghanistan. I also noted that they have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. I placed myself in solidarity with that call, if not the tactic of the letter to the President. What I noticed in reading the list of signatories is that outside a few old hardened “soft lefties”, like the very fine ‘magical realism’ writer Russell Banks and academic radical gadfly Howard Zinn, there were not the usual heavyweight academic lefties that usually sign these things. While a fair number of such types, like Norman Mailer, have passed away recently and some of the names that I did not recognize are just beginning their letter signing careers I have a funny feeling that in the academy Obama is being given that protracted “honeymoon” I mentioned above. This is not a good sign.
Today the gloves can come off. This is the first ‘wake-up’ call in the fight against President Obama’s slippery road to escalation in Afghanistan. Get ready. I also note that some leftist intellectuals share my concern. They have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. While I might disagree with the thrust of the letter to the President as a tactic I stand in solidarity with their call for withdrawal. Below is a proposal for a more concrete form of opposition.
Down With The Afghan War- Down With The Afghan War Budget- For Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan (and Central Asia)! Hands Off Pakistan!
Praise be. Finally we can get down to brass tacks on this Obamian imperial presidency. As regular readers of this space will know last fall in the American presidential elections, as befits an anti-capitalist labor militant, I called for a NO vote on Obama, McCain, Nader (“Independent”?) and McKinney (Green) as an expression of opposition to the pro-capitalist parties, large and small. I at the same time, nevertheless, recognized that the immense popularity of the Obama victory would give him, if not from me, then from the masses of youth, blacks, Hispanics and old time ‘soft’ lefties from my “Generation of ‘68”, a protracted “honeymoon”. That possibility seemed all the more likely as the wreckage of the truly obscene and incompetent Bush administration, an administration that even by loose bourgeois political standards was a disaster, came to light after he left office. But now, as if to mock the wisdom of the political gods, even that supposedly protracted “honeymoon” is to go by the boards, at least for thoughtful political types.
Why is that honeymoon over? Well the money season, especially the military money season, is upon us as the political calendar churns on. That means, in practical terms, also money for Obama’s Afghan war funding. Politics is about careful selection of issues and timing. That little nugget of political wisdom is true whether you, like Obama, have been empowered by a 600 million dollar plus electoral campaign or, like me, are out in the “wilderness” as a left-wing political propagandist with a budget of six dollars. Obviously, thoughtful militants, and I like to include myself in that category, have been frustrated over the past few weeks looking for a cutting edge issue in order to gain some political leverage.
After the aura of the Inauguration festivities dissipated what did we have for an edge? The muffed Obama Cabinet selections? That was a yawner, except for ‘insiders’ and truly desperate political junkies. The fight around the bailout of capitalism by the ‘second-handout’ governmental actions generically called the “stimulus package”? Frankly, there is no leverage in those issues for leftists today. Sure we can furtively rail about the “bum of the month” club now known as Wall Street but that is tempered as an issue by some of the ‘goodies’ in the package that might actually help working people. Times are desperate enough that we cannot get a reasonable hearing on that one, at present. But now, with military appropriations coming up over the next few weeks, we have a banner to fight under.
And, moreover, we apparently are not alone here, at least among those few left-wing parliamentary Democrats that fought a losing battle against the various Bush Administration Iraq/Afghan war appropriations. Very early on in the fight against the Iraq war build-up I noted that, on the parliamentary playing field, the only serious question is YES or NO on war appropriations in the fight against any particular imperialist war move. That is as true today as it was then. I do not know where ex-Democratic presidential contender Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, one of the few consistent “anti-war horses” (excuse the turn of phrase) on Iraq/Afghan war appropriations stands on opposition to Afghan war appropriations now but fellow “anti-war horse” Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern has, according to a recent article from the Associated Press (“Antiwar lawmakers wary of adding troops in Afghanistan” by Anna Flaherty, dated February 9, 2009), some ‘jitters’ about where things are heading there.
Well, Congressman McGovern here is the ‘skinny’. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!
Note: In my introduction to this entry I noted that some leftist intellectuals shared my concern about Obama’s slippery slope in Afghanistan. I also noted that they have already taken out a half page ad in the “New York Review of Books” entitled “Not This Time” (dated February 26, 2009, page 35) calling for, among other things, withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. I placed myself in solidarity with that call, if not the tactic of the letter to the President. What I noticed in reading the list of signatories is that outside a few old hardened “soft lefties”, like the very fine ‘magical realism’ writer Russell Banks and academic radical gadfly Howard Zinn, there were not the usual heavyweight academic lefties that usually sign these things. While a fair number of such types, like Norman Mailer, have passed away recently and some of the names that I did not recognize are just beginning their letter signing careers I have a funny feeling that in the academy Obama is being given that protracted “honeymoon” I mentioned above. This is not a good sign.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Afghanistan Redux -In Honor Of The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-1989
Commentary
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the historically decisive (for the fate of the Soviet Union itself as it turned out) and catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union is no more, to the great detriment of the international working class in its efforts to fight for socialism. Nevertheless this is an appropriate time and an appropriate space to honor the Soviet soldiers who fell doing their internationalist duty in Afghanistan. All Honor To The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-89!
I once again pose the question here (as I do directly below in the reposted commentary from May 14, 2007 because the points made there seem appropriate today)- Does any socialist, self-styled or otherwise, in the West want to reconsider their anti-Soviet support for Western imperialist objectives and material aid to the Islamic fundamentalists in respond to the Soviet assistance of the secular/nationalist government in Afghanistan in 1979? You should, although I would have to stretch my imagination to believe that you would do so.
Dated May 14, 2007
COMMENTARY
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!
"With the recent flurry of activity by Congress in Washington over the Iraq and Afghanistan war budgets and the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq Afghanistan has fallen below the newspaper fold. That is a mistake. In one of the ironies of history Afghanistan was the pivotal start of the whole ‘war of civilizations’ going back to the fight by the Soviet Union in the 1980’s that was fought, at least partially, to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century (or maybe even the 19th). If the Soviet Union had waged more than a half-hearted fight then world history might have looked significantly difference today. The Islamic fundamentalist forces, notably those committed to Bin Laden and an Al Qaeda strategy, got their first taste of blood there. And they liked it.
The current political situation in that benighted country is that the Karzai government’s writ does not extend outside of Kabul and that the U.S./NATO presence there is the only thing propping up that government. And this is the rub. There has been a recent spate of articles on the fighting in Afghanistan centered on the allied forces indiscriminate bombing of various outlining villages and the killing of innocent civilians. While not now a matter of widespread public knowledge the American strategy in Afghanistan is essentially the same as in Iraq. In order to defeat the Taliban (and other) insurgencies those allied forces have relied on the old tried and true imperialist method of bringing overwhelming military force and then letting “God” separate out the innocent from the guilty. Of course, this nice little strategy has its blow back effect as previously disinterested Afghans have now begun, on their own, to fight against the imperialist presence. One village that was bombed by the United States during the past week did just that. One can expect more to come.
American imperialism, for public consumption, will bring out the candy bars and soap to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populace but when the deal goes down the bomb is the persuader of choice. So much for all those vaunted pacification programs. In justification for the aerial bombing policy one of the Allied ground commanders stated that without the use of such power hundreds of thousands of additional ground troops would be necessary. Nobody in the political and military establishment in Washington, or anywhere else, wants to, at this point, get into that hornet’s nest. The long and the short of it is that while we keep the fight against the war in Iraq on the front burner we had better bring the demand for immediate withdrawal in Afghanistan up to the front as well. In fact, United States Hands Off The World!"
February 18, 2009
I have argued since the Americans presidential elections of November 2008 were decided with the election of Barack Obama that virtually every move that he had made up that time was predicated on making Afghanistan the center of his Middle Eastern foreign policy initiatives. That included his own predilection to gain a ‘win’ in that region of the world for American imperialism by shucking (that is the correct word for this) Iraq for the ‘greener pastures' fields of Afghanistan. His later national security and appropriate cabinet level appointments concerned with Afghanistan only confirm this. At that time, since then and today I will stand by the point I made there that Obama has staked his place in history on this decision. And working people, one way or another, in lives and treasure will the price of that decision.
That said, after reading a review in “The New York Review Of Books” (February 12, 2009) by William Dalrymple of a book “Descent Into Chaos: The United States And The Failure Of Nation Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by noted scholar Ahmed Rashid the probabilities submerged in that last sentence may prove even more ominous that I suspected. I would note that I have only started reading this work myself because I had some difficulty getting a copy but one should recall that this book is by the same author of the book “Taliban” that everyone started to climb the shelves for after 9/11. The man knows this area of world.
I am not sure whether President Obama, as intellectually-inclined as he appears to, is a devotee of “The New York Review”. However, he should read this article. And take these words as I intend them as I sure as hell have no ambition, like some others on the left, to be a foreign policy advisor to him or his administration. If one want to get an approximate understanding of the huge pitfalls that await this rookie president then read the review, or better, get a copy of the book. In short, the fates of the British and the Russians mentioned above are calling. Hey, I’ll stick with another point that I made last November (and repeated on Inauguration Day)- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia!
This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the historically decisive (for the fate of the Soviet Union itself as it turned out) and catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union is no more, to the great detriment of the international working class in its efforts to fight for socialism. Nevertheless this is an appropriate time and an appropriate space to honor the Soviet soldiers who fell doing their internationalist duty in Afghanistan. All Honor To The Fallen Soviet Soldiers In Afghanistan, 1979-89!
I once again pose the question here (as I do directly below in the reposted commentary from May 14, 2007 because the points made there seem appropriate today)- Does any socialist, self-styled or otherwise, in the West want to reconsider their anti-Soviet support for Western imperialist objectives and material aid to the Islamic fundamentalists in respond to the Soviet assistance of the secular/nationalist government in Afghanistan in 1979? You should, although I would have to stretch my imagination to believe that you would do so.
Dated May 14, 2007
COMMENTARY
IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF U.S/ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!
"With the recent flurry of activity by Congress in Washington over the Iraq and Afghanistan war budgets and the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq Afghanistan has fallen below the newspaper fold. That is a mistake. In one of the ironies of history Afghanistan was the pivotal start of the whole ‘war of civilizations’ going back to the fight by the Soviet Union in the 1980’s that was fought, at least partially, to bring Afghanistan into the 20th century (or maybe even the 19th). If the Soviet Union had waged more than a half-hearted fight then world history might have looked significantly difference today. The Islamic fundamentalist forces, notably those committed to Bin Laden and an Al Qaeda strategy, got their first taste of blood there. And they liked it.
The current political situation in that benighted country is that the Karzai government’s writ does not extend outside of Kabul and that the U.S./NATO presence there is the only thing propping up that government. And this is the rub. There has been a recent spate of articles on the fighting in Afghanistan centered on the allied forces indiscriminate bombing of various outlining villages and the killing of innocent civilians. While not now a matter of widespread public knowledge the American strategy in Afghanistan is essentially the same as in Iraq. In order to defeat the Taliban (and other) insurgencies those allied forces have relied on the old tried and true imperialist method of bringing overwhelming military force and then letting “God” separate out the innocent from the guilty. Of course, this nice little strategy has its blow back effect as previously disinterested Afghans have now begun, on their own, to fight against the imperialist presence. One village that was bombed by the United States during the past week did just that. One can expect more to come.
American imperialism, for public consumption, will bring out the candy bars and soap to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populace but when the deal goes down the bomb is the persuader of choice. So much for all those vaunted pacification programs. In justification for the aerial bombing policy one of the Allied ground commanders stated that without the use of such power hundreds of thousands of additional ground troops would be necessary. Nobody in the political and military establishment in Washington, or anywhere else, wants to, at this point, get into that hornet’s nest. The long and the short of it is that while we keep the fight against the war in Iraq on the front burner we had better bring the demand for immediate withdrawal in Afghanistan up to the front as well. In fact, United States Hands Off The World!"
February 18, 2009
I have argued since the Americans presidential elections of November 2008 were decided with the election of Barack Obama that virtually every move that he had made up that time was predicated on making Afghanistan the center of his Middle Eastern foreign policy initiatives. That included his own predilection to gain a ‘win’ in that region of the world for American imperialism by shucking (that is the correct word for this) Iraq for the ‘greener pastures' fields of Afghanistan. His later national security and appropriate cabinet level appointments concerned with Afghanistan only confirm this. At that time, since then and today I will stand by the point I made there that Obama has staked his place in history on this decision. And working people, one way or another, in lives and treasure will the price of that decision.
That said, after reading a review in “The New York Review Of Books” (February 12, 2009) by William Dalrymple of a book “Descent Into Chaos: The United States And The Failure Of Nation Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by noted scholar Ahmed Rashid the probabilities submerged in that last sentence may prove even more ominous that I suspected. I would note that I have only started reading this work myself because I had some difficulty getting a copy but one should recall that this book is by the same author of the book “Taliban” that everyone started to climb the shelves for after 9/11. The man knows this area of world.
I am not sure whether President Obama, as intellectually-inclined as he appears to, is a devotee of “The New York Review”. However, he should read this article. And take these words as I intend them as I sure as hell have no ambition, like some others on the left, to be a foreign policy advisor to him or his administration. If one want to get an approximate understanding of the huge pitfalls that await this rookie president then read the review, or better, get a copy of the book. In short, the fates of the British and the Russians mentioned above are calling. Hey, I’ll stick with another point that I made last November (and repeated on Inauguration Day)- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia!
Monday, February 09, 2009
Post-Civil War Reconstructon-Professor John Hope Franklin's View
Book Review
February is Black History Month
Reconstruction After The Civil War, John Hope Franklin, The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961
The Reconstruction period directly after the American Civil War ended in 1865 was cast as the time of the ‘scalawags’, ‘carpetbaggers’, Black Codes and ultimately after a determined and ugly political and military fight by the ‘right’ people, the so-called natural rulers in the South, ‘redemption’. In short, a least for any radical, a time of shame in the American experience and, at least implicitly, a racist slap at blacks and their supporters for attempting to upset the traditional social order.
There certainly was plenty that went wrong during Radical Reconstruction (there were, as Professor Franklin points out several phases of Reconstruction, not all of them radical) in the South but the conventional high school history textbooks never got into the whole story. Nor did they want to. The whole story is that until fairly recently this Radical Reconstruction period was the most democratic period in the South in American history, for white and black alike. The book under review that reflects the earlier 'revisionist' efforts as well as the likes of Professor Kenneth Stamp (whose book of essays on Reconstruction I have previously reviewed in this space) goes a long way toward a better understanding of the period than those old high school textbooks.
Professor Franklin, as he must, starts off his narrative history by describing the political problems associated with most of the earlier studies of Reconstruction done by those influenced by Professor Dunning and his school in the early 20th century (Franklin provides a very useful “Suggested Reading” section at the end the book which details his sources for those who want to look at the state of scholarship on the subject in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s). That picture presented, as I described above, the familiar corrupt and scandalous activities associated with this period. Needless to say this position dovetailed very nicely with the rationale for Jim Crow in the pre-1960’s South. Moreover, in the hands of its northern liberal devotees it nicely covered up the burgeoning corruption of the northern- based ‘robber barons’. There is an old adage that history is written by the victors. Whatever the truth to that assertion might be early Reconstruction history was written by the losers, or rather their apologists once removed.
The Reconstruction era was dominated by three basic plans that Professor Franklin describes in some detail; the aborted Lincoln ‘soft’ union indivisible efforts; the Johnson ‘soft’ redemption plans; and, the radical Republican ‘scorched earth’ policy. In the end none of these plans was pursued strongly enough to insure that enhanced black rights gained through legislation would lead to enlightened citizenship. Franklin, following Stampp, presents detailed critiques of all these plans and some insights about the social and cultural mores of the country at the time that do not make for pretty reading.
The professor then goes on to try to demystify what the radical reconstruction governments did and did not do. That there were scandalous activities and more than enough corrupt politicians to go around goes without saying. However like most myths there is a snowball effect about how bad things really were that obliterates the very real advances for black (and some poor whites) like public education, improved roads and increased state facilities that were anathema to the planting class that formerly ruled the South.
The last part of the book deals with the conservative counter-revolution to overthrow the radical governments culminating in the well-known Compromise of 1877. The actions of that rabble, rich and poor whites alike formed in militias and other para-military operations like the Klan, is certainly not pretty reading. Moreover it took about a century and a ‘cold’ civil war during the 1960’s (a battle that continues today) to even minimally right that situation. For those that need an in- depth, definitive study of this subject you must turn to the master, Eric Foner, and his monumental “Reconstruction, 1863-1877”. However, if you want an earlier, shorter but nevertheless informative overview of Reconstruction this is one of your first stops.
February is Black History Month
Reconstruction After The Civil War, John Hope Franklin, The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1961
The Reconstruction period directly after the American Civil War ended in 1865 was cast as the time of the ‘scalawags’, ‘carpetbaggers’, Black Codes and ultimately after a determined and ugly political and military fight by the ‘right’ people, the so-called natural rulers in the South, ‘redemption’. In short, a least for any radical, a time of shame in the American experience and, at least implicitly, a racist slap at blacks and their supporters for attempting to upset the traditional social order.
There certainly was plenty that went wrong during Radical Reconstruction (there were, as Professor Franklin points out several phases of Reconstruction, not all of them radical) in the South but the conventional high school history textbooks never got into the whole story. Nor did they want to. The whole story is that until fairly recently this Radical Reconstruction period was the most democratic period in the South in American history, for white and black alike. The book under review that reflects the earlier 'revisionist' efforts as well as the likes of Professor Kenneth Stamp (whose book of essays on Reconstruction I have previously reviewed in this space) goes a long way toward a better understanding of the period than those old high school textbooks.
Professor Franklin, as he must, starts off his narrative history by describing the political problems associated with most of the earlier studies of Reconstruction done by those influenced by Professor Dunning and his school in the early 20th century (Franklin provides a very useful “Suggested Reading” section at the end the book which details his sources for those who want to look at the state of scholarship on the subject in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s). That picture presented, as I described above, the familiar corrupt and scandalous activities associated with this period. Needless to say this position dovetailed very nicely with the rationale for Jim Crow in the pre-1960’s South. Moreover, in the hands of its northern liberal devotees it nicely covered up the burgeoning corruption of the northern- based ‘robber barons’. There is an old adage that history is written by the victors. Whatever the truth to that assertion might be early Reconstruction history was written by the losers, or rather their apologists once removed.
The Reconstruction era was dominated by three basic plans that Professor Franklin describes in some detail; the aborted Lincoln ‘soft’ union indivisible efforts; the Johnson ‘soft’ redemption plans; and, the radical Republican ‘scorched earth’ policy. In the end none of these plans was pursued strongly enough to insure that enhanced black rights gained through legislation would lead to enlightened citizenship. Franklin, following Stampp, presents detailed critiques of all these plans and some insights about the social and cultural mores of the country at the time that do not make for pretty reading.
The professor then goes on to try to demystify what the radical reconstruction governments did and did not do. That there were scandalous activities and more than enough corrupt politicians to go around goes without saying. However like most myths there is a snowball effect about how bad things really were that obliterates the very real advances for black (and some poor whites) like public education, improved roads and increased state facilities that were anathema to the planting class that formerly ruled the South.
The last part of the book deals with the conservative counter-revolution to overthrow the radical governments culminating in the well-known Compromise of 1877. The actions of that rabble, rich and poor whites alike formed in militias and other para-military operations like the Klan, is certainly not pretty reading. Moreover it took about a century and a ‘cold’ civil war during the 1960’s (a battle that continues today) to even minimally right that situation. For those that need an in- depth, definitive study of this subject you must turn to the master, Eric Foner, and his monumental “Reconstruction, 1863-1877”. However, if you want an earlier, shorter but nevertheless informative overview of Reconstruction this is one of your first stops.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
The Fire Next Time- Keb' Mo'
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
Keb’ Mo’, Keb’ Mo’, Okeh Records, 1994
This reviewer has spent much ink in this space over the past year or so touting various old time country blues singers like Bukka White, Skip James and, of course, Son House. I have noted that their music reflected the rural southern, mainly Mississippi Delta. plantation life of hard toil (picking that damn cotton), hard living and hard loving from an earlier part of the last century. That age effectively ended on an economic level with the vast increases in the mechanization of agriculture and the migration of blacks north (mainly to Chicago and other Midwest industrial stops) in the period leading up to World War II. Musically it ended with the electrification of the blues guitar as the music headed north. That, however, begs an important question. Who would, if anyone, continue that old blues tradition?
Well we know part of the answer. The various white (mainly) urban folk revivalists of the 1960’s, including the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt and British rock aficionados like Eric Clapton of that same period held the tradition together by physically “discovering” the remnants of the old time singers like the above-mentioned artists. And by creating their own blues tradition. But what of now. That is where the artist under review, Keb’ Mo’, comes into the picture. He has gone back to the roots with some sassy, saucy, sexy songs (mainly of his own creation) that would do his predecessors proud. In the age of the ‘hip-hop nation’ the sheer number of those who are committed to the maintenance of this music is surely much too small but the quality, as represented by Keb’, makes up the difference.
So what is good here? “Anybody Seen My Girl” deserves a listen as does “Dirty Low Down and Bad” but if you have only time to listen to one give a listen to the old Robert Johnson tune “ Kindhearted Woman” then you will know why the old blues tradition is still in capable hands. Kudos Keb’.
Note: I first heard of Keb’ through part one of Martin Scorsese’s six part 2003 PBS series on the history of the blues. I recommend that series for those who want a primer on the history of this music-then push on from there.
February Is Black History Month
Keb’ Mo’, Keb’ Mo’, Okeh Records, 1994
This reviewer has spent much ink in this space over the past year or so touting various old time country blues singers like Bukka White, Skip James and, of course, Son House. I have noted that their music reflected the rural southern, mainly Mississippi Delta. plantation life of hard toil (picking that damn cotton), hard living and hard loving from an earlier part of the last century. That age effectively ended on an economic level with the vast increases in the mechanization of agriculture and the migration of blacks north (mainly to Chicago and other Midwest industrial stops) in the period leading up to World War II. Musically it ended with the electrification of the blues guitar as the music headed north. That, however, begs an important question. Who would, if anyone, continue that old blues tradition?
Well we know part of the answer. The various white (mainly) urban folk revivalists of the 1960’s, including the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt and British rock aficionados like Eric Clapton of that same period held the tradition together by physically “discovering” the remnants of the old time singers like the above-mentioned artists. And by creating their own blues tradition. But what of now. That is where the artist under review, Keb’ Mo’, comes into the picture. He has gone back to the roots with some sassy, saucy, sexy songs (mainly of his own creation) that would do his predecessors proud. In the age of the ‘hip-hop nation’ the sheer number of those who are committed to the maintenance of this music is surely much too small but the quality, as represented by Keb’, makes up the difference.
So what is good here? “Anybody Seen My Girl” deserves a listen as does “Dirty Low Down and Bad” but if you have only time to listen to one give a listen to the old Robert Johnson tune “ Kindhearted Woman” then you will know why the old blues tradition is still in capable hands. Kudos Keb’.
Note: I first heard of Keb’ through part one of Martin Scorsese’s six part 2003 PBS series on the history of the blues. I recommend that series for those who want a primer on the history of this music-then push on from there.
*The Confessions Of Nat Turner- Novelist William Styron's View
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American author, William Styron.
BOOK REVIEW/COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Directly below is a review (January 29,2007)of William Styron's book (originally written in 1967) "The Confessions Of Nat Turner", an imaginative literary treatment (for the most part) of the justly famous 1831 slave rebellion led by the heroic Turner and his band of fellow slaves. The fall-out from that event (Turner's revolt) had not been the subject (to my knowledge) of such a literary treatment previously and the fall out from that latter event(the subsequent all-around open season furor over Styron's take on the matter from black nationalist, pro-segregationist and other sources)was not, I believe, anticipated by him at the time. I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book recently.
From The Archives: January 29, 2007
"THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, WILLIAM STYRON,VINTAGE PRESS, NEW YORK, 2004
I came of political age during the civil rights struggle here in America in the early 1960's. Part and parcel with that awakening struggle came an increased interest in the roots of the black struggle, especially in slavery times. Such intellectuals as Herbert Apteker, the Genoveses, the Foners, Harold Cruise, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin and others, black and white, were very interested in exploring or discovering a black resistance to the conditions of slavery not apparent on any then general reading of the black experience in America. This is the place where the recently deceased William Styron and his novelistic interpretation of one aspect of that struggle- Nat Turner's Virginia slave rebellion enters the fray.
No Styron is not politically correct in his appreciation of Turner or his followers. Nor are latter day Southern whites and their sympathizers who have recoiled in horror at what expansion of Turner's rebellion might have meant for the `peculiar institution'. But being politically correct, etc. now or historically is beside the point. Slavery was brutal. Slavery brutalized whole generations of black people for a very long time. If one expected nature's noblemen and women to come out of such a process, one would certainly be very sadly mistaken. That the white beneficiaries of this system were brutalized is a given. Human progress has come about through fits and starts, not a seamless curve onward and upward. Nevertheless all our sympathies are with Nat and his fellow rebels.
Moreover, here are some things to think about if you are not worried about your political correctness status. Outside of John Brown at Harper's Ferry Turner's rebellion represented the highest achievement of resistance to the white slaveholders in the early 19th century. Although the fight was not pretty on either side every progressive today should stand in historical solidarity with that fight. Then one will understand not only that oppression oppresses but also that the military conditions for a successful rebellion for isolated blacks in pre- Civil War American were slim. The later incorporation of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors among the Northern forces in the Civil War are a very, very profound argument that once off the plantation blacks were as capable of bravery, courage and honor as any other American. As difficult as it is, if you do not have access to the original chronicles of the Turner uprising, read this book to get a flavor of how hard the struggle for the abolition of slavery in this country was going to be."
February 4, 2009
In rereading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points that one can take from this essentially literary treatment of the person of the black preacher/ craftsman and intellectual Nat Turner by a seemingly sympathetic white writer writing over a century later in the heat of the turmoil over what direction the previously integrationist civil rights movement of the early 1960’s was headed I think I failed to give enough weight to the particulars of Turner’s leadership qualities. Although most of Stryon’s dialogue and descriptive narrative is, as he stated in his introduction, purely literary conjecture the portrait that emerges of a revolutionary black leader does not seem to be that far from some “truth”. As the careers of the later black liberation fighters John Brown and Frederick Douglass (and I might add what we know about the earlier slave general, Spartacus) also demonstrated, in the matter of revolutionary leadership the ‘norms’ of political acumen are of a different magnitude. That is a point I wish to expand on here.
Styron has done credible job of setting the framework for Nat Turner’s emergence as a leader of a slave rebellion. Precocious as a child, Turner strived to learn to read and write, by hook or by crook, in a culture that enacted laws (the infamous Black Codes) to prevent such an occurrence. In fact, even among sympathetic whites there was a feeling that Turner was unusual and that his ability to read and write was an exceptional experience. In short, as W.E.B. Dubois later put it in another context, Turner was one of the “talented tenth”. Moreover, Turner’s personal existence as a trained craftsman, self-taught preacher and one with time and opportunity to become a budding slave general would seem to conform to a historical pattern about the way plebeian leaderships are formed. Contrary to intuitive reasoning the most oppressed are not necessarily the most revolutionary (proven here by the betrayal by fellow slaves and by history a million times in a million ways). Some can be lead to see their plight. But they, initially at least must be led by the Nat Turners of the world. That, my friends, is where the ‘lessons’ of Styron’s book apply today. We better get busy.
BOOK REVIEW/COMMENTARY
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Directly below is a review (January 29,2007)of William Styron's book (originally written in 1967) "The Confessions Of Nat Turner", an imaginative literary treatment (for the most part) of the justly famous 1831 slave rebellion led by the heroic Turner and his band of fellow slaves. The fall-out from that event (Turner's revolt) had not been the subject (to my knowledge) of such a literary treatment previously and the fall out from that latter event(the subsequent all-around open season furor over Styron's take on the matter from black nationalist, pro-segregationist and other sources)was not, I believe, anticipated by him at the time. I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book recently.
From The Archives: January 29, 2007
"THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, WILLIAM STYRON,VINTAGE PRESS, NEW YORK, 2004
I came of political age during the civil rights struggle here in America in the early 1960's. Part and parcel with that awakening struggle came an increased interest in the roots of the black struggle, especially in slavery times. Such intellectuals as Herbert Apteker, the Genoveses, the Foners, Harold Cruise, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin and others, black and white, were very interested in exploring or discovering a black resistance to the conditions of slavery not apparent on any then general reading of the black experience in America. This is the place where the recently deceased William Styron and his novelistic interpretation of one aspect of that struggle- Nat Turner's Virginia slave rebellion enters the fray.
No Styron is not politically correct in his appreciation of Turner or his followers. Nor are latter day Southern whites and their sympathizers who have recoiled in horror at what expansion of Turner's rebellion might have meant for the `peculiar institution'. But being politically correct, etc. now or historically is beside the point. Slavery was brutal. Slavery brutalized whole generations of black people for a very long time. If one expected nature's noblemen and women to come out of such a process, one would certainly be very sadly mistaken. That the white beneficiaries of this system were brutalized is a given. Human progress has come about through fits and starts, not a seamless curve onward and upward. Nevertheless all our sympathies are with Nat and his fellow rebels.
Moreover, here are some things to think about if you are not worried about your political correctness status. Outside of John Brown at Harper's Ferry Turner's rebellion represented the highest achievement of resistance to the white slaveholders in the early 19th century. Although the fight was not pretty on either side every progressive today should stand in historical solidarity with that fight. Then one will understand not only that oppression oppresses but also that the military conditions for a successful rebellion for isolated blacks in pre- Civil War American were slim. The later incorporation of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors among the Northern forces in the Civil War are a very, very profound argument that once off the plantation blacks were as capable of bravery, courage and honor as any other American. As difficult as it is, if you do not have access to the original chronicles of the Turner uprising, read this book to get a flavor of how hard the struggle for the abolition of slavery in this country was going to be."
February 4, 2009
In rereading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points that one can take from this essentially literary treatment of the person of the black preacher/ craftsman and intellectual Nat Turner by a seemingly sympathetic white writer writing over a century later in the heat of the turmoil over what direction the previously integrationist civil rights movement of the early 1960’s was headed I think I failed to give enough weight to the particulars of Turner’s leadership qualities. Although most of Stryon’s dialogue and descriptive narrative is, as he stated in his introduction, purely literary conjecture the portrait that emerges of a revolutionary black leader does not seem to be that far from some “truth”. As the careers of the later black liberation fighters John Brown and Frederick Douglass (and I might add what we know about the earlier slave general, Spartacus) also demonstrated, in the matter of revolutionary leadership the ‘norms’ of political acumen are of a different magnitude. That is a point I wish to expand on here.
Styron has done credible job of setting the framework for Nat Turner’s emergence as a leader of a slave rebellion. Precocious as a child, Turner strived to learn to read and write, by hook or by crook, in a culture that enacted laws (the infamous Black Codes) to prevent such an occurrence. In fact, even among sympathetic whites there was a feeling that Turner was unusual and that his ability to read and write was an exceptional experience. In short, as W.E.B. Dubois later put it in another context, Turner was one of the “talented tenth”. Moreover, Turner’s personal existence as a trained craftsman, self-taught preacher and one with time and opportunity to become a budding slave general would seem to conform to a historical pattern about the way plebeian leaderships are formed. Contrary to intuitive reasoning the most oppressed are not necessarily the most revolutionary (proven here by the betrayal by fellow slaves and by history a million times in a million ways). Some can be lead to see their plight. But they, initially at least must be led by the Nat Turners of the world. That, my friends, is where the ‘lessons’ of Styron’s book apply today. We better get busy.
Friday, February 06, 2009
* Honor Black History Month- The "Underground Railroad"- Follow The Northern Star
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the "Underground Railroad".
DVD/CD REVIEW
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Underground Railroad, hosted by Alfie Woodward, History Channel, 1999
One of the most general perceptions that I received from my high school history days in the 1960’s concerning the fate of black slaves in America was that they essentially passively waited for the Union armies to free them during the process of the Civil War in the 1860’s. In short, blacks had no pre-history as a people who struggled for freedom in their own right but were merely the victims of history. Of course, since those days I have made it my business to find out the real story of slave resistance and although there are many parts that are lost to history we now know that as least some slaves in some situations found ways to break their bondage. Aided during the past few decades by serious scholarly research into the subject we have a more rounded view of the dynamics of slavery in ante bellum American society. This well done History Channel docu-drama, hosted by actress Alfie Woodward, presents one part of that struggle- the work of the Underground Railroad- the fight of courageous individual blacks, aided sometimes by their Northern supporters, to "follow the drinking gourd" North to freedom.
This presentation, complete with the ‘talking head’ commentators that inevitably accompany such efforts, goes back to the early days of slavery and demonstrates that there was always an element of the struggle for freedom by black slaves from the earliest days of European settlement in North America. Moreover, a cadre of freed blacks who were the catalyst for the freedom struggle developed from early on as well. However, the black anti-slavery movement (and for that matter the white part of the anti-slavery movement) did not get energized until the early 19th century in response to the increasing use of slaves to cultivate the expanding cotton crop on Southern plantations. From then on the propaganda fight for emancipation took many forms but basically continued unabated until the Civil War militarily resolved the issue against slavery.
One of the benefits of this production is a well though out exposition of the role that blacks played in this anti-slavery process. Not just the now well-known names like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman but the little known Henry Garnet, John Stills and John Parker. Moreover, whatever social distinctions could be drawn, even by those within the anti-slavery movement, between blacks and whites it represented the first serious integrated social movement in this country. Needless to say such efforts have been far and few in the history of this country. It is clear that there would be no Underground Railroad stretching, at it needed to at times, all the way to Canada without such integrated efforts. Aiding that clarity is mention of the Midwest, especially the Ohio River towns, as routes to freedom as well as the more well known eastern coastal routes.
A major highlight here was a serious exposition of the role of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in curtaining the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad, causing the first seeds of irreconcilable conflict between North and South and contributing to the overweening and disproportionate role that the South played in national politics. Some worthwhile time is spent here detailing the effects that such legislation had on ordinary citizens who wished not to be complicit with the slaveholders. The various efforts by Northerners, and not just hard core abolitionists, to resist the slave catchers as they headed north is dramatically presented. The well-known Boston case of Anthony Brooks is the focal point for this section.
If there is one criticism that I have of this presentation though it goes back to that first sentence of this entry. If we now know that blacks themselves, as ultimately demonstrated by the enlistment of 200,000 black Union soldiers in the Civil War, were not mere passive victims of slavery there was a tendency of this presentation to overplay the quest for freedom by blacks. One of the hard facts of human history is that oppression oppresses. That little truism conceals this truth- not everyone, and maybe not even many of those oppressed, in the great scheme of things, can break out of the struggle to merely exist to rise out and rebel. Or even flee. This black cadre was the vanguard, a precious vanguard, but a vanguard nevertheless. That vanguard expressed that suppressed urge for freedom that we assume beats in every human heart. That is the value of this docu-drama. Watch it and learn a few things about our common history.
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped blacks get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
DVD/CD REVIEW
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Underground Railroad, hosted by Alfie Woodward, History Channel, 1999
One of the most general perceptions that I received from my high school history days in the 1960’s concerning the fate of black slaves in America was that they essentially passively waited for the Union armies to free them during the process of the Civil War in the 1860’s. In short, blacks had no pre-history as a people who struggled for freedom in their own right but were merely the victims of history. Of course, since those days I have made it my business to find out the real story of slave resistance and although there are many parts that are lost to history we now know that as least some slaves in some situations found ways to break their bondage. Aided during the past few decades by serious scholarly research into the subject we have a more rounded view of the dynamics of slavery in ante bellum American society. This well done History Channel docu-drama, hosted by actress Alfie Woodward, presents one part of that struggle- the work of the Underground Railroad- the fight of courageous individual blacks, aided sometimes by their Northern supporters, to "follow the drinking gourd" North to freedom.
This presentation, complete with the ‘talking head’ commentators that inevitably accompany such efforts, goes back to the early days of slavery and demonstrates that there was always an element of the struggle for freedom by black slaves from the earliest days of European settlement in North America. Moreover, a cadre of freed blacks who were the catalyst for the freedom struggle developed from early on as well. However, the black anti-slavery movement (and for that matter the white part of the anti-slavery movement) did not get energized until the early 19th century in response to the increasing use of slaves to cultivate the expanding cotton crop on Southern plantations. From then on the propaganda fight for emancipation took many forms but basically continued unabated until the Civil War militarily resolved the issue against slavery.
One of the benefits of this production is a well though out exposition of the role that blacks played in this anti-slavery process. Not just the now well-known names like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman but the little known Henry Garnet, John Stills and John Parker. Moreover, whatever social distinctions could be drawn, even by those within the anti-slavery movement, between blacks and whites it represented the first serious integrated social movement in this country. Needless to say such efforts have been far and few in the history of this country. It is clear that there would be no Underground Railroad stretching, at it needed to at times, all the way to Canada without such integrated efforts. Aiding that clarity is mention of the Midwest, especially the Ohio River towns, as routes to freedom as well as the more well known eastern coastal routes.
A major highlight here was a serious exposition of the role of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in curtaining the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad, causing the first seeds of irreconcilable conflict between North and South and contributing to the overweening and disproportionate role that the South played in national politics. Some worthwhile time is spent here detailing the effects that such legislation had on ordinary citizens who wished not to be complicit with the slaveholders. The various efforts by Northerners, and not just hard core abolitionists, to resist the slave catchers as they headed north is dramatically presented. The well-known Boston case of Anthony Brooks is the focal point for this section.
If there is one criticism that I have of this presentation though it goes back to that first sentence of this entry. If we now know that blacks themselves, as ultimately demonstrated by the enlistment of 200,000 black Union soldiers in the Civil War, were not mere passive victims of slavery there was a tendency of this presentation to overplay the quest for freedom by blacks. One of the hard facts of human history is that oppression oppresses. That little truism conceals this truth- not everyone, and maybe not even many of those oppressed, in the great scheme of things, can break out of the struggle to merely exist to rise out and rebel. Or even flee. This black cadre was the vanguard, a precious vanguard, but a vanguard nevertheless. That vanguard expressed that suppressed urge for freedom that we assume beats in every human heart. That is the value of this docu-drama. Watch it and learn a few things about our common history.
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped blacks get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Thursday, February 05, 2009
*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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