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Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Imperialism: Monopoly Capitalism-From Lenin
AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell
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Workers Vanguard No. 1023
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3 May 2013
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AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell
Leonard Peltier is known throughout the world as one of the most
prominent political prisoners in the United States. His 37 years of
incarceration due to his courageous activism in the American Indian Movement
(AIM) has come to symbolize the U.S. rulers’ racist repression of the country’s
indigenous people, survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression.
Peltier emerged as a Native American leader in the late 1960s. In
response to the hideous oppression he experienced and saw all around him, he
became involved in struggles for Native American rights and joined AIM. It was
in his capacity as a trusted AIM activist that he came to assist the Oglala
Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the mid 1970s.
AIM came into the government’s crosshairs because it was attempting to combat
the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands
by the Feds and the energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium
deposits under Sioux land in western South Dakota. The hated Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA) and the FBI turned Pine Ridge into a war zone as they trained and
armed thugs to terrorize and crush Indian activists. Between 1973 and 1976,
these forces carried out more than 300 attacks, killing at least 69 people.
In June 1975, 250 FBI and BIA agents, SWAT police and local
vigilantes descended on Pine Ridge and precipitated a shootout. Two FBI agents
were killed, and Peltier and three others were charged. All charges were dropped
against one AIM activist, and two others were acquitted as jurors stated that
they did not believe “much of anything” said by government witnesses and that it
seemed “pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense” against the murderous
FBI-led assault.
The government then went into overdrive to assure a conviction
against Peltier. His trial was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, a city with strong
bias against Native Americans. The prosecution concealed ballistics tests
showing that Peltier’s gun could not have been used in the shootings while the
trial judge ruled out any possibility of another acquittal on grounds of
self-defense by refusing to allow any evidence of government terror against Pine
Ridge activists. In April 1977, Peltier was convicted by an all-white jury and
sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Successive court proceedings have laid bare the evidence of
Peltier’s innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals
hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those
agents.” In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury
could have acquitted Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had
been made available. In 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, “Much
of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its
prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence.
It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.” Nevertheless, in August
2009 the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s request for parole,
declaring that Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years!
For Peltier, who is now 68 years old, this in effect was a declaration by the
state that this courageous man will die in prison.
The long trail of injustice against Leonard Peltier has been
documented in the film Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford,
and in Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Decades of
unjust imprisonment have not only robbed him of the prime years of his life.
They have also taken a devastating toll on his physical well-being as he suffers
from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition. We
join millions around the world in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier
now!
Waco Massacre: We Will Not Forget
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Workers Vanguard No. 1022
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19 April 2013
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Waco Massacre: We Will Not Forget
April 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the government’s massacre of
over 80 men, women and children of the integrated Branch Davidian religious sect
outside Waco, Texas. For more than seven weeks, an array of police forces had
laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound following a raid by the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms aimed at arresting the group’s leader, David
Koresh, on false charges of illegal weapons possession. The government was out
for blood—and lots of it—after four Feds were killed in the initial assault,
which took the life of a two-year-old girl and a number of church members.
Finally, the state got its revenge through a massive attack that burned the
compound to the ground, with the trapped members of the sect perishing in the
inferno.
From the outset of the siege, the Spartacist League and Partisan
Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization
associated with the SL—protested the government vendetta against the Branch
Davidians. On 8 March 1993, as tanks rolled into Waco, the PDC sent a protest to
Democratic president Bill Clinton demanding that “all troops, tanks, police and
federal agents be removed from the area.” The letter pointed out, “We think you
would do well to take the advice of the newly elected President Lincoln, who
when asked what he proposed to do about the polygamous Mormons replied, ‘I
propose to let them alone’.”
Attorney General Janet Reno justified the assault by raising the
spectre of “child abuse.” This was forcefully answered by Bob Buck, a West
Virginia steel worker who had been railroaded to prison for defending his union
on the picket line during a bitter 1991-92 strike. In a letter to the PDC, Buck
wrote: “They were so damned concerned for the children they unleashed an armed
assault on the house they lived in and filled it full of bullet holes;…gassed
them, and ultimately burned them to death. Ain’t America great. I’m glad Mrs.
Reno isn’t concerned about me.”
The SL and PDC protested the Waco holocaust outside federal offices
in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Shamefully, the reformist left
turned a blind eye to the atrocity or joined in blaming the victims, just as
almost every one of them did when Philadelphia’s black Democratic mayor Wilson
Goode ordered the bombing of the predominantly black MOVE commune in 1985. Our
intention was, and is, to sear the memory of these acts of government mass
murder into the consciousness of the working class, whose historic interest lies
in revolutionary struggle to sweep away the murderous capitalist state.
We print below the bulk of the press release issued by the SL
announcing the protest demonstrations, which began in Manhattan the day of the
massacre.
* * *
The charred corpses of 87 men, women and children who perished in
the firestorm resulting from the FBI’s barrage of CS gas, flash-grenades and
battering rams are the direct responsibility of the White House. President
Clinton gave the green light, Attorney General Janet Reno personally supervised
the plan, and the FBI’s storm troopers moved in to carry out the government’s
“final solution” against the small, integrated Branch Davidian religious sect in
Waco, Texas. After a murderous raid by federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
agents armed to the teeth and a 51-day siege, almost a hundred people have now
been subjected to a flaming apocalypse for the sole “crime” of being a
non-conformist religious sect which dared to defend itself against government
assault.
An SL spokesman, in condemning this outrage, noted that the Branch
Davidians received the same death sentence meted out to the black MOVE commune
in Philadelphia, bombed by the Philadelphia police on Mother’s Day (May 13)
1985, using C-4 plastic explosives donated by the FBI. Eleven black people were
murdered there, including five children, and an entire black neighborhood was
laid to waste. “Like the racist cop beating of L.A. black motorist Rodney King,”
said Spartacist spokesman Marjorie Stamberg, “the Waco holocaust is the domestic
image of America’s ‘New World Order.’ This is U.S. imperialism’s ‘Desert
Slaughter’ in Iraq brought home.”
A banner outside the compound of the racially integrated Branch
Davidian religious sect said, “Rodney King—We Understand.” It is no accident
that the feds’ onslaught in Waco came two days after the slap-on-the-wrist
verdict for two racist cops in L.A. With troops poised to occupy the inner
cities coast to coast, amid a massive police-state mobilization, the racist
rulers breathed a collective sigh of relief that the urban ghettos and barrios
did not explode in outrage over another outright racist acquittal. They seized
the moment to incinerate the Waco commune.
In the gray light of dawn, the FBI moved in the heavy
artillery—M-60 Combat Engineering Vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles and
heat-seeking reconnaissance planes—in a bid to drive out or exterminate the 70
adults and 25 children still inside the wooden structure. The whole area had
already been ringed with razor-sharp concertina wire. Electricity and water were
cut off. The intent was to create a firetrap with no escape. Naturally there
were no firefighting vehicles present to put out the flames. Now the government
wants to blame the victims, but the Waco assault was deliberate mass
murder, decided at the White House.
On Sunday, Vice President Al Gore wept tears for those who died 50
years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But the methodical burning down of the
Waco commune, carried “live” on television, recalled nothing so much as the
Nazis’ razing of the Warsaw ghetto. Clinton/Gore have carried out their own
holocaust against another religious minority who evidently have “no right to
exist” in this racist capitalist society. The Clinton administration has carried
out its own Operation Prairie Slaughter, igniting a massive firestorm against
its perceived domestic “enemies,” a small group who did no harm to anyone.
The Spartacist League spokesman noted, “From Republican Bush to
Democrat Clinton, the racist rulers show what they have in store for anyone who
dares to defy the state. The murder of these innocent people, burned at the
stake by this bloodthirsty government, cries out for vengeance. It will take a
socialist revolution to mete out real justice to the police torturers of Rodney
King, to the FBI arsonists in Waco, to the U.S. military bombers of
Baghdad.”
Free Tinley Park Anti-Fascists!
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Workers Vanguard No. 1023
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3 May 2013
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Free Tinley Park Anti-Fascists!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
Last May, some 18 anti-racist militants broke up a gathering of
fascists in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park called to organize a “White
Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with
links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such
fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing
centers for race terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone
else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social
sanitation, five of the anti-fascist fighters were sentenced by a Cook County
court to prison terms of three-and-a-half to six years on charges of “armed
violence.” (See “Freedom Now for Tinley Park 5!” WV No. 1018, 22
February.)
The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee stand by
these militants and call on workers, leftists and anti-racist fighters to demand
freedom for the Tinley Park Five. The fascists are a deadly threat to the
integrated labor movement, which should be in the forefront of efforts to crush
them in the egg. Four of the five who were sentenced—Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee
Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin and Alex Stuck—have agreed to receive $25 monthly
stipends the PDC sends to class-war prisoners. The PDC program, which includes
additional gifts during the holiday season, serves not merely to alleviate some
of the harshness of incarceration but also as a message of solidarity from those
outside prison walls.
The courage of the Tinley Park defendants was seen in their
principled response to the government vendetta. Each of the five was initially
charged with 37 felony counts, including armed violence, property damage and mob
action. The cops and prosecutors applied continuous pressure to try to get them
to give up names of those involved in sending the fascists scattering, which the
five steadfastly refused to do. Unable to meet the exorbitant bonds, which
ranged up to $250,000, they spent seven months in Cook County Jail. Facing the
prospect of up to another year behind bars awaiting trial, they accepted a
non-cooperating agreement in which each pleaded guilty to three counts of armed
violence in return for guarantees of time off for good behavior.
In their letters agreeing to receive PDC stipends, the four
expressed appreciation for the contributions and also for the issues of
Class-Struggle Defense Notes and Workers Vanguard that they have
received. One noted that his fellow inmates lined up to read the WV
article about their case.
Initiated in 1986, the stipend program takes as its model that of
the International Labor Defense (ILD), affiliated to the early Communist Party,
which provided stipends to over 100 prisoners of the class war. As James P.
Cannon, founder and first secretary of the ILD, wrote, “The class conscious
worker accords to the class war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem”
(“The Cause That Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender [September
1926]). Past PDC recipients worldwide include an Irish Republican Socialist
Party militant, members of the British National Union of Mineworkers and members
of the U.S. miners, Teamsters and Steelworkers unions. Now, the Tinley Park
anti-fascists are joined in the program with America’s foremost class-war
prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier,
radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, former Black Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and
Ed Poindexter and imprisoned members of the Philadelphia MOVE commune.
We urge WV readers to contribute to the stipend program by
sending checks payable to the PDC and earmarked “prisoners stipends fund” to:
PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Station, New York, NY 10013-0099. Letters to the
Tinley Park Five can be sent to: Alex Stuck M34020, 2600 N. Brinton Avenue,
Dixon, IL 61021; Cody Sutherlin M34021, 13423 E. 1150th Avenue, Robinson, IL
62454; Dylan Sutherlin M34022, P.O. Box 7711, Centralia, IL 62801; Jason
Sutherlin M34023, 100 Hillcrest Rd., East Moline, IL 61244; John Tucker M34024,
P.O. Box 900, Taylorville, IL 62568.
Defend the NATO 3!
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Workers Vanguard No. 1023
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3 May 2013
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Defend the NATO 3!
Chicago
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
For nearly a year, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase, and Brian Jacob
Church have been locked away in Cook County Jail, facing possible 40-year prison
stretches on an array of “terrorism” and other trumped-up charges, with bail set
at $1.5 million each. Last spring, these Occupy activists traveled from Florida
to Chicago in the lead-up to protests against a May 20 summit of the
U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. The city was under a virtual
state of siege orchestrated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with thousands of National
Guardsmen, troops and cops mobilized to shield the summit from over 10,000
protesters. On May 16, Betterly, Chase and Church—now known as the NATO 3—were
arrested for a supposed plot to make four Molotov cocktails and hurl them at
police stations and other targets. The highly publicized arrests were part of a
campaign to brand the protests as violent, in order to chill opposition to the
NATO war criminals who have the blood of untold thousands in Afghanistan and
elsewhere on their hands.
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a 21 May 2012 protest
letter to the Cook County State’s Attorney (printed in WV No. 1003, 25
May 2012), “The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a
classic case of police entrapment and provocation.” The arrests came less than a
week after the defendants had posted a video on YouTube of a Chicago cop who had
pulled their car over, threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and
every one of you.”
In January, the NATO 3’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the
“terrorism” charges on constitutional grounds. The defense motion paints a
chilling picture of how undercover cops known as Mo and Gloves tried every trick
in the book to set the activists up:
“Despite a more than two-week continuing effort by the undercover
Chicago police officers posing as fellow members of Occupy to entice and
encourage the defendants to carry out some criminal act, the defendants never
did anything.... It was only in desperation, after two weeks of nothing to show
for their undercover infiltration of the defendants, and the untold resources
expended to facilitate those efforts, that the police suggested at least some
bottles of gasoline [Molotov cocktails] be put together. The defendants never
discussed a specific plan of what to do with these bottles, let alone a plan to
use them to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian
population. In fact, the bottles were always in possession of the under-cover
police who suggested their own provocative ideas for how to use the bottles.”
Just moments after the bottles were filled with gasoline, the
undercover cops sent a prearranged signal, and the police then raided the
apartment with guns drawn. They proceeded to ransack the place, confiscating
computers, cellphones and political literature.
The NATO 3 were not the only activists set up and slapped with
felony charges prior to the military summit. Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark
Neiweem were charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat” and “attempted
possession of an incendiary device” respectively. Both took non-cooperating plea
deals and remain imprisoned. In all, over 100 anti-NATO protesters were
arrested, from pacifist liberals to anarchoid activists. Also arrested during
the weekend of the May 20 protest were the Tinley Park 5, anti-fascists who have
been convicted for helping break up a white-supremacist gathering in a Chicago
suburb (see accompanying article).
On March 27, Judge Thaddeus Wilson denied the NATO 3’s defense
motion to dismiss, in a court hearing that was clearly designed to intimidate
the defendants and everyone who came out on their behalf. Observers noted that
while the judge announced his ruling, the defendants were held in a separate
room, sealed off by soundproof glass and away from their supporters, with an
armed, uniformed cop for each of them. Meanwhile, four armed cops sat in the
audience. “It’s what a lot of scholars and people who pay attention to national
security call the ‘new normal’,” said Thomas Durkin, a lawyer for Chase. In
simple terms, the “new normal” is a creeping police state.
As the NATO 3’s motion pointed out, the Illinois statutory
definition of terrorism is so vague and broad that it could include “labor
strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.”
Ever since the inception of the “war on terror” in 2001, we have warned that
while the first targets were mainly immigrants, particularly Muslims and those
from the Near East, the ultimate targets would be the labor movement, black
people, the left and anyone who would dare to protest the depredations of U.S.
imperialism, at home or abroad. And indeed, leftist political activity of many
stripes has increasingly become a focal point of “anti-terror” repression.
In 2008, a host of undercover agents wormed their way into the
organizing of protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis,
entrapping activists on “terrorism” charges. One agent later infiltrated the
Minneapolis branch of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization
(FRSO—publishers of Fight Back!). This led in 2010 to FBI raids and grand
jury subpoenas against 23 leftists and trade unionists in Chicago and
Minneapolis, many of them FRSO supporters, as part of a witchhunting
investigation falsely identifying solidarity efforts on behalf of Palestinian
and Colombian leftists with “material support to terrorism.” Last November, four
Cleveland supporters of the populist Occupy movement received prison terms
ranging from six to eleven and a half years for a plot concocted by an FBI
informant. Meanwhile police “red squads,” which had largely gone underground in
the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, have resurfaced in many cities
under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
A dangerous vise is being tightened around political protest in
this country. First Amendment rights and other civil liberties are shredded in
the name of “homeland security,” while the state’s moles and rats cook up
felonious “plots” aimed at luring political dissenters close enough to slap
charges on them. This is a concerted, bipartisan effort. The use
of anti-terror laws against leftists has accelerated under the Democratic
administration of Barack Obama. From San Francisco, Oakland and Portland to
Minneapolis, Chicago and Cleveland, it has been Democratic Party mayors who have
led the crackdowns and witchhunts aimed at Occupy and other protesters.
The NATO 3 are scheduled for trial on September 16. The PDC, a
legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist
League, calls on the left and labor movements to join in demanding: Drop
all the charges now! The PDC has donated $200 to the legal defense of
the NATO 3 and encourages others to do the same. Donations can be made at
https://www.wepay.com/donations/nato-5-defense.
Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Free the Detainees Now!
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Workers Vanguard No. 1022
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19 April 2013
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Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Free the Detainees Now!
APRIL 15—A mass hunger strike at the U.S. military’s Guantánamo
detention center in Cuba is now in its third month. Precipitated by a raid in
February during which prisoners’ Korans were desecrated, the hunger strike
includes a number of men who are near death as they protest being consigned to
endless incarceration in the prison’s notorious torture chambers. Lawyers for
the detainees report that some 130 prisoners are participating in the hunger
strike, with the military force-feeding 13 of them. As one striker told attorney
David Remes, detainees “feel like they’re living in graves” (Al Jazeera,
19 March). There has been at least one attempted suicide as well as reports of
prisoners coughing up blood and others hospitalized for dehydration. On April
13, shortly after a Red Cross delegation investigating the strike had left the
camp, guards fired “non-lethal” rounds at prisoners who resisted being forcibly
moved to single-cell lockups. In another display of cruelty, a federal judge
today dismissed an emergency motion from a hunger striker that sought an end to
the mistreatment, sneering that the prisoner had “self-manufactured” his
condition.
The hunger strike is a cry of despair over the legal limbo that
detainees have suffered under since U.S. imperialism launched its “war on
terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. As the U.S./NATO began its murderous occupation of Afghanistan,
hundreds of detainees were incarcerated indefinitely without a shred of legal
rights. Of the 166 men still imprisoned at Guantánamo, 86 were cleared for
release years ago. Most of the remaining 80 have not been charged with any
crime, and only 30 detainees are subjects of active “investigations.”
A March 14 letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel by detainees’
attorneys described the prisoners as “feeling hopeless in the face of 11 years
of detention without prospect of release or trial and the continuing inability
of the political branches to carry through on their commitment to close the
prison in a just manner” (ccrjustice.org). It is not only that Barack Obama has
reneged on his 2008 campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. The letter reports “a
background of increasingly regressive practices at the prison taking place in
recent months,” described by prisoners as a return to conditions in the Bush era
that were widely recognized as constituting torture.
Hunger striker Shaker Aamer is one of those who have been held
since 2002, never charged, never tried or convicted, cleared to go home but
still in detention despite protest from the government of Britain, where his
family resides. In a statement published in the New Statesman (5 April),
Aamer describes the plight of Yemeni detainee Abu Bakr, a/k/a “171,” who has
been on hunger strike since 2005 and has now become a special target of the
prison administrator: “Back in October, 171 was tied in the feeding chair, and
just left there for 52 hours. Then, from 4 January, he was isolated for a full
month.... He thinks they’ll kill him off, to encourage the others to give up
their strike.”
In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (14 April), another
Yemeni hunger striker, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, movingly recounted his
ordeal, not least the excruciating pain of the force-feedings. Moqbel observed:
“The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any
detainees back to Yemen.” Indeed, the U.S. president in early 2010 halted the
repatriation of detainees to Yemen under the pretext of “current security
conditions” in that country. Today, a majority of the remaining Guantánamo
detainees are Yemeni nationals. With the detentions provoking protests in Yemen,
its president, who has given his unqualified blessing to the U.S. campaign of
terror-by-drone in Yemen, felt compelled to intone: “We believe that keeping
someone in prison for over ten years without due process is clear-cut
tyranny.”
Whereas the Bush administration rounded up hundreds of men (some
under 18 years old) and tossed them into the CIA secret prison and rendition
network, the Obama White House has preferred to simply kill its targets, mainly
through drone strikes. At the same time, under Obama’s plan to shutter
Guantánamo, the system of indefinite detention would have continued, simply
relocated onto American soil. But with Congress working to ensure that
Guantánamo remain a detention center, the military’s Southern Command has
requested up to $170 million to upgrade existing facilities and an additional
$49 million for a new prison building to hold “special” detainees.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration cynically paints the
force-feeding of prisoners—officially recognized by the United Nations and
others as a form of torture—as supposedly protecting their safety and welfare.
This was too much even for the Obama-friendly New York Times, which ran a
5 April editorial declaring that “the truly humane response to this crisis is to
free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and
close the prison at Guantánamo.” For such bourgeois liberals, Guantánamo stains
the veneer of “democracy” with which America’s capitalist rulers cover their
depredations around the world.
As revolutionary proletarian opponents of imperialism, we call for
closing Guantánamo as well as for the release of all the remaining detainees,
despite the enormous gulf between our Marxist worldview and that of the
reactionary Islamist forces that the detainees are alleged to support. Our
program is not that of liberal reformers who seek to perfect the mechanisms of
imperialist rule by cleaning up its “excesses.” Our fight is to mobilize the
working class in opposition to imperialist wars and occupations and in defense
of all the exploited and oppressed, a struggle that must culminate in
proletarian revolution to destroy the imperialists’ machinery of state terror
once and for all.
For The Late Mad- Hatter Journalist Benny Sachem
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
There was a time when I would read everything that the mad-hatter journalist Benny Sachem wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Benny’s passing represents the end of an era. Not because I agreed with his (or their) political perspectives, or his cultural critiques but because, as a guy I respect, Kevin Callahan, a columnist for The Portland Gazette, pointed out one time he represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. Thompson as everybody knows, everybody from the back pages of the 1960s and 1970s knows, gored more oxen that one would think possible. But Benny did too.
Benny, like Thompson, went after, viciously went after which was the only possible way to do the thing, and do it right, one Richard Milhous Nixon. Yah, the guy who lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960, went away bleeding over everybody who would stand for it and spilled that same blood on everything he could get his grabby little hands around and came roaring back as the second coming of Count Dracula. In short as a President of the United States and common criminal who will forever replace guys like James Buchanan and Warren Harding as the bad boy of the White House. But see here was the beauty of a guy like Sachem, and Thompson too, he went after the thug Nixon when he was riding high during his first term back in the late 1960s when he was like some Madonna figure and most journalists were finding ways to take a dive for the duration and bury their heads in the sand and as well when he was almost sanctified in 1972 when he beat a bush league politician like George McGovern like a gong. Sachem was merciless in dragging Nixon down in the pits, into the pits of what a famous politician, one of the Kennedy boys, maybe Bobby of blessed memory I think, called Nixon the “dark side “of the American experiment. And he never let up beating Nixon like a gong while he down in the gutter with the common crooks, dope dealers, and hookers. Benny treated him rightly as just another night court denizen.
That wasn’t all though like Thompson Benny took on even bigger game in the American cultural night. Sacred mobbed up Las Vegas and its vengeful seeking of the American disposable dollar, the big hatted, bourbon-soaked untouchable Kentucky Derby from Thompson’s home state, and, Christ, this took real cojones, dismissing the football Super Bowl as so much bad hubris. And Benny Sachem, maybe a little less famously than Thompson always did the same thing on his various beats, mostly at the Kansas City Herald Tribune. Benny, from the same no holds barred school of journalism as Thompson, the notorious Gonzo school where a reporter actually reported stuff he thought about as well as the just the facts jack, not only took on old punching bag Nixon but he also skewered guys like Hubert Humphrey and that bush league George McGovern whom Thompson gave a pass to. See Benny, unlike Thompson, had no ill-defined political agenda so he didn’t have to give passes to those he was trying to influence, or in order to get some cozy one-on-one interview. One can hardly forget the time when Benny and the usually unflappable McGovern almost went mano y mano on national television when Benny asked about his hidden young mistress back in Fargo, or one of those dank Dakota places. That was pure Benny, go for the jugular, and take no prisoners
Benny was even better as being the thorn in side of lesser politicians, the guys who wanted to make it to the top but didn’t, didn’t in more than one case because of some Benny expose. Like that time that Muskie, the guy from Maine who ran as Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 was riding high before Benny got to his doctor who was issuing him morphine prescriptions. Jesus, a stone-cold junkie as President. Thanks Benny on that one. Or like the time he stopped Jerry Brown, yah, the California guy who has been running for some office since Hector was a pup, in his tracks when he exposed the Mexican cartel cocaine connection that was funding his presidential bids back in the 1980s. And who was caught sampling the merchandise as well, right in public, claiming it was just a snuff box like it was about 1750 or something. Kudos Benny.
But Benny was best known for his sports columns, for his disassembling of the disassemblers who people that industry, including some of his fellow sports- writers. Who can forget that expose of the famed football writer, Grantland Stevens, who it turned out was stealing his copy straight from the publicity department of the Chicago Bears and claiming it was his stone-cold own work. Or the time he dismissed the New York Yankees, a team he loved from childhood having grown up in the shadow of the stadium in the Bronx, as nothing but candy asses and pretty boys, overpaid as well. He even out bad hubris-ed [sic] Thompson on the Super Bowl calling it a worse show than some low rent drag queen review in the Village. There were too many individual player stories that he wrote to mention here but as a measure of his power by the end of his career he was persona non grata in most American sports locker rooms, including that of the saintly PGA. That is to his credit.
And of course, as well, you had to read Benny for his love of language, language that curled around an idea. Not some academic-trained use this word here and that word there and please, not too many syllables because someone might either not understand the word or become offended by use of the reference. He took more heat than one could shake a stick at for calling George Stevens, the baseball owner, a troglodyte, which of course he was (and Benny tracing his habits proved that to be true but everybody thought it was some off-the-wall sexual reference). One could go on and on.
Of course some of his characterizations would not be politically correct these days, and probably rightly so, as when he called one professional lady golfer a daughter of Sappho and another a daughter of Lesbos, or some pleasing and pleasant black ball player an Uncle Tom, or ditto some Latino player Tio Taco. Worse was when he would call about every guy not hunkered down with weight and muscle “light on his feet,” or a hermaphrodite. Fortunately most people who read his stuff were clueless on his references but in those days you could say that stuff an and not get called on the carpet for it since nobody wanted to have to prove they were, or were not, what he characterized them as. Not in court anyway.
Those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news flash world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so. Adieu Benny, warts and all.Tuesday, May 07, 2013
150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
Workers Vanguard No. 1021
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5 April 2013
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Spartacist Forum
150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
Finish the Civil War!
Part One
The following is a presentation, edited for publication, by
Spartacist League speaker Brian Manning at a March 23 New York City
forum.
The Commander-in-Chief of bloody U.S. imperialism was inaugurated
again a couple of months ago, and he cynically repeated the words of Abraham
Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence—fine words about fighting for
justice and equality. But Barack Obama is Commander-in-Chief of a capitalist
system long into its imperialist epoch of decay. Today, racist U.S. imperialism
continues to carry out what has been more than a century of pillage and war
across the globe, brutally exploiting labor at home and abroad while
qualitatively arresting wider social and economic development. The American
capitalist rulers are the main enemy of the world’s working people and
oppressed, as the millions of dead bodies from Hiroshima to Korea to Vietnam to
Iraq to Afghanistan silently attest.
In 1852 Frederick Douglass said, “There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the
United States at this very hour.” Substitute “ruling class” for “people” and it
holds true today. But in the interim there was a great revolution in this
country—the Second American Revolution. The Civil War was the last great,
progressive act of the American bourgeoisie. To further the consolidation of
industrial capitalism, at a time when the exploitation of free labor represented
an historical advance, the North was compelled to destroy the system of chattel
slavery in the South. Slavery has been smashed, but the legacy of slavery,
racial oppression, lives on.
The foundations of Obama’s current residence and indeed the
foundations of capitalist America were built by the labor of black slaves. The
election of the first black president in history has done nothing and will do
nothing to relieve the continuing nightmare of racial oppression for the mass of
the black population. That oppression is structurally embedded in American
capitalism and will not be overcome short of socialist revolution.
Obama’s liberal apologists, including those on the left who
consider themselves socialists, like the International Socialist Organization
(ISO) and Socialist Alternative, make excuses for Obama. They complain that
Obama’s hands are tied, that he can’t do anything because if he does the right
wing will say he was doing it for black people. Well, Obama’s hands aren’t tied!
The hands of the working class are tied, chained to the racist capitalist
Democratic Party by trade-union misleaders who preach that the Democrats are the
lesser evil. Obama likes to appeal for unity—one nation, one people. But this is
a class-divided country—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And the two classes
have no common interests. In this capitalist country, the head of the government
always represents the ruling class. Obama represents the system that is based on
exploitation, oppression and war. The cynical sops he throws out are so much
poisonous pabulum to fool the gullible or satisfy the sycophants.
With the release of the Lincoln movie, it was inevitable
that there would be favorable comparisons of Lincoln and Obama. But we are
talking apples and oranges. Abraham Lincoln was president in a different epoch,
when capitalism was historically progressive, when for a short time the
interests of the nascent bourgeoisie coincided with the interests of black
people in their fight against slavery and racist oppression, when the triumph of
capitalism despite all the horrors inherent in that system of exploitation
meant, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “a new birth of freedom.” Obama does not
represent the culmination of the fight for black freedom but the effort of a
retrograde system to preserve its barbaric rule by placing a black man at the
helm.
One hundred and fifty years ago, when Lincoln was president, the
capitalist system was different—not prettier, not benign, but compelled by
history to eliminate a more backward economic system. The Union armies, black
and white, began the task of ending black oppression by burning out the system
of slavery. But the task of achieving full equality for black people still
remains. The special oppression born of slavery will be destroyed only through a
class-struggle fight against that oppression and the system that perpetuates
it—capitalism. We fight for the full integration of black people into an
egalitarian socialist society—revolutionary integration. It is up to the
multiracial working class, led by its most conscious elements forged together in
a revolutionary vanguard party, to finish the job. That’s why we say: Finish the
Civil War!
The Civil War: A Social Revolution
An antiquated social order does not cede its place to a new order
without resistance—not today, not ever. A change in social regimes presupposes
the harshest form of class struggle, i.e., revolution. The American Civil War
was the most titanic and bloody of all social struggles during the 19th century.
That struggle and the changes it wrought in the social and economic system,
particularly in regard to the black population, set the stage for the American
socialist revolution today. It was of decisive significance because the first
American Revolution, in 1776, didn’t accomplish all of the tasks demanded of the
bourgeoisie, specifically, national unification under a common political
economy. It did not answer the question of who was to have political and
economic supremacy: the slavocracy or the bourgeoisie. The first American
Revolution was born of a compromise that gave the slavocracy an inordinate
amount of power.
Compromise, that’s what the American system is all about, that’s
how change comes about, right? The president of Emory University in Atlanta
recently lauded the compromise that left black people enslaved and counted as
three-fifths of a human being. But I bet the slave, shackled and whipped in
perpetuity, didn’t think it was much of a compromise.
Despite pervasive racist attitudes among all social classes in the
North, the compelling historic interests of Northern capital, expressed in the
founding of the Republican Party as explicitly anti-slavery, led to a war
against the southern slavocracy. The Radical program eventually became
government policies. The armies of the Confederacy were defeated on the
battlefields of the Civil War, and the political and economic power of the
slaveowners’ oligarchy was shattered. The bourgeois dictatorship set up during
the war was consolidated and the republic remodeled into conformity with the
class aims and interests of the bourgeoisie. The way was paved for the
exploitation of the North American continent and the world by American
capital.
The North’s victory was possible only through the emancipation of
the millions of black chattel slaves and the arming of 200,000 of them in a war
that destroyed the slave system. Today, the descendants of those slaves form a
key component of the American proletariat, which will be the gravedigger of
capitalism. The joint struggle of blacks and whites together has been a key
motor force for social progress in this country, from the liberal-led civil
rights movement that resulted in the end of de jure segregation to the
massive class battles—many led by reds—that led to the formation of the
integrated CIO unions.
In the 19th century, the Civil War and Reconstruction constituted
the most far-reaching example of that joint struggle. The turbulent decade
following the Civil War was one of interracial bourgeois democracy in the South,
carried out by the freedmen and their white allies and protected by federal
troops, many of them black. This period, known as Radical Reconstruction, was
the most egalitarian experiment in U.S. history. A hundred and fifty years after
the fact, the bourgeoisie wants to bury the truth about the Civil War. They
would like to blot out any record of the fact that a social revolution occurred,
that armies of black former slaves bloodily suppressed white racist armies. The
bourgeoisie wants to paint an image of the war as a tragic conflict, a purely
military affair, and to extol the virtues of Lincoln the gifted and wily
compromiser, the kindly Father Abraham who freed the slaves.
Because of the reality of black oppression today, people generally
don’t appreciate the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people
today are no longer slaves, but neither are they free. The war and its results
were a good thing. It was a social revolution in so far as labor is concerned.
Slavery was destroyed. It is just unfortunate that it did not come sooner and
that its job was not done more thoroughly.
The Northern bourgeoisie was reluctant to wage revolutionary
warfare against the slavocracy, and afterward they made their peace with the
Southern propertied classes and their minions at the expense of the emancipated
blacks. The period after the destruction of the slave system was a period
characterized by great fluidity in social relations, as the old social order had
been destroyed. But the defeat of Reconstruction ensured the subordinate
position of black people in American society. Black people were eventually
consolidated into a race-color caste, integrated into the capitalist economy but
forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. This was codified around the turn
of the last century in the system known as Jim Crow.
The contours of society that emerged out of the Civil War and the
defeat of Reconstruction—the economic system, the social relations, the
political structure—are essentially the contours of American society that we
know today. That’s not to say there haven’t been some changes since then, for
example, those resulting from the civil rights movement. But the basic lines are
still the same.
The young working class did not enter the struggle against the
slave power as a class on its own account, or with as much consciousness of its
own aims as had been the case in the bourgeois revolutions in Europe in the 19th
century. In the North, the white working class was the base of the slaveholders’
Democratic Party. You know, it’s nice to be able to denounce the Democrats here
and not have people argue, “Oh, they’re the lesser of two evils.” Political
parties cannot ignore their heritage. The Democrats were the party of slavery,
the party of the White Leagues and the Redeemers, the party of the Dixiecrats.
And now they’re the party of Obama.
It was only when the Northern bourgeoisie conquered political power
and remodeled the state according to its own wants that the inevitable conflict
between labor and capital became imminent. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in
Europe fought from the very beginning for the victory of the Union, the Northern
bourgeoisie, in the Civil War. This was not because they were interested in a
better, more just bourgeois society per se but because they wanted the working
class to fight for socialist revolution, to seize power in its own name. They
knew that it could not do so as long as slavery dominated and disfigured the
country, stunting the development and consciousness of the proletariat. As Marx
wrote, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, where in the black
skin it is branded.”
And the War Came
In 1860 the slaveowners said that the slave system was great. It
had been in place on this continent for 250 years. But in 1865, four million
black slaves had been freed in the course of a great Civil War. A key milestone
was the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the death knell of slavery on the
North American continent.
In this talk I want to focus in a little more detail on the summer
and fall of 1862, on the various challenges that Abraham Lincoln had to confront
when making his decision for emancipation. That’s when the character of the war
changed. Before the battle of Antietam in Maryland in September 1862 and the
announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in the wake of that Union victory,
it was possible that a compromise settlement that left slavery intact could have
been hammered out. Afterward, only a hard war was possible—a war of subjugation
in which the slavocracy and its ability to wage war against the Union were
destroyed.
As Marxists and historical materialists, we see the world in class
terms. In 1860, the South had to expand or die. The question was who was going
to be master of the North American continent. Marx wrote:
“The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore,
nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the
system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can
no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can
only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”
— “The Civil War in the United States,” November 1861
The slave system was increasingly a brake on material progress. By
all indices—industrial production, miles of railroad, agricultural
production—the South lagged way behind the North. Just as European capitalism
had to liberate itself from the outworn restrictions of feudalism, so a dynamic
American capitalism could no longer coexist with the outworn institution of
slavery. Abraham Lincoln was elected on a program of no expansion of slavery. He
could not have been elected on an abolition program. But even so, his program
was not acceptable to the South.
Lincoln wanted to put slavery on a road to eventual extinction, and
his favorite schemes were for gradual compensated emancipation and the
colonization of black people outside of the country. The slavocracy, that thin
layer of wealthy planters that ruled the South and the federal government for
most of its existence up till then, still would have none of that. Lincoln was
also inclined to denounce slavery as denying men and women the hard-earned
fruits of their labor. He thought it was immoral for some to eat while others
did all of the work. Lincoln and the Republicans extolled the virtues of the
free labor system whereby everyone supposedly has a chance to improve their
condition.
Now, there hasn’t been much acknowledgement of the Emancipation
Proclamation sesquicentennial. But the Wall Street Journal did notice,
and what they focused on was that Lincoln believed in liberty of all kinds,
beginning with economic freedom. That’s rich coming from the newspaper that
speaks for the lords of finance capital, some of the most despicable parasites,
who believe it’s their right to suck the lifeblood out of the poor and oppressed
masses around the world.
The Democrats had dominated the political scene since the time of
Andrew Jackson. But in 1860 the party split between a Northern and a Southern
wing. Many in the Northern wing opposed secession, and so the Democrats lost to
the Republicans. With Lincoln’s election, eleven states seceded and rose in
armed rebellion, attacking federal forces at Fort Sumter. Lincoln never
compromised on the need to save the Union despite pressure to do so. But
initially his war aims were limited to restoring the Union and bringing the
Confederate states back into the Union as it had been. Lincoln wanted to draw in
to that fight all the elements that wanted to save the Union. Hence, his
conciliatory policies toward the border states and the War Democrats. He could
not have mobilized for the war without the help of the War Democrats.
The Southern war aims were very explicit: to protect and defend
slavery. The Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, in a speech right
after secession—the famous “cornerstone speech”—said that his new government’s
“foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the
negro is not the equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the
superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” So even if the North was not
fighting against slavery, the South was fighting for
slavery.
Butler and the “Contrabands”
From the beginning, the abolitionists raised the call to turn the
war into an abolition war. For years, through tireless and courageous agitation,
the abolitionists had sought to bring the slavery question to the fore. There
had been the prelude to the Civil War in “Bleeding Kansas,” and John Brown and
his integrated band had sent a lightning bolt through the nation with the
Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Now the chance to wage war against the slave power
was here. The great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote:
“Fire must be met with water, darkness with light, and war for the
destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery....
Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed
into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of
Emancipation among the slaves.”
— “How to End the War,” Douglass’ Monthly (May 1861),
printed in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 3
The slaves knew the stakes. They had their own agenda and
immediately started coming into Union lines. Union commanders were wondering:
“What do we do with these slaves coming into our lines?” The slaves had been
doing work for the Confederates, raising food, of course, and working for the
army as teamsters and laborers. The Northern government had no consistent policy
as to what to do about slaves and the slavery question, as yet. So, in May 1861,
General George McClellan, who was a pro-slavery War Democrat in Virginia, told
his armies to send the slaves back to their owners and be prepared to suppress
slave insurrections.
On the other hand, Benjamin Butler—a political appointee and a
lawyer from Massachusetts—was also a Democrat, but one who actually started
changing when confronted with the problems of war. Butler came up with a new
policy, the contraband policy. Also in Virginia in May 1861, three slaves who
had been building Confederate fortifications came into Union lines. The next
day, a Confederate colonel who had been their owner came in under a flag of
truce and demanded his property back under the authority of the Fugitive Slave
Law. Well, Butler told him no, they’re contraband of war and we’re keeping them.
And he sent the colonel packing. That policy was eventually endorsed by the
federal government.
So the slaves came into Union lines by the thousands, saying,
“We’re contrabands!” and the pressure to abolish slavery started rising. But
Lincoln was not ready to act on the slavery question. In August 1861, General
Frémont, who had been the 1856 candidate of the Republican Party, issued an
order in Missouri freeing the slaves of rebels. His armies weren’t faring too
well and he needed some help. He was dealing with what would become a really
brutal guerrilla war in Missouri. He issued an order which stated:
“All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands within
these lines shall be tried by court martial, and, if found guilty will be shot.
The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri, who
shall take up arms against the United States...is declared to be confiscated to
the public use, and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free
men.”
— quoted in William Wells Brown, The Negro in the American
Rebellion (1971)
Lincoln forced Frémont to revoke that order, and in December 1861
he fired his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, who had been advocating
emancipation. Granted, Cameron was truly corrupt and ineffective. Nevertheless,
he was advocating emancipation. Lincoln ended up replacing Cameron with War
Democrat Edwin Stanton, who turned out to be a great choice.
Not a whole lot was happening on the battle front. There were a few
victories for the Union, notably by Ulysses S. Grant west of the Appalachians.
Meanwhile, McClellan was training the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. Lincoln
was pressuring him to act, but he just stayed with his huge army, camped around
Washington, D.C., doing nothing but drilling.
Toward Emancipation
In the spring of 1862, neither side was closer to victory. Lincoln
continued efforts at gradual, compensated emancipation. He begged the border
states to embrace compensation, hinting to them that bigger changes might be
coming down the pike if they did not embrace compensated emancipation. Lincoln
also signed into law all measures passed by Congress proscribing slavery,
including the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal
territories.
For many soldiers, the experience of war was turning them against
slavery. A volunteer from the Third Wisconsin Regiment wrote, “The rebellion is
abolitionizing the whole army.” In May 1862, General David Hunter, commanding
the Department of the South, comprising South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,
declared that slaves in his Department were forever free. Lincoln overturned
that order, much to the chagrin of abolitionists, and said that if anyone were
to act, it would be the president, not his generals. But Lincoln did not object
to emancipation per se.
Hunter was operating from the Sea Islands, just off the coast of
South Carolina and Georgia. The slave masters had fled at the beginning of the
war, when the Union Navy arrived. Hunter had been requesting reinforcements so
he could carry on some work on the mainland but had not been able to get any
from Washington. So he started arming the slaves on his own. The War Department
got wind of this and wanted to know what Hunter was doing. He replied in a
letter:
“No regiment of ‘fugitive slaves’ has been or is being organized
in this department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late
masters are ‘fugitive rebels’.... They are now, working one and all, with
remarkable industry to place themselves in a position to go in full and
effective pursuit of their fugacious and traitorous proprietors.”
— quoted in Dudley Cornish, The Sable Arm (1990)
Many of those first organized by Hunter later went on to be
incorporated into the Union Army as the First and Second South Carolina Colored
Troops.
Any momentum created by the Union victories at Fort Donelson and
Shiloh was offset by the stalled Peninsula Campaign in Virginia in the spring
and early summer of 1862, which culminated in a series of savage engagements
known collectively as the Seven Days’ Battles, fought between June 25 and July
1. George McClellan, leading the main Northern army, the Army of the Potomac,
had been delaying, dilly-dallying all winter. Then, when forced into battle, he
was overcautious, tentative and anxious to blame anyone—particularly Lincoln—for
his own failures. He got to within a few miles of Richmond and then retreated.
Two years later, Lincoln confided to artist Francis Carpenter that “I felt that
we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been
pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics,
or lose the game.”
In mid June, Lincoln apparently first decided to issue an
emancipation order, and he discussed this with his vice president, Hannibal
Hamlin. Six months earlier, in December 1861, Lincoln said in his message to
Congress: “The war continues. In considering the policy to be adopted for
suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable
conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless
revolutionary struggle.” But increasingly, the war was becoming exactly that on
the slavery question and on the question of the destruction of the South’s
ability to make war. To bring this to fruition, Lincoln had to dance through a
minefield: Pro-slavery generals who didn’t want to fight to finish off the
rebels, border state opposition to tampering with slavery, public opinion in the
North, which was hardly universally abolitionist.
McClellan in the Way
On July 8, Lincoln’s most powerful general, McClellan, gave him a
letter. Really it was a political manifesto urging a conservative war policy and
urging Lincoln to abjure all thoughts of emancipation and put control of all
military affairs into McClellan’s hands. McClellan was a real piece of work. He
had been placed in command the previous fall and had effectively reorganized and
trained the army. He was totally full of himself, disdainful of Lincoln and
angling for power. He surrounded himself with cronies all with the same view:
keep things as they are, don’t touch slavery.
But Congress and Lincoln had other ideas. On July 17, Congress
passed the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed the seizure of rebel property,
including slaves who would be emancipated. Although he signed it, Lincoln had
his doubts, still. He actually wrote out a veto message that said, “The severest
justice may not always be the best policy.” Lincoln was not a consistent
proponent of hard war, yet. At the same time, he wrote a letter to a Treasury
official in New Orleans who complained that Union policy seemed headed toward
emancipation. Lincoln wrote testily: “What would you do in my position? Would
you drop the war where it is? Or would you prosecute it in future with
elderstalk squirts charged with rosewater?”
On July 22, Lincoln presented a draft of the Emancipation
Proclamation to his cabinet. Secretary of State William Seward suggested that
Lincoln hold off issuing this preliminary proclamation until there was a Union
victory. Otherwise, it might be viewed as an act of desperation on the part of
the Union.
Lincoln acceded to this, but that victory did not come for another
two months. You know, Lincoln was such a bundle of contradictions. As we wrote
in our pamphlet Black History and the Class Struggle (No. 22): “The
American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois
and revolutionary at the same time. With all the contradictions this implies.”
Here’s a good example. Lincoln had already determined that he was going to
emancipate the slaves in August 1862, and so he met with black leaders that
month at the White House to encourage them to embrace colonization. He argued
that blacks should leave the country because “you and we are different races.
Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on
an equality with the white race. But for your race among us, there could not be
war. It is better for us both to be separated.”
The black delegation was not impressed, and told him so. Black
slaves had built the South, had supported themselves and their masters and
created untold wealth for their masters besides. And the war had raised the
hopes of the black population. What little sentiment there had been for
emigration before the war totally dissipated after the war began.
Then on August 17 Horace Greeley wrote in his New York
Tribune “The Prayer of Twenty Millions Demanding Emancipation.” Lincoln
wrote his famous response:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could
save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. And if I
could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do
that....
“I have here stated my purpose according to my view of
official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed
personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
Lincoln was still worried about the border states. How would whites
there react to an emancipation edict? Cassius Clay, a Kentucky radical Unionist
after whom Muhammad Ali would later be named, told Lincoln to chill out: Anybody
who’s in a border state who wanted to fight for the Confederacy is already
fighting for the Confederacy. Meanwhile, McClellan is sitting idly with his
army. He said he was gratified to receive “letters from the North urging me to
march on Washington and assume the government.”
On August 30 there was another Union disaster: General Pope was
defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run. McClellan looked on gleefully as
Pope’s forces around D.C. were routed, holding his own forces back from coming
to their relief. He figured if Pope was defeated it could only further his own
agenda. Pope had lost the confidence of his officers and the army. So Lincoln
appointed McClellan to command all of the armies around D.C., over the strenuous
objections of his cabinet. Secretary of War Stanton had passed around a
statement calling for McClellan’s removal, which almost all of the cabinet
signed. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase said that McClellan should be taken out
and shot. But Lincoln didn’t see an alternative. He kept McClellan as the top
general, but he was a total wreck about it.
McClellan Removed
The summer of 1862 was the key turning point in the war. The
strategies of both the North and the South had to change if either
was to win a victory. At the end of August, the South launched a simultaneous
invasion of two border states, Maryland and Kentucky, to “liberate” the
supposedly pro-Confederate population from Yankee oppression. Lincoln and
Confederate president Jeff Davis were not acting as the heads of stable national
governments defending well-established constitutional systems but as leaders of
embattled political movements whose regimes were vulnerable to the play of
social and political forces they struggled to control.
Lincoln knew from the moment McClellan came to Washington in July
1861 to assume command of the Army of the Potomac that “Little Mac,” as he was
called, had incessantly schemed and conspired and politicked to try to gain
control of the administration. In August and September of 1862, Lincoln came to
believe that McClellan was deliberately sabotaging the war effort and that the
ideas being espoused at army headquarters were increasingly disloyal and
treasonous. The capital was rife with rumors of plots and counterplots in the
summer and fall. Colonel Thomas Key, who was on McClellan’s staff, told a New
York Tribune reporter that high officers in the Army of the Potomac were
planning to “change front on Washington.” McClellan’s circle of confidants
considered him to be the one man capable of saving the Union from both secession
and radicalism, and the Army the only institution strong enough and loyal enough
to control the administration.
Lee invaded Maryland and McClellan lucked out. He got a copy of
Lee’s order detailing the disposition of Confederate troops going into Maryland.
So at Antietam the Union was able to thwart the Confederate invasion. But
McClellan refused to go in for the kill, to destroy Lee’s army. To his mind,
that was not part of the plan.
Lincoln had not effected the strategic transformation he had
envisioned in early July, the shift from a strategy of conciliation to a
strategy of subjugation. That required the permanent sidelining of McClellan and
the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation. But the victory at Antietam
enabled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which he did in
preliminary form on September 22. But it also aggrandized McClellan, who opposed
emancipation and was willing to use his power to thwart Lincoln. Additionally,
on September 24, Lincoln authorized the suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus anywhere in the country, which allowed the arrest and detention of
those accused of being Confederate agents or sympathizers and the suppression of
newspapers for sedition.
It remained to be seen whether the military leadership was prepared
to fight a war of subjugation, an emancipation war. Lincoln and his cabinet
worried about how McClellan would respond. Lincoln did not publicly acknowledge
the existence of the McClellan conspiracy; to do so would be to provoke a direct
and dangerous confrontation between civil and military authorities. McClellan
was either disloyal or incompetent, or both. So he had to go. But how to get rid
of him, when he had just won the Battle of Antietam and public opinion was still
in a tizzy over the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and
the suspension of habeas corpus? And all this was on the eve of midterm
elections. This was not the Korean War of the 1950s, when the primacy of civil
over military authority was already well-established. When General MacArthur
objected to Harry Truman’s war policies, Truman had a precedent for firing him.
Plus, MacArthur was halfway around the world, not 70 miles from D.C.
Lincoln started weakening McClellan’s position by exposing his
flaws as a general, and McClellan had to decide what to do. He discussed it with
his coterie in the army and prominent Democratic Party supporters who came to
his camp up at Antietam, and even his pro-administration generals, all of whom
advised him not to usurp civil authority. But McClellan did what he wanted. He
issued an order to his army on the subject of the Emancipation Proclamation,
carefully avoiding explicit opposition to the president but saying that the
remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the
action of the people at the polls, a clear challenge to the president.
Furthermore, McClellan refused to move his army to attack Lee, again, despite
direct orders. Lincoln waited until midterm elections were over (the Republicans
got trounced, by the way) and removed McClellan from his generalship. McClellan
accepted it passively.
TO BE CONTINUED
Workers Vanguard No. 1022
|
19 April 2013
|
Spartacist Forum
150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
Finish the Civil War!
Part Two
Part One of this article, which concludes here, appeared in
WV No. 1021 (5 April).
A hundred days elapsed between the announcement of the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and when it was to take effect
on January 1, 1863. Did the Army support the Emancipation Proclamation? A
resounding “yes.” The old vets in particular wanted to strike at the heart of
the rebellion. And many in the North greeted it heartily, such as the
abolitionists, the Radicals. And Northern public opinion followed the Army’s.
Northerners were getting radicalized en masse as well.
The Emancipation Proclamation was an unprecedented assertion of
presidential and federal power, altering forever the constitutional balance of
powers. Congress had challenged Lincoln’s authority to control war policy and
military appointments, but now, with the stroke of a pen, $3.5 billion worth of
property was legally annihilated. In purely economic terms it approaches Henry
VIII’s seizure of church properties during the Reformation and the Bolsheviks’
nationalization of the factories and farms after the Russian Revolution. The
preliminary emancipation also stated of the freed slaves that the government
“will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or
acts to repress such persons, in any efforts they may make for their actual
freedom.”
Oh, the howls of protest! Echoing the concerns of the rebels, the
London Times wrote that this was an incitement to servile insurrection.
Well, the British ruling class was maybe a little paranoid. They had just
finished putting down the 1857 Sepoy mutiny, the massive rebellion across the
Indian subcontinent sparked by the Sepoys, who were the Indian soldiers in
service to the British military. The abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner’s nice
riposte to this was that if servile insurrection happens, they’re only getting
what they deserve. But that phrase was taken out and replaced with an admonition
to the freedmen “to abstain from all violence unless in necessary self defense.”
This was still quite radical. That a slave could never raise his
hand against the master was fundamental to slavery. And then the preliminary
emancipation stated that blacks “will be received into the armed service of the
U.S.” The abolitionists had been fighting for that since the beginning of the
war. By extending the right to join in common defense through the use of federal
power, it fundamentally altered the civil status of blacks in the North as well
as the South, setting a precedent and stimulating a political movement for equal
citizenship.
The preliminary decree had a call for continued colonization
efforts. But by January 1, 1863, when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation,
Lincoln changed his mind. The final proclamation was silent about colonization,
and Lincoln would never again mention it in public.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a pledge, a promise. It only
freed slaves in areas that were not yet controlled by Union armies, true enough.
But in that sense it was like the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which
didn’t make any of the colonies free—it took a victorious war to free the
colonies from British rule. The Emancipation Proclamation bound the defense of
the Union to the destruction of slavery. Given the rebel determination to defend
slavery, the war could not be prosecuted as anything but a war of subjugation.
Once the power of the government was enlisted on the side of freedom in one
place, it couldn’t be restricted in another. Over three million slaves were
affected by the Emancipation Proclamation; 830,000 were exempted, but nothing
anywhere was untouched. Slaves in the exempted areas voted with their feet as
well.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not sound like much; it was a
pretty dry document. The abolitionists were disappointed because the
proclamation was only issued on account of military necessity; they wanted some
high-sounding phrases about advancing the cause of freedom. It was only because
Salmon Chase said he should put something in there that Lincoln actually put in
a sentence saying that it was sincerely believed to be an act of justice.
Nevertheless, as Karl Marx wrote in Comments on the North American Events
(October 1862): “The manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important
document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to
the tearing up of the old American constitution.” The only way the war could end
was by the outright victory of one side over the other, and the victory of the
North meant a revolutionary transformation of American society.
Since the beginning of the war there was a threat that Britain and
France would enter on the side of the South. But once emancipation was
proclaimed, Britain especially was unable to intervene. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels and others organized support for the Union among workers in Britain, then
the most powerful capitalist country in the world. They were quite successful,
too, despite the desperate attempts of the ruling class to win the workers to
the side of the slavocracy. British textile workers in particular exercised
militant and heroic solidarity with their white and black brothers and sisters
across the Atlantic. Impoverished to begin with, many endured years of
unemployment due in part to the war. But they never wavered. Marx wrote:
“The English working class has won immortal historical honour for
itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on
behalf of the American slaveholders by its enthusiastic mass meetings, even
though the prolongation of the American Civil War subjects a million English
workers to the most fearful sufferings and privations.”
— Proclamation on Poland by the German Workers’ Educational
Society in London (October 1863)
Who Freed the Slaves?
Lincoln both led and responded to a transformation in public
sentiment. He was later quoted as saying, “It is my conviction that, had the
proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment
would not have sustained it.” The same was true with enlisting black men. He
said, “The step taken sooner could not, in my judgment, have been carried out.”
So was Lincoln too slow in proclaiming emancipation, turning the Civil War into
an abolition war? Well, fast and slow are relative terms. Perhaps he agonized
too long on the border states. Perhaps he fretted too long about the Northern
Democrats. But by the standards of the American people as a whole, Lincoln’s
pace was radical and swift.
The bulk of the Northern populace, and particularly white soldiers,
came to see the need to fight for black freedom. The soldiers came to that
understanding much sooner. That’s not to say that the Army was free from
prejudice, far from it. But especially once blacks proved themselves in battle,
they earned the respect of their white comrades-in-arms.
Of course, there was opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation
from the Democrats, the most rabid of whom were known as Copperheads, after the
poisonous snake. The antiwar Democrats escalated racist hysteria among workers
and immigrants, with Democratic politicians and newspapers declaring that the
freed slaves would steal the jobs of white workers. We’ve heard that before,
haven’t we? I mean, the ruling class is whipping up that same hysteria over
immigrant workers today. Then in 1863 the anti-draft riots in New York City
turned into a racist pogrom. In 1864, during a period of defeat and
demoralization in the North in the lead-up to the elections, the Democrats
fomented racist opposition to emancipation. They actually coined the word
miscegenation and published material replete with lurid racist cartoons.
McClellan was the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 1864.
Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, many in the black nationalist
movement and the New Left questioned Abraham Lincoln’s role: Did he free the
slaves? The short answer is yes, because without a Civil War victory there would
be no emancipation. And Lincoln was the primary architect of that victory.
Lincoln has also been slandered as a racist by, for example, the historian
Lerone Bennett and the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP
has a sordid history in the fight against black oppression anyway, most
notoriously in Boston during the 1974 busing crisis when they sided with white
racists against the fight for integration. Lincoln was not a racist—the racists
were the ones Lincoln was fighting against.
And then there is the Spark organization. They’re agnostic on the
Civil War. They say it was a civil war in the South against Yankee capitalist
oppression and they have no problem with the Confederate flag. Progressive Labor
(PL), similarly, ignores the centrality of the fight against slavery. Even
worse, PL lauds the New York City draft riots without mentioning slavery.
They all imbibe the racist myth, born out of the defeat of
Reconstruction and perpetuated by generations of historians and defenders of the
Confederacy, that the Civil War was not about slavery. Lincoln
changed and the aims of the war changed. The Abraham Lincoln who said he was
against “remorseless revolutionary struggle” in 1861 is not the same Lincoln
who, at his second inaugural in 1865, said:
“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.”
But we are not uncritical of Lincoln. I would like to quote
Frederick Douglass from a speech he delivered in April 1876 at the dedication of
the freedmen’s memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. You had all the
luminaries of the Republican Party there: President Ulysses S. Grant, Salmon
Chase, who was at this point chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And
Frederick Douglass says:
“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either
our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of
thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man....
“Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a
bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the
oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose....
“Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in
living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things,
must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United
States.”
— The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 4
The Role of Black Troops
A key provision of the Emancipation Proclamation was the arming of
the slaves. Black troops played a critical role in the Union victory. With the
recruitment of regiments of former slaves against their former masters, it was
clear that a revolution was in progress. The Black Spartacus was on the march!
It was very demoralizing to the slaveholders.
But it was a question: Would the former slaves fight? Would they be
good soldiers? Many doubted that after the degradation of slavery blacks could
be good soldiers and not just humble, subservient, oppressed people. But the
heroic Massachusetts 54th Regiment decisively settled that question when they
charged into the guns of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, incurring massive
casualties. Black soldiers became some of the best fighters for the Union,
fighting for freedom, fighting for the freedom of their families, fighting with
nooses around their necks. They were sent back into slavery if they were
captured and their white officers faced execution if they were captured.
If black soldiers surrendered, the Confederates often massacred
them. One of the worst examples was at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, a federal
garrison composed of black regiments and white regiments. When the garrison
surrendered after being attacked by the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest,
scores of black soldiers were massacred. Forrest was a slave trader before the
war, a dealer in convict labor after the war, and he was a founder of the KKK.
But after the massacre, black soldiers seldom surrendered. When they went into
battle, they would fight like hellcats, with a battle cry on their lips:
“Remember Fort Pillow!”
The 54th was a great black regiment. But there were not a whole lot
of blacks in the North where the 54th was recruited. So Lincoln and Secretary of
War Stanton sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to
recruit black soldiers and dispel the opposition of white soldiers. I like to
use Lorenzo Thomas as an example of how people change during a revolution.
Thomas was a 60-year-old paper-pusher, a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., for
years and years. He had not seen the field of battle for ages. But he got sent
to the Mississippi Valley to recruit black soldiers, and he did it. He would go
from camp to camp and make speeches to the white soldiers. What he would say to
them about the black people coming into the lines was to “receive them kindly
and cordially. They are to be encouraged to come to us; they are to be received
with open arms; they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed.” He was
instrumental in recruiting 100,000 black soldiers. Two hundred thousand black
soldiers were recruited, all told.
Also illustrative of the contradictions of this bourgeois
revolution is William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a stone racist. He sabotaged the
effort to recruit black troops to the point of insubordination, all the while
dealing some of the deadliest military blows to the Confederacy. He refused to
allow the recruitment of black troops near his armies because he wanted blacks
only as laborers. Lincoln tolerated this because Sherman could win battles. With
his march to the sea and then up through South Carolina, Sherman did more than
any other Union general to burn the heart out of slavery. Sherman epitomized the
hard war that Lincoln and Grant had pushed.
It’s not about the ideas in people’s heads but what they do. As
materialists, we understand that social being determines social
consciousness—that is, most people can only transcend their own history to a
limited degree. So banish moralism and focus on the act! I’m sure the modern-day
fans of the Confederacy don’t care very much what Sherman thought. But they sure
can’t forget what he did!
The Dawn of Reconstruction
Bourgeois mythology would have it that it was a straight shot from
the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King and the civil rights
movement to Obama. No! The Chicago Tribune (3 February) had a little
piece on the Emancipation Proclamation headlined: “Lincoln’s Proclamation
Inspired Slaves to Leave Plantations, Embrace Hope.” Embrace hope? Please! Where
have we heard that before? Obama’s campaign literature, of course. It conjures
up images of tear-stained black faces turning their eyes to the sky, when the
reality was war and revolution!
At the end of the war, emancipated slaves, many with guns in their
hands, were at the very center of the Second American Revolution, pushing ahead,
without organization, toward the redistribution of land and toward political
liberty. These measures necessitated turning the entire structure of the old
South upside down. The confiscation of the land owned by the big proprietors and
its partition and distribution among the landless laborers meant an agrarian
revolution. The triumphant capitalists wanted to perpetuate their grip upon the
national government, increase their control over industry and agriculture and
grab natural resources. In order to promote this program, their political
representatives had to maneuver with other forces in the country.
What started out at the close of the Civil War as an alliance
between the Northern capitalists and the black and white plebeians of the South
against the landed aristocracy terminated in 1876 with a union between the
capitalist magnates and the planters against the Southern masses, particularly
the black freedmen. In 1865, aside from the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau,
which had been established by the federal government, there was no government in
the South. Everything was up in the air. The 13th Amendment was on the books,
but little else was settled.
There were several hundred thousand black people either in the Army
or recently demobilized. They felt it was time to cash in on what was due them.
Perhaps the most idealized version of what black people thought Reconstruction
was supposed to turn into was “40 acres and a mule.” This comes from Sherman’s
Special Order No. 15, which he issued in Savannah in 1865, right after he
finished his march through Georgia. That order gave 40 acres of abandoned land
and also unneeded old Army mules to newly freed black families.
The way this happened is that Secretary of War Stanton had come
down to visit Sherman’s army in Savannah. He and Sherman met with black
preachers from the area. Sherman was very well known for his hot temper. I can
see him just seething, having to sit down with all these black preachers and
talk with them man to man. But out of that meeting came the Special Orders. This
relieved Sherman of the problem of what to do with the thousands of former
slaves who had followed in his train. Then Stanton ordered Sherman to add a
black regiment to his army, which he did, except that regiment was abused all
the way from Georgia up through South Carolina. I told you that Sherman was
hardly a racial egalitarian. Yet and still, despite his subjective beliefs,
Sherman was caught up in a revolution. And he wrote that Order, which put land
into the hands of black freedmen and helped to inspire the fight for black
freedom.
Radical Reconstruction
In the summer of 1865, the redistribution of abandoned and
confiscated land was Freedmen’s Bureau policy, supported by the military. But it
was very quickly turned around. Many Southern states passed Black Codes. This
was slavery in everything but name—vagrancy laws, forced apprenticeships, forced
contracts—to regulate and control black labor. The precedent for Black Codes was
set in the North where, despite the abolition of slavery prior to the Civil War,
there were many legal proscriptions against black people. But the Black Codes
were not rigorously or uniformly enforced, unlike the Jim Crow laws that came
later. Things were still volatile and were so much up in the air, with lots of
victorious black soldiers with guns roaming around.
Let me note the importance of the right to bear arms, and how
important that has always been for the defense of black rights. The right of
self-defense was key. We say, “Gun control kills blacks.” Obama and a whole
section of the ruling class are bemoaning gun violence. But the whole history of
gun control in this country is the story of the ruling class trying to disarm
the population, particularly in periods of social struggle. Hence the
reactionary Black Codes passed in various Southern states tried to outlaw the
possession of firearms by black people. In response, the Freedmen’s Bureau
widely distributed circulars that read in part: “All men, without distinction of
color, have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or
themselves.”
Every gain that black people have made was a battle. In a letter to
Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, on behalf of the First International, Marx
wrote: “Yours, Sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been
felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political
reconstruction and social regeneration.” But Johnson did exactly the opposite.
He tried to restore the old social order in everything but name. Johnson started
amnestying former slaveowners and weeded radicals out of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Johnson had an all-consuming hatred of black people. He was a former slaveowner
with the mentality of poor white trash, a racist appeaser of remnants of the
slavocracy. Johnson was really fearful of a link-up of black and white poor. The
idea of real social and political equality repelled him. Johnson’s amnesty
proclamations were an abrogation of Sherman’s Field Order No. 15. Forty thousand
freedmen were deprived of 485,000 acres of land.
The hallmark of any revolution is the independent mobilization of
the masses in defense of their rights and aspirations. That occurred all over
the South, with committees, councils and armed self-defense groups springing up.
Could black people, arms in hand, have seized the land? In some cases they did.
But they were mostly forced off the land. Thaddeus Stevens, probably the most
consistent American Jacobin, recognized that land was the key. By being
landholders, black freedmen would have an economic basis to defend their rights
instead of being beholden to the landlords. Most others, including Frederick
Douglass, focused more on the right to vote.
The bourgeoisie was horrified by the thought of confiscation. The
free-soil ideology meant that through thrift and hard work you could own a
little shop or a farm. As if 250 years of unrequited toil didn’t count. The
bourgeoisie was quite class-conscious. It paid close attention to the restive
working class in Europe, where, in 1871, the French proletariat seized power in
Paris and held it for some months—the Paris Commune. The American bourgeoisie
recoiled from that. The New York Times, then as now a mouthpiece for that
class, wrote: “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.”
During Johnson’s presidency, blacks were beaten and shot down by
the hundreds. Black people were no longer anybody’s property, so life was cheap.
The slaughter of black and white Republicans led directly to military
Reconstruction. Many in the North started to be alarmed. They had just finished
a brutal civil war and did not want the slaveholders back in power. There was a
polarization. The moderates were driven into the arms of the Radicals. The
Chicago Tribune, hardly known today as a radical journal, wrote that the
North would convert Mississippi “into a frog pond” before allowing slavery to be
reestablished.
The Radicals got the majority of support in Congress and began to
set the tone of Reconstruction. The South was placed under military control by
Congress. As General-in-Chief, U.S. Grant appointed the generals running each
district. Grant was allied with the Radicals on many issues and was generally
sympathetic to the struggles of black people, even if like Lincoln he did not
personally believe in social equality. During his presidency, starting in 1868,
his policy was a real mixed bag.
It took a battle to preserve black rights. There were the
Freedmen’s Bureau, the Union Leagues, black militias. But federal troops were
the key. Reconstruction could not have succeeded as much as it did absent even a
halfhearted commitment to smash and crush forces of reaction by the federal
government. Congress wanted to readmit the former Confederate states to the
Union. But the only way these states could be admitted was on the Union’s terms.
And the only way those terms would be met was if black people got the vote.
Under military Reconstruction, with the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and
the 14th Amendment, blacks were given the vote and elected to state
constitutional conventions and Reconstruction governments.
Once black people gained the franchise, the Republicans dominated
Reconstruction governments across the South. The majority of officeholders were
white with a significant minority of blacks, based on the support of blacks and
some poor whites. Black Republicans became the major focus for political, social
and economic justice in the South. They agitated for more political rights, more
schools, more hospitals, more land, more debtors’ relief—things that benefitted
the vast majority of Southern labor, black and white. The passage of the 15th
Amendment in 1870 codified the right to vote, all across the North as well as
the South.
Racist Reaction
But Northern capitalists had other interests: profit. They were
willing to invest in the capital-starved South, but when those profits were
threatened by agitation and unrest, they pulled the plug. Reconstruction
governments and black people were always under attack by the KKK and similar
groups that wanted social and economic control of the black population. Black
schools were particularly a target, and scores went up in flames. Intimidation
and murder were rampant. Congress adopted all sorts of paper measures protecting
blacks, including the 14th Amendment that guarantees “equal protection of the
laws.” But the government betrayed the promise of black liberation in the
Compromise of 1877, when almost all the remaining Union troops were withdrawn
from the South. Reconstruction was defeated by blood and fire.
The post-Reconstruction period, called Redemption by the racists,
was marked by a political counterrevolution aimed at black people and enforced
by racist terrorists. A new system of racist exploitation was established by
restricting the rights of freedmen across the board. In 1896, the Supreme Court
codified “separate but equal” segregation as the law of the land in Plessy v.
Ferguson. Segregation took the place of chattel slavery as the main prop of
the new racist order. This rigid system of legally enforced racial segregation,
called Jim Crow, was imposed and maintained by police-state repression and the
terror of the KKK which, in the words of Civil War historian James McPherson,
“became in effect armed auxiliaries of the Democratic party.” It took a long and
often bloody struggle for the civil rights movement 80 years later to restore
some of the rights black people won during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
With the triumph of capitalism across the continent also came the
creation of the class destined to become the gravediggers of that same system,
the working class. Once freed from the retarding effects of the slavery
question, the labor movement took off with agitation for the eight-hour day,
agitation for unions. This culminated in the Great Rail Strike of 1877, which
was brutally suppressed by the Army that was no longer defending black people in
the South. However, concomitant with the entrance of the American bourgeoisie
onto the world stage as an imperialist power in the 1890s, there developed a
layer of hardcore trade-union bureaucrats bought off by the spoils of
imperialism and sharing the values of the ruling class. They imported and
continued to import this retrograde consciousness into the working class.
Now I would like to acknowledge the debt we owe to Dick Fraser, a
leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was
still a revolutionary organization. Fraser developed a trenchant Marxist
analysis of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, of the origins of the
racist system in this country and the material basis for black oppression.
Fraser wrote: “After the Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed the old slave
owning class, northern capital, from economic and political motives, betrayed
its promises and created a revised, capitalist form of race relations, based
upon many of the traditions and social relations of slavery” (“Revolutionary
Integration: the Dialectics of Black Liberation,” Revolutionary Age, Vol.
1, No. 1 [1968]).
Fraser took as a starting point the lessons he had learned from
studies of the 1917 Russian Revolution, particularly Bolshevik Party policies on
the many nationalities in Russia. And that is the point on which I want to
conclude—the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks united the struggles of all
the oppressed behind the banner of the working class, and that is what we must
do. Today, we take up struggles for immigrant rights, for women’s rights, and we
fight to replace the trade-union misleaders with a militant, class-struggle
leadership.
We wrote in one of our basic documents, “Black and Red,” in 1967:
“Only common struggle for common aims can unite the working class
and overcome the lifelong racial prejudices of American workers. A victory of
the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united
struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary
vanguard party. In the course of this struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged
between the two sections of the working class. The success of this struggle will
place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery,
racism and super-exploitation.”
The forcible segregation of black people, integral to American
capitalism, has been resisted by the black masses whenever a perceived
possibility for such struggle has been felt. The entire history of mass black
struggle—from the abolitionists through the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction
to the civil rights movement—has been in the direction of integration, not
separation.
While combating every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting
in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we
underline that full equality for the black masses requires that the working
class rip the economy out of the hands of the racist capitalist rulers and
reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate
the material roots of black oppression through the full integration of black
people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collective economy with
quality jobs, housing, health care and education for all. You see, it was the
Russian working class led by the Bolsheviks who carried out the first and thus
far only successful socialist revolution. We aim to build a vanguard party that
will fight for the next one.
In the midst of the Second American Revolution, Lincoln said in the
Gettysburg Address, “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to
the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Well, there is still a lot of unfinished work. Join us in the fight for a Third
American Revolution. Join us in the fight to build a revolutionary party. Finish
the Civil War—For black liberation through socialist revolution!
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