Reading notes: Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861–1877 The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction By Peter Camejo

Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861–1877
The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction By Peter Camejo

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From Chapter 3: Class alignments in the South after Appomattox

....Arguing in Congress for a land reform, Thaddeus Stevens presented the following statistics. The land of the richest 70,000 slave owners and public lands in the hands of the ex-Confederate states totaled 394 million acres. There were at most one million Black families in the South. To give each 40 acres would thus require only 40 million acres, a fraction of what was available. Stevens proposed selling the remainder to pay the federal war debt.

Even if one were to object that not all 394 million acres of Southern land was suitable for farming or that Stevens’s figures were exaggerated, it is obvious that such an expropriation would have provided more than enough land. And it should also be kept in mind that the Western territories were then being opened up for homesteaders (each settler entitled to 160 acres), thus providing additional vast acreages which could make feasible a land reform for the benefit of the ex-slaves. But such a reform ran contrary to the interests of the victorious Northern capitalists.

Historically the capitalist class in its revolutions against the feudal landowners of Europe, especially in France, had promoted land reform to win over the peasantry. Only after consolidating its power did it turn against its own past and oppose bourgeois-democratic revolutions elsewhere.

This process is most clearly seen in the expansion of European industrial capitalism into the colonial areas. While the bourgeoisie had favored land reform, industrialization, and even parliamentary democratic forms of governmental rule for France, it later opposed all three in its colonies. Vietnam under French control, for example, was denied self-determination, parliamentary forms of rule, land reform, or industrialization. The bourgeois revolution— unlike capitalism— was not for export. The rise of imperialism definitively turned the bourgeoisie against its own revolutionary past.

In the United States the bourgeois revolution took a form quite different in many respects from that in France. It was carried out in two struggles separated by over seventy years and was not fought against a nationally entrenched feudal landowning class. In the United States there never existed a “peasantry” like that in Europe but rather a huge layer of property-owning small farmers. In both the first and second American revolutions the bourgeoisie offered only limited land reform to the small farmers to win their support. During the second American revolution no land-reform measures were offered in the regions previously under capitalist domination.

What land reform was carried through was at the expense of the Native Americans and in essentially unsettled territory. The inducement offered the small farmers was free land through the Homestead Act. This not only benefited the landless farmers but enabled those sinking into debt to sell out for enough money to furnish a stake for a new start in the West. Nor was there any other way to so quickly and effectively settle this area for capitalist exploitation.

After the small farmers settled the West, the inexorable mechanism of capitalist competition brought about their gradual expropriation to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, which turned its back on the very ally that made possible its rise to political power and had assured its victory over the slavocracy. Through excessive railroad freight charges, control of the marketing of the crops, bank mortgages and credit, capitalism ground down the small farmers. By 1890 the records showed that two-thirds of the homesteaders had failed to retain their farms. Moreover, a quarter of all the farms in the U.S. were being operated by tenants— with almost half of these outside the South. Even most of those who still nominally owned their land were being turned, in effect, into laborers for big capital. By 1890 28 percent of all farm holdings in the U.S. were mortgaged. It is estimated that in Kansas, for example, one-half of all farm homes had mortgages on them, many having several. More and more the small farmers were being physically removed from the land to join the urban working class.

Unlike its French forerunner a century earlier, the American industrial bourgeoisie during the second American revolution was already a fully developed class with political hegemony in a substantial sector of the country— and with its opponent class concentrated in a smaller and less developed region. It was this regional character o f the second American revolution which permitted the industrial capitalists to mobilize a sufficiently powerful social force to achieve victory while limiting the concessions they offered to the lower strata of the population. The relationship of class forces never compelled the bourgeoisie to add land reform for the ex-slaves to its one truly revolutionary concession— the abolition of slavery.

Upon termination of the military conflict the initial reaction of the ruling class in the North was to bring concessions to a halt.

Northern capitalists were decidedly against a land reform in the South. They envisioned instead quick profits from the purchase of plantations and investment in cotton and other staple crops of the region. Southern land looked more promising than that in the West. There would be no problem of bringing new and resistant soil into cultivation but simply of exploiting already improved farmland in a region possessed of the necessary infrastructure of roads, bridges, towns, etc., and of utilizing a labor force already on the scene.

Though the slavocracy disappeared, the plantations not only survived but in some cases grew even larger under new owners. After the Civil War the amount o f cotton grown in the South— following a brief period of crises— began rapidly to expand once again even at the expense of other crops. For a long time it remained the nation's largest export product, and as late as 1910 American cotton still represented most o f the world’s production.

Labor's Giant Step

Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936–55 By Art Preis

Labor's Giant Step is a thrilling history of U.S. rank and file union militancy in the period 1934-1957.

The "giant step" of the title was industry-wide organizing, a break with insular and atomizing craft structures epitomized by the American Federation of Labor.

The sucesses that built the CIO were not unique strokes of genius by international union presidents or government officials. They were the product of rank-and-file initiative and leadership putting its stamp on events, reaching broadly outward for solidarity and creating a mass social movement in the process.

Art Preis, a young leader of the unemployed movement and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, covered most of the struggles in Labor's Giant Step as a reporter for The Militant newspaper. He was an expert on both the making and writing of working class history.

*    *    *

The giant step that U.S. labor has yet to take is independent political action.

Throughout Preis's book, top union officials of every political shade work with might and main to thwart any tendency in that direction. Johnson, Murray, and Reuther repeatedly and demogogically endorse the idea of a labor party, but keep their members tied in reality to the Jim Crow Democrat Party.

"Now is not the right time," they always lament.

(When John L. Lewis opposed Roosevelt's pro-war union-busting course in 1940, he endorsed Republican Wendell Wilkie.)

*    *    *

A real strength of Labor's Giant Step is its portrait of Roosevelt's real anti-labor record.

I have sat on my share of porches with prospective Militant subscribers debating the role of the Democrat party. More than a few told me, "Roosevelt gave us the unions." 

Preis gives us the facts and the context: far from being a "traitor" to his own class, Roosevelt was a champion union-buster. Before World War Two he made a few pious pronouncements, but he backed-up New Deal governors every time they called out the troops to try smashing a strike. 

He financed the U.S. imperialist war effort by freezing wages, outlawing strikes, and introducing taxes on incomes as low as $300 a year. By 1944 he was ready to introduce labor conscription, legislation that makes Taft-Hartley look like a vicar's tea party.

*    *    *

One roadblock the next mass U.S. labor radicalization will not have to face is Stalinism.

The U.S. Communist Party bent every effort in the period covered by Labor's Giant Step to promote peaceful coexistance between Washington and Moscow. They defended and promoted the Democrat party is a progressive force to this end, rationalizing and deceiving where they were not strong enough to beat and bully. 

They supported U.S. goverment prosecution of leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters and the Socialist Workers Party for their anti-war campaigns. During the war they opposed all strikes and demanded reintroduction of piece-work to boost labor productivity. At every opportunity, the CPUSA and its labor allies negated in word and deed the slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all."

*    *    *

Excerpt:

Roosevelt used troops against 1941 strikes

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6822/682249.html

Below are excerpts from Labor’s Giant Step by Art Preis, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for May. Written by a participant in the explosive labor struggles and political battles of the 1930s, it tells the story of how the industrial unions were built and how they became the vanguard of a mass social movement that began to transform U.S. society.

The excerpt below, entitled “Roosevelt—open strikebreaker,” tells the story of how during two strikes in 1941 U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic “friend of labor,” initiated his administration’s direct strike-breaking program. The first was the 75-day strike by members of United Auto Workers Local 248 against the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company plant in West Allis, Wisconsin. The second was at strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California.

The author refers to several top union officials: United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Phillip Murray, and Amalgamated Clothing Workers president Sidney Hillman. Copyright © 1964 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

*****

BY ART PREIS 

Now faced with opposition from the top CIO and UAW leaders as well as the strikers, the administration officials beat a retreat and denied they had issued any ultimatum to the strikers. They then asserted that “the original strike vote had been obtained by fraudulent means.” The March 30 New York Times reported, however, that “more than 5,000 UAW workers…voted today at a mass meeting to persist with their strike at the Allis-Chalmers Company plant, hooting down appeals of government officials….” There evidently was no fraud about the workers’ desire to continue the strike.
Inspired by the Roosevelt administration’s strikebreaking intervention, the local police on March 31 made a violent assault on the Allis-Chalmers picket line. For the first time in American labor history an armored car manned by police firing tear gas bombs through slits in the steel plates smashed through a picket line of 3,000 workers. Many were sickened and injured, but the line closed up and picketing went on.

In the meantime state militia had been sent to the scene. The workers, however, could not be driven back to work at bayonet point. After three days Governor Heil withdrew his troops and ordered the plant shut.

On April 7, after 75 days, the union voted to end the strike when the company agreed to accept the terms the union would have settled for at the beginning. The agreement provided a “maintenance of membership” clause—a watered-down version of the union shop—which guaranteed the membership status as of the time of signing the contract.

Just two months later Roosevelt moved into the most open and violent phase of his anti-strike program. This was his use of federal troops to smash the picket lines of peaceful strikers at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California.

Looking back, it seems incredible that the workers had not struck long before.…

North American’s minimum wage was 40 cents an hour, ten cents less than an unskilled laborer’s relief wage on WPA. It was far below the subsistence standard of living computed by government agencies and lower than the average of all Southern California aircraft plants.

When the company finally agreed to open negotiations on April 16, the workers asked for a 75-cent hourly minimum and ten cents an hour more for all workers. In 1940, even before receiving huge government war orders, the company had made a net profit of $855 for every worker in its employ. But when the union made its wage demand, North American’s President J.H. Kindleberger scoffed: “I don’t have to pay any more to my workers because most of them are young kids who spend their money on a flivver and a gal.”

After being stalled for five weeks with this kind of talk, the union membership on May 23 voted for strike. The issue then went to the National Defense Mediation Board. The workers stayed on the job 13 days past their strike deadline. When it became clear that the NDMB intended to stall indefinitely, the 12,000 North American workers struck on June 5.

The NDMB turned the case over to the White House. Roosevelt acted with dispatch. He ordered the workers to end their strike and announced he was sending U.S. troops to be on hand Monday morning, June 9, to open the plant in the interests of the “national emergency.” Why he did not order the company to pay decent wages as a means of ending this “threat” to the “national emergency” the President did not say.

Roosevelt acted with confidence because he felt he had the backing of high CIO and UAW officials. In speaking of those who were at the President’s side when he signed the order for the troops to smash the strike, Roosevelt’s secretary Stephen Early, spoke of “Mr. Hillman and the others.” Hillman—that was a name to conjure with. It was a “Labor” seal of approval.

After the strike was broken, at a meeting of 250 CIO executives in Washington on July 7, Lewis denounced Hillman as a “traitor” who was “standing at Roosevelt’s elbow when he signed the order to send troops to stab labor in the back.…”

On the very day the strike was called, the UAW international union officials dispatched Richard Frankensteen to the strike scene. That same night, without consulting the strike committee, he broadcast a denunciation of the strike over a national radio hookup.…

[On June 9] the embittered workers massed at the plant. There to meet them was the first large contingent of what was to grow by nightfall into an army of 3,500 federal troops. Thus, the United States government waged its first military engagement of World War II on American soil against American workers resisting hunger wages. 

Trump in London... No, sorry, Bush in London!

Trump will be in London in mid-July, which recalls the nationalist "Dump Bush" protests of November, 2003.

_

....The success of the U.S. president’s trip was only reinforced by the anti-American, pro-British tone of the demonstrations in the United Kingdom, organized by the Stop the War Coalition and other forces around the theme “Stop Bush.” Focusing their fire on the U.S. government and portraying Blair as a mere “puppet” of Washington, they buttressed the nationalist framework of the British rulers’ efforts to assert their own imperialist interests in the world....

‘Stop Bush’ protests 

A series of protests were organized by the Stop The War coalition and other groups around the theme “Stop Bush.” The British nationalist, anti-American theme of these protests was underlined at the November 20 demonstration of more than 100,000 people that rallied in Trafalgar Square. A 20-foot effigy of Bush was toppled to the ground in imitation of the bringing down of a large statue of Saddam Hussein when invading U.S.-British forces took over Baghdad in April. TV coverage of the rally also showed demonstrators burning a U.S. flag.

Demonstrators carried signs referring to Blair as Bush’s “poodle” and reading, “Troops out now—Stop the organ grinder and his monkey,” with the prime minister of the British imperialist state portrayed as Bush’s monkey.

Referring to the Istanbul bombings, Lindsay German, convener of the Stop The War Coalition, said, “I don’t think it can be any coincidence that these attacks have come against British targets on the day that George Bush is visiting London.” Her argument repeated a commonly heard nationalist theme that “Bush’s war” is hurting “our interests” by making Britain vulnerable to “terrorism.”

A half-page ad in the November 20 issue of The Times entitled “An Open Letter to President George W. Bush,” sponsored by a campaign called Our World Our Say, stated, “These protestors are not extremists. They are managers, builders, artists and stockbrokers.” It said that as a result of Bush’s policies the United Kingdom had become “one of the world’s foremost targets of fundamentalist hatred.”

The right-wing Daily Telegraph editorialized sympathetically about the demonstrators, stating, “Most of the marchers were decent people—even if we happen to think they are misguided.” John Hayes, a millionaire with more than 100 employees, told the paper, “I’m here because I think we are playing into the hands of terrorists with this occupation of Iraq.”

Current and former figures within the Labour Party were prominent in the debate. The mayor of London, Kenneth Livingstone, who was expelled from the Labour Party three years ago but is expected to rejoin in time for the mayoral elections next year, said in an interview with The Ecologist magazine that Bush was “the greatest threat to human life on this planet that we’ve probably ever seen.”

Quoted in the press a few days before Bush’s arrival in London, former foreign secretary Robin Cook said, “If the state visit takes on the character of the U.S. boss visiting his wholly owned British subsidiary, it will do further damage to relations with the Bush administration.” Another former cabinet minister, Clare Short, who resigned from the government after the war, urged people to protest because Bush had “made the world more dangerous.”

Source:

http://themilitant.com/2003/6743/index.shtml

Unions are an activity, not a thing

....By promoting class collaboration with the bosses and election of “friendly” capitalist politicians as the unions’ main purpose, the officialdom’s decades-long class-collaborationist course has hamstrung the union movement. It has been key to the union’s continued bleeding of membership and inability to recruit new forces, at a time of capitalist crisis when workers are starting to look for a way to fight back.

....unions are not “weak,” as many labor officials claim, pointing to declining numbers. This is simply an excuse for their refusal to organize workers and use union power — instead of subordinating workers and their organizations to the bosses, their government and the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties.

The unions are not a “thing,” but an activity, a movement — a “we” of all its members. Even today the unions encompass millions of workers with enormous potential to deal major blows to the bosses.

Our unions can and will become powerful instruments to fight back against attacks by the bosses and their government when workers start to take hold of them. During a recovery in hiring after a long period of high unemployment in the 1930s, “men and women from nowhere” started to gain confidence and waged mighty battles in the plants and on the streets that built the industrial unions.

___

Source

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7734/773402.html

When "socialists" get elected

....The question is, do any of these electoral victories represent an advance for the working class and its allies? Do they strengthen workers capacity to fight the bosses? Do they further the self-confidence, class consciousness and organization of labor? Do they move toward independent working-class political action?

In the absence of working-class struggles strong enough to transform our labor unions and lay the basis for a social movement that can challenge the bosses political power, the answer is no. Without this, and lacking a revolutionary program, these elections only nurture workers’ illusions in democratic forms of capitalist rule and provide them with left cover.

Kshama Sawant, an economics professor, ran for the nonpartisan Seattle City Council position No. 2, winning with 50.67 percent in a two-candidate race, with no Republican running. With a “practical” focus on getting elected, she campaigned around three central demands: “$15-an-hour minimum wage, a rent control ordinance to make housing affordable, and a tax on millionaires to fund transit, education and other public services.”

Sawant’s campaign flyers bore the headline “Make Seattle affordable for all” and featured an endorsement calling her a “rarity — a progressive candidate who is principled, articulate, competent, smart, and fearless.” She presented herself as an “activist,” highlighting her involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. She said she was speaking for the 99 percent against the 1 percent, running “so that working people finally have real representation.”

Constrained to the narrow boundaries that typify capitalist election contests for local offices, her literature avoided important political issues that affect all workers, such as high unemployment and a woman’s right to choose abortion. It made no mention of key international issues, Syria, the place of the Cuban Revolution, the common interests of working people worldwide against the bosses or the global crisis of capitalism that is driving their attacks against us.

“Sawant pushed the discussion in all races to the left — just as the Tea Party has pushed rightward elsewhere,” noted the Freedom Socialist Party.

The observation is accurate. In a similar fashion, de Blasio’s campaign helped carve out space for a growing socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

But a shift in bourgeois electoral politics to the left does nothing to advance political action on the part of the working class — which takes place in the streets, not at the ballot box. Electoral politics is not the arena for the working class — it’s the arena for the bosses and the labor officialdom. Getting workers to orient in that direction is the employing classes’ strongest weapon.

A major aspect of liberal and bourgeois-socialist politics is geared toward promoting the notion that the capitalist government can play a benevolent role with the right people in office pushing the right policies — a perspective that fosters attitudes of dependency.

Some middle-class socialist groups have in recent years pulled back from running for office themselves, burned out from previous exertions that didn’t produce the quick gains they were looking for. In 2013, the Freedom Socialist Party did not run in Seattle, their base. The Party for Socialism and Liberation did not run for mayor in New York.

Today, a number of the same socialist groups are united in pointing to elections as a key arena where workers and “activists” should focus attention. “On election night Sawant’s supporters, including this writer, gathered to watch returns,” the FSP’s Linda Averill wrote. There were “socialists of all stripes: independents, the FSP, SA, and International Socialist Organization (ISO). In the electoral arena, such collaboration is historic in recent times.”

This attempt to reap gains through a “practical” electoral focus is an attempt to look to something other than real politics — the actions of the working class and the hard road of struggle ahead. These groups, with their attraction to Occupy, no longer look to the working class as the engine of revolutionary change. They lack confidence that through experiences in class combat working people will forge a leadership of their own, gain political clarity and transform themselves into the kind of men and women capable of fighting to end the dictatorship of capital and replace it, from the ground up, with the political power of the toiling majority.

The electoral farce, in contrast, drags workers deeper into the trap of seeing their involvement in politics as a matter of choosing among a list of candidates who they hope will make things better for them.

Much of the left acts on the conviction that the heterogeneous and diffuse Occupy protests, which began and peaked in 2011, represented the growth of a new social movement for progressive change. The idea led to disillusionment in face of Occupy’s inevitable evaporation and cooption by the left of the Democratic Party. But today such hopes have been rekindled in growing excitement about new possibilities in electoral politics.

“It has been said that what happened in Seattle was that Occupy went to the polls,” Jason Netek wrote in the ISO’s Socialist Worker.

“Working people and the poor and all those fighting oppression need to start running pro-worker, anti-corporate independent candidates as part of forming a new, genuine party of the left, which will represent the interests of the 99%,” Socialist Alternative wrote.

In some cases this perspective has been marked by critical attraction to the de Blasio campaign. “He talked explicitly about the vast inequality between rich and poor in the city,” Socialist Alternative said. “In a distorted way, he has articulated the anger of the working class against Bloomberg and the rich elite.”

....What made possible the elections of Sawant and the Lorain labor ticket was a shift in workers’ thinking today under the impact of the bosses’ drive to foist the crisis of capitalism on our backs. What workers need is a clear class explanation of the roots of the crisis in the dictatorship of capital and a discussion on how to build a movement to overthrow it.

To advance this discussion, The Socialist Workers Party selectively runs candidates in U.S. elections today, with a focus on the highest offices to better engage in a discussion on the biggest political questions facing workers and their allies.

The party uses its election campaigns as a subordinate component of broader propaganda work, taking the Militant newspaper door to door in working-class neighborhoods in cities and rural areas. It uses them with a cold eye to the fact that the central political prop of the capitalist rulers is the idea that their ballot box gives us a choice in how we are ruled.

In a time of rising class struggle, one expression of independent labor action that could arise would be a labor party based in the street battles and combat organizations of the working class. Its purpose would be to mobilize the broadest involvement of workers and their allies in the struggles of the day, seeking to forge solidarity among combatants and advance the fight for workers’ power.

It would not be an electoral party whose goal was to hold posts in the capitalist government. History is full of such examples that in the end served to buttress capitalist rule.

The mighty revolutions of our epoch — in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 — weren’t won through elections, but by the actions of millions in the streets. 
 

Source:

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7747/774704.html

Imagine that the Socialist Workers Party and its organized supporters and friends had....

Post from a comrade on FB:

Imagine that the Socialist Workers Party and its organized supporters and friends had failed to notice the degeneration of the FSLN; and were still supporting them in elections. They are now a left-nationalist bourgeois party. US imperialism may still not like them, but at some point, they may need them. There are lots of individuals and groups who still don’t get it. They should read New International no. 9: ‘The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution.’

Imagine that we hadn’t noticed the degeneration of the ANC, and were giving them left cover as they, like the Sandinistas had their orgy of breaking piñatas.

What if we had failed to understand the nature of the Bernard Coard-led counterrevolution in Grenada, and hadn’t continued defending the legacy of Maurice Bishop? (See New International no. 6)

As far back as New International no. 7, dated 1991, Jack Barnes was writing about the bourgeoisification of the PLO.

Lenin said, and maybe someone has the full quote, that we support bourgeois national liberation movements only if they are “really revolutionary.” [LCW, vol. 31, p. 242.]

Does Hamas, a reactionary Jew-hating bourgeois-clerical movement meet that criteria? Does the Palestine authority? Really?

It’s not the Socialist Workers Party that has abandoned the Palestinians; it’s their own mis-leadership. And the stakes in getting this right are even greater than with Nicaragua and South Africa, because of the economic crisis, which has, as always, resulted in a rise of Jew-hatred, especially in France, where many Jews are either fleeing to Israel, or re-ghettoizing themselves!

People who think that the party shouldn’t have changed its call for a democratic secular Palestine, are living in another era, and should reread and discuss “Israel and the Arab Revolution,’ still available from Pathfinder or Amazon. Today, to the extent one can speak of an Arab Revolution, it has nothing to do with Israel and the Palestinians; it is about winning democratic rights in their own countries. And this is true beyond the Arab world, such as in Iran, where recent protests were not only against economic conditions, but also against Iran's war in Syria and elsewhere, and its support of Hezbollah and similar-type reactionary groups. (Much of the middle class "left" supports the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, but this is not what working people are interested in fighting for). And as I stated, there is no revolutionary national group leading the Palestinians. We support their struggle for a state of their own, regardless of the lack of leadership. It’s a lot better than pretending that Hamas and Fatah are revolutionary organizations.

George Novack on the 1844 Manuscripts

Page 2 of the 4/10/59 issue of The Militant

http://themilitant.com/1959/2332/MIL2332.pdf