On the Civil War and Slavery

PL vs. Karl Marx (and Abraham Lincoln)

Progressive Labor Party (PL), which originated as a left split from the Stalinist Communist Party in the early 1960s, evolved into an increasingly eccentric outfit that combines “Fight for Communism!” rhetoric with anti-Marxist, grossly opportunist and often socially retrograde practice. This spring, PL announced that they would “actively participate” in Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential campaign, justifying their support to this black capitalist politician, who is campaigning as a more effective Commander-in-Chief for U.S. imperialism, by pointing to the enthusiastic response to his campaign by a layer of liberal youth. As we commented in WV No. 913 (25 April):

“Not content with this reformist/Stalinist liquidation into the campaign for a representative of the class enemy, PL adds a grotesque twist, comparing Obama’s followers to the Hitler Youth: ‘Many earnestly hoped for the better world Nazi imperialism claimed to offer. And Hitler, after all, professing “socialism,” was able to rally many well-meaning people seeking change’ (Challenge, 26 March). This is the same group that grotesquely ran on the back page of its paper, Challenge (3 January 2007), a doctored photo of Obama in a Klan suit! After deploying its members into such reactionary outfits as church groups and the imperialist volunteer army, and (again) into ‘active participation’ in Obama’s campaign (and now vicariously into the Hitler Youth), one can only wonder what PL will do next.”

One no longer has to wonder. The 4 June issue of Challenge featured on its back page a bizarre (even by the standards of PL) article, “Civil War’s Hidden History: Women Workers Battled Gov’t, Bosses,” saluting the July 1863 New York City anti-draft riots—five days of furious racist terror against black people and supporters of the war against chattel slavery. PL’s article is a review of A People’s History of the Civil War, a 2005 book by David Williams. Williams is a professor of history at Valdosta State University in Georgia who has written several books attempting to minimize the question of slavery, declaring that the Civil War was simply a “rich man’s war” waged by competing “oligarchies” and glorifying “antiwar” activity against both the Union Army and the Confederacy. In its glowing review—which, unlike Williams’ book, does not even mention slavery!—PL declares: “Williams’ thesis is that class struggle—the consolidation of finance capital vs. the response of working folks—comprises the source of the conflict.” Hailing “resistance” to the revolutionary war waged by the Union Army that smashed black chattel slavery in the South, PL writes:

“In Port Washington, LI [Long Island], women led 1,000 protesters with a banner NO DRAFT, attacked the draft commissioner and broke up the draft box. In NYC, women took part in draft rebellions, grabbed stones and used their stockings as sling-shots.

“These inspiring stories of our history comprise a small part of Williams’ research on how the onset of the war and starvation of soldiers and their families was deliberate by Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton…. Legislation passed during Lincoln’s watch fed only the hunger of the growing wealthy class for land and centralized banking.”

PL thus disappears the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive orders issued by Lincoln on 22 September 1862 and 1 January 1863, that declared freedom for all the slaves of the Confederacy. While the Civil War began in 1861 over the question of whether slavery was to be extended to the territories and new states of the West, the Emancipation Proclamation committed the North to the abolition of slavery and revealed clearly the revolutionary character of the war. In the 1862 elections, following the adoption of an abolitionist program by Lincoln’s Republican Party, the Democratic Party—the party of the Southern slaveholders and their sympathizers in the North—won the governorship of New York. As Karl Marx pointed out in “The Election Results in the Northern States” (18 November 1862), New York City was “actively engaged in the slave trade until recently, the seat of the American money market and full of holders of mortgages on Southern plantations, [and] has always been decidedly ‘Democratic’.”

In response to the Emancipation Proclamation, “antiwar” Northern 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. After Lincoln in March 1863 issued the Enrollment Act of Conscription to supplement the ranks of the Union Army, Irish and other immigrant workers and poor were whipped into a racist frenzy. When results of the draft lottery were announced on 12 July 1863, tens of thousands began rampaging in the streets. While a clause of the draft order allowing those who could pay $300 to avoid military service provoked resentment, the riots were directed against the black population. Chasing and beating any blacks they could find, the mobs sacked and burned dozens of black dwellings. At least a dozen black people were murdered. The Colored Orphan Asylum, housing over 200 black children, was burned to ashes. Also targeted were prominent abolitionists like Horace Greeley and those who were known to associate with or provide housing and employment to blacks. While some blacks were able to organize armed self-defense, thousands desperately fled the city. The most significant urban rebellion in U.S. history up to that point, the riot was put down with the assistance of thousands of federal troops ordered into the city by Lincoln. PL, grotesquely, is “inspired” by this racist, counterrevolutionary rebellion.

PL today places itself on the opposite side of the barricades from Karl Marx. Their sympathy with the draft riots spits on the history of the 200,000 blacks who volunteered and fought in the Northern army and navy to destroy slavery. In Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels urged and organized international working-class support to the Union cause from the beginning. In his “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,” written in November 1864 after Lincoln’s re-election, Marx wrote: “We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war-cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.” Marx promoted Northern victory both as a struggle to abolish the barbaric slave system and as a precondition for the development of the class-consciousness of the proletariat in the U.S. Marx declared:

“While the working men, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

“The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes.”

Marx famously restated this position in 1867 in the first volume of Capital: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

PL’s grotesque article promised a forthcoming “part two,” which has yet to appear. Instead, Challenge has since published three letters on the subject. A 2 July letter by “Red teacher” reiterated the conclusion of the original article, declaring of the Civil War: “Workers were convinced to fight an intra-capitalist war, then, just as they are convinced to fight in the U.S. imperialist war in Iraq today. The rulers spread lies, myths, patriotic emotions and other weapons to confuse workers about what is in their own class interest. The struggles described in the article reflect examples of workers who were not accepting the ruling class lies.” A letter by “A Red Historian” (30 July) tries to clean up some of this malodorous crap, condemning the draft riots as “an attempt at anti-abolitionist counter-revolution, in which many racist Irish workers were involved in mass assaults on black people,” and referring positively to Marx, Engels and Lincoln.

PL’s nauseating “debate” on the draft riots and whether or not to have supported the war against slavery flows from their anti-materialist, anti-Marxist ideology and program. PL historically has promoted itself as anti-racist for its activities in fighting the Klan and Nazis. We have always criticized PL’s impotent tactics of small-group confrontations that reject the Marxist strategy of mobilizing the working class in major cities in united-front labor/black mobilizations to sweep the fascist killers off the streets. PL antics usually result in getting its members knocked on the head by cops and arrested. But at least PL used to express anti-racist views and even tried to implement them. Now PL openly supports the Democratic Party of racism and imperialist war through their “active participation” in the campaign of Barack Obama, who preaches that the solution to black oppression was “embedded” in the original U.S. Constitution, which embraced slavery.

The Civil War was the last progressive war of the American capitalist class. The destruction of slavery was in the class interests of the Northern bourgeoisie as the precondition to consolidating a unified, modern capitalist nation-state. But while a modern capitalist state was consolidated, the bourgeoisie did not fulfill the promise of liberation embodied in the Second American Revolution. As capitalism rapidly developed in the post-Civil War decades, the Northern industrial bourgeoisie became alarmed at a developing and combative working class. By 1877, Northern capitalists had abandoned Radical Reconstruction—the most egalitarian period in American history, when freed blacks exercised full political rights—and cemented ties with the ex-slaveholders of the South.

A new system of racist exploitation was established in the South through the systematic repression of the freedmen’s fight for land, education and civil rights. A rigid system of legally enforced racial segregation called Jim Crow was imposed and maintained by police-state repression and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, which, in the words of Civil War historian James McPherson, “became in effect armed auxiliaries of the Democratic party” (Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction [1982]). The white-supremacist and segregationist spirit of the South infected the whole country. It dovetailed with the entry of American capitalist imperialism on the world scene at the end of the nineteenth century and served abroad as a valuable weapon to fortify colonial oppression and exploitation.

Black oppression today remains a central pillar of American capitalism, but black workers are also a strategic component of the working class who will play a vanguard role in the emancipation of the working class as a whole. The key to this perspective is the forging of a revolutionary workers party in opposition to both partner parties of racist American capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans, and all capitalist parties. In contrast to PL, which capitulates to the racist capitalist system, we seek to build a Leninist party that will act as a tribune of the people. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!