Coalition Politics after the Civil War

What coalition politics means

I'm here, Camejo, and I'm giving a talk on coalition politics. This is the first of two, and I'm going to cover four basic things: Reconstruction, the Populists, the CIO, and the present situation. Now, before this West Coast Vacation School is over, you're going to have heard quite a bit about coalition politics. In fact, if you look over the list of talks, you notice this semi-emphasis on the question of coalition politics. And unfortunately, people generally have a rather schematic interpretation of what coalition politics means. Most people believe it means simply that you go out and support some Democrat who is a liberal, and that that is the beginning and end of coalition politics. Coalition politics is a term which maybe the words are not good to describe it, because it's a much more general phenomenon, a much broader thing that's involved.

What I want to do is go over some of the times when there have been mass movements, major social upheavals in the United States, and discuss how they related to the general question of coalition politics. Now, to define coalition politics in a broad way, it doesn't have to do strictly with electoral politics. Electoral politics is just one form it takes. The essence of coalition politics is the attempt of people who belong to an oppressed class, such as working people, Negro people, to try to solve the problems that confront them by seeking to have them solved through winning a section of the ruling class, or by supporting a section of the ruling class, or by believing that through their action they can affect a section of the ruling class. To have coalition politics doesn't necessarily mean you're in the Democratic Party.

You can be outside of it and be for coalition politics. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a capitalist around who's supporting you. There can be not a single capitalist supporting you, and you can be engaging in coalition politics, because the whole approach you're taking is trying to win a section of the capitalist class. The essence of the difference between coalition politics and the politics that the SWP or YSA or the Marxist movement as a whole has always espoused is that the Marxist movement seeks at all times to drive a wedge between all sections of the ruling class and the mass of the working class, to seek for it to form its own independent organizations at every level of struggle, and therefore finds itself always in irreconcilable opposition to anyone who suggests a program towards setting up some sort of coalition, engaging in coalition politics, with the ruling class. Now, in the second part of this talk, I'm going to go into the general question a little more, because looking back in history, it's a lot easier to see something. It's easier to see when ideas were presented and then had to be tested in reality, and one can see whether they worked or not. It's much harder when one is debating and arguing over things that are happening right now, which are not yet proven, to be able to see it as clearly.

And therefore, when we discuss the second part about today, I want to go back into the general definition and talk a lot more about it, so that we can place what's happening today more in the general context of what is involved, so we can see what direction, especially when we talk about something like the Scheer [?] campaign, which is probably the most advanced, in terms of trying to put on a left appearance, of any coalition politics we've had, at least within the antiwar movement and at least in recent times. What I mean by recent times is like the last six years. Now all I want to cover today, if everybody wants to go swimming, is Reconstruction and the Populists. Once again, I can't give you a history of these things, it would take much too long. I'm just going to deal with certain aspects of it and hope to tie it up together in the second talk when I talk about the CIO and the present situation.

Now, since the Civil War there have been three major mass social movements that took on a political form and created the potential of a political struggle against the ruling class, though there have been many other battles involved, and I'm not saying these are the only three times the masses moved in this country. They are the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction; the Populist movement; and the rise of industrial unionism, the CIO. Now, let us look into the question, and by the way, this whole historic period we're living in, in the United States, begins with the Civil War.

The classes at the time of the Civil War

The Civil War ends one historic period and opens up another. So let's begin by discussing just what happened in the Civil War. At the time of the Civil War in the United States, there were four basic classes. There were the slaves in the South, chattel slavery. There were industrial workers, primarily concentrated in the eastern border states, and those scattered in every small city, no matter how far west you go or how far south; there were small groups of industrial workers. And there were the small farmers, people who owned their own plot of land and farmed it for their own interest. Then there was the capitalist class, which was divided into two basic wings by the time of the Civil War. One, the industrial capitalists, who based themselves on the development of industry, and two, the capitalists who were either slave owners or whose interests were directly connected with the production of agricultural goods from the slave society. That is primarily commercial interests, some of the banks. And in this general division between the two sections, the conflict was reaching an irreconcilable point.

Now let me explain why that was. There's a whole series of myths which are taught in schools. To try to deal with something like the Civil War, you have to almost go back and go over all of them. We just can't do that. But let me go over one of the big ones. The concept was that the reason there was slavery in the South was that the land in the South could be run more profitably by slaves. The concept that the big plantation, if you run it by slavery, was more profitable than by wage workers. That's not true. It would have been more profitable to run the plantation by wage workers. Wage workers are much more productive than chattel slaves.

The reason they didn't have wage workers, the reason they had slaves, was that in the United States there was a fantastic shortage of labor. You see, you could not get someone to work for you for wages when all they had to do was move one mile and there was virgin land that they could take and farm for themselves. Under those conditions, it was impossible. No matter what you offered for someone to work for you, no one would. And in fact, all attempts to have wage labor work in the southern plantations failed. People would just get up and move. There's another problem, too. Since there was a tremendous demand for labor, it was very easy to strike and to make demands, because you couldn't just fire everybody and hire somebody else; there weren't other people around. It was trying to solve the problem of the labor shortage, when confronted with the possibility of people being able to go and get their own land for agriculture, that brought about the massive development of slave societies in the Western Hemisphere.

The Indians couldn't be enslaved, for an obvious reason. They knew how to live out in the woods. You made them a slave, well, they'd run back out in the woods and live. And you couldn't just make a white man a slave, because you had a very difficult problem of identification. White men would run away. But if you took someone from another society, someone who lived in an agricultural society and was not used to living in the woods, contrary to all the myths about people in Africa at the time, there was a clear definition as to who was a slave and who wasn't, by color. And given that you had all the advantages of having uprooted someone and taken them through the process of dehumanizing them, and especially the second generations, it was possible to create chattel slaves within the United States.

But though this was still profitable, it was an extremely unproductive way to produce, and in order to make any profit they had to work the land until they ruined it. Therefore it had to be an expansionist system. It had to continuously expand into new areas. The state of Mississippi didn't really become a slave state, in terms of actually having any large numbers of slaves, until the 1830s and after. The slave states began in the East and began expanding westward. Now, in the early period of the United States, the beginning of industrial capitalism had a coalition between them and the rulers of the Southern slavocracy through a political formation known as the Whig Party. And they ran it, and the basic class conflict that existed at that time was between small farmers against both the slavocracy and the industrialists, and between worker and capitalist in the small beginning factories in the Northeast.

The Democratic and Republican coalitions

However, as the slavocracy began to expand, as the industries began to expand, a very important conflict began to develop. The industries wanted high tariffs to protect them from England and from other industrial countries. The South, based on agriculture, wanted low tariffs so they could trade. The small farmer wanted more, and the masses of people that weren't farming wanted more and more free land. But the slavocracy was expanding more and more into more land. And as the conflicts between the sections of the capitalist class began to break down the old arrangement, the southern slave owners tried to make a coalition with the small farmer to keep control of the federal government, so that the political decisions of the ruling class would favor them. That is, they wanted the majority within the ruling class. And one way to create that majority was to create a coalition with small farmers.

They achieved that. That coalition took the form of the Democratic Party in the days of slavery. That's why the Democratic Party became known as the party of slavery, because naturally in that partnership the slave owners were the bosses and the small farmers were the friends of the bosses. However, this coalition began to break down with the crisis in the 1850s, because the small farmer found himself in competition with the big slave owner for the same land. Now, it's very important to understand the change in the relationship of forces that occurred. When this coalition began to break apart, the potential of a coalition between the western farmers, the Midwestern small farmers, with the Northeast capitalist industrial interests against the slave owners made it possible for the Civil War to take place. Now, this might explain to you, in case you didn't know this, why the abolitionists, when they set up a party, called it the Free Soil Party. They were precisely seeking that type of coalition to develop, that is, to win the small farmers, who were the majority of the American people. The base of the American people was in its traditions laid in the small farmer, as against labor. The Republican Party was exactly that, and that's why Abraham Lincoln was its representative, representing the small farmer coming into a coalition with Eastern capitalism against the expansion of slavery.

As this Republican Party is being created, in this transfer of the relationship of forces among the classes, as the coalition between the classes began to break up, it laid the groundwork for the crisis that developed in 1860. Now, just as the small farmers had looked towards one section of the ruling class, the slavocracy, now they turned to the other section. At both times, they were the junior partner. And the Republican Party was run from top to bottom by the industrial capitalists. They had complete control of it. And when the Civil War broke out, their purpose was to get national hegemony, to be the section of the class that runs, that sets the laws, that runs the governmental apparatus, in order to benefit the development of their section of the ruling class. Their goal was not to abolish slavery. Their goal was not to destroy this other section, though that was inevitably what was part of it. It just couldn't be otherwise, but that wasn't their immediate concern. They didn't care if slavery lasted another 20, 30, 50 years.

Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln, like all politicians who represent classes (things are never one-to-one, they don't have the exact same program as the class), had a maverick idea. His idea was what you should do with all the slaves: ship them back to Africa. And the man had picked up enough mathematics in his self-education that he added up and found out there weren't enough ships to do it. It just wasn't physically possible. But he hung on to the idea almost to the very end of the Civil War, that the thing was not to emancipate the slaves but to start a gradual process of shipping them back to Africa. Lincoln, like all the politicians at that time, outside of a very few handful in the Republican Party, was racist by any terms that we use today. They didn't believe in the equality of people. Lincoln was very point-blank about it. It's all a myth today about Lincoln being somehow the emancipator. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was a last-ditch maneuver by Lincoln to save slavery. Most people present it as the day when it was announced to free. No. If you read the Emancipation Proclamation, it doesn't free a single slave. It only frees slaves in the areas where they've already been freed by the Union Army, maintains slavery in all the slave areas, and guarantees slavery for any slave area that joins the Union. If you want to read the details of this, read Korngold's book on Thaddeus Stevens and read the chapter on Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, as he documents the process.

The radicals, the real radical bourgeois democrats, the ones who wanted to see bourgeois democracy within the United States, were pushing to make the war an abolitionist war. So were other forces, which I want to go over in a second. And Lincoln was trying to hold off, and he was a very good maneuverer. He was a very talented politician, and he was able to effectively not carry out a decision of Congress which would have permitted the emancipation of the slaves much earlier during the war, which was pushed by the radical Republicans and passed, I believe, in 1862. In order to stall that off, he began his promises of an emancipation proclamation and then refused to enforce the decisions of Congress, which required the Union Army to free slaves, not to turn slaves back over to the slave owners and stuff like that.

Now, the capitalist class tried at every point to make this a civil war and to end it as fast as possible within the context of not making it a revolutionary war. That is, not to make the shakeup within the society very deep. They did not want to mobilize the working class. They didn't want to mobilize too much the peasantry, the small farmers. They didn't want to mobilize, definitely, the slaves. Therefore, they proceeded with what they call their border state policy. And in our books, this is presented as a very intelligent military tactic: how, by not coming out against slavery, they were tempting the border states. Now notice the way they do this in history. They say "tempting the border states." What they mean is the slave owners in the border states. But like all history as it is taught in our country, the interest of the ruling class is identified in our history books with the interest of the whole region. So whenever they say the United States wanted to, always read the capitalist class in the United States wanted to. So when they spoke about the border states wanting to, they didn't mean the slaves, who outnumbered the slave owners 100 to 1. They meant the slave owners.

Arming the slaves

See? And this tactic weakened the United States militarily tremendously. One, they couldn't win the backing of the masses of Europe, like the British workers. Therefore it was possible for England to even aspire to give aid to the southern cause and to try to aid them in whatever way they could, because they could always point out to their workers that this war was not for abolition. Also, the most important and definitive military weakness of it was that it didn't win the slaves to the cause, and they were 4 million workers sitting behind the enemy's lines who, if they mobilized, of course, would deal a death blow very rapidly. In fact, the whole southern army depended upon the labor of these 4 million people, who made up 44 percent of the population of the South, and who made up the bulk in the key areas where secession had been successful, to do their labor. And it was only because they were going to militarily lose the Civil War, and only because of the tremendous danger there was to the ruling class, that they began inching their way up to letting the war become a little bit more a social revolution, in order to win the military victory and establish their hegemony.

And they did it piecemeal. First, they allowed the Union armies to let blacks join it and to do dirty work, to build trenches and stuff. Then they found that they just needed more troops. And by the way, you know where you could recruit troops? The best place. You don't have to recruit them back home and send them out to the front. You could recruit them right on the front lines. All you had to do is send out a little expedition at night, go 20 miles into the enemy's territory, go into the first plantation, arrest the plantation owner, or just don't even bother with him, and just go out and recruit. Go among the field workers and say, would you like to join the Union Army? And recruit an army and set up another battalion right on the front lines. Now, any army that can do that, you see, has obviously got tremendous military advantage. And they began doing that. The first army they set up was the First South Carolinas. No pay, no uniforms; well, I think they finally gave them uniforms, but they just treated them, of course, right away as secondary citizens. But by the end of the Civil War, one third of the Union Army was black, and the black soldier had carried out some of the very important key battles.

But mainly, once the black soldier had appeared on the scene, the word got around, the people knew, the black masses moved, and the slaves could no longer be counted upon, and this began to undermine and completely shake up the slave society, and therefore it collapsed much quicker. But this motion, which they were unable to prevent because it was necessary in order to win the Civil War, was not stopped by the Civil War. And so we entered into a period that, in time, let's say goes from 1865 to 1877, in which there was a general radicalization in the United States. Now, it's hard to explain this, but think of the fact that a slave takes a gun in his hand and goes and shoots his owner: it has an inspiring effect on anybody who's oppressed by anybody. Though it's unconscious, the fact that black soldiers went and shot Confederates and killed them also won them more respect and more support among poor whites in this country than any propaganda, the whole work of the abolitionists all put together. When an oppressed section rises up and is ready to take on its masters and does them battle, all the propaganda can cut across the fact that it shows that they have the potential within them to show an alternative, and therefore they attract to them all the oppressed.

Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment

And so by the victory in the South, there was a complete new shakeup in American society as to what a black person was. Racism was in a downswing. The smashing of the slavocracy was in the process of opening up the industrialization of the United States, and the industrial working class in the United States moved in a limited way, because it was a rather limited class at that time. They even talked of forming a labor party; they held a congress to form one. Trade unions began to grow. It was a general leftward turn, but it coincided with another development. At the minute the ruling class, the industrial capitalists, won the Civil War, they thought, okay, we won, now stop the whole thing. The first thing they did was they sent their troops down South and they took the land away from the Negroes that had taken the land. They tried to put a halt on the developing revolution. And in this process, they allowed the ex-slave owners and the agricultural interests in the South to reorganize their governments on the same basis that they had had before, through the Democratic Party, the slave Democratic Party, the same party, the same apparatus, to reorganize and to establish its rule. It's the same way that, when the United States went into Korea, it allowed the Japanese to continue to rule after the Second World War. Same type of thing. The army goes in but allows the apparatus that had been there all along to continue, as a means to halt. But as life has it, nobody gets their way simply.

No sooner had the industrial capitalists won the war than the danger of the slavocracy expanding into the areas of the small farmers came to an end. And therefore the small farmer was very much relaxed to create a coalition once again with southern agriculture, and most certainly felt perfectly relaxed that, if anything, their danger came from the Northeast, from the industrial capitalists. And no sooner had they won than the whole question of bourgeois democracy was at stake. Could they allow elections? The representatives of the agricultural, commercial, banking interests could now win a majority on the vote again by appealing to the agriculture which made up the majority of the American people. And therefore a lot of capitalists became very radical. They began to find out that, my God, they were for civil liberties. They became extremely interested in seeing if they could do something about it. So the first thing they did was they passed the 14th Amendment, which was a very tricky piece of legislation. It said that though blacks don't vote in the South, you can't count them for representatives. And that would take care of cutting down the number of representatives the South would have. Number two, they said foreigners who come to our country can't vote either. That's true. But we can count them, because they're in the North. So the number of seats the North got could now count all the foreigners, which was literally millions, who yet weren't citizens. But blacks who'd been born in the country, been there all along, if they couldn't vote, you couldn't have representation.

It was clearly a move to try to swing the representation in the national government so the industrial capitalists could control it, as opposed to the agriculture. That was the main purpose of the 14th Amendment. But in doing that, and out of this whole process, though the capitalists once again just wanted to limit it to this, they couldn't, because there were social masses in motion. The only way they could get these things passed and get the support of the mass of the American people was to give them some social content. In other words, the social content was being driven into it by the motion of the mass of the people. And so the 14th Amendment began to open up. With the debate on it, there began to open up a turn in the position of the ruling class regarding it. They began to realize that in order to assure their rule, they had to have the South in the hands of the party that supported industrial capitalism, and that was the Republican Party. And in order to achieve this they had a very simple method: they simply gave the franchise to the Negro, made a coalition with him on the basis that he gets the franchise and joins the Republican Party. You see, this whole process is put into motion where the Republicans, on the base of the Negro vote, are going to be able to run the South.

Now you've got to understand what happened. They calculated the vote. Thaddeus Stevens used to get up in Congress and say, there it is: even with this 14th Amendment, the whole bit, we're still going to lose. Either we give the vote to the Negro and assure our governmental control in the South, or we're going to run into more problems. So they voted to do that. And the Negro people, of course, supported that. Get the right to the franchise. Now, memorize this, probably the only thing you should memorize from this talk: Negroes could vote in the South before the 15th Amendment was passed, before they could vote in most northern states, including New England states like Connecticut, New Jersey, all the Midwestern states. In New York you had to have $250, so you couldn't vote. But in the South, everywhere in the South, a Negro could vote with no federal law giving him the right to vote. And he voted everywhere. There were more black people registered to vote in the South than whites in 1868, which goes to show that a ruling class can do a lot when it means to. Today they can't even enforce the laws. But when they needed it, when it was to their interest, they've got state power. Any class that's got state power can do anything it wants to do in legalistic terms.

Land reform and the capitalists' turn

Now a deepening radicalization then took place in the South, because the Negro people didn't join this alliance in order to make sure that industrial capitalism had sway in the nation. They joined it as a means to fight their immediate oppression, which was the landowners, the people who were hiring them as rural proletariat, and a class battle began to ensue in the South. Now, notice this dialectical thing. The more Reconstruction, as it was called, succeeded in establishing industrial capitalist governments in the South, the less the industrial capitalists needed the policies of Reconstruction. In other words, once they began to assure that their party could dominate, or that their interests could dominate, then they didn't need to give the Negro the right to vote or to defend the Negro. Once they could achieve their goal to establish their hegemony nationally, it was not in their interest.

On the other hand, the Negro people wanted a full completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution. What they wanted foremost in the South was all civil liberties, all civil rights, and fundamental to any possible real gain of civil liberties and civil rights, a land reform. So long as the land remained in the hands of a small class (and in this case it was no longer southerners, it was primarily northern bank interests and railroad interests which were getting the land, or to which southern landowners were now mortgaged or owed), so long as they couldn't get their own plot of land and become like the rest of America at that time, small farmers, they could not be guaranteed that their rights were going to be upheld. Therefore they began pressing again for land reform. Now notice this. The alliance is created on the basis that the old governmental structure of the slavocracy has left, which is denying civil liberties (the black codes, you remember that in school), denying civil liberties to the Negro people, and is threatening the national hegemony of the industrial capitalist class. The alliance is sown between the Negro people and industrial capitalists to resolve this, with the industrial capitalists wanting to resolve their hegemony and the Negro people wanting to win their civil liberties and to deepen the bourgeois democratic revolution. But immediately they come into conflict. Immediately the Negro people began demanding the land, and the industrial capitalists wanted this land precisely to exploit it, precisely so they could have cheap labor. So no sooner than the process begins, but the two partners are now at odds.

Now, an interesting process happens, and this hasn't been documented in history books until very, very recently. There are two schools, by the way, in southern history and Negro history as a whole in this country. One is called the classical school, which goes up to about 1940. The other is now known as the revisionist school, which started with the writings of Du Bois and Lynch in the 1920s, the Mississippi Negro senator who wrote a book defending Reconstruction. He was the first one that took a different line. The classical school is just a fundamentally racist school, the concept that the whole of Reconstruction failed because of the Negro. The revisionist line is geared to fit American imperialism today. That is, the Negro is really an American, don't tell him he's an African, don't get him confused about that, so he starts thinking he's African and he's going to want to do what the Africans are doing, that's fighting us. So now they're brothers. And when you go back in history, we can't say now it's their fault that Reconstruction didn't work, we've got to find another villain. The villain now, you see, is the white southern racists. So the revisionist school, and any professor of the revisionist school you talk to would right away swear on a Bible that that isn't why he's writing this way. You'd have to explain why it is that simultaneously as the Second World War ends and colonial revolutions begin to spread, this whole new school begins to catch on, so that today there's no one left in the classical school. They're all revisionists, and they are making money head over heels writing revisionist books. Every bookstore you go to, there's hundreds of new books on Negro struggles, the Civil War, Reconstruction. They're all coming out, and they're all discovering new things about it, you see.

But it's very fortunate for us, because in that we can find out some very, very interesting new information. One of the things we begin to find out is that the Democratic Party within the South collapsed when Reconstruction began, because the whole basis of it as an ex-slave owners' party could not last. A class whose property relations have been taken away from it cannot survive. The power was strictly within the industrial bourgeoisie, and it permeated the whole economy of the South very rapidly. And so the Democratic Party, in the state of Mississippi for instance, literally came to disappear. And what was left of it reformed itself and got together with some conservative Republicans and formed a party, I think they called themselves the Conservative Party for a little while. This all happened around 1867, 1868, 1869. But what did begin to happen was that, as the conflict between the ex-slaves and the industrial capitalists began to intensify, two wings began to develop in the Republican Party. One saying, okay, we've gone far enough, we've got what we want: national hegemony. The problem now is not the southern ex-slave owner or the agricultural interest as a whole. The thing now is to stop this process, to stop this social revolution before it gets out of hand, before you get an alliance of black rural proletariat with poor white farmers. That becomes the danger. And the southern racist [?], of course, is waving this danger all the time. He's trying to get the industrial bourgeoisie to support him and to end it, especially those who have any interest in land, because they must remember this, I'm talking about this labor shortage. They must have the Negro not being free to move out. There was still free land in the West, there was enough free land.

Let me tell you something. All right, memorize this fact too. If they just expropriated the 70,000 big slave owners, that would have been 390 million acres. And if they gave 40 acres per Negro family, that would have used up only one ninth of that land. Not only that, there was enough land in the South, there were 46 million acres owned by the government. So 40 acres could have been given to every Negro family in the South just on public land. So it's the industrial capitalists who stopped the land reform. They're the ones who opposed it. Because even if they own public land, if they just opened up the public lands, it's true they wouldn't be expropriating their own land, but then who would work it? Where would they get their working class? Go back into the literature of that time and you'll see article upon article upon article: where can we get workers? And they tried all sorts of things. They brought them from Ireland. They sent them to Alabama. They went to China, and they calculated everything. And when they got through calculating, they said the cheapest way is to keep the black man down. The Irish, by the way, were a big problem for them, because they got them down there and the first time it came to collect the crop, they went on strike. And since cotton had to be collected or it'd go bad in something like five days, they had to capitulate, and they tripled their wages. And of course that type of concept begins to spread.

The counter-revolution in the South

So the question of civil liberties was now directly tied into the question of the standard of living of the working class and what was going to happen to the black people in the South. And in order to exploit and take advantage of the South, Reconstruction had to be called to a halt. And the ruling class begins to divide. The Democratic Party as we know it today in the South was founded by the conservative wing of the Republican Party. They became its leaders, they became its backbone, and they became the political program of the party in the South. Now, they called upon an interesting tradition in setting up this party, the traditions of the slave Democratic Party, which was racism and just general backwardness, just general ignorance, barbarism, and began preparing a counterrevolution within the South against Reconstruction. And more and more of the industrial capitalist class began to switch. Naturally, the lumpen element, which existed in quite large numbers in the South at that time among whites who had been part of the slave system, were excellent recruits for the dirty work of the new party that was being rebuilt, in a sense, the Democratic Party. And they began forming armed underground units directly connected with the party. Everywhere they built a Democratic Party chapter, they built an armed body.

In our history books, they talk about the Ku Klux Klan, and they only feature the Ku Klux Klan for a very special reason. The Ku Klux Klan was an armed body of men of ex-slave-owner types that existed just after the Civil War, and then was dissolved at the same time the Democratic Party dissolved. They don't talk about the much larger, much more massive terrorist groups that were exactly like the Klan, based themselves on the structure of the Klan, and even in some cases were the reorganization of the Klan, but which were organized by the new Democratic Party after 1868, such as the White Camellia, the Red Shirts. Most of them were known as the Democratic Rifle Clubs. And all over the South literal class war, in terms of actual shooting, began to develop. The Negro people counted on their ally. They began to fight it legalistically. They had representatives within all the governments in the South; the Republicans were their party, their ally. I'll give you an example. They demanded that militias be set up to defend the rights of the citizenry, and the governments would say, okay, we want a militia. And the Northern federal government would say, well, we'll send you guns sometime, we'll get around to it. Meanwhile this Democratic Party is building up this massive army.

Now, let me just give you two quick cases, because I want to get off this and deal with another aspect of Reconstruction. Let me take Mississippi and South Carolina. In both cases the Negroes had a majority and could not lose an election. Mississippi came to an open confrontation. The white rifle clubs of the Democratic Party armed themselves, and the Negro people formed militias, legal militias passed by their legislature, democratically elected. And they were literally facing each other for battle. General Grant came to the rescue and sent his representative to Mississippi, and the representative came on the scene and said, well, we must have a compromise, we've got to settle this. And when they got through with all the talk and all the dealings, the Negroes were disarmed by the federal troops standing by, and the Democratic Party military machine wasn't touched. There was an election that year. Guess who won? And in that process, hundreds and hundreds of Negro militants and radical leaders throughout Mississippi were assassinated. A terror campaign began and swept the South as they began to smash Reconstruction through force.

In South Carolina, the Negro voters outnumbered the white voters, 90,000 to 60,000. Couldn't lose. It's just impossible. And it was only through terror that they were able to stop it. But even so, in the case of South Carolina, the blacks won the election. The Democratic Party contested it, and they took it before President Hayes. He, of course, sided with the Democrats, and so ended Reconstruction. Now, key to this (and I don't want to go into whether it would have been possible to stop it in a historic sense and so forth, that's very complicated), key to this was that in mobilizing the poor whites against the Negro, the Democratic Party as it was reorganized in the South took on a very important aspect, and that is that it was the party of demagogy. It approached the poor whites on the basis that it was for them, as agricultural workers, against industrial capitalism. And its cry began: drive the northerners out, drive the carpetbaggers out, put the South back in the hands of the Southerners. But that party was controlled from top to bottom by northerners.

Who the redemption governments were

There are two very well-written, excellent articles by myself, and the Young Socialists discussed this at length [?], and I want to just give you an example of who the people were who came in. Pick any history book and look up the Redemption period, and they all say the South was returned to southern rule. Okay, and the southerners didn't like Reconstruction. It's true the Negroes got a raw deal in it, but the South was back in the hands of southerners. And that whole demagogic approach, in order to win the small white farmer in the South on the basis of racism, laid a certain approach and the whole role that the Democratic Party was to play in that next period, unlike the Republican Party, which was known as the party of industrial capitalism. Okay. In Mississippi, the first two governors were Stone and Lowry. Both of them were railroad lawyers. In Tennessee, John Brown was the first Redemption governor. He was vice president of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and later president of the Bon Air [?] Company. The next one was John Porter. He was president of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad Company. You notice the railroads dominate all these governments. In Alabama, George S. Houston, the first governor, was director of a branch of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Raffis [?] Kopp [?] followed Houston as governor, attorney for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

In Georgia, Georgia is the classical example where they say the Southerners came back to rule. And they always said that because there were three guys who ran Georgia for about 20 years after Redemption who were all beautiful examples of the South. And probably the best of them was John B. Gordon, who was the general in command of the ex-Confederate troops. You know, they formed their, what do you call them, the veterans' organization, the veterans of the Civil War Southerners. He was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan of the state of Georgia, and he had been an ex-Confederate, he was a Confederate general. So there was a perfect Southerner. He was also on the payroll of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad for $14,000 a year. The other member was John Joseph Brown. He was president of the Western Atlantic Railroad Company, part owner of the Southern Railroad and Steamship Company. And he also had some money in iron. And the third one was Alfred Colquitt, who was a plantation owner, but also had money invested in fertilizer factories and in coal mining. So what you have in the South is not a return of the plantationers.

And by the way, I'll just throw this in for a sideline. Go read the CP's interpretation of Reconstruction in James Allen's book, The Fight for Democracy. If you read that, you would think that the ex-slave owners literally rose again, and took over. He puts a label on them, Bourbons, and from then on he's got his coalition politics, as he worked it out. There's the bad capitalists, they're called Bourbons. And there's the not-too-bad capitalists, who sometimes can be won over, called the non-Bourbons. And so you have the good-bad guy within the ruling class. But history, as these revisionists have been documenting, not meaning to, they're showing that there wasn't any bad or good guy, that it was the class as a whole, and especially its most so-called progressive section, the industrial capitalists, who finished Reconstruction. And the Negro people attempted to struggle from within the Republican Party, within this coalition, and it was precisely there that they got their betrayal. It was precisely within that coalition, the fact that there was no independent force of the working class, Negro people or the peasantry at that time, that made it impossible for them to stop the wave of reaction. And the results were devastating for Negro people.

Now, the success of the Democratic Party's demagogic approach to the small farmer in the South was an absolute smashing success. It set in a period of reaction, as far as the Negro people were concerned, that wasn't broken or even turned around until at least the rise of the CIO and the beginning of the Second World War. From then on it was straight down, step by step, and there was no easing of the picture until the turn in the relationship of forces which takes place at the time of the rise of the CIO.

The Populists

Now, that's one example and gives you the idea, begins to explain why the Democratic Party is so different from the Republican Party. But the Democratic Party passed its supreme test in its role as the party that approaches and takes in any opposing motion against the ruling class and is able, therefore, to kill it. It was proven when the small farmers, as industrial capitalism developed in this country, began naturally to be driven down. They were historically gone. You could not force capitalism back into small businesses. Monopolies were developing. That's progress. The thing to do, of course, is take over the monopolies. They wanted to cut them up again. Can't go back in history. But nevertheless, the Populist movement was an outburst of the small farmer against the development of monopoly capitalism, and in their own confused way, because they were themselves property owners and therefore their program could not offer a real alternative to capitalism itself, they began to try to find some means to struggle back. They built Farmers' Alliances and so forth. They eventually ended up taking on a political form, beginning to challenge the ruling class politically.

Now, I don't want to go over it. It begins around 1880 [?]. You know, for ten years they had more rainfall in the West, the beginning of the end of the prairies, than is normal. And a massive number of the American people became convinced that this was a real great place to go, and they all went. And then it stopped raining, in 1886, and panic ensued. They started going back. And then the freeze came in, too, and killed all the cattle in that area. It was a real depression, a conjuncture of many factors, that happened and created a real deep radicalization in the Midwest and in the West around the end of the 1880s. But the same process was taking place in the South. And what happened is you ended up with a Populist movement. To make a long story short, it was a classical Populist, Narodnik-type [?] movement, small farmers, but it had within it the embryos of all the working-class formations. It had the rural proletariat, as represented by the Negro farm worker, within it, organized independently in its own Populist organizations. It had the nucleus of the industrial proletariat in the South in it, and it had a semi-alliance with the developing working-class organizations in the Northeast cities.

And it had two ways it could go. It could either seek to win and influence a section of the ruling class to solve its problems, or it could turn to the working class and the program it can offer, that is, a socialist alternative, to solve their problem. Now, for one thing, the labor movement was not strong enough. It just hadn't developed within this country to present much of an alternative at that time. And just like under Reconstruction, the capitalist class historically wasn't interested in their problems. Just as the whole class was interested in smashing Reconstruction, what they were interested in, as far as the Populists were concerned, was removing the problem and proceeding as fast as possible with industrialization. The question is how to do it. Here's millions of people waking up, holding their meetings out in the countryside, singing songs, beginning to think politically, radical speakers getting up and raising all types of ideas. Most of them, 90 percent of them, were kooky ideas and nuts, because they were trying to think of some way to get around these problems without leaving the framework of capitalism. But nevertheless people were in motion and they didn't have control over it. In fact, they got into such motion they began to win elections.

In the South, the battle was extremely important, because if the Populists would win, they were going to reintroduce civil liberties for the black people. And that became a very important danger for the ruling class, because the rural proletariat would now be freed from the control they had over it by the semi-dictatorship type of governments they had in the South, where black people had no vote. And this alliance began to develop. And in the South, when they won elections, as they did, the Democrats just said, no, you didn't win. Now, when that happens, you've got a choice, one of two things. You can take a vacation, or get up some arms and say, we won and we're the government and it's tough macaroni. You lost. Now, the composition of the Populists being what it is, they wouldn't fight that way. And they couldn't. It was a composition of a multi-class mix-up. There were some big landowners in the Populists. Of course they didn't want to fight. From the very beginning there was this confusion of classes within it. But there was the potential that a section of it could be won to a socialist movement, that when the inevitable split between the different layers within the Populists came, a section could be won to the working class and be independent, in terms of both its program and its organization.

The capitalist class wanted to stop this. The Democrats in the South were their main instrument. The Democratic Party was the main opponent, the one they had the hardest battles with, the ones they met in the fields with guns and actually shot it out. At one point a Negro was going to speak, and the Democrats were going to shoot him, in Augusta, Georgia, and 2,000 poor whites armed themselves, rode into the town, and took it over to defend the right of a Negro to speak. That was the type of mood that the Populists had in 1892. But the government had to smash it. What did they do? The Democrats began to rethink. They began to say, well, we're not so opposed. Farmers? Why, you want some silver? We'll give you silver. They began to adapt this and that to their program, which was unessential. And the key to it wasn't whether they adapted or didn't adapt. What they wanted to do was destroy their independent formation, to smash it.

The 1896 convention

And the whole historic period, and this whole rise, sometimes history moves it into a few hours when all the forces come into play and the decisions are made. In a convention which you could spend hours just reading about, and you can see all the class forces in motion, all the development of American history at that point in the class struggle, the convention that took place in 1896, July 22nd, when the Populists met and presented before them was the proposal that they dissolve and join the Democrats. And the two forces were conflicting. The embryonic development of a socialist movement in the United States, and of the working class, was there, too. Eugene V. Debs had just become a Marxist. The whole future of what would happen within the Populists was [inaudible]. And let me just tell you what happened at that convention. There were 1,400 delegates. The poorest wing, especially from Texas, were the militants. They had no shoes on, for instance, at the convention. You could tell the different classes within the convention just by the way they appeared. And they came there determined to stay independent of the two parties, to stay independent of the ruling class, as they saw it, in the terms they understood from their class point of view.

The Democrats controlled the apparatus. They controlled the conference hall. The first thing they did was, the left wing prepared this big demonstration. Traditional American convention, they were going to parade with flags and wave banners and yell and scream to show their strength. So as soon as they got into the convention hall, the Democrats turned off the lights. They were out in pitch dark. Couldn't hold their demonstration. Now, right then and there, you see, a working-class organization probably would have left the hall and gone somewhere else and held their meeting and beat up the guys who were in charge of the lights. But precisely the type of wavering that this type of layer in the American population has, they wavered. They didn't know what to do. They tried to hold the demonstration. They gave it up. They came in the second day, tried again. The second day they won again. They passed a motion which was in their favor. But in all this they had no concise program, no leadership, no alternative. The only section that could have provided it was the working class.

And the left-wingers, especially the Texas delegation, said, let's nominate Debs for president. Here was a working-class representative, a guy who just turned socialist, and they raised the concept, let's nominate Debs. You know what Debs said? He sent a telegram to the convention saying, I want you to support the Democratic Party, I want you to support Bryan, and my name cannot be considered. And in that short stroke you have within it capsulized the fact that the American working class had not yet developed a conscious expression of its own class interest. And having that missing, there was nowhere this Populist movement could go. But interesting in its history, and in the development of how the Democratic Party approached it, we can see that their role as demagogues became essential.

Now, when Bryan gets nominated by this convention (I don't want to go into all the details, it's a lot more gory when you get down through the way they outmaneuvered him, it was just fantastic), when he gets nominated, now the Republican candidates can blast Bryan as a left-wing Communist, anything they want. There's no danger now from the left. Now they can present him as a real menace, you see, in the propaganda, and hope that they can play on all the weaknesses and the backwardness of the masses that still exist, to win. Even having the most reactionary get in, because if Bryan should get in, he's a reactionary too, there's no problem, he's part of the ruling class. His vice presidential candidate was a banker from Maine who opposed every single plank of the Populist program. So either way they win. So they might as well play it for all it's worth and have their right-wing guy go as right-wing as he wants. They can't lose. See?

And that opened up the invasion of Cuba. It opened up, by the defeat of the Populists, the possibility then to really smash the Negroes in the South. And that's when all the laws were passed in the South taking away the right of Negroes to vote formally. All the grandfather clauses, the poll taxes, and all these things were passed after, except in Mississippi, after Reconstruction was defeated. And then that's when Roosevelt went down there and made his tour of the South, speaking about how not allowing Negroes to vote was not in violation of the 15th Amendment, and the hardest period for the Negro people fell right after that. So in both Reconstruction and the Populist movement we see this party, the Democratic Party, developing as the party that has a place for the support of mass layers of people precisely to cut off and to destroy developments which might break away.

1896 was the last major challenge, in terms of electoral politics, that any section outside of the direct control of the ruling class ever had. Their next challenge, as a social movement, comes in the CIO. And then all their experience in the ruling class on how to handle this, born out of Reconstruction and the Populists, comes into play. And we'll discuss that next time. And then in this context, let's look at the new rising Negro movement that began with the Second World War and has been rapidly increasing its pace, and at the now embryonic development of the antiwar movement, and at what we can expect the tactics of the ruling class to be. And in all this, throughout this whole process, it wasn't any malicious intent of any individual in the Populists to get into the Democratic Party. And as we will learn in the CIO, it was simply in every case that the ruling class had no section whatsoever which it was in the interest of to accomplish the problems that these people had, and therefore to seek an alliance or try to work within them or with them could only end in defeat, because historically there was just nothing in the interest of the class you were appealing to, the class you were trying to seek support from, which was in their interest.

So the first thing you've got to ask yourself, whether you want to set up a coalition with any class, most certainly the class that rules over you, is, is it in its interest? Because if it isn't, it's not going to support you. After the Populists and Reconstruction, anyone who studies American history can see it: the last progressive stand of the industrial capitalist class in this country, finance capitalism, was when they opposed the slave owners. Since then it has not been in their interest to have any forward social step of any sort. Anything they've given has been under pressure only, to stem other problems. And they have developed in the United States what we call the two-party system, very important for them, any formation like that, and this whole myth about the two parties. It doesn't come out of the blue. It came out of the history of the actual class struggle after the defeat of the Populists. This became a big thing in American literature, about the two parties, how they can contain everything, how all problems can be solved within this context, how it's wrong to think in any other context.

And also, by the way, with the death of the Populist movement, the socialist movement begins its first organizational and programmatic developments on any sort of large scale. And by the way, it wins to it large layers of the militants of the Populists, especially in areas like Texas. And also the IWW develops and finds in its base also a lot of these ex-Populists, and the ones who lost their land and became rural landless workers. And then as we have the discussions here on the history of the American radical movement, you can see how the development of a working-class movement becomes more proletarian, less based on the rural workers or the small farmers, the class program becomes clearer and clearer, until you get the founding of the First Marxist Party in 1928. Okay, so that's about it. Next time we will go into the CIO and the question of the Labor Party, and then the present situation. Thank you.

Questions and discussion

Camejo: Stay for questions, stay, because we can't do it [?]. Okay, the question is, do I really [inaudible]. I made a little passing remark at the end about the first Marxist party being formed in 1928. Let me take that back, so we don't have to discuss it. I'll leave the question open so other people can explain it. It raises a very deep question which can't be discussed here. It depends on exactly what way you want to use the word Marxist. In a certain sense it most certainly can be said that the first Marxist party in the United States was 1928, in my opinion. Of course, this is not [inaudible]. But in many other ways it can be said that the Communist Party most certainly was the first Marxist party in the United States.

Okay, is there any question, or anybody want to disagree? Anybody want to challenge?

Question: I have a question.

Camejo: Sure. The governors [inaudible]. Most of them were Southerners by birth and by being brought up. Some of them weren't. The first governor of Florida was known as Millionaire Drew, who was from New Hampshire, a northerner from New Hampshire, naturally, and he was a labor tycoon [?]. The first Reconstructionist governor in Virginia was a Republican carpetbagger, a banker. So in some cases they were northern. But what all the northern companies did is they immediately hired southerners, especially anybody who'd been a southern Confederate general. I mean, there were all types of colonels, you know, because they had a lot of colonels and generals and stuff like that, and they were all over the place. They were out making a living by begging or anything, because these guys were so unused to work they couldn't work, but the companies went out and found them, and they gave them jobs as representatives to the public. So whenever a northern company wanted to make a statement in the South, they would have one of these colonels come walking out in all his Confederate uniform and the medals and say, well, we Southerners here want to do this and that.

I'll give you an example. In Alabama, when Reconstruction started, I'm sorry, Louisiana, they set up a lottery, and they were raking the money in with this lottery. He was a carpetbagger, a capitalist from the North, who came down and set up a lottery. All lotteries are usually to milk the working class. So they were doing real good business. And then these guys were not too concerned about whether it was Reconstruction or not, but as Reconstruction ended and Redemption set in, they still wanted the lottery, so they immediately went out and hired the biggest southern generals they could to be the guys who picked the numbers [?] and announced them, so they could now be a southern company. And that lottery company controlled Louisiana for about 20 years in that period. I mean, they had complete control. When the legislature would pass a motion against them, because some Democrats got all excited about returning to the South type thing and voted against the lottery, they just moved in and had their judges and their lawyers and all their politicians move in and just cancel the whole legislature, call whole new elections, put in their people, and settle the question by writing into a new constitution, which they had written for the state of Louisiana, the lottery, as part of the constitution, so that they could be assured of their rule. So you see, they were northern companies, but they were always looking for southern spokesmen. And therefore a lot of these governors were lawyers, for instance, who were southern attorneys for the northern railroad companies.

By the way, the Louisville and Nashville, which had control of most of this, the capital in it was about 50-50 between the United States and England. And that didn't change until after a crisis a little later. I think it was 1877 it began to change, and the United States had control of these stocks. But no, they were Southerners as a whole, but working for Americans.

Question: [inaudible] Democrats?

Camejo: Some of them became Democrats who had been Republicans. Some of them had a history of being Democrats even prior. Most certainly all these Confederate generals had been slave owners and had been Democrats. But take the guy who became the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta, which was the key city for the South financially: he was one of the Reconstruction governors, a Republican who now becomes a Democrat. The guy who wrote the anti-Negro legislation for Mississippi, the Mississippi Plan to break the right of Negroes, was a governor under Reconstruction, a Republican. So within it the general Republican capitalists switch over and become Democrats, and the Republican Party disappears. It becomes almost an all-black party. In fact, to show their class fear, they met at a convention in Mississippi at one point, and the Negroes demanded proportional representation on elected bodies, the number of votes they put up to the number of seats. That would have given them 95 percent. And they had 5 percent. And, oh man, at that time they switched over to the Democratic Party faster than hell. Because then you would have had a labor government. And they would have had land reform.

Question: [inaudible]

Camejo: Right. The question is, was there, before the Civil War, any southern industrial capitalist class? Basically, what role did they play? In giving any talk of this nature, you can't go into all aspects. This is a very important aspect in this sense. Remember when I spoke about the Whigs, this coalition, and then it breaks and they form the Democratic Party, which becomes the coalition led by the slave owners. Well, some naturally didn't want to. And some of the ones that didn't want to break this coalition were the small, beginning industrial capitalists of the South. They remained Whigs. And they also tended to agree to develop some sort of formulation to abolish slavery gradually, like 1 percent a year for 100 years. These proposals were actually made. They were proposals that anybody born after a certain year then would be free, and so much. They had all different types of ways to graduate. And when the Civil War came, most of them just shut up, sat back, and hoped to hang on to their money. Some actually went over to the North, very few. A lot of them went over to the South.

As soon as the war was over, of course, they find themselves in the Republican Party as being small capitalists. Many of them became leaders of the Democratic Party because they had the same political line the Democratic Party then developed and had been traditionally speaking for, and had standing within the ruling class as such. C. Vann Woodward has done a fabulous job of documenting this by looking up the personal letters between these people, northern capitalists, as they discussed this whole question, and as the southern Whigs said to the northern capitalists, you might as well dump Reconstruction now. The situation is completely in hand. If you allow the Democratic Party to smash the Negro, everything will be fine here. We will support all your national legislation. We guarantee you that.

And in our history books, when 1877 comes, remember the Compromise of 1877? Everybody learns that right in school. The Compromise of 1877: you pull out the northern troops in return for Hayes becoming president, even though he wasn't elected president, and there was a big crisis and so forth. A lot of garbage. It wasn't returning the South to Southern rule. What simply had happened is the Northern capitalists had destroyed Reconstruction and were now establishing their rule on a national scale. And there was no crisis. The Democrats in Congress were up in arms making speeches about never will we let Hayes have it and so forth and so on. Then they held a caucus, and one of the big guys in with the railroads and the capitalists said, no, no, you guys got the wrong line, we don't need to have that this year, we're going to vote and put Hayes in, it's all settled, we've ironed out the whole thing. And the whole thing that we're ironing out had nothing to do with Reconstruction, with troops, with nothing. What it had to do with was which way the railroads were going to go and who was going to own what sections of the railroads. And once that thing had been settled and compromises had been achieved, they went in the next day, the Democrats voted, wham, to put Hayes in. The questions were all secondary, like who was going to be the third man of the commission that's going to decide which way, you see? So that the Whigs and all this whole conflict that's called the 1877 conflict, it's just baloney, that's all. It's the version they want the American people to learn, and it's just not correct.

Question: I'm not too acquainted with American history, but I am curious, was there any sort of indemnity that the South had to pay after the war? And [inaudible] what happened to these plantations? Were they bought up by [inaudible]?

Camejo: Okay. Let me start the first. Well, wait a second. Repeat it a little bit. Say it again. Summarize it. The indemnity first, and then you went... Okay. The question was, did the South have to pay any indemnity, and secondly, what happened to the big plantations? Is that a good way to summarize? Okay, well, let me do the plantation thing first. Many, many things happened. Some plantations survived as big plantations owned by Southerners. Very large turnover did take place in the ownership of the land, primarily to a certain amount of it becoming actually smaller, but a large amount is indirect ownership, you see, where people were renting out or small farmers got into debt to banks, and the whole relationship of the land became definitively connected with northern interests, the railroads and so forth. There were still a lot of landowners left, many of them northerners, who came down right after the Civil War and bought land.

Now on the indemnity, you may not believe this, but what almost happened after the Civil War wasn't that the Southerners had to pay but that the North almost had to pay the South, at least that's what the Southerners wanted. They went to Congress with motions and stuff to get money for all their slaves. To my knowledge, and I believe this is correct (and it's so unbelievable that even though I read it, I keep remembering it and I still keep thinking I must be wrong), not a single rebel [was punished?]. You know, today they talk a lot about insurrection, about armed conspiracies to overthrow the government by force and violence. Well, you know, the Southerners tried it. The southern ruling class didn't talk about it, they did it. Now, one person was shot, and I believe that no one served more than a few years' imprisonment, and I may be wrong about this, I'm just not sure, but that's what I remember. In any case, some of the plantations: take Jefferson Davis's big plantation. The minute the Civil War was over, the Negroes on this plantation took it over, started running it for themselves. In fact, they drew a line. No white people could come on the plantation. It was strictly for them. And that whole thing was turned back over to the federal government.

There was only one case that I know of where any sort of indemnity was paid. And that was in Alabama, when the Negroes went to the Reconstruction Convention to write the constitution. A Negro from Dallas County, that's where Selma, Alabama is, right next to Lowndes County, got up and made a motion that slaves be paid for the back pay owed them. And, of course, this was a tremendous motion. The slave owners went wild, and, I mean, capitalists were still around. And they finally made their legal point that at least since the Emancipation Proclamation, which was five years back, four years back, and they won it at the rate of $10 a month back pay to 1863, and it passed 50 to 30. And today the Negro has trouble getting the right to vote in Selma, Alabama. So that, you know, I don't have to tell you. Any other questions? But as a whole, you see, the ruling class didn't want, why suppress them? You want to set the norm that ruling classes get suppressed? They tried very rapidly to get them back in.

Question: [inaudible]

Camejo: I prepared a bibliography for the YSA and sent it to them and they told me they were going to publish it, but I guess they haven't had a chance or they haven't found a form to do it. If people want to read more about this, unfortunately there is no single book that's any good on these periods. Stampp is the best, but you've got to understand this stuff. You have to read so much because you've got to begin figuring it out for yourself. None of them, of course, have a class line. They're all covering different things. Now, some of the early revisionist writings are good because they dug into the facts, and they weren't writing at the time that the civil rights struggle was going on. A lot of the ones who write now are covering their flanks, being careful not to give in, for instance, any information that would help the nationalists. And they're very cautious, because I see changes happen in the last few years among some of the liberals, like C. Vann Woodward and Kenneth Stampp, in the way they write about Reconstruction.

But, okay, if you want to read, read Du Bois's classic. It's not a history book, but it gives a good feeling for what happened. Anything written by the CP is worthless. It's just totally factually incorrect. Facts are taken that have absolutely no importance and blown up as though they're the most important thing that happened. And their whole approach to the development of Reconstruction was that there were good guys who went down there to try to make democracy, especially these abolitionists, middle-class guys who went down and got together with Negroes, and they were all fighting for democracy, and there was a real bad Bourbons. And they had a big fight. And look how lousy America is, that the northern government didn't do anything about this and allowed the Bourbons to come back to power. Now, by the way, the nice middle-class abolitionists, you know what happened to them? As a whole, they became anti-Negro in the 1880s. You know Stowe, the one who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin? She wrote in the Herald Tribune in the 1880s that the Negroes had everything they needed in the South. A lot of them sold out as the turn to reaction came in. Very few really held out. They showed their class base. Well, Garrison, yeah. The pacifist wing tended to quit. [inaudible]

Now, anything by Kenneth Stampp or C. Vann Woodward is very good. The Origins of the New South, the first chapter, gives you the statistics as to who became the new Redemption government. That's Origins of the New South, by C. Vann Woodward; we sell it in all our bookstores. And there's a book by a guy by the name of Wharton, written in 1947, called The Negro in Mississippi, which is the best for documentation of how the Democratic Party dissolved and the new one was built in the splits within the Republican Party. His book isn't about that. He just says that in passing, but to him it wasn't historically important. And then there are some little books by guys writing their PhDs who are just writing to make a living or to get a degree or something, which are written in the most boring manner possible, but which have good facts that sneak through, like the Negro Militias, that little book by Otis [?], whatever his name is. We sell that too, and Merit Publishers [?] sells it, called Negro Militias. It gives you documentation how the Ku Klux Klan and the rest were just armed bodies of the Democratic Party.

Question: Why wasn't John Brown successful? Why didn't the uprisings of the slaves take place?

Camejo: Now, okay, there are two separate questions. Let's go over John Brown first. John Brown's idea wasn't bad at all. It's not that John Brown had a nutty idea and just made a desperate move. It was a little adventuristic, but his idea was basically sound, that was to create a guerrilla-based movement through the Appalachians which would continuously harass the slavocracy and try to develop a gradual buildup until they could have an insurrection against the slavocracy and overthrow it. If the end of slavery had come that way, it would have been much better. It would have had much deeper social impact.

You see, if you study the Haitian rebellion, the only slave rebellion that succeeded in ending slavery without any other class interfering in the battle, you realize why it was so difficult in the United States for a rebellion to take place. You've got to remember that the black slave is outnumbered, even within the South, by people who are benefiting indirectly or think they're least benefiting [?]. There are other class layers which outnumber them. On top of that, they're spread out, and any uprising tends to take spontaneous form in an immediate area. All the attempts to link up information and to build on a broader basis were easily cracked in the early periods, and therefore uprising after uprising failed. If the crisis had deepened, and more and more the alliance of the small farmers in the West had not been through the industrial bourgeoisie but in direct contact, like within the South itself, and some sort of actions, as did take place in some areas where whites joined with black slaves in rebelling, then you might have had a successful one. It's impossible to say, if slavery had continued, just in which way it would have gone. It was historically doomed. It had to expand, and it had to expand hard and fast. It would have taken up all the Caribbean and almost all the United States to the West if it were to continue to live.

But basically what made it impossible for the Negro people alone to rebel successfully or to withstand Reconstruction was the diversity, and the fact that it was all agriculture. It wasn't like a proletarian revolution. Look at the history of all slave societies. Their ideal was some sort of commune, some sort of communal setup. But yet, as Marx explained in the history of the past, these were impossible until capitalism came along and created the productivity. In a sense, this was part of it. The fact that the working class, the only class that could solve fundamentally these problems, didn't exist in any size, any significant size.

Question: I want to just know why is this not [inaudible]. Why is this not a democracy? [inaudible] and why he couldn't see his interest [inaudible] and why he has to form a coalition [inaudible] the result of the North, who also had the same problem with [inaudible]. Why would the [inaudible] be able to form a common block? [inaudible] And also why would the [inaudible] be able to obtain labor, while the government labor wasn't able to do it?

Camejo: Okay. The question is, why, let me try to summarize it: why was there this conflict between the slavocracy and the industrial capitalists? Why couldn't they really work out their interests together? The second is, why didn't it permeate? Wait a second, I'm sorry, what was the second part? [inaudible] Why was the northern industrials able to get labor while the southerners were not? Well, let me first begin with the question of the conflicts. At first they tried. The Constitution was a compromise. And they passed the rule that in 1808 no more slaves could be imported. That's in the Constitution, I believe, and it never was withdrawn. What happened was it became more profitable. Cotton began to rise, and the slavocracy just went back on their conception that the nation was going to move in the direction of industrial capitalism, and they began to develop hegemony within the class. Now, what happens is they become in direct conflict. One can't grow without the other.

Let me show you how they came into conflict. For one thing, you can see it in the tariff. The cotton, you see, has got to be sold to England. Now, the northerners are interested in putting up some big tariffs on anything that England imports, comes into the country, so that locally you have to buy goods from the North. Now, those industrial goods, in most cases, were selling at more expensive than could be bought from England. The cotton grower has got to buy mechanical goods, he's got to buy industrial goods, he wants to buy them from the free market at the prices of the free market. He's got to sell his cotton in the free market. He's got no control over that, because he's got to sell it to outsiders. The northerner is interested in selling the cotton manufacturer his industrial goods. And he wants the cotton industry to buy it from him and not from England. So right away they start fighting over what the tariff's going to be. Not only that, the tremendously developing market among the small farmers in the West becomes very important to the development of industrial capitalism in the East. And they want to open up these lands for new small farmers to some extent, and they also want to open up all these lands for their railroads and so forth. They want a tax for these things. And they start running themselves into a continuous hassle, you see, over it.

Also, the southern slavocracy, in having to demand to expand itself, you see, is therefore assuring itself of hegemony. Because the more it's going to expand, it's going to have more votes and so forth, and within the framework of the bourgeois democracy it's going to control the government. So that becomes a big threat to the development of industrial capitalism. And in fact the whole direction of capitalism in the Western Hemisphere, as to whether England would be the dominant power and would have been the one who wins the First World War and the Second World War, both of which it lost, or whether the United States industrial capitalists were going to be the world rulers, was decided in this conflict, whereby either the South could smash down the North and become like a subordinate part of the British economy, with a massive development of industrialization there, or the United States, by smashing the industrial North, smashing the South, became dominant. So related to this was the whole future of the ability to expand. You see, the ability of the industrial capitalists in the North to be able to not only expand into the South and into the West, but to begin looking to the Caribbean, to be able to penetrate the Asian market and the European market. They couldn't do that so long as they had one large section of their economy pitted against them, and all the things they had to do, like tax to build an army and everything else, in order to expand their power. So the two came into deeper and deeper conflict, as one tended to want to make the United States subordinate economically to England's industrial base, while the North was fighting to break out of this and to be able to build a counterpower to the British industrial base. So this brought about an irreconcilable struggle between the two as to whether the industrial bourgeoisie was going to survive or not. And their survival became predicated on the smashing of the slavocracy. And the two came into, of course, armed conflict, which settled it.

Now, as far as the labor supply question. In the North, industrial capitalism developed, for various reasons. One of them was, of course, that they were able to meet labor problems. They just had a large influx. But the agricultural South [?], they just opened the doors for migration out of the crisis that Europe was going through, the surplus, the unemployment. And they came to the United States and were able to find jobs. Though there was a continuous [inaudible]. By the way, I'm getting myself into problems without being able to go over the whole period. See, at first the northern industrial capitalists are opposed to opening the lands, in order precisely to solve their labor problem. And they began only to change that when they began to get enough people, and they opened the doors. In the 1850s, the pouring into the United States was something. If you look at those figures, it was absolutely phenomenal, the number of people that came to the United States and built up this labor force.

But in southern agriculture, you see, once the slave system was set up, you couldn't just easily make a transformation now and start introducing free labor. And like I said, the productivity of the methods that they were using for their agriculture was such that you could not introduce free labor and be profitable. See, the minute they began to introduce it, they're going to strike, they're going to have higher pay and so forth. So to be able to maintain it, once they had established the slavocracy, they had to keep it out. It was just impossible. Now, it's interesting that many plantations tried to introduce it, and there were cases where plantations ran for several years on free labor. But in every one of their cases they found it complicating the whole system, which was based on slavery. And all the capital that was invested, you see, the logic of it was impossible to break at that point. Because after the Cotton Kingdom ended, the plantations continued to be profitable, not very profitable, but they continued to be profitable. And it was based upon wage labor. Though the Negro was not really a worker in the classical sense. That is, he was not free to quit his job, for instance. He was not free to move. He was a wage worker with all types of feudal [?] chains on him. In fact, I wish I could go into that more at length, to show what they had to do to stop him from moving. You know, during the First World War a northerner came down to recruit laborers from the Negroes in the South, and they were actually beaten up and attacked by the local capitalists, because they didn't want any Negroes leaving the South.

During the Second World War, when the migration became mammoth, and one of his little secret correspondences, the big liberal who's now in charge of the ACLU, the national chairman Biddle, who's the man who sent Farrell to jail, that big liberal wrote in his secret correspondence that he was even considering proposing some way to stop the Negroes being able to leave the South, because of certain requests he had had. But as it turned out, the overall majority of the ruling class in the United States wanted the Negroes to come north to fill the war jobs, and therefore they didn't put any stop to it then. But the problem remained in the South, the shortage of labor. It wasn't the type of problem where free labor could have been introduced, because once it had, it would have completely shaken up the whole plantation structure. And that's the essence of the defeat of Reconstruction, the need for that supply of cheap labor in the South. You can't just move people around. I don't know if that's a full answer. I really don't know American history well enough [?], in terms of knowing exactly how industrial capitalism rose in the period prior to the war in the North. So I really can't answer it well. If you get a chance to talk to a war [?], ask him.