Marx, Tocqueville, and
Race in America
Just when Republican Senator Trent Lott thought it was safe to publicly celebrate the “good old days” of Jim Crow, political reality rudely interrupted his nostalgic yearnings. Fresh from the gains his party made in the November 2002 elections he no doubt thought he had license to wax fondly about the bygone era of official racial segregation. The 100th birthday party for fellow Senator Strom Thurmond, Jim Crow’s 1948 presidential standard bearer, seemed to be the perfect occasion. Lott was, after all, the most prominent product of the party’s so-called “southern strategy.” This was the line the Republican Party adopted in the 1960s to woo southern whites away from the Democrats with the not-too-subtle message that a White House and Congress in its hands would be sympathetic to their “way of life.” The strategy seems to have worked given the increasing number of elected Republican officials in the South. But the Mississippi politician mistook successes in the electoral arena for the basic facts of American political life and his “faux pas” cost him dearly, his Senate Majority Leader post.
A few days after Lott’s demise a New York Times article tried to put the affair in perspective. Racial segregation it correctly argued was not unique to the South. The North had, in fact, a long history of such practices. As evidence, the article cited the observation of Alexis de Tocqueville during his travels to the United States in 1831 and 1832: “ ‘The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than those where it still exists.’”1 What the French traveler suggests is that the oppression that Blacks faced in the North was unrelated to the peculiar institution in the South and that it made no difference to them where they lived; both parts of the country were equally repressive. Neither suggestion could be further from the truth.
Most problematic with Tocqueville’s observation is the context from which it is taken, the last chapter of the first volume of his almost revered Democracy in America. Only there did he discuss the situation of Blacks in America. Tocqueville began with the bold assertion that the United States is an “absolute and immense democracy.” As for the realities of the “Negroes,” such “topics,” Tocqueville continued, “are collaterally connected with my subject without forming a part of it; they are American without being democratic, and to portray democracy has been my principle aim.”2 Yet at that very moment, 1835, the year in which the book was published, the slave owners were consolidating their rule both regionally and nationally. For Tocqueville, racial oppression and chattel slavery were marginal concerns in his account of the U.S. political system. But the Lott affair revealed, if anything, just how central race is in a real understanding of America’s political reality. To assume, then, as the editors of the New York Times evidently do, that Tocqueville can be employed to bring clarity to the politics of race in the United States is naive at best.
For Karl Marx, on the other hand, chattel slavery in the United States and what he called the “branding” of Blacks—their racial subordination—were key in understanding economic and political developments not only in America but worldwide. Shortly after arriving at his new communist worldview in 1844, the young Marx declared that Britain’s industrial preeminence, specifically, its textile industry, was largely the product of slave labor, that is, cotton production in America’s South. In the United States itself, he held—unlike Tocqueville—that the democratic quest had been hampered by the presence of the peculiar institution. This is just what his letter to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 emphasized. Addressing the president on behalf of the newly formed International Working Men’s Association (the First International), Marx congratulated him on his reelection and the progress he was making in the Civil War against the slave owners. Until the war, he wrote, “the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed [Negro] slavery to defile their own republic” and, thus, “were unable to attain the true freedom of labour.”3 Real democracy in America, Marx argued—what the editors of the New York Times could never acknowledge—required freedom for all working people.
America in the middle of the nineteenth century—the “absolute democracy” or the “defiled republic”? My basic argument is that Marx and his partner Frederick Engels had a far more accurate, and, thus, insightful, reading of democracy in the United States than Tocqueville because they understood that the overthrow of slavery and racial oppression were central to its realization. For Tocqueville, these were at best tangential issues having little to do with his portrait of American democracy.
I also intend to show how the grasp of “really existing” democracy in the United States by Marx and Engels played a crucial role in the conclusions they reached on the road to becoming communists. For Marx, Tocqueville’s reading of the United States, I argue, served as a major foil for his political development. Marx and Engels were more accurate because—my second argument—of their method, what they called the “materialist conception of history.” Rather than treating them as “mores” and customs, as Tocqueville did, slavery and racial oppression were fundamentally grounded in material reality—the exploitation of labor. Most importantly, the method employed by Marx and Engels informed their efforts to advance the democratic struggle in the United States, actions which, I hope to demonstrate, were not inconsequential. As communists, Marx and Engels recognized that theoretical and political insights were useful only if acted upon. They profoundly understood that they had to actively put into practice what they wrote and to learn from practice what to write—a modus operandi that today’s progressives would do well to emulate. Finally, their superior reading, I also argue, allowed them to more accurately anticipate the course of American democracy, even up to the present. The two very different perspectives of Marx and Tocqueville are at the heart of the debates about race and democracy in America today, as I posit in the conclusion.
I begin in chapter 1 with Marx’s appreciation of the American reality and compare and contrast it to what Tocqueville had to say. It is here that I make the case for my claim that Marx’s reading of the accounts of Tocqueville and others about the United States was crucial in his route to communism. If America was the best that liberal democracy had to offer, then clearly, more was required to realize what the young Marx called “true” or “real” democracy. Hence, I challenge the oft-made claim that “Marx never integrated America into his account of the world-historical future of capitalism.”4
In chapter 2, I show how Marx and Engels’s class-analytic perspective informed their efforts to bring about “real democracy” and contrast their practice to that of Tocqueville. The specific focus is on the activities they and their co-thinkers in the United States carried out leading up to the Civil War to assist the struggle against slavery. Chapter 3 details the practice of the “Marx party,” as it came to be known, during the war on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the period when Marx was clearest and most explicit about the necessity of ending racism against Blacks, or as he called it, the “branding” process, in order for “labor to emancipate itself”—the prerequisite for “real democracy.”
Chapters 2 and 3 highlight perhaps the most striking difference between the Marx-Engels team and Tocqueville. While the latter may be better known for his writings about the American democratic experience, Marx and Engels did more to make democracy a living reality.5 In chapter 4 I look at the period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, the most democratic opening in U.S. history prior to the outcome of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century—and Marx and Engels’s response to it. I then turn to the overthrow of Reconstruction and their response to this landmark defeat. I end the chapter by discussing the relevancy of their perspective on the subsequent course of developments in the aftermath of this historic triumph of reaction over the democratic quest. In the conclusion, I assess the Marx-Engels perspective in relation to that of Tocqueville in the context of the Second Reconstruction—politics in the United States today—and speculate on the likelihood of a solution to the supposedly insoluble “race question.”
Throughout the book, but especially in the first two chapters, I hope to demonstrate that the claims of the Marx-Engels team, rather than those of Tocqueville, are more in accord with the findings of current scholarship about sociopolitical developments in America not only before, but after the Civil War. I do so because the accurate representation of social reality was the premise upon which Marx and Engels operated. Tocqueville, it appears, functioned in a similar fashion. It’s not enough, in other words, to subject the writings of all three to the time-worn method of textual analysis. The best that modern research has to offer on the events and processes about which they wrote must be employed for a full assessment of their work. This book is, thus, a conscious effort to rescue not only Marx and Engels, but Tocqueville as well, from the clutches of those who labor primarily in the realm of “texts.” An appendix is included in order to critique in detail a recent work that claims to put in doubt Marx and Engels’s democratic credentials in their intervention in U.S. working-class politics after the Civil War. In the process, I excavate their views on the “woman question.”
I have argued elsewhere that Marx and Engels’s perspective and politics can only be fully comprehended in time.6 No two political theorists and activists were as conscious of and driven by the “lessons of history” as they were. Tocqueville also subscribed, in some ways, to a “lessons of history” approach though less consciously and less systematically than Marx and Engels. This explains the chronological organization of the book. For the most part, I therefore resist the temptation to skip ahead or anticipate later findings and opinions of all the protagonists. In those occasional instances where I do so, such claims are my own, and neither rest on nor are refuted by such references. This also assures a fair comparison of Marx and Engels to Tocqueville, especially since the former outlived him by respectively twenty-four and thirty-six years and had the advantage of hindsight. The actual comparison is therefore limited to chapters 1 and 2, that is, the period before the Civil War when all three protagonists were alive.
An underlying assumption here is that Marx and Engels constituted a partnership with the same perspective. While there may have been nuanced differences between them on various questions—among the issues examined here, one proved in fact to be of significance—it is clear that in politics, the area that was most important for them, they spoke with one voice.
Finally, a comment regarding usage. I employ “Black” in referring to Americans of historical African origin but use “white” in designating Americans who trace their origins to Europe. The capitalization of the former, unlike the latter, is a recognition of the national character of Blacks, especially in the aftermath of the overthrow of Reconstruction—which I discuss in chapter 4. I recognize, of course, that social labels may not always accurately describe current realities. This is especially true for group identities, which are always moving targets. In the conclusion, I raise this possibility for what is sometimes today called “the Black community.”
A number of people provided valuable contributions and suggestions in the writing of this book. It began as a conference paper and at that stage the comments of Bruce Baum and Laura Janara were especially helpful. Subsequent feedback from my political science colleagues at the University of Minnesota was largely responsible for my decision to turn the paper into a book-length manuscript. The questions that Lisa Disch raised were particularly useful in helping me to think through my argument. Paul Soper, Bill Scheuerman, Jeff Lomonaco, and Jorge Rivas also made comments that helped in the transition. I am still indebted to Mary Dietz’s reading of a chapter from an earlier manuscript in which I compared the practice of Marx and Tocqueville during the revolutions of 1848.
More than anyone, it was David Roediger who made it possible for the manuscript to become this book. His enthusiastic review, which included many thoughtful comments and suggestions, is forever appreciated. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewer who, though more critical of my argument, thought the project should find its way into Lexington’s list.
No one pushed me more to think about the political content of the book as much as Jon Hillson, with whom I’ve collaborated politically for almost three decades. As well, his most thorough editing of the manuscript was invaluable. If the book reads well, it’s largely due to Jon’s careful eye and editor’s pen. The political conclusions reached in chapter 4 also benefited from discussions with Chris Nisan. Finally, I thank the students who gave me substantive and editorial feedback in the final stages. The graduate students in the American Politics seminar taught by my colleague Jamie Druckman, spring 2003, posed stimulating questions. The undergraduate students in my Politics of Race, Class and Ethnicity course, also, spring 2003, and my teaching assistant, Eric Boyer, took seriously my request that they go over the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb. Notwithstanding all of this assistance, including that of Serena Krombach and her staff at Lexington, I am of course responsible for what finally appears in print.
Peter Applebome, “What Did We Just Learn?” New York Times 2002, December 22.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), p. 343. This is the edition edited by Phillips Bradley and the one cited here.
Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 20. Hereafter, citations from the Collected Works will be designated by the volume as 20, for example, and then the page(s).
Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Oracle of Post-Democracy,” New Left Review, no. 13, Second Series (January-February 2002), p. 154. This is Balakrishnan’s reading of Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Mark Reinhardt’s The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) appears at first glance to resemble this project. Specifically, he subjects Democracy in America and a few texts of Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” The Communist Manifesto, and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to what he calls “textual exercises.” But nothing better illustrates the limitations of textual analysis for understanding Marx than Reinhardt’s claim that his historical materialist method drove his “evasion of politics.” This is a variant of an old and tired marxological fable that this book hopes finally to put to rest.
August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2000).