BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IS, FOR revolutionaries in the U.S., particularly for the militants of the Black Liberation Movement, as cogent a work in laying out the history and field of our struggle as the singular works of the great international teachers. Some have carped at the work, because they claim it is not strictly Marxist, others because it did not make a “sharp enough” class analysis of pre-Civil War whites in the South, but to both questions I answer, read it again.
By 1935, when this work was issued, Du Bois had been a socialist twenty years. Though he had joined then unjoined the Socialist Party because, as he said, they tried to push Black folks into the background. This has been a problem throughout the movement, anywhere you look or investigate. That there has been a consistent belittling of the Black Liberation Movement. Ironically, not just from the mostly white, or multinational political forces, but, alas, even from those Negroes and white folks claiming to represent the best interests of the Afro American people.
Certainly, this was true for the NAACP, the organization Du Bois helped found, which was coopted by the bourgeoisie who replaced him with the comedy team of White and Wilkins. The Left too has been outrageously in evidence when such policies and ideological reaction is cited. So that given the fundamental relationship of the Afro American people to almost any segment of the organized U.S. body politic, aside from the identifying jargon that separates them, there has been a stunning similarity.
What Black Reconstruction does is present the historic development of the Afro American people, across the U.S. and most pointedly in the South, the area Du Bois called The Black Belt in The Souls of Black Folk. It is in Souls that we also receive his earliest perceptions and attempts to understand just what the South was and is, to Black people, to white people, to Afro America, to “White America” (the media fiction) and to the world.
By the 1930s, after his first removal from the NAACP, Du Bois had initiated the most scientific and detailed study of the South (Atlanta University Publications on “The Study of the Negro Problems 1897-1910,” edited by Du Bois; conferences covered by Du Bois at Atlanta University), from his chair at Atlanta University. But from the time he arrived at Fisk, astonished at the wonderful beauty of the sisters there, and believing he was, indeed, in heaven, there are few people who we will claim studied or knew more about the South than Du Bois. And that was obviously the strength and thoroughness of his analysis, and the penetrating force of Black Reconstruction. So that by 1903, when Souls appeared, with its millennium shattering force, Du Bois was already deeply immersed in Black southern studies, for, as he said many, many times, “The future of the Negro is in the South.”
What Souls did was to clarify the present by presenting it as a continuum, politically, socially, economically, culturally, psychologically, of the past. The African past and the Afro American present, both of which were hidden, obscured, crushed, belittled, denied, exploited beneath the Veil of “otherness” which slavery had placed upon Black people, which not only hid us from the world, but hid the world from a great part of itself, its history and its potential for salvation in the real world.
From the outset, those jarring words—“How does it feel to be a problem?”—he goes on for sixty more years to tell us. In Souls, he deals with the South before and after the Civil War in a general agitational overview, presenting at the same time a new form of presentation, the multiformed essay, poem, short fiction, analytical work, that Langston Hughes claimed was the single spark of the Harlem Renaissance. This is important in accessing Black Reconstruction, because the seeds of all his later explorations and conclusions are there.
First, the surgical dismantling of Booker T. Washington, to clean the slate and announce a new dispensation, a new generation’s assault on Black oppression. He speaks at length of the conditions, psychological, social and cultural and political, of the Black Belt, imparts to us a sense of its being, actually, somewhere other than the U.S. but exploited by being inside the U.S. at the same time. This is the thesis of the Veil, and the revelational description of the “twoness” of the Afro American. Being in it but not in it. To see ourselves through the eyes of those who hate us. That “double consciousness.” Am I Black or am I American? That double consciousness that we still until this very hour must deal with. And this is the overriding victory of studying Du Bois, because you understand, moving along with him through the years, through the twists and turns and small and substantial victories and defeats, the constant changes and regroupings, the common self-criticism and often sharp criticism of others, you understand the seriousness of the man and his work, but also the infinitely sensitive consciousness and self-consciousness which spurred him to move forward, to go back, to change, to modify, but to continue, always, at the very top of the mind he carried, always to struggle for Black Liberation, as he said, through “Self-Assertion.” It is this Self-Assertion that we must understand is at the root of everything Du Bois has ever said, or is moving to say, or why he will dismiss things he has said before. This is personal and intellectual and scholarly Self-Consciousness, which he urged on us—to seek a “True Self-Consciousness.”
Souls had to clear Booker T. and the submissionist sector of the Black national bourgeoisie out of the way, because for all that might pass as the practical motherwit of Washington, Du Bois could see that nothing lay in that direction but submission, the emergence of a comprador Black Bourgeois, rich servants of the same white master.
Souls dealt with Afro America, the history and culture of the U.S., but as a context in which Black life, the Afro American people, had developed. His essay on “ATALANTA,” the Atlanta, which he had experienced as the site of anti-Black riots, which actually had some part of the early tragic death of his First Born, and his wife’s lifelong partial withdrawal from the world, laid out the root of that city’s corruption. That it was an artificial thing created by the northern conquerors to control the South, that Atlanta was a city of the bribed. The essay is brilliant and evocative until this day. How prophetic that not only Booker T. Washington gave us back into new slavery there, but in 1988, Jesse Jackson followed suit.
The essay on African religion and the Sorrow Songs are touchstones of modern Afro American scholarship. They should be the base of any new studies on Afro American history, culture, psychology and social life. Du Bois was endeavoring to get down, to get all the way Down, to see from the very bottom of up under the Veil. He says “between the other world and me” … he wants to see from all the way back, clear back, forward beyond ourselves. And help shape this hazardous road we’ve taken, help point us to a new and more humanly rewarding “there.”
When Reconstruction appears thirty years later, Du Bois had been on quite a journey himself. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, The Negro, The Atlanta Studies, Crisis are all leading to this major work. Again and again in innumerable articles, essays, speeches, letters, he keeps moving toward this major work, this great work which should be and will be as impacting on the BLM as Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was and remains. Actually, the work it is most comparable to of the great teachers is Marx’s The Civil War in France. That work also dealt with civil war and the role of different classes within the war, which led to the first “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; though short lived, it was still the model Marx used to project what the fully constructed Dictatorship should look like. It is also a work analyzing the emergence of Imperialism, where the French bourgeoisie actually enlisted the Prussian (German) bourgeoisie for aid against the French working class! How perfect an analogy to the Civil War in the U.S., where the northern forces, after utilizing the 200,000 Black runaway slaves to defeat the Southern slavocrat secessionists, then enable and empower these same secessionists to impose a fascist dictatorship on Afro America (the Black South) and the whole of the Afro American people.
Black Reconstruction is such an immense and profound work, and still incompletely grasped by the Left, that its analysis and summation of the U.S. Civil War, the most central conflict in this country’s history, has still not been put to clear and consistent USE. Most of us are still trying to rationalize, to put into understandable form, what we have learned from the work, the practical and revolutionary use, as a weapon of theory, as Cabral said, to help us lay waste to Black national oppression and U.S. and all imperialism forever.
First, Du Bois makes a masterful class analysis of the vital class forces of the South and the rest of the U.S., historically and in their interrelationship, particularly how these various classes impact on the Black struggle for democracy. Du Bois had read Marx by this time and Lenin and had visited the Soviet Union for an extended period, so that some of his earlier uncertainty about what the USSR meant to do, and in fact what the great socialist teachers were saying, had been laid to rest.
For instance, he had foreseen the updating that Lenin would have to do to the basic Marxist analysis of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, Du Bois thought that Marx relied too heavily on the “productive forces” as ideological and political transporters of the working class to fully revolutionary positions. So that he welcomed the emphasis that Lenin makes on the formation of “a party of a new type,” i.e., the proletarian headquarters the revolutionary party must be.
Du Bois still rejected entrance into the Communist Party USA at this time, because he thought the CP dismissed the leveling quality of Black national oppression by insisting that the class structure of the Afro American people was the same as the oppressor nation’s. That is, the CP, except for the impact of Lenin’s 1920s paper on The National Question and Marx’s nineteenth-century analysis of the U.S. Civil War, has always tended to minimize the revolutionary function of the Black Liberation Movement, as a form of revolutionary democratic struggle against imperialism. This is a common failing of social democrats who make the struggle for socialism a single laser focus disconnected from (except for recruitment and too generalized propaganda) the spectrum of democratic struggles in the society.
This is the very opposite of what Lenin proposes in his works on the national question, certainly in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution and the essay “Our Tasks,” among many other works, where he points out that the Vanguard party must be a leader in the democratic struggle, while all the time putting out the Communist program. In fact the party must develop a minimum line, which is its analysis and proposal for mass struggle for democracy, and a maximum or socialist line, which calls for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism and the eventual emergence of Communism. Particularly when Du Bois, trying to grapple with the “twoness” of Afro Americans in the relationship to the U.S. as would-be citizens and an oppressed nation, begins to put forward more directly and openly his growing theories on the need for Self-Determination and the building of a broad political united front for Afro American democracy and economic and cultural cooperative organizations to begin to deal with the many problems Black people have which will not be solved by merely protesting. Because no matter how long and how strong we protest, the very protest itself is an act of self-determination. And this initial act must be followed by other such acts to raise the level of the struggle itself.
Some of the social democrats, and the Left, began to say that Du Bois was advocating segregation and nationalism. This was one of the sticking points in his struggle with White, Wilkins and their Black and white classmates, that protest, legal struggle, was not enough, that there had to be some substantive building of institutions and organizations even to further the struggle for democracy. At one point, some Negro said to Du Bois, when he was planning a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, that for Du Bois to raise the EP was racist!
But this is the essence of the deep class division between the revolutionary and bourgeois sectors of Black struggle. The struggle for Democracy is at root a struggle for self-determination, they are two sides of one coin. Even a minority—for instance, the Black masses outside the Black south, though they mostly live in twenty-seven cities where they are a substantial plurality or majority—has rights. No one lives anywhere at any time to be oppressed. Black people did not vote to be poor and exploited and uneducated; this is the result of the anti-democratic context historically of our lives, and even the struggle for democracy must be preceded by the act of and continuing struggle for self-determination. In other words, we must literally build the weapons we must use to defeat our national oppression. We cannot merely starve while demanding food, we cannot have our culture reduced to MTV and Def Jam and Death Row and Hollywood while we are demanding a democratic culture, we must create these things to the extent we can, even to intensify the demand for them.
Of course, the bourgeois sector of the democratic movement calls such thinking “separatist,” just as they called Du Bois. But the whole scam that separates the movement for Equal Rights into one separatist wing and one integrationist wing is unproductive. Black people are struggling for national liberation, which is a democratic demand! We cannot struggle only through the institutions and traditional structures of the oppressor nation, “White America.” The form and method and ideological essence of that struggle are acts of self-determination.
Where the bearers of the “abolitionist democracy” philosophy have too often been remiss is that in their struggle for democracy, they have put out only a program to gain equal access to U.S. mainstream society (which we should definitely understand after the sixties) will be possible for only a small sector of the Black bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie. This was the truest criticism of Du Bois earlier, I feel, that in his focus on Democracy he did not completely correlate the function of Self-Determination, even to further that struggle. During the period in which people like Walter White, Ralph Bunche and A. Philip Randolph were calling him Nationalist, Du Bois advocated that we must begin to struggle for a stronger black unity politically and self-determination in education and a movement for economic and cultural cooperatives. For these would be the groundwork for a more informed and stable Afro American community, able then to intensify and raise the struggle for equal rights, by Self-Assertion, to new heights.
By the time he began to write Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had also been through the Garvey wars. He was being criticized by not only the Communist party and various social democratic nearbys, and by the Negro petit bourgeois, but by the nationalists like Garvey. I think this intense fire had some influence on Du Bois, and though he had made some precise criticism of Garvey and his movement, which proved absolutely correct (certainly about the shakiness of the Black Star Economic program and some of the con men who were high up in the UNIA, some of whom testified against him), both his and Garvey’s criticism of each other sunk to demeaning bombast. Garvey was, at root, a kind of militant Booker T. Washington, with a catalyst of West Indian nationalism, directly connected to the land-based struggles that raged and still rage all over the Caribbean. Garvey felt the major class struggle was a form of racial contention (as Du Bois, to a certain milder extent, had felt earlier; see “The Conservation of the Races”). Plus, the historic role of the light-skinned Black or mulatto in Jamaica, Haiti, & c, is different in the sense that light-skinned Blacks have never been set up so completely “classed off,” like they say, from the masses of the Afro Americans as in the Islands. In the U.S., since the whole of the Afro American people were a minority, the oppressor nation did not have to use them so clearly as surrogate rulers, a neo-colonialism of caste.
However, when Garvey began to change his line from Africa for the Africans and Black Self-Determination around 1919, and even began meeting with the Klan, Du Bois justifiably denounced him. Though in a summary later on, he tried to analyze Garvey’s contribution on balance. But the influence of Garvey was in forcing Du Bois to think more deeply about the question of what do we do till the “full manhood suffrage” comes, especially as Black people entered the Depression thirties. Now the teachings of Garvey about Black self-determination and self-reliance seemed more useful, and his belief in the leadership of what he called “The Talented Tenth” (the Black bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie) had been wasted by reality. So that he was also coming more clearly into recognition of the sharpening class struggle within the Afro American community, as he identified “a stunning kind of national selfishness” shaping the Black bourgeois classes that he did not understand would emerge naturally with the extension of democracy and capitalism within the Black community. His clashes with the NAACP Negroes and the “good whites” who were on the NAACP’s board, no doubt, helped bring this class struggle to him with sharper definition.
Black Reconstruction begins with an epigram that sums up what it intends. Each chapter has a similar summation, which in themselves are concise analyses of the material to be handled. At the top of Chapter One, “The Black Worker,” Du Bois says, “How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.”
The first three chapters, “The Black Worker,” “The White Worker” and “The Planter,” present a general historic and precise socioeconomic analysis of the main classes in action in the U.S. Civil War. As one reads these chapters, one is being loaded with the exact scientific and historic data, not only to understand the particularity of his further observations in “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord,” but also to be carried along from observation to observation, all tirelessly detailed and confirmed by any number of other observers, and lifted up into the revelational sweep of Du Bois’s conclusions. For this work is not only a great work of science, of U.S. and Afro American history, but it is written as very few such works could ever be. For it is the soul of a poet that speaks to us, that points out and explains, that references and makes irony swim with gradual accretion of rationale for whatever he says. At times the poetry of the book is so stunning, it will make you pause to reread and savor, to read it aloud so that the other senses can dig it. The chapter called “The Coming of the Lord” actually made me stop and weep at such incredible power, that real life could be delivered to me silently, perfectly imaged by the facts it conveyed.
“The Black Worker” is a title of critical importance. Not The Black Slave, & c. Because Du Bois had understood, as some of us still do not, that The Black Slave was NOT a peasant. He was not a farmer. He was a slave worker. Such as Marx talks about in Das Kapital when he explains the corvée system as one basis of capitalism. In fact, Marx goes on to point out that North American Slavery is the anchor and base of capitalism generally. Saying that “without slavery” as its economic base, and the mode of primitive accumulation (of wealth to be turned into capital), Euro American civilization was impossible.
Du Bois makes it clear what is different about Black oppression, as he points out the similar exploitation and inhumane conditions that European workers and peasants and Asian peasants suffered, but he adds the stunning proviso, “But none of them was real estate”! This condition of the Afro American people remains at the bottom of our “twoness,” this legacy has been a continuing division between the Black struggle in the U.S. and the rest of U.S. workers. Because, no matter that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights thundered a commitment to equal rights and democracy, African chattel slavery made those words hollow and created an actual society where “the conscience of the nation was uneasy and continually affronted its ideals.” At base, the U.S. was rooted in the vicious seizure and attempted genocide of the native Akwesasne peoples and the African slave trade. It was also likewise based on the exploitation of European workers, but by the eighteenth century the U.S. rulers had seen that if the white indentured servants were not given a status somewhat different from the native peoples and the Black slaves they would continue to make alliances to overthrow their mutual servitude as the Servants’ Rebellion (1663, Virginia) and Bacon’s Rebellion (1802, Virginia) had shown, which led to the consolidation of a “racial slavery” (see “The Invention of Racial Slavery”).
Du Bois shows the checkered history of equal rights for Black people anywhere in the U.S. where one year pre-nineteenth century you might be able to vote in Pennsylvania but not in New Jersey, maybe in Illinois, but not in Delaware, and then the next year it would change. That is, for the Blacks who had somehow gotten freed from chattel status, either by manumission for service in the Revolutionary War or having come up with the necessary monies, or at the bequest of some more kindly slave master.
In the North, and at first, in most of the South, Slavery was a domestic “house service,” i.e., to make life easier for the mostly white owners. (A few Blacks and Native people had slaves as well.) But, as Du Bois expresses it with a hammering resonance, “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of blacks’ labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.”
This is so critical because it establishes both the centrality of the Afro American people to the rise of North America and Europe to world domination, but it also shows that with slavery, the separation of Black and white workers, as well as Black and white people, certainly in the U.S., was a fundamental characteristic of U.S. society. Chattel slavery was an actual contrasting material reality to what the rest of the American workers experienced. It was not just racism, i.e., persecution because of physical characteristics; it shaped an entirely separate perception of what America was from the outset.
Irony of ironies, the very cry of Democracy, accompanied as it has always been in the U.S. by slavery and Black national oppression, has allowed white workers to feel that somehow their destiny is separate from Black workers’. In fact, even today, many American workers refer to themselves as middle-class, unable to conceive of what a working class is. Plus, slavery, as an economic institution, created a competition with the so-called free white workers (who, in reality, were free only as far as their skin could eliminate wage slavery and the actual undemocratic nature of U.S. capitalist society).
Another striking point that Du Bois highlights is that for the white petit bourgeois and even large sectors of the working class, “The American Dream” not only seems achievable, but puts them in a psychological and philosophical mindset of not only believing this rich people’s propaganda but of striving to be in all ways as much like their rulers as possible. Hence we still are plagued with television programs like Escape With the Rich and Famous. Freed from indenture, the white worker could envision that with a little luck one day he might strike it rich and become the rich and the famous. Until recently, with the advent of the Buppies, it is safe to say that such an illusion was not widespread among the Afro American people.
Du Bois says, “The true significance of slavery in the U.S. to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free—were given schools and the right to vote—what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected?” The $300,000,000 American question.
Du Bois’s class analysis digs deep into the reasons for the various classes of Americans to perceive and answer the question in their different ways. For the slaves, arriving in the U.S. as chattel took them outside the relevance of the question, as it was silently posed by the rulers and their sycophants and superficially traduced Americans. For Blacks the question, from the beginning, was freedom, the end of slavery. The entire spectrum of our history and culture is poised before this question. “The Gifts of Black Folks,” “The Gift of Labor, of Song and Story, of Spirit” all are shaped, from Jump, by the material conditions of our chattel condition, however perceived through the ancient cultures we had come out of, as we adapted and changed but remained always another people’s property. The U.S. is the society that asks the question, “Can property become a Citizen?”
By the nineteenth century most of the Black slaves were American born, and the folkways of Africa were continued and reinforced by the separation that slavery maintained. Stripped of the drum, all Black music is percussive anyway. Black Christianity is deeply African rooted, except when you get to Clarence Thomas’s churches. The Africans were the great artists of the world and any unbiased look at this hemisphere, certainly in the U.S., will show that at the vortex and root of U.S. culture is the African and Afro American western hemispheric cultural continuum. Even the bizarre discussion of Ebonics points out the falsity of American assumption. I have a poem called “BullEating”; it says, “If white people/ Can play the Blues/ Black People can speak/ American.” It means that just as the whole of U.S. and western hemispheric culture is a mestizo, a mix of Africa, Europe and Native Akwesasne, so is American speech. It is political power that determines what is correct or incorrect.
Slavery and National Oppression, with their segregation and discrimination, separate and unequal, have provided a continuity of Black national culture, that by this time, with the integration of full citizenship, would have provided a much more even distribution of its historic characteristics throughout the society. But even in chains, Black history, material life and culture have colored U.S. culture in a way that is profound and irreversible. So, too, the question of slavery and, past that, the Afro American National Question are at the center of any consideration of U.S. civilization. That is, there are very few aspects of historic U.S. life and culture that can be discussed, honestly, without reference to chattel slavery and the continuing national oppression of the Afro American people.
When Du Bois says The Black Worker, what he is asserting is that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, not only was it mostly Americans who were enslaved, but with the cotton gin and the extension of cotton production to an international market, what was feudal slavery became capitalist slavery. And those slaves were workers on an agricultural assembly line. The peasant is a small, middle or Big farmer, with a direct relationship to the land. The revolutionary potential of this class has been debated; the Trotsky-Lenin debate which led to Lenin’s Two Tactics. Two Tactics states that not only can the small and middle peasants become a reserve of revolution, rather than a reactionary reserve of the bourgeoisie, but that their struggle for full control of the land (which Marx observed in his summation of peasant struggles, such as the peasant wars in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century) should also be a force enlisted in the overall domestic force of revolution and even as a strategic ally in building the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the slaves were not peasants, they were slave workers, except for the small groups of free Blacks and the overwhelming number of white farmers in the South. When chattel slavery was destroyed, the Black struggle also became a struggle for land, as the main democratic revolutions in Europe, Germany, Russia had been, so that the ex-slaves could become a class of small entrepreneurs, independent to some extent from the old chattel ties to the Planters. But with the betrayal of Reconstruction by the newly imperialist forces of northern corporate industrial power, the land (the vaunted forty acres and a mule) was seized by Wall Street (by 1873, eighty percent of southern lands were owned by northern capital), whose southern outpost was Atlanta.
The Mexican war of 1848, the ongoing pacification of the Native peoples, was followed by big capital allying itself temporarily with northern abolitionist democracy, as Du Bois called it, and the multinational southern working class, both Black and white, and once the two hundred thousand Black troops had completely destroyed the plantation owners as a class, the superficial move toward full democracy and land settlement, education, equal citizenship rights was tolerated until big capital secured full control of southern land and remaining institutions and then the white middle-class, the small businessmen, politicians, overseers, small farmers, professionals were transformed into a comprador for a rising Wall Street-based U.S. imperialism.
Add to this the fact that, aside from those white southern workers and farmers who had opposed the Planters historically and who quickly signed the declaration of loyalty to the U.S., the mass of poor whites often lived in ways comparable to slavery or worse. The historic existence of slavery, with its racial metaphysics, made the uniting of class forces against the rise of imperialism and its betrayal of Black democracy and workers’ control of the south impossible. Plus, you knew it, there were Negroes involved with the betrayal, just as there are today. Telling us the war is over and if we are still exploited and oppressed it’s just some more of that black stuff and we need to get more mature and quit being so self-pitying. Check the post-Civil War Negro politicians who went over to the insurgent democratic party, the party, they said, of the “poor white,” which actually became the visible face of the ruthless reaction and counterrevolution that possessed the South once the Union military occupation had been removed, and the Black militia forces were disarmed.
What is so profound about Du Bois’s analysis is that it shows that all the classes of modern capitalism had come to exist within Afro America before chattel slavery was dispatched. There were Black slave owners in New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, pre-Civil War. There were a fairly significant group of freed Blacks who formed the basis of an expanding, land-owning petit bourgeoisie. And then, of course, the myriad house Negroes who usually became part of that class as well.
When chattel slavery ended, the mass of Blacks were then thrust into a feudal situation in contrast to the conditions of capitalist slavery, where they were in bitter contradiction to the planter ruling class, when the host of whites, based on the disease created by racial slavery, actually wanted to become planters, and despised the Black slaves because often they said the slaves lived better than the poor whites, whose condition Du Bois describes in chilling detail.
Sharecropping was a kind of feudal recidivism, where instead of becoming a small land-owning peasant class, Black people were now transformed into semi-proletarian agricultural workers, plagued now by The Black Codes (which Du Bois describes as the South looking backwards toward slavery and never ahead to the resolution of these conflicts). Andrew Johnson is analyzed at length in Black Reconstruction because of the grim irony which places this poor white southerner at the head of the nation by the end of the Civil War. And where he had heretofore been characterized as staunchly against the rich and the planter class particularly, in a few months, based on his “inability” (which he shared with many of the poor whites) to envision a South where Blacks and whites had equal rights. Du Bois implies that Secretary of State Seward, who was always less than supportive of Lincoln’s decision to seek full suffrage for the ex-slaves, was an important influence on Johnson. But he also implies that the huge wealth the new northern imperialists were paying out had a little to do with Johnson’s conversion to reaction.
It was Johnson who dismantled the Freedman’s Bureau, which in its glorious futility had actually imposed a dictatorship of the working class and small farmers in the South, and had begun to distribute the forty acres and a mule that the two U.S. Senators who represented the Abolitionist Democratic philosophy, as Republican politicians, had put forth because they understood without some economic base, and with that, equal access to the ballot, education and a productive livelihood, the ex-slaves could not possibly become “citizens.” It was Johnson, as well, again with Seward’s urging, who immediately allowed the southern secessionists to re-enter the union, thus leaving the ex-slaves at the brutal hands of those who were looking backward, and those who sought to re-enslave Black people, which they did, as soon as possible. The book The Economics of Barbarism by J. Kucynski and M. Witt, points out that the Black Codes were Hitler’s model for his Nazi racial laws.
The overthrow of the Reconstruction actually united fronts of workers and small farmers, heaved Afro America into fascism. There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital, as Dimitrov termed it. Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.
What the masses of racially twisted white southerners did not understand was that the overthrow of Reconstruction was necessary not just for pitching Black people into American fascism, but for the complete triumph of imperialism. Since the Plantation Owners, “The Planters,” were the last force of competitive capitalism removed in order for imperialism to shoulder its way into power in the U.S. Du Bois says it was not until it was too late that the mass of working class and middle-class whites realized that the so-called “Redemption of the South” was actually the defeat of democracy for the entire South and the U.S. nation as well. By 1896, not only was Booker T telling the U.S. rulers that “the wisest of my race understand the folly of struggling for equality” but the U.S. was poised for its entrance onto the stage of big-time imperialism announced by the Spanish-American War.
Lenin points out in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and also in Critical Remarks on the National Question that national chauvinism is the most finished form of opportunism, in which the rulers can get the workers of one nation to fight the workers of another. The South is obvious as an example of such deep and constantly justified opportunism, not just the crude racial chauvinism of the clearly ignorant, but the smooth b.s. of the various “educated” classes as well as the political forces.
This opportunism, manifest as national or racial chauvinism, has been historically widespread in the U.S. and is the single most damning weapon the bourgeoisie use to prevent broad class unity of a multinational working class. Du Bois points out that this chauvinism, this racism, is not left to spontaneity by the rulers. For sixty years, he says, after the Civil War, the media was filled with sick distortions and attacks on Black people (like today) to hide the heroic anti-slavery image that emerged as a result of Black struggle against slavery. Stepin Fetchit, Sleep and Eat, Birmingham and the various frightened, dishonest, funny negro foils were put forward to justify the U.S. determination not to grant equality to the ex-slaves, and to use these demeaning portraits as “proof” that Black people did not have the capacity for equality. Today we have the media in the same role, read the newspaper any day or look at the TV, count the anti-black stories, plus we even have some of the same bogus sham theories that dotted the nineteenth century proving Black “inferiority”; today we have The Bell Curve and Stanley Crouch.
Andrew Johnson’s point position in overthrowing Reconstruction and imposing a racial fascism on Afro America and the Afro American people readied the whole of the U.S. nation for imperialist rule, which today has moved to complete control of the entire nation. The international network of finance capital has used its enormous power and wealth to dupe both the East and the West into a “cold war” and through this wrested billions and billions of dollars from nations, which all went into its coffers. Imperialism thus was able to bribe and finally overthrow the Soviet Union, but at the same time compromise the national or native bourgeoisie of most countries in the world, including the United States. By plundering all nations’ treasuries, imperialism could then put itself in charge worldwide through such imperialist loan sharks as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, thereby ruling the world by holding all the nations’ purse strings. This is the reason for such a sharp upsurge of nationalism, especially on the extreme right because the social base of this nationalism is the national bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, driven to outrage by their robbery and loss of status and democracy. Today the U.S. is governed by an imperialist ruling class, not even by its own national bourgeoisie. Notice, for instance, in the last election, the pitiful Perot could not even get to debate. It is the New World Order running the U.S., as it has moved to do openly since the Kennedy assassination, and a further sickening irony that both Kennedy and Lincoln were killed for obstructing the imperialist program for the Afro American people, and both were succeeded by Dudes from the South named Johnson. Obstruction to imperialist plans for Latin America must also be included in the assassination motive, Mexico and Central America generally for Lincoln, Cuba particularly was Kennedy’s cause of death.
Imperialism was the triumph of opportunism, national oppression and Big capital of the northern banks and industrialists. The destruction of the Black democracy provided the necessary capital for international U.S. imperialist investment and annexation.
This was a period of the upsurge of Imperialism internationally. By 1888 the European powers met to divide up Africa, chattel slaves now replaced with Colonialism, the enslaving of the whole of Africa. The financial panic of 1873 was the economic ground for the 1876 Hayes-Tilden compromise, in which the ex-slaves and the whole South were officially returned to the fascist rule of the comprador southern middle classes. With the Black Codes, any white citizen could arrest, question, beat and even kill any Black person, like the recent Louisiana legislation that any citizen can shoot any person suspected of trying to steal his or her car.
The leadership of the Afro American people was a petit bourgeoisie not really interested in Self-Determination as much as “getting into the U.S.,” focusing on their own narrow class interests more than the liberation of the whole people. The white leadership were sycophants of capitalism, whose mindset made them willing compradors, twisted gauleiters of a Wall Street “Neue Ordnung.” The American Revolution had, in Marx’s words, provided a leap up the social scale for the petit bourgeoisie, so the Civil War and end of chattel slavery provided a similar boost for the working class, but the destruction of Black democracy trashed all of that, with the ignorant collaboration of white workers and farmers “souped up” on white supremacy.
In 1879, the Paris Commune erupted, and like the ending of chattel slavery, the French working class should have continued the armed struggle … marched on Versailles, Marx says, just as the Afro American working class in strategic alliance with small and middle farmers and what democratic petit bourgeoisie existed, should have declared for Self-Determination and taken up arms again and fought for the Democratic Dictatorship of the working class, a People’s democracy and a United Front government for Afro America, which is a multinational oppressed nation in the Black Belt South.
The proffering of U.S. citizenship, while legitimately intended by Lincoln and the abolitionist democracy he had come to represent, was suddenly an ugly lie. The Emancipation Proclamation has removed all relationship between the Afro American people and the secessionist South. Without the guarantee of democracy, made real by the gaining of political and economic self-determination and access to education, the re-enslaving of the Afro American people, the transformation of the Black South into an oppressed nation, was clear.
Du Bois spoke about “a nation within a nation”; he meant the self-determination of the Afro American people’s revolutionary democratic struggle moving forward with national and anti-imperialist unity and the creation of economic and cultural cooperatives including education. Despite the bogus reentrance into the American union, the southern states still fly the confederate battle flags and U.S. apartheid did not end, de jure, until 1954; it has been equally clear that the South has never varied its backward-looking subjugation of Afro America, which has been permitted and joined in by the entire U.S. nation, where today, another Du Bois prediction, the entire U.S. is being “turned into a prototype of the South.”
What the great Dr. Du Bois did was lay out the entire spectrum of the centralmost aspect of what characterizes the U.S. nation state, the most illuminating and concrete historical, class-conscious and scholarly study ever published in the U.S. The incredible pantheon of his writings, a bibliography that covers political journalism and social criticism, especially the articles in The Crisis, which he edited; scholarly and academic writings in sociology, social and political history, Pan African studies, education and literary and cultural studies. The major sociological studies, as well as six novels and a great deal of poetry, and even a historical pageant. The magazine articles alone measure some 10,000! The Souls of Black Folk (1903); The Negro (1915); Black Reconstruction (1935); The World & Africa (1947) and The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (1968) would be good places to begin to access this giant. His The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the initial U.S. work and catalyst for urban sociology. His Harvard doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade” (1896), is still in print!