BY FARRELL DOBBS
We continue this week to highlight the factors that gave rise to U.S. imperialism at the end of the 19th century. The excerpts below are from the first volume of Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S. by Farrell Dobbs. This selection describes the rapid expansion of industrial capital following the defeat of the slaveocracy in the Civil War, the accompanying growth of the working-class, and the first generalized confrontation between labor and capital in the United States in 1877. The book is copyright 1980 by the Anchor Foundation and reprinted by permission. Subheadings and footnotes are by the Militant.

Crushing the slavocracy in 1865 brought the capitalist class definitive control over the nation. A general recasting of governmental policies and social institutions followed, so as to bring them into full conformity with bourgeois needs. That cleared the way for qualitative leaps in machine production, railroad construction, etc., already accelerated by the Civil War. Huge concentrations of capital were amassed to finance large-scale enterprises. Big corporations came into existence. Giant trusts were formed by industrial and banking combines in moves to establish monopolies. This trend soon produced a bumper crop of multimillionaires who fattened on harsh exploitation of wage-labor and wanton depredation of national resources. These plutocrats became the real power behind the bourgeois-democratic governmental facade, and they dealt brutally with all who resisted their ruthless methods of coining superprofits.

Expansion of the factory system also led to transformation of the working class. Unskilled laborers serving as appendages of machines became an increasingly larger section of the class and the weight of the skilled workers declined proportionately. As these contrasting trends revealed, wage-labor was becoming substantially proletarianized. This signified that - in terms of objective developments - the country was entering a new phase. Capitalism, which had just triumphed over the planter aristocracy and which was making fewer and fewer compromises with the independent producers, was already beginning to create "its own gravediggers."

This period also saw the definitive end to a progressive role for any wing of the bourgeoisie or its political parties.

By 1877 radical Reconstruction had gone down to bloody defeat, and not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered the worst setback in its history. The defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of the industrial ruling class, who were incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers.

The rural poor and working class were forcibly divided along color lines. The value of labor power was driven down and class solidarity crippled. Jim Crow, the system of extensive segregation, was legalized. Racism was spread at an accelerated pace throughout the entire United States. The ideological basis for imperialist expansion was laid. All the conditions were created for the forging of the new Afro-American oppressed nationality.

At the same time, the Marxists had been weakened in the aftermath of the Civil War. Isolation from the civilian work force, casualties in the war, and the death after the war of Joseph Weydemeyer - Marx and Engels's principal collaborator in the U.S. - virtually decimated the organized Marxist current in the United States...

By the spring of 1877 the cumulative hardships stemming from prolonged economic depression had generated widespread discontent among the exploited masses. So great was the social unrest, in fact, that the first substantial upsurge of class struggle precipitated a general confrontation between labor and capital.

The conflict opened when new wage cuts were imposed by railroad companies. This was one blow too many for the workers involved, who launched spontaneous walkouts on one railway line after another. A few among them belonged to weak craft unions. But in the main they were unorganized and without ready-made means of conducting a strike. Under those circumstances organizational improvisations, including formation of an ad hoc leadership, had to be devised in the heat of battle.

As the walkout gained momentum some of the Lassalleans1 momentarily put aside their opposition to trade union activity and joined with the Marxists in calling for all-out support of the railroad workers. Cadres of the Workingmen's Party extended help to the strikers in solving their organizational problems. In a couple of cities this led to formal inclusion of socialists, who were not necessarily railroad workers, in strike committees. A substantial contribution was thereby made to what rapidly developed into an effective shutdown of virtually the entire railway system.

Capitalist efforts to crush the walkout became increasingly brutal as it grew in scope. This counterattack took place behind a smokescreen of antilabor propaganda laid down by newspaper editors, church dignitaries, and other "civic leaders." It began with the hiring of strikebreakers at premium pay to run trains. The private railway police assigned to protect the scabs were beefed up and steps were initiated to form antilabor vigilante gangs.

At the same time, all levels of government went into action against the workers. City police and state militias were used to break up picket lines. Strikers were clubbed and jailed. Both official and extralegal armed bodies fired upon workers' gatherings, killing some and wounding many.

Those vicious assaults provoked a widening of the struggle. Large numbers of workers came to the direct aid of the embattled railroad strikers and the walkout was extended to other industries. The high point of the movement was reached in St. Louis, Missouri, where labor solidarity became manifested through a general strike in which socialists functioned as key leaders.

By then the national government had entered the conflict on the side of the bosses. Federal troops used extensively as the main repressive force tipped the scales against labor. The railroad strikers were finally driven back to their jobs in defeat.

Despite the setback received in the immediate struggle, the labor movement had gained new potential. Many workers had become more aware of their common interests as a class. They had also become more perceptive of the solidarity among the employers as a class in opposing them, as well as the antilabor character of the capitalist government. These advances in consciousness gave rise, in the aftermath of the strike defeat, to the initiation of working-class political action. Labor parties arose spontaneously in many cities to run candidates for government office in the 1877 elections.

For those parties to act effectively, the workers' demands as a class had to be generalized in political form. Safeguards were required to maintain rank-and-file control over electoral policy. Care had to be taken, as well, to assure that - in seeking political allies - labor continued to function at all times as an independent class force.

To achieve such objectives the workers needed help from the revolutionary vanguard. But the Workingmen's Party had lost the leadership capacity shown during the brief span when the ranks were somewhat more united than usual in support of the railroad strike. Entirely different courses of action were put forward by the rival formations within the organization, and both failed to meet their obligations to the working class.

1 Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) was a founder of the General Association of German Workers, which later became part of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. Political supporters of Lassalle and of Karl Marx were the main competing tendencies in the Workingmen's Party in the United States, a loose federation of socialist forces formed in 1876. Elsewhere in Revolutionary Continuity Dobbs writes that the Lassalleans "thought socialism could be achieved by outflanking the capitalists. To do so, they advocated that the workers form producers' cooperatives as a means of freeing themselves from the wage-labor system. Top priority should be given to electoral action based upon full use of universal male suffrage to increase their political strength, and force through government financing of such projects. Trade union activity had to be subordinated to `socialist' objectives of that kind."  
 
 
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