BY JACK BARNES
Below we reprint further excerpts from the article "The Fight for a Workers' and Farmers' Government in the United States" by Jack Barnes. The selection describes the Radical Reconstruction period of 1867 - 77, which followed the Civil War. It explains the revolutionary character of the Black nationality and the class forces that led to the period's bloody defeat. The Militant is printing this as part of a series on the conditions that gave rise to U.S. imperialism and the struggle against it. The entire article appears in issue no. 4 of the Marxist magazine New International. It is copyright 1985 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission.

The aspirations of the liberated and proletarianized Blacks, and their allies among southern white working people, were blocked by the growing power of the U.S. capitalist class. The final defeat of Radical Reconstruction required a bloody counterrevolution. The deal between the Democratic and Republican parties to withdraw Union troops from the South in 1877 accelerated a reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other racist gangs beholden to the interests of the exploiters.

Farrell Dobbs explained this culminating chapter of the defeat of Radical Reconstruction in the first volume of Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S. Farrell wrote:

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.

This defeat was suffered not only because the freed slaves, who aspired to get land and to become working farmers, were betrayed by the bourgeoisie and both capitalist political parties. It also occurred because the U.S. working class and its organizations were as yet still too weak and politically inexperienced to provide leadership to the kind of social revolution that could have made possible a massive expropriation and redistribution of land to the freed slaves.

The defeat of Radical Reconstruction set back the possibilities for a fighting alliance of workers and farmers, Black and white, in this country. Attempts at united action by the oppressed and exploited also ran up against the rise of U.S. imperialism during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The robber barons of finance capital encouraged racist notions as part of their ideological justification for imposing U.S. domination on the black-, brown-, and yellow-skinned peoples of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

An important effect of these blows was felt in the 1880s and 1890s, as economic and political conditions created a groundswell of protest among farmers across the southern and middle-western United States. This emerging farmers' movement, known as the populist movement, took some significant initial steps to involve Black farmers and organizations such as the Colored Farmers' Alliance. These efforts were ultimately aborted, however, by the forward march of Jim Crow at home and Uncle Sam abroad. Most populist leaders were not able to stand up to these ruling-class pressures, and by the mid-1890s many had joined in the capitalist-orchestrated chorus of racism and jingoism.

The U.S. working-class movement at that time was as yet incapable of developing a political leadership that could present an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist program and strategy to the ranks of labor, to exploited farmers, and to landless Black proletarians. The social and political conditions for such a development were not yet ripe.

In 1877 [Karl] Marx had expressed the expectation that the powerful nationwide strikes sparked by railroad workers in the United States that year might augur a new political situation in which the U.S. working class could provide leadership to the exploited farmers and freed slaves. "This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down," Marx wrote to [Frederick] Engels, "but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labour party in the United States."

Marx continued, "The policy of the new President [of withdrawing Union troops backing the Reconstruction governments] will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favour of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the peasants of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers."

This was not to be. The economic and political reserves of the rising U.S. industrial bourgeoisie were far from exhausted; over the next half century the United States would become the world's mightiest imperialist power. Moreover, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction - what Farrell Dobbs calls the "worst setback" in the history of our class in this country - was a much more devastating blow to Blacks and other U.S. working people than Marx had estimated. The U.S. working class remains deeply divided by the national oppression of Blacks that was reinstitutionalized on new foundations in the bloody aftermath of 1877. U.S. labor's first giant step toward the formation of major industrial unions did not come for another six decades, and the formation of a labor party, anticipated by Marx 108 years ago, remains an unfulfilled task of our class to this day.

Nonetheless, Marx could not have been more correct about the alliance of social forces that would be central to a successful revolution in the United States. Nor could he have been more correct about who had become the common class enemy of U.S. workers and farmers, Black and white, with the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction.

Today, the objective conditions do exist to build the class alliances that the working class was unable to forge and lead in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The U.S. working class does have the power to throw in its weight and give leadership to the battles of farmers and the oppressed Afro- American nationality. Black workers will be in the vanguard of the transformation of the labor movement that will make possible the conquest of state power in the United States by an alliance of the exploited producers. A multinational revolutionary working-class party, attracting both workers and exploited farmers to its ranks, can be built to lead this revolutionary struggle for socialism.

There can be no question in these closing decades of the twentieth century about what the capitalist class has to offer exploited working people in this country and worldwide. It offers war, destruction, economic misery, social inequality, the erosion and eventual crushing of democratic freedoms. That is how capitalism works. It cannot be reformed. The Socialist Workers Party offers an alternative future to the exploited producers. We offer them a party whose purpose is to educate and organize the working class to establish a workers' and farmers' government that will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism.  
 
 
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