Great labor uprising of 1877

Thank you for printing the excerpt from Philip Foner’s book The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 [August 21 Militant]. While the U.S. government ordered troops to suppress the 1877 strike, U.S. troops were also used in two other conflicts that year.

In his book Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, W.E.B. Du Bois argues that the Civil War, in effect, did not end with Gen. Robert Lee’s surrender in 1865. Forces that eventually became the Ku Klux Klan went to war against the revolutionary reconstruction governments. The KKK eventually defeated reconstruction because President Rutherford Hayes ordered in 1877 federal troops out of the former Confederate states. The defeat meant that Jim Crow laws would be enforced until the government bowed to pressure from the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The year 1877 was also the war against the Nez Perce Indians. Their defeat and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the 1890s marked the end of the 100-year war against Native Americans by the U.S. government.

Today, the struggles for Black rights and Native American rights continue to be issues that need to be addressed by the workers’ movement. In 1877, however, the working class also began to show how it is capable of transforming the world.

H.N.
by e-mail

Afghanistan I

How the hell is the war in Afghanistan imperialist when the country has absolutely nothing to offer in its ruins?

I read a lot of bullocks but that article [“Imperialist war in Afghanistan intensifies” in last week’s issue] has taken the cake. I have respect for our dying soldiers and despise those cheering the slime that they are risking their lives fighting. The Taliban are the enemy of civilized people everywhere. Calling this struggle “imperialist” is absolutely disgraceful.

You say you’re for working people? How about the honest working people of Afghanistan that don’t want to live under religious dogma?

Fabien Malouin

Itzig, Luxemburg

Afghanistan II

It seems that your reporter, Paul Davies, slept through the class on accuracy in headlines but never missed a session of “Misleading symbolism and self-promotion.” He and your editors should read Joseph Schumpeter’s classic work on imperialism so you understand how to use the word correctly before you misuse it again as you did in “Imperialist war in Afghanistan intensifies.”

Dave Thomas
by e-mail  
 
 
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