Do We Need a New Reconstruction?
What was the nature of Reconstruction? W.E.B. Dubois called the radical Black Reconstruction a “dictatorship of labor”. The governments elected by Black and white poor people in the South after the Civil War enacted important reforms — public education, laws against racial discrimination, progressive taxation, increased labor rights and expanded voting rights. They dominated over the old and new Plantocracy. This Plantocracy was made up of the old slavocracy but also new property owners, many from the North who had the same economic incentives as the ex-slavocracy.
Dictatorship of Labor?
Some compare “dictatorship of labor” to Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat. However, there were two key differences. First, labor during Reconstruction included sharecroppers. Just as importantly, the state apparatus, the “special bodies of armed men” were made up of Federal troops and those backed up by those troops. This means that the working classes that took political power did not have a state apparatus reflecting their class interests to back up their decrees. Their political decisions were only enforceable with the consent of the Union army which was an expression of the bourgeois dictatorship in Washington D.C. As Engels argued, successful revolutions need to be able to enforce their authority on the defeated with force of arms. Lacking this, their political power is tenuous at best.
Bourgeois Revolution
The Civil War was the second phase of the bourgeois revolution in the U.S., the consolidation of power by the capitalist class. The American Revolution was the first phase. The Civil War which included a general strike of slaves and large numbers of Black Union troops overthrew the slavocracy. The capitalist class of the North had had a running battle with the slavocracy over expansion of slavery, states’ rights and tariff policy. This was based on the conflict between an economy of free labor with one based on slavery. The Civil War settled that dispute. The South was more securely incorporated into the Northern capitalist economy. Railroad building and industrial investment increased. Sections of the old slavocracy were eliminated and replaced by Northern investors.
The new plantocracy that resulted still wanted cheap labor which it obtained through share cropping and prison labor. However, its economic demand for low tariffs receded with industrialization and integration. Especially with the rapid industrial growth in the North, it was never able to challenge the Northern bourgeoisie to the degree it had before the Civil War.
Revolution?
Radical Reconstruction was not an independent revolution. It was instead the radical phase of the U.S. bourgeois revolution. When the North conquered the South, it wanted to make sure that the old slavocracy would never regain its political power. Led by the Radical Republicans, the northern bourgeoisie was willing to accept radical measures to make sure of that result. It gave Black men voting rights and Black men and women formal civic equality so that they could check the power of the old slavocracy.
This phase of the bourgeois revolution was similar to the Jacobin Dictatorship in the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror may have killed rich people, but it ensured the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. It was necessary to defeat the French aristocracy and ensure the political power of the bourgeoisie, so as to further the growth of capitalism. When the radical phase had done its work, the bourgeoisie pulled back from the “excesses” and in turn killed the leaders of the radical phase.
Likewise, when Radical Reconstruction had ensured the destruction of the old slaveocracy, the northern bourgeoisie pulled back from support of Black Reconstruction. 1877 is usually seen as the endpoint when Federal troops withdrew. In reality as pointed out by Peter Camejo, the die was cast before this. The new post-war Plantocracy reasserted its political power in the South based on dividing the poor along race lines. White supremacy was a useful tool to ensure the rule of the white rich. There was resistance to this among the poor, especially during the Populist period but with the imposition of Jim Crow, the white supremacist rich succeeded.
“The revolutionary bourgeoisie became a conservative bourgeoisie once their power was secure”
The Northern capitalists accepted this for several reasons: Once their political opponents were defeated, they had no further use for Black enfranchisement and political power; they feared radical infringement on property rights in the South might endanger their property rights as well; and they wanted to suppress radical labor movements which they were dealing with in the 1877 railway rebellion. This included a general strike and workers’ takeover in St. Louis. In facing the need to break strikes they wanted the option of using racial divisions. Finally, by the mid-1870s some of the northern capitalists had become owners of plantations in the South. These capitalists put pressure on their northern siblings.
The revolutionary bourgeoisie became a conservative bourgeoisie once their power was secure and they no longer needed the plebian masses to defeat their ruling class enemies. They soon realized that their main enemies were the working class and poor who they needed to exploit.
Counter-Revolution?
Was the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction a counter-revolution? It was in the sense that a reactionary class took political power from the poorer classes. However, Reconstruction had never started a social revolution — -i.e. it never used popular political power to usher in a new mode of production and a new economic ruling class. The bourgeois revolution through the Civil War uprooted the bourgeois slave mode of production and replaced it with constrained free market capitalism. The “counter-revolution” consolidated the political power of the new plantocracy which was now based on exploitation of wage labor and share croppers. Share croppers at this stage were like the cottagers who were subjected to the formal subsumption to capital. The overthrow of Radical Reconstruction was like Thermidor in the French Revolution — -a rightward turn that consolidated the bourgeois revolution.
Fascism?
This was not analogous to the Fascist coup in Germany and Italy. Fascism was a fundamental shift in strategy by an already dominant class — the big bourgeoisie. In Germany and Italy, the economy was dominated by big capital exploiting a mass of wage workers in town and country. In desperation, the big bourgeoisie turned over political power to the Fascist bands, so as to atomize the working class and destroy its institutions. This was the only way they saw to raise the rate of exploitation sufficiently to survive and prosper in the face of severe economic and social crisis. The overthrow of Reconstruction did not need to atomize the whole poor population. Instead, it divided the poor on race lines giving the poor whites a “psychological wage” and some marginal economic advantages.
There is a big difference between crushing and atomizing a whole working class and dividing a poor population on race lines through White Supremacy. In the South, half the poor population was raised at least rhetorically to get them to identify with the suppression of the other half. That suppression in turn allowed the ruling class to impose lower wages and conditions for the whole poor population. As Frederick Douglass put it, “They divided both to conquer each.”
A new Reconstruction or Socialist Revolution ?
Reconstruction at its height accomplished important reforms. This has led some progressives and leftists to call for a new Reconstruction. Since Reconstruction was a phase of the U.S. bourgeois revolution, this stance is a mistake. The consolidation of the bourgeois revolution in the South also consolidated white supremacy. Institutional racism persists throughout the U.S. The bourgeois revolution has already been accomplished. We do not need another one. Too many on the left accept a stages theory that puts socialist revolution off into the distant future after intermediate stages.
Capitalism relies on racism and always has. To abolish racism as well as other forms of oppression and exploitation, we need a socialist revolution. Instead of the “dictatorship of labor” relying on the capitalist state, we need a dictatorship of the proletariat ( workers’ democracy) with its own institutions, militias etc. We need a revolution against the bourgeoisie, not a consolidation of its power.
Racism, Revolution, Reaction: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction, Peter Camejo