By Panagiotis Sotiris

Although ‘historical bloc’ is one of the most-well known concepts associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, at the same time not enough attention has been paid to its strategic theoretical significance. In most cases, ‘historical block’ has been taken to refer to alliances. This is most obvious in various texts from the PCI tradition.[1] Of course the identification of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ simply with social alliances can also be attributed to a surface reading of some of Gramsci’s pre-Prison writings, such as the famous text on the Southern Question where one can find Gramsci’s elaborations on the question of how to dismantle the Southern agrarian bloc and its particular intellectual bloc in order to advance the alliance of between proletariat and southern masses.[2] However, a look at Gramsci’s references to the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks provides evidence that the concept has a broader significance for Gramsci in prison than simply a reference to social alliances.

The first reference to the historical bloc can be found in Notebook 4, in a reference to the importance of superstructures, as the terrain where people become conscious of their condition, and to the necessary relation between base and superstructure. It is there that Gramsci refers to “Sorel’s concept of the “historical bloc”.[3] It is interesting that in Sorel’s work there is no reference to the concept of ‘historical bloc’. Valentino Gerratana has suggested that Gramsci, who did not have the possibility to reread Sorel’s Reflection on Violence when in prison, had in mind Sorel’s well known references to myths, and in particular Sorel’s insistence that these images should be taken as a whole (in Italian “prenderli in blocco”), as historical forces. [4]

In Notebook 7, the concept of the historical bloc returns in Gramsci’s criticism of Croce’s philosophy. For Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc is the equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s idealist conception and it also refers to a dialectical activity and a process of distinction that does not negate its real unity.[5] In the second version of this passage in Notebook 10 the concept of historical bloc (again attributed to Sorel) is linked to the unity of the process of reality, conceived as ‘active reaction by humanity on the structure’.[6] In another passage from Notebook 7 Gramsci links the historical bloc to the force of ideology and also of the relation ideologies and material forces and insists that in reality it is a relation of organic dialectical unity, distinctions being made only for ‘didactic’ reasons.

Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces.[7]

In Notebook 8 the concept of historic bloc returns and we have Gramsci’s insistence on the identity of history and politics, the identity between ‘nature and spirit’, in an attempt towards a dialectic of distinct moments (a unity of the opposites and the distincts).[8] In the second version of this passage, in Notebook 13, the reference is on the identity between ‘structures and superstructures’.[9] This conception of the historical bloc as referring to the (dialectical) unity of the social whole and in particular to the relation between material tendencies and ideological representations and the importance of such a relation between material conditions and ideologies as a condition for revolutionary praxis, also emerges in the following extract from Notebook 8. It is important to note the way this passage maintains a close dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the ‘complex, contradictory ensemble of the superstructures’ as the basis for a strategic revolutionary political orientation that is conceived in terms of ideology but also maintains the dialectical relation with social relations of production.

Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only an all-encompassing (totalitario) system of ideologies gives a rational refection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis.  If a social group is formed which is one hundred per cent homogeneous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist one hundred per cent for this revolutionising : that is that the “rational” is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process.[10]

Later in a note that first appeared in Notebook 8 but also, slightly expanded in Notebook 10 Gramsci used the concept of historical bloc as part of his criticism of Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history. In particular, for Gramsci it is exactly the conception of historical bloc as the relation of social and economic relation with ideological–political forms that enables a theoretical relevance for the concept of ethico-political history. “Ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc, in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the reconstruction of the various historical periods, is nothing more  than a polemical presentation of more or less interesting philosophical propositions, but its is not history”[11]. In a similar tone, in the summary first note of Notebook 10, Gramsci treats the concept of the historical bloc as a crucial aspect of his attempt towards a philosophy of praxis that could answer the questions that Croce’s conception of ethico-political history brought forward. Moreover, hegemony and historical bloc are theoretically linked in the most emphatic way in this passage.

Credit must therefore be given to Croce’s thought for its instrumental value and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in state life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation that must be always be borne in mind in the study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is to construct an integral history rather than partial or extrinsic histories.[12]

The concept of historical bloc constantly returns in Gramsci’s confrontation with Crocean concepts. For Gramsci the historical bloc can offer a historical and not speculative solution to the question of the relation between the different moments of the social whole.

The question is this: given the Crocean principle of the dialectic of the distincts (which is to be criticised as the merely verbal solution to a real methodological exigency, in so far as it is true that there exist not only opposites but also distincts), what relationship, which is not that of ‘implication in the unity of the spirit’, will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solution of these problems possible, or only a historical one, given the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel?[13]

The concept of historical bloc also appears in the fragment on the relation of forces in Notebook 9 but also in the well known fragment on the structure of parties during a period of organic crisis in Notebook 13. There the main point Gramsci wanted to make was on the importance of political initiatives in order to liberate the economic and political potential of a new historical bloc, including the used of force.

An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed. And, since two “similar” forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is “productive” to use it.[14]

The strategic character of the concept of historical bloc and its relation to accomplished hegemony can be found the famous fragment on the Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing, from Notebook 4 and reproduced in Notebook 11. Here the emphasis is on the particular relation between intellectuals and the people-nation, but also between leaders and the led, and on the need for intellectuals not only to interpret the conjuncture in an abstract way but also to understand the ‘passions’ of the subaltern classes and dialectically transform them into a ‘superior conception of the world’. This for Gramsci is exactly the creation of an ‘historical bloc. It is exactly here that one might see the analogy between the concept of the historical bloc and a condition of hegemony. The following passage exemplifies this point.

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive) , then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the “historical bloc”.[15]

Jacques Texier was one of the theorists that have insisted on the strategic theoretical importance of the concept of the historical bloc, within Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration. For Texier the concept of the historical bloc is exactly the concept that enables us think of the unity and interrelation between economics, politics and ideology, within Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the integral State. “Without the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the Gramscian theory of superstructures would not be Marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce.”[16] Based upon this conception, Texier treats the concept of the historical block as a theoretical node in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

The point of departure must be the concept of the’ historical bloc’ Gramsci stipulates. What does this mean? To think the unity of the distinct aspects or moments of superstructural activity, the moment of force and consent, of dictatorship and hegemony and the economico-political and ethico-politicaJ moment one must begin from the basis of the organic unity of the superstructures and infrastructure in the historical bloc and recognise the ultimately determinant character of economic conditions.[17]

For Texier it is important to follow carefully Gramsci’s novel redefinition of ‘civil society’ and how this encompasses a whole series of political and ideological practices, relations, beliefs conditioned by determinate social relations of production.

In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows lip on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethiico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses’ on the other.[18]

Therefore, the construction of a new historical bloc, a new articulation of economic, politics and ideology, is for Texier what is the stake in a struggle for hegemony: “the winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. A historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production.”[19]

Also of particular importance is Texier’s insistence[20] that in Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc implies an ‘organic unity’ between the State and the economy, in sharp contrast to every form of economism. In particular, Texier has offered a forceful reading of the concept civil society, which also points towards this particular dialectic of economics and politics within the historical bloc. For Texier the concept of civil society does not refer simply to the field of political and cultural hegemony, but also to economic activities. Although Texier distinguishes the economic structure and civil society, at the same time he provides textual evidence of Gramsci’s inclusion of the crucial aspects of economic activity and behaviour within the field of civil society, especially around the crucial Gramscian notions of “homo oeconomicus” and “determinate market”. In this sense we can say that a crucial aspect of the emergence of a new historical bloc is exactly the emergence not only of a new economic structure but also of a new “homo oeconomicus” and a new configuration of civil society.[21]

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has also offered an important reading of the theoretical centrality of the concept of historical materialism. For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s reference to structure and superstructure forming an historical bloc is the point to begin. The first error is the “simple identification between historical bloc and class alliances … or even the fusion … that embraces workers and intellectuals”.[22] For Buci-Glucksmann historical bloc goes beyond social alliances since it implies both a specific form of hegemonic leadership but also the development of the superstructures, “an ‘integral state’ rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and masses”.[23] Moreover, the concept of historical bloc is for Buci-Glucksmann not s a materialist position and anti-economistic answer to the relation between the different instances of the social whole; it is mainly an attempt to rethink a revolutionary strategy within the transition period.

Compared with Bukharin’s worker-peasant bloc of 1925-26, the Gramscian historic bloc demonstrates major new feature. This bloc is cultural and political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led. The cultural revolution, as an on-going process of adequation between culture and practice, is neither luxury nor a simple guarantee, but rather an actual dimension of the self-government of the masses and of democracy.[24]

For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s conception of revolutionary strategy as construction of a new historical bloc[25] leads to a “reformulation of the entire Marxist problematic of the withering away of the State as a passage to a regulated society, where political society is reabsorbed by civil society”.[26] Therefore, it is much more than a simple reference to a social alliance that manages to capture political power, since it entails the construction of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political, ideological and economic forms                                           . In opposition to a simple ‘bloc in power’, the historical bloc “presupposes the historical construction of long duration of new hegemonic system, without which classes become only a mechanical aggregate, managed by the State or a bureaucracy”.[27]

From the above elaboration it is obvious that historical bloc is a strategic not a descriptive or an analytical concept. It defines not an actual social alliance, but a social and political condition to be achieved. Historical bloc does not refer to the formation of an electoral alliance or to various social strata and movements fighting side by side. It refers to the emergence of a different configuration within civil society, namely to the emergence, on a broad scale, of different forms of politics, different forms of organization, alternative discourses and narratives, that materialize the ability for society to be organized and administrated in a different way. At the same time it refers to a specific relation between politics and economics, namely to the articulation not simply of demands and aspirations but of an alternative social and economic paradigm. Therefore, a new historical bloc defines that specific historical condition when not only a new social alliance demands power but is also in a position to impose its own particular economic form and social strategy and lead society. It also includes a particular relation between the broad masses of the subaltern classes and new intellectual practices, along with the emergence of new forms of mass critical and antagonistic political intellectuality, exactly that passage from knowledge to understanding and passion. Regarding political organizations, it refers to that particular condition of leadership, in the form of actual rooting, participation, and mass mobilization that defines an ‘organic relation’ between leaders and led, which when we refer to the politics of proletarian hegemony implies a condition of mass politicization and collective elaboration. It also implies the actuality of the new political and economic forms, and the full elaboration of what can be defined as a ‘dual power’ strategy conceived in the broadest sense of the term.

In this sense, it is obvious that the concept of the historical bloc, when used in relation to the politics of the subaltern classes, refers to a strategy of (counter)hegemony. A potential hegemony of the forces of labour, namely their ability to become actually leading in a broader front, that would make possible a process of social transformation, means exactly creating the conditions for a new historical bloc. This means a new articulation between social forces, alternative economic form[28]s in rupture with capitalist social relations of productions, new political forms of organization and participatory democratic decision-making. The struggle for hegemony means a struggle for the formation of a new historic bloc.

That is why the concept of the historical bloc is more than ever pertinent to contemporary discussions within the Left. The reasons for this are above all political and have to do with the dynamics of the conjuncture. The long retreat of the Left through as the combined result of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” for a long time seemed to make questions of strategy unimportant. What seemed to be necessary was the unity around basic struggles and movements of resistance. Strategic discussion was left either to theoretical elaborations or was postponed for a better day. Even after the return of mass protest movements after Seattle 1999, the return of the strategic questions Daniel Bensaïd talked about in 2006,[29] has yet to produce some specific strategic recommendations.

However, recent developments have made us all realize the urgency of these questions. The developments include the global economic crisis of the end of the 2000s, the crisis of neoliberalism, the impressive return of mass protest politics, from 2011 until now, and the evidences of an open hegemonic crisis in various “weak links” of the imperialist chain, a crisis that can be described in Gramscian terms.

And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example) , or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.[30]

At the same time, we have the possibility that the Left can lead an impressive reversal in the political balance of forces in countries such as Greece, and face the possibility of arriving at governmental power.

I would like to insist that the debate is more urgent than before. Recent developments, such as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have shown that what would be called the new age of insurrections is far from over. However, especially the developments regarding the developments within what has been termed the ‘Arab Spring’ has shown that when mass popular insurrections cannot be ‘translated’ politically into autonomously defined democratic and emancipator political projects, then the results can be tragic. At same time, regarding the crisis of neoliberalism and the current authoritarian, disciplinary turn of neoliberal governance, the only contribution the dominant elites can make is to only prolong the crisis. This situation is similar to one described by Gramsci.

What makes things worse, is that it is about a crisis for which the elements of its resolution are prevented from being developed with the necessary speed; those that are dominant can no longer resolve the crisis but have the power (to impede) others from resolving it, namely they have the power only to prolong the crisis.[31]

This means the need to think in terms of the necessary renewal of a revolutionary strategy. The fact that there are perhaps no ‘ideal types’ for revolution, does not mean that we do not need revolutionary changes. A new historical bloc refers exactly such a revolutionary process.

In light of the above, a strategy for a new ‘historical bloc’ suggests that we must elaborate upon an alternative productive paradigm, in a non market and non profit-oriented direction, an alternative non capitalist developmental path (as an aspect of the dialectics of economy and politics within the historical bloc). We refer to a developmental paradigm neither in the sense of quantitative growth, nor in the sense of an alternative capitalist development, but in the sense of a new conception of how to make good use of collective social productive capabilities and resources. This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non commercial networks of distribution, regaining the public character of goods and service that are currently under the threat of the tendency for ‘new enclosures’.  It could also include a new emphasis on self-reliance and decreased dependence upon international flows of commodities and resources, along with a break with consumerist conceptions of well-being.

Such a thinking of the ‘economic program’ of process of transformation, as part of a strategy for a new historic bloc, should not be seen as an attempt to simply devise or think of alternative economic forms. In reality, it is a process of collective experimentation based upon the emergence of alternative economic forms within movements, collective struggles and resistances to the commercialization of social goods. From the defence of public services and the new forms of solidary economy, to the new forms of self-management and worker’s control (from occupied factories in Argentina to Public Television in Greece), we have many important experiences. These have not been simply “resistances” but also collective experimenting sites that can help us understand how things can be organized in a different non-capitalist way. In a way, it means taking hold of the ‘traces of communism’ in actual movements and social resistances to the violence of capital and the markets. The Left should not consider these experiences to be simply “movements” and think of economic policy only in terms of non-austerity macroeconomics, however important these are.

Moreover, thinking in terms of a new “historical bloc”, means that the Left attempts to elaborate on the possibility of an alternative narrative for society, in an attempt exactly for the forces of labour to be leading (dirigente). And in this we must also think how the very experience of today’s’ forces of labour, despite their fragmentation into multifarious employment situation and prospects, with their unity undermined by precariousness, offers the basis for such a (counter)hegemony. Today’s collective labour force is not only more fragmented, it is also more educated, with more access to knowledge and communication recourse, and in an ability to voice its grievances in a more articulate way. Moreover, all over the advanced capitalist societies, those social strata that traditional sociology describes as middle class, in reality segments of intellectual labour or what Poulantzas described as the salaried new petite-bourgeoisie,[32] are under attack by stagnant wages, increased barriers to ‘upward social mobility’, private debt burden, workplace precariousness. Consequently, they have seen the class divide with various segments of the capitalist class grow, and have moved closer to working class demands and aspirations. All these developments are also reflected in the mass unemployment (and precariousness) of youth an element that has produced social explosions, and probably will in the future. This brings together, in mass collective practises, all those social forces that, one way or the other, depend upon selling their labour power to make ends meet. This offers not the only the material ground for social alliances, exemplified in the co-presence of all these strata in contemporary protests from the Indignados to the Syntagma to Occupy!, but also of collective experiences, aspirations and demands. New forms of “public spheres’ emerge that enable not simply tactical cooperation within protest movements, but the potential of collectively elaborating a new vision and perspective beyond “actually existing neoliberalism”.

This means that today rethinking socialist and revolutionary politics is not only about ‘injecting’ socialist consciousness into the movement – however necessary the defence of the socialist and communist tradition might be in a period of ideological erasure. It is also about elaborating upon collective aspirations, demands and ideological representations that emerge from the very materiality of today’s condition and struggles of the forces of labour. Creating conditions for a new historical bloc is not only about articulating a political project; it is about working upon actual social and historical tendencies and dynamics, in order to create new political forms that would enable a new dialectical relation between ‘structure’ and ‘superstructures’.

This gives a new importance to the question of the program. Contrary to the tendency to ignore the program in the name of a simple unity around the negation of austerity, it is important to insist that a strategy for a new historical bloc requires articulating an alternative narrative for society, not just a sum of grievances and demands. Such a program should not restrict itself to income redistribution, increased public spending and nationalization. It should also include experiments with new productive forms and relations based upon self-management, new forms of workers’ control, and alternative forms of economic coordination and planning, in sum a collective to move beyond the capitalist logic.  This is in contrast to the ‘pragmatist turn’ of some parties of the European Left that make a distinction between an anti-austerity politics aiming at ‘saving society from austerity’ and social transformation. On the contrary, it is now time to think of the transition program as offering at the same time an exit from austerity and the beginning of a process of transformation in sharp break not only with neo-liberalism but also with aspects of capitalist relations. This is today one of the most crucial aspects of a potential revolutionary strategy today.

In an era of increased forms of capitalist internationalization, this also means taking a stand regarding a country’s place in the international plane. In this sense, recent debates within the European Left, such as the ones pertaining to the relation to the Eurozone and the European Union should be read in a strategic manner. Breaking away from the Eurozone and the European Union, for the peripheral countries of the European South, such as Greece, is not simply about monetary sovereignty (which per se is a necessary aspect of regaining democratic control of economic policy). It is about the forces of labour offering an alternative orientation for society, especially since in countries such as Greece, the bourgeois ‘historical bloc, based both its strategy and its legitimacy, upon the ‘European Road’ as a road to capitalist modernization.

Moreover, a politics of a potential new ‘historical bloc’ means exactly aiming at political power, both in the sense of a left wing government but also and mainly in the sense of a change in actual social power configuration. If we are fully aware that it will be part of a long and contradictory process of transition and transformation and struggle ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, then a ‘government of the Left’ can be indeed be part of a modern revolutionary strategy. This would require making use of both governmental power (the radicalization of current institutional and constitutional framework) and forms of ‘popular power’ from below, without underestimating the constant confrontation with the forces of capital. This has been an open question in the communist movement, from the ‘Workers’ Government’ described in the 4^th Congress of the Communist International,[33] to Gramsci’s proposal for a ‘Constituent Assembly’ of the anti-fascist forces,[34] to Poulantzas’ confrontation with a possible ‘democratic road to socialism’,[35] to the contradictions of contemporary experiments in left governance such as the one in Bolivia. However, without a strong labour movement, without radical social movements, without the full development of all forms of people’s power and self-organization, any government of the Left will not manage to stand up to the immense pressure it will get from the forces of capital, the EU and the IMF. That is why it is necessary to experiment with new forms of social and political power from below and to create new forms of social practice and interaction based on solidarity and common work, new forms of direct democracy.

In this sense, a strategy for a new historical bloc also requires a new practice of politics, new social and political forms of organization beyond the traditional Party-form, beyond traditional trade unionism and beyond the limits of traditional parliamentary bourgeois politics. This corresponds exactly to the need for new forms of civil society organizations, in the broad sense that Gramsci gave to this notion. In a way, Louis Althusser pointed to this direction of the political forms associated with a potential historical bloc in his intervention in the debates of the 22^nd Congress of the French Communist Party.

In the best of cases, it is conceivable that the union of the people of France may become something quite different from the means to a new electoral balance, but is rather aimed, over and above the organizations of the Left, at the popular masses themselves. Why address the popular masses in this way? To tell them, even if still only as a hint, that they will have to organize themselves autonomously, in original forms, in firms, urban districts and villages, around the questions of labour and living conditions, the questions of housing, education, health, transport, the environment, etc.; in order to define and defend their demands, first to prepare for the establishment of a revolutionary state, then to maintain it, stimulate it and at the same time force it to ‘wither away’. Such mass organizations, which no one can define in advance and on behalf of the masses, already exist or are being sought in Italy, Spain and Portugal, where they play an important part, despite all difficulties. If the masses seize on the slogan of the union of the people of France and interpret it in this mass sense, they will be re-establishing connections with a living tradition of popular struggle in our country and will be able to help give a new content to the political forms by which the power of the working people will be exercised under socialism.[36]

Moreover, it is exactly this combination of popular power from below and new forms of self-management, workers’ control and alternative forms of economic coordination that can create the conditions for a modern form of ‘dual power’, namely the actual emergence of new, non capitalist social and political forms. Both Lenin and Gramsci thought that there can be no process of social transformation without a vast social and political experimentation, both before and after the revolution, which will guaranty that within the struggles we can already witness the emergence of new social forms and new ways to organize production and social life.

It is not going to be an ‘easy road’. It would require a struggling society actually changing values, priorities, narratives. It would also require a new ethics of collective participation and responsibility, of struggle and commitment to change, a transformed and educated common sense. In this sense, the promise of Left-wing politics cannot be a simple return to 2009, not least because it is materially impossible, but because we want to go beyond confidence to the markers and debt-ridden consumerism. In such a ‘world-view’ public education, public health, public transport, environmental protection, non market collective determination of priorities, and quality of everyday sociality, are more important than imported consumer goods and cheap credit.

At the same time, a strategy for a new historical block also implies an attempt towards a re-appropriation and redefinition of the very notion of the people. This refers to the complex process, political, ideological and social, through which the people can re-emerge in a situation of struggle, neither as the abstract subject of the bourgeois polity, nor as the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’, but as a potentially anti-capitalist alliance of all those social strata that one way or the other depend upon their labour power in order to make ends meet. This also means a new form of people’s unity, especially against the dividing results of racism and the varieties of neofascism.[37]

Such a process can (and should…) also be a knowledge process, both in the sense of using the knowledge accumulated by people in social movements (who can run better a hospital or a school? Appointed technocrats or the people actually working and struggling there) and also in the sense of struggle, solidarity and common practices being forms that help people acquire knowledge, learn how to do things differently and collectively re-invent new forms of mass intellectuality and a new cultural hegemony. Moreover, if political organizations cannot learn from actual experiences, if they are not themselves collective processes of learning and transforming the experiences from the struggles into political strategy, then they cannot contribute to a process of social transformation.

Such a strategy (and dialectic of strategy and tactics) can transform current emerging alliances, changes to the relations of representation, struggles, resistances and proposals for ‘concrete utopias’, into a new and highly original ‘historical block’, the necessary condition for an open-ended process of social transformation. It is an attempt to actually rethink revolutionary strategy, not as phantasy but as an open – ended sequence of transformation and experimentation. Talking today about socialism cannot be simply about “catch phrases” on worker’s power and worker’s control or worker’s democracy, however necessary it is to revisit in a self-critical manner the socialist experiences of the 20^th century. Talking about socialism today means building upon the dynamics of struggles, upon the new forms of democracy and popular sovereignty from below emerging within struggles, upon the attempt at re-appropriating public space and creating new public spheres, upon what Althusser described as ‘virtual forms of communism in contemporary movements and aspirations.[38]

Finally, all these also require a fresh thinking of the collective political subject. All recent developments have shown the importance of front politics. Contrary to the metaphysics of the Party as a guarantor of truth and the correct line, we need a more broad conception of the left political front that is not only unity but also dialectical process, a terrain of struggle itself, a collective democratic process, and a laboratory of ideas, projects and sensitivities.

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their  historical ‘laboratory’. [...] The relation of theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and all-encompassing intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. ^[39]

Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society.

To conclude recent developments have shown the potential for political change and breaks with “actually existing neoliberalism”. For the first time after a long time the forces of the Left are facing the challenge of political power and hegemony. We do not have the luxury of avoiding the discussion on a revolutionary strategy and a socialist perspective for the 21^st century. Concepts such as Gramsci’s historical bloc offer us the possibility to rethink politics in a strategic way.

References

Althusser, Louis 1977, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party”, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1977/22nd-congress.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Althusser, Louis 1998, Solitude de Machiavel, Paris: Actuel Marx / PUF.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2006, “On the return of the politico-strategic question”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2006/08/polstrat.htm#p5 (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Berlinguer, Enrico 1977, Historical Compromise, (In Greek). Athens: Themelio.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Comintern 1922, “Theses on Comintern Tactics” (Fourth Congress). http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978-1994, Cahiers de Prison. 5 vols. Paris : Gallimard.

Gramsci, Antonio 1995, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio ²1977, Quaderni di Carcere. Edited by Valention Gerratana, Rome: Einauidi.

Lisa, Athos 1933, Discusion political con Gramsci en la carcel, http://www.gramsci.org.ar/8/53.htm (Accesses 30 October 2013.)

Poulantzas, Nicos, 1975, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1980, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Sorel, Georges 1999, Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2013, “The Dark of Greek Neo-fascism”, Overland 210.

Texier, Jacques 1979, “Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures”. In Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 48-79.

Texier, Jacques 1989, “Sur le sense de “societé civile” chez Gramsci”. In Actuel Marx 5, pp. 0-68.

[40]

By Alain Badiou
24 January 2023
via Verso Blog

This article was originally published by L’Obs on 2 September 2022.

Review of Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri (PublicAffairs, 2022)

By Matthew E. Stanley
Jacobin

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War. This is only partly true: reactionaries did not just fear democracy, they feared the economic redistribution former slaves associated with it.

In August, a poll conducted by YouGov revealed that 40 percent of Americans believe it likely that a civil war will take place within the next decade. That same poll showed that an even larger number, 62 percent, think that levels of political violence will increase within the next few years. Undeniably, there seems to be a sense among Americans that our democratic system is not robust enough to deal with the conflicts it generates. Moments of episodic crises, such as the January 6 insurrection, would then seem to be symptomatic of the broader structural problems with American democracy. But what is their cause?

In Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, historian Jeremi Suri argues that the failure of Reconstruction, the ambitious post–Civil War project to create a new social order in the US South, explains not only the existence of a conspiratorial right but the January 6 insurrection too. Suri maintains that the world’s first experiment in genuine multiracial democracy inspired a long, violent resistance, not only against the progressive state governments of the 1860s and 1870s but against the very idea of a multiracial body politic. The effects of that backlash have reverberated for a century and a half, Suri argues, culminating with the ransacking of the US Capitol.

Suri’s study is thoughtful and deftly written. Its premise — that the January 6 attack, like Donald Trump himself, was far less a sudden, singular rupture than the predictable culmination of long-standing political currents — is indisputable. But by limiting its understanding of democracy to struggles for the franchise, Civil War by Other Means obscures what was at stake for former slaves and working-class whites during the Reconstruction era. Both groups were not simply concerned with the right to vote but in securing economic freedom for themselves after the dispossession of the planter class.

Ignoring these facts leads Suri to wrongly identify culture and constitutional encumbrances, rather than concentrated wealth under capitalism, as the primary obstacles to political self-determination.

A Splendid Failure
Suri begins by excavating the roots of white Southern anti-government resistance after slavery. In one chapter, he explores the power of martyrdom, including how the memory of John Wilkes Booth bolstered defenses of local white power, as anti-black collective violence surged throughout the former Confederacy. In another, he recounts how roughly fifty thousand white Southerners, mostly Confederate officers and Southern gentry, went into self-exile after Appomattox in the hopes of recreating their slave empire in Latin America.

These exiles, whom Ulysses S. Grant considered “a part of the Rebellion itself,” developed identities of resistance to multiracial democracy on both sides of the Rio Grande: against liberal reformers in Mexico and Radical Republicans in the United States. Suri views all of them — Lincoln’s assassins, Klansmen, and Confederate expatriates — as ideological ancestors of the January 6 insurrectionists.

Meanwhile, ex-slaves worked to realize their own understandings of democracy in the postwar South. The governments they created along with their allies, white Southern Unionists and black and white Northern “carpetbaggers,” were some of the most progressive in US history. In addition to universal male suffrage, the most reform-minded of those governments championed public education and infrastructure, women’s property rights, child labor laws, and new systems of credit that allowed poor people to buy land.

The result was, according to Suri, a “Second American Revolution” that made good on the promises of the Declaration of Independence. In some cases, Southern Republicanism was even more radical than Suri acknowledges. In New Orleans, for instance, the Republic Club sent a message of solidarity to the Paris Commune and applied for membership in the First International.

The book’s primary focus, however, is not grassroots radicalism but high politics. And it is here, in examining the nuances and limitations of the Republican Party, that Suri’s analysis is strongest. Considering how the party legislated and implemented policy to protect (or not) multiracial democracy in the South, he views Northern Republicans as necessary but cautious allies who were pushed from below.

Suri’s narrative is insightful but familiar: Andrew Johnson’s intransigence expanded and emboldened the Radicals in Congress; the Civil Rights Act of 1867, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Reconstruction Acts opened democratic possibility in the South. Believing the Fifteenth Amendment to be “the most important event” in the nation’s history, President Grant proved an ardent defender of civil rights laws, and his use of military occupation largely worked against rising white violence. However, time, expense, political fatigue, and economic panic fed growing indifference in the North. With no popular base to support them, the gains of Reconstruction teetered on collapse.

The Rutherford Hayes and James Garfield presidencies had their opportunities to protect multiracial democracy, Suri argues, but were plagued by tepid leadership, constitutional crisis, corruption, and assassination. By the summer of 1877, Northern Republicans had acquiesced to “local self-government” (white rule) in the South while deploying federal forces against striking industrial workers in the North, facilitating their turn from “a party of money rather than a party of morals,” as Frederick Douglass put it. Associating “big government” with black rights, white reactionaries fomented a violent overthrow of what W. E. B. Du Bois termed the “abolition democracy,” ushering in home rule and eight decades of Jim Crow. The death of Reconstruction was the dawn of a new tradition of racialized anti-government activism.

Suri’s version of Reconstruction celebrates the inclusive, democratic possibilities of US politics while offering a broader critique of the US election system. Its riveting narrative offers a powerful warning against Whiggish conceptions of the past. Suri convincingly argues, for instance, that the presidential election of 1872 was the fairest and freest election in the nation’s history until the 1960s. This is a story of revolutionary conditions and remarkable multiracial advances leading to backlash, violence, and the deterioration of political and social rights. Rather than a march of progress, this analysis of American democracy is that of an ongoing project — one that is long, arduous, uneven, and woefully incomplete.

A Flawed Democracy
Suri maintains that the problems of Reconstruction and of Republican efforts to protect multiracial democracy are the problems of our time, too. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, mass democracy in the United States has always been contested, its expansion predicated on hard-fought struggles for rights. There was never a golden age of American democracy. Indeed, the scope of disenfranchisement is even wider than Suri lets on. Enormous blocs of should-be voters have been — and in many cases continue to be — restricted by gender, race, servitude, the absence of property, age, ethnicity, literacy, criminal record, ability, or national origin. In many ways, the American ballot box has merely registered political outcomes that were largely determined before voting even began.

We still carry the US election system that Suri characterizes as arbitrary and contentious, and it has contributed to the nation’s current status as a “flawed democracy,” according to the Democracy Index. As Suri notes, the Constitution’s minoritarian elements — including the document’s strong protection of property rights, emphasis on capital mobility, and relative difficulty to amend — were designed by slaveholders and an ownership class that was deeply suspicious of, if not actively hostile to, popular democracy. Even for white male property owners, the system was mediated through a convoluted network of electors and representatives. Other features of US politics that structurally assist the forces of white democracy, according to Suri, include rampant gerrymandering, various forms of voter suppression, the nondemocratic nature of the US Senate and the Supreme Court, and the disenfranchisement of US citizens in the non-state territories of Washington, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Mariana Islands (whose residents are principally, and not coincidentally, non-white people).

It was not simply multiracial democracy per se that white reactionaries of the Reconstruction era found so offensive; it was the threat that mass democracy posed to material as well as racial status.
Suri reserves his greatest ire, however, for the Electoral College, which he identifies as an archaic, elitist, antidemocratic, and deeply unpopular relic of the eighteenth century. To be sure, Reconstruction-era Republicans benefited from that outmoded system, as Hayes won the Electoral College but not the popular vote in 1876. At the same time, white Southern fears of government unleashed during Reconstruction have helped sustain this undemocratic system ever since. Further, the Electoral College would for decades afford disproportionate power to the segregationist South, since black people counted as full persons for purposes of electoral representation after the Fifteenth Amendment but were disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws.

These weaknesses in our constitutional system and the absence of a direct popular vote continue to enable right-wing authoritarianism, Suri contends. Today’s Republicans are generally hostile to voting rights because they view them, understandably, as more likely to check than augment their power. Some party leaders, including senator Mike Lee of Utah, have gone so far as to openly celebrate the Constitution’s lack of democracy. In his book’s final chapter, Suri makes several recommendations about how to stave off this antidemocratic momentum and ostensibly “save our democracy.” He proposes a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote, the abolition of the Electoral College, the legal prohibition of partisan gerrymandering, and a new and more democratic presidential line of succession.

This focus on formal politics, intriguing though it is, nevertheless offers an incomplete portrait of the Reconstruction era. And Suri’s emphasis on technocratic fixes also skirts vital questions about securing, maintaining, and leveraging power. (How will these laws come to pass without a mass movement?) In other words, Civil War by Other Means falls short not in its diagnosis of problems but in its identification of causes and solutions. In Suri’s telling, Radical Reconstruction was hindered by anti-black violence, shifting public opinion, and the constraints of the political system. It was not hindered by class conditions. Similar to the mono-causal “whitelash” theory that gained traction after the 2016 election, Suri views racial resentment, rather than white supremacy bound to political economy, as the principal explanatory factor for Reconstruction’s failure — and for the precarious state of US democracy.

In truth, it was not simply multiracial democracy per se that white reactionaries of the Reconstruction era found so offensive; it was the threat that mass democracy posed to material as well as racial status. Anti-black collective violence was not identical to class violence, but the two were inseparable. Suri too often overlooks this fact. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan was not just a violent hate group; it was also effectively, as Chad Pearson argues in the book Capital’s Terrorists, a business owners’ organization. The white counterrevolution was not merely a racial project; it was also, as Du Bois argued, a conflict among classes, with former slaveholders using race hatred to “achieve economic security and restore fatal losses of capital and investment.”

Insurrectionist Workers?
Suri’s misapplication of class begins in the book’s introduction, which profiles insurrectionist Kevin Seefried as emblematic of those who stormed the US Capitol. A white worker and Sons of Confederate Veterans member from Sussex County, Delaware, Seefried supports Suri’s long Civil War thesis. After all, Seefried is an avowed anti-government white nationalist who forced a Confederate flag into the congressional chambers. But while Suri explains that the grievances of insurrectionists like Seefried may have stemmed in part from being “left behind” by the nation’s move toward a “multiracial meritocracy,” he marshals no evidence that Seefried was representative of the pro-Trump mob.

In reality, Seefried was a typical rioter only in that he is a white male who holds far-right political views (the January 6 insurrectionists were roughly 86 percent men and 93 percent non-Hispanic white). Few (about 14 percent) were members of militias or other hate or extremist groups. Far more (around 20 percent) were former military, offering further evidence that “the bombs explode at home.” Nor did the insurrectionists simply hail from rural America. They also came from the nation’s largest metro areas: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston. Rather than urbanity or rurality, the common-origin denominator among the rioters involved demographic trends. Most came from counties that are trending rapidly toward racial pluralism and majority-minority status, and where the share of the white population is declining at rates well above the national average. This, no doubt, speaks to the valence within their ranks of a “Great Replacement” theory, one promulgated by conservative media personalities.

Most critically, the January 6 insurrectionists were not downtrodden workers, unemployed and uneducated, as Suri’s portrait of Seefried suggests. The vast majority were, like Trump’s base, professional-class, with disproportionate numbers of deeply conservative provincial elites from midsize cities, small towns, and retirement enclaves. Some were the bourgeoise that Patrick Wyman terms the “American gentry” — business and property owners who sit atop local hierarchies, and who “see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.” Fearful of wavering influence in their own (typically racially and socioeconomically segregated) communities, they equated Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with protection of both their financial assets and racial identities.

In fact, the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats obtained employment data for 501 of the 716 people arrested or charged for their role in January 6. The vast majority were either business owners, self-employed, or white-collar professionals, including doctors, lawyers, bankers, architects, and accountants. Only 22 percent of the sample held what the compilers described as “blue collar” jobs, as either wage-earning or salaried workers. Only 7 percent were unemployed. Even relative to other right-wing extremist groups as compiled by the FBI, the January 6 insurrectionists were strikingly well-off. After all, partaking in a prearranged government takeover in one of the nation’s most expensive cities requires time off work, as well as travel, airfare, and hotel expense. Many of the rioters dined in gourmet restaurants the night of January 5. Others stayed at the posh Willard Hotel, where rooms will cost you over $300 per night. Some even flew to the “Stop the Steal” rally on private jets.

Among both white and black Radicals, phrases including ‘better classes,’ ‘most respectable,’ and ‘best men’ were code for the class difference between free men of color and recently freed slaves.
The depiction of Kevin Seefried as a typical insurrectionist reinforces Suri’s idea of the roots of racial repression as primarily cultural, based on “habit and tradition,” rather than material, in the service of profit and class hegemony. However, belief in the Big lie, and the willingness to act violently on its behalf, is dangerous not because it holds sway among relatively powerless citizens like Seefried. It is dangerous because it is mainstream among relatively affluent members of a particular social class, the vast majority of whom, yes, are white, and who wield white nationalism in the service of class politics, as well as class power in the service of white nationalism. This is not to downplay the obvious role that white identity played in both Trump’s election and January 6, only to highlight that it is not fringe bands of neo-Confederates but acute inequality, engendered by the basic machinations of capitalism, that poses the greatest threat to American democracy.

Democracy on the Land
For a book about the long struggle for democracy, Suri’s study contains surprisingly little about contests over the meaning of democracy. His emphasis is on electoral democracy, or the processes by which enfranchised people vote for political representatives in periodically held elections. Yet more than any period of US history, Reconstruction demonstrates how this definition of democracy is necessary but insufficient. Although Suri characterizes Reconstruction as “a struggle over conflicting conceptions of democracy,” his core question is “democracy for whom?” and not “democracy of what kind?” Put another way, Suri’s notion of democracy pivots entirely on race — white man’s democracy vs. multiracial democracy — while obscuring intraracial distinctions and calls for economic democracy.

Former slaves did indeed see voting rights and ballot inclusion as fundamental rights. However, Suri’s claim that blacks recognized “representation in politics” as “the basic foundation of democracy” requires further context, and the book’s fixation on voting rights gives the impression that land ownership was of secondary importance to former slaves. It was not.

Although Suri’s flattening of critical class differences prevents him from exploring such issues, countless ex-slaves prioritized rights in land as equal to or above voting. This was especially true of newly emancipated people in rural areas, most of them landless and illiterate, whose demands tended to be more material than their free counterparts in the urban South. One freedman prefigured Martin Luther King Jr’s pithy critique of civil rights devoid of economic justice: “What’s the use of being free if you don’t own enough land to be buried in?”

The story of “Forty acres and a mule” as a dream deferred, though largely absent from Suri’s account, is essential to any materialist interpretation of Reconstruction — or of US history for that matter. Eager to kickstart the South’s cash crop economy, Southern planters and Northern capitalists each had a vested interest in opposing both communitarianism (democratically owned property) and independent proprietorship (small-scale privately owned property) for former slaves. Some of the latter feared that land redistribution in the South would lead industrial workers in the North to challenge other forms of property. Countless Northern industrialists, philanthropists, and politicians supported black political rights out of either sincere egalitarian impulses or an opportunity to grow their political party in the South. But many also feared alliances between former slaves and poor and middling white agrarians in the North and West. Even free blacks, white reformers, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents, most of them well-meaning, sincerely believed that the dependency of wage labor was the surest way to self-sufficiency for former slaves.

While Reconstruction represented an exceptional — and in many ways revolutionary — reallocation of power toward working people, property confiscation constituted what historian Michael Fitzgerald calls a “wartime vogue,” far less a result of ideology than of military necessity. By 1866, the idea of land redistribution for ex-slaves was a nonstarter. Allies of the former slaves, including the Freedmen’s Aid Association, the American Missionary Association, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, called for education, thrift, and land purchase through savings as substitutes for land reform. As time wore on, Southern state governments and most congressional Republicans exhibited what historian Claude Oubre terms only a “meager effort” to provide economic security for blacks. The democratic visions of these institutions were limited somewhat by the economic concepts of the time and the political constraints of the moment. But they were also limited by their class positions.

Of course, there were also black intraracial class tensions, particularly in urban centers. While the postwar South held a broad range of black voters, leaders, and convention delegates, contested definitions of democracy, including which of its elements should be emphasized, tended to break along class lines. Among both white and black Radicals, phrases including “better classes,” “most respectable,” and “best men” were code for the class difference between free men of color and recently freed slaves — and also served as indicators of democratic prerogatives. In his study of Reconstruction-era Mobile, Alabama, historian Michael Fitzgerald argues that “class divisions within the black community were so urgent that factional conflict could not be contained.”

As early as the state black conventions of 1865, Eric Foner observes a striking divide between more prominent leaders who pushed “political equality and self-help formulas,” and rural freedmen who possessed above all a “thirst for land.” Demanding “land or blood,” ex-slaves in the countryside decisively favored assembly delegates who called for plantations to be broken up. Yet convention leaders rarely highlighted such views. “By and large,” Foner contends, “economic concerns figured only marginally in the proceedings, and the addresses and resolutions offered no economic program, apart from stressing the ‘mutual interest’ of capital and labor, and urging self-improvement as the route to personal advancement.” Describing this gulf between ex-slaves and free blacks (the self-described men of “intelligence and wealth”), historian Ted Tunnell argues that the type of civic rights prioritized by free blacks, notably equal access to public spaces such as theaters, saloons, and steamboats, were “remote from the needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of ex-slaves who lived hard lives on toil and ceaseless anxiety.”

In his 1935 Marxist masterwork, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterizes Radical Reconstruction as a “dictatorship of labor” and acknowledges that the failure of land reform had far more to do with white than black opposition. Yet he also maintains that black leadership during Reconstruction skewed petite bourgeois, its members steeped in an individualistic, capitalist ideology (which was by no means unique to the black middle class).

In other words, former slaves who desperately needed land were too often represented by conservative white Unionists and free blacks whose class statuses and interests disinclined them from supporting large-scale material redistribution, which raises the question: Were Reconstruction governments truly a “dictatorship of labor,” or were they liberal and multiracial bourgeois alliances sustained by the votes of black and a minority of poor whites?

The book’s key shortcoming lies in its failure to address the full spectrum of Reconstruction-era democracy and to foreground the materialist nature of its social and political conflict.
In either case, former slaves constituted a distinct and especially radical social class. They envisioned self-ownership as a right, viewing it not as apart from, but essential to and often ahead of, voting. Most understood that political democracy would be limited — and even be turned back altogether — without control over the land that their labor had made productive. And they perceived this issue as both a matter of justice and, in many cases, precedent. As Du Bois points out, “The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery.” Writing on Louisiana’s 1867 Radical convention, Tunnell explained that although civil rights were a monumental achievement, they did not directly address “fundamental economic problems.” “More than anything else,” he insists, “ex-slaves needed land.”

Democracy, in other words, was a contested concept in the Reconstruction South, not only between black and white but within the Radical movement. While Radicals shared common commitments to civil rights and state building, they were not a class coalition. And when the interests of Northern capital, the Northern voting public, and former slaves no longer intersected, as was the case by 1874, the coalition broke down. Despite populist economic programs and the workerist orientation of some party leaders, the absence of a working-class movement rendered social democracy unachievable, and the lack of social democracy in the South — the failure of land reform specifically — made the counterrevolution of property almost inevitable.

Beyond Political Democracy
As a history of Reconstruction, Civil War by Other Means is a brisk, engaging, and often penetrating read. Suri imposes a degree of continuity sure to give some historians pause — drawing a rather straight line between the Union Leagues and Black Lives Matter, between the Klan and QAnon, Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman and Donald Trump, white hoods and red hats. Yet the book’s premise, that “the Civil War never fully ended” and that its pronounced divisions related to race and anti-statism have been festering in US politics since Reconstruction, is unquestionable. Although his frequent use of Trump-era media language — “disinformation,” “white privilege,” “treason,” and “insurrection” — seems like an appeal to the incrementalist MSNBC crowd, Suri makes bold constitutional proposals and shows an uncommon commitment to representative government, multiracial political democracy, and majority rule, which he views as the solutions to the stubborn problem of white nationalism. In that regard, Civil War by Other Means is superior to other post-2016 studies of race in America that paint whiteness more as a timeless feature to be condemned morally and “worked through” by self-help-oriented individuals than a manifestation of social conditions to be overcome through mass politics.

But the book’s key shortcoming lies in its failure to address the full spectrum of Reconstruction-era democracy and to foreground the materialist nature of its social and political conflict. Suri hopes Americans will safeguard their democracy by digging up the roots to “remove the rot,” but his vision, which would no doubt remake US politics for the better, never transcends technocratic proceduralism. Skipping over the vital question of movement building, Suri is most concerned with what to do with power once achieved rather than how to achieve it. Accordingly, he views white nationalism as a cultural and political problem to be curbed through constitutional change rather than a question rooted in material relations to be solved through social transformation. In other words, Suri’s “democracy” is neither social democracy nor economic democracy. It is certainly not democratic socialism, with its emphasis on democratic participation beyond the political arena and a more equal distribution of resources through worker control.

Ultimately, Suri fails to answer a basic question: Is it even possible to possess and express equal political rights — to, in effect, “do” political democracy — in a profoundly materially unequal society devoid of economic rights? That question, too, is a legacy of Reconstruction, and part of our long and unfinished fight.

Matthew E. Stanley teaches in the department of history and political science at Albany State University.

By JERRY HARRIS

Race and Class

Abstract: The Russian invasion of the Ukraine is a powerful assertion of geopolitical power and conflict. But Russia’s nationalist and expansionary drive takes place within the context of transnational economic ties. Such ties help define the nature of the war, and both the Russian and western response. The contradictory pressures of nationalist desires conflicting with transnational integration is an underappreciated complexity of the war that this article will explore.

 Keywords: energy resources, finance capital, nationalism, oligarchy, Russian invasion, sanctions, transnational capitalist class, Ukraine.

 Introduction

The invasion of Ukraine is seen by most as a geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia. Nationalist ideologies and power competition do play a significant role, but such competition takes place within the context of transnational relations that also define the nature of the struggle. Unlike the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which took place during limited economic and cultural ties between the West and Soviet Union, the current war is deeply affected by mutual economic relationships between transnational capitalists and links between transnational corporations. Exploring how the contradictions between national and transnational elements structure the character of the war is the purpose of this article.

Global capitalism has gone through tremendous change over the past forty years, building a system of transnational integration characterised by global financial flows and production. This has profoundly changed a world built around nation-centric power. The emergence of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) reshaped domestic economies and social relations by restructuring state institutions and rules to serve the new forms of global accumulation. Major trade arrangements were ratified, banks bailed out, corporate taxes cut, transnational corporations promoted and social contracts undermined. And yet the old forms of power, habits, identities and privileges still fight to maintain their existence. This mixture of national structures overturned by transnational forces creates a powerful vortex of tensions.

In Russia, this process took place first under Yeltsin and then Putin, turning the country into a neoliberal state. As the new ruling class sought a capitalist identity outside the Soviet experience, it linked to its imperial past. As a result, Russian national concepts of power rooted in Tsarist imperialist expansion reasserted their influence, even as the oligarchy made use of transnational accumulation. Neither did Great Power concepts fully fade in the West, as NATO’s eastward expansion shows. As globalisation entered a sustained period of economic, environmental and social turmoil, transnational hegemony was opened to greater challenge, particularly from authoritarian state capitalism, which finds inspiration in fascism and empire. As the globalist project of a fully integrated economic world floundered under the weight of its own excess, nationalist ideology and power projections re-emerged.

Mike Davis hits home when he describes the Putin government as one that hates Lenin and the Bolshevik position on self-determination, a government drenched in Great Russian chauvinism and supported by the reactionary religious hierarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. A government that invites the backing of pan-Slavic neo-fascists, that idealises the Tsarist empire, with Putin himself an iconic hero of far-right nationalists throughout Europe and the US.[1]

And yet it is a government that has structured its economy to serve and benefit from transnational capitalism. That contradiction, between nationalist ideology and its transnational model of accumulation, is the Russian trap. And it works both ways, for Russia and for its global partners.

Global capitalism and Russia

In Russia, the creation of a TCC took place primarily through the privatisation of state assets, in combination with private/state ownership arrangements in energy and finance. The state did not represent a national capitalist class, nor was its primary concern building a modern industrial base. Rather, the state played a central role in integrating the key sectors of the Russian economy into global capitalism. Russian oligarchs also rushed to integrate into elite cultural and financial networks. They sent billions into offshore havens, spent hundreds of millions on London and New York real estate, lived on their yachts, and sent their children to elite western schools.

But the full political integration of the Russian state was stymied by the western architecture of power. NATO’s expansion eastward clashed with Russia’s intent to re-establish its own sphere of influence. This was an uneven process, unfolding over a period of three decades. The G7 became the G8 as Russia was given a seat at the elite table. But tensions never fully resolved. Political, social and environmental problems continued to sharpen, giving rise to security concerns and a renewal of nationalist rhetoric to regain state legitimacy. In turn, rivalries became more aggressive, and the balance between globalism and nationalism began to shift.

To explore the above process, we begin with Russia’s internal transformation and the creation of its transnational capitalist class.

Scholar Oleg Komolov describes the Russian economy primarily as a supplier of resources, with the TCC deeply integrated into global capitalism. He points out how the ruling class that emerged from the privatisation of state assets occupies primarily the role of an intermediate seller of Russian commodities on world markets and is not interested in improving the efficiency of the economy, developing competitive manufacturing industries and technological progress. [Moreover] the export economy was developed with large-scale participation of foreign capital in all sectors of the economy, the artificial devaluation of the ruble and net capital outflow to countries of the center.[2]

Between 1997 and 2017, the outflow of capital exceeded inflows, with offshore havens the destination for 70 per cent of capital exports. The two most prominent outflow years were during the global crash of 2008 and the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, with a combined total of $285 billion.[3] Outside the flight to offshore havens, Russian energy TNCs had made foreign direct investments of $335.7 billion by 2017.[4]

The Russian state and private oligarchy worked together in the outflow of capital, which reduces the amount of held dollars and keeps the value of the rouble low. In turn, this helps the export of fossil fuels and minerals. According to the World Bank, the rouble is one of the world’s most undervalued currencies.[5] Oil and gas make up 65 per cent of Russian exports, but minerals and wheat also play an important role. The state has supported this process by increasing its overseas holdings in US Treasury bonds from $8 billion to $164 billion between 2007 and 2013.[6]

Keeping the value of the rouble low meant undercutting investments in the modernisation of manufacturing. The results being high import prices for machinery and agricultural inputs, as well as high consumer prices for foreign goods. In 2017, machinery and equipment made up 47 per cent of imports, and chemical products 18 per cent.[7] Thus, a low-valued rouble drove up the cost of tractors, combines, transport and machine tools, fertilisers and chemicals – a typical pattern among transnational petro-states. Privileging globalist accumulation over the national market marked the Russian ruling class with a transnational character and strategy.

Another aspect of Russia’s integration was creating an attractive market for foreign speculative capital. During the 2005–08 financial frenzy, capital flowed into Russia, benefiting from liberalisation of currency regulations. During these years, transnational capitalists sank $325 billion into Russian corporations, with large amounts going to state-owned entities like Sberbank and the energy giant Gazprom. Among the biggest investors were financial giants JPMorgan, BlackRock and Pimco.[8] Loans were also made, reaching $400 billion from some of the biggest global banks including Citigroup, HSBC, BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank. The benefits for finance capital were double: debt from loans and earnings from investments meant profits for transnational investors the world over. The outflow of profits over a twenty-year period reached $1.2 trillion, and taking on foreign liabilities certainly didn’t support the rouble.

Energy, transnational capital and sanctions

Key to the Russian economy, and indeed the world economy, are energy resources. Russia’s fossil fuel industry has been largely exempt from the sanctions in 2022, as it was in 2014. In both cases, transfer payments for energy continued to flow through the SWIFT computers, and in 2022 these were worth about $350 million per day. Between 24 February and 24 March 2022, Russia sold $19 billion in fossil fuels. The links between western oil majors and Russian TNCs deeply influences the limits and impacts of sanctions, and so deserves attention.

First, we can review the degree of joint ventures between Russian and transnational energy majors. Rosneft emerged as Russia’s largest oil producer when Putin dismantled Yukos, and sold its $90 billion in assets for just $2 billion. Western banks rushed to loan Rosneft $22 billion as it became Russia’s dominant energy company. Financial backing came from ABN Amro, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Rosneft then raised $10.7 billion in an IPO on the London Stock Exchange with BP taking a 20 per cent stake. Other strategic investors included Petronas (Malaysia) and CNPC (China). Russian oligarchs joined in, with Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Lisin and Oleg Deripaska each investing $1 billion. As Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays and Rosneft board member, noted, Russia was ‘on the track of international economic integration’.[9] In 2006 Rosneft turned east, joining with China’s Sinopec in a $13.7 billion buyout of TNK-BP’s Udmurtneft Oil. In a key deal after the 2014 imposition of sanctions, Rosneft signed a thirty-year contract with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation worth about $400 billion. Furthermore, Exxon had a $3.2 billion Arctic offshore drilling deal with Rosneft in which the Russian TNC obtained minority stakes in the Gulf of Mexico and oil fields in Texas. Rex Tillerson, chief executive of Exxon Mobile and future Secretary of State, received the Order of Friendship award from Putin in gratitude for Exxon’s commitment.[10]

Gazprom also has a significant level of transnational integration. In developing Shtokman, one of the world’s largest gas fields, Gazprom partnered with Total from France and StatoilHydro of Norway. Total has a close relationship with the Russians. The French oil major has investments in two other Russian oil fields, and a 16 per cent stake in Novatek, the country’s largest gas producer after Gazprom. The largest foreign investment project in Russia, the Sakhalin-2 oil field, involved the British and Japanese. Although Gazprom retains majority ownership, Shell held 27.5 per cent, Mitsui 15 per cent, and Mitsubishi 10 per cent.[11]

Overall, more than 400 foreign financial institutions have provided $130 billion to Russian energy companies, $52 billion in investments and $84 billion in credit. A total of 154 US financial companies hold almost half of these investments at $23.6 billion. JPMorgan is the largest with investments and loans of $10 billion. Other major investors include Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund with $15.3 billion invested in Rosneft. The UK was the third largest investor, where 32 financial institutions contributed $2.5 billion. Other important investors come from Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and China.[12]

To understand how sanctions disrupted these transnational relations, we need to investigate sanctions from 2014 and 2022. In 2014, companies weren’t banned from conducting business with Russian state-owned energy giants, although banks were sanctioned from making loans. The policy allowed protection for transnational institutional investors. But the US did move to sanction Rosneft’s president, Igor Sechin. This prompted Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba, and John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, to resign from the Rosneft board; while Donald Humphreys, former chief financial officer of Exxon Mobil, and BP chief executive Bob Dudley continued to serve. As western sanctions tightened, they did cause some difficult problems, forcing Eni, Exxon and Statoil to withdraw from a $20 billion Rosneft Arctic exploration project. But to replace the loss of advance drilling technology, Rosneft took a 30 per cent stake in North Atlantic Drilling, a subsidiary of Seadrill, the world’s largest offshore driller controlled by Norway’s richest man, John Fredriksen. Rosneft also faced problems when sanctions cut access to foreign capital markets. To counteract the sanctions, it arranged a series of prepayment deals with some of the largest western oil traders including Glencore, Trafigura and BP. Furthermore, Rosneft bought Morgan Stanley’s global oil trading business, obtaining an international network of oil tank storage contracts, supply agreements and freight shipping contracts, as well as a 49 per cent stake in Heidmar, a manager of oil tankers. So, while the 2014 sanctions caused a number of real problems, Rosneft’s transnational relationships provided important avenues to avoid major disruptions.[13]

Overall, the 2014 sanctions did hurt Russia. FDI inflows fell from $69 billion in 2013 to $21 billion in 2014. But the Obama administration also faced stiff resistance not only across Europe, but in the US as well. Hostility to the sanctions came from the two most influential US business groups, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce. Both lobbied and took out critical ads in national newspapers, insisting that sanctions should not hurt financial institutions that held significant Russian debt. Among the corporations who lobbied against the sanctions were Exxon Mobil, BP, American Petroleum Institute, Amway, Caterpillar, Chevron and GM.[14]

In implementing sanctions, the US believed Russia would view its global business ties as too valuable to lose, and so economic pressure would force a retreat from eastern Ukraine. But from the other side of the mirror, Putin believed global business’s ties to Russia were too valuable and would undercut western sanctions. In important ways both were right, and the same dynamic is at play in 2022. In the recent crisis the US Chamber of Commerce has again lobbied Congress arguing sanctions should be ‘as targeted as possible in order to limit potential harm to the competitiveness of U.S. companies’.[15]

The magnitude of the 2022 invasion has caused the current sanctions to be deeper and broader. What Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky pointed out in 2014 is even more true today:

The situation confronting our elites … is more or less straightforward, they cannot enter actively into confrontation with the West without dealing crushing blows to their own interests, to their own capital holdings and to their own networks, methods of rule and way of life.[16]

But this is a two-way street – the West can’t sanction Russia without hurting itself, so the question becomes who hurts the most. For example, the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock took a loss of $17 billion on their Russian exposure.[17]

Because Russia is the main supplier of oil and gas to Europe, its energy industry is a major focus of new sanctions. ExxonMobil is beginning steps to exit the Sakhalin-1 project and cease operations it carries out on behalf of a consortium of Japanese, Indian and Russian companies. Shell also announced plans to leave Sakhalin and ‘withdraw all involvement in Russian hydrocarbons’.[18] BP has moved to offload its 20 per cent stake in Rosneft and may take a hit estimated at $25 billion. BP’s move comes after thirty years of joint venture. Additionally, the Singapore-based trading company Trafigura is threatening to opt out of its 10 per cent shareholding of Vostok Oil, a vast gas project led by Rosneft. And Norway’s Equinor will also begin to exit its joint ventures. But TotalEnergies, the large French transnational, while committing to no new investments, is holding on to its nearly 20 per cent of Novatek.

Yet none of these companies may end up leaving. Exxon, BP and Shell need to find someone to buy out their interests. That will not be easy in the present circumstances, and they may have to appeal to their Russian counterparts to take their shares. Furthermore, oil tankers continue to transport millions of barrels of oil from Russian ports, estimated to be worth $700 million per day. These include tankers from Greece, and those chartered by US oil giant Chevron.[19] And SWIFT payment transfers for energy continue at the above-mentioned $350 million per day. Consequently, for all the difficulties of the sanctions, global energy integration affords Russia significant amounts of capital, which helps to finance the war.

India’s case is yet another example of the complexity of transnational production. Obtaining about a 33 per cent discount from Russia, India’s oil imports have surged by 700 per cent.[20] Some of these imports go to Reliance Industries, which has the world’s largest refinery complex, and also to an affiliate of Rosneft, Nayara Energy. Using Russian crude, Indian refineries produce diesel and jet fuel, which is sold to Europe, whose imports from India have jumped. As Shell’s chief executive explained, oil substantially treated or changed loses it national origin. ‘We do not have systems in the world to trace back whether that particular molecule originated from a geological formation in Russia, [therefore] diesel going out of an Indian refinery that was fed with Russian crude is considered to be Indian diesel.’[21]

One particularly ironic aspect of transnational relations is that Russian gas flows through pipelines running through Ukraine to Italy, Austria and eastern Europe. Russia pays transport fees to the government, thus supplying funds to Ukraine even as the war raged. And, of course, gas reaching the EU means more money for Russia. It wasn’t until May 2022 that Ukraine stopped the Sokhranovka pipeline that operates from the Russian-controlled Luhansk region. The value of the gas is about $1 billion each month. But Sudzha, Russia’s main pipeline, is, at the time of writing, still in Ukrainian-held territory, allowed to operate, and expected to take on some of the lost capacity.

Another example of the complexity of transnational production is how the invasion impacted Rusal, the world’s second-largest aluminium producer, owned by Oleg Deripaska and listed on the Hong Kong market. Rusal has a joint venture with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. But because of sanctions, their joint refinery, Queensland Alumina, will not ship products to Russia. The result is that Rusal had to halt production at its Nikolaev refinery located in Ukraine, which accounts for 23 per cent of its annual production. Nikolaev is one of the most modern refineries in the world and employs about 1,500 people. To make up the shortfall Rusal may divert production from its Aughinish refinery in Ireland to feed its Russian smelters.[22] In turn, that will reduce supplies in Europe where materials are already short. The end result is higher unemployment in Ukraine, higher prices in Europe, and a lower stock price for Rusal.

Data compiled by the Yale School of Management reported 253 TNCs are making a clean break with Russia, essentially leaving no operations behind. Some of these include Uber, Shell, Salesforce, Reebok, McKinsey, Nasdaq, eBay, Delta, Deloitte, BP, BlackRock, American Airlines and Alcoa. Another 248 companies have suspended their operations without permanently exiting or divesting. Among these are Adidas, American Express, Burger King, Chanel, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, GM, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hyundai, IBM, McDonalds, Mastercard, Nike, Oracle, Starbucks, UPS, Visa and Xerox. Some seventy-five companies have suspended a significant portion of their business. These include Caterpillar, John Deere, Dow, GE, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Kellogg’s, Pepsico and Whirlpool. Pausing new investments are ninety-six companies. This is different from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who, while suspending some operations, continue to snatch up depressed Russian securities at very low prices. Among those pausing new investments are Cargill, Colgate-Palmolive, Credit Suisse, Danone, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens and Unilever. The total so far is 672 companies taking various forms of action. Yale reported 162 companies staying the course, including Acer, Alibaba, International Paper, Koch, and Lenovo.[23]

Some funds not appearing in the Yale report include the important financial centres in Singapore, which has halted any new economic activity with four major Russian banks. And Singapore’s large sovereign wealth funds, which have about $6 billion invested in Russia, have also suspended activity.[24] Two of China’s largest state-owned banks are limiting loans for purchases of Russian commodities.[25] The New Development Bank, established by Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa, put new transactions on hold. And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, whose major shareholder is China, stopped its projects in Russia and Belarus. As of the middle of March 2022, there were more than 3,600 sanctions on Russian individuals and companies.

Table 1: Estimated and potential losses of companies leaving Russia[26]

The rush to boycott Russia reminds one of the corporate rush to endorse Black Lives Matter; essentially a marketing strategy to stay in front of popular politics. And while the costs are disruptive, transnational corporations are large enough to swallow such losses. For example, as the price for oil rose, Shell increased its early quarterly profits by 300 per cent to $9.1 billion – already enough to cover its projected $5 billion loss. Most of these sanctions will only harm the Russian people without having any real effect on the ruling class or the invasion. Russian citizens are already experiencing a dramatic decline in purchasing power and may soon face growing unemployment and a lack of consumer goods. The larger developing crisis is in world food supplies as Russia and Ukraine export a significant amount of the world’s wheat, corn, barley and sunflower oil. Shortages and price increases will hit the poor in the Global South the hardest.

Financial institutions and the TCC

Because of the integration of the global financial system, Russian capital was exposed to severe sanctions in 2022 that constituted a geo-economic break. There has been a general belief in the sanctity of foreign reserves. The US often talks about a ‘rules-based world order’. This includes open capital markets and accounts, deeply integrated financial markets, and benchmark assets in US dollars. Putin counted on all of this to keep the Russian economy functioning during the invasion. But seven of the largest Russian banks have been removed from the SWIFT interbank system. This severely limits the ability to pay for imports or receive payment for exports, as SWIFT is used to link funds for transnational deals. Russia’s central bank also kept about half its $630 billion dollars and euro reserves in foreign institutions residing in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and from $86 to $140 billion in Chinese bonds. Except for the Chinese holdings, these funds are now frozen, causing the rouble to lose about 40 per cent of its value, although with capital controls the rouble regained most of its value. Moreover, the collapse of Russian corporate stocks triggered the multi-week closure of the Russian stock market. And both Moody and Fitch downgraded Russian sovereign debt to ‘junk’. Russia is moving towards its first foreign currency debt default in one hundred years, but, as of May 2022, was still making payments using money from energy exports.

The severity of the economic sanctions is a radical step. Even during the second world war, relations between the Bank of England and the Reichsbank continued into the 1940s. And the Bank of International Settlements continued to allow the German central bank access to its clearing and settlement facilities throughout the war.

As Dominik Leusder points out:

More than any armed conflict, the current international monetary system has laid bare the folly of this romantic liberal portrait of globalisation. The sanctions against Russia are the clearest manifestation yet of a distinct undercurrent of financial globalisation … the West’s ability to coerce states has only increased as a function of their integration [so] as Russia became a central node [of] the global economy, it became more vulnerable.[27]

And yet western investors and companies are also in danger, as sanctions over the transfer of funds may mean Russia defaults on billions in loans. Facing such problems, US authorities gave the okay to JPMorgan to process interest payments due on dollar bonds from the Russian government. Citigroup is another payment agent for about fifty corporate bonds tied to Russian TNCs like Gazprom and MMC Norilsk Nickel. [28] Furthermore, the important financial institution Gazprombank is spared from sanctions and continues to be a conduit for commodity transactions. For example, working with Citibank it helped Brazil purchase Russian fertiliser, which is not sanctioned. Thus, the flow of capital continues, at least in part, despite sanctions.

Again, Leusder provides insightful analysis:

As globalization underwrote Putin’s militarism and his increasingly hostile posture toward Russia’s neighbors, it simultaneously rendered the country’s economy fatally reliant: on the net demand from other countries such as Germany and China; on imports of crucial goods such as machinery, transportation equipment, pharmaceutical and electronics, mostly from Europe; on access to the global dollar system to finance and conduct trade … This is one way to construe the deceptively simple insight of Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman’s theory of weaponized interdependence: the logic of financial globalization that generated Russia’s trade surplus and gave Putin room to maneuver also provided the economic and financial weaponry that was turned against him.[29]

Thus, a nationalist strategy to reconstitute the Russian empire, using the profits and ties that come with globalisation, is undercut by the contradiction of those same ties and relationships.

Weaponised interdependence is a good description of the financial markets in metals. Alongside Russian fossil fuels are its exports of metals, including copper, alumina and nickel, which is used in making stainless steel and batteries for electric cars. Here are the complications of transnational capitalism. Tsingshan Holding Group in China is the world’s largest nickel producer, China’s second largest steel producer, and is involved in electric vehicle batteries. Tsingshan made an enormous $3 billion bet shorting the price of nickel, counting on its own increased production in creating an abundance of supplies. This bet was made on the London Metal Exchange (LME), which is a unit of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited. With the Russian invasion, although nickel was not sanctioned, fear took hold of the market and prices jumped 250 per cent. The short bet based on lowering cost was a disaster. Trade chaos took hold, leaving Tsingshan with two choices. Either deliver tons of nickel or pay for margin calls, which means coming up with the cash or securities to cover potential losses. But Tsingshan only held 30,000 tons of its 150,000-ton bet. The remainder was held by JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered and United Overseas Bank. On the cusp of a global financial disaster, LME suspended trading and retroactively cancelled $3.9 billion of trades, blaming banks for preventing efforts to create greater transparency that could have revealed the interconnected problem.[30] Consequently, the Russian invasion set off a financial crisis that punished transnational capitalists that have no part in the war.

Facing sanctions, oligarchs can’t be happy with the war, and a number have stated their opposition. Nevertheless, the global financial system has been built to safely hide their money, as well as the wealth of others in the TCC. It’s estimated that oligarchs have hidden about half their wealth offshore, amounting to some $200 billion. Somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 Russians hold more than $10 million each in offshore assets and havens.[31] Still, that is significantly less than their American counterparts who have an estimated $1.2 trillion in offshore tax havens. Much of the Russian money is in US, UK and EU assets. Transparency International has estimated about $2 billion just in UK property.[32]

But much of this wealth is difficult to discover because the TCC has structured international laws to hide wealth in complex trusts and shell corporations.[33] Global accounting firms PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY helped oligarchs move money to offshore shell companies for years before currently withdrawing services. Rosneft, VTB, Alfa Bank, Gazprom and Sberbank have been represented by leading US law firms, including White & Case, DLA Piper, Dechert, Latham & Watkins and Baker Botts. And Baker McKenzie, one of the world’s largest law firms, continues to represent some of Russia’s largest companies, including Gazprom and VTB.[34] Concord Management specialised in serving ultra-wealthy Russians, helping them invest in hedge funds, private equity and real estate. Since 1999, Concord has channelled billions to BlackRock, Carlyle Group and others. Wall Street banks such as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley often acted as intermediators, linking Concord to hedge funds.[35] Such well-worn networks tie the Russian TCC to global capitalists and financial institutions in a mutually beneficial relationship, and creates a shared culture that exalts the privileges of wealth and common ideas about how the world economic system works.

Capitalists the world over make use of sophisticated accountants, bankers and lawyers to hide their assets. An agent will set up an offshore shell company in a country with little transparency. This company then creates more shells in other low-transparency jurisdictions – about forty-two exist across the world, including the US states of Delaware and South Dakota. This allows the ‘ultimate beneficial owner’, often unknown, to have multiple bank accounts and the ability to move money and invest without any scrutiny. Government investigators in both the US and the UK regularly ignore suspicious banking activity. In 2018, the EU passed regulations demanding access to information on the ownership of European companies nested in shell companies. Yet in 2022 no such registry exists. Congress passed a transparency law in 2021 with a $63 million budget, but never provided the money to the Treasury Department. Consequently, the effort to sanction oligarchs is undercut by the global financial system built to the demands of the TCC, of which Russian capitalists are members. While some pressure is being directed on the oligarchs, the system of hidden cross-border capital flows is too valuable to end, allowing the Russian TCC to escape greater harm.

A good example of how shell corporations function is the effort to sanction Arcady Rotenberg. Rotenberg is worth about $3 billion with an estimated $91 million invested in the US and a $35 million mansion outside London, bought through an entity in the British Virgin Islands. He has at least 200 companies located across dozens of countries. Even after coming under sanctions in 2014, Rotenberg became the owner of two additional companies located in Luxembourg, well known as a haven for billionaires. Although senate investigators found countless bank filings on suspicious Rotenberg activities, none of them have been investigated by the Treasury Department.

As Cihan Tuğal reminds us, Putin and his cronies

are a solid part of world capitalism, and their apparently insane actions are intended to produce a better place at the table. They want to be recognized as legitimate imperialists in the new, post-Wilson and post-Lenin world of the 21st century … [Putin] is not only serving his ego, but a capitalist class fostered by post-1991 reforms, which were selective appropriations of free market ideas. The gang of cronies is not Putin’s creation alone. It is an outcome of transnational dynamics. This class is hungry for markets, and it cannot help but look for ways to burst out of Russia.[36]

German/Russian economic relations

Moving from a picture of transnational markets, industries and finance, we can explore the specific relationship between Germany and Russia. Germany as the largest European economy is also the most integrated with Russia. For Russia, it’s their most important economic partner alongside China. In 2021, German exports to Russia were worth more than $28.4 billion, and it invested a further €25 billion in operations.[37] Germany still depends on Russia for about 55 per cent of its natural gas, 35 per cent of its oil, and half its coal.

Before 2014, there were 7,000 German companies inside Russia representing some of the largest TNCs in the world, such as Adidas, BASF, Siemens, Volkswagen, Opel and Daimler. On the financial side, all major German commercial banks were active in Russia. In terms of oil and gas, Germany’s biggest energy group Eon was the largest foreign shareholder in Gazprom, which, alongside BASF, was building the $6.6 billion Baltic Sea pipeline. The Germans held 20 per cent of the Nord Stream joint venture, with former chancellor Gerhard Schröder as chairman and Matthias Warnig of Dresdner Bank its chief executive. Even after the seizure of Crimea, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser confirmed its commitment to Russia to sell trains, energy infrastructure, medical technology and manufacturing automation technology. Cross-border deals also continued, with RWE selling its oil and gas subsidiary to Russia’s LetterOne for over $7.5 billion. But, with the 2014 sanctions, German trade with Russia dropped by 35 per cent, and German firms investing in Russia dropped to just under 4,000 by 2020.[38]

Now the invasion of Ukraine has shaken the German/Russian relationship in a very significant manner, particularly in the auto and energy industries. Wintershall Dea, an oil and gas TNC, will stop payments to Russia and write off its €1 billion investment in Nord Stream 2. Additionally, it will not receive revenues from its Russian operations, which accounted for about 20 per cent of its 2021 profits. The company issued a statement on the turmoil caused by the invasion lamenting,

What is happening now is shaking the very foundations of our cooperation. We have been working in Russia for over 30 years … We have built many personal relationships – including in our joint ventures with Gazprom. But the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine marks a turning point.[39]

Nord Stream 2 has been a contentious issue between the US and Germany for years. The pipeline running through the Baltic goes directly to Germany. The US has pressured Germany to end the project, but Angela Merkel refused to do so. The project, worth $11 billion, is registered as a Swiss firm whose parent company is Gazprom. Gazprom owns the pipeline and paid half the costs, the rest shared by Shell, Austria’s OMV, France’s Engie, and Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall DEA.[40] The invasion has prompted Germany to halt the project. The suspension of Nord Stream 2 may not be permanent, but even a temporary suspension is a huge shift.

Russia exports fifty-six billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas to Germany yearly. Inside Germany, Gazprom owns and operates thousands of miles of pipeline, key storage facilities, and the largest underground storage tank for natural gas in western Europe. Russia also supplies German refineries with a third of their oil, a number with long-term contracts that Russia is not willing to cancel. Particularly ironic are the weapons sent by the German government to Ukraine that use steel produced in German factories powered by coal coming from Russia. As Putin has stated:

Let German citizens open their purses, have a look inside and ask themselves whether they are ready to pay three to five times more for electricity, for gas and for heating … You can’t isolate a country like Russia in the long run, neither politically nor economically. German industry needs the raw materials that Russia has. It’s not just oil and gas, it’s also rare earths. And these are raw materials that cannot simply be substituted.[41]

Turmoil has also hit the auto industry. Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW halted production in Russia, and also suspended all vehicle exports. But the invasion has had an even bigger impact because of the coordination of production between Ukraine and European auto companies. With its low labour costs and educated workforce, Ukraine became a manufacturing centre of systems which connect electronic components, like tail lights and car entertainment systems. The work, done by hand, requires a large number of skilled workers. The fighting brought production to a sudden halt, and within days the lack of parts shut down European factories. BMW shut several plants in Germany, Austria and Britain, while VW was brought to a standstill at multiple locations, including its main site in Wolfsburg. Electric vehicle production at Zwickau stopped, including its SUV exports to the US, and Porsche idled manufacturing the Cayenne sport utility vehicle in Leipzig. As Jack Ewing noted:

No car can operate without wiring systems, which are often tailor-made to specific vehicles. So-called wiring harnesses are among the first components to be installed in a new vehicle, and their absence brings assembly lines to a standstill.[42]

Furthermore, Ukraine is also a major source of neon, a gas used for high-performance lasers required for production of scarce semiconductors, adding more woes to the industry.

None of these economic disruptions are welcomed by the TCC. But the German government has taken a major step away from its previous positions. At first opposed to banning Russia from SWIFT, and refusing to send arms to Ukraine, it has now reversed on both those issues. And the sizeable increase in its military budget surprised everyone. Although transnational links are deep, for now geopolitical tensions are riding roughshod over economic concerns. But such concerns have not gone away. The New York Times observes that ‘multiple cracks’ have already occurred over ‘lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth’, as well as lower employment.[43] As Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of the chemical giant BASF stated, ‘Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness’.[44] And again, ‘Do we want to blindly destroy our entire national economy? What we have built up over decades?’[45] What is true for BASF is true for the German economy, whose success is built upon cheap gas from Russia and exports to China.

Conclusion

There are a number of questions not explored in this article. NATO’s eastward expansion, Great Russian chauvinism, fascist forces in both Russia and Ukraine, the meaning of independence and self-determination, US hypocrisy on foreign interventions, China’s role, and growing debates within the Left over the war. All these topics already have a growing and substantial body of literature. Also, events continue to rapidly develop and so the article has some time limitations. But the deeper issues on the intersections between national geopolitics and transnational economics, and how the resulting contradictions affect the war, will continue. What is clearly evident is that global capitalism has plunged the world into yet another crisis. A crisis that ignores a pandemic that threatens the health of every human on the planet, and an environmental crisis that threatens every species. The failure is staggering in its ignorance.

What the new global configuration will look like is difficult to tell. Much depends on how the conflict ends. A long-term occupation will freeze Russia’s transnational links, a rapid conclusion may mean the easing of sanctions. The invasion is a further deconstruction of the global capitalist system built over the past forty years of neoliberal hegemony. But there are still many trillions of dollars in cross-border accumulation, and global assembly lines continue to churn out commodities in a coordinated system of production and trade. The current problems in logistics and supplies are not because of too little demand, but because of too much, with the infrastructure of ports, shipping and transportation actually too limited. Such problems might call for an expansion of globalisation, which is at the heart of China’s Belt and Road strategy. But economic, political and social disruptions cause states to look to their own national security. As a result, the contradictions between national and transnational forces continue to be the nexus for world events, changing the balance of forces into new configurations of struggle.

This complex relationship between nationalism and globalism needs to be understood through historical materialism, which defines the world as a continual process of movement. Marx saw everything in motion – production, distribution, environmental metabolic relationships, the class struggle, and all human interactions. Change was driven by the balance between opposing forces, and the results were defined by the power between the aspects. How much of the old that remained, and how much of the new that was asserted, continually set the conditions for the movement to continue. This process of motion and change results in contradictions unfolding in many different forms. There is no historic queue in which socialism waits its turn to appear at the front of the line.

In the current capitalist world, neither nation-centric nor transnational relationships exist in isolation from the other. They exist in the same institutions and continually define and determine each other within a changing balance of forces. This unity of opposites in tension and conflict is what produces the historic transformation towards a new synthesis. No outcome is predetermined, but produced by the dynamic itself. Consequently, what aspects of nation-centric relationships survive or re-emerge depend on the agency of political struggle. Under pressure of globalist economic and environmental crisis, nationalist antagonisms have rematerialised, but within the context of transnational relationships. Globalisation didn’t create the ‘end of history’ because the past continues to exist in the present.[46]

We can see this contradiction in the balance between national and transnational forces in the Russian invasion. A balance in which nationalism and inter-state conflict has grown stronger as the forty-year hegemony of neoliberal globalisation has faced a series of economic, environmental and social crises. As the balance of power shifts, aspects of the old system reassert themselves, but deeply affected and redefined by the changes globalisation engendered. Old ideas and conflicts may re-emerge, yet they are never the same, but contextualised through the new forces that have asserted themselves. So, in analysing the Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict, we must be careful not to place it in the world of the 1960s, but a world deeply restructured by transnational capitalism.

References

By Ian Angus

Climate & Capitalism

Sep 07, 2022

In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book.

It is also a continuing source of confusion and debate. Literally dozens of articles have tried to explain what “primitive accumulation” really meant. Did it occur only in the distant past, or does it continue today? Was “primitive” a mistranslation? Should the name be changed? What exactly was “Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation”?

In this article, written for my coming book on The War Against the Commons, I argue that Marx thought “primitive accumulation” was a misleading and erroneous concept. Understanding what he actually wrote shines light on two essential Marxist concepts: exploitation and expropriation.

This is a draft, not my final word. I look forward to your comments, corrections and suggestions.

+ + + + +

On June 20 and 27, 1865, Karl Marx gave a two-part lecture to members of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in London. In clear and direct English, he drew on insights that would appear in the nearly-finished first volume of Capital, to explain the labor theory of value, surplus value, class struggle, and the importance of trade unions as “centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.”1 Since an English translation of Capital wasn’t published until after his death, those talks were the only opportunity that English-speaking workers had to learn those ideas directly from their author.

While explaining how workers sell their ability to work, Marx asked rhetorically how it came about that there are two types of people in the market–capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who must sell their labor-power in order to survive.

How does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood?

A full answer was outside the scope of his lecture, he said, but “the inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation,’ but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.”

“We should find that this so-called Original Accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour.… The Separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.”

Marx was always very careful in his use of words. He didn’t replace accumulation with expropriation lightly. The switch is particularly important because this was the only time he discussed the issue in English–it wasn’t filtered through a translation.

In Capital, the subject occupies eight chapters in the part titled Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation–later rendered in English translations as “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Once again, Marx’s careful use of words is important–he added “so-called” to make a point, that the historical processes were not primitive and not accumulation. Much of the confusion about Marx’s meaning reflects failure to understand his ironic intent, here and elsewhere.

In the first paragraph he tells us that ‘ursprüngliche’ Akkumulation is his translation of Adam Smith’s words previous accumulation. He put the word ursprüngliche (previous) in scare quotes, signaling that the word is inappropriate. For some reason the quote marks are omitted in the English translations, so his irony is lost.

In the 1800s, primitive was a synonym for original–for example, the Primitive Methodist Church claimed to follow the original teachings of Methodism. As a result, the French edition of Capital, which Marx edited in the 1870s, translated ursprüngliche as primitive; that carried over to the 1887 English translation, and we have been stuck with primitive accumulation ever since, even though the word’s meaning has changed.

Marx explains why he used so-called and scare quotes by comparing the idea of previous accumulation to the Christian doctrine that we all suffer because Adam and Eve sinned in a distant mythical past. Proponents of previous accumulation tell an equivalent nursery tale:

Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. … Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.

“Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defense of property,” but when we consider actual history, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” The chapters of So-called Primitive Accumulation describe the brutal processes by which “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”

These newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx’s account focuses on expropriation in England, because the dispossession of working people was most complete there, but he also refers to the mass murder of indigenous people in the Americas, the plundering of India, and the trade in African slaves–“these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” That sentence, and others like it, illustrate Marx’s consistently sarcastic take on primitive accumulation. He is not describing primitive accumulation, he is condemning those who use the concept to conceal the brutal reality of expropriation.

Failure to understand that Marx was polemicizing against the concept of “primitive accumulation” has led to another misconception–that Marx thought it occurred only in the distant past, when capitalism was being born. That was what Adam Smith and other pro-capitalist writers meant by previous accumulation, and as we’ve seen, Marx compared that view to the Garden of Eden myth. Marx’s chapters on so-called primitive accumulation emphasized the violent expropriations that laid the basis for early capitalism because he was responding to the claim that capitalism evolved peacefully. But his account also includes the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the Highland Clearances in capitalist Scotland, the colonial-created famine that killed a million people in Orissa in India in 1866, and plans for enclosing and privatizing land in Australia. All of these took place during Marx’s lifetime and while he was writing Capital. None of them were part of capitalism’s prehistory.

The expropriations that occurred in capitalism’s first centuries were devastating, but far from complete. In Marx’s view, capital could not rest there–its ultimate goal was “to expropriate all individuals from the means of production.”2 Elsewhere he wrote of big capitalists “dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.”3 In other words, expropriation continues well after capitalism matures.

We often use the word accumulation loosely, for gathering up or hoarding, but for Marx it had a specific meaning, the increase of capital by the addition of surplus value,4 a continuous process that results from the exploitation of wage-labor. The examples he describes in “So-called Primitive Accumulation” all refer to robbery, dispossession, and expropriation–discrete appropriations without equivalent exchange. Expropriation, not accumulation.

In the history of capitalism, we see a constant, dialectical interplay between the two forms of class robbery that Peter Linebaugh has dubbed X2–expropriation and exploitation.

Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground, so to speak, it intensifies exploitation.5

Expropriation is open robbery. It includes forced enclosure, dispossession, slavery and other forms of theft, without equivalent exchange. Exploitation is concealed robbery. Workers appear to receive full payment for their labor in the form of wages, but in fact the employer receives more value than he pays for.

What Adam Smith and others described as a gradual build up of wealth by men who were more industrious and frugal than others was actually violent, forcible expropriation that created the original context for exploitation and has continued to expand it ever since. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature:

Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation.6

In short, Marx did not have a “theory of primitive accumulation.” He devoted eight chapters of Capital to demonstrating that the political economists who promoted such a theory were wrong, that it was a “nursery tale” invented to whitewash capital’s real history.

Marx’s preference for “original expropriation” wasn’t just playing with words. That expression captured his view that “the expropriation from the land of the direct producers–private ownership for some, involving non-ownership of the land for others–is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”7

The continuing separation of humanity from our direct relationship with the earth was not and is not a peaceful process: it is written in letters of blood and fire.

That’s why he preceded the words “primitive accumulation” by “so-called.”

Notes:
1 Quotations from Marx’s 1865 lectures, “Value, Price and Profit,” are from Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 20, 103-149. Quotations from “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” are from Marx, Capital vol. 1 (Penguin, 1976) 873-940.
2 Marx, Capital vol. 3, (Penguin, 1981) 571.
3 Ibid, 349.
4 See chapters 24 and 25 of Capital vol. 1.
5 Linebaugh, Stop Thief! (PM Press, 2014), 73.
6 Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020), 36.
7 Marx, Capital vol. 3 (Penguin, 1981) 948. Emphasis added.

About Ian Angus
Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

By Steve Dubb and Emily Kawano

Nonprofit Quarterly
July 13, 2022 – What does ownership mean, and how can it be structured to design a more democratic economy? It is common to think of ownership as being about possession: it’s yours, or it’s mine—or perhaps, if we are thinking as a group, it’s ours. But it is much more than that. Ownership is a bundle of rights—social, individual, and collective—which means its boundaries and intersections vary from place to place.1

Today, a growing number of people are questioning how those ownership rights are defined and distributed. These days, in the world of work in the United States, there is talk of a Great Resignation;2 but this can also be thought of in other ways—as a great awakening, a great rebellion, a great recalibration.3 Beyond the workplace, communities are designing entirely new ecosystems of institutions—reclaiming ownership of their identities, cultures, land, and businesses.

Discussion of systems change has also rarely been more present. Yet, when people say “systems change,” more often than not they don’t mean systemic change—not really. Perhaps, to be generous, they mean systemic change writ small, focused on taking a multifaceted (sometimes called “collective impact”) approach to addressing a single problem—such as building a better workforce training and development system4— rather than shifting power and changing rights of ownership in society as a whole.

As Cyndi Suarez, NPQ’s president and editor in chief, observed a few years ago, “[S]ystem thinking has become deracinated, devoid of its true power implications.”5 Nowhere is this point more apt than when it comes to thinking of the overall economy. Simply put, when it comes to the economy, all too often systems change is treated as a bridge too far, best not entertained at all. Alternatively, systems change is only framed within the confines of our current dominant system: we are invited to “reimagine capitalism” rather than to dare imagine beyond it.6

With this article, we want to take that challenge on. We do this not out of curiosity or academic fancy but for some highly practical and pragmatic reasons. Our collective well-being—and perhaps even our collective survival—depends on it.

The Nature of the Challenge

It is common to treat the present global economy as a fact of nature, but it is not. Greed, we are also told, is part of the human condition. Maybe it is, but so too is cooperation. As Ariel Knafo, a psychology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explained in Scientific American years ago, “Human nature supports both prosocial and selfish traits,” and the “degree to which we act cooperatively or selfishly is unique to each individual and hinges on a variety of genetic and environmental influences.”7 Our current economic system privileges greed and diminishes cooperation; an economic system that prioritized solidarity would do the opposite. We can design our economy to build on the more cooperative, rather than the more self-serving, parts of our human selves—if we choose.

Can a redesign be done? Well, it has been done before. In fact, our present capitalist system, so often treated as permanent, is, historically speaking, quite new. The origins of the capitalist economy can be traced back to at least the beginning of the imperialist process unleashed by the European so-called “discovery” of the Americas. As economist Jeffrey Sachs explains in “Twentieth-century political economy: a brief history of global capitalism,” modern capitalism only “emerged as a [dominant] social system in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.”8

In short, capitalism became the world’s reigning economic system only two centuries ago, and in many parts of the world its ascendancy is more recent than that. Economic systems have changed before. They can—and almost certainly will—change again.

Capitalism, as an economic system, has unleashed human productive capacity, but it has done so in ways that are highly exploitative and extractive. Capitalism, in short, has done and is doing great harm. It is impossible to discuss capitalism without recognizing its roots in Indigenous genocide and the enslavement of millions of Africans and their forcible relocation—dragged in chains to the “New World.” As Joseph Inikori, a University of Rochester historian, details, “the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was central to the rise of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.”9

These days, even the benefits of capitalism on its own terms (such as gross domestic product) are showing diminishing returns—one sign of which is a decline in productivity increases.10 Meanwhile, when it comes to economic justice, the costs are disturbingly obvious. In January 2022, Oxfam offered a report that noted, “The 10 richest men in the world own more than the bottom 3.1 billion people.”11 And U.S. data on the racial wealth and wage gaps give few indications—to be polite—of substantive progress. In 2020, David Leonhardt in the New York Times observed that “the wages of Black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president.”12 Meanwhile, the Black-white wealth gap, according to Federal Reserve data, was greater in 2016 than in 1968 (2019 data showed modest improvement).13

Environmental costs are also rapidly rising. The climate crisis, the result of mounting carbon emissions, has already increased global temperatures by an estimated 1.11 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.14 But carbon emissions are by no means the only environmental challenge. As journalist Ashoka Mukpo writes in Mongabay, “The past 50 years have seen a catastrophic decline in the planet’s ecosystems and natural environments. Every day at least 32,300 hectares (80,000 acres) of forest vanish, and the size of wildlife populations has dropped by an average of 60%.”15

A Path Forward: Steps Toward a Solidarity Economy

How can any economy address the vast injustices ours generates today? The word economy is a combination of two Greek words—oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning management.16 The global economy, then, requires that we collectively manage our planetary home, including how we generate wealth and allocate resources. This is, of course, an immensely complicated endeavor in a world inhabited by more than 7.9 billion people.17
continue

By Eugene Puryear

Liberation School

March 19, 2022 

The price…of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of laborers…in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government…and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.1–W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Introduction

Karl Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864 that he was sure that the “American anti-slavery war” would initiate a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes for the “rescue…and reconstruction of a social world”.2 The Black historian Lerone Bennett, writing 100 years later, called Reconstruction, “the most improbable social revolution in American history”.3

Clothed in the rhetoric and incubated within the structure of “American Democracy,” it was nonetheless crushed, drowned in blood, for being far too radical for the actual “American democracy.” While allowing for profit to be made, Reconstruction governments made a claim on the proceeds of commerce for the general welfare. While not shunning wage labor, they demanded fairness in compensation and contracts. Reconstruction demanded the posse and the lynch mob be replaced with juries and the rule of law. This all occurred during a time when the newly minted “great fortunes” brooked no social contract, sought only to degrade labor, and were determined to meet popular discontent with the rope and the gun where the courts or the stuffed ballot box wouldn’t suffice.

The defeat of Reconstruction was the precondition for the ascension of U.S. imperialism. The relevant democratic Reconstruction legislation was seen by elites as “class legislation” and as antithetical to the elites’ needs. The proletarian base of Reconstruction made it into a dangerous potential base for communism, especially as ruling-class fears flared in the wake of the Paris Commune, where the workers of Paris briefly seized power in 1871. The distinguished service of Blacks at all levels of government undermined the gradations of bigotry essential to class construction in the United States.

Reconstruction thus lays bare the relationship between Black freedom and revolution. It helps us situate the particular relationship between national oppression and class struggle that is the key to any real revolutionary strategy for change today.

The new world

Like the Paris Commune, the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam and Mozambique, the Reconstruction governments were confronted by the scars of brutal war and long-standing legacies of underdevelopment. They faced tremendous hostility from the local ruling elites and the remnants of their formerly total rule, and were without powerful or terribly well-organized allies outside of the South.

With the status quo shattered, reconstruction could only proceed in a dramatically altered social environment. Plantation rule had been parochial, with power concentrated in the localized despotisms of the forced labor camps, with generalized low taxes, poor schools, and primitive social provisions.

Reconstruction answered:

“Public schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylum for orphans and the insane were established for the first time or received increased funding. South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants. The law altered relations within the family, widening the grounds for divorce, expanding the property rights for married women, protecting minors from parental abuse… Nashville expanded its medical facilities and provided bread, soup, and firewood to the poor. Petersburg created a thriving school system, regulated hack rates, repaved the streets, and established a Board of Health that provided free medical care in the smallpox epidemic of 1873”.4

And further:

“Throughout Reconstruction, planters complained it was impossible to obtain convictions in cases of theft and that in contract disputes, ‘justice is generally administered solely in the interest of the laborer…’ Equally significant was the regularity with which lawmakers turned down proposals to reinforce labor discipline”.5

South Carolina disallowed garnishing wages to settle debts, Florida regulated the payment of farm hands, and the Mississippi legislature instructed local officials to construe the law “for the protection and encouragement of labor.” All across the South, former slaves assessed the taxable property of their former owners; state after state protected the upcountry farmer from debt, exempting his tools, personal property, and horse and plow from the usurers. In Alabama, personal property tools and livestock were exempt and a Republican newspaper declared that “a man who has nothing should pay no tax”.6

The school-building push resulted in a serious expansion of public education:

“A Northern correspondent in 1873 found adults as well as children crowding Vicksburg schools and reported that “female negro servants make it a condition before accepting a situation, that they should have permission to attend the night-schools.” Whites, too, increasingly took advantage of the new educational opportunities. Texas had 1,500 schools by 1872 with a majority of the state’s children attending classes. In Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina, enrollment grew steadily until by 1875 it accounted for about half the children of both races”.7

Georgia, which had no public school system at all before the war, had 1,735 schools by 1874. The first public school law in Georgia was passed on the 100-year anniversary, to the day, of Georgia’s slave-era law making it a crime to teach Blacks to read and write.8 In South Carolina, in 1868, 30,000 students attended four hundred schools. By 1876, 123,035 were attending 2,776 schools, one-third of all teachers were Black.9

The source of this social vision was the most solid base of Reconstruction: the Black workers, farmers, and farmhands. Within the Black population there grew a few men of wealth and the pre-war “free” population provided notable and standout leaders. However, at the end of the day, Black was essentially synonymous with “proletarian.”

Black political power made itself felt all over the South in perhaps the most profound cultural turnaround in U.S. history. Blacks—who just a few years previously had, in the words of the Supreme Court, “no rights” that a white man “was bound to respect”—now not only had rights, but exercised power, literally and metaphorically, over their former masters.

The loss of a monopoly on the positions of power vested in either local government or local appointments to state and federal positions was deeply intolerable to elite opinion, alarming them “even more than their loss of statewide control”.11 In 1900, looking back, a North Carolina Congressman, highlighted Black participation in local government as the “worst feature” of Reconstruction, because Blacks “filled the offices which the best men of the state had filled. He was sheriff, deputy sheriff, justice of the peace…constable, county commissioner”.12 One Charlestonian admirer of the old regime expressed horror in a letter: “Surely our humiliation has been great when a Black Postmaster is established here at Headquarters and our Gentlemen’s Sons to work under his bidding”.13

This power was exercised over land sales, foreclosures, tax rates, and all civil and minor criminal cases all across the Black Belt. In Mississippi, former slaves had taken control of the Board of Supervisors across the Black Belt and one-third of the Black population lived under the rule of a Black sheriff.

In Beaufort, South Carolina, a center of the Plantation aristocracy, the mayor, police force, and magistrates were all Black by 1873. Bolivar County Mississippi and St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana were under total Black control, and Little Rock’s City Council had an on and off Black majority.14

Vicksburg and New Orleans gave Black officers command of white policemen while Tallahassee and Little Rock had Black police chiefs. Sixty Blacks across the South served as militia officers as well. Integrated juries also appeared across the South; one white lawyer said it was the “severest blow” he had ever felt to have to address Blacks as “gentlemen of the jury”.15

In South Carolina, Blacks had a majority of the House of Representatives and controlled its key committees. There was a Black majority in the Senate, the Lt. Governor and Secretary of State were Black throughout Reconstruction, and Blacks served as Land Commissioner, on the Supreme Court, and as Treasurer and Speaker of the House.16 Scottish journalist Robert Somers said the South Carolina statehouse was “a Proletarian Parliament the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world”.17

In Mississippi, throughout Reconstruction about 20% of the State Senate was Black as were 35% of the State House of Representatives.18 Two Black men served as Speaker of the House, including Isaac Shadd, a militant abolitionist who helped plan John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Mississippi sent two men to the U.S. Senate, the only Blacks to serve during Reconstruction in that body. Sixteen Blacks from the South served in the U.S. Congress.

In Louisiana, a Black man was the governor for a brief period and the treasurer and the secretary of education for a much longer time. Florida’s superintendent of education was also Black, along with the Secretary of State.

One Northern observer touring South Carolina summed up the general upending of the social order noting there was “an air of mastery among the colored people.” They further noted that whites were “wholly reserved and reticent”.19

The source of Black power in the South was not simply the passive presence of large Black populations, but their active political organization and mobilization. This took place in a variety of overlapping venues such as the grassroots Republican “Union Leagues,” churches, and masonic networks. Newspapers often served as points of political education and influence as well.

“By the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League or some equivalent local political organization…informal self-defense organizations sprang up around the leagues, and reports of blacks drilling with weapons, sometimes under men with self-appointed ‘military titles.’ The local leagues’ multifaceted activities, however, far transcended electoral politics. Often growing out of the institutions blacks had created in 1865 and 1866, they promoted the building of schools and churches and collected funds ‘to see to the sick.’ League members drafted petitions protesting the exclusion of blacks from local juries”.20

In St. Landry Parish in Louisiana, hundreds of former slaves gathered once a week to hear the newspaper read aloud to get informed on the various political issues of the day. In Georgia, it was said that every American Methodist Episcopal (a predominantly Black denomination) Minister was active in Republican organizing (Hiram Revels, Black Senator from Mississippi was an AME minister). Holland Thompson, a Black power-broker in Montgomery, Alabama, used a political base in the Baptist church as a route to the City Council, where he shepherded into being that city’s first public school system.21

All across the South, it was common during Reconstruction for politics to disrupt labor flows. One August in Richmond, Virginia, all of the city’s tobacco factories were closed because so many people in the majority-Black workforce were attending a Republican state convention.22

Blanche K. Bruce’s political career, which would lead to the U.S. Senate, started when he became actively engaged in local Republican political meetings in Mississippi. Ditto for John Lynch, one of the most powerful Black politicians of the Reconstruction era. The New Orleans Tribune was at the center of a radical political movement within the Republican Party that nearly took the governor’s office with a program of radical land reform in 1868.

Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina all had “labor conventions”—in 1870 and 1871—where farm workers and artisans came together to press for regulating rents and raising minimum wages, among other issues. Union Leagues were often sites of the organization of strikes and other labor activity.

One white Alabamian noted that, “It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a negro away from the polls…that is the one thing he will do, to vote.” A Mississippi plantation manager related that in his part of the state Blacks were “all crazy on politics again…Every tenth negro a candidate for some office.” A report from the 1868 elections in Alabama noted the huge Black turnout: “In defiance of fatigue, hardship, hunger, and threats of employers.” They stood in the midst of a raging storm, most without shoes, for hours to vote.23

Republican politics in the South were viable only due to these Black power bases. The composition of these politics required the rudiments of a popular program and a clear commitment to Black political power, and thus a degree of civil equality and a clear expansion of social equality as well. Reconstruction politics disrupted the ability of the ruling classes to exercise social control over the broad mass of poor laborers and farmers.

Republican politics was a living and fighting refutation of white supremacy, in addition to allowing the working classes access to positions of formal power. However outwardly accommodating to capital, the Reconstruction governments represented an impediment to capital’s unfettered rule in the South and North.

The political economy of Reconstruction

In addition to economic devastation, Reconstruction governments faced the same challenges as any new revolutionary regime in that they were beset on all sides by enemies. First and foremost, the Old Southern aristocratic elite semi-boycotted politics, organized a campaign of vicious terrorism, and used their economic influence in the most malign of ways. Secondly, the ravages of war and political turmoil caused Wall Street, the city of London, and Paris Bourse to turn sour on democracy in the South. On top of that, increasingly influential factions of the Republican Party came to agree that reconstructing the South was shackling the party with a corrupt, radical agenda hostile to prosperity.

The Republican coalition rested on a very thin base. While they had the ironclad support of Black voters, only in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi did Blacks constitute a majority, and even there, Republicans needed some white support to firmly grasp electoral power.

Most of the white Republican leaders were Northerners, with an overrepresentation of Union army veterans seeking economic opportunity after the war. Most entered politics to aid their own economic interests. These would-be capitalists, lacking the economic resources and social connections, sought a political tie and the patronage that came with it, which could become the basis for fortunes. This created a pull towards moderation on a number of economic and social issues that seeded the ground for Reconstruction’s ultimate defeat.

The Reconstruction governments had one major problem: revenue. Republican leader John Lynch stated as much about the finances of the state of Mississippi: “money was required. There was none in the treasury. There was no cash available even to pay the ordinary expenses of the State government”.24 Reconstruction governments sought to address this issue with taxes, bonds, and capitalist boosterism.

Early Reconstruction governments all operated under the belief that, with the right accommodation, they could revive and expand commerce. In particular, the railroad could open the upcountry to the market and encourage the expansion of various forms of manufacture and mineral extraction. A rising tide would lift all boats, and private capital would provide the investment and employment necessary for the South to prosper. And as such, they showered favors on the railroads in particular:

“Every Southern state extended munificent aid to railroad corporations… either in… direct payments… or in the form of general laws authorizing the states endorsement of railroads bonds… County and local governments subscribed directly to railroad stock… from Mobile, which spent $1 million, to tiny Spartanburg, South Carolina, which appropriated $50,000. Republican legislators also chartered scores of banks and manufacturing companies”.25

In 1871, Mississippi gave away 2 million acres of land to one railway company.26 The year before, Florida chartered the Great Southern Railway Co., using $10 million in public money to get it off the ground.27 State incorporation laws appeared in Southern legal codes for the first time, and governments freely used eminent domain. Their behavior, in the words of one historian, “recapitulated the way Northern law had earlier been transformed to facilitate capitalist development”28.

Many states also passed a range of laws designed to exempt various business enterprises from taxation to further encourage investment. That investment never showed up, to the degree required at least. Diarist George Templeton Strong noted that the South was “the last place” a “Northern or European capitalist would invest a dollar” due to “social discord”.29

As investments went, the South seemed less sure than other American opportunities. There were lucrative investment opportunities in the North and West as the Civil War had sparked a massive industrial boom, creating the careers of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

The South was scarred by war, generally underdeveloped, and politically unstable from the fierce resistance of white supremacy to the rise of Black power. Major financiers were willing to fund cotton production—which was more of a sure thing—and a handful of new industries, but generally felt the South wasn’t much worth the risk. Southern state bonds thus traded at lower values than Northern or Western states, and given the South’s dire economic straits, their supply far outstripped demand for them on the market.

This meant that these investments attracted those “trained in shady finance in Wall St.” whose “business was cheating and manipulation,” and who were “in some cases already discredited in the centers of finance and driven out…of the North and West”.30

The old ruling classes grafted themselves onto the new enterprises, using their history and connections to become the board members and agents of many of the companies. Among other things, this meant the new enterprises were controlled by Democrats, who, while happy to exploit the Reconstruction governments, were doing all they could to undermine them and restore themselves to political power.

The old plantation owners were joined in the new ruling class matrix by the merchants and bankers who arose alongside the expansion of the railroad and of the commercial farming economy outside of the Black Belt.

This new “Bourbon” aristocracy quickly emerged as the main interlocutor with whatever outside investment there was. Economic uncertainty only increased after the Panic of 1873 sent the country into a depression. This made the South an even less attractive investment to outsiders and increased the power and leverage of the Democratic elite, who desired a quick return to total white supremacy and Black subordination.

Republican governments, then, had a choice: they could either turn towards this business class and try to strike an understanding around a vision of the “Gospel of Prosperity,” with some limited Black suffrage, and thus, expanded social rights for the laboring class, or they could base themselves more thoroughly on those same laboring classes, particularly in the Black Belt.

The political power of the elite still rested primarily on their monopoly of landownership and thus effective control over the most profitable industries. Land reform, breaking up the big plantations, and granting the freedman access to tracts of land would fatally undermine that control. It was a shift that would have curtailed the ability of planters to exercise economic coercion over their former slaves in the political realm and would have inserted the freedman more directly into the global economy, thereby marginalizing former planters’ roles as intermediaries with the banks, merchants, and traders. Among other things, this would strengthen Republican rule, crippling the economic and social power most behind their opposition.

Land, was, of course, the key demand of those emerging from slavery. Aaron Bradley, an important Black leader in Savannah, Georgia became known for holding “massive…public meetings” that were described by one scholar as “frequent gatherings of armed rural laborers,” where the issue of land ownership was front and center.31 “Deafening cheers” were heard at a mass meeting in Edgefield County, South Carolina, when a Republican orator laid out a vision where every attendee would acquire a parcel of land.32 In the words of Du Bois, “this land hunger…was continually pushed by all emancipated Negroes and their representatives in every southern state”.33

Despite that, only in South Carolina was land reform taken up in any substantial way. There, under the able leadership of Secretary of State Francis Cardozo, 14,000 Black families, or one-seventh of the Black population, were able to acquire land in just the four years between 1872 and 1876.34

Elsewhere, states eschewed direct financial aid to the freedman in acquiring land and mostly turned to taxation as an indirect method of finance. Cash-strapped planters, unable to make tax payments, would be forced to forfeit their land that would be sold at tax sales where they could be bought by Blacks. Of course, without state aid, most freed people had little access to the necessary capital. In Mississippi, one-fifth of the land in the state was forfeited through tax sales, but ultimately, 95% of that land would end up back with its previous owners.35

Through hard struggle, individuals and small groups of Blacks did make limited footholds into land ownership. In Virginia, Blacks acquired 81-100 thousand acres of land in the 1860s and 70s. In Arkansas in 1875 there were 2,000 Black landowners. By that same year, Blacks in Georgia had obtained 396,658 plots of land worth the equivalent of over $30 million today.36 Ultimately, however, most Blacks were consigned to roles as tenant farmers, farm laborers, or town and city workers. This placed the main base of the Reconstruction governments in a precarious position in which they were susceptible to economic coercion on top of extra-legal terrorism by their political enemies.

The chief advocates of the showering of state aid and the eschewing of land reform was the “moderate” faction of Republicans who tended to gain the upper-hand in the higher and more powerful offices. The fruits of these policies, however, sparked significant struggle over the direction of the Republican cause.

In Louisiana, in the lead-up to the 1868 elections, the Pure Radicals, a grouping centered on the New Orleans Tribune— the first Black daily newspaper—nearly seized the nomination for the governor’s chair on a platform laden with radical content. Their program was for an agriculture composed of large cooperatives; “the planters are no longer needed,” said the Tribune. The paper also editorialized that “we cannot expect complete and perfect freedom for the working men, as long as they remain the tools of capital and are deprived of the legitimate product of the sweat of their brow”.37

As mentioned, several states had “labor conventions.” The South Carolina convention passed resolutions endorsing a nine-hour day and proportional representation for workers on juries, among other things. The Alabama and Georgia conventions established labor unions, which embraced union league organizers across both states, and engaged in a sporadic series of agricultural labor strikes. Ultimately, most of these resolutions would never pass the state legislature.

Nonetheless, they certainly give a sense of the radicalism in the Republican base. This is further indicated by Aaron Logan, a member of the South Carolina House, and a former slave, who in 1871 introduced a bill that would regulate profits and allow workers to vote on what wages their bosses would pay them. The bill was too controversial to even make it to a vote. But, again, it’s deeply indicative of the mood among Black voters since Logan represented the commercial center of Charleston. Logan, it should also be noted, came on the scene politically when he led a mass demonstration of 1,000 Black workers, demanding the right to take time off from work to vote, without a deduction in wages, and he ended up briefly imprisoned at this action after arguing for Black gun ownership. 38

On the one hand, this resulted in even the more moderate factions of the Republican coalition broadly to support Black officeholding. Additionally, the unlimited largess being showered on corporations was curtailed by 1871.

On the other hand, the Reconstruction governments were now something of a halfway house, with their leaders more politically conservative and conciliationist than their base. They pledged to expand state services and to protect many profitable industries from taxes. They were vigilant in protecting the farmer’s axe and sow while letting the usurer establish debt claims on his whole crop. They catered to—but didn’t really represent—the basic, and antagonistic, interests in Southern society. And it was on this basis that the propertied classes would launch their counter-offensive.

Counter-revolution and property

The Civil War had introduced powerful new forces into the land:

After the war, industry in the North found itself with a vast organization for production, new supplies of raw material, a growing transportation system on land and water, and a new technical knowledge of processes. All this…tremendously stimulated the production of good and available services…an almost unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth, and new income ensued…It threatened the orderly processes of production as well as government and morals…governments…paid…the cost of the railroads and handed them over to…corporations for their own profit. An empire of rich land…had been…given to investors and land speculators. All of the…coal, oil, copper, gold and iron had been given away…made the monopolized basis of private fortunes with perpetual power to tax labor for the right to live and work.39

One major result was the creation of vast political machines that ran into the thousands of employees through patronage posts that had grown in size as the range of government responsibilities and regulations grew along with the economy. It created a large grey area between corruption and extortion. The buying of services, contracts, and so on was routine, as was the exploitation of government offices to compel the wealthy to come forth with bribes.

This started to create something of a backlash among the more well-to-do in the Republican coalition. Many of the significantly larger new “middle classes” operating in the “professions” began to feel that the government was ignoring the new “financial sciences” that prescribed free trade, the gold standard, and limited government. They argued that the country was being poorly run because of the political baronies created through patronage, which caused politicians to cater to the whims of the propertyless. These “liberals,” as they became known in Republican circles, increasingly favored legislation that would limit the franchise to those of “property and education” and that would limit the role of government in the affairs of businesses or the rights of workers.

This, of course, was in line with the influence of the rising manufacturing capitalists in the Republican Party, and became a point of convergence between “moderate” Republicans and Democrats. That the Democratic Party was part of this convergence was ironic as it postured as the party of white workers, although in reality they were just as controlled by the wealthy interests, particularly on Wall Street, as their opponents.

Reconstruction in general, and in South Carolina in particular, became central to the propaganda of all three elements. The base of Reconstruction was clearly the Black poor and laboring masses of the South, who voted overwhelmingly for Grant and whose governments were caricatured as hopelessly corrupt. On top of all that, they were willing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for public goods for everyone else.

It made the Reconstruction governments the perfect scapegoats for those looking to restrict the ballot of the popular classes in the service of the rights of property. Taxes, corruption, and racism were intertwined in a powerful campaign by the wealthy—in the clothing of the Democratic Party—to dislodge Republican rule.

Increases in taxation were as practical as they were ideological. The Reconstruction states had only debts and no cash. In order to attract more investment, early Republican governments didn’t dare repudiate the debt racked up by the rebels. The failure to ignite an economic boom and the lackluster demand for Southern bonds left increasing taxes as the only realistic means to increase revenue to cover an expanded role for public services.

The antebellum tax system had been very easy on the planters. Republicans relied on general property taxes that were increased more or less across the board. In particular, the wealthiest found their wealth—in land, stocks, and bonds—taxed, often for the first time. Their wealth was certainly taxed for the first time at their real value, since planters lost the power to assess their own property.

The planters, the bankers, and the merchants, or the “men of wealth, virtue and intelligence” in their own minds, organized a vicious propaganda war against higher taxes. They went so far as to organize conventions in the mid-1870s to plead their weak case. South Carolina’s convention, which included 11 Confederate Generals, put the blame for the tax “burden” squarely on the fact that “nine-tenths of the members of the legislature own no property”.40

Their critique wasn’t just over tax rates, but what they were being spent on. They depicted the Reconstruction governments as corrupt and spendthrift. These were governments run foolishly by inferior races, which were, in their world, dangerous because they legislated for the common man.

They also linked Reconstruction to communism. In the wake of the war, working-class organization intensified. Only three national unions existed at the end of the war, while five years later there were 21. Strikes became a regular feature of life.41 Their regularity was such that the influential magazine Scribner’s Monthly lamented that labor had come under the sway of the “senseless cry against the despotism of capital”.42 In New Orleans, the white elite feared Louisiana’s Constitutional Convention in 1867 was likely to be dominated by a policy of “pure agrarianism,” that is, attacks on property.43

The unease of the leading classes with the radical agitation among the newly organized laborers and the radical wing of the Reconstruction coalitions was only heightened by the Paris Commune in 1871. For a brief moment, the working people of Paris grasped the future and established their own rule, displacing the propertied classes. It was an act that scandalized ruling classes around the world and, in the U.S., raised fears of the downtrodden seizing power.

The Great Chicago Fire was held out to be a plot by workers to burn down cities. The Philadelphia Inquirer warned its readers to fear the communist First International, which was planning a war on America’s landed aristocracy. Horace White, editor of the Chicago Tribune, who’d traveled with Lincoln during his infamous debates with Douglas, denounced labor organizations as waging a “communistic war upon vested rights and property.” The Nation explicitly linked the northern labor radicals with the Southern freedman representing a dangerous new “proletariat”.44

August Belmont, Chairman of the Democratic National Convention, and agent for the Rothschild banking empire, remarked in a letter that Republicans were making political hay out of Democratic appeals to workers, accusing them of harboring “revolutionary intentions”.45

The liberal Republicans opened up a particular front against the Reconstruction governments, with a massively disorienting effect on Republican politics nationwide. Among the ranks of the liberals were many who had been made famous by their anti-slavery zeal, including Horace Greeley and his southern correspondent, former radical Republican James Pike. The duo turned the New York Tribune from a center of radicalism into a sewer of elitist racism. They derided Blacks as lazy, ignorant, and corrupt, describing South Carolina as being victimized by “disaffected workers, who believed in class conflict”.46 Reporting on the South Carolina taxpayer convention, Greeley told his audience that the planters were menaced by taxes “by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen”.47

Greeley also served as a cipher for Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, who observed that “reading and writing did not fit a man for voting. The Paris mob were intelligent, but they were the most dangerous class in the world.” He stated further that the real possibility of poor whites and Blacks uniting was his real fear in that they would “attack the interests of the landed proprietors”.48

The liberal Republicans were unable to capture the zeitgeist in the 1872 election. Former Union General and incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant and his campaign managers positioned their campaign as the true campaign of the working man. Nominating Henry Wilson, “The Shoemaker of Natick,” former indentured servant, and “friend of labor and the Negro,” as Vice-President. They famously waved the “bloody shirt,” reminding Northern workers and farmers what they had fought for and linking their opponents to a return of the Slave Power.

However, their challenge scrambled Republican politics and Grant quickly sought to conciliate his opponents by backing away from enforcing the rights of the freedman with force and doling out patronage and pardons to all manner of rebels, traitors, and terrorists. In 1874, Democrats swept the midterm elections, further entrenching the consolidation of the political power of capital. So emboldened, the 1875 elections devolved into an orgy of violence and fraud. Black Republican leader John Lynch noted that “Nearly all Democratic clubs in the State were converted into armed military companies”.49

In Yazoo County, Mississippi, a Republican meeting was broken up by armed whites who killed a state legislator. In Clinton, Mississippi, 30 Black people were murdered when bands of white vigilantes roamed the countryside.50 As one historian details:

“What we have to deal with here is not a local or episodic movement but a South-wide revolution against duly constitute state governments…the old planters as well as the rising class of bankers, merchants, and lawyers…decided to use any and every means…they drew up coordinated plans and designated targets and objectives. Funds for guns and cannons were solicited from leading planters”.51

That same historian estimates that “thousands” were killed in this brutal campaign.52

John Lynch, the Black Republican leader from Mississippi, related that, when he asked President Grant in the winter of 1875 why he had not sent more assistance to loyal Republicans besieged by terrorists in Mississippi, Grant replied that to have done so would have guaranteed a Republican loss in Ohio. This is as clear a sign as any of the shifting sands of Republican politics.

Black Power in the South had become an obstacle to the elites in both parties. It was the only area of the country where the “free ballot” was bound to lead workers holding some of the levers of power. Black suffrage meant a bloc in Congress in favor of placing social obligations on capital, a curtailment of white supremacy, and bitter opposition to property qualifications in voting. The very fact that opposition to Reconstruction was cast in “class” terms, against the political program of the freedman as much as the freedman themselves, speaks to these fears.

A solid (or even not so solid) Republican South was an ally to political forces aggrieved by the “despotism of capital” around the country. A solid white supremacist South was (and is) a bastion for the most reactionary policies and allies of policies of untrammeled profit making, which is, as we have shown, the direction in which the ruling classes were traveling. Thus, Reconstruction had to die.

The final charge

It was not until after…that white labor in the South began to realize that they had lost a great opportunity, that when they united to disenfranchise the Black laborer they had cut the voting power of the laboring class in two. White labor in the populist movement…tried to realign economic warfare in the South and bring workers of all colors into united opposition to the employer. But they found that the power which they had put in the hands of the employers in 1876 so dominated political life that free and honest expression of public will at the ballot-box was impossible in the South, even for white men. They realized it was not simply the Negro who had been disenfranchised…it was the white laborer as well. The South had since become one of the greatest centers for labor exploitation in the world.53 -W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

While Reconstruction was destroyed in the service of the ruling classes, its defeat could not have taken place without the acquiescence and assistance of the popular classes among the white population as well. In the South, in particular, the role of the “upcountry small farmer” was essential.

During the war, these yeomen farmers had coined the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” At first, there was some fear, and some electoral evidence, that poor whites and the newly freed slaves might make an alliance of sorts. Instead, the rift between them widened. The hierarchy constructed of white supremacy relied on inculcating racial superiority in many ways, one of them being the idea of “independence” that made white small farmers “superior” to slaves. They were poor, but at least they were masters of their own patch of land.

The coming of the railroad changed all of this drastically. The railroad opened up the upcountry to the world economy. While it initially seemed like an opportunity, it was, in fact, a curse. Many small farmers dove into cotton production, the one thing financiers were eager to fund. They quickly found, however, that the cost of transporting and marketing their goods, in addition to the costs of inputs from merchants, made success very difficult, and made it almost certain they would have to resort to credit. The rates of usury were, however, allowed to go high enough that a majority of these small farmers became trapped in webs of debt.

The only way to keep going was to offer one’s crop as security for loans, ahead of time—the so-called “crop-lien.” From masters of their own realm, these farmers had now become slaves to debt, losing all real control of their destiny and farming to avoid eviction rather than to make any money.

This reality increased resentment at Reconstruction governments, and, given their dire financial situation, created another base of support for those trying to make an issue out of higher taxes. This ultimately helped solidify white opposition to Republican rule behind the planters and their Democratic Party.

As the 1870s turned into the 1880s, this consensus started to crack. The depression unleashed in the Panic of 1873 led to a breakdown of the two-party system as the two parties consolidated their views on how to move the country forward at the expense of workers and farmers. A variety of movements started to emerge, particularly strong in the West, opposing various aspects of the new consensus.

In the 1880s, the movement started to strengthen itself through a series of “Farmers Alliances” that spread like wildfire across the country. The alliances not only advocated and agitated for things like railroad regulation and more equitable farming arrangements, but also organized their own cooperatives and attempts to break free of the unjust state of affairs to which they were subject. The alliances were also major sites of political education where newspapers and meetings helped define and disseminate the economic realities of capitalism and exactly why these farmers were facing so much exploitation.

A Black alliance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, also grew rapidly, ultimately embracing millions of Black farmers. Black farmers, likewise, were getting the short-end of the stick in terms of the results of Reconstruction-era land policies. Despite being shut out of land ownership, Black farmers were highly resistant to returning to the plantations as farm laborers. This led to a rise in tenancy where Black farmers rented the land and took on the production of the crops for a share of the crop that they could sell, or what is called “sharecropping.”

Similar to white farmers in the upcountry, however, this system turned viciously against them. The costs of credit to carry out various farming activities or to cover the cost of goods in the offseason meant that they too, quickly and easily became ensnared by debt. This started to create intriguing political opportunities in the South. Disaffected white farmers started to become interested in the third-party movements representing popular discontent, particularly the Greenback-Labor Party.

The Greenbackers embraced much of the agrarian reform ideas favored by farmers, and added in support for an income tax, the free ballot, and the eight-hour day for workers. In Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama, the Greenback movement found some shallow roots with white farmers who, recognizing the political situation, understood their only possible ally could be Blacks.

Black politics, while in retreat, had not disappeared. The Colored Farmers Alliance was rooted in the same networks of religion, fraternal organization, and grassroots Republican political mobilization that had formed during Reconstruction. It was thus more politically inclined than the Southern Farmers Alliance of whites, which remained tied to the Democratic Party and its white supremacist policies.

Nonetheless, a growing number of Blacks seeking political opportunity sought to embrace the Greenback movement through a process known as “fusion.” This meant Republicans running joint candidates or slates with third parties in order to maximize their voting power and take down the Democrats. This led to somewhat of a “second act” of Reconstruction. The Colored Farmers Alliance played a key role in the early 1890s in pushing the alliances to launch the Populist Party, turning the incipient potential of the Greenback Party into a serious political insurgency, but one which couldn’t be truly national without a Southern component. Populism united the agrarian unrest of the West and South against the “money power” of the Wall Street banks.

Populists championed public ownership of the largest corporations of the time—the railroads—as well as the communications apparatus of the country. In addition, they advocated an agricultural plan known as the “sub-treasury system” to replace the big banks in providing credit to the farmers as well as empowering cooperatives rather than private corporations to store and market goods. All of these were ingredients to break small farmers out of a cycle of debt.

They also advocated for a shorter working day and a graduated income tax and sought to link together the demands of urban workers and those living in rural areas, saying in their preamble: “Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. ”If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their enemies are identical”.54 This turned the People’s Party into a real challenge to the ruling class on a national scale, one particularly potent in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama on the Southern front:

“The People’s (Populist) Party presidential candidate James B. Weaver received over one million votes in 1892 (approximately nine percent of the vote), winning 22 electoral votes (albeit, mostly in the West); in North Carolina, a Populist-Republican alliance took over the state legislature in 1894; Populists and their allies sat in Congress, governor’s offices, and held dozens of local offices over the next two years; and scores of Black and white People’s Party chapters had been established across the region”.55

This success would evoke a wave of terrorist violence against Populists and the Black community writ large that rivaled Reconstruction times and that, in terms of outright election fraud, exceeded it, which can be viewed clearly through the example of North Carolina, and Wilmington, in particular.

The 1892 election, the first time out for the Populists, opened up a new lane of cooperation. White Populists openly appealed for Black votes. “In addition to voting the ticket, blacks sometimes…took roles in county organizations and in mobilizing black voters. Some counties [even] placed blacks on ballots, and blacks were present at Populist rallies and in local Populist nominating conventions”56. In Raleigh, Blacks campaigned on horseback and on mule with the Presidential candidate James Weaver as well.57 The results reflected the campaign: “African Americans voted “en masse” for the People’s Party in 1892 in the first and second districts of the eastern part of the state, where the majority of black counties were. Black voters in both Hyde and Wilson counties, for instance, gave near unanimous support to the third party ticket”.58

Over the next two years Populists, Black and white, worked with Republicans, Black and white, to hammer out a fusion agreement for the 1894 state elections. This was despite fairly significant differences, such as the rise of Black populism, for instance, which heralded a rise in class differences within the Black community. Nonetheless, they found common ground and swept the elections:

“Among other changes, the elected Republican-Populist majority revised and simplified election laws, making it easier for African Americans to vote; they restored the popular election of state and county officials, dismantling the appointive system used by Democrats to keep black candidates out of office; and the fusion coalition also reversed discriminatory “stock laws” (that required fencing off land) that made it harder for small farmers to compete against large landowners. The reform of election and county government laws, in particular, undermined planter authority and limited their control of the predominantly black eastern counties”.59

The Fusion coalition also championed issues like “public funding for education, legislation banning the convict-lease system, the criminalization of lynching”.60 The Fusion government also restricted interest rates to address the massive debts being incurred by farmers and sharecroppers. Most notably, the Fusion governments stood up to the powerful railroad interests and their Northern backers like JP Morgan.

The port city of Wilmington was an important Republican stronghold and had to be neutralized for Democrats to break through the Fusion hold on the state. In 1897, Democrats started a vicious campaign of white supremacy, forming clubs and militias that would become known as “Red Shirts,” along with a media offensive.

As the Charlotte Observer would later state, it was the “bank men, the mill men, and businessmen in general,” who were behind this campaign.61 One major theme of the campaign was a particular focus on Black men supposedly “preying” on white women and girls. Physical violence and armed intimidation were used to discourage Blacks or Republicans and Populists of any color from voting.

As the election drew closer, Democrats made tens of thousands of copies of an editorial by Alex Manley, the Black editor of the Daily Record newspaper. Manley, an important civic leader in Wilmington had written the editorial in response to calls for increased lynchings against Blacks to stop interracial relationships. Manley argued that white women who sought out relations with Black men often used rape allegations to cover their tracks or end a dalliance.

While undoubtedly true, it raised the ire of white supremacists to the highest of pitches. On election day, most Blacks and Republicans chose not to vote as Red Shirt mobs were roaming the streets and had established checkpoints all over the city. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats won.

Unwilling to wait until their term of office began, some of the newly elected white officials and businesspeople decided to mount a coup and force out Black lawmakers right then and there. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of whites, marauded through the streets, attacking Black businesses and property and killing more than 300 Black people in the process. They forced the Republican mayor, along with all city commissioners, to resign at gunpoint. They banished them from the city, leading them in front of a mob that assaulted them before putting them on a train out of town. At least 2,000 Black residents fled, leaving most of what they owned behind.

The Wilmington massacre destroyed the Fusion coalition. All over the state, fraud and violence had been used against the Fusionists to no avail, but, as evidenced by the example of Wilmington, there was little chance of rebuilding ties of solidarity.

The same can be said for the populist period more generally. While Populists certainly have a mixed record, at best, when it came to racism in the general sense, it’s undeniable that the Populist upsurge opened up new political space for Blacks that had been shut-off by the two major parties. Further, it did so in a manner that was ideological much more commensurate with the unrealized desires of Republican rule.

So, in North Carolina and all across the South, Populists were crushed in an orgy of violence and fraud. Racism was a powerful motivating factor in Southern politics across this entire period. This racism, however, did not stop large numbers of whites from entering into a political alliance with Blacks. The anti-Populist violence has to be seen in this context as a counterweight against the pull of self-interest in the economic field.

Toward a third Reconstruction

Reconstruction looms large in our current landscape because so much of its promise remains unrealized. The Second Reconstruction, better known as “the sixties,” took the country some of the way there, particularly concerning civil equality. It reaffirmed an agenda of placing social claims on capital. It also, however, revealed the limits of the capitalist system, showing how easily the most basic reforms can be rolled back. This was a lesson also taught by the first Reconstruction.

The history of Reconstruction also helps us to understand the centrality of Black Liberation to social revolution. The dispossession of Blacks from social and civic life was not just ideologically but politically foundational to capitalism in the U.S. The Solid South, dependent on racism, has played and continues to play a crucial role as a conservative influence bloc in favor of capital.

Reconstruction also gives us insight into the related issue of why Black political mobilization, even in fairly mundane forms, is met with such hostility. The very nature of Black oppression has created what is essentially a proletarian nation which denounces racism not in the abstract, but in relationship to its actual effects. Unsurprisingly, then, Black Liberation politics has always brought forward a broad social vision to correct policies, not attitudes, which is precisely the danger since these policies are not incidental, but intrinsic, to capitalism.

In sum, Reconstruction points us towards an understanding that “freedom” and “liberation” are bound up with addressing the limitations that profit over people puts on any definition of those concepts. It helps us understand the central role of “white solidarity” in promoting capitalist class power. Neither racism nor capitalism can be overcome without a revolutionary struggle that presents a socialist framework.

References:
1 Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935/1999). Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Simon & Schuster), 325.
2 Marx, Karl. (1865). “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,” Marxists.org, January 28. Available here.
3 Bennett, Jr Lerone. (1969). Black Power U.S.A.: The human side of Reconstruction 1867-1877 (New York: Pelican), 148.
4 Foner, Eric. (1988/2011). Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Perennial), 364-365.
5 Ibid., 363, 372.
6 Ibid., 372-375.
7 Foner, Reconstruction, 366.
? Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 651.
8 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 179.
9 Magnunsson, Martin. (2007). “No rights which the white man is bound to respect”: The Dred Scott decision. American Constitution Society Blogs, March 19. Available here.
10 Foner, Reconstruction, 355.
11 Rabinowitz, Howard N. (Ed.) (1982). Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 106-107.
12 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 150.
13 Foner, Reconstruction, 356-357.
14 Ibid., 362-363.
15 Facing History and Ourselves. (2022). “The Reconstruction era and the fragility of democracy.” Available here.
16 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 183-184.
17 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 441.
18 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 160.
19 Foner, Reconstruction, 283-285.
20 Ibid., 282-283.
21 Ibid., 282.
22 Ibid., 291.
23 Lynch, John R. (1919). The facts of Reconstruction (New York: The Neale Publishing Company), ch. 4. Available here.
24 Foner, Reconstruction, 380.
25 Ibid., 382.
26 Rabinowitz, Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction Era, 73.
27 Foner, Reconstruction, 381.
28 Ibid., 391.
29 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 407-408.
30 Rabinowitz, Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era, 291-294.
31 Foner, Reconstruction, 374.
32 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 601.
33 Foner, Reconstruction, 375.
34 Ibid., 376.
35 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 603.
36 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 247.
37 Foner, Reconstruction, 377-378.
38 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 581.
39 Foner, Reconstruction, 415-416.
40 Ibid., 478.
41 Cox Richardson, Heather. (2001). The death of Reconstruction: Race, labor, and politics in the post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 85.
42 Foner, Reconstruction, 328.
43 Cox Richardson, The death of Reconstruction, 86-88; Foner, Reconstruction, 518-519.
44 Cox Richardson, The death of Reconstruction, 88.
45 Ibid., 94.
46 Ibid., 96.
47 Ibid., 97.
48 Lynch, The facts of Reconstruction, ch. 8. Available here.
49 Foner, Reconstruction, 558-560.
50 Bennett, Black Power U.S.A., 330-331.
51 Ibid.
52 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 353.
53 Populist Party Platform. (1892). Available here.
54 Ali, Omar. (2005). “Independent Black voices from the late 19th century: Black Populists and the struggle against the southern Democracy,” Souls 7, no. 2: 4-18.
55 Ali, Omar. (2010). In the lion’s mouth: Black Populism in the new South, 1886-1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 136.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 140.
59 Ibid., 141.
60 The Charlotte Observer. (1898). “Editorial,” November 17.