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Chapter 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism

Bourgeois revolution – the challenge beginsAt a time when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming “all Men are created equal, that they are

endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights”, many white people reconciled the subjugation of black slaves and colonial peoples by rationalising that somehow they were, by nature, not fully human. However, on the other side of the ideological struggle, many white people also sought to extend the universalising principles of bourgeois democracy to the slaves. In the revolutionary ferment of late 1700s United States, lifelong and hereditary enslavement of some 20% of the population began to stand out as a monstrous aberration. In response to a slave revolt in Boston in 1774, Abigail Adams told her husband John Adams, the later US president, “it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have”.1

Prominent bourgeois revolutionaries like Benjamin Rush and James Otis fiercely opposed slavery and countered the racist charges of black inferiority. Otis wrote in his Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764):

The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black…. Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as tis called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical influence in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face? Nothing better can be said in favour of a trade, that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant from the director of an African company to the petty chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast. It is a clear truth, those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.2

The Reverend Isaac Skillman even asserted in 1772 that the right of slaves to rebel conformed “to the laws of nature”.3 Benjamin Rush wrote in the following year:

…I need hardly say any thing in favour of the intellects of the Negroes, or of their capacities for virtue and happiness, although these have been supposed by some to be inferior to those of the inhabitants of Europe. The accounts which travellers give us of their ingenuity, humanity, and strong attachment to their parents, relations, friends and country, show us that they are equal to the Europeans…. All the vices which are charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies, and the West Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended by Providence for it…Future ages, therefore, when they read the accounts of the slave trade (if they do not regard them as fabulous) will be at a loss which to condemn most, our folly or our guilt, in abetting this direct violation of the laws of Nature and Religion.4

It was in the birthplace of racial oppression that some of the most ardent and radical critics of slavery first emerged under the driving force of revolution. In order to wage their revolutionary struggle, the American bourgeoisie had to rally the mass of (white) plebeians under the banner of universal natural rights and liberties. The seething, uncontrollable ferment and upheaval that was then unleashed naturally threatened to reach into the ranks of the black 1 Herbert Aptheker, A History of the American People: The American Revolution 1763-1783, International Publishers, New York, 1960, p. 2092 Louis Ruchames (ed.), Racial Thought in America Volume 1: From the Puritans to Abraham Lincoln, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1969, p. 1383 Aptheker, op. cit.4 Ruchames, ibid., pp. 140-41

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 1

toilers themselves. In any revolution, cracks can spread throughout the edifice of the ruling order. Indeed, large numbers of African-Americans did take part in the upsurge. At least 5000 were regular soldiers in the revolutionary army,5 many distinguishing themselves in combat like the famous Salem Poor. Some were freed and even awarded land and pensions. Still many others participated in a civilian capacity. The whole process even radicalised some slaveholder revolutionaries. John Laurens, a South Carolinian lieutenant-colonel and son of a slaveholder, was an early advocate of freeing and arming 3000 slaves in exchange for military service. He won support from Congress in 1779 but was vetoed by the South Carolina assembly. Laurens’ father had written to him four years earlier to tell him that he was freeing his slaves and “cutting off the entail of slavery”.6

Ultimately though, the American revolution was limited to the political sphere. Unlike the more far-reaching social revolution in France a few years later, the Americans were out to secure political independence from London, another bourgeois state, without touching the existing social-economic system. As such, the revolutionary alliance of class forces was founded on the interests and structures of US capitalism at that time – not only the mass of petty bourgeois artisans, farmers, and the mercantile (and some manufacturing) bourgeoisie in the north, but also the profitable slave-worked plantation empire in the south. Northern capitalists and southern slaveholders had distinct interests, but these had not yet become antagonistic. The original US constitution of 1777 had confederated the thirteen colonies into a union of sovereign states and protected the southern slave system from outside interference. In the immediate years after the revolution’s victory in 1783, central government was kept to a minimum, lacking even a national army. When a Constitutional Convention came together in 1787 to devise a new federal system, everyone was well aware of the delicacy of negotiating a national government that would preserve harmony between north and south. The convention eventually came up with a state structure that would allow the two wings of the ruling class to work together while protecting their separate interests. Congress was split into two houses, with only the lower house subject to direct election. Both the Senate and president were to be indirectly elected. There were also property qualifications placed on voters. This was all codified in a new Constitution that embarrassedly avoided the words “slave” and “slavery” and, instead, used the euphemism of “other persons”. The Constitution counted each slave as “three-fifths” of a person so that the number of southern representatives in Congress matched those from the North with its greater number of white men.

The compromise of 1787 gave the southern slavocracy a confidence boost. They had, for now, brought partly under their control what was potentially the biggest threat to their power and legitimacy – a new revolutionary government resting on the allegiance of a mass of non-slaveholding free citizens. In fact, the slavocracy deliberately worked to foster a political alliance with the small farmers – the majority of the population – not in support of slavery, but around trade, tax and monetary policies that favoured their shared agricultural interests. Leading slaveholder politicians of this time, such as Thomas Jefferson, who won the presidency in 1800, continue to be eulogised today as a champion of the “little people”.

The free, white plebeian citizenry were generally hostile to slavery. In the North, where the weight of small freehold farmers and artisans was much greater, new settlements banned slavery. But this hostility to the institution of slavery was not necessarily matched by a sense of solidarity with the slaves (or former slaves). Foreshadowing later racism elsewhere against “servile” immigrants of colour, many free white towns in the Midwest excluded blacks, free or slave. Even anti-slavery revolutionaries like Tom Paine had reservations about extending full and equal citizenship to African-Americans. Blacks were seen as alien to the organic bonds of free smallholding community which the revolution rested on. Even those who went as far as advocating full emancipation saw a solution in resettling blacks outside the United States. The new plebeian democracy was undoubtedly tainted by a racially exclusionist streak.

To foster their alliance with the farmers, slaveholder politicians settled for some restrictions on the expansion of slavery while fiercely defending its preservation in the southern states. The importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808, although the law was hardly enforced. Some northern states abolished the slave trade but not slavery itself. Some states decreed freedom for future generations born to slaves, but only after they had served out a period of servitude into their adult years, ostensibly to repay their masters for their keep.

5 Aptheker op. cit., p. 2266 Ruchames, op. cit., p. 157


Two subsequent developments in 1793, one at home, the other abroad, were to simultaneously crank up the slave economy and eventually produce the conditions of its destruction. At home, in that year, the invention of the cotton gin allowed the mass production of that commodity so vital to the emerging Industrial Revolution. Cotton exports soared, from 500,000 pounds in 1793 to 18 million pounds in 1800 and 83 million by 1815. In 1801-5 40% of British cotton imports came from the US.7 Cotton became the US’s most important crop and came to overshadow all others in the plantation economy. The southern slave zone became the driving engine of the US economy. However, in a dialectical twist, this very prosperity was to eventually upset the delicate alignment of class forces that had produced the 1787 compromise and allowed the slavocracy to survive.

The anti-racist Haitian RevolutionAlso in 1793, the French Revolution entered its radical Jacobin phase. With moves toward a

constitutional monarchy in shambles and a mass movement of poor sans-culottes mobilised, a section of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was to lead the most far-reaching social and political revolution to date. In the Jacobin phase, the revolution spread to France’s slave colony in St Domingue (present-day Haiti) and racial oppression was dealt its first major blow. In the words of the West Indian Marxist, C.L.R James, in his classic work, The Black Jacobins:

Paris between March 1793 and July 1794 was one of the supreme epochs of political history. Never until 1917 were masses ever to have such powerful influence – for it was no more than influence – upon any government. In these few months of their nearest approach to power they did not forget the blacks. They felt towards them as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counter-revolution, they hated as if Frenchmen themselves had suffered under the whip. It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. “Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in the fields” all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the “aristocracy of the skin.” There were many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes.8

A complex hierarchy of racial castes had governed St Domingue, the jewel of the French colonies. The white colonial-settlers were vastly outnumbered by the slaves. As such, unlike mainland North America, people with both black and white parentage, the “mulattoes”, were freed and coopted into functioning as an intermediate social buffer on behalf of the white slaveholders, who were an even smaller minority among the general white population. People of mixed colour formed the backbone of the maréchausée, a police force for capturing fugitive slaves. Throughout the slave-worked Americas, a growing population of mixed ancestry was produced by the male slaveholder’s treatment of slave women as sexual chattel. However, in the French Caribbean, just to be sure to know on which side they ultimately stood, 128 formal categories recognised the huge permutations of intermixture while clearly dictating that they all belonged to the status of “mulatto”. Thus, even the whitest of the mixed coloureds, the sang-mêlé with 127 parts white ancestry and one part black, was still a person of colour.9 They suffered all sorts of discrimination and legally occupied a subordinate position.

Nevertheless, people of mixed ancestry were incorporated into the free population and could thereby climb the social ladder to a certain extent. Many even became slaveholding planters. From the outset then, the racial caste system in St Domingue was inherently less stable than in the US. When the revolution came, the wholesale discrediting of privilege by birth began to further shake up the racist assumptions of this caste system. The choice of criterion for political representation was ultimately posed between racial or property privilege, one having been acquired by birth, the other including those many bourgeois who had acquired it by social mobility. The planters wanted narrow political representation to protect their economic interests against the diktats of Paris; the free, propertied people of colour wanted political and legal equality with the rest of their class; the petits blancs (“small whites”) wanted liberty, equality and fraternity for all white men and resented any prospect of propertied people of colour getting representation at their expense. The slaves as yet were beyond any consideration.

Therefore, the radical democracy of the white plebeians in St Domingue was initially synonymous with preserving the racial caste system. Once again, fulfilling their role of social buffer, many people of mixed colour were drawn into an alliance with the counter-revolutionary 7 Robin Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Verso, London, 1988, p. 2768 C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Random House, New York, 1963, pp. 138-39. In this passage James relies on a revealing primary source – a book published in 1802, written by a French colonist who opposed emancipation.9 ibid., p. 38


forces of the colonial administration, against the white plebeian masses. Governor De Peynier instructed the commandants of the districts, “It has become more necessary than ever not to give [people of mixed colour] any cause for offence, to encourage them and to treat them as friends and whites.”10

In France itself, the colonial question came to occupy a key position in the shifting tides of the revolution. An abolitionist group had emerged during the growth of the political movement of the French bourgeoisie, the Friends of the Blacks. Many of the early leaders of 1789 were also key figures in this group. They were ideologues who universalised the principles of 1789 to also include blacks. Their views were best summed up by the fiery interjection of Mirabeau against d’Arsy, the planter delegate to the famous tennis-court meeting of the Third Estate in 1789:

You claim representation proportionate to the number of the inhabitants. The free blacks are proprietors and tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote. And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consideration the number of our horses and our mules?11

But there were also many bourgeois in the revolutionary parliament whose fortunes were tied to colonial slavery. They were sensitive to any move that upset the racial hierarchy which, in turn, would undermine slavery. Most crucially, the planters wielded the threat of secession. Initially, Paris decided it did not want to lose the colonies and compromised.

The trans-Atlantic French revolution was played out by a dizzying mix of rival social and political forces: rich whites, poor whites, rich people of colour, colonial planters, metropolitan bourgeoisie, constitutional monarchists, absolute monarchists, radical republicans, those in favour of the mulatto vote, those against. In amongst this, first the people of mixed colour, then the slaves themselves, came to play the decisive role. The whites as a whole were outnumbered in St Domingue. As such, whites on all sides were soon forced to recognise that the mixed coloureds held the balance of power. In May 1791 Paris gave the vote to those coloured people whose parents were both free. But this was rescinded in September, when the revolution had temporarily swung to the right.

The cracks were nonetheless glaring and emboldened the racially oppressed. The wealthy coloureds began organising independently. Masses of slaves also took up arms and revolted. They were wooed for a time by the Spanish in the eastern half of the island (present-day Dominican Republic), who commissioned them into their army. The mulattoes then allied with the white property-owners to put down this slave uprising. But the whole structure of slavery required the maintenance of racial castes. People of mixed colour, having gained a taste for independent organisation, lost confidence in this alliance. Further, with ongoing moves by Paris to recognise their legal equality, the mixed coloureds began to close ranks with the revolution. Royal intrigues in the metropolis were driving a widening polarisation. The Jacobins were going from strength to strength. They effectively took the reins of government in early 1792. On April 4 they passed a decree giving full civil rights to all free adult males, regardless of colour. In late 1792 the polarisation gave way to a second revolution as the king went over to open counter-revolution. The constitutional monarchy was ditched and a republic formed.

At about the same time, Paris dispatched three commissioners to restore order in St Domingue. These officials were led by a Jacobin who built an alliance with the commanders of the mulatto forces and set up a Légion d’Egalité, to put down both the slave armies and the counter-revolution. Many of the wealthy whites had now openly gone over to the royalists. The royalists called on the assistance of foreign powers who were very nervous about the spread of the French example. German and British troops invaded France; British and Spanish troops entered St Domingue. Under such grave threat, the mass of the revolutionary forces in France radicalised even further. The danger of the sans-culottes in the metropolis, and that of the slaves in the colonies, was now far outweighed by the royalist counter-revolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie moved sharply to the left. The vacillating Girondins were purged and the Jacobins consolidated their power in June 1793, whereupon they mobilised a popular defence of the revolution.

It was in this knife-edge situation that a dramatic shift in the balance of forces took place in St Domingue. Under siege, the republican commissioners were finally forced to decree emancipation and seek the alliance of the armed slaves who, in turn, began to see their own

10 ibid., p. 6311 quoted in ibid., p. 60


interests in the radicalising French Revolution. The petits blancs split: those more ardently concerned about preserving the gains of the revolution accepted the alliance with the blacks; others went over to the royalists.

In January-February 1794 this movement was capped by an extraordinary episode in the National Convention in Paris. It’s an episode that still stands with momentous stature in the whole history of revolutionary movements. A trio of deputies from St Domingue was sent to request an official decree of emancipation from the metropolis: Bellay, a freed slave; Mills, a person of mixed colour; and Dufay, a white man. A French deputy introduced them with the following words: “Since 1789 the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of religion have been destroyed; but the aristocracy of the skin still remains. That too is now at its last gasp, and equality has been consecrated. A black man, a yellow man, are about to join this Convention in the name of the free citizens of St Domingue.”12

After an eloquent and passionate speech by Bellay, requesting the Convention abolish slavery, a French deputy moved the motion: “When drawing up the constitution of the French people we paid no attention to the unhappy Negroes. Posterity will bear us a great reproach for that. Let us repair the wrong – let us proclaim the liberty of the Negroes. Mr President, do not suffer the Convention to dishonour itself by a discussion.” The chamber burst into sustained acclamation. Embraces and kisses followed, met by further applause. A coloured woman sitting in the public gallery, tears streaming down her face, was invited to sit to the left of the President. Lacroix, who had earlier introduced the St Domingue deputies to the Convention, then proposed the wording of the decree: “The National Convention declares slavery abolished in all the colonies. In consequence it declares that all men, without distinction of colour, domiciled in the colonies, are French citizens, and enjoy all the rights assured under the Constitution.”13 The Commune of Paris held a celebration at the Notre Dame, which the revolutionaries now called the Temple of Reason.

But it did not stop at mere decrees. The Jacobins dispatched a naval fleet to the Caribbean to wage a revolutionary war for the liberation of all slaves. This fleet of 1200 soldiers arrived with a guillotine and a printing press. It ran off the emancipation decree, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and other revolutionary documents, in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English, as well as French, to distribute all over the Caribbean.14

With emancipation now signed, sealed and delivered by Paris, the most proficient of the slave armies, that led by Toussaint Louverture, came over to the revolution. Thereupon the revolutionary army of Black Jacobins dealt a series of terrific blows to the counter-revolution and, simultaneously, waged a war of revolutionary emancipation of those still enchained on the plantations. However, after defeating the Spanish and British, the forces of Louverture had to face France itself. With the fall of the Jacobins and the Thermidor backlash, Napoleon’s army simultaneously spread the revolution in Europe and tried to reimpose slavery in St Domingue.

But the Black Jacobins prevailed again. Twelve years before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, this black army of former slaves drove out the French and established the Republic of Haiti in 1804 – the first black bourgeois government in the world and the second revolution in the Americas, but the first to give civil rights to all its people, and one, no less, led by former slaves. The Haitian Revolution sent tremors throughout the Americas and Europe, inspiring rebellion among slaves and fear among slaveholders.

Thus, in the one and the same year, an economic turning point that dramatically upped the demand for slave labour in the US was matched by a spectacularly successful movement of revolutionary emancipation in the Caribbean. They were the contradictory outcomes of the two great bourgeois revolutions: the first had ended in a sordid compromise with the slavocracy and the second in the self-emancipation of the slaves. This twin, dialectically connected process revealed a more general truth. Just as capitalism and racism had been joined in birth, the fates of revolution and anti-racism were one and the same. The more complete bourgeois revolutions (in France, Haiti, and the nineteenth-century Bolivarian revolutions in continental Latin America) were associated with the emancipation of slaves; the retreat of revolution (in the US and Britain, and later in France under Napoleon) was associated with renewed racial oppression and the deepening of racist ideology.

Nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ racism

12 quoted in ibid., pp. 139-4013 ibid., pp. 140-4114 Blackburn, op. cit., p. 226


In Britain and the US, a whole trend of chauvinist literature against the French Revolution formed an important adjunct to the deepening racist world-view of the nineteenth century. The inherent extremism of the French “race” was counterposed to the more balanced temperament of the Germanic/Teutonic Anglo-Saxons. This chauvinism was also ultimately directed at the simmering radical-revolutionary impulses in Britain and the United States. It sought to legitimise the 1787 compromise with the slavocracy and Britain’s much earlier compromise with the monarchy.

In Britain, this chauvinism was also needed to justify the colonial oppression of the Irish, in a period when Irish nationalism was becoming a political force that looked to the French Revolution for inspiration. Indeed, for the purpose of chauvinist attack, the French and Irish were often lumped together into the single category of “Celt”. This literature was best summed up by one of the US’s foremost historians in the nineteenth century, Francis Parkman:

The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine and, therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason, and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question…. the French Celt is cast in a different mould. He sees the end distinctly, and reasons about it with an admirable clearness; but his own impulses and passions continually turn him away from it. Opposition excites him; he is impatient of delay, is impelled always to extremes, and does not readily sacrifice a present inclination to an ultimate good. He delights in abstractions and generalizations, cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires and theories.15

Dr Robert Knox, an anatomy professor at the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, wrote in 1850 that the Celts are characterised by “furious fanaticism: a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain; look at Ireland.” Further, “The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland.”16

This sort of chauvinism was not racist per se, that is, it could not be based on any identifiable physical markers, such as dark skin. However, it nonetheless sought to portray French and Irish ethno-cultural traits as inborn and thereby served racism by reinforcing a biological conception of people’s social and cultural characteristics. Subsequently, racism and national-ethnic chauvinism were tightly interwoven, reaching its pinnacle in the Nazi ideology of Teutonic superiority over other white people (especially the Slavs and Jews, whom they sought to portray as non-white), as well as African and Asian peoples (with the pragmatic exception of the Japanese, whom they needed a military alliance with and thus labelled “honorary Aryan”).

At the same time, the French Revolution itself was partly rolled back under Napoleon. The French bourgeoisie sought to find a new equilibrium after the “excesses” of the Jacobin period. The spectre of 1848 then drove the last nails into the coffin of any remaining bourgeois revolutionary momentum. The French tried to expunge the memory of 1793-4: they temporarily restored slavery in the Caribbean colonies in 1802 (trying but failing to retake Haiti) and embarked on a new colonial offensive. Racist ideology returned with a vengeance.

The retreat of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was aided by the onward march of science. Instead of debunking racist assumptions, science actually did the opposite in the hands of the “learned men” of the British Century – a century built on the debris of 1848; a century of controlled, gradualist advances in the Westminster political system, and a vast expansion of colonial fortunes. The world-view of the nineteenth-century scientist was unshakeably embedded in a racial hierarchy, and rather than explode it, the tools of science were harnessed to secure this ideological bedrock. Even the great, enlightening discoveries of Charles Darwin were pressed into the service of validating racist ideology.

For the anatomist Robert Knox, “Race is everything. Literature, science, art, in a word, civilisation, depend on it.”17 The renowned man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in English Traits (1856), “It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe…. Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle.”18 French scientist, Julien-Joseph Virey, wrote in his Dictionary of Medical Science (1819), “Among us [whites] the forehead is pushed forward, the mouth is pulled back as if we were destined to think rather than eat; the Negro has a shortened forehead and a mouth that is pushed forward as if he were made to eat instead of to think.”19

15 quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1963, p. 9516 quoted in ibid., p. 96, italics in the original17 ibid., p. 9518 ibid., p. 9719 quoted in the website 19th Century Racism, http://www.geocities.com/ru00ru00/racismhistory/19thcent.html


Thus, well before the imperialist epoch, many bourgeois intellectuals in the field of social and political theory abandoned the ideals of the Enlightenment and came to serve an increasingly bankrupt capitalist system. Marx and Engels alone continued to uphold the banner of consistent humanism and eventually built up a powerful ideological and political counter-pole for the succession of capitalism by an even more enlightened and scientific social system.

The fates of revolution and racism were one and the same. The more complete bourgeois revolutions (in France, Haiti, and the nineteenth century Bolivarian revolutions in continental Latin America) were associated with the abolition of slavery; the retreat of revolution (in the US and Britain, and later in France) was associated with renewed racial oppression and the deepening of racist ideology.

The Second American RevolutionNevertheless, despite any retreat the seeds of mass politics and democratic revolt had been

safely sown. No revolution can ever be fully undone. The petty bourgeoisie, sold out by the compromises of the big bourgeois, continued to agitate and organise for more far-reaching change, pulling in its wake the emerging proletariat. In the US, Britain and Europe, the aspirations of this democratic citizenry included the push for the abolition of slavery. The 1848 revolutions on the European continent had been crushed in their homelands but still resulted in the final death blow to slavery in the French Caribbean, where it had been restored by Napoleon in 1802. In the US, this simmering anti-racist impulse developed the furthest – into a second revolution. The “French disease” was to infect the heartland of racial slavery.

The Second American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that ran from 1861 to 1877. It was made up of two components, the American Civil War in 1861-65 and the period of Radical Reconstruction following the war. This revolution pitted the North’s industrial bourgeoisie and its allies, chiefly the mass of small farmers and then the freed and fugitive slave armies, against the southern slavocracy which formed the breakaway Confederate States of America. What began as a war to restore the unity of the United States eventually unleashed a titanic, revolutionary movement of black self-emancipation that both mirrored and took to completion what was begun by the first detachments of black revolutionary soldiers in 1775-83.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had thrust cotton to the centre of the US economy. US capitalism united behind this tremendous, slave-produced boom. The small farmers produced food for the plantations, the northern merchants profited from selling and exporting the cotton. But towards the mid-1800s the slave system began to outlive its usefulness. By then it had fulfilled its kick-start function and could be dispensed with, as much of the advanced capitalist world, including parts of the US, began to move on to the phase of general industrialisation. The profits accumulated from the cotton boom, together with soaring immigration and the introduction of steam power and the railroad, opened the way for a rapid growth of manufacturing in the North.

While the slavocracy had adapted slave labour for the capitalist mode of production, it still retained its core, pre-capitalist weakness – slavery severely hindered technological innovation and blocked the development of a domestic mass market. If the key tools you own, slaves, are also creative producers of surplus value; if the slaves can be forced to carry out almost every task on the plantation – then there is no objective drive to technologically innovate and diversify. And if there is no such innovation, then there is no corresponding development and diversification in the types of industries. The Cotton Kingdom is forever condemned to remain a backward agrarian economy servicing an outside textile industry, exclusively dependent on cheap labour and a growing supply of land. Moreover, without a mass of wage-earners, there is no growth in a domestic mass market, further hindering capitalist development. While the slavocracy may have wallowed in their lavish, aristocratic pretences, they became more and more of a fundamental block on the overall, strategic interests of the US capitalist class and economy. This was most acutely felt by the newly emerging industrial bourgeoisie in the North.

By the mid-1800s US capitalism reached a fateful fork in the road. Would the United States be dominated by a slave-dependent, agrarian ruling class, or would it achieve the industrial and financial dynamism that would eventually lead it towards global domination in the twentieth century? Would US agriculture serve British or American capitalism? Would the new territories opening up in the western United States serve the needs of industrial development, or would they succumb to the slave-worked plantation empire? At this fork in the road, the 1787 compromise broke down and the separate interests of the two wings of the US ruling class went over into open, revolutionary conflict.


In addition to the rise of the northern industrial bourgeoisie, there were other changes in the alignment of class forces towards the mid-1800s. Principally, the alliance between the small farmers and the slavocracy collapsed. They came into conflict over land. The invention of the cotton gin allowed cotton to be grown and processed far inland. The slavocracy became land-hungry and their “Cotton Kingdom” began pushing westwards. They were no longer on the defensive; they no longer felt they had to compromise by allowing slave-free states in return for maintaining the “southern way of life”.

On the other hand, there was a tremendous growth in European immigration, especially following the Irish potato famine and the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. To this day, the greatest influx of immigrants, as a proportion of the existing US population, arrived in the years 1845-50. This massively expanded the ranks of the American yeomanry, spreading to the Midwest and beyond in search of political and agrarian freedom. Today, the legend of the westward pioneer continues to be the stuff of novels, movies, musicals and TV shows. The Midwest farmer soon moved to the centre of the US agricultural economy. The 1850 census revealed that the northern hay crop alone equalled the combined market value of all southern staples – cotton, tobacco, rice, hemp and sugar.20 Further, the mass of small farmers came to be less dependent on southern markets – the rapidly growing industrial towns of the North were now taking more and more of the farmers’ foodstuffs.

With the growth of the American yeomanry, the battle was resumed for the meaning and future of American democracy. New aspirations were awoken and accounts had to be settled with the sordid compromises of the first revolution. This, as always, was grounded in concrete, material interests. A series of political contests over the expanding western territories, each fiercer than the last, unfolded between the slavocracy, on the one hand, and the democratic petty-bourgeoisie and northern industrial capitalists, on the other: Missouri in 1819-20, Texas in 1836-45, California in 1849-50, Kansas in 1854-61. Each new application for statehood teetered the balance of equal Congressional seats for slave and free states, contained in the 1787 constitutional compromise. The fight over each territory amounted to whether they would be admitted into the Union as a free or slave state. A compromise in each case only prolonged the inevitable, open rupture: Missouri was to be admitted as a slave state; all others to the north would be free. California was to be free, in exchange for the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which made it mandatory for a fugitive slave anywhere, North or South, to be forcibly returned to their owner. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise and left the decision to the people of the territory.

This increasingly bitter struggle dominated United States history in the first half of the nineteenth century and, in the second half, finally forced back onto the historical agenda a settlement of the slave question once and for all. A range of social and political forces helped shape the revolutionary and anti-racist character of this unfolding process. Among white democrats and free blacks in the North, there arose for the first time a mass movement explicitly and singularly focused on abolishing slavery and emancipating the slaves. This movement allied with counterparts in Europe. It was aware of, and sensed a kinship with, the revolutionary movements of 1848. Indeed, some abolitionists correctly saw their mission as an integral part of the broader, international democratic struggle and felt a renewed sense of responsibility in the wake of the 1848 defeats. This movement embraced both black and white activists. It helped give birth to the first movement for women’s rights in the United States. The abolitionists pioneered a wave of lively, influential activist newspapers, consciously setting out to agitate and propagandise for the anti-slavery movement. The fight even reached the level of an armed, guerrilla struggle.

It was the conscious, deliberate intervention of the anti-slavery movement into the changed class alignments of the early to mid-1800s that gave a conscious focus and program to the white plebeians’ struggle with the slavocracy. They used a range of devices to build the movement. The newspaper of the American Anti-slavery Society, The Liberator, played a crucial part, helping to draw into the movement such important leaders as the ex-slave Frederick Douglass. Douglass later started his own newspaper, the North Star, specifically to encourage the self-organisation of African-American activists. A hectic schedule of lecture tours and rallies kept up the intense agitation and propaganda. The AAS and other organisations produced a large range of widely-circulated pamphlets and books.

20 Peter Camejo, Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction, Monad Press, New York City, 1976, p. 23


The abolitionist movement arguably took off in the political climate triggered by two events: the publication of a pamphlet by a free black man in Boston in 1829 and the slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World could be said to be the first articulation of Black Power, asserting the legitimacy of black people’s rage, advocating the right of black people to self-defence, calling for open rebellion against racism by slaves and free blacks alike, and insisting on the inevitable end of white domination. Walker and many other radicalising blacks at the time were influenced by the revolution in Haiti – a thunderous event that shook the whole of the Americas and put the fear of freedom into the slavocracy. Slaveholders censored, sensationalised and demonised news of what had happened in Haiti. The US government took a hostile position and refused to recognise the new revolutionary government of the Black Jacobins. The slavocracy saw the likes of David Walker as a home grown Black Jacobin lurking in their midst. They censored and confiscated his book, while free blacks smuggled it into the South. The book went through six editions. Eventually a price was put on Walker’s head and he was found murdered some years later.

Abolitionists intervened into each fight over the western territories, culminating in the battles over California and Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, in giving the settlers the choice of whether the new state should be free or slave, left the field open for an all-out struggle between pro- and anti-slavery forces. Settlers from both sides flooded in, one side from the northeast, and the other from neighbouring Missouri, a slave state. Armed clashes broke out. Both sides set up rival governments and parliaments, the pro-slavery settlers resorting to outright electoral fraud. Activists throughout the North raised money, supplies and weapons for the “free-soilers”. The final compromise over Kansas turned into its very opposite and became the precursor to the civil war that began the second revolution.

In the struggle over Kansas, that magnificent hero and martyr, John Brown, made his first major appearance leading successful attacks against pro-slavery terrorists. This Midwestern farmer was a militant abolitionist who believed that the struggle against slavery could not be won unless blood was spilt. Unlike some white abolitionists, Brown was not afraid of slaves taking up arms for their own liberation. In fact, he saw the insurrection of slaves as the only way to end slavery. John Brown was one of the first truly anti-racist white revolutionaries. As Frederick Douglass, a black revolutionary and close friend of Brown, said upon first meeting him, “[T]hough a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”21 In 1859 John Brown and two of his sons joined with 19 black and white men to stage a guerrilla raid on Harpers Ferry, a federal arsenal, in order to capture weapons and distribute them to slaves throughout the South. The raid was crushed and Brown hanged, but this momentous event, together with Brown’s testimony at his trial, inspired many abolitionists to new levels. In turn, it hardened the slavocracy even further and made civil war all the more inevitable. Harpers Ferry was to the Second American Revolution what the Moncada Barracks was to the Cuban Revolution nearly 100 years later.

The escalating conflict between “free-soilers” and the slavocracy sharpened national politics. It gave birth to the anti-slavery Republican Party which was later transformed into the party of the second revolution. Previously the Whigs had only put up a timid and hesitant fight against the party of the slavocracy, the Democrats. When the Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 the slavocracy resorted to secession, even though Lincoln was opportunistic in his attitude towards slavery. Faced by the intransigence of the breakaway South, he tried to conciliate with the Confederacy. Even when war broke out, he tried to retain the loyalty of those slave states that did not secede by promising to maintain slavery if they joined in the fight against the Confederacy.

It was only as the war became more and more embittered that it transformed into a full-scale war against slavery. In the process, the Republican Party attracted a current of bourgeois revolutionaries, including Frederick Douglass, and was pushed sharply to the left. Emancipation was proclaimed by the Republican administration of Abraham Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of fleeing slaves were drawn into active participation in a war for their own collective liberation. Large columns of fully-armed black men, who felt the justice of the struggle in their bones, were an amazing and inspiring sight to the millions of downtrodden black civilians. On the other hand, the sight of black men with guns alarmed racist whites. Black units were

21 Quoted in US Public Broadcasting Service, People & Events: John Brown 1800-59, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html


especially repugnant to the white supremacist Confederate forces, who shot black prisoners, including those who surrendered. Non-combatant African-Americans also played their part, as part of the crucial civilian support base for the Union army. If ever there was a just war, this was it, the most destructive war of the nineteenth century which took more American lives than the first and second world wars combined. No war since has killed that many Americans in a single conflict.

On the foundations of the massive upheaval of the Civil War, the Republicans led a post-war process of Radical Reconstruction and carried through a second bourgeois-democratic revolution. They extended democratic rights to the mass of freed blacks in the South and, by 1867, ensured the election and appointment of a wide layer of African-American politicians, judges, sheriffs, mayors and other government officials. This dramatic extension of democratic rights empowered the mass of ex-slaves to self-organise. Radical Reconstruction also established the first public schools in the South, which allowed not only black children, but also the children of poor whites, to attend school for the first time ever.

Again, though, all this was limited to a political revolution and remained partial. The mass of ex-slaves were crying out for land – 40 acres and a mule. But the northern industrial bourgeoisie and the professional politicians who controlled the Republican Party had relented to Radical Reconstruction only in order to shore up Republican power in the South. As such, they refused to countenance land reform and, indeed, bought up a lot of the former plantation lands themselves. Eventually, a complex combination of a severe labour shortage in the South (now that slaves were freed), an economic depression in 1873, discontent among poor white farmers with the economic policies of the northern industrialists, and massive corruption scandals in the Republican Party, all led to a catastrophic derailing of Radical Reconstruction and the driving down of the Southern black population into an underclass of poor tenant farmers and super-exploited rural workers – all under the catch-cry of “stability” and “reconciliation”. In these circumstances, the Democrats made a comeback, but this time remade as an alternative, conservative party of the industrial bourgeoisie favouring the smashing of Radical Reconstruction.

But, by its very nature, the repression of the African-American movement could not be peaceful. It took waves of horrific terrorist violence by the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and other white supremacist terror gangs to intimidate black voters and eventually install racist, Democrat state governments in the South. Fearful of escalating this conflict, Radical Republican governors treacherously refused to answer the demands of many blacks and rank-and-file white Radical Republicans to organise and arm popular militias to crush the terrorists. At the same time, the Republican federal government became increasingly hesitant to intervene with federal troops. Now that slavery had been abolished, and thereby a key obstacle to further industrial development removed, and now that the Democrats had been reformed, the northern industrial bourgeoisie were much more worried about the mass of restless blacks – especially the prospect of armed ones – than the return of Democrat governments in the South.

With the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, white supremacist governments triumphed in the South, and race relations, again, became a purely local affair for each state to settle by itself. One could say that a partial secession had been successful. During the remainder of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, Southern state governments – as well as some Northern ones – implemented a stringent system of racial segregation. This highly oppressive system of social policing ensured that, while African-Americans were not re-enslaved, they would be legally subordinated on the basis of their skin colour and kept down as a source of extra-cheap and reserve labour. Earlier, at the height of the revolution, the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution had explicitly enshrined the abolition of slavery and an end to racial discrimination. However, in what became the definitive legal seal on the shunting of the second revolution, the US Supreme Court manoeuvred around these constitutional amendments in the infamous 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling that segregation was not unconstitutional because blacks and whites were “separate but equal”.

It was an astonishing example of the process of Thermidor, first seen following the French Revolution. While the explosive tumult of revolution can not be completely undone, a faction or section of the revolutionary forces may control and partially roll it back within the very framework of the revolution itself to suit their narrow, sectional interests. That is, the American Thermidor was based on the very abolition of chattel slavery – it could not, and nor did it aim to, restore the previous ruling sub-class, the slavocracy, nor its backward labour system. At the same time, the Northern industrial bourgeoisie – who had initiated and led the revolution –


sought to re-subjugate the emancipated African-Americans, but this time into a layer of extra-cheap waged workers and a reserve labour army of poor tenant farmers. This task of revamping racial oppression, on the rubble of the original material source of racism, chattel slavery, necessitated a chilling new level of racist ideology. Elaborate bodies of “research”, theory and branches of “science” (principally eugenics) flourished. Foreheads were analysed for shape and slope, noses and skulls measured, brains weighed, all in the cause of proving the existence of clear-cut, immutable races and the superiority of the white race. The abolitionist struggle and the Civil War had kept at least a section of the American bourgeoisie honest for a time. Long after its counterparts in Europe had opted for pragmatic settlements in return for economic supremacy, the US bourgeoisie had been forced to embark on one final and risky venture in revolutionary mass mobilisation. Then once the slave question was formally settled and the slaveholding wing smashed, the American bourgeoisie rapidly caught up with (if not surpassed) the rest of the European world on the race question.

But Thermidor is fundamentally an objective phenomenon – a potential danger in all revolutions when far-reaching political gains come into conflict with divergent economic imperatives and/or when economic transformations lag behind politics. The democratic gains of the first American revolution were forced into a compromise because of the continued need for slave labour, but within the very framework of the new republic – this was the essence of Jeffersonian democracy, based on the assertion of states’ (read Southern) rights, expressed in plebeian rhetoric. The second revolution was partially pushed back, not because the capitalist economy was limited in its possibilities, but because its further expansion came into conflict with a consistent expansion of bourgeois democratic rights. But Thermidor is not inevitable, for adverse economic conditions must still be dealt with by politics – thinking human beings engaged in the conscious political processes of organising parties, movements and their class, exercising power, making decisions and choices. The contrast between the French-Haitian and US methods of dealing with slavery show there is no room for fatalism, even in bourgeois revolutions.

Thermidor, imperialism and racismThe American Thermidor was part and parcel of a new historical and developmental stage

for capital accumulation: imperialism. New advances in chemical, metallurgical, rail, automotive, petroleum and other sectors of heavy industry toward the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a qualitatively greater concentration of control and ownership in all the established capitalist economies. Fewer and fewer families came to command greater chunks of a massive new accumulation of capital. The problems of over-capacity and market saturation now took whole economies with them. This exponentially greater scale of wealth and crisis drove the merging of industrial and banking capital in an effort to sustain profit rates by conglomerating all stages of economic production. Cartels and trusts were formed for the same reason. The commanding heights of each industry and each national economy came to be dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations. Capitalist competition spiralled upwards, between whole economies, most abominably displayed in a global scramble for new colonies, but this time imposing a much tighter stranglehold on the non-European world. The colonies were no longer left as simple trading posts; they were “developed” into subordinate capitalist economies that could deliver super-profitable returns on otherwise idle surplus capital from the advanced countries.

American capital’s march into this epoch of monopoly and imperialism objectively required both the second revolution and the subsequent Thermidor. The Civil War and Reconstruction not only expanded democratic rights but, most crucially for the Northern bourgeoisie, completed the freeing up of labour and capital required by the needs of industrial restructuring and global capitalist competition. The very democratic rights that were needed for the bottom-up unlocking of the Southern economy, landmass and labour force were what eventually stood in the way of this march. The large-scale assembly lines and heavy industrial plants of the new epoch could neither run on an inert slave labour force nor afford a large section of workers spurred on by the fruits of a recent revolutionary victory.

This dilemma was part of a bigger one yet, for monopoly capital was also forcing an even greater demographic shift from a farmer to a worker majority, as it simultaneously sought out new branches of the economy to colonise and new sources of factory fodder. In this era, mass immigration from abroad was accompanied by the internal mass migration of farming families forced off the land. However, this demographic shift from a majority that had been small-


propertied and rurally bound to one that was restless and propertyless called for a wholly new scale of social control. Alongside other forms of social division and stratification, racism proved most effective. Thus, in this period, the scissored doling out of white privilege and black oppression, described in the second chapter, took on a new intensity as monopoly-imperial capitalism endowed the American bourgeoisie with the wealth to racially entrench a privileged caste of white labour.

Abroad, racism proved just as useful in justifying imperialist plunder. The inseparable connection between racism at home and abroad in the epoch of imperialism was made explicit by the liberal US magazine The Nation in 1898. Commenting on a US Supreme Court decision upholding the denial of voting rights to African-Americans in the Southern states, the article called it “an interesting coincidence that this important decision is rendered at a time when we are considering the idea of taking in a varied assortment of inferior races in different parts of the world which, of course, could not be allowed to vote.”22

The period of rising imperialism was to globalise and massify a more systematic racism. In addition to segregation in the US, this was the era of South African apartheid, the Nazi and other fascist regimes, the White Australia Policy, and a generally deepening inequality between what came to be known as the (predominantly white) First World and the (predominantly coloured) Third. South Africa’s treatment of blacks was modelled on Australia’s policies toward Aborigines; Hitler’s 1933 Hereditary Health Law was modelled on the widespread practice of eugenics in the US. Even following Hitler’s defeat, there were still 27 US states that had laws enforcing the sterilisation of the “unfit” and “degenerate”. All the imperialist powers were dominated by the kind of racist ideas that, today, is confined to the far right. Mainstream politicians, newspapers, magazines, novels, plays, scientific writings, everyday discourse were permeated through and through by the ideology of white racial superiority, which was considered natural and therefore righteous. The industrial barbarism of the Nazi regime was merely the most developed form of a culture that gripped the whole of the European imperial world.

Change was forced upon them only when the global catastrophe of the second world war imperilled all the major imperialist powers, with the threat of mutual destruction, defeat at the hands of expanding socialist revolutions looking to the Soviet Union, risings by colonial peoples, or some combination of all three. Faced by this threat, all the imperialist powers scrambled to reform their image and distance themselves from any likeness to the Nazis. No one wanted to be left holding the rotting corpse of eugenics and racial pseudo-science as they quickly sought to readjust to a vastly changed world situation.

The sea change of the second world war and the resulting anti-colonial revolutions had a particularly direct, albeit contrasting impact on those colonial-settler societies where systems of racial oppression had been a dominant and pervasive feature of all aspects of social life. On the one hand, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia continued to dig their heels in, thereby sharply intensifying open – even armed – social conflict that was to engulf the whole of southern Africa and eventually lead to the toppling of white minority rule in the last three decades of the 20th

century. On the other, the US as chief imperialist power and aegis to all imperialism, could not afford the deepening social unrest provoked by Jim Crow. Similarly, the Australian bourgeoisie, mindful of its growing reliance on Asian trade, was forced to turn away from the South African path and adopt the US ruling class’s tactic of appeasement and cooption.

22 Camejo, op. cit., p. 212
