On Hierarchies and Humanity: A Review of ‘The Dawn Of Everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow

[Pictured: Waving across time, the Cave of Hands in Argentina, painted as far back as 11,000 B.C., reminds us that prehistory was filled with real people. Credit: R. M. Nunes / IStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Nathan Albright

Before his sudden death in September of 2020, two weeks after the completion of his final book, The Dawn of Everything, the beloved anthropologist David Graeber had demonstrated a knack for writing about the right thing at the right time. In 2011, his masterwork Debt: The First 5,000 Years, an inquiry into the relationship between debt, morality, and political power, was published just a few months before Occupy Wall St. began an international conversation on much the same. In addition to authoring the book and other writings that circulated in the movement, Graeber was actively involved from the beginning of the encampment, participating in direct actions and assembly meetings, and famously coining the Occupy mantra “We Are the 99%.” In 2013, Graeber, again, struck a chord with a short article titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he batted around a few ideas about how a surprising number of jobs seem to be “utterly meaningless,” even to those working them, and speculated that this kind of work had become more widespread than is openly talked about. Within a week of its publication, the article was read by millions and translated into over a dozen languages, prompting countless responses, mostly from those  effusively agreeing with Graeber’s premise and wanting to share their own anecdotes of meaningless work. In 2018, Graeber expanded the article, and combined it with the testimonies that readers had sent him, along with some of his past writing on gendered labor, authority, bureaucracy, and imagination, into what became his most accessible and widely read book, Bullshit Jobs. Its main themes, especially his willingness to question what work is actually necessary, foreshadowed many of the discussions that took shape during the the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic as the public found itself split into essential and non-essential workers. In the years since, as droves of workers have quit their jobs in what is being called the Great Resignation, Graeber’s writing has been widely circulated in online communities like the Anti-work sub-reddit, an online forum where millions of users share stories of workplace abuses and encourage one another to quit their jobs and seek more meaningful and less exploited ways of living.

Years before, in 2005, long before Graeber amassed much of a readership, he wrote a pamphlet titled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which, maybe more than any other work, serves as a prequel to his final publication. In the pamphlet, he asks, if Anthropology is the academic field most familiar with the variety of social arrangements that have existed without structures of domination – those which have valued cooperation over competition, creativity over conformity, and autonomy over obedience – why does it, as a discipline, so rarely engage with social movements that are, sometimes rather aimlessly, trying to recreate just such conditions. Graeber concluded the pamphlet with a call for his fellow anthropologists to make common cause with social movements because, in short, “we have tools at our fingertips that could be of enormous importance for human freedom.” That same year, Yale University controversially declined to renew his teaching contract, a move that many saw as retaliation for his political affiliations. Sixteen years later, the posthumous release of The Dawn of Everything, coauthored with the archeologist David Wengrow, shows that the incident only sharpened Graeber’s resolve to actualize the kind of ‘anarchist anthropology’ his pamphlet had envisioned, and to do so in a way that could not be ignored. According to Wengrow, Graeber insisted on publishing each section of the book individually in peer reviewed journals before releasing the full compilation in order to head off any efforts to dismiss their findings. What the two present in the volume is a radically different vision of human history, an attempt to broaden our understanding of what we, as a species, have been, that is as doggedly hopeful as it is rigorously researched. 

Graeber and Wengrow set out from one of the oldest questions in the social sciences: “what is the origin of inequality?” They begin by turning the question on its head, instead asking, how is it that social theorists of 18th Century Europe came to be interested in the idea of inequality in the first place? The answer, they suggest, is simple: although Enlightenment thinking is often framed as the unique brainchild of individual European male genius, it was actually the result of an explosion of cultural exchange following first contact with the indigenous people of the Americas who had exposed Europeans to entirely different ways of thinking and living. Moreover, Indigenous intellectuals like the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk (who the authors profile at length in the second chapter), were so horrified by the hierarchy, competitiveness, and poverty permeating European culture that they leveled scathing critiques of the inequalities they witnessed.

That this indigenous critique is to thank for enlightenment debates over inequality is plain to see in the historical record. In fact there is simply “no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus,” not to mention that while most Western historians seem to overlook it, the fact is that most enlightenment figures openly “insisted that their ideas of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples.” It only makes sense that enlightenment thinkers would have come across indigenous critiques because, at the time, some of the most popular books circulating in Europe were summaries and accounts of cultural exchanges with Native Americans, usually in the form of dialogues and debates. In some of these debates, the European, often a Jesuit priest, argued at length against the idea of freedom as a virtue, a line of argument so utterly untenable by today’s standards that it is clear just how drastically indigenous thinking went on to shape the course of history.

The popularity of this indigenous critique left European pride bruised, and the authors suggest that reactionary thinkers scrambling for counter-arguments to protect their sense of superiority developed lines of thinking that have endured to the present day. The Economist A.J.R. Turgot, friend and colleague of Adam Smith, pioneered a line of argument that societies move through stages of development marked by forms of technology and subsistence that are progressively more sophisticated. Thus, the mere fact that some indigenous peoples were hunter gatherers meant that they were inferior.  Graeber and Wengrow point out that Turgot latched on to technology and forms of subsistence as central to superiority because, when it came to quality of life, wisdom, or happiness, equality, or freedom, eighteenth century Europe was in abysmal shape. But the emphasis on forms of subsistence and technological progress stuck, and eventually developed into its two most enduring forms in the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes essentially argued that indigenous people were equal only in so far as they were equally poor and stupid, that life for the so-called uncivilized was a vicious \war of all against all and modern powers vested in governments were the only thing keeping people from tearing each other apart – reasoning that remains the bedrock of conservative thought. Rousseau on the other hand, painted indigenous people as coming from a utopian state of innocence, totally unaware of inequality and un-corrupted by the kinds of inevitable technological advances, like agriculture, which had forced Europeans to lose touch with their own Eden. 

While both formulations are patently false and racist in their own unique ways, the authors note that Rousseau was not wrong in observing that something had been lost in European culture that clearly did exist among indigenous groups. Settlers, when exposed to indigenous ways of life, overwhelmingly chose to remain, or even to return after failing to re-integrate to European society. Indigenous Americans brought to European society, on the other hand, would invariably seek every opportunity to escape and return home. Even European children separated from their parents and brought to Indigenous communities would often choose to stay. But why? What was so different, so much more appealing about indigenous life? “The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting,” the authors suggest, “is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.” Our understanding of life in other times and places, and therefore our idea of what is possible for our lives here and now, is shaped by our own narrow experiences. The authors provide an example: travel routes uncovered by archaeologists. These pathways have frequently been assumed to be trade routes, an assumption that reflects a modern obsession with markets, but, in actuality, these routes served as everything from elaborate circuits traversed by healers and entertainers, to inter-village networks for women’s gambling, to long distance vision quests for individuals guided by dreams. “When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to,” the authors write, “we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.” The rest of the book, with this in mind, sets out to retell some of the most widely misunderstood stories that we have come to believe about our past and, with the help of some of the most recent archaeological discoveries, to uncover this more colorful, more imaginative, more human history. 

Some of the details the authors cover won’t be new to a student of Anthropology: medieval serfs worked significantly less hours than the modern office or factory worker, and “the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked less than that.” Such details were made widely known in the 1960’s in an essay titled The Original Affluent society by the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, who would later serve as Graeber’s thesis advisor. The authors confirm that the basic tenets of the essay have held up over time, but it too provided a limited picture of what pre-agricultural life was like. For one thing, the break between pre-agricultural and agricultural was not so clean, not the “revolution” we have been taught, but a long process of experimentation. There were sometimes thousands of years between the first examples of agriculture in a region and any kind of consistent use for subsistence purposes. The first instances of farming looked a lot more like gardening, and were carried out with little effort, often in delta regions where seasonal floods would do most of the work of tilling, fertilizing, and irrigating – such liminal farming spaces also had a sort of built in resistance to measurement, allotment, or enclosure. The first farmers in these spaces, it seems, were women, and they often grew herbs or ornamental crops rather than food staples as had once been assumed. There’s even evidence that early farmers actually worked against traditional hallmarks of plant domestication in order to avoid becoming solely dependent on their own labor to produce crops. The authors use the term “play farming” to describe this millennia long process of leisurely experimentation and learning. 

More to the point, Graeber and Wengrow want to get one thing straight – the advent of agriculture was not the revolutionary social, political, cultural catalyst it has been heralded as. There is no evolution of social forms based on subsistence mode. How a group of people obtains its food doesn’t determine how it’s politically or hierarchically structured. In fact, pre-agricultural life was not made up of roving bands of hunter gatherers, but “marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.” Similarly the authors dispel the idea that greater scale, of a city for example, necessarily results in greater hierarchy. A revelation that upends an assumption so widespread that is long been considered common sense. 

Cities populated by tens of thousands began appearing around the world roughly six thousand years ago and there is surprisingly little evidence of any kind of hierarchy among them. Neither, it seems, were they dependent on a rural population to supply their needs, but instead relied on forms of subsistence gardening, animal husbandry, fishing, and continued hunting and gathering in surrounding areas. “The first city dwellers,” the authors write, “did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other.” Graeber and Wengrow provide examples of self governing cities from regions around the world including Ukraine, Turkey, China, central Mexico, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley and others. The evidence that most of these early cities were non-hierarchically organized is so compelling the authors argue that the burden of proof is now on those trying to find evidence for hierarchy. 

Life in these early cities, the authors write, was one grand social experiment: large public works projects, public housing, elaborate city planning, monuments, temples and more, all before the widespread adoption of farming. In many of the largest early cities, the grandest projects, centrally located, elaborately adorned and monumentally constructed, appear to have been public meeting spaces, likely for citizen’s assemblies, neighborhood councils, and any number of other forms of direct democracy. In fact, popular councils and citizen’s assemblies were simply part of the fabric of life in early cities, even those civilizations that readers will be most familiar with like Sumeria, Akkadia, and other Mesopotamian cities as well as among the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines, and Israelites. “In fact,” the authors write, “it is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly – or often several assemblies … even … where traditions of monarchy ran deep.” 

In the Americas, this applies not only to pre-history, but also to relatively recent history, including the time of first contact with Europeans. Even the conquistador Hernando Cortez wrote at length about the assemblies he encountered in central Mexico, comparing it favorably to the forms of Italian democracy he was familiar with. While we tend to learn the history of the few, large-scale hierarchical empires in the Americas, like those Cortez most directly sought out, Graeber and Wengrow convincingly argue that the majority of indigenous Americans actually lived in social arrangements specifically formed in contrast to these cities, self-consciously arranged in such a way as to prevent forms of domination from emerging. The authors describe a world of constant experimentation and fluidity in the structures that did exist. Some groups, for instance, transitioned from short term rigid hierarchy during a hunting season, to total egalitarian relations during the next. The result of such fluid experimentation seems to have been a much more accepting, creative populous, where eccentricities were celebrated, and individuals could change identities, kin, even names from season to season as a a spirit of perpetual reinvention and regeneration flourished. Far from Rousseau’s naive state of innocence, the indigenous people of the Americas were keenly aware of the dangers of hierarchy and had become adept at the art of heading off any signs of individuals amassing coercive power. 

The evidence suggests that this fluidity of social forms and an avoidance of hierarchy, alien as it may now seem, was characteristic of most social life for most of human history. The authors suggest that perhaps the most guarded values common to all people were autonomy (as in, the complete freedom of the individual from domination by others) and communism (as in, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’) – one serving as the necessary precondition for the other. Far from the realm of idealistic fantasy, these were the social relations in cities of hundreds of thousands of people who self-governed for periods of thousands of years. In fact, there are periods in the archeological record of up to 500 years in which entire regions as large as “eastern North America” show remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries or other forms of interpersonal violence. For the majority of human history, throughout the majority of the world, except for islands of hierarchy, people tended to resist domination and instead live in voluntary associations of mutual support.

A book with such an inspiring reinterpretation of human possibility, written by an author who has on more than one occasion presaged social movements, is a glimmer of hope in a very dark time. As the largest protest movement in US history swept across the country, raising questions of police and prison abolition, demonstrators could have used a vote of confidence from anthropologists who are keenly aware that the kind of possibilities activists are pursuing have not only existed, but thrived for millennia at a time. Abolitionists may be heartened to read the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk’s views on the European penal system: “For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?”

As Wildcat Workers Unions, Tenant’s Unions, Citizens’ Assemblies, and Mutual Aid Networks are blossoming around the country, participants must wonder on what scale this kind of grassroots self-organization is possible. The answer, according to Graeber and Wengrow, is entire regional federations of metropolises –  as big as any hierarchical structure has ever managed and arguably with much greater success.  

What kind of a social movement could take form armed with the knowledge of the full spectrum of social forms throughout human history? Could humanity’s oldest values, autonomy and mutual-aid, flourish again? Can the violence and rot of capitalist empire really be undone? If a reader takes one thing from The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow want it to be this: nothing in history was ever predetermined. Neither Hobbes’ mindless automatons nor Rosseau’s innocent children of Eden ever existed. History is alive with self-conscious actors, constantly negotiating the conditions of their lives and with far more possible outcomes than we were ever led to believe. But more importantly, so is the present.

Nathan Albright is a building super in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His writing can also be found in The Catholic Worker newspaper and at TheFloodmag.com.

The U.S. Gives Us Hell But It’s A Liberated Africa That Can Douse the Flames

By Mark P. Fancher

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

African Liberation Day is a reminder that African descended people make progress when joined together in international unity. Internationalism is essential.

When U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007, the only thing more offensive than its use of proxy African soldiers to carry out imperialist missions was the appointment of a Black man, William E. (“Kip”) Ward, to lead AFRICOM operations.

After Ward stepped down, white men assumed leadership of AFRICOM. But now, yet again, AFRICOM will be headed by a man of African descent. Lt. Gen. Michael Langley will assume the role of training and directing the armed forces of African countries to militarize Africa and plunder the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign governments and corporations. The publication Stars and Stripes reported that for Langley “a top priority will be countering militants in the East African country of Somalia.”

The cynical use of Africans to control and exploit Africa is surpassed in its odiousness only by a willingness of Africans like Ward and Langley to engage in the enterprise. Those committed to Africa’s liberation have long been aware of the importance of ensuring that members of African communities decline such collaboration with oppressors. To that end, in 1963, the Organization of African Unity proclaimed May 25th as African Liberation Day - a day when the African World might orient itself to a serious commitment to achieving Africa’s genuine independence.

Although the commemoration of African Liberation Day throughout Africa and the African diaspora has become an ever-growing tradition, this year, in the wake of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, there are no doubt many Africans born and living in the U.S. who can’t bring themselves to think of Africa’s plight when their personal circumstances seem so precarious. If the only problems were violent white supremacists, prospects for survival might not seem so bleak. But the anti-Black hostility has manifested in so many ways that signal that help is not on the way from any of the quarters from whence Africans in America might expect it.

Specifically, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a police bullet was fired into the head of Patrick Lyoya at point-blank range making him one of the latest of a very long series of Africans killed by cops and affirming yet again that not only are Africans unable to look to the police for protection, but that the police themselves are an enemy force.

Less blatant, but no less concerning, is the U.S. government’s seeming indifference to the international dilemma of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a captive in Russia, purportedly for drug-related offenses, even as the U.S. State Department fought more efficiently and vigorously for the release of others. In fact, it took weeks for the U.S. to even acknowledge its belief that Griner had been wrongfully detained. Concern is not limited to the plight of Griner as an individual, but it is also for the unmistakable message that a U.S. government that should presumably protect its nationals can’t be counted on if the person in question is Black.

It is not surprising then that persons of African descent in the U.S. might perceive themselves to be adrift, alone, vulnerable and unprotected even by the government entities charged with keeping them safe. The perceived intensity of the danger means that calls to work for Africa’s liberation may not resonate. While this is understandable, historically, the challenges of Africa’s diaspora have not deterred engagement in internationalist service.

The list of revolutionaries who have emerged from communities under stress but who have nevertheless thrown themselves into Africa’s struggles is long. Frantz Fanon left colonized Martinique to struggle alongside those fighting for Algeria’s independence. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) physically relocated himself from the U.S. where Civil Rights and Black Power struggles raged to become a vital member of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Che Guevara was not content with his sterling service to the Cuban revolution, and he fought in Congo and ultimately Bolivia where he was captured and killed.

In fact, some of the most important internationalist service to Africa has been rendered by Cuba, even in the face of extreme pressure from not only western imperialism but also from the Soviet Union. Of Cuba’s assistance to the efforts to liberate Angola, Piero Gleijeses, a Johns Hopkins University professor explained:

“In early November 1975, as South Africans were advancing along the coast, Angola sent a desperate appeal request to Cubans for help. The military mission also told Fidel [Castro] that the Cubans had to do something, because Luanda was going to fall. On November 4, Fidel decided to send troops to Angola. The Soviet Union was miffed, because it didn’t want the Cubans to intervene. It showed its annoyance by not assisting in the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola. Until 1975 or 1976, the Cubans arrived by ship and old transport planes.”

Cuba went on to play a vital role in the liberation of Angola and the fall of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa. Cuba’s sacrifices for Africa neither began nor ended in Southern Africa. Even after its military forces withdrew from the region, they were replaced by brigades of Cuban physicians and other medical personnel deployed throughout the continent.

For Black people in America, internationalist service can be not only as noble as that rendered by forebears, but it can also be pragmatic. This is because Africans are not only a numerical minority in the U.S., but also a powerless minority. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is exploding. Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze explained that by 2050, Africa’s population will account for nearly 25 percent of the population of the planet. He said:

“In the 2040s alone, it is likely that in the order of 566 million children will be born in Africa. Around midcentury, African births will outnumber those in Asia, and Africans will constitute the largest population of people of prime working age anywhere in the world.”

It just makes good sense for Africans in the U.S. to see themselves as part of that mass of humanity. This does not even consider the potential of Africa to seize control of the continent’s natural resources and to use them for the benefit of Africans worldwide. Such global sharing and collaboration will happen more organically if the African diaspora participates not only in reaping the benefits of the power that flows from control of Africa’s natural wealth, but also in the struggle on the front end to make such control a reality.

While a united and socialist Africa, with all its resources could be a powerful social, economic and political engine for communities throughout the African diaspora, as a practical matter it would need to do nothing to impact them. The mere existence of a powerful, unified Africa would be a deterrent to every police officer inclined to kill brothers like Patrick Lyoya. When the Brittney Griners of our communities might find themselves in international predicaments, the State Department would likely turn somersaults if necessary to assist them because of the need to curry favor with a powerful Africa. In the end, Africans in America need to make Africa a primary focus of their struggles despite the many hardships and challenges presented by the U.S. It just makes good sense.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations with which he is affiliated. He can be contacted at mfancher[at]comcast.net.

A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

It is also worth tackling the Trump-era propaganda, which is double-edged. Trump supporters claimed that their hero ended America’s “forever wars,” as he “bombed the shit out of ISIS,” in his words, which often meant dumping munitions on Iraqi and Syrian women and children, while blowing Somalis to pieces via drone operators in numbers greater than during Obama’s term. It is accurate that Trump withdrew US ground forces from Somalia, though it appears to have been both an America First PR stunt and a device to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.

On the other side, the pro-war, neoliberal, anti-Trump establishment sought to portray Trump’s withdrawal of ground troops as a sign of American weakness in the face of globalized “Islamic” terrorists. By demonizing Trump and inaccurately reporting the motives of his withdrawal, the NYT, BBC and company were essentially clamoring for US militarism in Somalia: Trump bad so militarism good. And as usual, their reporting was absent of any critical or skeptical voices.

The real agenda: “acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests”

Billionaire-backed, self-appointed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, PolitiFact often rate what they call “fake news” as having “missing context,” yet mainstream state-corporate media operate almost entirely on an unspoken doctrine of propaganda-by-omission. Researchers are left to piece together the kind of coherent recent-historical narratives that MSM refuse to provide. Somalia’s “missing context” can be summarized as follows:

In 1997, the US Space Command (which is still operational, though its duties are largely second to the Space Force) committed the Pentagon to achieving “full spectrum dominance” of land, sea, air, and space by the year 2020, “to protect US interests and investment,” which means elite corporate interests. Since then, numerous oil-rich and strategically-important nations have been occupied by the US and its allies. Various Pentagon departments, including the Central Command and Africa Command, divide the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility, based on the given region and/or nation’s strategic relevance to the Pentagon. This follows Britain’s colonial model.

In the 1950s, the Colonial Office described Aden—the Gulf between Yemen and Somalia—as “an important base,” from which forces could rapidly deploy to the energy-rich Middle East. In those days, the so-called Scramble for Africa (which began in the late-19th century) was justified under the doctrine of the “white’s man burden”: the mission to civilize the backward black races, as their lands and resources were plundered.

But Somalia gained independence in 1960 before being governed by the one-time CIA-backed dictator Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to ‘91. At the time, US support for Siad—including his killing of tens of thousands of political rivals—was justified as part of American Cold War policy.

With the Cold War over and Siad deposed, successive US administrations tested new “interventionist” doctrines, the first post-Cold War ideology being humanitarian intervention. Operation Restore Hope was launched in 1992 by the outgoing George H.W. Bush administration, supposedly to provide humanitarian relief during the famine triggered by the civil war. But a Fort Leavenworth paper reveals a hidden agenda: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Under an umbrella of Islamic political parties, known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), most of them non-extremist, Somalia enjoyed a short period of peace, stability, and an increase in living standards. Branches of the UN, Amnesty International, and the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House have acknowledged that the ICU prevented “piracy,” provided schooling for large numbers of children, and reduced malnutrition.

The US and UK wage proxy war on the ICU, infiltrate the movement with Al Qaeda extremists

The attacks of 9/11 in 2001 provided the George W. Bush administration an excuse to sanction Somali banks, even though the 9/11 Commission cleared the banks of wrongdoing. Since then, Somalia has become a testing ground for the imposition of cashless societies.

Convinced that the more right-wing elements of the ICU were “al-Qaeda” fronts, the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA operated covertly in Somalia. Failing to destroy the ICU from within, the US and Britain backed an opposition government in exile comprised of Ethiopian and other warlords.

In December 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia as a US-British proxy war. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to neighboring Kenyan and Ethiopian refugee camps, while others made the perilous journey in rickety boats to Yemen. The so-called Transitional Federal Government was comprised of killers and torturers funded by the British taxpayer and given homes and citizenship in the UK. The war reversed the ICU’s social achievements and thousands starved in successive famines.

The frightening-sounding al-Shabab simply means “the Youth,” and was the young persons’ wing of the ICU. In 2007, with the non-violent ICU destroyed by a campaign of US-British terror, al-Shabab turned to violence to defend its country against Ethiopian aggressors and Somali collaborators. British intelligence agencies saw their chance to infiltrate al-Shabab with terrorists and transform it from a nationalist militia into an extremist group that could then be used as pretext for more Western aggression against Somalia. And indeed, some of the high-profile terrorists operating in Somalia post-9/11 were US-British intelligence assets.

It is well-known that the British and American militaries helped fuel the rise of what was later known as “al-Qaeda” to battle the Soviets in 1980s’ Afghanistan. One Afghanistan-based terror cell at the time was a Somali group called Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, whose leader Ahmed Abdi Godane went on to lead al-Shabab after the ICU collapsed. In London, an MI5 double agent tasked with spying on mosques tried in vain to alert his handlers to the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s main UK connection, Abu Qatada, was training and sending fighters to half a dozen Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. TIME had reported that Qatada was an asset of MI5.

A US puppet takes control in Somalia as drone war escalates

In 2010, with war still raging, US President Obama signed Executive Order 13536, describing Somalia — a country nearly 8,000 miles away with a GDP of less than $5 billion — as an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” As you wipe tears of laughter away, notice the emphasis on “foreign policy”: non-compliant regimes in Somalia might threaten total US operational freedom along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

That year, the radicalized and infiltrated al-Shabab launched its first foreign attacks (in Uganda and later Kenya), prompting regional governments to join the US in “counterterrorism” operations. A year later, drone strikes against “al-Shabab” and other groups began, killing at least 300 people by 2017; tragedies small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who died in multiple, human-made famines over the last decade.

In 2011, the group allegedly pledged allegiance to “al-Qaeda.” The 2012 election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud provided the US with a client who was described by Obama’s National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, as committed to “strengthen[ing Somalia’s] democratic institutions and promot[ing] economic development.”

By 2016, Bush and Obama had launched a total of 41 confirmed strikes largely from the US base at Camp Lemonier in neighboring Djibouti. The Shabab leader, Godane, was killed in one such strike. His replacement is supposedly named Ahmad Umar, and is a shadowy bogeyman about whom little is known.  By 2020, Trump alone had launched 40 drone strikes against Somalia, eliminating AFRICOM’s accountability protocols.

Exploiting “playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa”

We cannot say that corporate-state media do not do their job. They have successfully kept the public ignorant and deluded on virtually every geopolitical issue of significance. Nor can we say that the “war on terror” has failed (i.e., that after 20 years terror groups still operate), because it is not designed to combat terrorism. It is designed to produce an endless cycle of tit-for-tat killings and to create extremist groups where none previously existed. Permanent counterterrorism is a thin smokescreen to justify “full spectrum dominance” to the voting and taxpaying American public whose purse is plundered to fund these wars.

As we see from recent history, professed justifications for bloody US interference in impoverished Somalia shift according to the political climate: countering the Soviets until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, preventing famine under the guise of 1990s’ humanitarian intervention, stopping “pirates” as European ships plunder the starving country’s fish stocks, and, for the last two decades, fighting endless hordes of post-9/11 terrorists; many of them incubated in London by protected intelligence assets.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence recently announced that 70 personnel are training 1,000 Somalis as part of the African Union’s so-called Transition Mission in Somalia, “protecting civilians from Al Shabaab and other terrorist groups.” A more plausible reason for the ongoing US-British involvement is offered by a policy paper published last year by the European University: “Strategic areas of the western shore and the Horn of Africa are being incorporated in the Red Sea geopolitical map and Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea have become playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa.”

As excuses change, the geographies of power remain the same. These strategic interests are the real motivations for war. Ordinary people, as always, pay the price.

T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, the latest being We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus.

Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh Remind Us of the Roots of White Supremacy in the Aftermath of the Buffalo Shooting

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Substack.

On May 15th, a white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire on a Tops supermarket in Buffalo’s Black district of Kingsley, killing ten people. The massacre was immediately labeled a hate crime and liberal mainstream corporate media went to work finding easy explanations that would absolve them and their elite handlers of any wrongdoing. Democrats placed blame on the GOP for normalizing racism. GOP-aligned Fox News host Tucker Carlson was given special attention for mainstreaming the “Great Replacement Theory” that filled the pages of Gendron’s manifesto.

Indeed, white supremacy has been the GOP’s organizing principle for more than a half century. The “Great Replacement Theory” is the 21st century version of a historic trend. The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” successfully mobilized white Americans fearful of the Black movement for social justice into a formidable political bloc. Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy transformed the racist rhetoric within the Republican political establishment into a coded war on “welfare queens” and “crime.” The “Great Replacement Theory” is another iteration of white supremacist ideology which posits that Black Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and non-whites generally are invading the Anglo world in a bid to eradicate whites.

There is no doubt that the influence of far right and white supremacist ideology has played a role in the more than one hundred mass shootings that have occurred in the United States over the past several decades. A society organized to dehumanize and wage war on the masses is ultimately a society at war with itself. However, it is too simplistic to view white supremacy as a purely ideological phenomenon. White supremacy is not merely a set of ideas that, once spread, sets the stage for racist violence. This idealist conception of history strips white supremacy of its roots in the system of U.S. imperialism and simplifies its existence to a matter of moralistic virtue.

Such idealism presents only one solution to white supremacy; the marginalization or eradication of a few bad apples in Tucker Carlson and the GOP.  On May 19th, the world will celebrate the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two deceased revolutionaries who commented extensively on the roots of white supremacy. Ho Chi Minh was the first president of an independent and socialist Vietnam and arguably the most important force in that country’s struggle for liberation from colonialism. Malcolm X was one of the most important leaders of the Black liberation movement that the United States has ever known, and his influence on the political development of the global struggle for peace and self-determination remains immense.

Though Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh spent much of their lives on different hemispheres, both charted a course for liberation that was influenced by the rising prestige of Black nationalist, anti-colonial, and socialist politics. Both were internationalists who traveled the world learning and seeking solidarity from movements abroad. Ho Chi Minh traveled to New York City and worked as a dish washer while attending United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) meetings held by Marcus Garvey. Shortly before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X made his third trip to the African continent and paid visits to Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Algeria, and Tanzania. He would go on to form the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) upon his return, stating in his first public address for the new organization that the success of African nations in uniting against colonialism directly inspired his determination to organize and unite Black people in a global struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

Ho Chi Minh wrote several articles on racism and the Black condition in the United States. In his 1924 article on lynching, the Vietnamese revolutionary declared:

It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had the immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace of mankind. What everyone perhaps does not know, is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching.

Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X believed that racist violence could not be understood outside of the global struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor. Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution inspired Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism in the liberation of Vietnam from colonialism and imperialism. It was African revolutions which motivated Malcolm X to adopt an internationalist vision for Black liberation in the United States. For each, racism was not about bad apples. The entire system of imperialism was rotten and both sought to uproot it through the positive means of winning the power of the oppressed to control and manage their own societies.

This doesn’t mean that Ho Chi Minh or Malcolm X ignored ideology. Ho Chi Minh struggled intensely with the socialist parties of the Second International, opposing their chauvinistic support of “fatherland” Western governments in the First World War to the detriment of colonized people. Malcolm X outlined the key tenets of what is now called the “Great Replacement Theory” nearly sixty years ago in 1964 when he said,

During recent years there has been much talk about a population explosion. Whenever they are speaking of the population explosion, in my opinion, they are referring to the people primarily in Asia or in Africa— the black, brown, red, and yellow people. It is seen by people of the West that, as soon as the standard of living is raised in Africa and Asia, automatically the people begin to reproduce abundantly. And there has been a great deal of fear engendered by this in the minds of the people of the West, who happen to be, on this earth, a very small minority.

In fact, in most of the thinking and planning of whites in the West today, it’s easy to see that fear in their minds, conscious minds and subconscious minds, that the masses of dark people in the East, who already outnumber them, will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun the people of the West like a human sea, a human tide, a human flood. And the fear of this can be seen in the minds, and in the actions, of most of the people here in the West in practically everything that they do. It governs their political views, it governs their economic views and it governs most of their attitudes toward the present society.

But even here Malcolm X related white fears of replacement not to some unexplainable hatred but to the material reality that white Americans and Westerners were quickly losing their ability to control the destinies of oppressed peoples of the world. Malcolm X’s words have only become more relevant in the current period. The rise of socialist China has precipitated a Cold War response from imperialism that has poured gasoline on the fire of anti-Asian racism and violence. The Black struggle for self-determination has faced a severe backlash from the U.S. mass incarceration state, opening the floodgates of racist reaction. And the fact that Payton Gendron was wearing a white supremacist Black Sun symbol so commonly seen on the uniforms Nazi Azov fighters in Ukraine is no coincidence. White supremacy is a global system of social control that is directed at any person, government, or movement (Russian, Chinese, Black American, Muslim, Arab, etc.) that is perceived to threaten the domination of Euro-American imperialism.

The entire system of U.S. imperialism is thus implicated in racist violence. This includes the Democratic Party, which has for decades been wedded to a neoliberal model of governance reliant upon austerity, state repression, and war. The Republican Party is but the loudest and most ideologically influential political branch of the U.S.’s racist and imperialist system. The more that the U.S. finds itself bogged down in its own contradictions, the stronger the tide of racist reaction becomes. A true fight against white supremacy involves popular organization against the forces that gave it birth: the U.S. military state waging wars fueled by dehumanization, the two-party duopoly enacting policies that deprive oppressed people of their needs, and the economic system of capitalism robbing the earth of public wealth and ecological sustainability to enrich its corporate masters.

Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present's: The Left Lens. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link.   He is co-author of the book “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.” You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com. 

The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney. [1]

After being banned from Jamaica, Rodney settled with his family in Tanzania to teach history and political science at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. He reconnected with the socialist students he had met during his first stay in 1966. In those days, Rodney helped them establish the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). He ran their Marxist workshops and attended their anti-imperialist protests and talks. His connections brought the likes of CLR James, Stokely Carmichael and Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan to speak on USARF platforms. Upon his return in 1969, Rodney was pleased to see that the USARF had gained new members. Karim Hirji was one of them. He got Rodney to write the first article for the group’s magazine Cheche on African labour (Cheche took its name from Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. Both words mean ‘spark’–in Swahili and Russian respectively). Rodney thus continued agitating for socialism on campus as he had done in Jamaica. But the political climate was now more favourable for him, as Tanzania was the mecca of African liberation. [2]

Tanzania offered hope to Rodney and many radical black intellectuals. They believed the African diaspora’s fight for freedom and equality relied on the success of anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere and his party, the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU) opposed imperialism as few independent African states did. Nyerere gave diplomatic and material support to every national liberation movement in southern Africa. He opened offices for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and built military bases for them. He established training camps for the paramilitary wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, uMkhonto we Sizwe, to help it fight the apartheid regime in South Africa. Living in Tanzania enabled Rodney to deepen his understanding of guerrilla warfare and international solidarity. FRELIMO fighters taught him how to shoot a rifle when he visited their camps. He also met with delegations from Vietnam, then involved in the war against the United States and organised solidarity protests with the Vietnamese on campus.

When Rodney first visited Tanzania in 1966, he witnessed Nyerere publish his program for socialism and self-reliance, the Arusha Declaration. The president had turned his African socialist philosophy known as Ujamaa—familyhood—into a policy of nationalisation of foreign companies and land reform. He aspired to increase food production through the creation of Ujamaa villages based on collective farming. Africans no longer had to rely on volatile cash crops and aid from advanced capitalist nations to make a living. Nyerere was confident that his plan suited the interest of the peasant majority. But he had yet to convince the minuscule educated elite, made up of students and state officials, to help the peasants. Back in 1964, some elitist students had shown Nyerere their disdain for work in the countryside when they protested against compulsory national service. Afterwards, Nyerere vowed to turn the university into a battleground for his progressive ideas. [3]

By 1970, Rodney stood at the heart of the debates concerning African underdevelopment that occurred almost every night at the University. In the packed auditorium, Rodney debated a TANU Cabinet Minister on Tanzania’s economic direction. He also debated the renowned Kenyan political science professor, Ali Mazuri, on why Africa should be socialist, not capitalist. His ideas, however, did not always please Nyerere. The president replied with anger to an article Rodney published in TANU’s newspaper, which argued that African leaders who served western capitalism deserved to be overthrown by the people. Nyerere disagreed and accused him of preaching violence to young people. The regime set limits on how left-wing students and academics could be. A few months later, it banned the USARF for promoting “foreign ideology”. [4]

The ban did not change Rodney’s respect for Nyerere, nor did it discourage him from sharing his radical Marxist ideas with students. He taught a graduate course on the Russian Revolution to show his African students that they could draw lessons for their own struggle from October 1917. He made parallels between present-day Tanzania and Tsarist Russia, which both had a large peasantry and a small working class. Rodney praised the Russian Revolution as the first break with capitalism, transforming the once mainly agrarian country into an industrial power in its aftermath. Bourgeois historians, he argued, sought to discredit October 1917 because it represented the victory of organised workers allied with peasants over their class. [5]

Rodney had begun a monograph on the Russian Revolution in 1971, but he never finished it because he had more urgent matters at hand. He wanted to use Marxist theory to address the issue of African underdevelopment.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney’s involvement in debates concerning African underdevelopment in Tanzania inspired him to write his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was concerned that most African nations had not broken ties with the old colonial powers in the decade after colonialism. They had achieved political independence, but their economies remained in the hands of European and American companies. They remained poor and reliant on foreign aid because the Western ruling class stole their natural wealth (land, oil etc.) for its benefit, with help from African leaders who served them. Yet, many African intellectuals still believed that trade deals, loans and investment from advanced capitalist countries would benefit African development. Rodney sought to convince them to the contrary.

His book, published in 1972, revealed that European intervention in Africa, through the slave trade and colonialism, stifled African development. It told how the European ruling class robbed Africa of its wealth, which contributed to Europe’s prosperity and industrial growth. Rodney examined Africa’s relationship with Europe from 1500 to 1960 to elucidate the present. He opened the preface with his message for the future: “African development is only possible on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system” which had underdeveloped Africa for centuries. [6]

Rodney’s skilful use of Marx’s historical method in his book uprooted Africa from the colonial myths surrounding its past. In Chapter One, Rodney dismantled the racist idea that Africa stood outside progress by defining development as a universal and multifaceted process. As Marx and Engels did before him, he understood development as being rooted in how human beings cooperate to provide the necessities of life out of nature. He explained that when people found better ways to produce wealth by working together, they developed new forms of cooperation, new ideas and changed the form of their society. Rodney showed a sophisticated understanding of development, arguing that it did not unfold as a linear process but rather was uneven across continents and regions, as sometimes the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. [7]

Rodney dedicated the second chapter to portraying Africa’s development before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. Far from being outside of progress, Africa displayed formidable advances in agriculture, science, and art. Most societies at the time were small classless ones with low levels of production, where people had equal access to land and evenly shared resources. Africa, however, developed more hierarchical societies that resembled Europe’s feudal states in places like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In these unequal societies, a ruling class owned the land and appropriated the surplus created by the exploited peasants. Rodney argued that underdevelopment was never the absence of development. It was not inherent to Africa and its people, but the historical consequence of capitalist expansion and imperialism. [8]

By the 16th century, Europe developed at a faster pace than Africa and the rest of the world, transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney argued that European powers demonstrated their superiority in maritime and armaments technology. They opened West Africa for trade with their ships and canons and transformed it into a supplier of slaves for their plantations in America and the Caribbean. In the third and fourth chapter, Rodney explored the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade on African development by engaging in the debate concerning the number of African captives. He opposed Philip Curtin’s tally that counted only 10 million enslaved from 1500 to 1870. “Because it is a low figure it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality”. [9] Rodney explained that Curtin’s toll failed to measure the whole tragedy because it only relied on records of slaves’ arrivals in America. The number of victims went far beyond 10 million, as some captives were smuggled, and millions more never left Africa. They died in the wars fought over slaves and more captives perished during the long journeys from the interior of Africa to the coast as well as the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ the journey across the Atlantic.

After he established the horrific magnitude of the slave trade, Rodney explained how it underdeveloped Africa. He showed that the trade stunted Africa’s demographic growth. As European powers kidnapped able young men and women, Africa lost those of childbearing age who performed the most arduous tasks on the land. With fewer people at hand, many African societies struggled to harness nature and develop. Moreover, Rodney argued that Europe’s demand for slaves made slave raiding and wars commonplace in West Africa. Societies that had hitherto coexisted in peace now turned on each other to acquire more slaves. Violence instilled fear and insecurity among Africans. It disrupted the organisation of agriculture, mining, and commerce that they had established over centuries. It destroyed crops and artisanal trade turning farmers into soldiers, and soldiers into slaves. This disruption of farming and trade even impeded the development of African regions that were not involved in the slave trade.

While the slave trade stalled and reversed African development, it contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Rodney demonstrated that the slave trade generated enormous profits for the Portuguese, British and French empires, making fortunes for countless bourgeois merchants and plantation owners. Its wealth and magnitude gave rise to the infamous ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux. He explained how the profits and goods accrued from the exploitation of African slaves in the New World fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. A century ago, Karl Marx had made the same point when he wrote, “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry”. [10] At the end of chapter four, Rodney explained how colonialism emerged out of the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late 19th century. Rivalries between European capitalist firms assumed the form of a competition between nation-states for control over the world’s markets, natural resources and trade routes. Africa, which had been weakened from centuries of slave trading, fell victim to Europe’s violent colonial conquest. European ruling classes justified this conquest with racist ideology, as they claimed to be civilising savage people by converting them to Christianity. Thus, by 1900, they had divided the entire African continent into colonies. [11]

In the fifth chapter, Rodney analysed colonialism (1885-1960) as a cruel and exploitative system, whereby the European bourgeoisie extracted wealth from African workers and peasants. He assessed the oppression and suffering of African workers at the hands of the colonial state. The state ensured that Africans often worked under forced labour, while their European counterparts could freely sell their labour. Even those Africans who were able to choose their employer received miserable wages for endless hours of work. Colonial rule was even worse for the African peasant. Rodney showed how the colonial state confiscated their land through severe taxation, evictions, and warfare. It forced some peasants to abandon food production for export crops that were sold cheap. Moreover, peasants suffered at the hands of trading companies and their middlemen who offered miserable prices. Rodney, however, did not simply illustrate the horrors of colonialism. He provided case studies of multinational companies, like Unilever, and the enormous profits they acquired from robbing Africans. Moreover, he described how Africa’s contribution to capitalism went beyond monetary returns. Its raw materials supported Europe’s advancement in electronics, metallurgy and chemistry and other industries, which stood at the centre of Europe’s capitalist development in the 20th century. [12]

In the final chapter, Rodney attacked the racist idea that colonialism had benefits for Africans because the colonisers built railroads, schools and hospitals. All the roads and railways, he said, went from the plantations and mines to the coast to ship raw materials to Europe, never to encourage trade between different regions of Africa. The infrastructure that colonialists built served to entrench Africa’s unfavourable position in the world economy, as a precarious supplier of raw materials and a free market for European finished products. The colonialists had no interest in providing health care and education to Africans. Rodney established the grim tally of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation:

The Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in Eastern Angola was less than thirty years. [13]

Rodney’s historical account received support from Tanzania’s radical socialist minister A M Babu who clarified Africa’s present predicament in the postscript. “Foreign investment”, the minister wrote, “is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.” [14] Investment went into projects designed to exploit African labour and raw materials for the benefit of the Western ruling class, never into health care and education. At best, foreign investment made fortunes for the few African leaders and businessmen, who partnered with western states and multinationals. But it failed to uplift the masses from poverty. Babu and Rodney advocated a revolutionary path to development, aimed at breaking Africa’s dependence on imperialist powers and empowering the workers and peasants. What would that path look like? Initially, Rodney thought that Nyerere’s socialism offered an answer to that question.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board.

Notes

1. Karim Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Mkuki Na Nyota, 2017).

2. Karim Hirji, Karim, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine. (African Books Collective, 2010), p.29.

3. See Mattavous, Viola, 1985, “Walter Rodney and Africa”, Journal of Black Studies, pp. 115-130. and Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010) pp.351-362.

4. Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

5. Rodney, 2018, p.76.

6. Walter Rodney, 2012, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town, 2012), p.xi.

7. Rodney did not see development as a linear process. Although it was a general trend, it was uneven across continents and regions. As sometimes, the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. See Rodney, 2012, pp.7-10. For Marx’s historical materialist method, see Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) pp.42-60.

8. Rodney, 2012, pp.3-70.

9. Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

10. Karl Marx, Karl, Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1846).

11. Rodney, 2012, pp.75-145.

12. Rodney, 2012, pp.149-201.

13. Rodney, 2012, p.206.

14. Rodney, 2012, p.284.

Toward a Third Reconstruction: Lessons From the Past for a Socialist Future

By Eugene Puryear

“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

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 relation 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. Availablehere.
[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.
[8] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 651.
[9] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 179.
[10] Magnunsson, Martin. (2007). “No rights which the white man is bound to respect”: The Dred Scott decision. American Constitution Society Blogs, March 19. Availablehere.
[11] Foner,Reconstruction, 355.
[12] Rabinowitz, Howard N. (Ed.) (1982).Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era(Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 106-107.
[13] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 150.
[14] Foner,Reconstruction, 356-357.
[15] Ibid., 362-363.
[16] Facing History and Ourselves. (2022). “The Reconstruction era and the fragility of democracy.” Availablehere.
[17] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 183-184.
[18] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 441.
[19] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 160.
[20] Foner,Reconstruction, 283-285.
[21] Ibid., 282-283.
[22] Ibid., 282.
[23] Ibid., 291.
[24] Lynch, John R. (1919).The facts of Reconstruction(New York: The Neale Publishing Company), ch. 4. Availablehere.
[25] Foner,Reconstruction, 380.
[26] Ibid., 382.
[27] Rabinowitz,Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction Era, 73.
[28] Foner,Reconstruction, 381.
[29] Ibid., 391.
[30] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 407-408.
[31] Rabinowitz,Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era, 291-294.
[32] Foner,Reconstruction, 374.
[33] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 601.
[34] Foner,Reconstruction, 375.
[35] Ibid., 376.
[36] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 603.
[37] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 247.
[38] Foner,Reconstruction, 377-378.
[39] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 581.
[40] Foner,Reconstruction, 415-416.
[41] Ibid., 478.
[42] 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.
[43] Foner,Reconstruction, 328.
[44] Cox Richardson,The death of Reconstruction, 86-88; Foner,Reconstruction, 518-519.
[45] Cox Richardson,The death of Reconstruction, 88.
[46] Ibid., 94.
[47] Ibid., 96.
[48] Ibid., 97.
[49] Lynch,The facts of Reconstruction, ch. 8. Availablehere.
[50] Foner,Reconstruction, 558-560.
[51] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 330-331.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 353.
[54] Populist Party Platform. (1892). Availablehere.
[55] Ali, Omar. (2005). “Independent Black voices from the late 19th century: Black Populists and the struggle against the southern Democracy,”Souls7, no. 2: 4-18.
[56] Ali, Omar. (2010).In the lion’s mouth: Black Populism in the new South, 1886-1900(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 136.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., 140.
[60] Ibid., 141.
[61]The Charlotte Observer.(1898). “Editorial,” November 17.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

Liberation School's new book Revolutionary Education is edited by Nino Brown.

Capital was a formidable book from the moment it was published in 1867. In an attempt to make the content more accessible, Capital's first French publisher published the book in multiple pieces.

Karl Marx wrote to the publisher and commended him for the new teaching method used to present Capital. "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial," he wrote. "In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

The first three chapters, however, had a unique structure that were harder to understand split apart. Despite this tradeoff, Marx approved of the approach since the most important metric for him was whether people would understand his analysis of capitalism.

So as in 1872, so today: Socialism must be understood to be accepted. Socialism is a system where the working class wields control over the productive forces of society, and the economy is planned in a scientific manner according to the needs of the people and planet. Socialism unleashes the potential of the highest creativity and flowering of the working class.

Although the demonization in recent years has faded, socialism remains a badly-misunderstood topic. Teaching, therefore, is a critical skill that socialist organizers can and must hone and master.  Different situations calls for different teaching methods, or pedagogies. How do we know which method to use? How do we improve our own efficacy in presenting information? 

Liberation School's fresh book, Revolutionary Education: Teaching and practice for socialist organizers, explores these questions from the viewpoints of history, theory, and practice. Edited by Nino Brown, the book compiles essays from educators, organizers, and journalists on revolutionary education and socialist educational methods.

Brown explains in his essay on building organizations and developing cadre that organizers have much to learn from the suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over the world. "We are all linked by our common oppression under imperialism," he writes. The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. To do that, socialists need to make more revolutionaries.

How do socialists win people over? Socialists are actually in the most favorable moment for socialists in the U.S. in decades. Organizer Walter Smolarek explains that organizers have the opportunity to make connections with working people and build a base of support through different tactics, including provisioning direct services.

Provisioning direct services, commonly referred to as "mutual aid", can be a way to make inroads with communities. Even an inherently nonrevolutionary activity can be used as an opening to bring people into the political struggle for socialism, but the tactic itself cannot be confused with the strategy. When a current approach does not work, organizers must recalculate and find new tactics to reach people.

The goal of Revolutionary Education, after all, is the emancipation of humankind.

Guinea-Bissau's struggle for independence led by the liberator, theorist, and educator Amilcar Cabral is one such example.

Curry Mallot traces the history of how the small west African country became a world leader in decolonial education, in large part due to the leadership of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. For more than 400 years Guinea-Bissau was a colony of the vicious Portuguese empire, Mallot writes, whose colonial mode of education was "designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth." Colonial educators set predetermined outcomes sought to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects.

Militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges, the child of Cape Verdean immigrants, grew up in Portugal. Vaz Borges experienced firsthand the colonial education taught to the African diaspora in the colonial center. In an interview with Breaking the Chains, she recounts how the African community "does not see themselves reflected in official versions of Portuguese history." Political education is not abstract.

Socialists must be able to explain the class character of all events. Organizers know socialist revolution is the only path to survival, yet how do we convince others of its necessity? Revolutionary teaching has to give the person all of the keys needed to be able to interpret events. "Every event has an origin and a process of development," explains Frank González, director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in a 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva.

Television overwhelms us with images, González notes, but the same media denies space to interpret events. The development of social media has only exacerbated these effects. In the end, bourgeois media leaves people with nothing but confusion.

In a separate essay, Mallott explores Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ground-breaking work that shows how people's development corresponds to their past and present experiences. Thought emerges from engagement with the concrete world. "While all of us have been shaped by this racist, sexist, capitalist society," Mallott writes, "we never lose the ability to grow, change and think differently."

Intelligence is an attribute but also a social construct. How do you tell children facing hunger, homelessness, and police brutality to be more "gritty", when in fact they already put in tremendous effort to survive? Organizer Jane Cutter in her essay on comradeship emphasizes that all progressive people must be willing to learn from experience and work in collaboration. 

Revolutionary Education closes with two practical appendices for day-to-day organizing. "Formulating study and discussion questions" explains how to break out of a linear mode of education. The sample questions are in and of themselves instructive for the tactics they represent in addition to the thought that they provoke. Learning facts and timelines goes hand-in-hand with discussion with others, reflection on ideas and combining those with our own experiences.

Comprehension questions, for example, help distill dense texts down to their key points. Questions that focus on the identification of significance help people understand why the author themselves highlighted portions as key. For revolutionaries, perhaps the most important types of questions are those that apply and extend our knowledge of the world. How can revolutionary pedagogy sharpen our ability to educate and reach people?

The second appendix covers teaching tactics that can be applied in study groups or classrooms. Some material is best presented in a lecture form, while other situations call for more interactive engagement through having participants draw out concept maps.

How do we best reach people? How do we make sure that our message is getting across? Each situation calls for its own tactics. Revolutionaries must be flexible and adaptable according to the needs of the moment. Learning is an endeavor that requires effort on the part of both participant and teacher.

Marx closes his 1872 letter with an encouragement to work through such difficulties. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

Those in the struggle for socialism will find in Revolutionary Education a worthy climbing tool indeed.

Patricia Gorky co-hosted the podcast Reading Capital with Comrades.

Blows Against Empire—2021 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

2021 was marked, from start to finish, as a year dominated by the pandemic and its attendant dramas, including vaccination, variants, and lockdowns. When the prior year had come to a close, journalists and writers had described 2020 as the “plague year” or the “lost year.” Although 2020 was defined by the onset of the pandemic and over two million deaths attributed to COVID-19, this was nothing compared to the all-encompassing, inescapable pall that COVID cast over the year 2021.

The pandemic has dealt a particularly heavy blow to residents of the world’s greatest imperialist power, where over 880,000 US citizens have perished. The country’s failure to care for the well being of its people — particularly when juxtaposed with the success of China, where about 875,000 fewer deaths have been attributed to the novel coronavirus — laid bare the futility of capitalism and individualism when faced with crisis. The parallels with global climate catastrophe are impossible to ignore.

From January 1, 2021, until the final day of the year, powerful blows reigned down on the global imperial superstructure captained by the US, leading in tow its Western European vassal states and junior partners including Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Colombia, India and the UK.

January 6: If any one event marks the end of the unipolar world led by the US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the cringeworthy storming of the US Capitol, incited by Donald Trump and carried out by farcical supporters united by their belief that the US presidential election was a fraud.

“Trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other US leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf — and that was before the embarrassment of the failed uprising exposed the fragility of the US capitalist regime.

Contrary to the mainstream media narrative, over half of those arrested for involvement in the January 6 insurrection were “business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.”

January 19: On his very last day in office, disgraced President Trump labels China’s treatment of Xinjiang’s Uighur community as a “genocide.” The laughable claim is promptly echoed by mainstream/imperialist media. A month later, Canada’s parliament voted to second the motion, cementing its status as fawning minion to the US war machine. These claims were particularly ironic as Canada, like the US, is a nation founded on actual genocide.

January 28: The GameStop scandal went viral and many learned firsthand that capitalism was a giant Ponzi scheme designed to plunder their savings.

March 7: A death blow was dealt to Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime, one of the US’ largest and most compliant vassals, as former President Lula was acquitted of all charges related to the Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) lawfare scheme which had imprisoned him for 580 days. The failure of the maneuver exposed the similar proceedings against his successor, Dilma Rousseff, as a fraud, and later in the year the White House admitted the nefarious role it played in using paralegal means — also known as lawfare — to overthrow Brazil’s progressive governments and replace them with the neo-fascist Bolsonaro, whose popularity continued to bottom out through the course of the year.

March 13: The 99% rejoiced as fugitive former Bolivian dictatress Jeanine Áñez was discovered hiding under a bed and arrested by the democratically elected government of Luis Arce, committed to restoring order in Bolivia and serving justice to Áñez’s US-backed coup regime.

April 28: The gigantic paro nacional [national strike] broke out across US client state Colombia. A neoliberal austerity package passed by the Duque regime set off the mobilizations. The package would have seen Colombia bowing to IMF pressure with a swath of proposed “reforms” that increased taxes on the most vulnerable, accelerated privatization of healthcare, increased student tuition fees, and allowed for a 10-year wage freeze. The national strike was met with brutal force, dozens were killed and thousands arrested.

The immensity of the revolt led to working-class victories including “the withdrawal of the tax package, the sinking of the privatizing health project, the extension of the zero tuition to students of stratum 3, the unanimous international condemnation against the insane wave of police-paramilitary repression of the regime, the forced resignation of the ministers of finance and foreign affairs — representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie — and a parliamentary trial of the minister of war,” as detailed by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

May 14: Amid the genocidal war on Palestine waged by the apartheid state, Hamas missiles pierced the so-called Iron Dome defense system. The vaunted missile defense system, funded by billions of dollars from the US and the apartheid state, proved to be an overpriced lemon, like so many other US weapons of war, as Gaza rose to the defense of Palestinians in the West Bank, on the other side of their divided nation. The militant solidarity shown by Gaza, and its ensuing sacrifice when civilian dwellings were subsequently levelled by the apartheid state, will be remembered as a turning point in the long journey towards a free Palestine.

May 26: President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected by the Syrian people, receiving 78% of the vote. “Supporters of the president took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands as the results were publicized, celebrating what they saw as a repudiation of violence and a step forward for the beleaguered nation,” wrote Mnar Adley for MintPress News. Celebrations in Damascus put the lie to claims by the empire ruled from DC regarding Assad’s supposed lack of popular support.

May 29: A chilling reminder that Canada was founded on the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land was unearthed in Kamloops, BC. A mass grave of 215 children, whose deaths were undocumented, was found at an Indigenous children’s concentration camp — euphemistically called “residential school” — after years of denial that such sites existed.

“We hear from residential school survivors who tell you of these things happening, of mass graves existing, and everybody always denies that those stories are true,” said Arlen Dumas, grand chief of Manitoba’s Assembly of Chiefs. “Well, here’s one example… there will be more.”

Sure enough, mass graves continued to be unearthed throughout 2021. The last Canadian “residential school” closed in 1996, and between 6,000 to 50,000 children are estimated to have been murdered in the concentration camps for Indigenous children.

June 6: Pedro Castillo, presidential candidate of Peru’s Marxist Peru Libre party, rose from virtual obscurity to defeat the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, convicted in 2008 of crimes against humanity. Castillo named staunch left-wing revolutionary Héctor Béjar as his foreign minister, who re-established diplomatic relations with Venezuela (made official on October 16), bringing an end to the Canada-led “regime”-change operation The Lima Group. Béjar referred to The Lima Group as “the most disastrous thing” Peru had ever done in the field of foreign relations.

June 24: The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World convened in Caracas, Venezuela, to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the decisive victory by Venezuelan troops, led by Simón Bolívar, over Spanish imperialism. Delegates from 123 countries attended the Congress, lauded as an “anti-imperialist and internationalist space for dialogue with social movements.”

June 24: Yet another powerful symbol of the crumbling foundations of the empire ruled from DC, a building collapse in Miami, Florida, left 98 people dead. Only four survived the sudden disintegration of the 12-story beachfront condominium, one of the deadliest residential building collapses in modern history. Rescue operations went on for two weeks. With each passing day, monotonous news items covered the rescue operations, effectively delaying the announcement of the death toll until few were paying attention anymore.

June 28: Russia and China announced the renewal of their 20-year long mutual cooperation pact. “The two sides agreed to continue maintaining close high-level exchanges, strengthening vaccine cooperation, expanding bilateral trade, and expanding cooperation in low-carbon energy, digital economy, agriculture and other fields and promote the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union,” reported Xinhua. The midsummer event was another milestone in the death march of the unipolar world.

July 1: The Communist Party of China celebrated 100 years since its founding. During that span, the CPC has lifted 850,000 people out of extreme poverty, according to the DC-based World Bank.

July 6: Honduras’ highest court found Roberto David Castillo guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated land defender and activist Berta Cáceres. Castillo was a graduate of the West Point US Military Academy in New York state. COPINH, the organization founded by Cáceres, hailed the verdict as a “people’s victory for justice for Berta; a step towards breaking the pact of impunity.” In addition, COPINH hoped that the conviction would open the door to “bringing the masterminds behind the crime to justice,” members of Honduras’ family of billionaires, the Atalas.

July 6: The dictator Jovenel Moïse, who dissolved parliament and ruled Ayiti (Haiti) by decree beyond the term of his mandate, was assassinated by a team of Colombian paramilitaries contracted by a Florida-based firm. Ayiti had been racked by waves of mass protests and general strikes almost continually since 2018, when Venezuela was forced to suspend the Petrocaribe program due to US economic sanctions on Venezuela’s national petroleum company PDVSA. Petrocaribe had provided cheap fuel to Ayiti in exchange for deferred payment. These deferred funds, earmarked for social programs, were instead pocketed by Moïse’s administration. Demonstrators demanded his resignation and a proper election in which Fanmi Lavalas could fully participate. The Moïse regime was propped up by the de facto ruling cartel, the Core Group including the US, Brazil, and Canada.

August 13: The Mexico Talks, a dialogue between Venezuela’s government and the opposition, began in Mexico City. To its great ire, the US was excluded from the process. Both parties signed a memorandum demanding an end to the economic blockade imposed on Venezuela by the empire ruled from DC.

August 15: With the US hastening its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took the capital Kabul and overthrew the US puppet government. Videos filmed at Kabul airport the next day went viral, capturing the hysteria of the fleeing US forces and their supporters. At least five people died in the panic, while about 200,000 Afghans were directly killed by the failed invasion and 20-year long occupation, led by the empire ruled from DC.

September 16: Working in tandem, the resistance forces of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah break the imperial siege on Lebanon, delivering much-needed Iranian fuel. The courageous operation exposed the permeable nature of illegal US and EU “sanctions,” which had triggered shortages, fuel scarcity, inflation, and a deadly economic crisis in Lebanon.

September 16: Thumbing his nose at the empire, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invited his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as guest of honor for Mexico’s independence day celebrations. AMLO used the opportunity to reiterate his calls for an end to the 61-year-long US economic blockade of Cuba.

November 7: Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista revolution that defeated the US-backed Somoza dictatorship and overcame the subsequent counter-revolutionary assault of the US-funded and trained Contra paramilitaries, was re-elected as president of Nicaragua. The result came as no surprise because Ortega has presided over a broadening of social programs and a strong Nicaraguan economy since his return to power in 2007. “The Nicaraguan people believe in their government and their electoral system,” wrote electoral monitor Dan Kovalik. “And one of the things they believe in is the government’s right, and indeed duty, to protect the country and its sovereignty from outside intervention, and in particular the incessant intervention by the US, which has been interfering in Nicaragua — often through local quislings — in quite destructive ways for over a century.”

In 2021 the rabid mainstream media assault on Nicaragua’s democracy accused Ortega of jailing his opponents, after a court order prevented Cristiana Chamorro from running due to illegal foreign campaign contributions. Chamorro’s NGO received over $6 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2015, more than half of which went to influencing the 2021 elections.

November 15: Heavily publicized in Western media, this day was supposed to see a great popular uprising in Cuba, a supposed resurgence of the protests that had shaken the nation in early July, when Cuba suffered its worst COVID-19 problems.

“The nationwide ‘Marches for Change’ was scheduled for November 15,” wrote Ted Snider. “The Biden administration endorsed the demonstrations. So did Congress: on November 3, the House of Representatives voted 382–40 — and you thought they couldn’t agree on anything — for a resolution declaring ‘strong solidarity’ with ‘courageous Cuban men, women, and youth taking to the streets in cities and towns across the country.’ What the media and the government doesn’t want to tell you is that, once again, it didn’t happen.” The non-event was dubbed #15Nada.

November 21: Venezuela’s violent opposition returned to the political fray for the country’s regional and municipal “mega”-elections. These were carried out in relative peace, without any credible allegations of fraud, by Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed electoral system. The results were a sweeping victory for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The PSUV captured 19 of 23 state governorships (including the capital district), and 213 of 325 mayoralties.

November 29: Perhaps the most inspiring and surprising of the year’s significant electoral victories, in Honduras Xiomara Castro unseated US-backed narco-dictator President Juan Orlando Hernández. Castro is representative of the rising anti-imperialist political forces in Latin America. Her husband, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by the Honduran military — with Hillary Clinton’s blessing — in 2009, after he promised to convoke a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution, raise the minimum wage, and join the ALBA-TCP regional alliance founded by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in 2004.

December 9: Nicaragua resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, recognizing the One China principle and the sovereignty of China in Taiwan. Nicaragua thus ceased to consider Taiwan as a country and severed all contact and official relationship with Taipei. This expands the scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America and at the same time diminishes US imperial authority in the region.

2021 was marked by a series of embarrassments and defeats for the empire ruled from DC, the decisive end of US hegemony, and the birth of a new multipolar world, which promises to continue asserting itself in the face of informational and military assault throughout 2022 and beyond.

This item was originally published on January 23, 2021 by Orinoco Tribune

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Revolution in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

By Atlee McFellin

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” [1]  His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented.  To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. [2] Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”  That “new middle class” is not the “irreversible feature of the system” he thought it would be though.  Despite his misplaced optimism, rather than an electoral path to socialism, Harrington argued for the proliferation of “little republics” across the so-called USA, looking to Antonio Gramsci on a cross-class “historic bloc” and the Paris Commune of 1871. [3]

This Paris Commune was catalyzed in defense against an outside force invading the city to restore the power of a monarch, a dictator supposedly appointed by god.  The commune in Paris sprung from socialist clubs that had formed throughout the city, and where feminists had been building internal systems of mutual aid for decades. [4] They learned from a similar experience during the decline and fall of the republic twenty years earlier.  Marx referred to those socialist clubs in 1851 as “constituent assemblies” constituting a “proletarian commune” to sustain general strikes as a systemic alternative during that republic’s fall to dictatorship. [5] Back then though, the left remained dependent on electoral approaches until it was too late.  Twenty years would pass before that dictator was overthrown and the Paris Commune of 1871 was born.

When it came to the German left against Hitler and the Nazis, Harrington criticized socialist strategy that solely relied on the republic and its supposed capacity for managed capitalist development.  Throughout Germany there were also autonomous councils in communities and workplaces, formed by people in both the socialist and communist parties who rejected orthodoxy in recognition of the threat posed by fascism.  Though these councils were identical to the socialist clubs in France, they also looked to the successful 1917 revolution in Russia, similarly catalyzed in defense against violent forces who sought to restore the power of a monarch. 

 Against the Nazis and using the Russian word for council, this approach was best described as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany,” socialist clubs as dual power with inherent mutual aid to sustain general strikes as another republic declined and fell. [6] Harrington never wrote on this particular commune against Nazi fascism, but whether it is a little republic, soviet, assembly, council, or socialist club, they were all meant as systemic alternative, dual power in the midst of crisis.  

But this is just European history.  No matter how important it is to learn from these past struggles, our fight against resurgent fascism is taking place in the settler colony known as the USA.  However, we can relate these European movements to historical forms of Black abolitionist mutual aid, communes, and the solidarity economy along with contemporary queer, feminist, Indigenous perspectives on communal resistance.  

Going back to at least 1780, Black communities in both the north and south pooled resources, financial and otherwise, democratically deciding how to sustain the movement for abolition, most often led by women.  In some cases, this resulted in the formation of rural communes for raids on slave plantations.  Over time and up to the first decades of the twentieth century, “mutual aid societies” spread across the country.  These democratic organizations operated their own internal solidarity funds so members could support one another and from which the nation’s first Black church, first Black labor union, and first movement for Black reparations were born. [7]  They were like European socialist clubs, but far more sophisticated.

This important yet still largely hidden history informed Ella Baker’s work running the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League from 1930-1933.  As a chapter-based organization, each would first form a council made up of young Black leaders.  These councils sought to identify what critical infrastructure was needed in the community to then learn enough about cooperative development and solidarity economics to turn those ideas into reality. [8] Importantly, many of these chapters were located in the Jim Crow south.  The YNCL practiced a socialist strategy meant to help communities survive conditions of racial segregation and white supremacist violence, conditions that inspired Hitler himself. [9]

Hitler was also inspired by the genocidal origins of the USA, the “cult of the covenant” at the core of our settler colonialism. [10]  As such, Nazi fascism sought Lebensraum or “living space” in pursuit of their own version of the American Dream as “summons to empire” for war and holocaust. [11]  Though fighting for bread and butter issues is imperative, especially in these times of profound crisis, the dream of universal middle classes masks a genocidal settler nightmare.  The actual alternative to resurgent fascism is not a more inclusive settler colony, but the proliferation of communal societies like what has repeatedly emerged from within sites of Indigenous resistance like Standing Rock, i.e. “caretaking relations, not American dreaming.” [12]

Constant warnings of constitutional crisis means that defeating fascism at the ballot box is essential, but also fundamentally insufficient for the cause of multi-racial democracy and socialism.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 could lead us down the path of a possible quasi-constitutional fascist coup.  Without our own systemic alternative as dual power rooted in mutual aid and the solidarity economy, including to sustain an uprising, we could again be dependent upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military to supposedly save democracy in a “color revolution” inspired by the CIA. [13]  Instead of repeating the mistakes made as other republics declined and fell, we have the chance to build an alternative as communes of resistance in process of formation from the midst of crisis. 

References

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303 ; Ibid, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Verso Press, 2019).

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, (New York: Macmillan Press LTD, 1976). P. 208-215 ; Ibid, Socialism: Past and Future, (New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1989). P. 53-59.

 Ibid, 275-277.

Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24-26 and 130.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, (New York: International Publishers, 2018). P. 83 and 98-99.

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 175.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). P. 27-47.

Ibid, 112-125.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). P. 86-88.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 13-14, 28, and 325.

Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289. ; Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 24-38.

Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava, “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” The Intercept, August 11th, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/08/11/trump-november-2020-election/

South Korean Dictator Dies, Western Media Resurrects a Myth

By K. J. Noh

General Chun Doo Hwan was the corrupt military dictator that ruled Korea from 1979-1988, before handing off the presidency to his co-conspirator General Roh Tae Woo.  Chun took power in a coup in 1979, and during his presidency he perpetrated the largest massacre of Korean civilians since the Korean war. He died on November 23rd, in pampered, sybaritic luxury, impenitent and arrogant to the very last breath.  

Many western media outlets have written censorious, chest-beating accounts of his despotic governance and the massacres he perpetrated (here, here, here, and here)-- something they rarely bothered to do when he was actively perpetrating them in broad daylight before their eyes.  Like the light from a distant galaxy--or some strange journalistic time capsule--only after death, decades later, do "human rights violations" in South Korea burst out of radio silence and become newsworthy.

Better late than never, better faint than silent, better partial than absent, one could argue.  Still all of them miss out on key facts, spread lies through omission.  A key dimension of Korean history and politics looks to be buried with his death. A little background history is necessary to elucidate this.

The Sorrows of the Emperor-Dictator

The imperial president, Park Chung Hee

Chun's predecessor and patron, the aging South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, had ruled the country as an absolute totalitarian despot for 18 years, but he knew in his bones that his days were numbered. He had survived two violent assassination attempts, mass civil protests, and even opprobrium from his American puppet masters, despite serving them loyally by sending 320,000 South Korean troops to Vietnam. Even Park's closest advisors were worried about the fragility of his rule.

Park Chung Hee had been a former Japanese military collaborator during Japan’s colonization of Korea. A US-installed puppet Syngman Rhee had smashed socialism in the South through genocide--a method later to be replicated in Indonesia's "Jakarta method".

Park Chung Hee (in Sunglasses) and Cha Ji Chul (right; in camo), 1961 during their coup.

But the puppet-genocidaire Rhee was in turn toppled by student protests in 1960, and the integration of South Korea into a US-led security structure and capitalist order looked precarious due to popular hatred of the US. Into this foment, Brigadier General Park took power in a vicious putsch. Park was a totalitarian fascist groomed within the Japanese military system, where he had conducted counterinsurgency against Korean independence fighters in Manchuria. (One of them, a legendary guerrilla leader called Kim Il Sung, would escape his clutches and become a life-long nemesis). He had then been trained and cultivated by the US during the 1950's, attending military school in the US. When Rhee was deposed, Park rapidly took power, pledging fealty to the US and total war against communists. Having already proven his anticommunist credentials through a massive treachery, betrayal and slaughter, he was welcomed by the Kennedy Administration. This established the Junta’s legitimacy, while maintaining the continuity of US colonial “hub and spoke” architecture in the region.

Park Chung Hee as Japanese Military Officer

Park nominally assumed the presidency through an election but then tightened his regime until he attained the powers of the Japanese Emperor, whom he had worshipped and admired during Japanese rule. He formally rewrote the constitution after the Japanese imperial system, legally giving himself the powers of Showa-era Sun God.  This, along with his dismissal of colonial atrocities to normalize relations with Japan, in obeisance to the US strategic design for the region, resulted in massive civil insurrection against him.  These protests were barely put down with mass bloodshed, torture, disappearances, and terror.  But even among his inner circle, doubts were voiced about his extreme despotic overreach.   

The Insurance Policy: Ruthless and Cunning

From the earliest days of his rule, Park Chung Hee had cultivated high ranking officers to key positions, as loyal retainers in an insurance policy in case a coup happened against him.  A secret military cabal, later to be called "Hanahwe" [also, “Hanahoe”; "the council of one"], a group of officers within the 1955, 11th class of South Korea's Military Academy, had signaled their total fealty to Park during Park's military coup in 1961.  As a result, Hanahwe members were rapidly brought in-house, rewarded with powerful roles within the military government, and formed a deadly, elite Praetorian guard within the labyrinthine power structures of the Park Administration. 

Park Chung Hee with Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963

Two of them were the leaders of this secret-society insurance policy.   One of them, Chun Doo Hwan, would be referred to as the "ruthless one", known for his amoral brutality and utter lack of conscience.  He would later be called "the slaughterhouse butcher".  The other was Roh Tae Woo, Chun's military blood brother, the "cunning one", known for his strategic, tactical, and political cunning.

Power players, left to right: Roh Tae Woo, Chun Doo Hwan, Cha Ji-Chul

Together, “Ruthless and Cunning” would prove their mettle in Vietnam, auditioning as understudies for the US Imperial war machine, and proving their bona fides by operating a rolling atrocity machine, the SK 9th Infantry "White horse" Division, where Chun’s 29th regiment would cut its teeth on brutal massacres against Vietnamese civilians. Psychopathic and Amoral, they would form a two-headed hydra, ensuring Park's rule against enemies within and without.  A third member of Hanahwe, Jeong Ho Yong, would also cut his teeth in the 9th Division in Vietnam, as would the Capital Mechanized "Fierce Tiger" Division, and various Marine and Special warfare brigades.  All would gain recognition and favor with the US military brass in Vietnam, where South Korean troops would eventually outnumber US troops on the ground.  They would also play key roles in future Korean history.  

Sex, Whiskey, and Guns: High Deductibles

Park's insurance policy kicked in when his KCIA chief pumped him full of bullets at a whiskey-sodden orgy gone bad in late autumn of 1979.  Two young women--a nervous college student and a popular singer--had been procured to serve the sexual whims of the president at a luxurious KCIA "safehouse" that had been set up for such routine vernal assignations.  During the pre-coital dinner banquet, with expensive whiskey serving as lubricant, a heated argument arose between the KCIA Chief, Kim Jae Kyu and Chief Presidential Bodyguard, Cha Ji Chol, about how to put down massive civil protests against Park's rule in Pusan and Masan. Cha Ji Chol proposed the "Pol Pot option" arguing that a massacre of 30,000 civilians would subdue civilians and put the genie back in the bottle.  This was accompanied by insults at Kim for not having implemented such "effective" measures.   Kim Jae Kyu, incensed either at the casual brutality or at the blatant criticism, put an abrupt end to the debate by drawing his pistol and shooting Cha and Park. "I shot the heart of the beast of the (Yushin) dictatorship", he would later claim.  Park's insurance policy would rapidly kick in at that point, although the deductible would be his own life.  

Enter the Praetorian Guard: Tigers, Horses, and Dragons

After Park's death, Oct 26th, Lt General Chun Doo Hwan, the head of the Armed Forces Defense Security Command (DSC)--Park's institutional Praetorian Guard--rapidly took matters in hand.  Chun would rapidly take over, first the investigation of the assassination, then key army positions, and then the government.  Some historians marvel at the rapidity with which Chun consolidated power and how quickly he disciplined loose factions within Park's old guard.  This ignores the rhizomatic base of Hanahwe deep within the executive and in all branches of the military, and the institutional powers baked into the DSC to preserve loyalty and deter subversion and coups. 

Chun, using his statutory powers, and good dose of military firepower, arrested key military leaders for the assassination, and then on Dec 12th, 1979 instigated a coup, supported by Hanahwe comrade Roh Tae Woo, now division commander of the 9th “White Horse” Division. Roh withdrew the elite unit away from its critical position on the DMZ to the Capital, where they were joined by another Vietnam/Hanahwe classmate, general Jeong Ho Yong.  These troops, with another Vietnam-veteran division, the Capitol Mechanized "Tiger" Division, and various special warfare brigades, fought the old guard in the streets before rapidly subduing them. Not long after this class reunion, Chun would declare martial law and appoint himself president with a new constitution and fill all key military ranks with his Hanahwe classmates.

A "Splendid Holiday" turns sour

Mass protests broke out again after Chun’s declaration of Martial Law on May 17th, 1980.  In the city of Gwangju, hundreds of students protested. 

Chun's response was to send a crack division of special warfare troops to smash heads, assault bystanders, and shoot protestors, in an operation named "Splendid Holiday". Beatings, rapes, and mass killings were the order of the day; “blood flowed like rivers in the streets”.

Mass Protest in Gwangju, May 1980

However, in an extraordinary turn of events, stunned protestors, instead of capitulating at the terror, responded by storming police armories and requisitioning weapons, taxis, buses, and improvised explosives, to fight the elite troops to a standstill. Despite the deployment of helicopter gunships and Armored Vehicles, 3000 Special Warfare Paratroopers, along with 18,000 riot troops, found themselves driven out of the city. In this, the liberation of Gwangju stands out as one of the most astonishing feats of civil resistance of the 20th century.

Riot Troops and Paratroopers assault protestors and bystanders in Gwangju

This victory was not to last, however. After the rebels surrendered thousands of arms as a gesture of good faith to seek amnesty, Chun's administration would assault the city with 2 armored divisions and 5 special forces brigades. An untold number of civilians--excess death statistics note 2300 individuals--would be slaughtered, searing Gwangju into the historic annals of atrocity and infamy.

Anti-government protests would go underground, and re-erupt 7 years later, when Chun's presidency, which had been awarded the Olympics found it inconvenient to perpetrate another massacre in front of the international press in the run up to the Olympics.  Chun would accede to protestors' demands for a direct election, the outcome of which conveniently passed the presidency to his Hanahwe second, General Roh Tae Woo.

The missing factor:  Who let the dogs out?  

The above are the basic historical outlines, acknowledged by most journalists and historians.  But what they miss out, is the platform and permissions that circumscribed these historic events.  In particular, two questions arise: Under what authority did Chun initiate his coups? And how did he subdue Gwangju?  The answer leads back to the same place.  

South Korea has never had a policy independent of the US--it has always been a vassal neo-colony. This was demonstrated when the US placed THAAD missiles on Korean soil, ignoring the explicit orders of President Moon Jae-In by coordinating secretly with the South Korean military. Even US Ambassador Donald Gregg, acknowledged openly before Congress that the US-South Korea relationship had historically been a Patron-Client relationship.

This is because the Southern state of Korea, from its inception, was created deliberately by the US after liberation to thwart a popular, indigenous socialist government (the Korean People's Republic) from taking sovereign power over the entire peninsula.

Since its occupation in 1945 by the US military government, South Korea has always been constrained and controlled by the US. Its politics and culture, even where it might be nominally independent, has been thoroughly colonized by the US. For example, in the early 90's, a fractious intra-party conflict broke out between two Cabinet factions of the Liberal Kim Young Sam presidency.  The “irreconcilable” fight was between cliques who had studied political science at UC Berkeley and those who had studied at Yale.  Such were boundaries of South Korean discourse and the overarching nature of US influence.

This state of affairs is most true of the South Korean military, which was cloned from the US military during the US occupation of 1945-1948, and which has been continuously under US control (Opcon) since July14th, 1950. 

A young Chun Doo Hwan at US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg (1950’s)

Key leaders such as Park, Chun, Roh were trained and indoctrinated into US military practices and culture and had close personal connections with the US military.  Chun, for example, had attended the US Psychological Warfare school and Special Warfare school in Fort Bragg, Ranger school at Fort Benning, and Airborne training at the US Army infantry school before receiving commissions to lead Special Warfare forces.  He then in Vietnam fighting under US MACV command before ascending to key positions in the ROK military.

This dependency is starkest regarding military operational control, which the US still maintains in “wartime” to this day. ROK divisions cannot move or act independently without explicit orders from the top of the military command chain, or unless explicit permission is granted to be released from this operational control. The head of the military command chain at the time of Gwangju was General John A Wickham Jr, the head of the UNC/CFC command.  Wickham would have been subordinate to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

In other words, SK troops do not get to commit massacres on their own.  They need a hall pass from the US to engage in any military maneuvers or actions.  The US military granted them such a hall pass to travel down to Gwangju, knowing that this plan that would likely result in the slaughter of students and citizens.  The released units under the Special Warfare Command, a lethal killing machine, are all divisions with a deep integration with and long history of serving the US.

Chun Doo Hwan with Ronald Reagan, 1981

The US claims that it was utterly in the dark and in no position to refuse the release of Opcon demanded by South Korea: that the Koreans snatched up Opcon, like a bully stealing lunch money, and then went on to commit mass atrocities that the US could only sit by and watch in slack-jawed innocence. These are after-the-fact re-workings of history by creative lawyers ignorant of military realities. Militaries are instituted to have unity of command, and Chun was a US-trained, known actor in a specific chain of command, with close ties to the US brass.  The notion that a partially established coup junta of a client state could simply Swiss-cheese US military command structure and snatch Opcon to commit massacres at will strains credibility.  The absurd official portrayals of the US Military brass as hapless damsels before roguish generals is refuted by official records and smacks of satire or desperation.   

Protestors running from Troops, Gwangju, 1980

In fact, Journalist Tim Shorrock  using the declassified "Cherokee files", has detailed well the discussions that happened at the time of Gwangju: top US officials in the Carter administration 1) knew of the brewing crackdown and 2) greenlighted military action, knowing full well the costs.  According to Shorrock’s meticulous reporting:

[Troops] were sent with the approval of the US commander of the US-Korea Joint Command, Gen. John Wickham…That decision, made at the highest levels of the US government….exposed how deeply the Carter administration was involved in the planning for the military coup of 1980….the Carter administration had essentially given the green light to South Korea’s generals to use military force...

This action was authorized to avoid a second "Iran" debacle, where another US-placed despot had been overthrown by popular revolt to US consternation, humiliation, and loss.  Not only did the US greenlight the massacre by US-familiar Vietnam-veteran divisions, the US deployed the USS Coral Sea to support the flank of Chun's military during the retaking of the city and heightened surveillance support with AWACS. In other words, the Gwangju massacre was a US-enabled-and-supported operation, done with explicit US knowledge and coordination.

Pentagon lawyers have argued that they had previously "released opcon" to the Korean military, so that these massacres were not done under direct US control. That is a distinction without a difference, akin to a pit bull owner saying that they took their beast off the leash, and therefore are not responsible for the deadly consequences.  The ROK military was a US-trained-and-coordinated combatant force; some units involved had served directly under the US I Corps in Vietnam only years prior to Gwangju.  The very fact that the US released opcon, knowing full well their capacities, military histories, and what was on the cards, makes the whole argument a poor exercise in plausible deniability.  No one who has the smallest understanding of how armies work would fall for "the pit bull ate my homework" excuse.   

The US has also argued that the Special Warfare division was exempt from opcon at the time.  This, too, is a legal fiction--Special Warfare Troops, of all ROK troops, are the most tightly integrated and bound to US command, where they have a long history of training, coordinating, and working with and as proxies for the US military. (The US maintains this pretense because SWF are designed to infiltrate into NK, where the necessity to avoid US command responsibility requires a legal fiction of "independence").

The same could also apply for Chun's coups as well.  The Dec 12th coup involved the movement of the Vietnam-veteran 9th division, far away from its position guarding the DMZ to attack the incumbent government, along with maneuvers of the Capital Mechanized Division and Special warfare troops.  The May 20th coup also involved large troop maneuvers to threaten and dissolve the Korean parliament.  South Korea is a small, crowded peninsula, bristling with arms and military bases on hair trigger alert, surveilling and monitoring every inch of its territory for military movement.  To assert that the US command was aware of the coups is not conspiracy that presumes US omniscience.  It's simply assuming clear signaling on a crowded dance floor to avoid inadvertent collisions.  It's inconceivable that such a massive troop maneuver would not have been signaled up the chain at minimum to avoid a friendly fire incident.  

Return OPCON, Restore Peace

So where do these facts leave us? 

As the media stir up the flies around Chun's sordid past, they also seek to bury with his body the fact that South Korea's military is an appendage of the US military, and that its warts, chancres, and tumors are grown from within the US body politic. Exorbitant atrocities such as the Bodo League Massacres, or the Gwangju Massacre, accrue to the secret debit account of the US imperial ledger, where human rights violations vanish off the books, and where moral debt and karmic interest are never calculated or reconciled.  

Despite a confusing, bifurcated organizational structure (Independent command control vs. Subordinated operational control; Peacetime Opcon vs. Wartime Opcon), the bare political fact is that South Korea's military falls effectively under US control, not simply in “wartime”, but whenever it is politically expedient or strategically necessary. This card was obvious when the ROK military simply defied Moon’s moratorium on THAAD missile installation and took its orders from the US, not even bothering to notify the Korean president that the missiles had been delivered in-country.  Subsequent investigation revealed that the South Korean military claimed a confidentiality agreement with the US military as the reason to hide the information from South Korea’s own commander-in-chief.  

Not only does the ROK military translate the will of the US in domestic actions--including coups and massacres, but it has also functioned as a brutal sidekick for US aggressions abroad, and serves as a strategic force projection platform and force multiplier for US containment against China. Unlike any other "sovereign" state in the world, South Korea's 3.7 million troops and materiel all fall under US operational control the instant that the US decides that they want to use them.

This is despite the fact that since the inception of its civilian government in 1993, SK has sued the US for the return of Opcon.  This request is now going into its third decade; the US has simply stalled, moved goal posts, changed definitions and conditions, and stonewalled to this date.

This debate around Opcon is important in the current historical moment as the US is escalating to war with China. Any de-escalation with North Korea will require the declaration of peace, predicated on the return of sovereign opcon to South Korea.  However, the US will not seek to de-escalate tensions with North Korea, because if that happens, South Korea is likely to confederate in some manner with North Korea, join China's Belt and Road Initiative and then become integrated as an ally of China.  This would cripple the US security architecture in the Northeast Pacific.  This renders any peace with North Korea antithetical to US strategic interests. 

Secondly, the US escalation for War with China requires the capacity to access and threaten the Chinese continent across a series of leverage points. Inescapably, South Korea will be a key theater of battle, because of its geostrategic position as a bridgehead onto China.  Also, the temptation to leverage a force of 6.7 million South Koreans (3.7 M troops +3 M paramilitary) as cannon fodder for war against China is simply too irresistible to pass on.  In light of this, Korea expert Tim Beal argues that in this moment of heightened tension with China, the most dangerous place in the Pacific is not the South China Sea or the East China Sea, but on the Korean Peninsula.  

We will see this conflict heighten as South Korea enters into a new presidential election cycle between a US-favored conservative candidate, and a China-sympathetic progressive candidate.  

Nevertheless, South Korea’s history offers a stark and ominous lesson, one that the MSM would prefer you ignore: a battle is brewing, with very high stakes.  Under pressure, the US has taken brutal actions to maintain control and hegemony. It may do so again.  

Chun’s passing is being taken as an opportunity to distribute soporific drafts of historical amnesia--the better to sleepwalk into war or tragedy, again. 

People with a conscience should not let this misdirection pass.  To close one’s eyes to history is to enable future atrocities and war.   Only with eyes wide open does the public have a chance of staving off this coming war. 

K.J. Noh, is a scholar, educator and journalist focusing on the political economy and geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific.   He writes for Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Popular Resistance, Asia Times, MR Online.  He also does frequent commentary and analysis on the news programs The Critical Hour, By Any Means Necessary, Fault Lines, Political Misfits, Loud & Clear, Breakthrough News, Flashpoints. He believes a functioning society requires good information; to that end, he strives to combat the weaponization of disinformation in the current cold war climate.