I have been following the Llorente v. Schaeffer debate with some interest, particularly the brief discussion of Reconstruction. Those who know me, know that I am at a distance from ‘neokautskyism’, so my present comments will not address this political strand, at least not directly. Instead, I will focus on the deficiencies in Schaeffer’s assessment of the postbellum era.
In ‘Democratic Rights and Socialism’, Schaeffer’s comments on Reconstruction are brief but revealing. He states: ‘To take the example of the ex-slaveholders, it wasn’t freedom of speech and the freedom to organize political parties that gave them power. It was only by the organization of terror and the denial of civil and political rights to the ex-slaves that the ex-slaveholders were able to regain any semblance of their former power.’ How does one organize terrorist groups and wage low-level guerilla warfare if not with the ability to freely speak and organize politically? It would be strange for something like the Ku-Klux to emerge without prior organization of some kind, but unsurprisingly, this was not the case. They were highly sophisticated in using mass-society for their aims. They were well-organized, and both they and their enemies knew it.
The very first Klan chapter is an illustrative rebuttal to Schaeffer’s claim. It is a common myth that ex-slavers, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, formed the base of the Ku-Klux. In fact, the first Klansmen were educated young male professionals from Pulaski, Tennessee who were well tapped into mass-media and popular culture. (There is no record that Forrest was ever a Klan leader or that he affiliated with it prior to 1868.) They were lawyers, elected clerks, insurance salesmen, etc. Klansmen throughout the South and to the end of Reconstruction, fit this profile. The Pulaski Ku-Klux initially formed as a kind of social forum, performing music, dancing, serenading, etc. Historians have noted that they were apolitical, espousing no meaningful political positions of any kind, interested only in ‘amusement’. Yet, it goes without saying that the Klan were nothing if not political. Historian Elaine Parsons ominously notes that ‘Ku-Klux members through the spring of 1867 did nothing to differentiate themselves from other white social and fraternal orders of the time’ (47). Were we to enter into another revolutionary period akin to Reconstruction, politics following Schaeffer’s conclusions may well open the space for a Klan-like organization to surface and play a key counter-revolutionary role (as they did during the 1910s-20s). If it has happened once, then there is nothing suggesting it won’t happen again. This is doubly true for a country which has failed to grapple with its history, leaving important business unfinished, as ours has done. Perhaps I am too uncharitable. Need every grouping of right wingers be a counter-revolutionary cell? Parsons continues:
There is a way to reconcile the Ku-Klux founders’ seriousness with the apparent frivolousness of their actions: they were engaged in entertainment with a purpose and saw the very act of organizing themselves as having a publicly significant end. Forming a social group might get young white elite potential leaders moving. Letting the community know about such a group’s existence might remind them that they matter. (47)
Further below, she writes:
The men who thought up the Ku-Klux shared this broad belief in the political valence of entertainment. […] The call for a theatrical club to combat vice (very close to what these men would come to believe they had created with the Ku-Klux) is here tied to an assertion of the civic value of creating an organically southern cultural space—something to be “proud of.” (49)
The answer to our above question seems clear, but I will let the reader draw their own conclusion. Schaeffer also claims: ‘Nor is it necessary to deny them [ex-capitalists] normal civil and political rights after they have been dispossessed of their economic resources.’ Again, the experience of the Klan shows that this doesn’t work. From Parsons once more: ‘At the time they conceived of the Ku-Klux, Pulaski’s elite young men not only were unhappy about their troubling political and economic situation; they were also deeply worried about their own lack of occupation.’ Dispossession would not destroy counter-revolutionaries’ abilities, but would, in fact, encourage the worst of them. A two-pronged assault is needed against both their economic and political power. In the words of one Ohio infantryman: ‘What a cruel and inhuman lot the southern whites are. I think if we are to truly conquer this area, a war must be waged against them for at least a generation. They must be broken and remade to live peacefully with the negro who they have grown fat off his blood.’
Herein lay the key lessons of Black Reconstruction. It is not by chance that the single most democratic period of this country’s history coincided with a period of military dictatorship over half of its stretches. A common liberal refrain over Reconstruction’s failure is that Yankee Republicans did not wish to fully expropriate the ex-slavers and redistribute their lands to freedmen. This arose from a natural fear of giving an ‘unwise’ example to Yankee workers about the mills, mines, canals, etc. in which they worked. If Black people were entitled to the lands which they and their ancestors had worked, what’s to say the same principle did not apply in the North? Many freedmen and radical abolitionists turned abolition democrats (such as Wendell Phillips) understood this. (Indeed, the Louisiana chapter of the GOP applied for entry into the IWMA.) Yankee capital obviously understood this. But the white working class did not, for why should they? Whites had long been entitled to lands stolen from Indians–for they had taken part in its genocidal theft–they received higher wages, they had the ‘right’ to sell their labor to a master of their choosing, and so on. It was only fitting that this class was content to renew its deal with the system of white privilege and the settler-colonial project to which it was integral. At the same time, as per DuBois and Ignatiev, the failure to see the ‘kernel and the meaning’ of the Black struggle bound them to capitalism and all of its ups and downs, foreclosing any better future. It is worth recalling that DuBois never once blamed the death of Reconstruction on Yankee capital. After all, it was only in their interests to abandon freedmen once the planters had been liquidated as a real threat. Rather: ‘When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in sight.’ As Noel Ignatiev writes: ‘Let that stand as Reconstruction’s epitaph.’ It would serve equally well as the epitaph to all would-be revolutionary movements in this country’s history.
Comradely,
R.A.
Sources:
Black Reconstruction – WEB DuBois
Ku-Klux – Elaine Parsons
American Civilization – CLR James
‘American Blindspot’ – Noel Ignatiev
‘White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question’ – Don Hamerquist
