On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 18:04:13 -0500 "Nathan Newman"
<nathanne at nathannewman.org> writes:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj at juno.com>
> Quoting Louis Proyect:
> -Newman makes no effort to conceal his real goals in writing such a
> -blinkered version of American history. Basically he is arguing that
> -progressives should spare no effort in keeping the Supreme Court
> out of
> -the hands of reactionaries. Implicitly, the election of John F.
> Kerry
> -would have had as momentous an impact on American society as a
> different
> -composition of the Supreme Court would have had in the 1870s.
>
> While I obviously think keeping the Court out of the hands of
> reactionaries
> is important, especially to prevent the striking down of a range of
> economic legislation, it's actually a strange interpretation of
> motives,
> since I'm on record as saying that liberals should not depend on the
> Supreme Court even if they win the Presidency.
>
> And Proyect's ranting about the Nation magazine circa the Civil War
> is
> silly, since the Nation was to THE RIGHT of the Republicans in
> Congress who
> impeached Johnson and pushed forward harder on Reconstruction than
> the more
> moderate Nation editors desired.
>
> The Republican Party of the post-Civil War period was hardly
> perfect-- with
> anti-immigrant No-Nothingism and pro-business factions -- but the
> enactment
> of Reconstruction reflects some of the best values of American
> history.
I don't think anyone, not Yoshie, not even Proyect, is questioning that.
> Those who try to reduce Reconstruction to some kind of bourgoisie
> conspiracy is merely wrapping around to echo Confederate propaganda
> with a
> leftwing twang.
I think that Proyect's analysis of the class dynamics underlying Reconstruction and its aftermath, are a bit more subtle than that. The Civil War, itself, represented among other things a class struggle between the industrial capitalists of the North and the Southern planter class.
Thus, whereas upon ascending to the presidency, Lincoln sought a compromise that would have preserved the Union, and was discinclined to do anything more (in terms of limiting or abolishing slavery than he absolutely had to, nevertheless, circumstances were to drive him in an increasingly radical direction as the Civil War proceeded. He found, that despite his original intentions, the winning of the war required the abolition of slavery in the rebellious states, the acceptance of African-Americans into the Union Army, and indeed even the treatment of African-Americans as if they had certain basic civil rights. To some extent all these moves were made against his own basic instincts, but he came to realize the necessity of them, nevertheless.
One can see the industrial bourgeoisie of that time as being pulled in contradictory directions. On the one hand, they did have a class interest in a radical reconstruction of the South along bourgeois democratic, market capitalist lines, which would have required them to permit the freedmen a share of political power in the South, and indeed an acceptance of the freedmen's demands for a redistribution of property (as embodied for instance in the slogan of "forty acres and a mule.") But the industrial bourgeoisie also had a class interest in resisting the rise of the working class a political force in its own right, and to the extent that the populist Reconstruction governments in the South came to be seen as contributing to the development of a class consiousness among workers, black and white, then that was something to be opposed. In other words, the industrial bourgeoise of the North faced a situation analogous to that faced by the German bourgeoisie in 1848, and in both cases, the good burghers, when confronted by the possibility of working class political power fled into the arms of reaction. The example of the Paris Commune, which received wide publicity in the US press at the time, was viewed by the American uppercrust as a warning that something similar could occur on this side of the Atlantic. IAnything, including even the cutting of a deal with the defeated planter class in the South, was better than such a fate.
>
> Nathan Newman
>
>
>
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>
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