Chapter 3:

Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism

Bourgeois revolution – the challenge begins

At a time when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming “all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights”, many white people reconciled the
subjugation of black slaves and colonial peoples by rationalising that somehow they were, by
nature, not fully human. However, on the other side of the ideological struggle, many white
people also sought to extend the universalising principles of bourgeois democracy to the slaves.
In the revolutionary ferment of late 1700s United States, lifelong and hereditary enslavement of
some 20% of the population began to stand out as a monstrous aberration. In response to a slave
revolt in Boston in 1774, Abigail Adams told her husband John Adams, the later US president,
“it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily
robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have”.1
Prominent bourgeois revolutionaries like Benjamin Rush and James Otis fiercely opposed
slavery and countered the racist charges of black inferiority. Otis wrote in his Rights of the
British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764):
The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black…. Does it follow that
tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as tis
called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical
influence in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face? Nothing better can be said in
favour of a trade, that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish
the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant from the director of an
African company to the petty chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast. It is a clear truth, those who
every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.2
The Reverend Isaac Skillman even asserted in 1772 that the right of slaves to rebel conformed
“to the laws of nature”.3 Benjamin Rush wrote in the following year:
…I need hardly say any thing in favour of the intellects of the Negroes, or of their capacities for virtue and
happiness, although these have been supposed by some to be inferior to those of the inhabitants of Europe.
The accounts which travellers give us of their ingenuity, humanity, and strong attachment to their parents,
relations, friends and country, show us that they are equal to the Europeans…. All the vices which are
charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies, and the West Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft,
and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not
intended by Providence for it…
Future ages, therefore, when they read the accounts of the slave trade (if they do not regard them as fabulous)
will be at a loss which to condemn most, our folly or our guilt, in abetting this direct violation of the laws of
Nature and Religion.4
It was in the birthplace of racial oppression that some of the most ardent and radical critics
of slavery first emerged under the driving force of revolution. In order to wage their
revolutionary struggle, the American bourgeoisie had to rally the mass of (white) plebeians
under the banner of universal natural rights and liberties. The seething, uncontrollable ferment
and upheaval that was then unleashed naturally threatened to reach into the ranks of the black
1
Herbert Aptheker, A History of the American People: The American Revolution 1763-1783, International
Publishers, New York, 1960, p. 209
2
Louis Ruchames (ed.), Racial Thought in America Volume 1: From the Puritans to Abraham Lincoln, Grosset &
Dunlap, New York, 1969, p. 138
3
Aptheker, op. cit.
4
Ruchames, ibid., pp. 140-41

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

toilers themselves. In any revolution, cracks can spread throughout the edifice of the ruling
order. Indeed, large numbers of African-Americans did take part in the upsurge. At least 5000
were regular soldiers in the revolutionary army, 5 many distinguishing themselves in combat like
the famous Salem Poor. Some were freed and even awarded land and pensions. Still many
others participated in a civilian capacity. The whole process even radicalised some slaveholder
revolutionaries. John Laurens, a South Carolinian lieutenant-colonel and son of a slaveholder,
was an early advocate of freeing and arming 3000 slaves in exchange for military service. He
won support from Congress in 1779 but was vetoed by the South Carolina assembly. Laurens’
father had written to him four years earlier to tell him that he was freeing his slaves and “cutting
off the entail of slavery”.6
Ultimately though, the American revolution was limited to the political sphere. Unlike the
more far-reaching social revolution in France a few years later, the Americans were out to
secure political independence from London, another bourgeois state, without touching the
existing social-economic system. As such, the revolutionary alliance of class forces was
founded on the interests and structures of US capitalism at that time – not only the mass of petty
bourgeois artisans, farmers, and the mercantile (and some manufacturing) bourgeoisie in the
north, but also the profitable slave-worked plantation empire in the south. Northern capitalists
and southern slaveholders had distinct interests, but these had not yet become antagonistic. The
original US constitution of 1777 had confederated the thirteen colonies into a union of
sovereign states and protected the southern slave system from outside interference. In the
immediate years after the revolution’s victory in 1783, central government was kept to a
minimum, lacking even a national army. When a Constitutional Convention came together in
1787 to devise a new federal system, everyone was well aware of the delicacy of negotiating a
national government that would preserve harmony between north and south. The convention
eventually came up with a state structure that would allow the two wings of the ruling class to
work together while protecting their separate interests. Congress was split into two houses, with
only the lower house subject to direct election. Both the Senate and president were to be
indirectly elected. There were also property qualifications placed on voters. This was all
codified in a new Constitution that embarrassedly avoided the words “slave” and “slavery” and,
instead, used the euphemism of “other persons”. The Constitution counted each slave as “three-
fifths” of a person so that the number of southern representatives in Congress matched those
from the North with its greater number of white men.
The compromise of 1787 gave the southern slavocracy a confidence boost. They had, for
now, brought partly under their control what was potentially the biggest threat to their power
and legitimacy – a new revolutionary government resting on the allegiance of a mass of non-
slaveholding free citizens. In fact, the slavocracy deliberately worked to foster a political
alliance with the small farmers – the majority of the population – not in support of slavery, but
around trade, tax and monetary policies that favoured their shared agricultural interests. Leading
slaveholder politicians of this time, such as Thomas Jefferson, who won the presidency in 1800,
continue to be eulogised today as a champion of the “little people”.
The free, white plebeian citizenry were generally hostile to slavery. In the North, where the
weight of small freehold farmers and artisans was much greater, new settlements banned
slavery. But this hostility to the institution of slavery was not necessarily matched by a sense of
solidarity with the slaves (or former slaves). Foreshadowing later racism elsewhere against
“servile” immigrants of colour, many free white towns in the Midwest excluded blacks, free or
slave. Even anti-slavery revolutionaries like Tom Paine had reservations about extending full
and equal citizenship to African-Americans. Blacks were seen as alien to the organic bonds of
free smallholding community which the revolution rested on. Even those who went as far as
advocating full emancipation saw a solution in resettling blacks outside the United States. The
new plebeian democracy was undoubtedly tainted by a racially exclusionist streak.
To foster their alliance with the farmers, slaveholder politicians settled for some restrictions
on the expansion of slavery while fiercely defending its preservation in the southern states. The
importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808, although the law was hardly enforced. Some
northern states abolished the slave trade but not slavery itself. Some states decreed freedom for
future generations born to slaves, but only after they had served out a period of servitude into
their adult years, ostensibly to repay their masters for their keep.

5
Aptheker op. cit., p. 226
6
Ruchames, op. cit., p. 157

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 2

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

The anti-racist Haitian Revolution

Also in 1793, the French Revolution entered its radical Jacobin phase. With moves toward a
constitutional monarchy in shambles and a mass movement of poor sans-culottes mobilised, a
section of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was to lead the most far-reaching social and political
revolution to date. In the Jacobin phase, the revolution spread to France’s slave colony in St
Domingue (present-day Haiti) and racial oppression was dealt its first major blow. In the words
of the West Indian Marxist, C.L.R James, in his classic work, The Black Jacobins:
Paris between March 1793 and July 1794 was one of the supreme epochs of political history. Never until
1917 were masses ever to have such powerful influence – for it was no more than influence – upon any
government. In these few months of their nearest approach to power they did not forget the blacks. They felt
towards them as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counter-
revolution, they hated as if Frenchmen themselves had suffered under the whip.
It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. “Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in
the fields” all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the “aristocracy of the skin.” There were
many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as
drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes.8
A complex hierarchy of racial castes had governed St Domingue, the jewel of the French
colonies. The white colonial-settlers were vastly outnumbered by the slaves. As such, unlike
mainland North America, people with both black and white parentage, the “mulattoes”, were
freed and coopted into functioning as an intermediate social buffer on behalf of the white
slaveholders, who were an even smaller minority among the general white population. People of
mixed colour formed the backbone of the maréchausée, a police force for capturing fugitive
slaves. Throughout the slave-worked Americas, a growing population of mixed ancestry was
produced by the male slaveholder’s treatment of slave women as sexual chattel. However, in the
French Caribbean, just to be sure to know on which side they ultimately stood, 128 formal
categories recognised the huge permutations of intermixture while clearly dictating that they all
belonged to the status of “mulatto”. Thus, even the whitest of the mixed coloureds, the sang-
mêlé with 127 parts white ancestry and one part black, was still a person of colour.9 They
suffered all sorts of discrimination and legally occupied a subordinate position.
Nevertheless, people of mixed ancestry were incorporated into the free population and could
thereby climb the social ladder to a certain extent. Many even became slaveholding planters.
From the outset then, the racial caste system in St Domingue was inherently less stable than in
the US. When the revolution came, the wholesale discrediting of privilege by birth began to
further shake up the racist assumptions of this caste system. The choice of criterion for political
representation was ultimately posed between racial or property privilege, one having been
acquired by birth, the other including those many bourgeois who had acquired it by social
mobility. The planters wanted narrow political representation to protect their economic interests
against the diktats of Paris; the free, propertied people of colour wanted political and legal
equality with the rest of their class; the petits blancs (“small whites”) wanted liberty, equality
and fraternity for all white men and resented any prospect of propertied people of colour getting
representation at their expense. The slaves as yet were beyond any consideration.
Therefore, the radical democracy of the white plebeians in St Domingue was initially
synonymous with preserving the racial caste system. Once again, fulfilling their role of social
buffer, many people of mixed colour were drawn into an alliance with the counter-revolutionary
7
Robin Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Verso, London, 1988, p. 276
8
C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Random House, New
York, 1963, pp. 138-39. In this passage James relies on a revealing primary source – a book published in 1802,
written by a French colonist who opposed emancipation.
9
ibid., p. 38

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

forces of the colonial administration, against the white plebeian masses. Governor De Peynier
instructed the commandants of the districts, “It has become more necessary than ever not to give
[people of mixed colour] any cause for offence, to encourage them and to treat them as friends
and whites.”10
In France itself, the colonial question came to occupy a key position in the shifting tides of
the revolution. An abolitionist group had emerged during the growth of the political movement
of the French bourgeoisie, the Friends of the Blacks. Many of the early leaders of 1789 were
also key figures in this group. They were ideologues who universalised the principles of 1789 to
also include blacks. Their views were best summed up by the fiery interjection of Mirabeau
against d’Arsy, the planter delegate to the famous tennis-court meeting of the Third Estate in
1789:
You claim representation proportionate to the number of the inhabitants. The free blacks are proprietors and
tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote. And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are
not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for
seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France,
taken into consideration the number of our horses and our mules?11
But there were also many bourgeois in the revolutionary parliament whose fortunes were tied
to colonial slavery. They were sensitive to any move that upset the racial hierarchy which, in
turn, would undermine slavery. Most crucially, the planters wielded the threat of secession.
Initially, Paris decided it did not want to lose the colonies and compromised.
The trans-Atlantic French revolution was played out by a dizzying mix of rival social and
political forces: rich whites, poor whites, rich people of colour, colonial planters, metropolitan
bourgeoisie, constitutional monarchists, absolute monarchists, radical republicans, those in
favour of the mulatto vote, those against. In amongst this, first the people of mixed colour, then
the slaves themselves, came to play the decisive role. The whites as a whole were outnumbered
in St Domingue. As such, whites on all sides were soon forced to recognise that the mixed
coloureds held the balance of power. In May 1791 Paris gave the vote to those coloured people
whose parents were both free. But this was rescinded in September, when the revolution had
temporarily swung to the right.
The cracks were nonetheless glaring and emboldened the racially oppressed. The wealthy
coloureds began organising independently. Masses of slaves also took up arms and revolted.
They were wooed for a time by the Spanish in the eastern half of the island (present-day
Dominican Republic), who commissioned them into their army. The mulattoes then allied with
the white property-owners to put down this slave uprising. But the whole structure of slavery
required the maintenance of racial castes. People of mixed colour, having gained a taste for
independent organisation, lost confidence in this alliance. Further, with ongoing moves by Paris
to recognise their legal equality, the mixed coloureds began to close ranks with the revolution.
Royal intrigues in the metropolis were driving a widening polarisation. The Jacobins were going
from strength to strength. They effectively took the reins of government in early 1792. On April
4 they passed a decree giving full civil rights to all free adult males, regardless of colour. In late
1792 the polarisation gave way to a second revolution as the king went over to open counter-
revolution. The constitutional monarchy was ditched and a republic formed.
At about the same time, Paris dispatched three commissioners to restore order in St
Domingue. These officials were led by a Jacobin who built an alliance with the commanders of
the mulatto forces and set up a Légion d’Egalité, to put down both the slave armies and the
counter-revolution. Many of the wealthy whites had now openly gone over to the royalists. The
royalists called on the assistance of foreign powers who were very nervous about the spread of
the French example. German and British troops invaded France; British and Spanish troops
entered St Domingue. Under such grave threat, the mass of the revolutionary forces in France
radicalised even further. The danger of the sans-culottes in the metropolis, and that of the slaves
in the colonies, was now far outweighed by the royalist counter-revolution. The revolutionary
bourgeoisie moved sharply to the left. The vacillating Girondins were purged and the Jacobins
consolidated their power in June 1793, whereupon they mobilised a popular defence of the
revolution.
It was in this knife-edge situation that a dramatic shift in the balance of forces took place in
St Domingue. Under siege, the republican commissioners were finally forced to decree
emancipation and seek the alliance of the armed slaves who, in turn, began to see their own
10
ibid., p. 63
11
quoted in ibid., p. 60

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 4

interests in the radicalising French Revolution. The petits blancs split: those more ardently
concerned about preserving the gains of the revolution accepted the alliance with the blacks;
others went over to the royalists.
In January-February 1794 this movement was capped by an extraordinary episode in the
National Convention in Paris. It’s an episode that still stands with momentous stature in the
whole history of revolutionary movements. A trio of deputies from St Domingue was sent to
request an official decree of emancipation from the metropolis: Bellay, a freed slave; Mills, a
person of mixed colour; and Dufay, a white man. A French deputy introduced them with the
following words: “Since 1789 the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of religion have been
destroyed; but the aristocracy of the skin still remains. That too is now at its last gasp, and
equality has been consecrated. A black man, a yellow man, are about to join this Convention in
the name of the free citizens of St Domingue.”12
After an eloquent and passionate speech by Bellay, requesting the Convention abolish
slavery, a French deputy moved the motion: “When drawing up the constitution of the French
people we paid no attention to the unhappy Negroes. Posterity will bear us a great reproach for
that. Let us repair the wrong – let us proclaim the liberty of the Negroes. Mr President, do not
suffer the Convention to dishonour itself by a discussion.” The chamber burst into sustained
acclamation. Embraces and kisses followed, met by further applause. A coloured woman sitting
in the public gallery, tears streaming down her face, was invited to sit to the left of the
President. Lacroix, who had earlier introduced the St Domingue deputies to the Convention,
then proposed the wording of the decree: “The National Convention declares slavery abolished
in all the colonies. In consequence it declares that all men, without distinction of colour,
domiciled in the colonies, are French citizens, and enjoy all the rights assured under the
Constitution.”13 The Commune of Paris held a celebration at the Notre Dame, which the
revolutionaries now called the Temple of Reason.
But it did not stop at mere decrees. The Jacobins dispatched a naval fleet to the Caribbean to
wage a revolutionary war for the liberation of all slaves. This fleet of 1200 soldiers arrived with
a guillotine and a printing press. It ran off the emancipation decree, the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen, and other revolutionary documents, in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch
and English, as well as French, to distribute all over the Caribbean.14
With emancipation now signed, sealed and delivered by Paris, the most proficient of the
slave armies, that led by Toussaint Louverture, came over to the revolution. Thereupon the
revolutionary army of Black Jacobins dealt a series of terrific blows to the counter-revolution
and, simultaneously, waged a war of revolutionary emancipation of those still enchained on the
plantations. However, after defeating the Spanish and British, the forces of Louverture had to
face France itself. With the fall of the Jacobins and the Thermidor backlash, Napoleon’s army
simultaneously spread the revolution in Europe and tried to reimpose slavery in St Domingue.
But the Black Jacobins prevailed again. Twelve years before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo,
this black army of former slaves drove out the French and established the Republic of Haiti in
1804 – the first black bourgeois government in the world and the second revolution in the
Americas, but the first to give civil rights to all its people, and one, no less, led by former
slaves. The Haitian Revolution sent tremors throughout the Americas and Europe, inspiring
rebellion among slaves and fear among slaveholders.
Thus, in the one and the same year, an economic turning point that dramatically upped the
demand for slave labour in the US was matched by a spectacularly successful movement of
revolutionary emancipation in the Caribbean. They were the contradictory outcomes of the two
great bourgeois revolutions: the first had ended in a sordid compromise with the slavocracy and
the second in the self-emancipation of the slaves. This twin, dialectically connected process
revealed a more general truth. Just as capitalism and racism had been joined in birth, the fates of
revolution and anti-racism were one and the same. The more complete bourgeois revolutions (in
France, Haiti, and the nineteenth-century Bolivarian revolutions in continental Latin America)
were associated with the emancipation of slaves; the retreat of revolution (in the US and Britain,
and later in France under Napoleon) was associated with renewed racial oppression and the
deepening of racist ideology.

Nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ racism

12
quoted in ibid., pp. 139-40
13
ibid., pp. 140-41
14
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 226

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 5

 In Britain and the US, a whole trend of chauvinist literature against the French Revolution
formed an important adjunct to the deepening racist world-view of the nineteenth century. The
inherent extremism of the French “race” was counterposed to the more balanced temperament
of the Germanic/Teutonic Anglo-Saxons. This chauvinism was also ultimately directed at the
simmering radical-revolutionary impulses in Britain and the United States. It sought to
legitimise the 1787 compromise with the slavocracy and Britain’s much earlier compromise
with the monarchy.
In Britain, this chauvinism was also needed to justify the colonial oppression of the Irish, in
a period when Irish nationalism was becoming a political force that looked to the French
Revolution for inspiration. Indeed, for the purpose of chauvinist attack, the French and Irish
were often lumped together into the single category of “Celt”. This literature was best summed
up by one of the US’s foremost historians in the nineteenth century, Francis Parkman:
The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine and, therefore,
peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason, and has the
judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question…. the French Celt is cast in a different mould. He sees the
end distinctly, and reasons about it with an admirable clearness; but his own impulses and passions
continually turn him away from it. Opposition excites him; he is impatient of delay, is impelled always to
extremes, and does not readily sacrifice a present inclination to an ultimate good. He delights in abstractions
and generalizations, cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires and theories.15
Dr Robert Knox, an anatomy professor at the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, wrote in 1850
that the Celts are characterised by “furious fanaticism: a love of war and disorder; a hatred for
order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain; look at
Ireland.” Further, “The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland.”16
This sort of chauvinism was not racist per se, that is, it could not be based on any
identifiable physical markers, such as dark skin. However, it nonetheless sought to portray
French and Irish ethno-cultural traits as inborn and thereby served racism by reinforcing a
biological conception of people’s social and cultural characteristics. Subsequently, racism and
national-ethnic chauvinism were tightly interwoven, reaching its pinnacle in the Nazi ideology
of Teutonic superiority over other white people (especially the Slavs and Jews, whom they
sought to portray as non-white), as well as African and Asian peoples (with the pragmatic
exception of the Japanese, whom they needed a military alliance with and thus labelled
“honorary Aryan”).
At the same time, the French Revolution itself was partly rolled back under Napoleon. The
French bourgeoisie sought to find a new equilibrium after the “excesses” of the Jacobin period.
The spectre of 1848 then drove the last nails into the coffin of any remaining bourgeois
revolutionary momentum. The French tried to expunge the memory of 1793-4: they temporarily
restored slavery in the Caribbean colonies in 1802 (trying but failing to retake Haiti) and
embarked on a new colonial offensive. Racist ideology returned with a vengeance.
The retreat of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was aided by the onward march of science.
Instead of debunking racist assumptions, science actually did the opposite in the hands of the
“learned men” of the British Century – a century built on the debris of 1848; a century of
controlled, gradualist advances in the Westminster political system, and a vast expansion of
colonial fortunes. The world-view of the nineteenth-century scientist was unshakeably
embedded in a racial hierarchy, and rather than explode it, the tools of science were harnessed
to secure this ideological bedrock. Even the great, enlightening discoveries of Charles Darwin
were pressed into the service of validating racist ideology.
For the anatomist Robert Knox, “Race is everything. Literature, science, art, in a word,
civilisation, depend on it.”17 The renowned man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in
English Traits (1856), “It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the
dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe…. Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the
representative principle.”18 French scientist, Julien-Joseph Virey, wrote in his Dictionary of
Medical Science (1819), “Among us [whites] the forehead is pushed forward, the mouth is
pulled back as if we were destined to think rather than eat; the Negro has a shortened forehead
and a mouth that is pushed forward as if he were made to eat instead of to think.”19
15
quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Southern Methodist University Press,
Dallas, 1963, p. 95
16
quoted in ibid., p. 96, italics in the original
17
ibid., p. 95
18
ibid., p. 97
19
quoted in the website 19th Century Racism, http://www.geocities.com/ru00ru00/racismhistory/19thcent.html

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 6

 Thus, well before the imperialist epoch, many bourgeois intellectuals in the field of social
and political theory abandoned the ideals of the Enlightenment and came to serve an
increasingly bankrupt capitalist system. Marx and Engels alone continued to uphold the banner
of consistent humanism and eventually built up a powerful ideological and political counter-
pole for the succession of capitalism by an even more enlightened and scientific social system.
The fates of revolution and racism were one and the same. The more complete bourgeois
revolutions (in France, Haiti, and the nineteenth century Bolivarian revolutions in continental
Latin America) were associated with the abolition of slavery; the retreat of revolution (in the US
and Britain, and later in France) was associated with renewed racial oppression and the
deepening of racist ideology.

The Second American Revolution

Nevertheless, despite any retreat the seeds of mass politics and democratic revolt had been
safely sown. No revolution can ever be fully undone. The petty bourgeoisie, sold out by the
compromises of the big bourgeois, continued to agitate and organise for more far-reaching
change, pulling in its wake the emerging proletariat. In the US, Britain and Europe, the
aspirations of this democratic citizenry included the push for the abolition of slavery. The 1848
revolutions on the European continent had been crushed in their homelands but still resulted in
the final death blow to slavery in the French Caribbean, where it had been restored by Napoleon
in 1802. In the US, this simmering anti-racist impulse developed the furthest – into a second
revolution. The “French disease” was to infect the heartland of racial slavery.
The Second American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that ran from 1861 to 1877. It
was made up of two components, the American Civil War in 1861-65 and the period of Radical
Reconstruction following the war. This revolution pitted the North’s industrial bourgeoisie and
its allies, chiefly the mass of small farmers and then the freed and fugitive slave armies, against
the southern slavocracy which formed the breakaway Confederate States of America. What
began as a war to restore the unity of the United States eventually unleashed a titanic,
revolutionary movement of black self-emancipation that both mirrored and took to completion
what was begun by the first detachments of black revolutionary soldiers in 1775-83.
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had thrust cotton to the centre of the US economy.
US capitalism united behind this tremendous, slave-produced boom. The small farmers
produced food for the plantations, the northern merchants profited from selling and exporting
the cotton. But towards the mid-1800s the slave system began to outlive its usefulness. By then
it had fulfilled its kick-start function and could be dispensed with, as much of the advanced
capitalist world, including parts of the US, began to move on to the phase of general
industrialisation. The profits accumulated from the cotton boom, together with soaring
immigration and the introduction of steam power and the railroad, opened the way for a rapid
growth of manufacturing in the North.
While the slavocracy had adapted slave labour for the capitalist mode of production, it still
retained its core, pre-capitalist weakness – slavery severely hindered technological innovation
and blocked the development of a domestic mass market. If the key tools you own, slaves, are
also creative producers of surplus value; if the slaves can be forced to carry out almost every
task on the plantation – then there is no objective drive to technologically innovate and
diversify. And if there is no such innovation, then there is no corresponding development and
diversification in the types of industries. The Cotton Kingdom is forever condemned to remain a
backward agrarian economy servicing an outside textile industry, exclusively dependent on
cheap labour and a growing supply of land. Moreover, without a mass of wage-earners, there is
no growth in a domestic mass market, further hindering capitalist development. While the
slavocracy may have wallowed in their lavish, aristocratic pretences, they became more and
more of a fundamental block on the overall, strategic interests of the US capitalist class and
economy. This was most acutely felt by the newly emerging industrial bourgeoisie in the North.
By the mid-1800s US capitalism reached a fateful fork in the road. Would the United States
be dominated by a slave-dependent, agrarian ruling class, or would it achieve the industrial and
financial dynamism that would eventually lead it towards global domination in the twentieth
century? Would US agriculture serve British or American capitalism? Would the new territories
opening up in the western United States serve the needs of industrial development, or would
they succumb to the slave-worked plantation empire? At this fork in the road, the 1787
compromise broke down and the separate interests of the two wings of the US ruling class went
over into open, revolutionary conflict.

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 7

 In addition to the rise of the northern industrial bourgeoisie, there were other changes in the
alignment of class forces towards the mid-1800s. Principally, the alliance between the small
farmers and the slavocracy collapsed. They came into conflict over land. The invention of the
cotton gin allowed cotton to be grown and processed far inland. The slavocracy became land-
hungry and their “Cotton Kingdom” began pushing westwards. They were no longer on the
defensive; they no longer felt they had to compromise by allowing slave-free states in return for
maintaining the “southern way of life”.
On the other hand, there was a tremendous growth in European immigration, especially
following the Irish potato famine and the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. To this day, the
greatest influx of immigrants, as a proportion of the existing US population, arrived in the years
1845-50. This massively expanded the ranks of the American yeomanry, spreading to the
Midwest and beyond in search of political and agrarian freedom. Today, the legend of the
westward pioneer continues to be the stuff of novels, movies, musicals and TV shows. The
Midwest farmer soon moved to the centre of the US agricultural economy. The 1850 census
revealed that the northern hay crop alone equalled the combined market value of all southern
staples – cotton, tobacco, rice, hemp and sugar.20 Further, the mass of small farmers came to be
less dependent on southern markets – the rapidly growing industrial towns of the North were
now taking more and more of the farmers’ foodstuffs.
With the growth of the American yeomanry, the battle was resumed for the meaning and
future of American democracy. New aspirations were awoken and accounts had to be settled
with the sordid compromises of the first revolution. This, as always, was grounded in concrete,
material interests. A series of political contests over the expanding western territories, each
fiercer than the last, unfolded between the slavocracy, on the one hand, and the democratic
petty-bourgeoisie and northern industrial capitalists, on the other: Missouri in 1819-20, Texas in
1836-45, California in 1849-50, Kansas in 1854-61. Each new application for statehood teetered
the balance of equal Congressional seats for slave and free states, contained in the 1787
constitutional compromise. The fight over each territory amounted to whether they would be
admitted into the Union as a free or slave state. A compromise in each case only prolonged the
inevitable, open rupture: Missouri was to be admitted as a slave state; all others to the north
would be free. California was to be free, in exchange for the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of
1850 which made it mandatory for a fugitive slave anywhere, North or South, to be forcibly
returned to their owner. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri
Compromise and left the decision to the people of the territory.
This increasingly bitter struggle dominated United States history in the first half of the
nineteenth century and, in the second half, finally forced back onto the historical agenda a
settlement of the slave question once and for all. A range of social and political forces helped
shape the revolutionary and anti-racist character of this unfolding process. Among white
democrats and free blacks in the North, there arose for the first time a mass movement explicitly
and singularly focused on abolishing slavery and emancipating the slaves. This movement allied
with counterparts in Europe. It was aware of, and sensed a kinship with, the revolutionary
movements of 1848. Indeed, some abolitionists correctly saw their mission as an integral part of
the broader, international democratic struggle and felt a renewed sense of responsibility in the
wake of the 1848 defeats. This movement embraced both black and white activists. It helped
give birth to the first movement for women’s rights in the United States. The abolitionists
pioneered a wave of lively, influential activist newspapers, consciously setting out to agitate and
propagandise for the anti-slavery movement. The fight even reached the level of an armed,
guerrilla struggle.
It was the conscious, deliberate intervention of the anti-slavery movement into the changed
class alignments of the early to mid-1800s that gave a conscious focus and program to the white
plebeians’ struggle with the slavocracy. They used a range of devices to build the movement.
The newspaper of the American Anti-slavery Society, The Liberator, played a crucial part,
helping to draw into the movement such important leaders as the ex-slave Frederick Douglass.
Douglass later started his own newspaper, the North Star, specifically to encourage the self-
organisation of African-American activists. A hectic schedule of lecture tours and rallies kept
up the intense agitation and propaganda. The AAS and other organisations produced a large
range of widely-circulated pamphlets and books.

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

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 8

 The abolitionist movement arguably took off in the political climate triggered by two events:
the publication of a pamphlet by a free black man in Boston in 1829 and the slave revolt led by
Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
could be said to be the first articulation of Black Power, asserting the legitimacy of black
people’s rage, advocating the right of black people to self-defence, calling for open rebellion
against racism by slaves and free blacks alike, and insisting on the inevitable end of white
domination. Walker and many other radicalising blacks at the time were influenced by the
revolution in Haiti – a thunderous event that shook the whole of the Americas and put the fear
of freedom into the slavocracy. Slaveholders censored, sensationalised and demonised news of
what had happened in Haiti. The US government took a hostile position and refused to
recognise the new revolutionary government of the Black Jacobins. The slavocracy saw the
likes of David Walker as a home grown Black Jacobin lurking in their midst. They censored and
confiscated his book, while free blacks smuggled it into the South. The book went through six
editions. Eventually a price was put on Walker’s head and he was found murdered some years
later.
Abolitionists intervened into each fight over the western territories, culminating in the battles
over California and Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, in giving the settlers the choice of
whether the new state should be free or slave, left the field open for an all-out struggle between
pro- and anti-slavery forces. Settlers from both sides flooded in, one side from the northeast,
and the other from neighbouring Missouri, a slave state. Armed clashes broke out. Both sides
set up rival governments and parliaments, the pro-slavery settlers resorting to outright electoral
fraud. Activists throughout the North raised money, supplies and weapons for the “free-soilers”.
The final compromise over Kansas turned into its very opposite and became the precursor to the
civil war that began the second revolution.
In the struggle over Kansas, that magnificent hero and martyr, John Brown, made his first
major appearance leading successful attacks against pro-slavery terrorists. This Midwestern
farmer was a militant abolitionist who believed that the struggle against slavery could not be
won unless blood was spilt. Unlike some white abolitionists, Brown was not afraid of slaves
taking up arms for their own liberation. In fact, he saw the insurrection of slaves as the only way
to end slavery. John Brown was one of the first truly anti-racist white revolutionaries. As
Frederick Douglass, a black revolutionary and close friend of Brown, said upon first meeting
him, “[T]hough a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply
interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”21 In
1859 John Brown and two of his sons joined with 19 black and white men to stage a guerrilla
raid on Harpers Ferry, a federal arsenal, in order to capture weapons and distribute them to
slaves throughout the South. The raid was crushed and Brown hanged, but this momentous
event, together with Brown’s testimony at his trial, inspired many abolitionists to new levels. In
turn, it hardened the slavocracy even further and made civil war all the more inevitable. Harpers
Ferry was to the Second American Revolution what the Moncada Barracks was to the Cuban
Revolution nearly 100 years later.
The escalating conflict between “free-soilers” and the slavocracy sharpened national politics.
It gave birth to the anti-slavery Republican Party which was later transformed into the party of
the second revolution. Previously the Whigs had only put up a timid and hesitant fight against
the party of the slavocracy, the Democrats. When the Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected
president in 1860 the slavocracy resorted to secession, even though Lincoln was opportunistic in
his attitude towards slavery. Faced by the intransigence of the breakaway South, he tried to
conciliate with the Confederacy. Even when war broke out, he tried to retain the loyalty of those
slave states that did not secede by promising to maintain slavery if they joined in the fight
against the Confederacy.
It was only as the war became more and more embittered that it transformed into a full-scale
war against slavery. In the process, the Republican Party attracted a current of bourgeois
revolutionaries, including Frederick Douglass, and was pushed sharply to the left. Emancipation
was proclaimed by the Republican administration of Abraham Lincoln and hundreds of
thousands of fleeing slaves were drawn into active participation in a war for their own collective
liberation. Large columns of fully-armed black men, who felt the justice of the struggle in their
bones, were an amazing and inspiring sight to the millions of downtrodden black civilians. On
the other hand, the sight of black men with guns alarmed racist whites. Black units were
21
Quoted in US Public Broadcasting Service, People & Events: John Brown 1800-59,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 9

especially repugnant to the white supremacist Confederate forces, who shot black prisoners,
including those who surrendered. Non-combatant African-Americans also played their part, as
part of the crucial civilian support base for the Union army. If ever there was a just war, this was
it, the most destructive war of the nineteenth century which took more American lives than the
first and second world wars combined. No war since has killed that many Americans in a single
conflict.
On the foundations of the massive upheaval of the Civil War, the Republicans led a post-war
process of Radical Reconstruction and carried through a second bourgeois-democratic
revolution. They extended democratic rights to the mass of freed blacks in the South and, by
1867, ensured the election and appointment of a wide layer of African-American politicians,
judges, sheriffs, mayors and other government officials. This dramatic extension of democratic
rights empowered the mass of ex-slaves to self-organise. Radical Reconstruction also
established the first public schools in the South, which allowed not only black children, but also
the children of poor whites, to attend school for the first time ever.
Again, though, all this was limited to a political revolution and remained partial. The mass of
ex-slaves were crying out for land – 40 acres and a mule. But the northern industrial bourgeoisie
and the professional politicians who controlled the Republican Party had relented to Radical
Reconstruction only in order to shore up Republican power in the South. As such, they refused
to countenance land reform and, indeed, bought up a lot of the former plantation lands
themselves. Eventually, a complex combination of a severe labour shortage in the South (now
that slaves were freed), an economic depression in 1873, discontent among poor white farmers
with the economic policies of the northern industrialists, and massive corruption scandals in the
Republican Party, all led to a catastrophic derailing of Radical Reconstruction and the driving
down of the Southern black population into an underclass of poor tenant farmers and super-
exploited rural workers – all under the catch-cry of “stability” and “reconciliation”. In these
circumstances, the Democrats made a comeback, but this time remade as an alternative,
conservative party of the industrial bourgeoisie favouring the smashing of Radical
Reconstruction.
But, by its very nature, the repression of the African-American movement could not be
peaceful. It took waves of horrific terrorist violence by the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues
and other white supremacist terror gangs to intimidate black voters and eventually install racist,
Democrat state governments in the South. Fearful of escalating this conflict, Radical Republican
governors treacherously refused to answer the demands of many blacks and rank-and-file white
Radical Republicans to organise and arm popular militias to crush the terrorists. At the same
time, the Republican federal government became increasingly hesitant to intervene with federal
troops. Now that slavery had been abolished, and thereby a key obstacle to further industrial
development removed, and now that the Democrats had been reformed, the northern industrial
bourgeoisie were much more worried about the mass of restless blacks – especially the prospect
of armed ones – than the return of Democrat governments in the South.
With the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, white supremacist governments triumphed in the
South, and race relations, again, became a purely local affair for each state to settle by itself.
One could say that a partial secession had been successful. During the remainder of the
nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, Southern state governments – as well as
some Northern ones – implemented a stringent system of racial segregation. This highly
oppressive system of social policing ensured that, while African-Americans were not re-
enslaved, they would be legally subordinated on the basis of their skin colour and kept down as
a source of extra-cheap and reserve labour. Earlier, at the height of the revolution, the
Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution had explicitly enshrined the abolition of
slavery and an end to racial discrimination. However, in what became the definitive legal seal
on the shunting of the second revolution, the US Supreme Court manoeuvred around these
constitutional amendments in the infamous 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling that segregation
was not unconstitutional because blacks and whites were “separate but equal”.
It was an astonishing example of the process of Thermidor, first seen following the French
Revolution. While the explosive tumult of revolution can not be completely undone, a faction or
section of the revolutionary forces may control and partially roll it back within the very
framework of the revolution itself to suit their narrow, sectional interests. That is, the American
Thermidor was based on the very abolition of chattel slavery – it could not, and nor did it aim
to, restore the previous ruling sub-class, the slavocracy, nor its backward labour system. At the
same time, the Northern industrial bourgeoisie – who had initiated and led the revolution –

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 10

sought to re-subjugate the emancipated African-Americans, but this time into a layer of extra-
cheap waged workers and a reserve labour army of poor tenant farmers. This task of revamping
racial oppression, on the rubble of the original material source of racism, chattel slavery,
necessitated a chilling new level of racist ideology. Elaborate bodies of “research”, theory and
branches of “science” (principally eugenics) flourished. Foreheads were analysed for shape and
slope, noses and skulls measured, brains weighed, all in the cause of proving the existence of
clear-cut, immutable races and the superiority of the white race. The abolitionist struggle and
the Civil War had kept at least a section of the American bourgeoisie honest for a time. Long
after its counterparts in Europe had opted for pragmatic settlements in return for economic
supremacy, the US bourgeoisie had been forced to embark on one final and risky venture in
revolutionary mass mobilisation. Then once the slave question was formally settled and the
slaveholding wing smashed, the American bourgeoisie rapidly caught up with (if not surpassed)
the rest of the European world on the race question.
But Thermidor is fundamentally an objective phenomenon – a potential danger in all
revolutions when far-reaching political gains come into conflict with divergent economic
imperatives and/or when economic transformations lag behind politics. The democratic gains of
the first American revolution were forced into a compromise because of the continued need for
slave labour, but within the very framework of the new republic – this was the essence of
Jeffersonian democracy, based on the assertion of states’ (read Southern) rights, expressed in
plebeian rhetoric. The second revolution was partially pushed back, not because the capitalist
economy was limited in its possibilities, but because its further expansion came into conflict
with a consistent expansion of bourgeois democratic rights. But Thermidor is not inevitable, for
adverse economic conditions must still be dealt with by politics – thinking human beings
engaged in the conscious political processes of organising parties, movements and their class,
exercising power, making decisions and choices. The contrast between the French-Haitian and
US methods of dealing with slavery show there is no room for fatalism, even in bourgeois
revolutions.

Thermidor, imperialism and racism

The American Thermidor was part and parcel of a new historical and developmental stage
for capital accumulation: imperialism. New advances in chemical, metallurgical, rail,
automotive, petroleum and other sectors of heavy industry toward the end of the nineteenth
century fuelled a qualitatively greater concentration of control and ownership in all the
established capitalist economies. Fewer and fewer families came to command greater chunks of
a massive new accumulation of capital. The problems of over-capacity and market saturation
now took whole economies with them. This exponentially greater scale of wealth and crisis
drove the merging of industrial and banking capital in an effort to sustain profit rates by
conglomerating all stages of economic production. Cartels and trusts were formed for the same
reason. The commanding heights of each industry and each national economy came to be
dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations. Capitalist competition spiralled upwards,
between whole economies, most abominably displayed in a global scramble for new colonies,
but this time imposing a much tighter stranglehold on the non-European world. The colonies
were no longer left as simple trading posts; they were “developed” into subordinate capitalist
economies that could deliver super-profitable returns on otherwise idle surplus capital from the
advanced countries.
American capital’s march into this epoch of monopoly and imperialism objectively required
both the second revolution and the subsequent Thermidor. The Civil War and Reconstruction
not only expanded democratic rights but, most crucially for the Northern bourgeoisie,
completed the freeing up of labour and capital required by the needs of industrial restructuring
and global capitalist competition. The very democratic rights that were needed for the bottom-
up unlocking of the Southern economy, landmass and labour force were what eventually stood
in the way of this march. The large-scale assembly lines and heavy industrial plants of the new
epoch could neither run on an inert slave labour force nor afford a large section of workers
spurred on by the fruits of a recent revolutionary victory.
This dilemma was part of a bigger one yet, for monopoly capital was also forcing an even
greater demographic shift from a farmer to a worker majority, as it simultaneously sought out
new branches of the economy to colonise and new sources of factory fodder. In this era, mass
immigration from abroad was accompanied by the internal mass migration of farming families
forced off the land. However, this demographic shift from a majority that had been small-

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 11

propertied and rurally bound to one that was restless and propertyless called for a wholly new
scale of social control. Alongside other forms of social division and stratification, racism proved
most effective. Thus, in this period, the scissored doling out of white privilege and black
oppression, described in the second chapter, took on a new intensity as monopoly-imperial
capitalism endowed the American bourgeoisie with the wealth to racially entrench a privileged
caste of white labour.
Abroad, racism proved just as useful in justifying imperialist plunder. The inseparable
connection between racism at home and abroad in the epoch of imperialism was made explicit
by the liberal US magazine The Nation in 1898. Commenting on a US Supreme Court decision
upholding the denial of voting rights to African-Americans in the Southern states, the article
called it “an interesting coincidence that this important decision is rendered at a time when we
are considering the idea of taking in a varied assortment of inferior races in different parts of the
world which, of course, could not be allowed to vote.”22
The period of rising imperialism was to globalise and massify a more systematic racism. In
addition to segregation in the US, this was the era of South African apartheid, the Nazi and
other fascist regimes, the White Australia Policy, and a generally deepening inequality between
what came to be known as the (predominantly white) First World and the (predominantly
coloured) Third. South Africa’s treatment of blacks was modelled on Australia’s policies toward
Aborigines; Hitler’s 1933 Hereditary Health Law was modelled on the widespread practice of
eugenics in the US. Even following Hitler’s defeat, there were still 27 US states that had laws
enforcing the sterilisation of the “unfit” and “degenerate”. All the imperialist powers were
dominated by the kind of racist ideas that, today, is confined to the far right. Mainstream
politicians, newspapers, magazines, novels, plays, scientific writings, everyday discourse were
permeated through and through by the ideology of white racial superiority, which was
considered natural and therefore righteous. The industrial barbarism of the Nazi regime was
merely the most developed form of a culture that gripped the whole of the European imperial
world.
Change was forced upon them only when the global catastrophe of the second world war
imperilled all the major imperialist powers, with the threat of mutual destruction, defeat at the
hands of expanding socialist revolutions looking to the Soviet Union, risings by colonial
peoples, or some combination of all three. Faced by this threat, all the imperialist powers
scrambled to reform their image and distance themselves from any likeness to the Nazis. No one
wanted to be left holding the rotting corpse of eugenics and racial pseudo-science as they
quickly sought to readjust to a vastly changed world situation.
The sea change of the second world war and the resulting anti-colonial revolutions had a
particularly direct, albeit contrasting impact on those colonial-settler societies where systems of
racial oppression had been a dominant and pervasive feature of all aspects of social life. On the
one hand, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia continued to dig their heels in, thereby sharply
intensifying open – even armed – social conflict that was to engulf the whole of southern Africa
and eventually lead to the toppling of white minority rule in the last three decades of the 20th
century. On the other, the US as chief imperialist power and aegis to all imperialism, could not
afford the deepening social unrest provoked by Jim Crow. Similarly, the Australian bourgeoisie,
mindful of its growing reliance on Asian trade, was forced to turn away from the South African
path and adopt the US ruling class’s tactic of appeasement and cooption.

22
Camejo, op. cit., p. 212

Ch. 3: Racism, Revolution and Anti-racism, by Iggy Kim 12