A House Divided Cannot Stand
On the Racial Division of the US Labor Movement during Reconstruction
A Thomas Nast cartoon depicting an anti-labor union stance (1871)
“In the United States of America, every independent workers' movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I
This famous declaration is made by Marx in Capital during the chapter on “The Working Day” in its concluding section on “The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Impact of the English Factory Legislation on Other Countries.”1 This chapter is one of the most significant in the book, as its extensive review of English factory inspector reports into working conditions and the ensuing account of the origins of the English Factory Acts that set a legal limit on the duration of the working day show the actuality of capitalist social relations as class struggle. The rights of laborers over the limits to the exploitation of their commodity labor-power are determined by their respective capacity to act as a class, to achieve a balance of forces capable of wresting time from capital. The reality of this struggle, however, is not readily apparent, as the condition of labor-power as commodity and individual possession of the atomized subject, “the independent worker, a man who is thus legally qualified to act for himself, who enters into a contract with the capitalist as the seller of a commodity” conceals the social quality of exploitation.2 This “isolated worker,” says Marx, “succumbs without resistance once capitalist production has reached a certain stage of maturity,” and thus the struggle to establish a normal working day “is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class.”3
The evident contradiction here is in the articulation of the commodity labor-power as the individual property of the single laborer, and the social basis for action that is given by the category “class.” Exploitation’s mode of appearance is that of the particular, while its movement is predicated on this form of exploitation’s universal basis. Amidst this social metabolism, the establishment of legislation that defines a limit imposed by the State appears as a crystallization of a definite balance of class forces. Marx’s examples in this concluding section survey the agitations for a normal working day in England, France, and the United States, where the remark on the racial color line’s paralysis of the labor movement makes its appearance. National configurations of the labor movement here appear as particular eruptions that reveal a universal condition in the social form of production and its constitutive social relations. Marx uses the singular term “the working-class movement” as the name of this phenomenon “on both sides of the Atlantic, which had grown instinctively out of the relations of production.”4 This is where Marx concludes the chapter with the objective necessity of the working class’ organization as the condition for its relative freedom within the capital-relation, where the individual encounter of the worker with the free sale of their labor-power is revealed to be a social condition of existence:
It must be acknowledged that our worker emerges from the process of production looking different from when he entered it. In the market, as owner of the commodity 'labour-power', he stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist proved in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no 'free agent', that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go 'while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited'. For 'protection' against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In the place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'. Quantum mutatus ab illo! [‘What a great change from that time’, from Virgil’s Aeneid]5
However, a further contradiction becomes evident here in this social unity of class as a condition for action, and its articulation in national particularities that form the limit of legal enforcement to the duration of the working day. The “all-powerful social barrier” of law becomes a moment of the class struggle’s concentration in the political limit of the nation-state, a limit that is already superseded by the admission of the global effects of the English Factory Acts and the labor movement’s development of a struggle to limit and enforce a fixed temporal duration to the exploitation of labor-power, even while a similar control over its spatial extent remains out of reach.
This problem of the national articulations of the labor movement encounters a further complication in Marx’s invocation of the racial division of the working class in the US, and, in particular, the historical example he points to as the moment in which “a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery.”6 According to Marx’s account, the American Civil War and the ensuing emancipation of enslaved black labor gave birth to a movement for the 8-hour working day, where the General Congress of Labor, organizing the National Labor Union in Baltimore on August 20, 1866, declared that “the first and great necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.”7 To this, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association, in a resolution drafted by Marx himself in direct reference to the post-war struggles of labor, would declare that “the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.”8 Yet this “new life” preserved the continuity of the labor movement’s paralysis, regardless of the eventual success of the 8-hour day, as a more sober account from W.E.B. Du Bois of the congress in Baltimore and its trajectory demonstrates:
There were sixty delegates and on their banner was inscribed "Welcome to the sons of toil from the North, East, South and West." An address was issued on cooperation, trade unions, apprenticeship, strikes, labor of women, public land and political action. As to the Negroes, the union admitted that it was unable to express an opinion which would satisfy all, but the question must not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The Negro worker had been neglected. Cooperation of the African race in systematic organization must be secured. Otherwise, Negroes must act as scabs, as in the case of the colored caulkers, imported from Virginia to Boston, during the strike on the 8-hour question. There should be no distinction of race or nationality, but only separation into two great classes: laborers and those who live by others' labor. Negroes were soon to be admitted to citizenship and the ballot. Their ballot strength would be of great value to union labor. If labor did not accept them, capital would use the Negro to split white and black labor, just as the Austrian government had used race dissension. Such a lamentable situation should not be allowed to develop in America. Trade unions, eight-hour leagues, and other groups should be organized among Negroes. Here was a first halting note. Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.9
This moment forms an essential pivot in the development of our understanding of the dictatorship of labor that Du Bois discovers in the rise of the Reconstruction period’s abolition-democracy, and the failure of that dictatorship of labor to actualize itself in a united working class movement that could overcome the racialized differentiation of labor internal to the working class. For Du Bois, this failure is the key to Reconstruction’s defeat, but its inability to actualize itself does not render the dictatorship of labor false. Rather, it is its failed social unity that reveals the objective historical necessity of labor’s universality as a basis for social action, much as Marx’s assessment of the particular national labor movements agitating for a limit to the working day reveal a universal operation of the logic of capital’s constitutive social relations of production in class struggle. Yet the universality of class still confronts as a necessity the mediating categories of its appearance and articulation, in this case those of nation and race. Thus, if it is the case that, as Marx says, the working-class movement grows “instinctively out of the relations of production,” then it is also the case that its racial divisions indicate a fundamental characteristic of these relations of production as well.
The attempts to organize the US labor movement during Reconstruction give a survey of how this consciousness of the essential task of integrating emancipated black labor failed to resist its exclusion. Where the vague declarations of the General Congress in Baltimore in 1866 appeared the beginning of labor’s self-consciousness in complete solidarity, the second annual meeting in Chicago in 1867 saw a debate that was more direct, but also less successful. To the problem of black labor’s competition with white workers in the labor market, the threat of their mobilization as scabs, the proposed solution was the formation of separate black trade unions, and a Committee on Negro Labor was established. After its consideration of the “problem,” the committee would conclude "That, while we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the future of competition in mechanical Negro labor, yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject in this National Labor Congress.”10
The heated debates within the congress that followed were no more conclusive, though they continued to vacillate between actions to preempt the “danger” of black competition and the “respectable” conduct of black labor that various delegates had witnessed at times. Du Bois tells us that the “whole question was finally dodged by taking refuge in the fact that the constitution invited ‘all labor.’”11 The National Labor Union’s New York meeting in 1868 saw no mention of black labor, and the arrival of nine black representatives of unions and organizations in the Philadelphia meeting in 1869 led to the further promulgation of the strategy of racially-segregated organization, where “Contrary to all labor philosophy, they would divide labor by racial and social lines and yet continue to talk of one labor movement. Through this separate union, Negro labor would be restrained from competition and yet kept out of the white race unions where power and discussion lay. A resolution was adopted saying that the National Labor Union would recognize neither color nor sex in the question of the rise of all labor, and the colored laborers were urged to form their own organizations and send delegates to the next conference.”12
A contradictory approach to the organization of class solidarity emerges here, where the lack of recognition of categories of substantive difference in the social composition of labor becomes the very means by which this differentiation is further entrenched; abstract rejection via ignorance of a category’s significance is not a sufficiently critical stance. Appeals were made throughout the labor movement that this approach of organized racial segregation was not conducive to labor’s self-emancipation. Isaac Myers, a trade unionist caulker and leader among the black delegation of the National Labor Congress, appealed that “the white laboring men of the country have nothing to fear from the colored laboring men”, and even Marx would appeal to William H. Sylvis, President and co-founder of the National Labor Union, that while “the sufferings of the working class are in glaring contrast to the new-fangled luxury of financial aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats and other vermin bred by the war[,] Still the Civil War offered a compensation in the liberation of the slaves and the impulse which it thereby gave your own class movement.”13 Sylvis would acknowledge Marx and respond, but, according to Du Bois, he said nothing of slavery or emancipation, instead focusing on attacking the monied aristocracy.
The racial antagonism of labor, the inability of organized white labor in the US at large to see the organization of black labor as anything other than a competitor in the labor market, indicates an internally-constitutive division in the formation of the labor movement itself. Even if racial tensions could be, and indeed were, stoked by capitalist class formations in an effort to stave off labor solidarity, false consciousness cannot arise from mere trickery alone. The balance of class forces in the US of the late nineteenth century saw a clash in labor’s self-knowledge as commodity given by the differentiated hierarchy of exploitation that constitutes the form of surplus value. The sudden promises of a new population of free labor, the as-yet undecided fate of temporarily confiscated planter landholdings in the immediate post-war aftermath, and the contested reconstruction of state governments and their social and political constitution all attracted a movement of prospective investment of Northern capital. Amidst this moment various class formations of the South become important to identify, even as their exact position becomes murky by the uncertainty of their trajectories in this struggle.
Black workers, now the free owners of their own labor-power, seeking political and economic autonomy from the planter regime in their desire to seize land; a corresponding black petit bourgeoisie of property-owning citizens and businessmen, many free before the war; a class of poor white farmers, idlers, and laborers that largely experienced economic neglect against the backdrop of planter oligarchy, yet did not themselves at large oppose the racial hierarchy of the slave society even if they did oppose the planter monopoly on land; a white labor movement in the North that had developed through rapid wartime-induced industrialization; Northern businessmen that sought to make of the South a modern industrial region with the aid of Republican political control of new state governments; former Confederates and planter oligarchs that now faced a struggle for their temporary loss of the monopoly of land and labor, thus too their sudden removal from power as a raw material provider to global mechanized industry; merchants and brokerage firms that made their living mediating the sales and purchases of the South’s agricultural product to the Northern US and around the world; a newly activist Federal government with increased capacity from wartime mobilization with a Republican party essentially in control of its new machinery to attempt direction of the social revolutionization of the South; a Democratic party temporarily isolated from power due to the disenfranchisement of its secessionist element, but still given room to maneuver by its foothold in white Northern labor due to its prior commitments to white male suffrage in Jacksonian populism and resistance to Know-Nothing nativism in the 1850’s.
This list, while far from exhaustive, establishes the primary forces at play, as the re-establishment of the Union and national consolidation militated against the political potential of four million proletarian subjects newly freed from a now-dissolved system of labor discipline. It was clearly not only the challenge to labor’s self-organization, but the challenge to capital’s continued dominance, that bears out in this moment of contingent reproduction. Regional distinctions between North and South crystallized in these developmental trajectories originating from civil war that now had to be combined once more. Thus the origins of free labor in the North, the social composition of the working class and its conditions for reproduction in those states, did not prepare within that sector of the labor movement a consciousness of the necessary requirements of establishing a free labor economy and basis for capital accumulation in the South. Du Bois thus tells us of this divergence within the labor movement:
As the Negro laborers organized separately, there came slowly to realization the fact that here was not only separate organization but a separation in leading ideas; because among Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be attempted and those who were leading the Negro race in this vast experiment were emphasizing the necessity of the political power and organization backed by protective military power. On the other hand, the trade union movement of the white labor in the North was moving away from that idea and moving away from politics. They seemed to see a more purely economic solution in their demand for higher wages and shorter hours.14
The military occupation of the South, the role of federal institutions such as the Freedmen’s Bureau in recomposing agricultural production in line with free labor relations, and the phase of Radical Reconstruction in which Congress overrode President Jackson’s veto in order to implement a mandatory process of new constitutional conventions across former Confederate states with the political integration of black suffrage and representatives all made readily apparent the interrelation of politics and labor. The State as a terrain of struggle in which the key to economic freedom rested with the ability to secure the vote made apparent the task of the Southern labor movement, and so too also the necessity of the class of black political leaders in aligning themselves with the interests of labor. The necessity of federal military occupation to sustain the state-building projects of Reconstruction governments, and the Congressional oversight process in the approval of drafted state constitutions, meant that black labor in the South also remained wed to support of the Republican party, and dependent on the Republicans’ continued control of Congress.
The fragmentary and diversified character of the North’s industrial boom between 1863 and 1873 presented a different terrain of engagement. The growth of organized labor during this era appeared suddenly, as a 40 percent increase in average real wages resulted from the combination of the labor shortage induced by the post-war boom and waning inflation’s decline in prices. A burgeoning network of large-scale factory centers was linked together with thousands of smaller-scale enterprises by the industrializing transportation corridors of steamboats and canals, locomotives and railroads. Trade unionism’s roots in artisan and craft labor confronted a rapidly growing milieu of wage-earning operatives, seasonally-employed unskilled labor, and women in the labor force. Despite these trends, and the extension of Reconstruction’s principle of equal rights, the new unionism was resistant to incorporate labor beyond white men in artisanal and skilled industrial professions. Caught between states of consciousness regarding the relation of capital and labor, union leaders at large remained committed to free labor ideology, what Du Bois called “the American Assumption,” that gains for the working class relied upon the cooperation of capital and labor, in order that labor may obtain capital and economic self-sufficiency. Despite the intensifying proletarianization of labor in the process of industrial development against the simultaneous rapid concentration of wealth in corporate hands, and growing critiques of the wage-system itself, both Northern and Southern iterations of the labor movement did not yet articulate labor as an interest intrinsically antagonistic to capital, as a class in and for-itself.15
This organization of the US labor movement within the confines of the market’s liberalism saw expression in the protectionist manner by which labor sought to secure wage gains and an eight-hour day. When the Working Women’s Association formed and sought cooperation with male labor organizations, it was viewed as a competitive threat posed to the ability to command a “family wage.” According to Eric Foner, in California, “where indentured Chinese immigrants by 1870 constituted a quarter of the wage labor force, the agitation for their exclusion, more than any other issue, shaped the labor movement’s development.”16 The exclusion of black labor and the broader lack of engagement by white labor on Reconstruction issues was punctuated by the meager recognition of demanding “speedy restoration” of the South to the Union, and the acknowledgment that employment in the North relied upon the return of cotton production. Even though cotton production would be revived to pre-war levels by 1870 through the development of sharecropping systems of land reformation and production, the racial division in the labor movement would persist in the division of political and economic objective. As Du Bois says, “As the Negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist.”17
This is, according to Du Bois, what left labor divided and unprepared as it entered the Great War of 1877, where white labor in the North did not receive the solidarity and support of the black worker, and the black worker in the South was left on its own to protect what it could of Reconstruction’s social transformations while the erosion of the Republican party’s constituency and loss of control of federal elected institutions by 1876, and waning national support for Reconstruction, gave way to the return of planter oligarchy in the South through the rise of the Redeemer governments. 1877 marks a point where the cooperative precepts of liberalism’s harmony of capital and labor in industry loses ground to the capital-labor relation as one of irrepressible conflict and inherent antagonism. Yet while this universality of class antagonism made itself apparent along the nation’s railways and industrial centers, the national composition of capitalist industry had already outmaneuvered labor in segregated organization and the consolidation of US State political constitution from the immanent dictatorship of labor.
There arises here an evergreen difficulty in the ability to account for the persistence of racial antagonism within the US labor movement, even our very ability to speak of a unified working-class movement amidst this movement’s own self-repulsive qualities. Theories that view racism as an elite deception imposed from the top-down to maintain ruling class hegemony neglect both the voluntary adoptions of racially-protectionist policies by white workers, and the sincerity of intra-capitalist conflicts over State power. Likewise, essentializing racial difference beyond the social and historical categories from which it has emerged in actuality only obfuscates the conditions of racial reproduction, fetishizing what pertains as socially objective as an inherent quality of people. This, however, does not mean that we can discount the essential nature of doctrines of racial supremacy and inferiority to the constitution of definite historical social relations. In this sense, the segregated composition of the labor movement during Reconstruction reveals white supremacy to not only be an ideological position, political agitation, but an economic doctrine and social relation of production.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. Pp. 411-416
Ibid, p. 411
Ibid, p. 412
Ibid, p. 415
Ibid, pp. 415-416
Ibid, p. 414
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 415
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: [1860-1880]. New York, NY: The Free Press. Pp. 354-355
Quoted in Ibid, p. 355
Ibid, p. 356
Ibid, pp. 356-357
Ibid, p. 357
Ibid, p. 358
Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 475-479
Ibid, p. 479
Du Bois (1998) p. 367