Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

enemy. while "only" a minority of a few hundreds of
thousands were personally active in killing and reenslaving
Afrikans, they committed their crimes with the support of
the rest of their white kith and kin. Those "advanced"
workers (particularly the German socialist and radical exiles)
who loudly sympathized with the plight of the exslaves,
didn't stop for one hour in their headlong rush to
unite with the white supremacist mobs. It was as if witness
to a criminal attack were to loudly bemoan the injuries
done to the victim-while trying to convince the criminals
that they should become partners! The Eight-Hour campaign,
the "Anti-Coolie" and anti-Afrikan campaigns
were not separate and unconnected events, but linked
chapters in the development of the same movement of
white labor.
This young movement, for all its anti-capitalist
noises, was unable to resist being drawn deeper and deeper
into bourgeois politics. As the National Labor Union was
having its first convention and first issuing the call for the
Eight-Hour campaign, five representatives of the new
organization were meeting with President Andrew
Johnson to solicit his support. And when he threw out a
gesture towards white labor by ordering the workday for
Government printers cut to eight hours, he was hailed as
the true friend of the white masses. The leading union
newspaper National Workman of New York City praised
his "practical sympathy with labor". The Philadelphia
Trades Council described his administration as "...for the
benefit of the working classes". When the N.L.U. attacked
Black Reconstruction, it ws clearly carrying out its part
of an unholy alliance with President Johnson-who was
the newfound champion of the defeated planter class.(56)
If the National Labor Union had begun life with
an uncertain attitude towards class struggle-and a desire
for the quick "fix" of bourgeois political deals-by 1872 it
was wholely given over to these illnesses. It completely
abandoned mass struggle; instead, the N.L.U. promoted a
"National Labor Reform Party" to compete with the
Democrats and Republicans. This abortive party was so
opportunistic and malformed that it nominated Charles
O'Connor, a well-known advocate of slavery, as its
Presidential candidate in the 1872 elections.(57) The
N.L.U. itself perished in this fiasco. But the class outlook
it represented continued and flourished.
In this period white labor, although still young,
took definite shape. Euro-Amerikan labor increasingly
found itself pressed to organize, to fight the employers, to
demand from the bourgeois state some relief from exploitation
and some democratic rights. At the same time,
these white workingmen were also a part of settler society,
and felt their welfare tied up with the supremacy of the
Empire. Further, pressed downward by Capital, they
sought to establish a stranglehold on jobs by ruthlessly
degrading or eliminating colonial labor. This consciousness
was very sharply manifested in the 1870's, when
these white workingmen became the eager tools of various
factions in the bourgeoisie in the mass drives to reenslave
Afrikans and drive out Chinese-at the same time engaging
in the most vigorous and militant strike waves against
the bourgeoisie.
roots in the middle position of these white masses in the
class structure. It is important to see why white labor could
only unite on a petit-bourgeois and opportunistic basis.
While white labor had tacked together a
precarious political unity based on the commonalities of
wage-status and settlerism, it was as yet so divided that it
did not even constitute a class. In brief, we can point to
four main aspects of this: 1) White workingmen were
sharply divided by nationality 2) The upper stratum
of workmen, which contained most of the native-born
Americans", had a definite petit-bourgeois character 3)
Even the bottom, most exploited layer-who were largely
new European immigrants-were politically retarded by
the fact that their wages were considerably higher than in
Old Europe 4) Immigrant labor did not constitute a single;
united proletarian class itself because they were part of
separate national communities (German, Swedish, etc.)
each headed by their own bourgeois leaders.
The "native-born" settlers, as the citizen descendants
of the original English invasion force, still kept for
themselves a high, general level of privileges. They still
thought of themelves as the only true "Americans", while
considering the non-Anglo-Saxon, new immigrants as
"foreigners" only a step better than Afrikans or Mexicans.
Among these "native-born" settlers petit-bourgeois,
property-owning and small tradesman status was the
norm, and even wage-laborers confidently expected to
move upwards once they mastered the knack of exploiting
others. Engels noted in 1886:
"There were two factors which for n long tim~
prevented the inevitable consequences of the capitalist
system in America from being revealed ir? their true light.
These were the access to ownership of cheap land and the
flood of immigrants. They enable the great mass of indigenous
Americans, for years on end, to 'retire' from
wage-labor at an early age and to become farmers, dealers,
or even entrepeneurs, whereas the hard lot of the wagelaborer
with his status of proletarian for life, fell mostly on
the immigrant. "(58)
Thus the Irish, Polish, Italian, etc. immigrants had
the honor of replacing Afrikans, Mexicanos, Indians and
Asians as the primary labor force of the U.S. Empire in the
North. But the position of "native-born", Anglo-Saxon
settlers changed little if at all. The "native-born" settler
masses were still above the nationally-differentiated proletarians,
still small property-owner!: and small
businessmen, still foremen, overseers, and skilled craftsmen.
\
The European immigrant workers, who were promoted
to be the new, more loyal proletariat of the U.S.
Empire, were themselves very divided and confused.
Amerika as it entered the industrial age was a literal Tower
of Babel. In the hellish brutality of the mines, mills and
factories, the bourgeoisie had assembled gangs of workers
from many different nations-torn away from their native
lands, desperate, and usually not even speaking a common
language with each other. Engels noted the importance
of these national barriers:
This was a middle position-between the colo- "...immigration.. .divides the workers into
nial proletariat and the settler bourgeoisie-and it had its 47 groups - native-and foreign-born, and the latter into: (1)