Ideological history: the Fourth International take on 1619

An early colonial Quaker meeting

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North over at the World Socialist Web Site have a rebuttal to the New York Times’s 1619 Project that is interesting and infuriating in nearly equal measure. I suppose that is to be expected from Trotskyists. But all the same there’s enough that’s substantially correct about their critique that it’s worth dwelling on at some length.

First of all, I have to admit that I agree with the overall general thrust of the Fourth International’s critique of 1619. Given my antiracist positions, as well as my High Tory scepticism of the American project generally, a casual blog reader might be tempted to conclude that my sympathies are firmly on the side of the Times in this case. That would be incorrect.

Racism is indeed an evil. Racism is indeed an evil that is deeply enmeshed in American society going back to colonial times. However, I have also always held that racism is historically circumscribed and that concrete things can be done to combat it. Useless white liberal self-flagellation on the op-ed pages of the Times is not one of them. Community policing reforms, criminal justice reform, instituting rent controls, providing equitable funding and staffing for public schools, instituting Medicare for All, ending informal population-control policies in black neighbourhoods, ending private for-profit prisons, ending redlining and predatory credit practices by both banks and payday institutions, ending the damn Forever War that runs on and destroys primarily black and poor bodies: these largely œconomic fixes would go a long way toward eliminating the most intolerable forms of racism in American society. In short, ending capitalism would also end the great bulk of the race-based misery of black America.

I agree wholeheartedly with Niemuth, Mackaman and North insofar as they hold to the limited argument against the 1619 Project and its central conceit. It is indeed not ‘in the DNA’ of America or Americans to hate each other based on the colour of their skin – either literally or figuratively. The biological and sociological determinism of the worldview behind the 1619 Project is ahistorical and, indeed, morally noxious – for the very reasons they describe.

But the problems begin to crop up very quickly when the authors for the Fourth International stray from this narrow critique into a broader take on world history, and their sweeping and reductive takes on ‘the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world’. For one thing, classical slavery and modern chattel slavery were and are very different institutions, underpinned by very different material conditions. It’s actually something of a travesty, that authors proclaiming themselves to be Marxist overlook this. Any Marxist worth his salt should have a ready materialist explanation for the differences between classical and early modern slavery, because – as it happens – there is one.

In Europe itself, the two institutions – the slavery of Antiquity, and the chattel slavery of the Age of Exploration – were separated by a good half millennium of gradual abolition and humane developments in law, like those undertaken by Adamnán of Iona in the British Isles and by Eike von Repgow on the Continent. This gradual abolition happened in large part because of the building reliance of the agrarian œconomies of the late-antique barbarian kingdoms on arable land and its produce rather than on labour. This œconomic structure, which was still largely in place on the continent during the capitalist revolution, was the source of a great deal of the early resistance to the new institution of modern chattel slavery, and made up a significant element of the abolition movement going forward. This is something I have laid great stress on over the course of my writing on this blog. The old feudal resistance to the new money-based, urban and mercantile œconomy provided an early basis for the proletarian resistance that was as yet in its germinal stage.

This article series takes aim at a distorted and blinkered view of the social history of the Americas, which obliterates the contributions – as the authors purport to see it – of the nascent proletarian movement in the Northern United States in combatting both chattel slavery and Jim Crow, as well as a host of other forms of œconomic and social exploitation. And that is good and right and just. Every one of their critiques of Hannah-Jones and her Project is fully deserved. But it’s more than a bit infuriating to see the authors themselves fall into the same trap when it comes to the early history of the movement for abolition.

Tracing abolitionism as a movement back only to Wilberforce – as Niemuth, Mackaman and North do – is in fact its own form of erasure. For the same reasons that it is dishonest to omit, elide or downplay the rôle of the Northern white working class in abolitionism, so too it’s dishonest to do the same for the religious predecessors of the movement. Omitting the religious convictions of the Society of Friends or the anti-slavery activism of James Oglethorpe, or the later political syncretism of Richard Oastler (which actually got results for the working-class in Britain), from the story of abolition is every bit as great an act of distortion and violence to historical truth. Why? Because it shows the actual instance of a Marxist dialectical synthesis between the advocates of ‘feudal’ reaction and the advocates of anti-slavery radicalism, in directing a humane change in œconomic relations.

Now, I do understand that my gentle readers are likely to think, after reading all this, that the foregoing is just Cooper on one of his genealogical or arcane political hobbyhorses. And you might be right to think so to some degree. But getting the history right is something for modern leftists to be concerned with, precisely because there is simply no critical mass or critical constituency for any sort of ‘pure’ leftism in the United States. And that constituency is very unlikely to be built without some kind of populist rapprochement.

It’s telling that the closest that the working class has ever come to achieving meaningful degrees of political power in the United States was the ultimately-failed populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s – and that was born precisely out of a fruitful alliance between urban workers who wanted to expand public ownership of infrastructure, and rural farmers who wanted to reduce their debt burden. It’s also telling in a negative way: even the most liberal elements of the professional class have always put their own interests first, and never those of the working class. It’s worth pointing out that there is considerable discontent nowadays among the very people who identify as conservative or independent, against the neoliberal consensus the authors justly rail against. A lot of that discontent is voiced in opportunistic or cynical ways, but it’s there and it’s genuine. If the left wants to gain power, it has to work with this discontent rather than in isolation from it.

I agree with the authors of the critique that history is not a morality play. Therefore, there is nothing to be gained by rendering one side of that history idealistically ‘pure’, any more than by rendering it racially ‘pure’. We only impoverish our own historical understanding when we airbrush out of our history the religious Dissenters, the Royalists, the Nonjurors and such who prepared the fields for abolitionism, built up much of the œconomic infrastructure which made abolition possible, and even tended the first fruits of its harvest. Even though, to a large degree, they were either neutral or on the ‘losing side’ of the American Revolution.