*https://imhojournal.org/
~~ Article written by collectivist action ~~
By Collectivist Action
A document posted online by a political formation called, Liberation Road, described the struggle against, what it identified as “white authoritarian rule", as a fight against the “New Confederacy”.
Imo, that term describes, provocatively and succinctly, if not completely, the organized fascist forces in the United States of America today.
Since the aborted January 6, 2021 rightwing coup, it has dawned on everyone (except anyone politically sleepwalking) that a sprawling, violent, fascistic tendency has, once again, emerged in this country, and has gone viral, since the beginning of the 21st century.
Of course, the concept of a new Confederacy conjures up the bloody history of the old Confederacy:
- Eleven southern U.S. state governments, led by slave owners, which, in 1861, seceded from the U.S. federal state to form their own nation state, the Confederate States of America (CSA).
- After precipitating a civil war, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people, and being defeated on the ground of battle, the CSA surrendered to northern forces in 1865.
Or did they?
We do know that:
The original American confederacy actually emerged as a slave owner-led movement to prevent the abolition of chattel slavery. Although abolitionism was a relatively small political movement as late as the 1850s many leading slavocrats had begun to see, as early as the 1820s to abolitionism as potentially powerful enough to present a serious threat to its further expansion of the slavocracy. Moreover, as slave states, and territories, became free, under the jurisdiction of the federal government, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, enslaved people began escaping in greater numbers than ever before, effectively ‘bleeding’ the 46, 000 slave labor camps across the South of valuable property-in-labor. Much of this was facilitated by a multicultural, secret network, called the Underground Railroad.
Preserving the rule of slave owners, even if it meant severing ties with and declaring war against the federal government, was the primary reason for the formation of the C.S.A. Iow, their principal fight was for the right to own, and trade, people.The latter were ‘legally’ defined as both capital and commodities of the highest material value.*
It is important to understand that the Confederacy eventually became much more than a secessionist political tendency.It was all of that and more.
If the goal of its principal architects, before and during most of the war, was secession from a federal government which it perceived as increasingly hostile to its slave owning interests, by the time of the Battle of Gettysburg (and after several other major losses to the Union) the leaders of the insurgency became more desperate and, quiet-as-it’s-historically-
Thus, the slavocrats would MAINTAIN local, state and political power and RESTORE whatever power they lost during the military conflagration, or before.
Although the old confederacy did maintain much of its power after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction it never totally regained its former dominant position in the ruling class alliance . . . but it never ceased trying.In the subsequent decades it managed to secure many political victories on a federal level. Remnants of the original C.S.A. and some of its political descendants continued to play prominent and important roles, not only in U.S. society, but also in the ruling class itself.
What else do we know?
President Lincoln was assassinated only months before the war’s end.
After suppressing the rebellion, the states which had seceded were dissolved as political entities were officially reclassified as defeated ‘territories' under U.S. jurisdiction.
Most of the Confederate officers, including the top general, Robert E. Lee, were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded President Grant and was formerly a senator from antebellum Tennessee and vice president under President Lincoln.
The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1866, by unrepentant Confederate officers, initiating, along with other white nationalists, a reign of terror against African Americans and their allies; only partially suppressed by the Grant Administration and several Civil Rights Acts (the first ones enacted in 1871)
Around 1867, the ‘radical’ Republican Party-led federal state implemented a ‘Radical Reconstruction’ plan to, ostensibly, 1) economically restore the defeated Confederacy and politically re-integrate it into the ‘Union’ , and 2) to integrate the formerly enslaved population into the Union as citizens, especially, after the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. constitution
Undergirding all of that was the consolidation of the rule of the triumphant industrial capitalists, who’ would shortly thereafter gain infamy as modern-day ‘robber barons.’
The Hayes/Tilden Compromise was an informal, unwritten deal that settled the hotly disputed 1876 U.S. Presidential election. Through it Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House, on the understanding that he would remove the federal troops from the 'conquered' areas.
Instead of being the dominant, white nationalist tendency in the U.S., - as they had been since the founding of the U.S. nation state - the ex-slave owners became ‘junior partners’ in a new global, political, economic configuration led by an industrial-based, rather than a plantation-based, ruling class.
By the end of the 19th century, and the Supreme Court Ruling on Plessy vs Ferguson, most vestiges of radical reconstruction had been dismantled, and another wave of domestic white terrorism. e.g., mass incarceration, convict lease labor and lynching emerged, often led, sanctioned or tolerated by the federal government.
Also, by the end of the 19th century, the U.S. ruling class had suppressed the last major resistance of indigenous nations and consolidated its total control of the continental landmass between Canada and the half of Mexico they had seized after their victory in the Mexican/American War 50 years earlier.
“ The New Confederacy is a white united front that includes the most reactionary capitalists, with a pro-austerity, white supremacist and cis-hetero-patriarchal agenda, and uses the Republican Party as its political instrument.” (Liberation Road)
The only thing I’d add to that statement is that the New Confederacy CURRENTLY uses the Republican Party as its primary political instrument.
It was the Democratic Party which politically led the old Confederacy. Since then, both major parties, for the most part, have upheld white nationalist private and public policies, programs and practices, among other things. Even African Americans and other people of color, have at times, upheld and enforced them, advertently and inadvertently. (The Hayes/Tilden Compromise was negotiated in a Washington, D.C. hotel owned by a free African American!)
Fast forward history to the present era and we find credible evidence to suggest that this new, reconsolidated Confederacy should not be narrowly understood as just about election denial, a cult of ( Donald Trump’s) personality, white working and middle class economic ‘discontent’, xenophobia, a response to neoliberal rule, etc.
The New Confederacy (whether Trump remains the figurehead or not) has, since the turn of the 21st century, reared its ugly head, again, as a multifaceted alliance of many reactionary forces.The goal: to prevent the rise to power of anti-patriarchal, anti-white supremacy and, first and foremost, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist movements, especially in the United States.
Both sides of this struggle recognize now - or at least should - the irreconcilable nature of this social contradiction.
“We believe the New Confederacy remains our principal enemy in this political moment due to the dominance of this block and the elevated threat it poses to democracy, the planet and oppressed peoples.” (LB)
We could add there that the New Confederacy’s categorical denial of catastrophic climate change bodes ominously for ALL genuine human rights, democratic and anticapitalist movements, and subjectively and objectively undermines humanity’s efforts to prevent the Earth from becoming inhospitable to life-as-we-know it.
..
As a new wave of European immigrants’ streamed into the country, there arose a need to further ‘refine’ the white nationalist social system in order to justify the persistence and prevalence of white poverty and maintain a class-stratified society ruled by a small minority of ‘whites’. . . .
(To be continued, next week, in Part 2)
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