News & Letters, July 1998

From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya--Marxist-Humanist Archives

Racism and the birth of imperialism, 100 years after the Spanish-American war

Editor's Note:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Spanish-American war-an event which signaled a new stage of imperialist intervention overseas as well as intensifying racism here in the U.S. Because the connection between new stages of capitalist expansion and intensifying racism is especially crucial to grasp in light of today's globalization of capital, we here reprint excerpts of Dunayevskaya's discussion of the rise of imperialism at the turn of the century from the pamphlet AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: BLACK MASSES AS VANGUARD. The excerpts are taken from Part III, "Imperialism and Racism." First published in 1963, AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL has undergone several new editions, the latest being in 1983. The full pamphlet is available from N&L for $2.

The United States' plunge into imperialism in 1898 came so suddenly that Populism hardly noticed it. Although for a decade and more Populism had fought monopoly capital which gave birth to imperialism, it was not weighted down by an awareness of any connection between the two. This was not the result only of the deflection of the struggle of the people vs. monopoly into the narrower channel of free silver vs. banker. BEHIND THE APPARENT SUDDENNESS OF THE RISE OF IMPERIALISM STANDS THE SPECTACULAR INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AFTER THE CIVIL WAR. THE UNPRECEDENTED RATE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION TELESCOPED ITS VICTORY OVER AGRICULTURE AND ITS TRANSFORMATION FROM COMPETITIVE TO MONOPOLY CAPITAL.

Because monopoly capital had appeared first in transportation, the Mid-Western wheat belt as well as the post-Reconstruction South resented their veritable bondage to the railroads that controlled the outlet of, and thus set the prices for, their products. The agricultural population had been the first to revolt, the first to organize into a new political party, and the ones mainly responsible for getting the first anti-trust Acts of 1887 and 1890.

It was this precisely which so shook up the Southern oligarchy that it quickly gave up its resentment of Northern capital's victory over agrarianism in order to unite with its former WAR enemy to destroy their mutual CLASS enemy, Populism. TOGETHER, North and South pulled out all stops-the violence of Northern capital against labor was more than matched by the Southern oligarchy's encouragement of the revival of the rule of rope and faggot against a mythical "Negro domination" inherent in Populism.

That ADDITIVE OF COLOR, moreover, now had a promissory note attached to it: a veritable heaven on earth was promised the poor whites in the new white-only enterprise-textiles. So began "the great slaughter of the innocents" that will first in the late 1920s explode into the unwritten civil war of unarmed, starving textile workers against armed, well-fed Southern monopolists-the great Gastonia, North Carolina strike. But for the late 1890s the Southern monopolists-in agriculture as in industry-became so frightened over the explosive force contained in Populism, the threat to THEIR rule, that they happily embraced the North, Northern capital.

Monopoly capital first appeared in transportation before it appeared in industry, but from the first it was built on Andrew Carnegie's principle: "Pioneering doesn't pay." Empire building through consolidations did. Swallowing up of smaller capital, destruction of cut-throat competition alongside of monopolization, not to mention cheating on top of exploitation-that was the way of all great American fortunes built by means more foul than fair during those two decisive decades. Four times as much acreage as had been taken up by homesteaders was given to railroad companies. Bourgeois historians must record what even bourgeois politicians had to admit-after the fact, of course. In THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, Charles A. Beard states: "The public land office of the United States was little more than a centre of the distribution of plunder; according to President Roosevelt's land commission, hardly a single great western estate had a title untainted by fraud."

Monopoly was on its way in all fields and with just as unclean hands-Rockefeller started the oil trust; Carnegie, steel; Morgan, banking; while Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, James J. Hill, Cornelius Vanderbilt first kept to railroads and then spread tentacles outward until all together they impelled the Federal Government to its imperialist path.

Long before American capital's discovery of the easy road to wealth, Marx had described European capital's birth: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On the heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theater... Great fortunes sprung up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling."

THE CAPITALIST LEOPARD COULDN'T CHANGE ITS SPOTS IN THE U.S. EVEN THOUGH ITS PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION HAD TO BE ACHIEVED WITHIN THE CONFINES OF ITS OWN LAND. DIRECT SLAVERY WAS STILL THE METHOD OF DEVELOPING SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE, WAGE LABOR THAT OF DEVELOPING INDUSTRY. DESPITE THE FAMOUS FREE FARMER IN THE WEST AND ITS SEEMINGLY ENDLESS FRONTIER, FREE LAND WAS STILL MORE, FANTASTICALLY MORE, AT THE DISPOSAL OF RAILROAD MAGNATES THAN AVAILABLE TO HOMESTEADERS, AND THAT FACT HELD THOUGH THE "MAGNATES" WERE FIRST TO BECOME SUCH. HERE TOO "GREAT FORTUNES SPRUNG UP LIKE MUSHROOMS INA DAY" NOT FOR EVERY MAN BUT FOR THOSE WHO KNOW HOW TO GET GOVERNMENT TO HELP NEW INDUSTRIALISM, HOT HOUSE FASHION, TO BLOSSOM FORTH INTO MONOPOLY FORM.

It is no historic secret that the later the bourgeois revolution against feudalism or slavery takes place, the less complete it is, due to the height of class opposition between capital and labor. The lateness in the abolition of slavery in the United States accounts for the tenacious economic survival of slavery which still exists in the country.

PLUNGE INTO IMPERIALISM

Nevertheless, as the strength of Populism and the solidarity of Black and white that it forged showed, the economic survival of slavery couldn't have persisted, much less dominated the life of the Negroes North as well as South, IF they hadn't been reinforced by the "new" Northern capital. It was not the "psychology of Jim Crowism" that did the reinforcing. THE 'PSYCHOLOGY OF JIM CROWISM" IS ITSELF THE RESULT, NOT THE CAUSE, OF MONOPOLY CAPITAL EXTENDING ITS TENTACLES INTO THE CARIBBEAN AND THE PACIFIC AS IT BECAME TRANSFORMED INTO IMPERIALISM, WITH THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR. So great, however, was the corruption of capitalism that the muckrakers were blinded by it; that is to say, diverted by it from grasping capitalism's ORGANIC exploitative nature that would NATURALLY transform itself into quasi-totalitarian imperialism. The result was that when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, it had the appearance of a sudden manifestation out of nowhere. In truth it was long building up. Latin America had known, ever since 1820, that while the Monroe Doctrine could protect it from EUROPEAN INVASION, there was no such protection from AMERICAN AGGRESSION FOR WHICH THE DOCTRINE WAS DESIGNED.

Were we ever to exclude the imperialistic adventure of the Mexican-American War of 1846 on the excuse that it had been instigated, not by Northern capital but by the Southern wish to expand the territory for slavery, these facts that are incontrovertible preceded the Spanish-American war:

(1) Three full decades of phenomenal industrial expansion followed the end of the Civil War; (2) three full decades of undeclared civil war were waged against labor in the North; and (3) the combined might of Northern capital and the Southern aristocracy was used against the challenge from agriculture-Populism. The removal of the Federal troops was only the first of the steps in this unholy alliance which two decades later jointly ventured into imperialism.

IT COULD NOT BE OTHERWISE. THE CAPITALISTIC MENTALITY AND THE SLAVEMASTER MENTALITY ARE NOT VERY FAR APART WHEN THE DOMINATION OF THE EXPLOITERS IS CHALLENGED BY THE WORKING PEOPLE. INDEED, MONOPOLY CAPITAL NEEDED SOUTHERN RACISM FOR ITS PLUNGE INTO EMPIRE. NORTH AND SOUTH, THE THIRST FOR EMPIRE WAS BRILLIANTLY WHITE.

As America shouldered the "White Man's Burden" she took up at the same time many Southern attitudes on the subject of race. "If the stronger and cleverer race," said the editor of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, "is free to impose its will upon 'new-caught, sullen peoples' on the other side of the globe, why not in South Carolina and Mississippi?"....

Even Samuel Gompers and the A.F. of L., which began by opposing this imperialistic venture, ended by capitulating to it. Only the independent Negro movement maintained a consistent and principled opposition to this plunge into imperialism: "... in 1899 the Afro-American Council... demanded an end to lynching and the enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This was the year of the Spanish-American War which gave the United States the Philippines; and DuBois and other Negro intellectuals, together with a large section of the Negro press, actively supported the recently formed Anti-Imperialist League, castigated the war as unjust, and linked it to their own struggle with the demand that America should put itself in order at home before expanding overseas. This Negro campaign against American imperialism did not stop with the acquisition of the Philippines; and, in 1900 many voices-including that of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop, Henry M. Turner-were raised against the use of Negro troops in the United States' effort against the Boxer Rebellion in China."

RACISM

This poison in the air from the smell of empire pervaded North as well as South even as it had already pervaded Europe when it set about carving up Africa in the previous decade. It is true that despite dollar diplomacy's "lapses" in not sticking only to the dollar profits but participating both in marine landings and the actual occupation, American imperialism was not on the level of spoliation and barbarism of Europe's conquest of Africa.

THE GREATER TRUTH, HOWEVER, IS THAT THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S "MANIFEST DESTINY" DOES NOT FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFER FROM BRITAIN'S JINGOISTIC "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" OR FROM THE FRENCH "MISSION CIVILISATRICE" OR THE GERMAN "KULTUR." ALL WHITE CIVILIZATION SHOWED ITS BARBARISM IN THE CONQUEST OF THE WHOLE AFRO-ASIAN, LATIN AMERICAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN WORLDS.

The debate over whether imperialism means a search for exports and investments or imports and "consumer choice" sheds no illumination on the roots of racism and its persistence over the decades so that by now the hollowness of American democracy reverberates around the globe and makes the newly awakened giants of freedom in the economically underdeveloped world look sympathetically to the totalitarian Sino-Soviet orbit which had not directly oppressed it. Whether imperialism's exploitation was due to the need for cotton or copper, coffee or copra, cocoa or diamonds, super-profits for finance capital or "prestige" for national governments, ITS INHUMANITY TO MAN IS WHAT ASSURED ITS RETURN HOME TO ROOST ON NATIVE RACIST AS WELL AS EXPLOITATIVE GROUNDS.

The Spanish-American War was no sooner over than the United States began forcing the door open to trade in China. The 1900 election campaign was built around this imperialistic note. It was not merely out of the lips of a young senator from Indiana that we heard jubilation: "The Philippines are ours forever... And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race..." When McKinley was assassinated there came to rule over this new empire from Latin America to the Philippines, and from Hawaii to some open doors in China and Japan, Theodore Roosevelt-that alleged trust buster and very real empire builder.

Racism, in the U.S. AND/OR abroad, helped pave the way for totalitarianism with its cult of "Aryanism" and its bestial destruction of an entire WHITE RACE in the very heart of Europe. Those who wish to forget that at the root of present-day APARTHEID South Africa was the "civilizing mission" of the white race which meant, in fact, such horrors as the extermination of the Khoisan peoples by the Boers, of Leopold II's reduction of 20 to 40 million peaceful Congolese to 8 million-are the ones who took the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany "in stride"-until the Nazi search for "lebensraum" meant a challenge to their own area of exploitation.

Surely, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation when the holocaust of World War II is still fresh within the memory of living men, it is high time to stop playing psychological games with racism. It is precisely such playing with the question as to whether the Civil War was to be limited only to the question of Union, and not extended to the abolition of slavery, which both prolonged the war and left the revolution in human relations in so unfinished a state that to this day we suffer from its state of incompletion.