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The Hands of the Laboring Class One hundred and fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States witnessed an equally significant political battle to determine the fate of the country. As liberal and left-wing commentators today increasingly look to Reconstruction for political enlightenment, it’s worth borrowing a crucial lesson about race, class, and partisan realignment from W. E. B. Du Bois’s Marxist classic, Black Reconstruction. Contrary to much popular history, Du Bois argued, “Reconstruction was not simply a fight between the white and the black races in the South.” It was a multipolar struggle that involved northern capitalists, southern planters, and “a vast movement of labor,” white and black, in both regions. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party had organized the suppression of the Confederate rebellion and the destruction of slavery. But in the late 1860s, as that party fell under the sway of the “monarchs of industry and finance,” it increasingly came to blows with organized white workers in the North. On the other end of the political spectrum, meanwhile, President Andrew Johnson made naked appeals to racism, hoping to forge a pseudo-populist alliance of planters, farmers, and laborers on the basis of white supremacy. The result of this double movement, by the late nineteenth century, was a party system that left the American working class hopelessly rent by race. Through the Gilded Age Republican party, Du Bois noted, the cause of “humanitarian radicalism” — and black civil rights — became “completely harnessed to capital and property in the North.” The major opposition party, the Gilded Age Democrats, stood vaguely for northern white labor, and vigorously for “reaction and property in the South.” The fruit of this divided working class was more than half a century of violent labor repression, harsh racial apartheid, and unfiltered capitalist profit. Over the last two years, another clownish demagogue in the White House has made the same gambit as Andrew Johnson did a hundred fifty years ago: divide by race and rule by class, while capital laughs all the way to the bank. Today’s Democratic Party, to their credit, appears far more committed to preserving civil rights than the late-nineteenth-century Republicans. But as the party consolidates its strength around the wealthy suburbs, the dangers of a Gilded Age–style class division persist. A political coalition led by affluent metropolitans, armed with pietistic certainty about their moral cause, but almost physically allergic to huge chunks of the working-class population: this was the Republican Party of 1884. It does not offer us a roadmap to the future. “The only power to curtail the rising empire of finance in the United States,” Du Bois concluded, “was industrial democracy — votes and intelligence in the hands of the laboring class, black and white, North and South.” The hands of the laboring class: in the struggle against capitalist power, they are the only thing that can save us. That was true in 1868, it was true in 1938, and it remains true in 2018.