The Class Struggle in the US Since the Civil War
An innovative, wide-ranging, thought-provoking account of class struggle in the US since the Civil War, Jon Jeter’s latest book Class War in America: How the Elites Divide The Nation by Asking: Are You A Worker Or Are You White? is both redemptive and damning. He has rendered the tale forcefully but with a charm and grace that frees the reader to face the terrible beauty of class war in America. It’s a story that pulls you in and doesn’t let you go, not just because it’s so well done and so deeply researched but because Jeter guides us on an exploration of the primary issue confronting class struggle in the US — the long and winding relationship between race and class.
The question that reverberates throughout this book is for workers of all colors, but for people like me, as children of the white working class, we must confront our own deeply contradictory position:
America’s interpretation of capitalism…demands a hard choice from its European settlers: Are you a worker, or are you white?*
How we answer that question means everything.
New History
The first thing I love about this book is that I have learned much about US history since the Civil War. Jeter has revised the accepted timelines and interpretations by excavating tales rarely told and events on the periphery of historical awareness. As a people’s journalist, his chapters also give voice — and often the last word — to the otherwise unheard.
Jeter does not offer a simple linear narration as he travels through time and space. Jumping back and forth between historical eras with ease, the author leaves no doubt about the relevance of his material or the persistence of racial betrayal or class solidarity. Some readers may suffer from jet lag or whiplash, but buckle up—it’s a new kind of history that we desperately need.
Jeter’s account brings us up to the present (with insight on more topics than this review can touch on). He reveals the pattern of solidarity and betrayal emerging during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Jeter introduces us to the question that informs his work by telling the story of two crucial events—the Battle of the Crater and the rise of a third party, the Virginia “Readjusters.”
The Battle of the Crater was a botched, suicidal nightmare in which white racial solidarity triumphed, and Black soldiers were murdered by their own “brothers in arms.”
And then, in a horrific demonstration of racial solidarity, scores of white Union soldiers turned their bayonets, knives, and sidearms on the Colored troops they had fought alongside just moments earlier. “The cry was raised that we would all be killed if we were captured among the negroes,” one white soldier recalled later.
Jeter continues:
A white proletariat literally dug a hole for itself and managed to escape only with the help of the African Americans they had shunned and marginalized. But once the white settler has climbed from the chasm, they do not repay their Black rescuers with gratitude but a knife thrust in the back…. the worst racial massacre of the Civil War shines a spotlight on our maddening national metanarrative…[E]very victory is undone, every insurrection put down, with the 99 percent in full retreat…and the betrayal of a radical Black vanguard by their white allies who—like the Union soldiers at the Battle of the Crater—ineluctably choose “race” when the going gets tough.
Yet, the author also finds a very different flower in the same Virginia soil—a brief but shining example of the rise of a people’s third party—the Readjusters. The Readjusters championed the working class’s interests, actually got things done, and provided a model for bi-racial movements in other southern states.
The Readjusters remain the most powerful independent political movement in American history…. seizing control of the state legislature, the Congressional delegation, both U.S. Senate seats, city halls in Richmond, Danville, Petersburg, and the governor’s mansion, all within a single election cycle.
The Readjusters bucked hard times, white supremacy, and the bankers to form a biracial political party. They worked with Black Republicans to push through real reforms in 1880s Virginia.
Class solidarity or racial betrayal? So, the story of Class War in America unfolds.
The Mid-20th Century
Jeter makes a compelling case that the defense of the Scottsboro Boys was the catalyst for America’s last period of reform and revolution that lasted from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. An international solidarity movement rose to defend a group of innocent young black men who faced legal lynching after they were falsely accused of rape. Cross-racial solidarity in the face of this injustice and the visionary work of the Communist Party that lead the defense put the New Deal back into the hands of everyday people and a principled left opposition where it belongs.
[T]he arrest of the Scottsboro Boys triggered 50 years of tumult in America’s class relations, as a critical mass of whites forfeited their racial privileges to join with their Black co-workers and fight the wealthiest 1 percent who oppressed them all. Until roughly the moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s 40th president, employees went blow for blow with their employers, modernizing the state in the process.
As we know, this revolution did not occur unopposed. By the mid-1970s, a corporate counterattack was launched to lower wages, impose austerity, and breathe new life into the embattled empire.
Chicago, Counter-Revolution and the Election of 2024
Jeter makes clear that the book’s central question is not posed to whites alone.
The people of Chicago made a last stand against the resurgence of corporate control by organizing a multi-year effort to elect Harold Washington mayor in 1983. But, as the half-century of upheaval and progress waned, a class of elite Black politicians rose to “isolate the vanguard of the revolution: the African American working class.”
If there is one book to read before the 2024 election, this would be it.
Jeter’s recounting of Chicago politics puts Obama and his hand-picked successor, Kamla Harris, in their larger political context. The grassroots movement that put Harold Washington in the Mayor’s office was overshadowed by the rise of well-financed, well-connected Black politicians, including one who would one day occupy the White House.
Absent an understanding of Chicago’s first Black mayor you cannot begin to make sense of the Republic’s first Black president. Obama owed his electoral triumphs to a top-down political movement that was antithetical to the grassroots organizing that produced Washington, and each man governed accordingly. As such, the pro-business policies of Black politicians such as Obama, Kamala Harris, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, New Jersey’s U.S. Senator Cory Booker, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser…can only be explained as a response to an insurrection, and the radical Black polity that was its engine. Or, to put it another way, Obama was the figurehead for a counterrevolution that takes dead aim at its foes in the American working class.
If, indeed, “Obama was the figurehead for a counterrevolution that takes dead aim at its foes in the American working class,” then 2024 offers us no real choice between the two corporate parties, both hostile to everyday people. We can be sure that war and austerity will continue regardless of which corporate candidate wins. Both poverty and the poverty draft increase the short-term value of white privilege, making it an asset fewer whites are willing to sacrifice to the rigors of class struggle — despite the fact that a much bigger prize awaits a working class who can tell friends from enemies. After all, Jeter asks, “What good would it be to be white in a country where everyone’s needs are met?”
And so, meeting our needs will never be on the agenda of the Democrats or Republicans. Austerity is their strategy to maximize profits, preempt dissent, and perpetuate white ethnonationalism. As we are divided, so are we conquered.
Hey, What’s the Big Idea?
Jeter convincingly shows that — in the battles of the class war — we do not have an either-or choice between race and class. Class has multiple meanings in America: multiracial solidarity is the feature of class struggle at its high water mark, and white treachery is the feature of class struggle when the bosses win and we lose.
This thoroughly dialectical account shows that race and class do not work as static opposites but as two possibilities of a single revolutionary process.
In Jeter’s telling, and among the contemporary opposition, there are two master narratives: the colonial/settler narrative and socialist or anarchist-inspired class analysis. Jeter’s contribution, and a significant one it is, has shown us that great storytelling can weave both strands into a single tapestry. Jon Jeter has done his part and paid his dues by moving us closer to the day that workers will answer the call to join and win the Class War in America.
*All quotes are from Jon Jeter, Class War in America.
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