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SETTING OUR SIGHTS ON A THIRD RECONSTRUCTION  
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Max Elbaum
April 25, 2024
Convergence
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_ If our goal is a robust democracy and working-class power, the
experiences of the Civil War-Reconstruction era and the Second
Reconstruction of the 1950s-’60s provide crucial lessons for
breaking out of our current impasse. _

Selma to Montgomery March for the right to vote, 1965, Abernathy
Family Photos via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

 

“The white riot of January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol Building is
impossible to understand without reference to earlier, yet strikingly
similar, efforts during the First Reconstruction period. In both cases
there were attempts to violently overthrow democratically held
elections won with the aid of Black votes. To fully understand the
challenges and opportunities of this moment, we must take a deep
historical dive, one that braids together the most crucial aspects of
these three [Reconstruction] periods and the repeated clashes between
the forces of redemption [white supremacy] and the forces of
reconstruction.”

–Peniel E. Joseph, _The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle
for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
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pp. 14-15.

With a genocide underway in Gaza and the threat of a MAGA victory in
November hanging over our heads, it’s hard to avoid getting trapped
in a strictly defensive mind-set. But it is essential to focus on the
better future we are trying to create as well as the dangers we need
to prevent, and see how these two components of a “Block and Build
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strategy interrelate. Grasping both the dangers and the positive
potential of today’s conflict is necessary to keep our balance and
to tap the energies and turn out the votes of the pro-ceasefire
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Highlighting the deep patterns of US history discussed in Peniel
Joseph’s book and W.E.B. DuBois’ _Black Reconstruction in
America_
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Joseph draws so much from, gives us one way to do that. Even a short
review of the key lessons offers insights useful for staving off
fascism and embarking on the path of popular empowerment and deep
structural change.

Reconstructionists vs. Redeemers

Joseph explains the central thread in his argument in another passage
from the introduction to _The Third Reconstruction_:

“For W.E.B. DuBois, ‘double consciousness’ did not refer simply
to Black efforts to forge coherent identity in a country scarred by
racial slavery… America itself has a dual identity, reflecting
warring ideas about citizenship, freedom, and democracy. There is the
America that we might call _reconstructionist_, home to champions of
racial democracy, and there is the America we might
call _redemptionist_, a country that papers over racial, class, and
gender hierarchies through an allegiance to white supremacy.”

—_The Third Reconstruction_, pp. 9-10

Using this lens to understand key junctures in US history sheds
significant light on the ways democratic and class struggle intersect
and interweave; the driving-force role of the Black laboring classes,
and the synergies among electoral victories, direct action, and
organizing on a mass scale. It underscores the necessity, and
difficulty, of social justice partisans (“reconstructionists”)
joining with inconsistent allies to defeat the outright reactionaries
(self-styled “redeemers
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also contending with those allies over the program and leadership of
our coalition.  

General strike, dictatorship of labor

W.E.B. DuBois debunked the “Lost Cause
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myths about the Civil War and Reconstruction, revealing the actual
course of events and the underlying dynamics that shaped them.  The
most crucial points made by DuBois and those who built upon his work
include:

* Enslaved African Americans played a decisive role both in the US
victory over the Confederacy and in making emancipation federal
policy. DuBois characterized the multifaceted uprising of the enslaved
as a “general strike
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the country’s most oppressed labor force, as well as the sector
which had produced the most capitalist profit.  
* The Reconstruction governments were the most progressive in US
history. The pre-war plantation economy had no social services for the
enslaved or for poor whites. The new governments established after the
war, protected by federal troops, were anchored by enfranchised
African Americans who, in alliance with poor whites, constituted a
governing majority. These governments established public schools and
hospitals and provided aid and care to the poor. DuBois spoke of these
governments in terms of “abolition democracy
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frequently characterizing them as a “dictatorship of labor
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times a “dictatorship of the proletariat
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* Abraham Lincoln was not part of the abolitionist movement, which
was the grassroots force driving opposition to the “slave power”
before and during the Civil War. Abolitionists including top leaders
like Frederick Douglass harshly criticized and consistently pressured
[[link removed]] Lincoln.
But abolitionists simultaneously saw his election to the Presidency in
1860, and his re-election in 1864, as crucial for advancing their
cause. Asked what to make of Lincoln’s 1860 win, Frederick Douglass
said:

“Not much, in itself considered, but very much when viewed in the
light of its relations and bearings…. It has taught the North its
strength and the South its weakness. More important still, it has
demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at
least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United
States…. Mr. Lincoln’s election breaks the enchantment, dispels
this terrible nightmare, and awakes the nation to the consciousness of
new powers and the possibility of a higher destiny than the perpetual
bondage to an ignoble fear.”

—_Life and Writings_, vol. 2, p.528

* The abolitionists and the enslaved who anchored the “general
strike” were the fiercest opponents of slavery and as such contended
for leadership in the broad coalition needed to win the Civil War and
shape its aftermath. As the dynamics of war pushed all defenders of
the union to the left, the Radical Republicans
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influence and became the dominant force in Congress. As such, they
played the crucial role in winning the “Reconstruction Amendments
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which provided legal basis for the Reconstruction governments and set
a new bar for further advance of democracy and equality still used
today.

This process is a textbook example of how strength gained in the fight
to _block_ the “slave power” produced the capacity
to _build_ anti-racist and pro-working class governing power during
Reconstruction.

Civil Rights Movement drives a Second Reconstruction

Reconstruction was overturned by a self-identified force of white
“Redeemers” using a combination of racist terror and
disenfranchisement of African Americans. They were able to do so
largely because key sections of the coalition that had won the Civil
War—northern industrialists and all too many whites of the middle
and working classes —abandoned the fight for Black rights.

Almost a hundred years of Jim Crow followed. Then, building on fights
for equality during the 1930s workers’ upsurge, the double “V”
campaign during World War II, and fresh stirrings of activism right
after the war, a sustained Civil Rights offensive began in earnest
with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. The dynamics of this
“Second Reconstruction” parallelled the first in several ways:

* Black America—particularly the overwhelmingly working-class
Black population in the states of the former Confederacy—was again
the driving force of what became a society-wide political flow.
* As in the First Reconstruction, the gains made for Black equality
and enfranchisement expanded democracy for all and tilted strongly in
favor of workers and their families. While driving the end of Jim
Crow, the Civil Right Movement broke the back of McCarthyism, ended
racist immigration quotas, and played a powerful part in opposing the
Vietnam War. The energy from the Civil Rights and Black Power
struggles drove the launch of Medicare and revitalized freedom
movements among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, and Native
Americans. It inspired second-wave feminism and the modern LGBTQ
movement.
* The 1964 landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson over anti-Civil
Rights Act candidate Barry Goldwater was an important factor in
winning passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The
complicated relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the
Johnson administration (epitomized in the contend-and-agree,
agree-and-contend see-saw between Johnson and Dr. King) was one of
history’s “rhymes” with the unity-struggle relationship between
abolitionism and the federal government under Abraham Lincoln.

Direct line from the redeemers to MAGA

Once again, a backlash against every hard-won gain took shape.
Well-financed by the elite forces at its core and utilizing a
sophisticated combination of electoral action and grassroots
organizing, it moved from Nixon’s Southern Strategy
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the Reagan era rise of neoliberalism
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the Tea Party reaction
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the country’s first Black President. In 2013 it achieved one of its
paramount goals when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act
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That backlash has now reached its most intense phase with a
MAGA-controlled GOP bidding for total federal power in the 2024
election. It is no coincidence that its banner—“Make America Great
Again”—is a reworking of the “Redeem the Country” slogan under
which the First Reconstruction was overturned. There is a direct line
between the redeemers of the 1870s, the practitioners of “Massive
Resistance
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to de-segregation in the 1960s, and the MAGA bloc we face today.

A Third Reconstruction to expand on the first two

Many things have changed in the US and the world since the 1960s, not
to mention the 1870s. Changes in demographics, the structure of the
working class, gender relations, and the cataclysmic crisis of climate
change loom especially large for formulating goals and strategies. But
the structural dynamics that underlay the development and the overturn
of First and Second Reconstruction have not disappeared. Combining an
appreciation of those patterns with the adjustments mandated by
changed circumstances brings several key points to the fore:

* Just as broad fronts that extended far beyond abolitionists, the
enslaved. or the Civil Rights Movement were necessary to defeat the
slavocracy and then the segregationists, a broad front extending well
beyond progressives and the Left is required to beat the MAGA
“redeemers” today. That front manifests itself mainly in the
electoral realm.
* As in past periods, sustained, militant action by peoples located
at the intersection of class exploitation and racial oppression and
their allies is essential both for defeating the main enemy and for
winning significant gains. The Black community remains the most
consistently progressive and combative constituency in US politics.
(It is worth stressing that there, alongside Arab and Muslim
communities, is where internationalist sentiments and sympathy with
the Palestinian struggle is strongest.) But changing demographics have
heightened the importance and clout of Latino/a, Asian American, Arab
and Muslim and Native peoples; and the political “gender gap”
first noted in the 1970s and ‘80s has increased substantially in the
era of MAGA.

As Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and the movements
they helped lead have shown, the impact from radical movements is
greatest when they project a compelling narrative that that offers
direction to all those claim allegiance to democracy. Appealing to our
common humanity and shared self-interests while denouncing the
injustices of the current system is the path to gaining both the
political and moral high ground.

Most concrete programmatic elements needed by a modern-day
Reconstructionist force have already been thrust into the mainstream
by social movements and progressive elected officials: the John Lewis
Voting Rights Advancement Act
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a Green New Deal
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Health Protection Act
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the PRO Act labor legislation [[link removed]], a
blueprint for “A Revolution in US Foreign Policy
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and more.  With a central focus on voting rights and expansion of
democracy in general, the framework of a Third Reconstruction can bind
these together and project a vision in which the whole becomes more
than the sum of its individual parts. (For a detailed treatment of a
Third Reconstruction program and strategy, see Bob Wing, Introduction
to “Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction
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Already the Third Reconstruction framework has moved from the work of
historians and scholars into popular movements. Rev. William Barber,
Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral
Revival, used the Third Reconstruction concept in his book _The Third
Reconstruction: How a Moral Monday Movement Is Overcoming the Politics
of Division and Fear_
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The Poor People’s Campaign works to popularize the idea
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its ongoing work. An approach with deep roots in US history and
centered in the Black experience, it is increasingly present in the
wave of recent materials exploring the real history of US racism and
the fight against it, including the widely discussed 1619 Project
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The call for a Third Reconstruction resonates in the layer of society
most opposed to MAGA and most likely to drive progressive change in
the next decade—the inter-related block and build
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As both narrative [[link removed]] and a guide to
mass organizing and electoral action, the Third Reconstruction
perspective holds great promise.

Max Elbaum is a member of the _Convergence Magazine_ editorial board
and the author of _Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao and Che_ 
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Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of _Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections _
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* Third Reconstruction
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* civil rights movement
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* W. E. B. Du Bois
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* MAGA
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* multi-racial democracy
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