Crushing the slavocracy in 1865 brought the capitalist class definitive control over the nation. A general recasting of governmental policies and social institutions followed, so as to bring them into full conformity with bourgeois needs. That cleared the way for qualitative leaps in machine production, railroad construction, etc., already accelerated by the Civil War. Huge concentrations of capital were amassed to finance large-scale enterprises. Big corporations came into existence. Giant trusts were formed by industrial and banking combines in moves to establish monopolies. This trend soon produced a bumper crop of multimillionaires who fattened on harsh exploitation of wage-labor and wanton depredation of national resources. These plutocrats became the real power behind the bourgeois-democratic governmental facade, and they dealt brutally with all who resisted their ruthless methods of coining superprofits.

Expansion of the factory system also led to transformation of the working class. Unskilled laborers serving as appendages of machines became an increasingly larger section of the class and the weight of the skilled workers declined proportionately. As these contrasting trends revealed, wage-labor was becoming substantially proletarianized. This signified that--in terms of objective developments--the country was entering a new phase. Capitalism, which had just triumphed over the planter aristocracy and which was making fewer and fewer compromises with the independent producers, was already beginning to create "its own gravediggers."

This period also saw the definitive end to a progressive role for any wing of the bourgeoisie or its political parties.

By 1877, radical reconstruction had gone down to bloody defeat, and not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered the worst setback in its history. The defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of the industrial ruling class, who were incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers.

The rural poor and working class were forcibly divided along color lines. The value of labor power was driven down and class solidarity crippled. Jim Crow, the system of extensive segregation, was legalized. Racism was spread at an accelerated pace throughout the entire United States. The ideological basis for imperialist expansion was laid. All the conditions were created for the forging of the new Afro-American oppressed nationality.

At the same time, the Marxists had been weakened in the aftermath of the Civil War. Isolation from the civilian work force, casualties in the war, and the death after the war of Joseph Weydemeyer--Marx and Engels's principal collaborator in the U.S.--virtually decimated the organized Marxist current in the United States....

The accelerated immigration from abroad far exceeded the rate at which workers from the eastern region of the United States were moving westward to take up farming. A mushrooming of the labor forces concentrated in industrial centers resulted, and the trend gained further momentum as the area of western land available for settlement diminished. Artisans and small masters constituted a smaller and smaller percentage of production relative to the dominant factory system. Economic conditions were locking a hereditary, a permanent working class into the cities, one which was steadily growing in social weight.

In those circumstances more and more workers began to think of themselves as part of a distinct class. Goaded by hardships suffered at the hands of capitalist exploiters, they groped for a way to act together in defense of their common interests as a class. Bitter struggles developed in which the employers resorted to acts of extreme violence in efforts to repress organized labor. Those experiences made the existence of class antagonisms quite plain to see, but the steps required to advance the workers' cause were not so readily apparent. Because of the rapidity with which social and economic changes were occurring; because of social confusion resulting from the swift changes; because of the relative immaturity of the working class--it would take time, experience, and the aid of a revolutionary vanguard to develop an effective class-struggle strategy.  
 
 
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