August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, "The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution" (Brill, 2024)
01:42:19 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks. Admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life.

At Capella University, our game-changing FlexPath learning format lets you set your own deadlines so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you. It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earn your degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Pell. I'm the editor-in-chief of the New Books Network. And school is about to begin, so I imagine many NBN listeners who are teachers are putting together a syllabi. And we'd like to encourage you to put the NBN on your syllabi. There are over 25,000 episodes in the NBN library. And we're going to be talking about the NBN syllabus.

each of them an interview with an author who really knows what they're talking about. No matter what you teach, you'll probably find something there that will be interesting to your students. So put it in the resource section of your syllabus and encourage your students to go take a listen. Thanks very much. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozman. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest and urgency to questions of racial oppression and emancipation. We've

We've now had about a decade of activists fighting for the idea that Black Lives Matter, which eventually culminated in the summer of 2020 with millions taking to the streets. The actual concrete victories have been more of a mixed bag, which leads us to the question, what sort of politics are needed to achieve real emancipation?

This led Kyle Edwards and August Nims back to The Americans of War, and more specifically to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass.

Both wrote quite prolifically on the events that were happening and were enthusiastic about its possibilities for the advancement of human freedom, but both brought some very different political values and ideas to their analysis. In studying these two figures together, Edwards and Nims are able to show how both a fight for communism rooted in class struggle and a revolutionary liberalism rose to this profound historical moment.

The result is a study with concrete answers to the question of what sort of politics will be needed going forward.

Kyle Edwards is a curriculum administrator at the University of Minnesota and a member of AFSCME 3800. August Nims is a professor in the political science department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books, including Marxism vs. Liberalism, Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis, and The Real-Time Political Analysis.

and The Ballot, The Streets, or Both, From Marks and Angles to Lenin and the October Revolution. Kyle Edwards and August Nymphs, welcome to the New Books Network.

Thank you. It's a real honor on our part to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, very excited to have you. So I always like to start things off by having guests introduce themselves. Given that there are two of you and this was very much a collaborative project, I'm wondering if you could both tell us both a bit about yourselves and your academic backgrounds and also how you two linked up and came to

maybe get connected and start working on this book together? Well, maybe I should ask Kyle to begin because in many ways it was his idea. This project really got off the ground owing to an initiative that he took. And what I can do is provide some broader historical background to the initiative that he took.

Yeah, yeah. So my name is Kyle Edwards. I'm a curriculum associate at the University of Minnesota in the College of Liberal Arts.

I'm a former undergraduate student of August's. I took a number of courses with him, did an independent study with him, was really impacted by his classes and the work that he did. I got a job at the University of Minnesota after graduating and stayed in touch with August and his work.

And specifically his latest before this book was Marx versus liberalism, a real time comparative politics. And in that book, he compared Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to Marx on the European revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War.

And as I was reading August's book, I was also reading David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass. And I thought, you know, I noticed that Douglass watched and commented on the 1848 revolutions. He was obviously a heroic leader of the abolitionist movement.

I thought maybe here is a liberal who could compare more favorably to Marx than some of the others he chose. Maybe Douglas was more of a revolutionary liberal. I kept badgering August about what Marx would have thought about Douglas's political and electoral choices, the major issues facing him in the 1850s.

and the civil war and reconstruction. Um, we, we kept having conversations about this. Um, we thought there was enough where we could maybe produce an article on the topic. Uh, but, uh, as things kept piling up, there was more to compare and analyzing, uh, culminating at least for me and my work and in Douglas's unexplored writings on the Paris commune. Um,

And yeah, and we just, you know, as a former undergraduate student, somebody who's, you know, not in academia, I thought this project might fall apart at any minute, that August might move on to the next thing. But here we are. Yeah. And, you know, as Carl puts it, yep.

pestering me with these questions, which I had no answers to at a certain moment. I said, look, why don't we try to find out? Let's do something about

together, and I thought maybe it would be a long article. But we kept digging and digging, and it became clear this was going to be a book. And for me, it fit nicely with my earlier project that Kyle mentioned. But my project really began with a 2000 book

I did looking at Marx and Engels, for me, the moment, the crucial moment then was the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the other Stalinist regimes. I thought it was an opportunity to look at the real Marx and Engels, particularly with regard to that democratic credentials. And so my 2000 book is exactly about Marx and Engels as political activists and

with very, very fine democratic credentials. But for me to make that case, I realized because of my training and what I'm referring to the fact that I'm not, I wasn't trained as a political philosopher or political theory. I was trained in comparative politics.

And from a comparative politics perspective, we argue that it's the comparisons of the closest thing, method that we have within the social sciences to try to make a valid, valid claim. And for me to make the claim about Marx and Engels' democratic credentials, I had to make some comparisons. And the obvious comparison is,

for the first book was with Alexis de Tocqueville with the 1848 revolutions. I mentioned in the book at the end that later I would try to think about someone like John Stuart Mill, but I never got around to doing that

until about 15 years later with the 2019 book. So again, my project has been about how to, what I sometimes joke on and say, liberate Marx and Engels from the clutches of political theorists and to bring them back into the world of politics is what they consciously joined

to be in and to make a case for their democratic credentials, it seems to me comparisons would be the best way to do so. And so the John Stuart Mill comparison in the 2019 book, it could be argued was not fair for John Stuart Mill because Mill never pretended to be a political activist in the way that Marx was.

And so looking for someone who was much more comparable in terms of activism and so on would be a much fairer, wouldn't be the apples and oranges issue. And so when Kyle kept asking me questions, it occurred to me at a certain moment, aha,

This is the appropriate comparison for looking at the Civil War, someone who was a revolutionary and an activist in a way that John Stuart Mill never pretended to be. So again, the project for me is a part of a

three-decade campaign to make the case for Marx and Engels' democratic credentials because of their activism. And it's not enough to be a democrat in word, in print, but also in action. Yeah, continuing on with kind of contextualizing this book, you spend a

a substantial amount of time, both in the beginning and at the end, talking both about the civil rights struggle with especially Martin Luther King, as well as talking about the last decade of struggle, especially around Black Lives Matter. So we'll kind of elucidate a lot of the conclusions at the end, but I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to

maybe our more contemporary moment and how it informed this kind of search back into the archives. Because a lot of books have come out in the last few years on race in America, on Black Lives Matter. And especially after 2020, you two kind of took a much different route of trying to understand that by kind of

going back almost 200 years through these, you know, voluminous archives to try and really contextualize and give a genealogy to some of the tensions that are still running through our politics today. I'm wondering if you could just speak to how our present moment informed that search back. Well, in the spirit of Marx and Engels, neither of us is interested in history for history's sake.

we are always thinking about, well, what does it mean for the present moment? And that's why we framed the book the way we did. We're not historians for the sake of history. Someone once jokingly said that historians are like vultures. They feed off of history. We're interested in how does that history apply and make sense, help us to make sense of the world,

we live in. And that was the spirit in which Marx and Engels wrote, and that was the spirit in which we wrote this book. So yes, we thought the Martin Luther King example would be a good way to begin. King's Last Epiphany

That epiphany in his last year of his life when he realizes after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that racial and economic equality could never coexist.

come into existence in the United States unless there was fundamental radical economic and political change. And that was that insight. He had to go through that experience. Just the way Marx and Engels had to go through the experience of learning about the limits of elections.

that was King's epiphany. And we thought that insight would be a useful way for us to begin and let us step back in time and see indeed where the roots of that insight and that's

indeed is what we are very conscious about doing. And we can also come back today later in the discussion to discuss the significance of what I think November 5, 2024, the presidential election. As you may have seen the lead article in the New York Times today, it was about the Democratic Party and the working class.

And never in my lifetime, and I've been a conscious political being for seven decades, never in my lifetime have I seen so much reference by the commentariat to the working class. And in many ways, our book really addresses this question about the working class and the historical roots of the working class for making a sense of politics today. And so, yes, we can come back and discuss that, but I wanted to...

put that forward because that's another current issue upon which we'd like to peg the book. Yeah, and one of the things I learned as an undergraduate with August is that politics today is still, in part at least, centered around working out the contradictions and the consequences of the advances of the war against the slave owners and the failure and overthrow of interracial democracy of Reconstruction.

This was the time, the first time where a potential answer to the problem of racial inequality was posed in America, at least in its most repulsive forms, the ownership of human beings. So going back to this point of time was natural for us. Obviously, it was the longest, the most important and successful revolution that Marx ever witnessed in his lifetime.

And it was certainly the most important event Douglass lived through. So comparing these two gave us an opportunity to examine how two different and still competing political perspectives, liberalism and Marxism, performed during this time. And then to try to, like you said, bring that forward to the present day and what it means for us. Because, you know, the lessons of history are

are meaningless if they're not applied to present issues. Yeah, so...

Moving from that introduction to kind of the real bulk of the book. So you spend most of it comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass. So let's start with Frederick Douglass's biography. Particularly, I want to hear a bit about his political development leading up to the Civil War. Obviously, a lot of people know he escaped from slavery. And then I actually didn't know that he had had a trip to England before.

that gave him a much broader kind of political and historical perspective.

And there were some other influences as well. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to kind of the development of his own political thinking throughout the 40s and 50s. Definitely, yes. As you say, he escaped from slavery in the late 1830s. And, you know, he became an anti-slavery activist immediately upon reaching the North through the local churches and church groups, right?

uh, where he was, he was discovered. He was, um, recruited by the Garrisonians, uh, after speaking to, to a conference of theirs. Uh, he then wrote his first autobiography in, in 1845. Um, and in that autobiography, he, he outed himself as, as a fugitive slave, uh,

leading to his trip to the United Kingdom. He was in danger of being reclaimed by his former master, and this was also an opportunity to promote his book and his Garrisonian form of abolitionism, which for Douglass at that time meant an apolitical abolitionism, seeing

The Constitution and all levels of government has corrupted by slavery, so you couldn't and shouldn't participate in them. And a pacifism and moral suasion against even self-defense. And yes, once he was in England, there were the Chartists, working class people.

English reformers fighting for democratic rights, including the right to vote. This sort of political movement, we think, really did, as you mentioned, expand his politics, his horizons of what is possible. But importantly, while he was there, he reached out to the more moderate wing, the moral force, Chartist who opposed him,

radicalism within the movement, opposed physical force. And these were more middle and upper class layers. As one former biographer, Willie McFeely noted, Douglass reached up and out to these middle and upper class ranks under the mentorship of Garrison, as opposed to out to the working class that he was still then a part of.

So it was on this trip where Douglas first was exposed to the importance of voting rights. And he expressed in a letter back to Garrison, still as a non-voting Garrisonian, that he thought the complete suffrage movement was the next big reform movement.

And the success of the suffrage movement would bring about a time when people and not property shall govern. And Douglass thought that this would mean that people will cease to be subordinate to property. So this was an indication very early on, even before he became a political abolitionist, of the importance that Douglass saw in the right to vote, something that he was exposed to when he was in the U.K.,

And while he was there, you could also tell that Douglass was really struck by the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1834 and the lack of racial animus he encountered when he was visiting the islands. This would lead him to have a really rosy view of both the constitutional monarchy compared to what he called the bastard republic of slaveholding America and the British capitalist government in general, something he would rethink later.

during the war years. Then, yeah, so, yeah, once he came back from England, he was, I think, more self-confident in himself.

He wanted to be out from under the Garrisonian umbrella. He wanted to strike out on his own. So he moved to Rochester, New York. He started his own newspaper and began to engage more critically in these debates around politics, around the Constitution. He eventually came out of those debates convinced that the Constitution was an abolitionist document.

He became convinced of the need to engage in politics, first with the smaller, more purely abolitionist Liberty Party, then later expanding out into the more

broad coalitions of the Free Soil Party and then later the Republican Party. During these times, and this is maybe something we can get into more later, he became convinced of the need first for physical self-defense. He later became a proponent of slave insurrection, something he was totally opposed to in the 1840s.

And then finally, as we'll see, a recruiter to the Union Army. Yeah, a couple of things that we thought were important about that visit. The Irish question, and we think it was instructive in his understanding of what would later become racism, even though I don't think we ever encountered his usage of that label, racism itself.

But prejudice is the term he oftentimes used. We think that visit was very instructive for him. And we can come back and discuss it, particularly with regard to the Irish question. The other thing in thinking about that early period and the differences between Marx, Engels on one side and Douglass on the other side is

is that Douglas is an American. And what we mean by that, he grew up in a world in which there was not yet really a hereditary proletariat in the United States. And the idea of the proletariat being a revolutionary class, it seems to me, was very foreign to Douglas. There was just simply nothing in the American experience that would...

give him that insight, that also important insight that Marx and Engels had. And I think it's a fundamental, it's a big matter. It's a serious matter in trying to understand the different...

Political conclusions between Marx and Engels on one side and Douglass on the other side. Again, the absence in the United States of a hereditary proletariat that had gone through battles, had fought and so on, had revealed its revolutionary potential. There was simply nothing like that in Douglass' experience, whereas that was the case for Marx and Engels.

Yeah, on that note, it's maybe worth bringing Marx into this now. So asking about Marx's own political and philosophical development, initially was a student of law, but eventually through various exposure to various groups, other people, as well as observing some of the revolutionary events.

happening in Europe, some of which he was an actual participant in. Could you give us a sense of his own political development leading up to, again, the Civil War, the American Civil War?

Yeah, again, he began as a revolutionary Democrat and begins to see, though, the liberal bourgeoisie in Germany defaulting on the question of bourgeois democracy. The 1848 revolutions are extremely instructive for Marx. The limitations of the bourgeoisie and the

But that insight that he and Engels reached

as early as 1844, that only the working class has not only an interest, but also the capability of bringing about social equality. And at the basis of, and the premise upon which that is based is the question of private property, is the property question. And for Marx and Engels,

Their claim, their argument was that as long as private ownership of the means of production exists, you can't really have social equality. And that's an insight, by the way, that goes back to the levelers in the English Civil Wars in the 17th century.

And their argument marks an English argument is that all of the proletariat has an interest in getting rid of, getting rid of private ownership of the means of production. If,

its freedom, its liberation, its emancipation, all that comes with the end of private ownership and the means of production. And one of the things about Marx's development, which is underappreciated, is his deep read into U.S. political history and the U.S. reality. And we argue that

the, uh, uh, what the U S review for the young marks on the road to communist conclusions was that if, if, if, if, if United, if the United States was the best that political, uh, uh, liberalism, political liberal liberalism had to offer, then clearly something was lacking. Something more radical was needed to bring about social equality. If,

given the continuing and deepening inequalities that were taking place in the United States, in the United States at that time, up until the 1848 revolution, remember the United States was the most politically liberal country in the world, the most politically liberal country in the world. And if that was the best that liberalism had to offer, then clearly something much more radical, something much more revolutionary was needed in order to bring about social equality. That was the insight that

for the young Marx and Engels. And August mentions Marx and Engels and their participation in the 1848 revolutions. I think it's important to note, too, that Douglass followed those revolutions in Europe closely, and he was really impacted by them, both positively and negatively.

The February 1848 revolution in France, the Republican Revolution, convinced Douglass that it was possible to unite anti-slavery forces in America into what he called one mighty phalanx to bring down the haughty citadel of slavery. And he later said that...

He could see abolitionists now hailing news from the South that the slave had risen up to achieve what the Republicans of France achieved against the royalists, so it made him begin to reconsider his pacifism.

However, in the fact to just a hat and the fact that they knew government in France brought about ended slavery in the French in the French West Indies, it had a big, big impact on Douglas. Yes, exactly. But however, in April and then in June, Douglas saw developments in Europe that gave him pause and.

In April 1848, the Chartists attempted to rally out of inspiration of what was happening on the continent.

And Douglass denounced this in his newspaper, saying that under the constitutional monarchy, people had the rights that they needed, the rights to freedom of speech. They had representatives in parliament and there was no need to try to overawe the government.

And then in June in Paris, the working class went into motion after the workshops, the employment program was shut down. Here, Douglass blamed communists for that.

the tumult that was going on in Paris. And he came out against it. He saw the institution of Republican institutions and the, as August mentioned, the overthrow of slavery in the West Indies as sufficient for the revolution. And anything further was a challenge to those gains.

Yeah, moving into kind of some more direct comparisons. So there are a number of themes that both writers throughout the Civil War, actually in the lead up throughout and after the Civil War, where they both touched on them, but due to their kind of differing political backgrounds and orientations, came away with some very different answers. So first question I'd like to bring up is for both Douglas and Mark's

what drives racism, racial animosity, or racial oppression, and not just in terms of...

I think it's easy to understand why a slave owner might be in favor of thinking about racial inferiority. But you also point out that there are some difficult contradictions and reconciliations with, say, the very poor whites of the South who did not directly benefit from slavery or even people of color who at times,

accepted certain racial hierarchies. I'm wondering, how did these two kind of try and understand how people came about to believe in certain hierarchies, accept them, try and find their place in them? Yeah.

What were kind of the parallels and differences here? Maybe Kyle should begin with Douglass because it's in his second autobiography that Douglass begins to, and this is before the war begins. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm happy to. And some of these, as your question indicates, some of these pronouncements by both Douglass and Marx on race and slavery and what's needed to bring these things down, they sound remarkably similar.

Uh, so, and, um, so yes, in his 1855 autobiography, Douglas looks to, um, what's going to be needed to overthrow slavery in this, in the South. Um, and he shares with, with readers, the working conditions he experienced as a slave in Baltimore, um, including the anger and the enmity he felt, uh, from white workers, uh,

But Douglass recognized the conflict between white workers in the South and slavery and slave owners. He didn't necessarily subscribe to the theory of white supremacy, that all whites are lifted up by the system. He saw white workers in some of the bigger cities. He mentioned Baltimore, New Orleans, Richmond as seeing this clearly. And Douglass,

He thought that the bosses, the slave owners, by encouraging this anger of the poor laboring white man against black people, against slavery, the slaveholder succeeds in making the white man almost as much of a slave as the black slave himself.

Douglas recognized that what he called the white slave has taken from him by indirection what the black slave has taken from him directly and without ceremony. And he identified the plunderer as the slave owners. At this point, it's fairly understandable why Douglas is focusing on the slave system and the slave system most of all. But he never really develops this critique further to class society as a whole.

But Douglass was clear throughout, at least through the 1850s, through the Civil War, that racism is taught or stirred up amongst working class people. He talked about Irish immigrants who he said are instantly taught on arriving in this, you know, quote unquote, Christian country to hate and despise the colored people.

But he was sure that the Irish-American will find out his mistake one day. He thought, you know, in the early to mid-1850s that, you know, education and enlightenment would open the eyes of the people of the South who owned no slaves to come out against the slaveholders and the humiliations that they brought down upon them.

Um, so like I mentioned, a lot of this sounds similar to, to what I think Marx's analysis of slavery would be. Uh, and Douglas also pointed to, uh, the wealth slavery created as a reason why, um, as he put it, the, the press was bribed against abolitionists, uh, why, uh, the, uh, institutions of higher learning would be against abolitionists, um, and religion and, and so on. Um,

Yeah, Marx's most detailed comments really don't begin until the war, when he has to do a deep dive into U.S. history. But there were fleeting comments he made before the war. In a lecture he gave in 1847, I think it was, yes, in 1847, in which he suggests that the

what we sometimes today call the social construction of identity and how Black people, the Negro, is the prejudices

attitudes about the Negro very much related to the economic, to economical pressure, especially the cotton question. And so, but it's not until the war begins that Marx begins to do a deep dive into, to look more deeply at this question. And one of the discoveries we made, which I had noticed before in Marx is,

is that Marx offers an explanation for anti-Black attitudes amongst what was sometimes known as the poor whites, the poor whites in the South. And he would put in quotation marks the so-called white trash. And his explanation was fascinating in that what the slave-owning, the slaveocracy could do

always continued to do, always promoted amongst poor whites in the South, was the possibility, the hope of becoming slave owners themselves one day. And this was the importance of the westward expansion, why the slavocracy had to conquer western lands. And those, it was a way in which to entice or to lure, and that's the term, the bait for poor whites to conquer

In other words, the promise, the possibility of upward mobility was Marx's explanation for the why would people who had no interest, no economic interest, why would they latch on? People who would deplore, people who were seen as the deplorables by the elite in the South. Why is it that they would embrace democracy?

the slave project. And that's, so that's, that's Marx's explanation, I think was a quite insightful explanation, I think has relevance for today. And then one other point that Douglas made, I think is, is important to bring up during, during the civil war in March, 1862, Douglas made clear. He didn't think that black people, that Negroes were an exception to,

uh in any way and having this racial prejudice brought up against them he he wrote or maybe he said in his speech and reprinted in his newspaper he said whenever and wherever any particular variety of the human family having been enslaved by another their enslavers and oppressors in every instance have found their best apology for their own base conduct in the bad character of their victims

This has been true, Douglass said, of the Jews, the Indians, the Saxons, and the ancient Britons have all had a taste of this bitter experience. So this was sort of towards a theory of racial prejudice that Douglass was developing. It was very much...

grounded in material economic facts. If you are enslaved, your oppressors are going to rationalize your enslavement. And it paralleled that explanation by the Douglassons. In many ways, it paralleled an explanation that Engels had offered to explain anti-Irish

prejudices within England. In his 1842 book on Manchester, England, looking at the oppression of the Irish, it's fascinating reading because you see how anti-Irish prejudices were indeed generated very much by the divide and rule strategy on the part of the English elite. And it's

And again, that's written in 1842 by Engels before he becomes a communist. But it's really quite striking to see how

Douglass is a little bit more judgmental of Irish on the question when it came to inebriation, the temperance question, unlike Ingalls. Yeah, another theme or topic that comes up a lot that I'd like to ask about is Abraham Lincoln's

because both Marx and Douglass wrote him a number of letters. And I also enjoyed finding out that one of Marx's daughters at the age of, I think, six wrote a letter with some military advice as well. But both often tried to pull and push him

towards their own politics, but also both sometimes not to his face, but also had their criticisms of him as well. So I'm wondering if you could just tell us how both viewed Abraham Lincoln. Was he a properly revolutionary figure? Was he more of a reformist figure?

Was he, you know, someone who could really lead history or was he more someone being carried along by it? How did they see Abraham Lincoln and how he stepped up in this moment? Kyle can get into more on Douglass. Let me just say by way of context.

print introduction to that topic and one of the key things we try to do in the book. Marx and Engels and Douglass are on very different pages prior to the firing on Fort Sumter. They had very different, different politics. But once the slavocracy fires on Fort Sumter in April of

1861, Marx, Engels, and Douglass are on the same page, the importance of getting rid of the slaveocracy, but they're on the same political page for very different reasons.

There are different reasons. For Douglass, it was about getting rid of the abominable institution of chattel slavery. For Marx and Engels, getting rid of slavery was just only the beginning of the process. It was the beginning of the process to bring about a capitalism into the United States, a full-fledged capitalism. Why would Marx and Engels be interested in that? Because the working classes with the capitalist mode of production

You bring into existence the real revolutionaries, the working class. So, yeah, the key thing we wanted to emphasize is that before the firing on Fort Sumter, they're on very different political pages. But once the slavocracy makes that fatal mistake of firing on Fort Sumter, they are working in league with one another.

Yes, both certainly saw well before most other protagonists the importance of slavery to this contest. And in terms of Douglas and Lincoln, it's quite an emotional rollercoaster, an emotional rollercoaster type journey for Douglas as it relates to Lincoln. Early in the presidential campaign in 1860,

Douglass, more so than in past presidential campaigns with the broad anti-slavery candidate, was a complementary of Lincoln. He complimented him compared to Seward after he received the nomination. But as the election approached, Douglass waffled on this question. He eventually wrote that he hoped

uh, the Republicans would win. He, he recognized that this was an anti-slavery force that, that this, the, um, the South could not put up with, but he didn't vote himself for Lincoln. He gave his vote to the, uh, the radical abolitionist candidate, Garrett Smith, somebody who he had, um, had a relationship, uh, a political relationship with for years before. Whereas an American Marxist, uh, Joseph Weidemeier, uh,

threw his lot in with, uh, the Republicans, um, on critically or, uh, but he, he, he worked for their election, um, uh, from the, from the time that, that Lincoln was nominated, uh, through the election. Then once the, the South seceded and fired on Fort Sumter, uh, Douglas was, uh,

unstoppable in his advocacy for bringing black troops into this fight as the way, uh, to win, to win the war and to make the war have meaning, uh, not just bring back, uh, the status quo. Um, starting then in March, 1862, when, when Lincoln brought forward a gradual emancipation plan, um,

As tame as that looks to modern eyes, Douglass was jubilant. This was a president of the United States advocating for emancipation. However, between that March plan and the preliminary emancipation proclamation of September 1862, Douglass was tearing his hair out. He doubted Lincoln would definitively move

But once Lincoln did move in September and then with the final Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Douglass recognized that this was, the Emancipation Proclamation specifically, was the most important document a president had ever signed. And August couldn't say more, but Marx agreed.

You know, it took it took 18 months, but Lincoln went from promising never to interfere with slavery in the southern states to committing all the military and financial might of the nation to the emancipation of millions of black people. Some abolitionists continue to be disappointed in this because of the military necessity reasons that that Lincoln made.

used as opposed to the moral necessity of freeing the slaves. But to Douglass at that point, it didn't matter one way or the other as long as Lincoln moved.

One thing we should emphasize, and it would be derelict if we didn't point this out, thinking about today's politics, is that by the middle of the 19th century, it became clear there was no political party committed to getting rid of chattel slavery. And that required the creation of a new political party.

That was the lesson of 19th century politics for abolitionists. The Democratic Party was the party of the slave owners. The Whig Party had vacillated and not taken a position, and under those circumstances, there was a need for a new political party. And the partisans, the followers of Karl Marx and Engels, who had migrated to the United States,

enthusiastically embraced this new political party. Unlike Douglass, who was more hesitant about this new party, the followers of Marx and Engels jumped on board and did all they could to promote this new political party, the Republican Party. And so I think it's important. There are lessons, I think, for today, the importance of creating a new political party when the times and circumstances, you learn that the old political arrangement simply is not working.

Yeah, moving along, another topic that both figures touch on a lot is the question of recruiting Blacks into the Northern Army regiments of Negro soldiers. Beyond simply the question of this is a valuable source of getting bodies to the front, both seem to see it as important for political reasons as well. I'm wondering if you could speak to why both felt that –

recruiting and giving them a chance to fight in this war was important? Yeah, well, yes. So recruiting Black soldiers was part of the Emancipation Proclamation, part of the reason why Marx thought it meant, this new proclamation meant tearing up of the old constitutional, waging the war in a revolutionary manner now. But for Douglass, yeah, participating in the war effort was crucial for Black people, specifically Black men,

to make the case for their inclusion in society and the body politic. It would give them experience with firearms and the discipline that would be necessary to defend their rights in the post-war period. And of course, he recognized that early on in the war, enslaved Black laborers were integral in building up Confederate fortifications and were crucial to early Confederate victories over Union forces.

Not returning fugitives would be one thing. Those laborers would no longer be building fortifications, would no longer be growing the food needed to feed the Confederate Army in the plantation fields. But using their power in the Union Army would then double their impact.

Not that this was morally right to ask them to do so, but Black success on the battlefield would prove to skeptical Northerners that they were capable of freedom and citizenship. And this was extremely important to Douglass. In his first pronouncement on the war in a letter to his uncle, Marks,

that the Union in the North would be victorious eventually because Lincoln had a... He could always play the last card up his sleeve. And what Marx was referring to was the recruiting blacks to be in the Union Army. He thought that would...

would be advantageous to the Union. And Douglas, from the very beginning, Douglas is chomping at the bit. He's trying to get Lincoln. He's trying to win Lincoln over to that fact. Look, you've got to recruit. You've got to recruit. That's the way you've got to win this war. So it's an example of how Marx and Douglas are very much

on the same page when it came to Black recruitment. Yeah, moving along. So one question that both tried to also address and that you bring up at several points is the question of what true freedom really means and what is going to really be needed to bring it about. So on the one hand, Douglas was fighting hard really for the political franchise and the right to vote.

For Marx, he felt that that was important, but ultimately not, or really just one step towards freedom. I'm wondering if you could speak to the parallels and differences here and how they thought about what freedom meant. Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, I think for both...

Douglass and then for Marx and Engels, they really started to think this through in the mid to late 1840s when Douglass was exposed to the Chartists, when Marx and Engels went through the failed revolutions of 1848. And then, you know, when emancipation became closer and closer to reality, this is when Douglass really started focusing on the right to vote and

And for him, he called it the keystone in the arch of liberty. All other rights, according to Douglass, flowed through the right to vote. As the war was coming to an end, he held that granting the right to vote

He supported for both men and for women, but importantly for men after the Civil War, would remove any need for an occupation of the South, something he felt as a defender of free speech and civil liberties. An occupation would be fairly odious to him, whatever its merits or whatever the reason was.

But he wrote that if Black people are granted the right to vote, there's no need for occupation.

But his understanding of political economy, not understanding the importance of wealth in the political process or land to independence at that time, and seeing a harmonious relationship between capital and labor, this led him to focus entirely on the right to vote and to ignore the necessity of land redistribution. It wasn't until the late 1860s when any potential had passed that

where Douglass wrote and spoke in favor of a scheme to sell lands to black people. He never came on board to the more radical redistribution of land. For him, the vote was enough.

The advantage that Marx and Engels had over Douglass is having gone through a revolution themselves, the 1848-1849 revolution. I can't emphasize the importance of that. They learned about what's involved in a military campaign, what's involved in the logistics of warfare.

And just simply nothing like that, not only for Douglass, but for almost anyone in the United States. That experience of going through a war, a revolutionary war, was enormously important. Also, to the lessons of the 1840 and 1849 revolutions, at a certain moment, Marx and Engels had illusions about elections.

But that was corrected. That was corrected very quickly in the 1848, 1849. They revised, they corrected themselves.

on the question of elections and the importance of workers having their own political party and voting for themselves. However, unlikely it is that they would actually get anybody elected. But the importance of the working class being organized independently of the bourgeoisie was the key lesson adjustment that they made in their campaign. And it's something that, again, you have to... Again, the advantages...

of experience, having what we sometimes call the laboratory of the class struggle. And that's something that Douglass simply didn't have, just like anybody else in the United States, not having gone through a revolutionary experience

And to learn from it, the mistakes, the trial and error of being in a revolution. Yeah, moving on past the war and towards reconstruction. So, Kyle, you already alluded to kind of the contradictions and ultimately some of the failures and limitations of reconstruction. How did both see that playing out in terms of either predicting or reflecting on it as it unfolded?

Well, yeah, I can say that it wasn't until the 1880s or 1890s that Douglass looked back on Reconstruction and the Republican Reconstruction policy with regret. This was an implicit criticism of his own position. In his last 1893 autobiography, he published a speech that he gave in the 1880s

where he finally recognized that the former slaves were left completely in the power of their former masters. As he put it, freedmen were given the machinery of liberty, but denied the steam to put it into motion. He called out Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, then prominent proponents of land redistribution, as two leaders who should have been followed to avoid the evils of Reconstruction's overthrow.

But of course, this was this was now in hindsight, the any revolutionary potential had passed and the United States was well on its way to to Jim Crow, the worst setback that not only black people face, but the working class as a whole faced.

in American history. And other than Stevens and Sumner, there were American Marxists who saw this in real time. Again, Joseph Weidemeier, who wrote articles for the German language press in St. Louis, calling both for the right to vote

uh, for, uh, for black people and, uh, the nationalization of the, the port Royal experiment, uh, experiment where, uh, black people were given there. Um, I'm sure it, it varied, you know, from time to time, but we're given their 40 acres, uh, to become independent land owners. He was, uh, Vitamire was able to see much more clearly than Douglas in real time, uh,

the importance of that land redistribution. And one of the great discoveries we made, only because we knew a scholar who's been doing research on the question of reconstruction in Georgia, looking at reconstruction in Georgia, was that not only did Marxists see the importance of a land reform, but there was a former slave owner

It was a former slave owner in Georgia who says essentially the same. He says, look, giving the former slaves the right to vote will be insufficient if they don't get land. Because as long as the former slave owners have land, they were able to hold that order.

Over these former slaves, these former slaves will be dependent upon them. And so that's an interview he gives in, I think, in November or April of 1865. That's a former slave owner. So he sees this, and we think it really goes to the heart of the weaknesses and the differences between Marx and Engels and Douglass on one hand.

You mentioned Martin Luther King earlier. We can come back. But four days before his assassination, King has another epiphany. He realizes the problem of the land reform never having been carried out. He sees this as a problem. He's trying to figure out why is it there's still social inequality, racial inequality in the United States. And he goes back.

to the failure of a land reform taking place. That's an insight he makes in a famous speech he gives in Washington, D.C., about four days before his assassination. And a part of what we're doing in our book is to go back to that moment and see what happened. Why didn't that, why didn't a land reform take place? And we think there's that all-important insight on a

on the part of Frederick Engels in his draft and his second draft for the Communist Manifesto. It's done in a very pedagogical, catechistic style of writing. What is the difference between a slave and a worker?

And the slave has an interest in getting rid of private property, a particular kind of private property. That is private ownership of persons. The working class has an interest not only in getting rid of a particular kind of private property, but private property in general. Getting rid of private property in general. And that's where Douglass could not go. He could not go to that.

And he wasn't alone. He was most of the Republican Party, except for Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner and maybe Wendell Phillips and so on. There were very few people in the Republican Party who were willing to go that route. And therein...

answer to the question that Martin Luther King is grappling with in 1968. That is, why wasn't there? Why didn't racial equality come about in the aftermath of the overthrow? And that's the insight

We argue that that's the advantage that the Marx and Engels had over Douglass, that insight. And again, Engels writes that in 1847, before the 1848 revolutions, before the 1840, he writes that.

Yeah. And just to follow up quickly on that, as August was talking, Martin Luther King Jr. and other social Democrats often call, as King did towards the end of his life, for a radical redistribution of economic and political power. But without, as Engels argued in 1847, abolishing private property in general.

You know, one can lambast the rich and call for other well-meaning reforms. But until working people are organized to take state power and private property and the means of production is abolished, those reforms will be tenuous. The retreat of the working class over the last half century has shown as much.

And further, the political coalitions that social Democrats join and point to from the New Deal to the Great Society and beyond serve either intentionally or unintentionally to prop up capitalism in times of crisis. And in the final draft of the manifesto, Marx and Engels describe bourgeois socialists as being desirous of redressing social grievances in orderly

order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. Um, and we, we think that in the American context, uh, this, this description fits, fits Douglas very well. And his, his reaction to the potential of land reform, uh, during reconstruction and then to international events, uh, during reconstruction, like the, like the Paris commune, uh,

really provide the evidence for that, we believe. Douglas was a small businessman, we have to recognize. Even there's a research, there's an article that we came across, what was it, Kyle, about Douglas the slumlord?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Douglass was a landlord and potentially a neglectful one. Yeah, to unpack this a little bit more. So near the end of the book, really throughout it, but you really drive it home near the end, you argue that while Douglass's politics were radical in certain respects, he was often suspicious of

revolutionary politics, and you argue that these are the very sort of politics that might have allowed Reconstruction to achieve its actual aspirations. I'm wondering if you could unpack his political limitations and what it might reveal about the limits of liberalism more broadly, even of a very radical sort. Why would it be unable to carry out either Reconstruction of the post-Civil War sort or

or any other broader kind of understanding of freedom or emancipation. Yeah, and in terms of Reconstruction specifically, historians have identified, you know, in addition to the reactionary terror in the South, the views of Northern liberals as contributing to the overthrow of Reconstruction. Historian Gregory Downs identifies these people as bloody constitutionalists.

But for them, yeah, during Reconstruction, the fear that the working class would now begin to organize themselves and demand their rights in equality led them to step back from their commitment to reconstruct the South, let alone the North, specifically.

Class conflict and the potential of interracial cooperation among workers caused a large group, like I said, to retreat from their original embrace of Reconstruction. And Douglass really, I think unappreciated until now, really was an ideal type of this bloody constitutionalist. Like we've talked about, he rejected land redistribution. Right.

He opposed a labor party early on in his editorializing of his third and last newspaper, the New National Era, excuse me.

He editorialized against a defense of picket lines from strike breaking scabs, even when those strike break breakers were white workers sent in to take the jobs of black black laborers. And he argued against a class struggle view of unionism.

And then, as I've mentioned, internationally, when the workers of Paris went into motion in 1871 and constituted the first short-lived working class government, he denounced them just like he did in 1848.

He never wavered in his Douglas, never wavered in his fight for political equality, especially for for the former enslaved people. But he failed to realize that the only force that could effectively defend that equality was.

was the multinational working class. As August has explained, there was nothing yet in the U.S. context that would help him understand this. And as the labor question started to grow in the United States, he was already integrated with the Republican Party, with the more well-off elite members of New York and then Washington, D.C., and

even as he was elected in 1871 as president of the Colored National Labor Union, and throughout his short tenure there, he argued against class struggle methods. He argued for the theory of harmony between labor and capital. He was unable to...

advanced beyond the liberalism, the natural rights philosophy that had been his core for decades. And again, Marx and Engels had this advantage of having gone through the experience of witnessing

how liberals betrayed the working class. That's how the, remember the Republic is the first, the overthrow of the Second Republic. That's the first time a liberal democracy is actually overthrown anywhere in the world. And this is what Lincoln is referring to in the Gettysburg Address, whether or not such governments can long endure.

Up until then, yeah, liberal democracies had a very, very poor track record of enduring. And indeed, that's exactly what happened in 1851, 1852, if not in France. Two decades later, this is exactly what happens in the South. That is, the first-time republic government in the form of confederacy, it's seen by the old landed people

elite, the property owners, as a threat to their interests. And so they overthrow radical reconstruction, not unlike the bourgeoisie did in France two decades earlier. So that's, again, the advantages of going through, having experiences, having lived through these kinds of developments. And so that's the advantage that the

Marx and Engels had. And again, I can't emphasize enough the absence of a hereditary proletariat in the United States. In 1893, Engels got a letter from one of the Marxists in the United States who was complaining about, he was bemoaning the fact, why couldn't we have a labor party in the United States? We were having these labor parties in Europe, but nothing is happening in the United States. Engels wrote him back saying, look,

One, you've got a problem with the kind of electoral system you have. You don't have proportional representation with the winner-take-all system. It makes it difficult for a third party to get off the ground. Secondly...

The land question, as long as there was upward mobility, realizing the American dream, having access to land and so on, you really don't have a hereditary proletariat. And thirdly, the divisions within the working class, between the foreign born and the natives and between the race question, the oppression of blacks, as long as those obstacles in the place, you really can't have

You can't have the kind of labor party developments that were going on within Europe. So he told them to say, be patient, be patient. This will happen. There will be a time in the United States indeed for a real working class, a working class political party. Yeah, I want to pick up another thing that has come up. A few times you've mentioned Martin Luther King. He comes up both in the beginning and near the end of the book.

And August, I like how you put it that throughout his life, even though he was suspicious of revolutionary politics, at times critical of Marx, throughout his life and his political career, he kept having epiphanies, light bulbs here and there kept going off.

even though he never kind of pulled it fully together to a fully revolutionary or Marxist view. He does seem to, in his political life, embody some of the tensions that you have been developing throughout this debate, this kind of Marx-Douglas revolutionary versus liberal debate. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to how you see Martin Luther King kind of living out some of these tensions there.

Let's say, yeah, if Douglass, as I've said, can be forgiven for his lack of appreciation of the importance of the working class and bringing about real social equality, because he had no examples in the in the U.S. history, certainly. And so by the time they get to King, I think it's very different.

I've had some of my colleagues argue that King's statements, anti-communist statements and so on, opposition to Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in that speech, which is oftentimes ignored. But in that speech, some of my colleagues have said that it's because King was operating

during the Cold War. In the depths of the Cold War, he was under pressure to make the kinds of statements he did about Marxism. Well, yes and no. I'm sure he was under pressure. But also was Malcolm X. Malcolm X was also under pressure. And in that last year of his life, Malcolm X was openly collaborating, openly collaborating with white communists in promoting their newspaper.

And I argue that the fundamental difference was that King's background, his social background and the class that he looked to, to liberal forces, not unlike Douglass' perspective, was very different from Malcolm. Malcolm was the expression of the black proletariat. By the time that Malcolm X comes along, you've got now a hereditary black proletariat. The migration from the South, a former proletariat,

which just simply didn't exist in the 1870s, 1880s, why someone like Douglass and Booker T. Washington and so on could have the influence that they did. But boy, by the time you get to the 20th century, the 18, 1960s and 70s when Malcolm X comes along, King has an opponent.

King has someone who has a very, very different position on this question. That's Malcolm X. And so, yes, the absence of a hereditary proletariat was very limiting for Douglass and what he could and could not see. But King, it seems to me, is being challenged today.

Malcolm X in that last year. Malcolm represents his background. However brief he spent in

in a factory in Michigan. He had worked on the line. He knew something about the conditions of the proletariat in a way that King simply had no organic connection to. So I can just begin by that. If you want me to flesh it out more, Stephen, I can. Kyle, anything to add on that? No, I think August put that great and covered it all. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to also bring up, you mentioned at the beginning, some modern commentary on racial politics. I want to draw attention. You spent some time discussing the New York Times and in particular the last few years, what they've called the 1619 Project, which has been kind of an ongoing series of articles and eventually a book to try and reframe how we think about American history and racism.

race's place in it. And you do see some occasional insights popping up, but you also argue that there are a lot of key blind spots and critical omissions in the way they talk about the history of race in America.

John Brown being one major omission, but several other places where you feel, well, there might be noble intentions behind this project. It ultimately kind of misfires in a lot of ways. Could you maybe speak to what you see going on there?

Maybe Carl can talk about how the 1619 Project deals or does not deal with Douglass. Yeah, with Douglass and even more so, as you mentioned, with John Brown, Douglass is largely missing from the 1619 Project other than a number of criticisms Douglass had about the U.S. government, about the racial politics of his time. And

Douglas, though, is a key piece of evidence, his life, his political life against some of the arguments that the 1619 Project makes in that context.

Black people have always acted alone in their fight for greater democracy and their fight for equal rights. Douglass was a product and a participant in an interracial abolitionist movement where his closest, most revered ally was John Brown, a white man.

And then, of course, you know, Brown is missing from the 1619 Project. And yeah, in general, though, whereas the 1619 Project sees the landing of the slave ship in Virginia in 1619 as definitive, as a path-dependent beginning toward racism being in the DNA, being unalterable in America, right?

Douglass saw that landing in connection with and in opposition to the landing in 1620 in Massachusetts by the Puritans. How accurate Douglass's conception of the Puritans are, he saw that as the beginning of a free labor society in contrast and in contest with

slave labor system in the South. So Douglas, I believe, has always seen these things as a terrain of struggle, as a contest and not something that is path dependent in the DNA, unalterable, unchangeable.

anything like that. Yeah, Douglass would never have seen 1619 as the beginning of the American project. But Douglass was 1776. 1776, the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. That was his load star. And that's missing. That's missing within the 1619 project, the claim that 1619 was the beginning. No, Douglass was very, very clear about that.

I think the 1619 Project, by and large, is one, a project consciously that intends to promote us to, for us to think in terms of race rather than class.

to emphasize race rather than class. And that, to me, is a real weakness, and I think it's a potentially dangerous weakness because it misses the opportunities. It blinds us to the opportunities that exist today for the working class to come together to operate across racial lines in a way that has never been possible in the United States in its history. We have opportunities now to reach across the working class

class lines within the working class. And this is one of the things that this recent election revealed. The most recent election revealed how there's less and less political differences in the working class across racial lines. To the surprise of the Democratic Party, they missed it. They missed it. And so it seems to me that's the real problem, I think, with

The 1619 Pride. It has an interest. The people who promote that Pride have an interest in...

Getting us to think in terms of racial, the racial differences rather than the class differences that unite us. Yeah, continuing with the Times and the kind of professional political commentariat, another person you bring up, I believe it was Stacey Abrams, who you quote as an example of trying to use the opinion section to respond to especially mass movements like Black Lives Matter,

and redirect that energy towards electoralism. Given what you've explored about Douglass and Marx and the end of Chattel slavery, what do you see people like Abrams trying to do or how do you see them fitting into this larger struggle? Yeah, trying to keep the mass struggles within the Democratic Party. Yeah, she's pretty transparent.

Not only she, but also at the local level here in Minnesota, where, as you know, this is where the George Floyd protests began. We had local Democratic Party officials trying to tell the youth, young people, no, no, no, no. The time for demonstrations are over. The important thing is to make sure that Donald Trump does not get elected. All of the energy has to be channeled twice.

toward that end. That was the message. That was the message of the local Democratic Party here in Minnesota, trying to undermine the mass movement. So the Democratic Party, as some of us say, is the graveyard. It's the graveyard for progressive social movements.

It began with the populist movement in the 1890s, and it continues until today. And that's what Abrams was trying to do, promoting what some of us call voting fetishism, the mistaken belief that what takes place at the ballot box is the be-all and end-all of politics. We argue no, and history has shown what takes place in politics today

if you want to exercise power, power is not exercised within the ballot box, at the ballot box. Power is exercised in the streets,

on the picket lines, on the barricades, and sometimes, sometimes as 1861, 1865 illustrated, sometimes on the battlefield. That's where real politics takes place. Yeah. Another person you quote, kind of taking a different angle or response is, I believe it was David Brooks who,

who argued that in response to students protesting that maybe what they should bother to do is go attend their history classes, read a history book, which really stood out to me to kind of draw a connection to history

Last spring, a lot of students were out protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with Palestine. And in response to this, Hillary Clinton made a similar comment that maybe these students wouldn't be protesting if they bothered to go learn their history. What do you see going on in these sorts of responses to mass movements? Ironically, their view seems to be the opposite of yours, that history will de-radicalize some of these movements.

Yeah, if I remember right, Brooks recommended that students should take one class in revolutions and one class in constitutionalism. The class on revolutions will show the students that the

These sort of mass uprisings always end, I think he said, waist deep in blood, whereas constitutionalism is a more elegant and beautiful way to solve our problems. Of course, he totally ignores the Civil War. What other time in the United States have people been almost literally waist deep in blood fighting for

the expansion of democratic rights, the end of the slave system. So like Abrams, who is just the latest in, like August said, hundreds, 150 years of slavery,

trying to move mass movements back into constitutionalist or electoralist or specifically Democratic Party politics. Brooks is in the same, he's in the same vein. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. I mean, I think that's, yeah, Brooks is a

ignorance or consciously ignoring the lessons of the Civil War. We think between 1857 and 1865 is one of the most instructive moments in U.S. politics. We learned first that there was no constitutional solution to the problem of chattel slavery. We tried with the Supreme Court in 1857 with the Dred Scott decision. We tried with an election in 1860 with Lincoln.

And the slave owners decided to walk away. They didn't like the outcome of the election. We won't participate in this. Lincoln, at a certain moment, tried to offer compensation to the slave owners in the border states. Look, we'll pay you. We will pay you for your slaves and so on. And so, the

The only way in which it was solved, the only way in which that, the most contentious issue so far in the history of the United States, chattel slavery, the only way in which it was solved was on the battlefield. That's the lesson. And for liberals, that's a very, very discomforting, that's a very, very discomforting fact, inconvenient, a very inconvenient fact. By the way, I use Brooks' essay from her final exam in a couple of my classes. My students there have to read it

and have a discussion about it as a part of that final, as a part of that final exam. Yeah. So moving on towards the end of this conversation, I want to end by asking about the last couple of the last decade or so since the black lives matter movement really emerged and really kind of in some ways culminated in 2020, I would argue over the summer and you two being in Minneapolis, obviously saw a lot of that up close and,

So understanding that it kind of started initially as a hashtag and a slogan slowly turned into a movement and in some brief instances was tried. There were attempts to turn it into a sort of party movement.

To the degree that we can ascribe a singular political orientation or political view to this movement in the last decade of political struggle around racial emancipation, where would you say it falls on this spectrum from, say, Marx to Douglass, given everything you've kind of put on the table so far?

What do you see going on over the last decade? Well, Kyle can give his opinion, but we should say that both of us were very privileged. We were at the initial, the very first George Floyd protest. And Kyle can give his assessment. I will give mine.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we were, we were, we were both there at the start at that, that first mass gathering. And I, I, I think the summer of 2020, um, uh,

first of all, shows how far the American working class has come since reconstructions, since the race riots that hit places like Duluth, Minnesota in 1920, and what people did across the country in the summer of 2020. It

there were, there were tens of millions of people who were willing to defy lockdown orders to come out and join rallies, uh, because George Floyd was killed by, by a police officer. Uh, this, this in different circumstances, this might've been a, a pre-revolutionary or a revolutionary moment, but unfortunately, uh,

I think August would agree, there's no working class leadership to really take hold of the potential that was there. Abrams was, you know, successful enough in diverting Black Lives Matter into electoral politics, making, you know, and trying to ensure that Trump wasn't reelected. And it, you know, the, unfortunately, you know, we, you know,

Parts of the movement, the people who are willing to come out, either went down an electoral avenue or a more destructive avenue that made it more difficult to include broader and broader layers of the population in this fight.

Yeah, we were, yeah, Carl, to underscore what Carl just said, sometimes young people who participated in the action take it for granted. But I suspect I was the only gray-haired person involved.

at the action, so I have a lot of memory. And what was so striking to me how multiracial the action was, I think the majority of the participants were young Caucasian people, very multi-gendered and so on. Can't emphasize enough the climate. Remember, this was right at the beginning of the lockdown. So we had to defy, in many ways, the order of

of the mayor said that we could not congregate. We had to socially distance ourselves at the march. All right, most of us had masks on, but there's no way we're going to socially distance and so on.

For many of us, really, it felt like a breath of fresh air after having been confined to come out to that march. And it's also important to understand the climate in which George Floyd was murdered. The police had been on a rampage leading up to his death. The attitude of the police was to close down, lock down everything.

basketball courts and so on in black neighborhoods. The nets were taken off the rims and so on to prevent young blacks from assembling. That was the attitude of the police in the lead up to it.

And so it was so striking the day of the demonstration when we all gathered 24 hours, the police could not be found. You couldn't see them. They were conspicuously after. They knew they were completely discredited. They had no moral authority. And to try to enforce the mayor's orders was simply a layer to a real, real disruptive. So that was a highlight of the march, the multiracial character of it. Again,

As I try to emphasize to young people, anti-police brutality marches in the 1960s and 70s, 1980s, maybe up until the 1990s, were almost exclusively African-Americans.

almost exclusively. That's changed. That's changed exactly because of the changes that have taken place within the United States. But the problem with the march, though, was that there was no leadership. There was no working class leadership. And both of us

have been going to these marches long enough to know that they can deteriorate because of the absence of leadership. Anarchists, non-anarchists, maybe provocateurs, infiltrators within the march and so on, took advantage of the absence of leadership. And indeed, we knew it was going to happen. So the burning down of the first police station, the possibility that a second one would be burned down, the

the national guard. It gave the ruling class an excuse to bring out, to clamp down on civil liberties and so on. And it turned off a lot of people. And it was, that was tragic in many ways because in small town, Minnesota and elsewhere in the United States, people who had never been to protest before and so on came out for these protests. But the ultra leftist, uh,

violent response and so on turned off a lot of people. So by the time he got to the Chauvin trial, by the time the trial came along, the numbers had dwindled considerably. The numbers of people who had participated in these actions had dwindled. So in addition to that movement being taken into the electoral policy road, the violent

ultra-leftist character of the marchers and so on, turned off a lot of people. So an important moment was missed. But the significance of it is that it did. It registered how multiracial the working class is and is willing to come out and to act collectively.

Yeah, a final question I have to kind of wrap this conversation up. You've said it several times the last few questions that there's kind of a lack of political leadership to take advantage of the rising political consciousness we're seeing around issues of race, gender, everything else. Given everything you've learned, both by doing your kind of historical analysis and what you're observing in our kind of contemporary moment,

What sort of political leadership is needed to go from this kind of formal freedom that we currently have to a much richer, real freedom? Well, I would just say I think the most important thing is for workers to understand, as Marx and Engels understood in their first self-criticism in 1850, the need for independent, working-class political action in a labor party of our own.

to no longer rely on one wing or the other of the ruling class parties. For decades, it was the Democrats. Some workers are willing to, after decades of failure, look to the other capitalist party in the form of Trump's Republican Party.

But what's the most important thing for workers in any diversion around this, any sort of half measure is just one step further away from real democracy is forming independent working class political action in the Labor Party. Sure.

The challenge we face, we admit, the challenge we face is that what we are advocating for and promoting is something that no one, almost no one alive in the world has ever seen. That is the working class in an advanced capitalist country taking revolutionary leadership. The last time we saw that was in the 1930s.

And almost no one is alive who has ever seen that. So you can only know that through history and reading history. So what we're doing always is a conscious intervention into that history, bringing these lessons from the past for young people today. That's what we see our future.

project as, as a way to look back, look at that history. When is the last time the working class was in? What happens when the working class goes into motion? The significance of the working class in the lessons of history. That's our not so hidden agenda.

Yeah. So a question I always like to ask at the end, what, if anything, are you both working on now? Any projects that we can look forward to in the near or far future from either of you or both? Yeah, I have one project I'm working on the very early stages. That's an outgrowth of this. We looked at how Marxists

at this really important turning point in U.S. history in terms of addressing the issue of racial inequality. I'm hoping to look at the time period between the 1930s and the 1970s and the lead-up to then the Civil Rights Movement and how Marxists, specifically in the Socialist Workers Party, supported

addressed and related to the civil rights movement, how that might have been different from mainstream liberalism from Communist Party USA. So I'm looking to get into the archives, both here in Minnesota and the Wisconsin Historical Society to see what I can find.

And I'm doing something somewhat related. In my previous comments, I mentioned the last year of Malcolm X and that he was openly collaborating with white communists. And I want to get into more details about that, especially the role of a militant newspaper, which is the organ of the Socialist Workers' Party. We know Malcolm rated very closely.

And you can see in some of his speeches in that last year, he's alluding to international developments, especially in Algeria, for example. And so what I want to do is to take a closer read of Malcolm's speeches and so on and see whether or not there are any parallels. Is it being informed in any way by the militant newspaper? So that's the project I'm working on.

Excellent. So in the meantime, Kyle Edwards and August Nims, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. No, this was great. We really appreciate being invited to be a part of this. This was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.