The air inside the Hamburg armory on July 8, 1876, was hot and close, thick with the weight of a South Carolina summer and the fear of what was coming. Outside, more than two hundred armed Red Shirts had encircled the building. They were the paramilitary vanguard of the Democratic Party’s white supremacist counterrevolution, and they had come to finish what they started four days earlier.

On July 4, two white farmers had picked a quarrel with a Black militia company drilling on Hamburg’s main road. The dispute was minor. The militiamen let them through. But former Confederate general Matthew Butler turned that minor quarrel into a legal ultimatum: disarm, disband, surrender. Captain Doc Adams refused. On July 8, Butler returned with more than two hundred armed men. A cannon was also brought into the small town from Augusta. After a few rounds from the cannon rendered the brick building useless, the desperate militiamen huddled inside began to make escape attempts through the holes and windows, dashing for the nearby woods. Thirty or forty were captured. Six were selected from among the prisoners, marched away, and executed.

The federal government looked away.

The Hamburg Massacre was not an isolated crime. It was a signal of what was to come, and Washington answered it with silence. Counterrevolution swept South Carolina that fall. By 1877, the infamous Compromise between Northern capital and the planter class had withdrawn federal troops from the South entirely. The democratic republic that Reconstruction had begun to build fell to terror and betrayal. The centennial of American independence became the year the revolution was reversed.

The defeat of Reconstruction did not extinguish the freedom struggle. A Second Reconstruction rose after World War II, as Black veterans home from fighting fascism joined a surging labor movement and renewed the democratic revolution. Henry Winston was forged in that upsurge, a CPUSA leader whose formation ran through both struggles at once. His essay From Anti-Slavery to the Anti-Monopoly Strategy traced the line from the abolition struggle through the Second Reconstruction to the fight against monopoly capital today, and in doing so laid the strategic foundation on which a Third Reconstruction can be built.

The scale of democratic crisis and the scale of organized resistance are both rising toward a historical confrontation. But the forces building this movement must learn the lessons of the Reconstructions that came before. The anti-monopoly struggle has to stand at the core of this rising movement, because only the working class, organized and at the head of a broad popular coalition, can finally complete the democratic revolution launched on July 4, 1776.

From Anti-Slavery to Anti-Monopoly

The first Reconstruction failed for a specific reason: class limits inside the very coalition that won it.

W.E.B. Du Bois identified this failure in his chapter “Counter-Revolution of Property.” The coalition that defeated the Slave Power joined Black freedmen, poor white farmers, and Northern industrial capital. Each had reasons to fight the planter class. But only one of these three forces held real national economic power, and that force’s commitment to Black freedom was always conditional. Northern capital needed Black votes and Black labor to break the planter class and secure the South for national markets. It did not need Black political power once that goal was achieved.

The railroad strikes of 1877 showed Northern capital a labor movement closer to home and more threatening to its own interests than anything in the South. Northern capital answered by striking its own bargain. The Compromise of 1877 traded Black political rights for sectional peace with the planter class and the opening of an offensive against the Western tribes, the newly born proletariat, and Black freedmen.

This betrayal cleared the ground for monopoly capital’s rise. The same years that buried Reconstruction saw the trusts, the railroad combinations, and the first great concentrations of finance capital take shape. Jim Crow began as the political form that secured controlled, low-wage labor in the New South’s mills, mines, and farms. As monopoly capital consolidated nationally across the Gilded Age, it nationalized Jim Crow as a strategic instrument, using racial division to prevent the working class from uniting against capital as a whole. The defeat of Black Reconstruction and the consolidation of monopoly capital were not two separate stories. They were two parts of a single story.

An ever smaller number of giant firms and financial institutions now exert overwhelming control over almost every economic sector in our lives. Production has gone global, breaking labor into supply chains that stretch across borders and weaken any single group’s bargaining power. The result is the sharpest concentration of income and wealth since the original Gilded Age, built on the systematic destruction of union density and the steady erosion of the civil and voting rights that once gave working people the political power to fight back.

Monopoly capital no longer settles for control of the market either. It captures the state itself, writing the regulations that govern its own industries, shaping the tax code that finances its expansion, and securing bailouts when its own risks come due. This fusion of monopoly and the state is what an earlier generation of Marxists called state-monopoly capitalism, and it is not a deviation from capitalism’s logic. It is capitalism’s logic carried to its conclusion.

Anti-Monopoly and the National Democratic Revolution

The Radical Republicans who drove the First Reconstruction were the last great expression of the bourgeois-led revolution in the United States. They pushed Reconstruction as far as a capitalist class still committed to political democracy was willing to go. Once Reconstruction threatened to outrun capital’s own interests, the revolutionary bourgeoisie vacillated and then collapsed. This betrayal of principle was simultaneously a demonstration of class limits. A revolutionary bourgeoisie can carry a democratic revolution only so far before its own position inside the existing order pulls it back.

From that point forward, leadership of the democratic revolution in the United States could no longer rest with the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism traced how competitive capitalism had given way to monopoly. The same ceiling that limited an earlier revolutionary bourgeoisie did not loosen as capitalism matured into its monopoly stage. Monopoly is the stage at which bourgeoisie’s capacity to lead a democratic revolution exhausts itself entirely. Bourgeois-democratic tasks are transformed into national-democratic tasks.

Once Northern capital was able to subordinate the ruined Southern plantocracy into a junior partnership within a national coalition, it had no further use for the democratic mobilization that had once served it. Leadership of the democratic revolution had to pass to a new social base, one with no stake in monopoly capital and no ceiling on how far it was willing to carry democratic demands. This is the working class, and the stage of struggle it leads is the National Democratic Revolution: a fusion of the fight to complete the democratic revolution with the fight against capital’s narrowest and most parasitic form.

The National Democratic Revolution is the path along which the working class discovers and builds the particular national forms of socialist construction. Just as the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions each found their own road to socialist construction through their own national democratic struggles, the road to socialism in the United States runs through this country’s own National Democratic Revolution: the unfinished business of a Third Reconstruction, completed under working-class leadership rather than bourgeois leadership.

Third Reconstruction and the Popular Front

What makes this revolution possible is a simple fact about how monopoly capital makes its money, starting with its own workforce. Exploitation at the point of production deepens as monopoly’s scale grows. A handful of firms commanding an entire industry can set wages and conditions the way no single firm in a competitive market ever could. They can whipsaw plant against plant, region against region, even country against country, because they control enough of the market to make every relocation threat real.

The same concentration that lets monopoly capital fix prices for consumers lets it fix wages below the value of what its own workers produce. Scale is not only an advantage in the marketplace. It is leverage at the point of production, and the bigger monopoly capital grows, the more of that leverage it holds.

Monopoly capital’s exploitation does not stop at the factory gate. Through market power and capture of the very state policies meant to check it, monopoly capital also draws superprofits from consumers, from farmers, from minority-owned small business, and from oppressed nations abroad.

Farmers show this clearly. A handful of meatpacking and grain firms control the markets where farmers sell their crops and livestock, and a similarly small number of seed, fertilizer, and equipment firms control the markets where farmers buy their inputs. Farmers are squeezed from both directions at once, and the same firms doing the squeezing have shaped decades of farm policy, writing subsidies and trade rules around their own position rather than the farmer’s.

Minority small business owners face a related squeeze, and the same broken promise of Reconstruction runs through it. A 2024 University of Washington study found that Black-owned businesses pay interest rates 3.09 percentage points higher than white-owned firms with the same creditworthiness, a bias that costs minority-owned businesses $8 billion a year in extra interest. Where an established competitor borrows cheaply to expand, a minority-owned business pays more for the same capital, when it can get capital at all. That $8 billion does not vanish. It flows out of minority communities and into the monopoly banks and finance houses charging the premium, capital that would otherwise have gone into new hires, new storefronts, and the next generation of minority-owned firms. The drain compounds across every business cycle, and it shows up later as the entrepreneurship gap, the wealth gap, and the development gap that mark minority communities across the country.

This is the material basis for the coalition that can overthrow monopoly’s rule. Each of these groups has a real and separate interest in the fight against monopoly capital, even when their other interests diverge. But a shared material interest does not organize itself into a shared political force automatically.

Dimitrov explained why at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International. Fascism, he argued, is monopoly capital’s own power, built on a mass base that monopoly capital recruits through demagogy from exactly the strata it has squeezed: the ruined peasant, the threatened small proprietor, the desperate unemployed worker. If the working class does not win these strata to its own banner, monopoly capital’s most reactionary wing will find a way to recruit them to its own political project. A Popular Front is the organizational form built to win that battle and hold these separate interests together long enough to act as one force.

The struggle against monopoly capital is, at bottom, a political struggle for state power. Monopoly does not simply dominate markets. It captures legislatures, courts, and regulatory agencies, and turns that control into a lock on every advantage already described. A coalition that wins every fight at the point of production but loses every election allows monopoly to claw back those gains legislatively.

This is what makes the Popular Front indispensable rather than optional. It has to combine grassroots struggle, with workplace fights as its main engine, with a vehicle capable of contesting elections at every level of the state, from city council to Congress. Workplace power without electoral power does not hold ground. Electoral power without workplace power behind it does not have force. The Front has to build both, together, or it has not built anything that monopoly capital needs to fear.

Conclusion

The Red Shirts who encircled the Hamburg armory did not separate their racial terror from their class program. As monopoly capital consolidated its power across the Gilded Age, it nationalized racial division as a strategic instrument, using it to split the working class along racial lines and block the unified labor and civil rights coalition that could have challenged it. The freedom struggle and the labor struggle have been targets of the same ruling class offensive from 1877 to the present, and they will only defeat that offensive together.

The first two Reconstructions fell when the class forces leading them reached their historic limits. The Radical Republicans carried the first as far as Northern capital was willing to go, then traded it away. The Second Reconstruction’s gains were real but incomplete. The neoliberal counteroffensive of the 1970s and 1980s found the labor and civil rights movements already fracturing from each other. Monopoly capital drove through that break, dismantling union power and rolling back civil rights enforcement with the same class program. What had been powerful together was defeated separately. The Third Reconstruction faces the same test, and it has one path through it: the reunification of the labor movement and the civil rights movements into a single organized force, capable of carrying the democratic revolution past every limit that has stopped it before.

One hundred and fifty years after Hamburg, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Third Reconstruction is taking shape. It needs a strategy equal to its historical task. That strategy starts with the anti-monopoly struggle, proceeds through the National Democratic Revolution, and demands a Popular Front capable of fighting for state power at every level of government. Winston’s essay told us where to aim. The rest is organizing.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Image: Principles for a just recovery by ©Victor Barro/Friends of the Earth Spain. CC BY 4.0.