Dear Friends,                                                                      Juneteenth, June 19, 2025

This is a day late, sorry. But I think it’s still worth saying, especially the way things are today. Lift Every Voice and Sing is not an exclusionary song, it is for everyone. Juneteenth is a day of celebration for all Americans because on that day, June 19, 1865, slavery, the great American nightmare, came to an end. At least, it came to an end in law. We know that the hopes and aspirations of 1865 were not realized. But, at least, slavery was no more. In form at least all Americans finally became free when Major General Gordon Granger spoke those words, the words of General Order, No. 3, for June 19, 1865. The existence of slavery enslaves us all. We must all be ashamed that we are still so far from realizing the aspirations of 1865.

But we need to go much further. Atlantic slavery as a whole is perhaps the largest mass of human misery, pain and death in all history. Let’s take a moment for that. Now, why did it happen? We in the US think of cotton, and rightly. But cotton came later. The entire vast system of evil (I don’t recognize the concept of evil, but here …) came into existence so that Europeans had sugar to put in their coffee (tea, like cotton, came later). The paltriness of the motive against the mass of horror continues in capitalism today. Yes, I am invoking Hannah Arendt.

Not that cotton would be much better, it is at least something like a modern necessity.

Atlantic slavery never in any way came from some terrible imperative which European society faced as a matter of survival. I think that one of the most important things for Europeans and Americans whether or not their ancestors were slave owners (many of mine were), to face up to is this unimaginable disproportion: what did we do it for? Anyone who bought a cotton shirt participated in slavery. The free people of Boston still see molasses as one of their emblems (I love molasses).

I wrote what follows for a course in Spring 2020, or was it 2021? I’m leaving it unchanged, including significant dates, though, as you’ll see, they’re a bit confused.

Juneteenth: Slavery, Freedom, Wage-Labor

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger, of the Union Army, standing on the balcony of the Ashton Villa, in Galveston, Texas, read aloud these words, the words of General Order, No. 3, for that day:

GENERAL ORDER, No. 3. – “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

It is because of the reading of these words that June 19th, Juneteenth, also called Freedom Day, became a holiday and a day of celebration. It is an official holiday in many states. Since yesterday [when written, June 2020], as you know, it is an official holiday for the University of Denver. There is a growing movement to make it a federal holiday, that is, for the whole country [as of this moment, 1:02 pm (MST), June 17, 2021, the Bill making it a federal holiday will be signed into law by the President in less than half an hour].

Granger, reading these words aloud, sought, in an instant and by proclamation, to transform all slaves into free and equal members of society, and at the same time, into members of the working class, wage-laborers. Such a proclamation is an example of what philosophers call a performative utterance, a sequence of words that does not merely mean something, but does something. There is something astonishing and moving about the absolute, but absolutely radical, simplicity of this attempt, however naïve it may seem now.

Whether he knew it or not (in the Union Army during the Civil War there were at least three generals who were Marxists in the quite specific sense) he was proclaiming the inauguration, at that precise moment, of the capitalist mode of production in all formerly slave states and territories. And the order embodies the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, between “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves”, and the new state of affairs that takes “the connection heretofore existing between them”, slavery, and turns it into that between “employer and hired labor”, wage-labor. The commodity form, in itself, gives all commodity owners – all members of society – formal freedom and equality, while at the same time, in requiring that labor-power itself be a commodity, it creates substantial unfreedom and inequality. The simplicity of the transformation – slaves simply become wage-laborers, masters simply become employers – belies the proclamation of absolute equality.

BUT:

This was absolutely the best remotely possible solution for emancipation on that day, remember that. The reality that followed, in fact, was a cruel simulacrum of slavery: share-cropping, Jim Crow, lynching. The Great Migration of black workers north to the industrial cities, above all Detroit, beginning during the First World War (which caused a decline in European immigration, and, by 1917, enlistment of white workers, so, a shortage of labor), was truly a step, though only a step, towards liberation, and it was precisely the step that Granger sought to enact, by proclamation, on June 19, 1865: they became wage-laborers.

Certainly, other very important steps have been taken since then, but what has happened in the last months [written in June 2021] is harsh reminder of how many more need to be taken, of how much remains the same. Liberation is something that must be for all, whites must be engaged in this struggle as much as blacks and all others. In Bert Brecht’s words:

Everything or nothing. All of us or none.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby