This coming October 17 marks the 162nd anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle!
1850s: U.S. capitalist class splits violently
The setting of John Brown’s Raid is the U.S. of the 1850s, with dueling factions of the U.S. capitalist class fighting each other. To the Southern slave-owning planters, harvesting cotton depended on enslaving Black workers indefinitely, even if it meant seceding and forming their own country. The Southern capitalists had a stranglehold on U.S. state power, controlling the Supreme Court and the presidency for decades. The logic of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court case of 1857 gave a green light to expand slavery, and in 1859, John Brown led his multiracial raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The Southern plantation-owning U.S. capitalists were terrified by John Brown’s Raid’s militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."
From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black workers did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed Black and white people were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, NY near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist and former enslaved worker.
Tubman: Liberator of 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown close. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her owner tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead, she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the Southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black rebellions petrified slave owners
Like all forms of class society, slavery relied on ruling class violence. But to those who say workers won’t fight back against oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal.
Nat Turner’s 1831 armed rebellion catapulted abolition as an immediate demand.
Abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and many others, joined this fight. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act extended the reach of the enslavers into the North to capture accused runaways, but abolitionists often attacked these kidnappers, sometimes freeing the runaways. Frederick Douglass said, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”The enslavers, although talking of "docile" Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of "outside agitators."
They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep abolitionist literature away from them. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas
 cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Revolutionary mass violence
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in antiracist struggle to join Progressive Labor Party (PLP). PLP stands on the shoulders of Brown, Tubman, Douglass and the masses of workers who supported John Brown’s Raid and the Underground Railroad. These antiracists and their politics, however, were not without limitations.
John Brown correctly analyzed that only direct action and violence could end slavery — and on the eve of his execution, even admitted he underestimated how much violence it would take. PLP applauds the merciless violence shown by Brown to racists like plantation owners and kidnappers but rejects small-scale guerilla warfare. We fight for a mass militant communist movement whose soldiers will come from workers in the factories and fields. Communist revolution means millions of us —eventually all of us — must become communist organizers at our jobs, campuses, barracks, and mass organizations.
Mass violence is the opposite of John Brown’s religious-based outlook of individual martyrdom. History has shown that wherever the working masses have stood and fought, they are invincible. Mass violence means millions of workers are organized and armed, first, with communist ideas. It means fighting to win workers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and analyzing the world from the perspective of class struggle and smashing racism with communist revolution for workers’ dictatorship.
The working class’ historic task is to overthrow capitalism. Violence cannot be avoided. However, this means neither dwelling on death nor on individualistic “revolutionary suicide,” but on organizing and preserving our forces to continue the struggle.
Join PLP!
Today there is again a split within the U.S. ruling class, but the world situation is much different. U.S. imperialism is declining while Chinese and Russian imperialism grow more assertive. The Big Fascist (see glossary box), imperialist section of the U.S. ruling class has no Lincoln to unite their faction of capitalists, just the feeble Joe Biden. The Big Fascists want to build liberal fascism under the guise of saving a democracy that never existed while building for war with China and or Russia. Meanwhile the domestically oriented, Small Fascist capitalists have unhinged egomaniacs like Donald Trump who want an isolationist “Fortress America.”
Both capitalist factions mean sharper racist, sexist, and open fascist attacks on the international working class. PLP fights to follow John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s example and lead the working class to revolution where workers run the world, without racist bosses and their profit system. JOIN US!