radical histories of the US civil war

[The Douche]

Can anybody suggest texts that deal with the US civil war and reconstruction from a communist perspective? (not peoples history)

[Os Cangaceiros]

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps "Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans" by David Montgomery? Might be of interest. David Montgomery is a very good historian of American labor, I have one of his books and it's great.

[The Douche]

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps "Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans" by David Montgomery? Might be of interest. David Montgomery is a very good historian of American labor, I have one of his books and it's great.

I forgot about him. I actually got to see him speak, he gave a lecture at the tiny community college I went to. When I got there, me and my friend were the only non-professors in the audience, he was pretty stoked to hear I was a wobbly (at the time), thanks for the suggestion.

[Ostrinski]

I second that about Montgomery. Also by Montgomery that is good is Fall of the House of Labor, which deals with the labor movement from the 1860's to the 1920's.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Eric Foner writes about this period, mostly Reconstruction. I can't recommend any specific books but he's supposed to be good.

Marx himself wrote about the US Civil War and his stuff on the subject are interesting.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/index.htm

[Geiseric]

Thanks Lenina, I was actually just reading Marx's stuff on the subject. I'd highly reccomend them.

Spoiler alert: The Union didn't wage the war to get rid of slavery! The south was the aggressor, and was trying to spread slavery into the "border states."

[MustCrushCapitalism]

Spoiler alert: The war wasn't about slavery!

Marx's argument was, if I remember correctly, that the war was fundamentally about slavery.

Furthering on that - fuck the CSA and fuck all neo-confederate movements. Reactionary scum, all of them.

[Grenzer]

Spoiler alert: The Union didn't wage the war to get rid of slavery! The south was the aggressor, and was trying to spread slavery into the "border states."

This doesn't make any sense. Slavery already existed in the border states.

[Geiseric]

Slavery competed with free labor in border states over what the dominant productive mode was to be. That's why I edited my post.

[The Douche]

I think you mean "western territories" (not formally organized as states), not "border states".

[GoddessCleoLover]

IMO The Douche is correct. "Bleeding Kansas" was the prime example.

[SonofRage]

The best book on this subject in my view, hands down, is "Black Reconstruction in America" by W.E.B Dubois.

-SoR

[GoddessCleoLover]

W.E.B. DuBois was a great African-American Marxian writer and his writings are certainly well worth reading.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Foner is very good on the history and debunking a lot of the myths that have developed over the years. His book on Reconstruction is freaking huge but it's good at showing both cultural reflections of really quickly changing attitudes as well as emphasizing the self-activity of slaves and white abolitionists. It's been a while since I read that, and I think at the time there were some larger framing arguments of his that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember - overall very interesting from a revolutionary perspective.


Marx's argument was, if I remember correctly, that the war was fundamentally about slavery.

Furthering on that - fuck the CSA and fuck all neo-confederate movements. Reactionary scum, all of them.Awww, you're both right! It was fundamentally about this, but only some of the slaves, some abolitionists, and maybe some plantation owners realized this from the beginning. Lincoln resisted again and again until it was basically the only option left.

[Jolly Red Giant]

Spoiler alert: The Union didn't wage the war to get rid of slavery! The south was the aggressor, and was trying to spread slavery into the "border states."
A major reason for the conflict was over the control of the expansion of the railroad network westwards.

The Southern States had blocked the expansion of the railroads to the west by the Northern States up until the signing of the Pacific Railroads Act by Lincoln in 1862. The Southern States wanted to control the expansion westward in order to use slave labour for mining and food production further to the west. During the 1850s the Southern States had laid more than 8,300 miles of railroad mainly in the western border regions of the Southern States with slavery and the plantation owners following closely behind. The Northern States needed to gain control of westward expansion in order to create a dominant position controlling transportation that would make slave labour redundant in terms of competition.

[Raskolnikov]

Can anybody suggest texts that deal with the US civil war and reconstruction from a communist perspective? (not peoples history)


Mythology of the White Proletariat.(By J. Sakai. Just type it on google and it'll be presented to you, as it can be read via internets) It, at least, shows it in a light of what the civil war was really about.

A capitalist society attempting to prevent a slave-insurrection just waiting to happen (and to solve this - immigrants. Which were used during the reconstruction to remove Africans from their jobs, as now Irish men became the new cleaners rather than the Africans) and the Roman-Greek successor state of the South.

A pure lover of slavocracy and intending to make sure land was surely open for them alone (thus the despised idea of immigrants helping reduce the ratio between White and African among the Southerns).

That's the overall message it presents in some parts - and goes over the Reconstruction quite well actually.

[pluckedflowers]

The Civil War is also the cover topic for the latest issue of Jacobin magazine:
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/the-war-of-northern-aggression/

[Red Commissar]

Eric Foner writes about this period, mostly Reconstruction. I can't recommend any specific books but he's supposed to be good.

Back in my freshman year of university, my history teacher assigned us Foner's general US history book, "Give me Liberty!: An American History" as the main text for the course. It's really thick, but he's great with giving information on many points of history that are often ignored or brushed over. He even devoted a decent amount of coverage to the labor movement, the early Socialist Party, Eugene V. Debs., etc. (which is in fact how I learned more about Debs when I was younger, before then I only knew him as that guy who ran for president too many times from high school...), and mind you this is a textbook for a regular college course.

Of course he gets a lot of conservatives ticked off because he talks about some of the unsavory parts of US history, and they cry "political correctness" when he tries to cover women and black perspectives on events. Overall, I really liked his "survey" on American history- a lot of good information and gets you thinking from different angles.

This was before I was very political, and I can say it's probably one of the few textbooks I read in full rather than trying to bs my way through the course.

I haven't gotten a chance to read his Reconstruction book that has been brought up, but if his general history on the US is anything to go by I can recommend him.