Was Abraham Lincoln a decent US president?

[d3crypt]

I consider every US president to be pretty bad, with the exception of Lincoln. But I may reconsider this. On the list of positives he helped accomplish was to help to end slavery, fighting against confederate fascism. Still he was the head of bourgeois state and apparently he did some very bad things to Native Americans.

But was he progressive historically speaking?

[Armchair Partisan]

On the list of positives he helped accomplish was to help to end slavery, fighting against confederate fascism.

The Confederates weren't fascists. And yes, he did help end slavery - a welcome development. I don't think he was morally that great, considering that he too was a racist at the end of the day, and he became most vocal in his anti-slavery rhetoric and actions only when the Civil War was already underway and he had nothing to lose. But at least he had a positive role to play in the history of the United States.


Still he was the head of bourgeois state and apparently he did some very bad things to Native Americans.

I don't know much about the latter, although I suppose "doing bad things to Native Americans" is just part of the job of U.S. President.


But was he progressive historically speaking?

Of course he was! He helped do away with the slave-based plantation economy, allowing the US South to transition to a more modern, advanced form of economy. In that sense, he was definitely progressive, moral judgments aside.

[Emmett Till]

I consider every US president to be pretty bad, with the exception of Lincoln. But I may reconsider this. On the list of positives he helped accomplish was to help to end slavery, fighting against confederate fascism. Still he was the head of bourgeois state and apparently he did some very bad things to Native Americans.

But was he progressive historically speaking?

Lincoln was a bourgeois revolutionary--utterly bourgeois, and definitely revolutionary. Putting an end to chattel slavery in America was a very difficult, world-historical accomplishment, which doomed chattel slavery worldwide.

The Second American Revolution, sometimes called the Civil War, was the last great bourgeois revolution. Marx's writings on it are fundamental to Marxism.

[Zoop]

I don't get how you can say any President can be a decent President. By definition, any President is surely indecent?

[Emmett Till]

I don't get how you can say any President can be a decent President. By definition, any President is surely indecent?

Well, like they said back in Lincoln's time, whatever you do behind closed doors is your own business and perfectly decent, as long as you don't do it on a publick carriageway and shock the horses.

[Comrade Jacob]

Their has never been a good western leader.

[Rafiq]

The history of the civil war is important even today. The spirit of civil war abolitionism is culturally necessary insofar as it must be related to any Left movement in the US (Just as, of course, the legacy of Jacobinism in France must be assumed, ETC.).

In fact many labor songs derived from old civil war Union songs. "Solidarity forever" came from "John Brown's Body". "There is power in a Union" came from "Battle cry of freedom". The list goes on.

The spirit of Union radicalism is necessary to re-assert in the United States also because it historically gives both the white and black working classes a common national, cultural identity to be politicized. More practically, the re-assertion of federal power over local, state power is always progressive: We all know the story vis a vis slavery, but the 'decentralized' nature of American politics makes building a nation-wide movement difficult, as well as the fact that in virtually every circumstance, local, state based politics has been reactionary: From civil rights, right-to-work, to more recently - gay marriage. Lincoln is still a relevant figure for practical and immediate politics, and the more militant and mature a political proletariat would become, the less necessary such an emphasis on the particularities of American national traditions would be.

[Redistribute the Rep]

Apparently he exchanged letters with Karl Marx himself; the guy couldn't have been too bad.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

I consider every US president to be pretty bad, with the exception of Lincoln. But I may reconsider this. On the list of positives he helped accomplish was to help to end slavery, fighting against confederate fascism. Still he was the head of bourgeois state and apparently he did some very bad things to Native Americans.

But was he progressive historically speaking?

While the abolition of slavery is rightly recognized as a step forward, you can only call Lincoln progressive on the whole, historically speaking, if you are willing to call Manifest Destiny progressive.

Lincoln oversaw the largest mass execution in US history (the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862). US colonization of the Dakota lands began to accelerate in 1819 with the construction of Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, across from Pike Island, or Wita Tanka ("Big Island" in Dakota), which is the heart of their homeland and considered a sacred location. In the coming decades, when more white settlers came, land was ceded in treaties, the territory became an American state in 1858, and they were consigned to a small reservation and became dependent on payments promised by the treaties because the reservation land could not produce adequate food. The Dakota feared that the US government would not be able to afford its payments due to the Civil War. They were facing mass starvation and local traders said they would rather leave them to "eat grass or their own dung" than give them food on credit, so the Dakota Uprising began and some 400 settlers were slaughtered. 303 men, alleged to have taken part in the killing, were given dubious trials and sentenced to death. Lincoln intervened to prevent most of the condemned men's executions, but then compensated for those saved lives by overseeing the transformation of Pike Island into a concentration camp and interning the Dakota nation there, resulting in the deaths of over 300 men, women, and children. The men whose executions Lincoln prevented were sent to Iowa and a third of them were dead by the time their sentences were up (around 1865/1866), and they were deported to Nebraska. The survivors of the Pike Island concentration camp were then expelled in 1863 to Crow Creek, South Dakota, many of them dying during the voyage and about 200, mostly children, dying within the first 6 months of arrival. Dakota people were banished from the state of Minnesota. After the executions, grave robbers dug up the cadavers for medical students, at least one skull remaining on display at the Mayo Clinic until the late 20th century.

[reviscom1]

The Second American Revolution, sometimes called the Civil War, was the last great bourgeois revolution. Marx's writings on it are fundamental to Marxism.

What is the rationale for labelling it a bourgeois revolution?

As for it being the last, don't forget those that occurred in Europe at the end of the First World War, including the one in Russia.

[A.J.]

The romance was with the Confederacy.

I bit like the Jacobite rebellions in this country.

Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:

[R.Rubinelli]

Bourgeois in the sense that it "proclaimed" the supremacy of "free labor" and "free soil" (i.e. "free" farming) over slave labor and plantation agriculture. As with all things bourgeois, this Civil War was incomplete, and shrank back in horror from the necessary next steps which were tentatively undertaken with Radical, that is Congressional, Reconstruction.

As far a Lincoln himself-- it's a bit like asking if the US was "decent" when engaged in the Civil War? Well, yes and no. It was fighting to abolish slavery (although the recognition came later to the Union than it did to the Confederacy), but it was still the US.

There were decent people-- Thaddeus Stevens; Gould Shaw fighting the South with his Colored Troops, and fighting the Union bureaucracy on behalf of his Colored Troops; John Brown, and many more, not the least of whom were those who went South after the war to staff the Freedmen's Bureau offices.

But look-- even someone as great as Frederick Douglass wound up serving the US interests in Haiti.

[Aslan]

Abraham Lincoln himself eliminated slavery on paper but the vile act was still practiced in all but name in the deep south. Although it wasn't necessarily his fault.

Although FDR is favored by several in the revolutionary left. He paved the way for Woodrow Wilson's neo-liberalism to take place.

..So my conclusion is that Grover Cleveland was the best president since he took the term ''fat cat'' to the next level.;)

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I quite like the man, myself. Obviously he was very much a bourgeois politician, but he was a very revolutionary politician in his era. While President he utterly destroyed the system of black chattel slavery that had been the bedrock of the system that upheld the wealthy, faux-aristocratic planters as the Southern ruling class.

Class conflict, in fact, was a very big part of the Pro-Union resistance in the Confederacy, which included quite a few Poor Whites who recognized the Confederacy for what it was: A naked attempt by a bunch of rich planters to keep their free labor. When Gen. Sherman and his troops marched into Richmond, among the cheering crowds who greeted him were several poor whites, along with now free slaves.

In truth, it wasn't Lincoln's views on slavery that evolved (he'd always been against slavery, despite what he said in the Lincoln/Douglas debates), but his views on race. By the end of the war, he had in fact come to believe in the essential equality of the races. Granted, it took the whole goddamn war, but still....

[Burzhuin]

I consider every US president to be pretty bad, with the exception of Lincoln. But I may reconsider this. On the list of positives he helped accomplish was to help to end slavery, fighting against confederate fascism. Still he was the head of bourgeois state and apparently he did some very bad things to Native Americans.

But was he progressive historically speaking?
I think that president publicly stated that if to preserve the Union he has to enslave all blacks he would do it cannot be decent by definition.

[R.Rubinelli]

Abraham Lincoln himself eliminated slavery on paper but the vile act was still practiced in all but name in the deep south. Although it wasn't necessarily his fault.

Although FDR is favored by several in the revolutionary left. He paved the way for Woodrow Wilson's neo-liberalism to take place.

..So my conclusion is that Grover Cleveland was the best president since he took the term ''fat cat'' to the next level.;)


FDR was elected president after Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was WW1. Roosevelt was WW2.

I don't know of anybody in the revolutionary left who "favors" FDR, since favoring an executive agent of and for capitalism is by definition anti-revolutionary.

[Tim Redd]

Apparently he exchanged letters with Karl Marx himself; the guy couldn't have been too bad.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

He also vigorously opposed the American ripoff of northern Mexico. As a congressman from Illinois he slipped out of a Capitol building window to avoid and thwart a vote that would authorize the US war against Mexico in 1848.

[Tim Redd]

FDR was elected president after Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was WW1. Roosevelt was WW2.

I don't know of anybody in the revolutionary left who "favors" FDR, since favoring an executive agent of and for capitalism is by definition anti-revolutionary.

Many in the US Communist Party and various socialist parties supported the platform and agenda of FDR. Wallace, FDR's vice president until his last term, was enthusiastically supported by many in the same 2 groups.

Before FDR's last run for president Democratic party elites nixed Wallace because they feared him becoming president with high probability given FDR's overall poor health.

[PhoenixAsh]

I bit like the Jacobite rebellions in this country.

Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:

Because reactionaries rely in myth creation to justify their positions...

[Sibotic]

Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:
What is being implied with this, by the way?


He also vigorously opposed the American ripoff of northern Mexico. As a congressman from Illinois he slipped out of a Capitol building window to avoid and thwart a vote that would authorize the US war against Mexico in 1848.Funny that you would mention the US war on Mexico in the context of people who exchanged letters with Karl Marx.


I think that president publicly stated that if to preserve the Union he has to enslave all blacks he would do it cannot be decent by definition. To be fair, especially given conceptions of 'states' rights,' in a sense you allow states to diverge from others on fairly important issues, on moral issues, and so on, but they're at the same time supposed to be part of the same organic nation. As a result of this, a state has views which the rest do not uphold, and at the same time thinks that they ought to, and that its laws are those which should be enforced upon these states which it is part of the same whole with. As such, there is in a substantial sense no real Union which was to be preserved, and it's likely that other motives may have impelled his decision one way or another, in an overall sense. In either case it's a question of subjugating states overreaching their boundaries naturally, or subjugating blacks. In such a disagreement 'preservation' was unlikely to be - the question on a political level.



As far a Lincoln himself-- it's a bit like asking if the US was "decent" when engaged in the Civil War? Well, yes and no. It was fighting to abolish slavery (although the recognition came later to the Union than it did to the Confederacy)To be fair, it's a decent question in some ways, as it implies understanding in some sense how Lincoln's bourgeois position came into his motivations in 'abolishing slavery,' and what precisely he might be fighting against. That said, obviously their question had problems.

As far as 'bourgeois' or otherwise, the thing with slavery needn't be counted as an independent 'bourgeois revolution' in a state which was already predominantly bourgeois, although this status of the Southern states obviously played into the hands of Lincoln's states and the generalisation of wage-slavery. It also needn't be counted as a furtherance of the 'bourgeois revolution,' rather as a matter within capitalism, which itself seems questionable.

That said, the 'US Communist Party' has a rather chequered history, so in that sense whether they were to be included in the mainstream of the revolutionary left is questionable.

[Tim Redd]

Quote: He also vigorously opposed the American ripoff of northern Mexico. As a congressman from Illinois he slipped out of a Capitol building window to avoid and thwart a vote that would authorize the US war against Mexico in 1848.

Funny that you would mention the US war on Mexico in the context of people who exchanged letters with Karl Marx.

I don't know what point you're making.

[Sibotic]

Quote: He also vigorously opposed the American ripoff of northern Mexico. As a congressman from Illinois he slipped out of a Capitol building window to avoid and thwart a vote that would authorize the US war against Mexico in 1848.


I don't know what point you're making.

Relevantly in that case, Engels wrote to - anyway, this again.

[R.Rubinelli]

He also vigorously opposed the American ripoff of northern Mexico. As a congressman from Illinois he slipped out of a Capitol building window to avoid and thwart a vote that would authorize the US war against Mexico in 1848.

Which makes Lincoln "more decent" than Engels who "welcomed" the US war against Mexico, theorizing that the whip of Yankee capitalism was just what Mexico needed to "develop."

[Tim Redd]

Which makes Lincoln "more decent" than Engels who "welcomed" the US war against Mexico, theorizing that the whip of Yankee capitalism was just what Mexico needed to "develop."

Wow. Didn't know that about Engels on this question. It's a shameful response on Engel's part.

[Tim Redd]

Lincoln evolved enough during the war to promote Black male suffrage (right to vote) in the last speech he gave from a front facing window at the White House. Booth was there and found what Lincoln promoted was the exposition of his worst fear. A month or 2 later Booth assassinated Lincoln.

[Aslan]

Which makes Lincoln "more decent" than Engels who "welcomed" the US war against Mexico, theorizing that the whip of Yankee capitalism was just what Mexico needed to "develop."

Thanks for helping me with my US history I confused Wilson for Truman. I made an ass out of myself. Secondly, I'd like to say that Engels made an even greater ass out of himself by saying something that stupid. How the fuck would Mexico ''develop'' from the US conquering a great swath of useful and prosperous land from an already poor country?

[Hermes]

Isn't the whole narrative of Lincoln 'freeing the slaves' a little bit too simplistic, however? I thought that, for the most part, the slaves freed themselves due to the advancing Union armies, and Lincoln had to find some way to deal with this, so he declared the slaves free - but only those in states currently controlled by the Confederacy (initially).

[Tim Redd]

Isn't the whole narrative of Lincoln 'freeing the slaves' a little bit too simplistic, however? I thought that, for the most part, the slaves freed themselves due to the advancing Union armies

And in many instances Blacks in confederate states took matters into their own hands even without an advancing Union army - sabotage, intelligence gathering, fleeing bondage and so on on from behind the lines.

Indeed Blacks filled the ranks of the advancing Union army. The Union army later in its later stages had large numbers of Black regiments, mostly made up of those formerly in bondage in the confederate states.


and Lincoln had to find some way to deal with this, so he declared the slaves free - but only those in states currently controlled by the Confederacy (initially).

Yes Lincoln was astute in implementing policies like the Emancipation Proclamation which turned up the heat in confederate states by further activating the slave population in those states to take measures that dealt a blow to the cause of the confederacy in those states.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Isn't the whole narrative of Lincoln 'freeing the slaves' a little bit too simplistic, however? I thought that, for the most part, the slaves freed themselves due to the advancing Union armies, and Lincoln had to find some way to deal with this, so he declared the slaves free - but only those in states currently controlled by the Confederacy (initially).

The Proclamation was primarily intended to give the Union Army authority to liberate any and all slaves they came in contact with, and to declare any escaped slaves they came in contact with legally free from bondage.

It's also true that this only applied to the Confederacy. The reason that it didn't apply to the Union slave states was for strategic reasons: Lincoln couldn't risk the possibility that MORE states would secede to the Confederate cause. It was only when Union Victory was all but assured that he could begin plans for the 13th Amendment.

[Tim Redd]

Edwin Stanton who served as Secretary of War in Lincoln's cabinet was a notable bourgeois democratic radical Republican.

However Andrew Johnson who as vice president became president upon Lincoln's death was a lowlife, neo-confederate scumbag. He missed being impeached in the radical Republican dominated Senate by 1 vote. Grrrr...

Just rambling. I've deeply studied the Civil War, during, before and after for past 3-4 years. It lies at the center of US history and still resonates today. In fact the Republicans "Southern Strategy" and the fact that most states that didn't extend Obamacare to their citizens are the core confederate states demonstrates that the same or similar dynamics of the Civil War still very much operate today.

I hate the fact that racial prejudice is found at every turn of American history, but socialist/communist revolutionaries should be up on American history in order to enhance their ability to bring about revolution we all hope for.

[R.Rubinelli]

Thanks for helping me with my US history I confused Wilson for Truman. I made an ass out of myself. Secondly, I'd like to say that Engels made an even greater ass out of himself by saying something that stupid. How the fuck would Mexico ''develop'' from the US conquering a great swath of useful and prosperous land from an already poor country?


Well, I chalk it up to "youthful enthusiasm." So entranced was Engels by the "universalizing" aspects of capitalism, that he overlooked the itty-bitty detail of slavery in the US, and the fact that the war was looked upon by the slaveholders as a way to expand their system.

Engels, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung wrote:


Will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a "war of conquest", which, although it deals with a severe blow to his theory based on "justice and humanity", was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization? Or is it perhaps unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give the world trade a new direction? The "independence" of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in someplaces "justice" and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?

Uh... Fred, slow down-- capital is, as your best friend puts it, "contradiction in motion" so all those "great things" you foresee are part and parcel of increased brutality, expanded slavery, extermination of indigenous people, vicious exploitation. You don't get one without the other; and therefore you can't pick sides, endorse one without endorsing the other.

[blake 3:17]

What is the rationale for labelling it a bourgeois revolution?

As for it being the last, don't forget those that occurred in Europe at the end of the First World War, including the one in Russia.


To answer your question briefly, the rationale behind calling it a bourgeois revolution is that it was a fight between free labor and slave labor. A slave owning mode of production, much like a fascist mode of production, has its own very clear top down authoritarian logic, but is incredibly expensive to run. Because slave owners had bought their slaves, they had to feed them and they didn't fire them when they underperformed or misbehaved, they had to discipline them in super complicated ways.

As to your second comment -- do you mean bourgeois or democratic?

[Emmett Till]

What is the rationale for labelling it a bourgeois revolution?

As for it being the last, don't forget those that occurred in Europe at the end of the First World War, including the one in Russia.

So the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution? Funny, that was not the opinion of the Russian bourgeoisie, who were definitely against it.

The rationale for labelling the Civil War a bourgeois revolution is simple and obvious. It was led by the Republican Party, then and now the purest party of the American bourgeoisie.

The capitalists of the North had finally had enough of letting the US government be controlled by the slavemasters of the South. Push came to shove over the West, where the South wanted to turn the lands stolen from the Indians into cotton plantations worked by slave labor, and the North wanted the West to be a replica of the North, with "free labor," the Republican party slogan, instead of slave, and Indian land going to those settlers heading west in their covered wagons instead of sold off to the highest bidder, the southern slavemasters. As ratified under the Homestead Act passed in 1862, at the height of the Civil War. With much of the Western land given away to the biggest capitalists of the time, the railroad barons, as well.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected in American history who had any actual opposition to slavery. His election inevitably set off civil war. His initial conception was that if slavery's expansion could be stopped and the Union preserved, it would naturally die off sooner or later.

As it happened, the South agreed, and therefore seceded, so Lincoln was pushed to the truly revolutionary act of abolishing slavery with *no* compensation to the slaveholders in the Confederacy (slaveholders in union states did receive some), unlike the abolition of slavery almost anywhere else in the 19th century.

It set off true revolutionary turmoil in the South, with the slaves encouraged to essentially abolish slavery themselves, without always waiting for the union army to arrive first.

[Emmett Till]

Which makes Lincoln "more decent" than Engels who "welcomed" the US war against Mexico, theorizing that the whip of Yankee capitalism was just what Mexico needed to "develop."

That was in the 1840s. We all make mistakes when we are young. Remember, M and E had just joined the already-existing communist movement, and he was simply echoing the position of the American communists, whom he assumed understood the situation better than he did.

M and E at least opposed slavery, a disputed point among the New York communists, some of whom thought that capitalism and oppression of the working class in the North was as Mao would put it the "prime contradiction," so one ought not to call for abolition of slavery in the South.

In particular, Engels did not realise that what the Mexican-American War was really about was the expansion of slavery, which was already illegal in Mexico. Something Lincoln, much closer to the scene, was very clear on.

Until about 1843 or so, Marx himself was not a communist, the original Rheinische Zeitung which he edited was the paper supported and financed by the Rhenish bourgeoisie.

By the late 1850s at earliest Marx through further study had realised that the spreading of capitalism to what we now call the Third World did not represent historical progress, that in fact capitalist imperialism was holding back human progress. Notably he flip flopped over British imperialism in India, which at one point he thought had been historically progressive. Engels by the way completely agreed.

So even leaving aside the question of slavery, if Engels had ever gone back to writing about the Mexican-American war, I'm sure he would have repudiated that casual comment he threw off at the age of 25 or so.

[lutraphile]

He was extremely progressive for his time

(I think the same can be said about Quincy Adams)

[R.Rubinelli]

That was in the 1840s. We all make mistakes when we are young. Remember, M and E had just joined the already-existing communist movement, and he was simply echoing the position of the American communists, whom he assumed understood the situation better than he did.

It was 1849. Like I said, youthful enthusiasm, taken, a bit too much, by the so-called dynamism of capital.


M and E at least opposed slavery, a disputed point among the New York communists, some of whom thought that capitalism and oppression of the working class in the North was as Mao would put it the "prime contradiction," so one ought not to call for abolition of slavery in the South.


Don't know that there was much of an existing communist movement in NYC in 1846, 47, 48, or 49. It was only after 1849 and the defeat of the revolutions in Germany and France, that the European "communists" emigrated to the US.

Some radical formations in the North were already agitating against slavery, including a few city working class formations. Abolitionists, of course, were already extremely active. I don't know of any group of "socialists" in the US in the 1850s who argued against abolition. Would be interested in seeing a reference.


In particular, Engels did not realise that what the Mexican-American War was really about was the expansion of slavery, which was already illegal in Mexico. Something Lincoln, much closer to the scene, was very clear on.


Not only Lincoln; not only abolitionists; but even "moderates" and some slaveholders themselves knew what it was all about and opposed it, Henry Clay for example.



Until about 1843 or so, Marx himself was not a communist, the original Rheinische Zeitung which he edited was the paper supported and financed by the Rhenish bourgeoisie.


Except Engels wrote this in 1849, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.



By the late 1850s at earliest Marx through further study had realised that the spreading of capitalism to what we now call the Third World did not represent historical progress, that in fact capitalist imperialism was holding back human progress. Notably he flip flopped over British imperialism in India, which at one point he thought had been historically progressive. Engels by the way completely agreed.


The historical record is not quite that clear and unequivocal. There are considerable references to the "progress" supposedly inherent in capitalism after the 1850s. And of course there is Engels persistence in urging the IMWA to actually endorse Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war; something Marx, to his credit, would not support.



So even leaving aside the question of slavery, if Engels had ever gone back to writing about the Mexican-American war, I'm sure he would have repudiated that casual comment he threw off at the age of 25 or so.


Idle and pointless speculation. Nobody's trying to make Engels out to be anything other than he was; or Marx for that matter, "warts and all" as they themselves put it.

[ComradeAllende]

I think we are conflating the terms "decent" and "progressive" when talking about Lincoln (and history in general). For instance, I believe that the Civil War was a tragedy and an immense humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, I think it was unavoidable (given the political and economic contradictions between North and South) and that it was progressive in the sense of freeing the slaves and opening up the South to non-chattel capitalist development. Likewise, I think Lincoln was a "progressive" president when it came to creating a national banking system, crushing the Confederate insurrection, freeing the slaves (when it became politically expedient), and supporting a Whiggish program of economic development. I also like him personally, especially his witty charm and his pardoning of Union deserters. But we must remember that he suspended crucial liberties such as habeas corpus and free speech in the Border States, not to mention his flip-flopping on the issue of slavery (and pretending that he could save the Union without messing with the "peculiar institution"). He also was an asshole to the Native Americans, as evidenced by John Pope's incursions against the Dakota Sioux (after having his ass kicked by the Confederates as Bull Run).

[R.Rubinelli]

I believe that the Civil War was a tragedy and an immense humanitarian disaster.

Tragedy? How so? What's tragic about destroying slavery?

Humanitarian disaster? Really? Was slavery a more humanitarian, less disastrous alternative?

What exactly do you mean by tragic and a humanitarian disaster, particularly if, as you say, it was inevitable? Should Sherman have not marched to the sea, destroying the slaveholders' economic holdings in doing so? Should Grant not have utilized overwhelming firepower to pulverize the Confederate troops?


The tragedy and the disaster were not in waging, and winning the Civil War but in the failure to follow through; in the retreat from Radical Reconstruction; in the re-establishment of the ex-slaveholders' power in the Redemptionist governments and the plantation economy.

[Emmett Till]

It was 1849. Like I said, youthful enthusiasm, taken, a bit too much, by the so-called dynamism of capital.

Don't know that there was much of an existing communist movement in NYC in 1846, 47, 48, or 49. It was only after 1849 and the defeat of the revolutions in Germany and France, that the European "communists" emigrated to the US.

German emigration to America did not begin in 1848. Yes, there were organized New York communists before 1848. In fact, Wilhelm Weitling, the leader of the German communist movement before Marx and Engels joined, *returned* to Germany from New York in 1848.


Some radical formations in the North were already agitating against slavery, including a few city working class formations. Abolitionists, of course, were already extremely active. I don't know of any group of "socialists" in the US in the 1850s who argued against abolition. Would be interested in seeing a reference.

I don't have them in front of me, I'll get back to you on this, a not unimportant point. By the 1850s it's true that the previous anti-abolitionist attitudes of the workers movement in general and the small communist groups in particular had melted away under the impact of political developments.

You need to remember that America had the first actual workers party in the world, the Workingmen's Party of the 1820s, and America was also pretty much the first country where "socialism" had a certain popularity, with Owen, the founder of British socialism, actually invited to address the House of Representatives in 1924, almost the only foreigner ever to do so in the 19th century. Socialist colonies were extremely common in antebellum America, and not only pure utopians, you had radical socialist-feminist Flora Tristan in America for awhile, and not utterly uninfluential.

This is mostly forgotten because it all flowed into Andrew Jackson's racist-populist Democratic Party, which fundamentally was the party of slavery and white racism, even though Jackson's anti-bank anti-northern capitalist rhetoric has a lot more in common with Occupy Wall Street populism or Sander's more radical speechifying than your average mainstream modern Democrat. Even Flora Tristan saw herself as a Jacksonian more or less.

Given that the fundamental conflict in American society then was between the capitalists of the north and the slaveowners of the south, it was just as natural for workers to support the slaveowners party, the Democrats, as it was for slaves when given the opportunity to support the northern capitalists's party, the Republicans. Thereby helping to create the historic subordination of the oppressed to the oppressors in politics that has marked America ever since.



Not only Lincoln; not only abolitionists; but even "moderates" and some slaveholders themselves knew what it was all about and opposed it, Henry Clay for example.

Clay was even less of an "opponent" of slavery than Thomas Jefferson, the best, most intelligent and most successful leader of the Southern plantation owners in American history, who did more than anyone else to fasten the chains of slavery on America. Rhetoric aside, every policy Jefferson ever advocated served the social interests of Virginia tobacco-growing slaveholders (often not the same as those of the Carolina rice growers) with absolute precision.

Jefferson understood that tobacco plantation slavery had no future. But when the cotton gin was invented, he masterminded the Louisiana Purchase and the ban on the African slave trade, enabling an extremely profitable expansion of slavery westwards combined with turning Virginia into a breeding farm for selling slaves down south to the cotton plantations. And his anti-merchant populism enabled a "Virginia dynasty"to run the US government for 40 years, with the support of western farmers and northern artisans. The model for Jackson.



Except Engels wrote this in 1849, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.



The historical record is not quite that clear and unequivocal. There are considerable references to the "progress" supposedly inherent in capitalism after the 1850s. And of course there is Engels persistence in urging the IMWA to actually endorse Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war; something Marx, to his credit, would not support.

I'd like to see the reference for that. If that is correct, Marx was wrong, but I don't think so, I think you've misread some things. Europe and the Third World are two very different stories. German unification was highly progressive, completing the work of the failed German Revolution of 1848. Napoleonic imperialism was the prime obstacle for German unification and indeed a dangerous force of reaction in Europe overall, especially in Italy. Of course, as soon as Napoleon was ousted and German unification was complete, Bismarck instead of contenting himself with unifying Germany seized French Alsace-Lorraine and offered his services as hangman for the Paris Commune, so Marx, correctly, flip flopped on his position on the war *at that point.*

As Perry Anderson pointed out, though Marx was the better economist and philosopher, in general Engels was a better historian than Marx.


Idle and pointless speculation. Nobody's trying to make Engels out to be anything other than he was; or Marx for that matter, "warts and all" as they themselves put it.

Here we agree.

[Emmett Till]

I think we are conflating the terms "decent" and "progressive" when talking about Lincoln (and history in general). For instance, I believe that the Civil War was a tragedy and an immense humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, I think it was unavoidable (given the political and economic contradictions between North and South) and that it was progressive in the sense of freeing the slaves and opening up the South to non-chattel capitalist development. Likewise, I think Lincoln was a "progressive" president when it came to creating a national banking system, crushing the Confederate insurrection, freeing the slaves (when it became politically expedient), and supporting a Whiggish program of economic development. I also like him personally, especially his witty charm and his pardoning of Union deserters. But we must remember that he suspended crucial liberties such as habeas corpus and free speech in the Border States, not to mention his flip-flopping on the issue of slavery (and pretending that he could save the Union without messing with the "peculiar institution"). He also was an asshole to the Native Americans, as evidenced by John Pope's incursions against the Dakota Sioux (after having his ass kicked by the Confederates as Bull Run).

I totally agree with Rubinelli on this, despite other disagreements. I'll add a couple things.

On Native Americans, he was no better and no worse than any other politicians of his time. He was after all a bourgeois politician, and only a socialist revolution, historically impossible in America at that moment, could give justice to Native Americans. The development of a capitalist America could only take place on the backs of the Native Americans, who were indeed an obstacle to capitalist development. At some point Marx wrote that human progress historically until nowadays has always only taken place at the cost of immense human suffering, or something like that (tried to find the exact quote, couldn't, I guess it's nobody's favorite Marx quote).

But as for abolishing habeas corpus and jailing the Copperheads, that's one of the best things Lincoln did in the Civil War, too bad he didn't do more. That's why Reconstruction failed, the federal government should have had less of this "malice towards none" stuff in dealing with the secesh. Less of spirit of Abraham Lincoln, more of the spirit of Felix Dzherzhinsky, and maybe a lot more justice for black Americans could have been achieved.

[R.Rubinelli]

German emigration to America did not begin in 1848. Yes, there were organized New York communists before 1848. In fact, Wilhelm Weitling, the leader of the German communist movement before Marx and Engels joined, *returned* to Germany from New York in 1848.

Yes, Weitling spent a very brief period of time in New York between 1846 and 1847, but not exactly in outspoken public agitation for communism. In think it wasn't until 1850, after the failure of the revolutions in Germany and France and his return to the US in 1849, that Weitling started producing printed periodicals in the US advocating on behalf of labor.

Labor supported the Democrats well before the founding of the Republican Party, which occurred in 1854 at a meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin convened to determine a response in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing the spread of slavery into new territories, and therefore states.


Clay was even less of an "opponent" of slavery than Thomas Jefferson,

But that wasn't my point. Clay opposed the invasion of Mexico by the US. And there's no force on this planet that could get me to say anything positive about the rapist slaveholder Jefferson.


German unification was highly progressive, completing the work of the failed German Revolution of 1848. Napoleonic imperialism was the prime obstacle for German unification and indeed a dangerous force of reaction in Europe overall, especially in Italy. Of course, as soon as Napoleon was ousted and German unification was complete, Bismarck instead of contenting himself with unifying Germany seized French Alsace-Lorraine and offered his services as hangman for the Paris Commune, so Marx, correctly, flip flopped on his position on the war *at that point.*


German unification by German workers, creating a unified workers' republic would have been the progressive element. German unification on behalf of the consolidation and expansion of capital was not a "progressive" element. You're own argument here shows the ambiguity "party Marxists" create in attempting to abstract "progressive" from the class relations that were already determining the path of conflicts in Europe.

Louis Napoleon was certainly no greater a force of reaction in Europe than the Austro-Hungarian empire; than Czarist Russia; or even Britain under Palmerston or Gladstone (just ask the Irish). Bismarck's "Junker capitalism" replete with ant-socialist laws was not "more progressive." Maybe it represented greater expansion of capitalism, but that, like the the US seizure of territory from Mexico does not come without expropriation, dispossession, and brutal expansion against indigenous peoples, which, despite Bismarck's own ambivalence about colonies in Africa, followed necessarily from the so-called "progressive unification" of Germany under Bismarck's Junker capitalism.

Marx never flip-flopped his position on the war. He never urged the IMWA to endorse Prussia; to offer "military support" much less political support to Bismarck. His public utterances were confined to "warning" the German workers to not let a "defensive" battle become a war of conquest-- a bit of self-delusion, IMO, on Marx's part. Since when does capitalism ever engage in a defensive military engagement that does not necessarily become a war of conquest?

There were, and are, places were capitalism is more developed, places where it has developed more slowly and is less advanced, places where its penetration has been circumscribed by pre-existing relations which it, capital, cannot overthrow without threatening its own existence.

But none of that means, that the "unification" of a territory under the control of capitalism is "progress." The "progressive era" of capitalism is really over by 1868

Marx pretty well expunges his ambiguity about the "progressive" impact of capitalism in his ethnographic writings.

Oh, and Perry Anderson was dead wrong. Marx was neither philosopher, nor economist. He, Marx, was a historical materialist, and better at that than Engels.

Capital is not a work of economics, or political economics, but the critique of political economy which critique "realizes itself," immanently, in the class struggle against capitalism.

That's kind of the whole point of Marx's work. Leave it to a quasi-Althusserian to miss it. Completely.

[Luís Henrique]

The romance was with the Confederacy.

I bit like the Jacobite rebellions in this country.

Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:

Because, er, romanticism is reactionary?

Luís Henrique

[Emmett Till]

...But that wasn't my point. Clay opposed the invasion of Mexico by the US. And there's no force on this planet that could get me to say anything positive about the rapist slaveholder Jefferson...



More later, but one thing at a time.

Yes indeed, Clay opposed the Mexican-American War. And so did Martin Van Buren, then still the leader of the Democratic Party, the true party of the slaveholders. Why? Because Clay was the leader of the Whigs, the party of capital and the "market revolution," who just like Van Buren saw the breaking of the "historic compromise" over Missouri between the capitalists and the slaveholders as the worst thing that could happen.

For neither Clay nor Van Buren were Mexican sovereignty and rights in any way a consideration. It's because both of them foresaw that US seizure of huge tracts of Mexican (well, actually Indian) territory would lead inevitably to conflict between North and South over the West, whether it would be slave or free. Hell, even Andrew Jackson originally was persuaded by Van Buren to oppose bringing Texas into the USA in 1837.

And they were right. The Mexican American war led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

Were Jefferson still alive, one can be quite sure he would have opposed the Mexican American War also. Last thing he would have wanted was another "firebell in the night."

[Emmett Till]

...
German unification by German workers, creating a unified workers' republic would have been the progressive element. German unification on behalf of the consolidation and expansion of capital was not a "progressive" element. You're own argument here shows the ambiguity "party Marxists" create in attempting to abstract "progressive" from the class relations that were already determining the path of conflicts in Europe.

Louis Napoleon was certainly no greater a force of reaction in Europe than the Austro-Hungarian empire; than Czarist Russia; or even Britain under Palmerston or Gladstone (just ask the Irish). Bismarck's "Junker capitalism" replete with ant-socialist laws was not "more progressive." Maybe it represented greater expansion of capitalism, but that, like the the US seizure of territory from Mexico does not come without expropriation, dispossession, and brutal expansion against indigenous peoples, which, despite Bismarck's own ambivalence about colonies in Africa, followed necessarily from the so-called "progressive unification" of Germany under Bismarck's Junker capitalism.

Marx never flip-flopped his position on the war. He never urged the IMWA to endorse Prussia; to offer "military support" much less political support to Bismarck. His public utterances were confined to "warning" the German workers to not let a "defensive" battle become a war of conquest-- a bit of self-delusion, IMO, on Marx's part. Since when does capitalism ever engage in a defensive military engagement that does not necessarily become a war of conquest?

There were, and are, places were capitalism is more developed, places where it has developed more slowly and is less advanced, places where its penetration has been circumscribed by pre-existing relations which it, capital, cannot overthrow without threatening its own existence.

But none of that means, that the "unification" of a territory under the control of capitalism is "progress." The "progressive era" of capitalism is really over by 1868

Marx pretty well expunges his ambiguity about the "progressive" impact of capitalism in his ethnographic writings.

No, he expunged any remaining ambiguity about the "progressive" impact of capitalist imperialism there. The unification of Germany and Italy were absolutely necessary for laying the economic foundation for proletarian rule in Europe, the only area in the world except the USA where capitalist economic and social development made working class seizure of power and the beginnings of construction of socialist society objectively possible during Marx's lifetime.

Had Germany not been united, the German working class would not have become the most powerful in the world, and the Social Democratic Party, the foundation stone of the Second International and therefore of the Third International, would never really have been significant. If a worldwide workers movement had arisen at all, it would have been a ragbag of Proudhonism and whatnot, not a potentially revolutionary force.

The best argument against your simplistic notions is Engels' brilliant pamphlet, "The Role of Force in History."

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1887/role-force/

Very much worth reading today, still relevant. His analyses therein are vital for understanding how Japan could have a bourgeois revolution, the "Mikado restoration," despite the non-participation of the feeble Japanese bourgeoisie,except with their checkbooks. And, by analogy, how Eastern Europe and Cuba and China could become workers states with little or no proletarian participation.


Oh, and Perry Anderson was dead wrong. Marx was neither philosopher, nor economist. He, Marx, was a historical materialist, and better at that than Engels.

Capital is not a work of economics, or political economics, but the critique of political economy which critique "realizes itself," immanently, in the class struggle against capitalism.

That's kind of the whole point of Marx's work. Leave it to a quasi-Althusserian to miss it. Completely.

Marxoid metaphysics. Question: did Marx ever call himself a "historical materialist"? Don't think so. Think the phrase was invented by Plekhanov, a true "Althusserian" by your standards. A good description, but trying to claim he wasn't a philosopher or an economist or a sociologist or a historian in general as well is just word games.

Marx thought Plekhanov at heart wasn't much of a revolutionary, and subsequent developments proved Marx had a point. Unfortunately, Marx therefore ended up siding with the heroic but confused Narodniks, and even coquetted with their utterly false notion that the Russian agricultural "communes" could evolve into socialism. Plekhanov and Lenin were polite enough not to polemicize against this, either that or they never saw the relevant writings, but they were right and Marx, rather obviously, was wrong.

[R.Rubinelli]

No, he expunged any remaining ambiguity about the "progressive" impact of capitalist imperialism there.

Right, I said ambiguity, you said remaining ambiguity, which means the same thing-- there was ambiguity existing prior to. Ahh.... now I see the difference.



The unification of Germany and Italy were absolutely necessary for laying the economic foundation for proletarian rule in Europe, the only area in the world except the USA where capitalist economic and social development made working class seizure of power and the beginnings of construction of socialist society objectively possible during Marx's lifetime.Interesting. So without the consolidation of capitalism in a "Germany" or an "Italy"-- there could have been no working class seizure of power and the beginnings of construction of socialist society objectively possible. Got it. But.....

A) Because something is necessary, that does not make it "progressive." The positivist interpretation of history is not part of the core curriculum of Marxism

B) How very interesting. So with the consolidation of capitalism in Germany as Germany, the advance of the German proletariat as the "strongest in Europe" was there a working class seizure of power in Germany by that working class? In Europe by a working class under a consolidated dynamic powerful unified capitalism? No. There was not. In Russia, in a social terrain that was uneven and combined, where agricultural relations were not at all capitalist (Lenin, BTW, in his Development of Capitalism in Russia was wrong where he wasn't mistaken or worse), where the working class was hardly the strongest, in terms of numbers, concentration or "proto-organization" (i.e. unions), workers seized power, but not in necessary/progressive/unified Germany, backbone of the 2nd Intl,

C) Speaking of the 2nd Intl, and the vital, necessary progressive role it played, that Intl, if I recall correctly, "spit the bit" so to speak when it came to pulling the carriage of revolution, did it not?

D) The point I'm trying to make is that by 1868 any war to consolidate capitalism entailed class war against workers, the poor, small rural producers, indigenous peoples, and while all of that may be necessary for capitalism, it is not necessary for the advocates, supporters, representative of international working class action to endorse, support, or otherwise sanction such activity.

It is no accident that in the US the final retreat from Reconstruction is accompanied by... the general railway strike in the US, during which President Hayes deployed the troops withdrawn from the South against the striking workers.

E) If we're going to argue that the consolidation of capitalism, and its expansion, in territory and bodies, is essential to the future prospects of proletarian revolution (that is to say, beyond a certain point), then what is the point of cut-off? OK for Prussia in 1870, vis a vis reactionary Bonapartist France? How about for the US in 1898 vs. reactionary, royalist, mercantile, colonizing Spain? Where do you draw the line? What is the basis for that determination? The US, after all, introduced far more capital, and capitalist relations than the Spanish ever did. The US provided for at least some mechanism of secular education, roads, etc. So what stops you, or any supposed friend of revolution from saying "Bully for the US" and "Remember the Maine"? I mean that war was prior to the "epoch of imperialist decay;" prior to WW1 which is kind of seen as the demarcation point by offical Marxists for "progressive" vs. "decaying" capital.


Had Germany not been united, the German working class would not have become the most powerful in the world, and the Social Democratic Party, the foundation stone of the Second International and therefore of the Third International, would never really have been significant. If a worldwide workers movement had arisen at all, it would have been a ragbag of Proudhonism and whatnot, not a potentially revolutionary force.See above comments. And the following: As opposed to the contributions the 2nd and 3rd Intls made in Germany? In Turkey? In China? In the UK? In Spain? In Vietnam? in South Africa? Yes, indeed if it hadn't been for them, we would be living in the world suffocating on Proudhonism and whatnot. Yep, who else but the 3rd Intl could have so fucked up the struggle over 12 years in Germany? Who but the 3rd Intl would have given a murdering moron like Bela Kun the portfolio as its emissary and agent?


Very much worth reading today, still relevant. His analyses therein are vital for understanding how Japan could have a bourgeois revolution, the "Mikado restoration," despite the non-participation of the feeble Japanese bourgeoisie,except with their checkbooks. And, by analogy, how Eastern Europe and Cuba and China could become workers states with little or no proletarian participation.
Love it. First it's the Mejii Restoration. Secondly, the dynamics are a bit more complicated that your simple-minded rendering of Engels allows. And sure thing. Eastern Europe and Cuba and China became workers states with little or no participation from workers, and............without even the consolidation of capitalism as you argued was so essential to the proletariat in Europe. Aren't you just a bit uneasy with that apparent contradiction?


Marxoid metaphysics. Question: did Marx ever call himself a "historical materialist"? Don't think so. Think the phrase was invented by Plekhanov, a true "Althusserian" by your standards. A good description, but trying to claim he wasn't a philosopher or an economist or a sociologist or a historian in general as well is just word games.
Right. Theses on Feuerbach and The Introduction to Hegel's Critique of the Philosophy of Right are metaphysics. You got it pal. Don't know if Marx called himself that, I do know he didn't call himself an economist; nor did he call himself a philosopher. As a matter of fact, he attacks philosophy as an alienated practice, an indicator of the human beings estrangement from their conditions of their own social reproduction. Same thing for economics. Marx was a revolutionist. His goal, purpose, is the emancipation of labor, of social labor. His work was the critique of capital, the immanent tendencies setting the stage for its abolition and the emancipation of labor.

As for Plekhanov-- never interested me. Never read him.

[ComradeAllende]

Tragedy? How so? What's tragic about destroying slavery?

It's not the "destroying slavery" part that I find tragic; it's the way in which it was carried out.


Humanitarian disaster? Really? Was slavery a more humanitarian, less disastrous alternative?

I never stated or implied that slavery was a "more humanitarian" alternative, nor that there was any alternative to the Civil War available. I just think that the 600,000+ deaths and the massive destruction that the war entailed would qualify as a "humanitarian disaster".


What exactly do you mean by tragic and a humanitarian disaster, particularly if, as you say, it was inevitable? Should Sherman have not marched to the sea, destroying the slaveholders' economic holdings in doing so? Should Grant not have utilized overwhelming firepower to pulverize the Confederate troops?

The tragedy and the disaster were not in waging, and winning the Civil War but in the failure to follow through; in the retreat from Radical Reconstruction; in the re-establishment of the ex-slaveholders' power in the Redemptionist governments and the plantation economy.

No; Sherman and Grant should have demolished the Confederacy's war-making abilities (in fact, I believe that Lincoln should have redistributed the slaveholder's land to the former slaves as reparations) and punish the slaveocracy for their crimes. I agree that the failure to maintain the radical nature of Reconstruction was a part of the Civil War's tragedy; indeed, this unwillingness to repatriate the slaves into citizens of a bourgeois republic has only amplified the racial tensions and injustices occurring today.

I simply wish that slavery had ended somewhat differently, preferably through a mass slave revolt of some sort. Then again, I know this to be an idealistic illusion; the slaves in America had little capacity to organize on such a scale, and the antebellum South was a virtual police state for slaves and freedmen, given their extensive mobilization and provisioning of armed militias in the event of a slave revolt.

[R.Rubinelli]

600,000 deaths is nothing to dismiss, but I don't think there was any alternative. The US Southerners were not about to accept any graduated emancipation. And, not that "size matters,"-- but the 600,000 lives that were lost in the struggle to eliminate a system, or at least a major part of a system (Brazil, Cuba, etc. still maintaining slavery) is not a tragedy when that system ripped about 20 million Africans from their continent.

I just don't think the Civil War fits any definition of tragedy. Bloody, yes. Brutal, yes. Horrific, yes. Tragic? Don't think so. Bloody and heroic; brutal and noble; horrific and humanitarian. The tragic element is not the war, or its methods. The retreat from Reconstruction, from carrying through the impulse of emancipation is the tragedy.

I think a mass revolt by slaves was indeed a possibility. It occurred in Haiti, right? And that prospect haunted the slaveholders. But.... that mass revolt would hardly have been less bloody, less brutal, less horrific.

[Emmett Till]

600,000 deaths is nothing to dismiss, but I don't think there was any alternative. The US Southerners were not about to accept any graduated emancipation. And, not that "size matters,"-- but the 600,000 lives that were lost in the struggle to eliminate a system, or at least a major part of a system (Brazil, Cuba, etc. still maintaining slavery) is not a tragedy when that system ripped about 20 million Africans from their continent.

I just don't think the Civil War fits any definition of tragedy. Bloody, yes. Brutal, yes. Horrific, yes. Tragic? Don't think so. Bloody and heroic; brutal and noble; horrific and humanitarian. The tragic element is not the war, or its methods. The retreat from Reconstruction, from carrying through the impulse of emancipation is the tragedy.

I think a mass revolt by slaves was indeed a possibility. It occurred in Haiti, right? And that prospect haunted the slaveholders. But.... that mass revolt would hardly have been less bloody, less brutal, less horrific.

Indeed. Throughout history, successful slave revolts have almost always, as in Haiti, led to the slaughter of all the slavemasters who don't escape, men, women and children. This is quite understandable due to the element of *personal subjugation* involved in slavery. That would have been pretty horrific in the South, I'd have to say...

And also, absolutely impossible. In most slavery systems, the slaves were the great majority of the population. Not in the South, where the white population was scared, well armed and well prepared against exactly that. A mass slave revolt without Union Army assistance would have led to mass slaughter of the slaves, not of the white slavemasters. Which is exactly why none ever happened.

As for graduated emancipation, not impossible, but then the chains of subjugation black people in America are still bound by would be much heavier. It was only due to the conflicts over Reconstruction that the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, allegedly guaranteeing black people against racial discrimination and giving them the right to vote, were passed. A "gradually emancipated" black population would be non-voting second-class citizens at best, and white supremacy would then still be America's official social and political doctrine.

[Emmett Till]

[/QUOTE]Right, I said ambiguity, you said remaining ambiguity, which means the same thing-- there was ambiguity existing prior to. Ahh.... now I see the difference.[/QUOTE]

Actually, you don't. The ethnological manuscripts, which by the way prove that Marx was a better anthropologist than Engels, removed, or rather would have removed if they had been published, any ambiguity among would-be Marxists over whether capitalist *imperialism* had a progressive side to it. They have nothing to do with whether social progress was still possible under capitalism in Europe, which is mainly what we are discussing.

You date the end of possible social progress under capitalism to 1867, I assume because discussion on this thread shows that you agree that the abolition of slavery represented social progress in America.

I would push that back to 1870, with the unification of Italy and Germany, which both Marx and Engels wrote over and over again was a necessity for European social progress. As I'm sure you must know.


Interesting. So without the consolidation of capitalism in a "Germany" or an "Italy"-- there could have been no working class seizure of power and the beginnings of construction of socialist society objectively possible. Got it. But.....

A) Because something is necessary, that does not make it "progressive." The positivist interpretation of history is not part of the core curriculum of Marxism

How does that have anything to do with positivism? If something is necessary, damn right it's progressive! Or better yet, let me remind you of the classic Marxist definition of "freedom," which I hope you are familiar with.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.



B) How very interesting. So with the consolidation of capitalism in Germany as Germany, the advance of the German proletariat as the "strongest in Europe" was there a working class seizure of power in Germany by that working class? In Europe by a working class under a consolidated dynamic powerful unified capitalism? No. There was not. In Russia, in a social terrain that was uneven and combined, where agricultural relations were not at all capitalist (Lenin, BTW, in his Development of Capitalism in Russia was wrong where he wasn't mistaken or worse), where the working class was hardly the strongest, in terms of numbers, concentration or "proto-organization" (i.e. unions), workers seized power, but not in necessary/progressive/unified Germany, backbone of the 2nd Intl,

Sad but true, and that is why the Russian Revolution was a failure. The revolutionary slogan of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was "Russia is the spark, Germany will be the flame." In practice, the prospect of world revolution after WWI hinged on Germany. If the German Revolution had succeeded, which it came fairly close to on a couple of occasions, the rest of Europe and then the world would have followed. Since it failed, well, we got what happened instead.

And the delusion that Russian agrarian relations were not at all capitalist is, speaking plainly, absurd. Final proof of that was the horrible failures of collectivization, which would have been unforced and shot through with remarkable ease if that were true.


C) Speaking of the 2nd Intl, and the vital, necessary progressive role it played, that Intl, if I recall correctly, "spit the bit" so to speak when it came to pulling the carriage of revolution, did it not?

It split into two wings, and the left wing of the Second International became the Communist International.

What was the problem? Ultimately, and here you do have an error by both Marx and Engels, the conception they had of the nature of a working class party, formulated by Kautsky into the idea of a "party of the whole class."

M and E did realise that the proletariat would not automatically be a revolutionary class without the introduction of socialist consciousness "from outside" as Lenin, following Kautsky, famously put it. Actually, you find that much criticized idea right in the Communist Manifesto, where he talks about the key role of bourgeois intellectuals breaking from their class roots in the birth of the communist movement. This is because of the class society imposed divide between mental and manual labor, and the confinement of oppressed classes to physical labor.

But M and E thought that the problem was lack of industrial development, and would be solved over time by that, with the proletarianization of the artisans whom they blamed for Proudhonism, anarchism etc. in the proletarian movement.

Although they did understand that English imperialism had created what they called a "bourgeois proletariat" in England, voting for the Liberals and Tories, they did not grasp the phenomenon of a labor aristocracy made possible by that highest stage of capitalism, finance-monopoly imperialism, providing the basis for an anti-revolutionary wing *within* the Socialist parties. This of course was one of the greatest theoretical contributions of Lenin, best formulated by Zinoviev actually.



D) The point I'm trying to make is that by 1868 any war to consolidate capitalism entailed class war against workers, the poor, small rural producers, indigenous peoples, and while all of that may be necessary for capitalism, it is not necessary for the advocates, supporters, representative of international working class action to endorse, support, or otherwise sanction such activity.

It is no accident that in the US the final retreat from Reconstruction is accompanied by... the general railway strike in the US, during which President Hayes deployed the troops withdrawn from the South against the striking workers.

E) If we're going to argue that the consolidation of capitalism, and its expansion, in territory and bodies, is essential to the future prospects of proletarian revolution (that is to say, beyond a certain point), then what is the point of cut-off? OK for Prussia in 1870, vis a vis reactionary Bonapartist France? How about for the US in 1898 vs. reactionary, royalist, mercantile, colonizing Spain? Where do you draw the line? What is the basis for that determination? The US, after all, introduced far more capital, and capitalist relations than the Spanish ever did. The US provided for at least some mechanism of secular education, roads, etc. So what stops you, or any supposed friend of revolution from saying "Bully for the US" and "Remember the Maine"? I mean that war was prior to the "epoch of imperialist decay;" prior to WW1 which is kind of seen as the demarcation point by offical Marxists for "progressive" vs. "decaying" capital.

1898? Hardly. The Spanish-American War was all about exactly the kind of capitalist imperialism Lenin was talking about. Indeed imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt were much more open about that sort of thing, not only calling themselves imperialists but even making public statements that the purpose was for US *economic* expansion, including capital investment abroad.

I suppose the obvious date for the US would be 1877, with the crushing of the rail strike and the end of Reconstruction, but that's really a bit late. Grant's effort to acquire Santo Domingo had a distinct whiff of "later" capitalist imperialism about it. Really, when the House of Representatives failed to impeach Andrew Jackson and voted down the idea of expropriating 70,000 slavemasters and distributing the land to the slaves, a fairly close vote by the way, I think that was a good cutoff date, 1867. So your date is about right for America actually, but slightly too early for Europe.

Well, more than enough for one posting, more later.

[/QUOTE]See above comments. And the following: As opposed to the contributions the 2nd and 3rd Intls made in Germany? In Turkey? In China? In the UK? In Spain? In Vietnam? in South Africa? Yes, indeed if it hadn't been for them, we would be living in the world suffocating on Proudhonism and whatnot. Yep, who else but the 3rd Intl could have so fucked up the struggle over 12 years in Germany? Who but the 3rd Intl would have given a murdering moron like Bela Kun the portfolio as its emissary and agent?


Love it. First it's the Mejii Restoration. Secondly, the dynamics are a bit more complicated that your simple-minded rendering of Engels allows. And sure thing. Eastern Europe and Cuba and China became workers states with little or no participation from workers, and............without even the consolidation of capitalism as you argued was so essential to the proletariat in Europe. Aren't you just a bit uneasy with that apparent contradiction?

Right. Theses on Feuerbach and The Introduction to Hegel's Critique of the Philosophy of Right are metaphysics. You got it pal. Don't know if Marx called himself that, I do know he didn't call himself an economist; nor did he call himself a philosopher. As a matter of fact, he attacks philosophy as an alienated practice, an indicator of the human beings estrangement from their conditions of their own social reproduction. Same thing for economics. Marx was a revolutionist. His goal, purpose, is the emancipation of labor, of social labor. His work was the critique of capital, the immanent tendencies setting the stage for its abolition and the emancipation of labor.

As for Plekhanov-- never interested me. Never read him.

[Emmett Till]

....

See above comments. And the following: As opposed to the contributions the 2nd and 3rd Intls made in Germany? In Turkey? In China? In the UK? In Spain? In Vietnam? in South Africa? Yes, indeed if it hadn't been for them, we would be living in the world suffocating on Proudhonism and whatnot. Yep, who else but the 3rd Intl could have so fucked up the struggle over 12 years in Germany? Who but the 3rd Intl would have given a murdering moron like Bela Kun the portfolio as its emissary and agent?

Well, as you should have guessed, I'm basically a Fourth International man, the Third got off to a good start, but then you had Stalin come along and it all went to hell.

For ultimately the same reason as the Second. The Second fell into the hands of the reformist labor aristocracy and bureaucracy, the Third into the hands of the Stalinist workers bureaucracy, most of whom were from the best educated and paid elements of the Russian working class, who sure as hell got huge pay boosts when they became factory managers and state and party bureaucrats, and had a material interest in "socialism in one country" and forget about world revolutionary pipe dreams.

Kun definitely screwed things up in both Hungary and Germany, Lenin once made a speech later entitled "the stupidities of Bela Kun." But he was the leader of the only other successful workers revolution of the time, and it would have been quite arrogant and Russian chauvinist for the leaders of the Third International to deny him a leading role in the Comintern *before* his major German screwup, after which he got relevated to the second rank.

And what were his biggest mistakes in Hungary? Not giving the land to the peasants, not supporting the right of self-determination for non-Hungarians, and worst of all, merging the Communist Party with the Socialist Party. In short, he was a Luxemburgist. Rosa would presumably have made the exact same mistakes, as well as most of the other non-Russian revolutionaries in the movement at the time.

As for calling him a murderer, yes he unjustifiably killed a lot of White Wrangel officers without trial in the Crimea, Lenin's opinion as well by the way. These mass murdering Jewish pogromists should all have been given fair trials, and probably only about half of them actually deserved death sentences. Trotsky would have wanted to recruit the less bad, "only following orders" elements for the Red Army, where they could have been quite useful, as many of them had genuine military talent. Kun overreacted to the torture and murder of most of his comrades by the Whites in Hungary.

As for who but the 3rd International could have screwed things up so badly in Germany, check out the 2nd. Or for that matter the German leftcoms, anarcho-syndicalists, etc., whom perhaps you prefer, who had exactly the same attitudes as Kun except worse. Indeed, his "March Action" blunder was, essentially, a capitulation to them.


Love it. First it's the Mejii Restoration. Secondly, the dynamics are a bit more complicated that your simple-minded rendering of Engels allows. And sure thing. Eastern Europe and Cuba and China became workers states with little or no participation from workers, and............without even the consolidation of capitalism as you argued was so essential to the proletariat in Europe. Aren't you just a bit uneasy with that apparent contradiction?

Er, no. Check out Trotsky on combined and uneven development, permanent revolution, etc. etc. Capitalism wasn't fully consolidated in Russia either as of 1917. And Eastern Europe, China and Cuba all had the Russian model to copy, not to mention provide material aid, without either of which no, this would not have been possible. And, post 1991 Soviet collapse, ain't possible anymore.


Right. Theses on Feuerbach and The Introduction to Hegel's Critique of the Philosophy of Right are metaphysics. You got it pal. Don't know if Marx called himself that, I do know he didn't call himself an economist; nor did he call himself a philosopher. As a matter of fact, he attacks philosophy as an alienated practice, an indicator of the human beings estrangement from their conditions of their own social reproduction. Same thing for economics. Marx was a revolutionist. His goal, purpose, is the emancipation of labor, of social labor. His work was the critique of capital, the immanent tendencies setting the stage for its abolition and the emancipation of labor.

As for Plekhanov-- never interested me. Never read him.

That stuff ain't metaphysics, at least not the Theses on Feuerbach (the earlier Into to Bashing Hegel had great stuff in it, really the beginnings of Marxism, but it did still have a few leftover metaphysical hangovers). Your posting, well, that's another matter.

Did Marx call himself a philosopher? No, nor did he call himself a Marxist, in fact he found that a bit offensive.

But was Marx a Marxist? Well, yes. And of course, very much a revolutionist, unlike most of the posters to Revleft.

[R.Rubinelli]

Yeah, I "guessed" that. I'm sure you've been through these arguments before, as have I. Basically, there's little light, no matter how high the heat gets. You have, in my opinion, substituted an ideology , a "world-view" that explains everything according the requirements of the ideology, for Marx's critical method.

Germany 1870, progressive.... Russia 1917---19?? "degenerated workers state".... Bela Kun "made mistakes".... Everything is categorized according to, not Marx's criteria-- which is the condition of labor, but by an abstraction, i.e. "development of the means of production" or "property forms."

The ideology allows you to balance any number of statements that not only can't be verified by historical outcomes, but are in fact refuted by historical outcomes: German capitalism was essential for the prospects of European proletarian revolution, when in fact no such revolution was produced; The Soviet state was based on "essentially healthy property forms" when in fact those property forms were the product of the very backwardness of Russian development (the bureaucracy being in fact a property form antithetical to international revolution, just as a trade union bureaucracy is).

That's what ideologies, like religions, like philosophies do. The historical reality is a bit more complicated and less forgiving than that.

But back to Lincoln; he was the man for his time, and much better as a human being than other presidents-- except that doesn't mean all that much in context. I quite like the evolution of his thinking on equality and emancipation, because it evolved, so what we're seeing and identifying as "decent" is really based on the caution, hesitancy, equivocation that Lincoln brought to considering these critical issues, which others had approached boldly, explicitly, and without such hesitancy.

Good luck with your Ortho Trotskyism.

[Tim Redd]

Quote:
Originally Posted by A.J. http://www.revleft.com/vb/images/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2861160#post2861160)
The romance was with the Confederacy.

I bit like the Jacobite rebellions in this country.

Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:
Because, er, romanticism is reactionary?

Luís Henrique
__________________

And of course what's reactionary is deliciously appealing. At least for some philistines and craven intellectual midgets.

[Tim Redd]

.
The romance was with the Confederacy.
I bit like the Jacobite rebellions in this country.
Why is the reactionary side always the more romantic?:wub:


Because, er, romanticism is reactionary?


And of course what's reactionary is deliciously appealing. At least for some backward philistines and craven intellectual midgets.

[Emmett Till]

Yeah, I "guessed" that. I'm sure you've been through these arguments before, as have I. Basically, there's little light, no matter how high the heat gets. You have, in my opinion, substituted an ideology , a "world-view" that explains everything according the requirements of the ideology, for Marx's critical method.

Germany 1870, progressive.... Russia 1917---19?? "degenerated workers state".... Bela Kun "made mistakes".... Everything is categorized according to, not Marx's criteria-- which is the condition of labor, but by an abstraction, i.e. "development of the means of production" or "property forms."

The ideology allows you to balance any number of statements that not only can't be verified by historical outcomes, but are in fact refuted by historical outcomes: German capitalism was essential for the prospects of European proletarian revolution, when in fact no such revolution was produced; The Soviet state was based on "essentially healthy property forms" when in fact those property forms were the product of the very backwardness of Russian development (the bureaucracy being in fact a property form antithetical to international revolution, just as a trade union bureaucracy is).

That's what ideologies, like religions, like philosophies do. The historical reality is a bit more complicated and less forgiving than that.

But back to Lincoln; he was the man for his time, and much better as a human being than other presidents-- except that doesn't mean all that much in context. I quite like the evolution of his thinking on equality and emancipation, because it evolved, so what we're seeing and identifying as "decent" is really based on the caution, hesitancy, equivocation that Lincoln brought to considering these critical issues, which others had approached boldly, explicitly, and without such hesitancy.

Good luck with your Ortho Trotskyism.

And good luck with your Whateverism. You think my ideological blinkers blind me to reality, which is about the same as what I think of your ideological blinkers, which strike me as metaphysical abstractions devoid of content.

Case in point, your assertion that Marx's basic criterion was the "condition of labor." By which do you mean the socio-economic conditions of actual workers, or the condition of the abstraction of "labor"?

Either way you are wrong, Marx's criterion was the condition of the human race and human society, which he believed could only ultimately be advanced through proletarian seizure of power, as objectively the proletariat is the only class whose objective interest, whether they realise it or not, is in abolition of class rule.

And that is ultimately the only reason he supported workers' revolution. While also supporting other things that would advance society, like uniting Germany and Italy, liberation of women, etc. etc.

I guess we agree more or less on Lincoln.

That German unification and industrial development was the physical foundation which made building a socialist Europe a practical possibility in the 20th century seems self-evident. And given European domination of the world then, that would inevitably have meant a socialist world.

And yes, it didn't happen. Nobody ever promised us a rose garden. But we'd better not give up because of that, since the only alternative, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is barbarism. The direction that human society is by and large headed in now. And if we abandon practical realities for metaphysical abstractions and defeatism, which it seems to me is what you advocate, that will not help.

[Emmett Till]

A couple more comments, mostly to fill in what I mean as to what is concrete and what is abstract.


Everything is categorized according to, not Marx's criteria-- which is the condition of labor, but by an abstraction, i.e. "development of the means of production" or "property forms."

What can possibly be more concrete than the means of production? What are they? Dams, steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, silicon chip fabs, railroads, airplanes, highways and trucks. And concrete itself, a highly useful building material.

Well, one thing is even more concrete, namely property. Who owns all those concrete factories and whatnot is the decisive question for the evolution of human society. Getting rid of the ownership of the means of production by particular individuals, replacing it by social ownership, is what we need to do.


The ideology allows you to balance any number of statements that not only can't be verified by historical outcomes, but are in fact refuted by historical outcomes: German capitalism was essential for the prospects of European proletarian revolution, when in fact no such revolution was produced; The Soviet state was based on "essentially healthy property forms" when in fact those property forms were the product of the very backwardness of Russian development (the bureaucracy being in fact a property form antithetical to international revolution, just as a trade union bureaucracy is)...



The idea of a bureaucracy as a "property form" is a true metaphysical abstraction, utterly meaningless. Bureaucracies always and everywhere are created to administer for the actual owners to whom they are beholden. And as the Stalinist bureaucracy was just that, a bureaucracy, fireable appointees with no ownership whatsoever of the means of production they administered, allegedly on behalf of the working class.

Its social dominion was fundamentally unstable, as demonstrated by its spectacular explosion and collapse in 1991, simply because you finally, inevitably, got a top bureaucrat, Gorbachev, who got tired of it all. All sorts of temporary conjunctual circumstances (first and foremost, Soviet victory in WWII) had delayed this inevitable collapse for fifty years or so, which Trotsky had predicted with eerie but premature accuracy in 1937.

[R.Rubinelli]

Case in point, your assertion that Marx's basic criterion was the "condition of labor." By which do you mean the socio-economic conditions of actual workers, or the condition of the abstraction of "labor"?

I mean, as Marx meant, the social organization of labor; the way labor is expressed in its social form, i.e. labor-power as a commodity; as value positing value.

Marx makes this point repeatedly, and throughout his Economic Manuscripts 1857-1864, continuing the point he first establishes in his critiques of Hegel and of the "Young Hegelians."

All I can say to your "wrong either way," is that you might benefit from reading more Marx.


Either way you are wrong, Marx's criterion was the condition of the human race and human society, which he believed could only ultimately be advanced through proletarian seizure of power, as objectively the proletariat is the only class whose objective interest, whether they realise it or not, is in abolition of class rule.


Except of course, the condition of human society is a material condition, determined by the way the human being reproduces himself/herself as a social being. So while I'm supposedly wrong, either way, you in your rectitude do nothing but re-process my supposed error in your abstractions.



I guess we agree more or less on Lincoln.

That's good to know, as painful as it might be.


That German unification and industrial development was the physical foundation which made building a socialist Europe a practical possibility in the 20th century seems self-evident. And given European domination of the world then, that would inevitably have meant a socialist world.

You might as well be telling me that it was capitalist development that made building a socialist Europe a practical possibility. No shit, Sherlock. You should have been a detective.

The issue is: does that mean supporting capitalist development? If so, then tell me how one know where the cut-off is? How would a "socialist" know to support or not support the US vs. Mexico in 1846 using exactly your "criteria," or Germany in 1870, or the US vs. Spain in 1898.

The issue is not what hastens capitalist development more, but hastens proletarian class development more. Those are not the same thing. Sometimes they might possible converge, but most often not.

What would have advanced socialist revolution more: the IMWA requiring that its sections agitate among workers in France and Germany to refuse to engage each other on the battlefield; railway workers of both countries refusing to transport men and materiel to the front, for workers' deputies in and out of any parliament to vote "no" on war credits on both sides? Or endorsing Bismarck (which the IMWA never did)?



And yes, it didn't happen. Nobody ever promised us a rose garden. But we'd better not give up because of that, since the only alternative, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is barbarism. The direction that human society is by and large headed in now. And if we abandon practical realities for metaphysical abstractions and defeatism, which it seems to me is what you advocate, that will not help.

I'm not asking for a flower garden. I'm talking about practical advancement of the working class as a class whose interests are antithetical to the interest of the bourgeoisie.

The Franco-Prussian War was not of the same type as the US Civil War, as a war where capitalism is forced to rip up the ground of its own antecedent. The Franco-Prussian war does not involve a qualitative reorganization of the condition of labor, your so-called "abstraction," as that condition is, on both sides, already, and fundamentally capitalist. The outcome of the US Civil War did involve, require such a qualitative reorganization -- which the capitalists disowned by reestablishing the plantation economy and abandoning Reconstruction.

That's what makes Lincoln "decent" or "half-decent" or "complicated" or something other than what the other presidents were and are.

[Emmett Till]

I mean, as Marx meant, the social organization of labor; the way labor is expressed in its social form, i.e. labor-power as a commodity; as value positing value.

Marx makes this point repeatedly, and throughout his Economic Manuscripts 1857-1864, continuing the point he first establishes in his critiques of Hegel and of the "Young Hegelians."

All I can say to your "wrong either way," is that you might benefit from reading more Marx.

Glad to see you proving my point that you are more into Marxoid metaphysical abstractions than concrete reality.

I dare say I've read a remarkable amount of Marx. I think you'd benefit from reading his later more mature works, particularly I'd recommend his letter exchanges with Engels of which I have read huge quantities, instead of focusing on the early stuff from his youth, still not altogether free from Hegelian metaphysics. I have always found everything he wrote prior to the "theses on Feuerbach" not quite as good as what he wrote afterwards.



Except of course, the condition of human society is a material condition, determined by the way the human being reproduces himself/herself as a social being. So while I'm supposedly wrong, either way, you in your rectitude do nothing but re-process my supposed error in your abstractions.

No, it's not determined by the way that "the human being reproduces himself/herself as a social being," but by the actual material, social and economic conditions of the actual lives of actual people.




That's good to know, as painful as it might be.

You might as well be telling me that it was capitalist development that made building a socialist Europe a practical possibility. No shit, Sherlock. You should have been a detective.

The issue is: does that mean supporting capitalist development? If so, then tell me how one know where the cut-off is? How would a "socialist" know to support or not support the US vs. Mexico in 1846 using exactly your "criteria," or Germany in 1870, or the US vs. Spain in 1898.

The issue is not what hastens capitalist development more, but hastens proletarian class development more. Those are not the same thing. Sometimes they might possible converge, but most often not.

"Capitalist development" vs. "proletarian development" is a misleading distinction, as development is development is development, whichever class holds the reigns of power.

The question is, when and where was further social development still possible with the capitalist class still ruling? That has to be judged according to concrete circumstances. Basically, when Smithian "free market capitalism" gives way to monopoly and the dominion of finance capital, it no longer is. When and where you can mark that transition is a concrete question.

In the Mexican-American War, the prime question was slavery. It's basically best seen as the spark that set off the American Civil War, the last great bourgeois revolution. Whether America would have been "progressive" against Mexico in the absence of chattel slavery is too abstract really to consider, as an America without chattel slavery in the 1840s would have been an utterly different country, perhaps not one that would have wanted to go to war with Mexico.

I am puzzled why you even mention the Spanish-American War, an imperialist war on the Lenin model if ever there was such a thing, at a point when America was already beginning to displace England as the industrial capital of the world, and the dominion of America by monopolist "robber barons" was notorious, the House of Morgan being the richest bankers in the world, and Carnegie's U.S. Steel the richest corporation.

On Marx and the Franco-Prussian War, I happen to have made an intensive study of Marx's writings on said war and the previous conflicts (Napoleon's invasion of Italy, Bismarck's wars against Denmark and Austria), for a college paper I wrote on the subject, in which I argued that his writings, seen by some as inconsistent and questionable, were in fact brilliant and completely correct. On this at least I can claim to have read a lot of Marx.




What would have advanced socialist revolution more: the IMWA requiring that its sections agitate among workers in France and Germany to refuse to engage each other on the battlefield; railway workers of both countries refusing to transport men and materiel to the front, for workers' deputies in and out of any parliament to vote "no" on war credits on both sides? Or endorsing Bismarck (which the IMWA never did)?

The IWMA had trouble endorsing anything, as it was basically a coalition of all tendencies within the world labor movement, a model that could work for the creation of a world labor movement, but became unworkable as soon as it had come into existence. Which is why Marx finally decided to get rid of it, which he successfully maneuvered to accomplish.

It did however manage to endorse the Paris Commune and let Marx write the public statement, one of the best things he ever wrote, which is how the incorrect but useful concept that the IWMA was "Marxist" came about.

Lassalle endorsed Bismarck, Marx most certainly did not. However, Marx unlike the "Marxist" organization in Germany did endorse war for German unification, even if Bismarck was the commander in chief.

Bebel and the elder Liebknecht's opposition to the war reflected South German particularism, Bavaria and the other small non-Prussian principalities where the "Marxist" organization was strongest being less proletarian and more petty bourgeois in social composition than Prussia. And there of course was where Bernstein's reformist "revisionism" had its social roots. Their opposition to a supportable war IMHO slowed down the victory of the then-revolutionary wing of German Social Democracy over Lassallean reformism, which in fact was never totally complete.

And once German unification was accomplished and Bismarck turned the war into a German war to subjugate France, seizing Alsace Lorraine and sending troops into the French heartland, you had the Paris Commune, in which proletarian internationalism and Jacobin French nationalism were inextricably intermingled. Then the war of France, or rather the war of the Paris Commune, vs. Germany became historically progressive. With the Versaillese allying with Bismarck against the French proletariat, and the French national cause for that matter.

So an anachronistic "plague on both your houses" attitude to the war would have been actually more disastrous in France than in Germany, as logically it would have led to not supporting the Paris Commune, which by the way did absolutely nothing to change the social organization of labor during its brief existence. They had a war to fight, and that came first.


I'm not asking for a flower garden. I'm talking about practical advancement of the working class as a class whose interests are antithetical to the interest of the bourgeoisie.

The Franco-Prussian War was not of the same type as the US Civil War, as a war where capitalism is forced to rip up the ground of its own antecedent. The Franco-Prussian war does not involve a qualitative reorganization of the condition of labor, your so-called "abstraction," as that condition is, on both sides, already, and fundamentally capitalist. The outcome of the US Civil War did involve, require such a qualitative reorganization -- which the capitalists disowned by reestablishing the plantation economy and abandoning Reconstruction.

That's what makes Lincoln "decent" or "half-decent" or "complicated" or something other than what the other presidents were and are.

Well, like I said, we are agreed on Lincoln. But not on the Franco-Prussian war.

In the matter of German unification, the interests of the German bourgeoisie and the German proletariat were identical not antithetical, for the last moment in German history.

Which neither fully recognized, allowing the feudalist Bismarck to play his literally Bonapartist role, in direct imitation of the two Bonapartes, though primarily of the uncle not of the rather contemptible nephew whom he was dealing with directly.

[R.Rubinelli]

the interests of the German bourgeoisie and the German proletariat were identical not antitheticalPriceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Somehow, twenty years after the defeat of the revolution of 1848-49, which showed just how non-identical the interests of bourgeoisie and proletariat are, the interests of the two opposing classes are identical.

'Nuff said. Have your last word, although truly, you've already uttered it.



On Marx and the Franco-Prussian War, I happen to have made an intensive study of Marx's writings on said war and the previous conflicts (Napoleon's invasion of Italy, Bismarck's wars against Denmark and Austria), for a college paper I wrote on the subject, in which I argued that his writings, seen by some as inconsistent and questionable, were in fact brilliant and completely correct. On this at least I can claim to have read a lot of Marx.


Really? Then of course you are familiar with this from Marx's correspondence:


1) Enclosed herein (marked No 1) are the two Addresses of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War. In its first Address, dated 23 July 1870, the General Council declared that the war was not the handiwork of the people of France but of the Empire and that basically Bismarck was as guilty as Bonaparte. At the same time the General Council appealed to the German workers not to let the Prussian Government change the war of defence into a war of conquest.


and this, also by Marx:


The singing of the Marseillaise in France is a parody just like all the Second Empire. But that scoundrel at least feels that ‘Going off to Syria’ would not do. In Prussia, on the other hand, such buffoonery is not necessary. ‘Lord, in Thee is all my trust!’, sung by William I, with Bismarck on the right and Stieber on the left, is the German Marseillaise. Like in 1812 seqq, the German philistine seems to be really delighted because he can now give free vent to his innate servility. Who would have thought it possible that twenty-two years after 1848 a national war in Germany would be given such theoretical expression!
It is fortunate that this whole demonstration originated with the middle class. The working class, with the exception of the direct adherents of Schweitzer, takes no part in it. The war of classes in both countries, France and Germany, has fortunately reached such an extent that no war abroad can seriously turn back the wheels of history...


And certainly you are aware that Marx never endorsed Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, never proclaimed Prussian victory was essential to the advancement of the working class in Europe, just as Marx never endorsed the US in the US-Mexican war.

Engels did. For better or worse. Engels was wrong on both counts.


Yeah, I know-- it wasn't going to comment anymore....sue me.

[Emmett Till]

Priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Somehow, twenty years after the defeat of the revolution of 1848-49, which showed just how non-identical the interests of bourgeoisie and proletariat are, the interests of the two opposing classes are identical.

'Nuff said. Have your last word, although truly, you've already uttered it.

As to German unification, identical, though counterposed in all other matters. Dialectics you know. Another of Marx's letters to Engels during the war, not for publication so Marx did not have to make the kind of political concessions to others needed to hold the International together, expresses the complexities very well.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_08_08.htm

Not only does Marx make clear that he thinks the Franco-Prussian War *fulfilled* the revolutionary national slogans of 1848, he even expresses the hope--not fear, hope--that a war between Germany and Russia will result, and that it might lead to Bismarck liberating Poland!

If anything, Marx's somewhat obsessive anti-Russian attitudes, which distort his problematic historical writings about Russia, get expressed here. Perry Anderson's critique of Marx's writings on Russia were what led him to make the judgment that Engels was a better historian.

Your attempt to come up with two different "lines" of Marx and Engels missed the fifteen year or so gap between the Marx-written International proclamation below, which had to be acceptable to all the non-Marxists , and Engels's later analyses with the benefit of hindsight, therefore naturally more sophisticated.

In fact, the "line" of the piece you quote, calling on the German workers "not to let the Prussian Government change the war of defence into a war of conquest," is totally "Engelsian." It says that yes, the war started as a war of defense and therefore, or so is clearly implied, was supportable, but as soon as Germany invades France, time to change position.

Really, for a Marxist, and Marx despite his denials was a Marxist, it doesn't matter whether a war is offensive or defensive, what matters is which side is objectively supportable. Wisely, Marx refrained from pointing that out publicly, a thought whose expression would have made it much more difficult to get the International Council to let Marx write the manifestos.

In general, it is unwise to bandy about quotes out of context from Marx in the fashion of Stalinists, Stalin having learned those polemical habits in his Russian orthodox catechism school.

And if you must do so, at least do so from the mature Marx, not from stuff he wrote in his '20s before he really fully "became a Marxist."




Really? Then of course you are familiar with this from Marx's correspondence:

and this, also by Marx:

And certainly you are aware that Marx never endorsed Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, never proclaimed Prussian victory was essential to the advancement of the working class in Europe, just as Marx never endorsed the US in the US-Mexican war.

Engels did. For better or worse. Engels was wrong on both counts.

Yeah, I know-- it wasn't going to comment anymore....sue me.

You did? Didn't notice such a promise, or didn't believe it so thoroughly it slipped my mind. Feel free to comment again. Though I'm sure you will with or without my, er, non-objection.

[R.Rubinelli]

As to German unification, identical, though counterposed in all other matters. Dialectics you know.

That's specifically NOT dialectics. Your "notion" of dialectics has nothing in common with Marx's...or Hegel's. Has a lot in common with Stalin's though.


Another of Marx's letters to Engels during the war, not for publication so Marx did not have to make the kind of political concessions to others needed to hold the International together, expresses the complexities very well.

Not only does Marx make clear that he thinks the Franco-Prussian War *fulfilled* the revolutionary national slogans of 1848, he even expresses the hope--not fear, hope--that a war between Germany and Russia will result, and that it might lead to Bismarck liberating Poland!

Apparently, Marx's ironic tone in this letter is a bit too subtle for you. He is not endorsing Bismarck or supporting Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war. He is noting, ironically, how the Bismarck is compelled to confront the same issues that revolutionaries confronted in 1848, and that Bismarck's response is to engage the issues through a war-- as opposed to revolution. The "national war" is in fact not revolutionary at all.

Nice, and totally predictable,that you ignore Marx's correspondence where he specifically rejects endorsing Prussia.


If anything, Marx's somewhat obsessive anti-Russian attitudes, which distort his problematic historical writings about Russia, get expressed here. Perry Anderson's critique of Marx's writings on Russia were what led him to make the judgment that Engels was a better historian.


But you're not. You argue that the US-Mexican war was some sort of prelude to the Civil War, which it was not. Bloody Kansas certainly was a prelude. Maybe even the nullification and secession measures passed by South Carolina in 1832 were, but the US-Mexican war definitely was not.

Then you claim that supporting Prussia in 1870 was a necessary precondition for a socialist revolution-- that didn't occur anyway.

Think that excludes you pretty much from being taken seriously in your "history"

You miss the point that while Germany's unification was essential for capitalism, that does not mean the proletariat subordinates its own interests to those of the bourgeoisie.



Your attempt to come up with two different "lines" of Marx and Engels missed the fifteen year or so gap between the Marx-written International proclamation below, which had to be acceptable to all the non-Marxists , and Engels's later analyses with the benefit of hindsight, therefore naturally more sophisticated.


In a word, bullshit. The proclamation had to be faithful to the best interests of the working class as a whole. That's what guided Marx, not making acceptable to recalcitrant and chauvinist elements. It was not in the interests of the class as a whole.

As for it being "naturally more sophisticated..." that too is bullshit. Nothing makes an evaluation more sophisticated because it occurs later. That's an ideological mystification.


In fact, the "line" of the piece you quote, calling on the German workers "not to let the Prussian Government change the war of defence into a war of conquest," is totally "Engelsian." It says that yes, the war started as a war of defense and therefore, or so is clearly implied, was supportable, but as soon as Germany invades France, time to change position.


Nothing is implied or assumed. IMO, the "not let the Prussian government change the war..." is Marx's concession, an ill-advised one, to Engels in this matter. It also on its face is untenable-- when has a capitalist war ever been solely defensive, and not been a war of conquest?


Really, for a Marxist, and Marx despite his denials was a Marxist, it doesn't matter whether a war is offensive or defensive, what matters is which side is objectively supportable. Wisely, Marx refrained from pointing that out publicly, a thought whose expression would have made it much more difficult to get the International Council to let Marx write the manifestos.


But he was under no such "tactical" restraints in his correspondence, so where in his correspondence does he say what you say? Where does he say he wishes he could endorse Prussia explicitly? Nowhere. Where does he say, after the demise of the IMWA that he would have endorsed Prussia but refrained for tactical reasons? Nowhere.

You say you have made an extensive study of Marx's correspondence, and yet you can't provide any reference for these claims.

So much for you as a historian. You are speculating-- perfect activity for some, I guess.


In general, it is unwise to bandy about quotes out of context from Marx in the fashion of Stalinists, Stalin having learned those polemical habits in his Russian orthodox catechism school.
Word to yourself, brother


And if you must do so, at least do so from the mature Marx, not from stuff he wrote in his '20s before he really fully "became a Marxist."
The quotes from his correspondence come from the mature Marx. FYI, my area of "concentration" is specifically the period between 1857-1867, generally known as his "economic" writings.

If you have something to say about Lincoln, or the US Civil War, or Reconstruction, that's fine...as long as it isn't based on "speculating" why Lincoln did or said what he did or said.

[Tim Redd]

But you're not. You argue that the US-Mexican war was some sort of prelude to the Civil War, which it was not. Bloody Kansas certainly was a prelude. Maybe even the nullification and secession measures passed by South Carolina in 1832 were, but the US-Mexican war definitely was not.

Why wouldn't converting the vast tracks of land confiscated by the US as a result of the war into slave territory be a major incentive for the slaveholders to 1) foment the Mexican-American War and 2) to take on the Union to take control of said territory while continuing to hold on to what they already possessed?

[R.Rubinelli]

Because there was no conflict between the Federal power declaring the war, and the regional power that would benefit from it, nor was there direct and sustained conflict and confrontation over the war between North and South.

Compare that to Bloody Kansas, or even the violent confrontation even in the Congress itself over the Kansas-Nebraska Act; or the confrontation in 1832 over South Carolina's "nullification" of the tariffs and its attempt at secession (which really was a maneuver to protect slavery from the expanding power of the North).

[Emmett Till]

...

Apparently, Marx's ironic tone in this letter is a bit too subtle for you. He is not endorsing Bismarck or supporting Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war. He is noting, ironically, how the Bismarck is compelled to confront the same issues that revolutionaries confronted in 1848, and that Bismarck's response is to engage the issues through a war-- as opposed to revolution. The "national war" is in fact not revolutionary at all.

Nice, and totally predictable,that you ignore Marx's correspondence where he specifically rejects endorsing Prussia.

Of course M & E never "endorsed" either Prussia or Bismarck. They "supported" Bismarck's war, in Lenin's golden phrase, "like a noose supports a hanged man." However, both Marx and Engels explicitly came out in support of Germany in the Franco-Prussian war in their letters, though they were cautious in public statements so as not to offend the French section of the International, especially what with the Paris Commune.

Due to Lawrence & Wishart treating Marx's letters like their own private property, they are not all on the Internet directly. But Franz Mehring's Marx bio is, and it quotes the key letters in full and with proper context.

"On the 20th of July, immediately after the outbreak of war and before the abstention of Liebknecht and Rebel, Marx had written to Engels sharply criticizing “republican chauvinism” in France: “The French need a drubbing. If the Prussians are victorious then the centralization of the State power will be favourable to the centralization of the working class. German preponderance will shift the centre of the working-class movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement of 1866 in both countries to see that the German working class is theoretically and organizationally superior to the French. The superiority of the Germans over the French in the world arena would mean at the same time the superiority of our theory over Proudhon’s, etc.” When Marx received the appeal of the Brunswick Committee he approached Engels, as he always did in all important questions, to secure his advice, and, as in 1866, it was Engels who decided the details of the tactics adopted.

In his reply on the 15th of August Engels writes: “The situation seems to me to be as follows: Germany has been forced into a war to defend its national existence by Badinguet (Bonaparte). If Germany is defeated then Bonapartism will be consolidated for years and Germany broken for years, perhaps for generations. Under such circumstances there could be no question of any independent German working-class movement. The struggle for the establishment of national unity would absorb all energies, and in the best case the German workers would be taken in tow by the French. If Germany is victorious then French Bonapartism is destroyed in any case, the eternal squabbling about the establishment of German unity will be ended at last, the German workers will be able to organize themselves on a far broader basis than previously, whilst the French workers will also have much greater freedom of movement than under Bonapartism, no matter what sort of a government may follow there. The great masses of the German people, all classes, have realized that the national existence of Germany is at stake and they have therefore immediately sprung into the breach. Under these circumstances it seems impossible to me that a German political party can preach total obstruction (à la Wilhelm (Liebknecht) and place all sorts of subordinate considerations before the main issue.”

Engels condemned French chauvinism, which made its influence deeply felt even in the ranks of the republican elements, as severely as Marx: “Badinguet could never have begun this war without the chauvinism of the masses of the French people, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the imperialist Haussmann building proletariat created by Bonaparte in the big towns and recruited chiefly from the peasantry. Peace between France and Germany is impossible so long as this chauvinism has not been crushed, and thoroughly at that. One might have expected a proletarian revolution to undertake this task, but now that the war has begun the Germans have no alternative but to do it themselves and at once.” The “subordinate considerations,” namely that the war had been planned by Bismarck and company, and that a German victory would reflect glory on Bismarck’s system, were due to the miserable quality of the German bourgeoisie. It was all very unpleasant, but nothing could be done about it: “But to raise anti-Bismarckism to a guiding principle for this reason would be absurd. First of all, just as in 1866, Bismarck is doing a share of our work; he is doing it in his own way and without wanting to, but nevertheless he is doing it. He is giving us a clearer field than we had before. And then we are no longer living in AD 1815. The South Germans must now necessarily enter the Reichstag and with their entry a counter-weight to Prussia is established ... In any case, Liebknecht’s desire to turn back the whole course of history since 1866, just because it doesn’t please him, is nonsense, but then, we know our exemplary South Germans."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch14.htm

If anything, Marx is less equivocal than Engels. "The French need a drubbing."


But you're not. You argue that the US-Mexican war was some sort of prelude to the Civil War, which it was not. Bloody Kansas certainly was a prelude. Maybe even the nullification and secession measures passed by South Carolina in 1832 were, but the US-Mexican war definitely was not.

Do you even know what the Civil War was about?

It wasn't a war to abolish slavery, although that's what happened. It wasn't even a war to "preserve the union," except from a purely Northern perspective.

It was a war between North and South over the West. Slave or free? The reason the war happened was because of the Mexican-American War making that the burning issue. No Mexican-American War, no Civil War.

What would have happened instead is impossible to even guess, but it is not inconceivable that chattel slavery would still exist in the South in the year 2015--in which case the world tide of abolition would have ben reversed, and probably Latin America would be American property and slavery, which had by then been abolished everywhere there but Brazil, would likely have been re-established.

The "nullification crisis" was a tiff between Jackson, who wanted a united America dominated by the slaveholders through his Democratic Party, vs. the less intelligent and foresighted Calhoun, his VP, who wanted the South to secede even though the South was dominating the rest of America. A "legal precedent" for the Civil War, but the fact is that Jackson was the wiser defender of slavery.


Then you claim that supporting Prussia in 1870 was a necessary precondition for a socialist revolution-- that didn't occur anyway.

Think that excludes you pretty much from being taken seriously in your "history"

And Marx too I guess, by your criteria.


You miss the point that while Germany's unification was essential for capitalism, that does not mean the proletariat subordinates its own interests to those of the bourgeoisie.

Duh.

Marx, as I have just demonstrated irrefutably, believed that German victory was in the proletarian interest.

You should get your nose out of the economic notebooks and start reading what Marx had to say about revolution and war in the 1850's and '60s, because guess what, Marx was primarily a revolutionary politician, and only secondarily an economist and philosopher.



In a word, bullshit. The proclamation had to be faithful to the best interests of the working class as a whole. That's what guided Marx, not making acceptable to recalcitrant and chauvinist elements. It was not in the interests of the class as a whole.

As for it being "naturally more sophisticated..." that too is bullshit. Nothing makes an evaluation more sophisticated because it occurs later. That's an ideological mystification.

And that is the silliest thing you've said so far. Yes, when one has fifteen years to think about something, and has witnessed the subsequent evolution of events, anyone's evaluation of anything damn well ought to be better. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.



Nothing is implied or assumed. IMO, the "not let the Prussian government change the war..." is Marx's concession, an ill-advised one, to Engels in this matter. It also on its face is untenable-- when has a capitalist war ever been solely defensive, and not been a war of conquest?

But he was under no such "tactical" restraints in his correspondence, so where in his correspondence does he say what you say? Where does he say he wishes he could endorse Prussia explicitly? Nowhere. Where does he say, after the demise of the IMWA that he would have endorsed Prussia but refrained for tactical reasons? Nowhere.

Cute. So Marx in his public statements had to make no concessions to all those French chauvinists and Proudhonists in the International, as he saw eye to eye with them. You do know, by the way, that Proudhon, a white racist, supported the South, chattel slavery, and Napoleon, in the American Civil War and the French invasion of Mexico? But to wrongheaded Engels he had to make concessions...


You say you have made an extensive study of Marx's correspondence, and yet you can't provide any reference for these claims.

So much for you as a historian. You are speculating-- perfect activity for some, I guess.

OK, can and did. Happy now? That your quotes in your last posting were from the mature Marx represents some progress on your part, a slight improvement over previous postings, perhaps if I keep whacking away at you here sooner or later you will straighten up and fly right. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.


Word to yourself, brother
The quotes from his correspondence come from the mature Marx. FYI, my area of "concentration" is specifically the period between 1857-1867, generally known as his "economic" writings.

If you have something to say about Lincoln, or the US Civil War, or Reconstruction, that's fine...as long as it isn't based on "speculating" why Lincoln did or said what he did or said.

[Emmett Till]

Because there was no conflict between the Federal power declaring the war, and the regional power that would benefit from it, nor was there direct and sustained conflict and confrontation over the war between North and South.

Compare that to Bloody Kansas, or even the violent confrontation even in the Congress itself over the Kansas-Nebraska Act; or the confrontation in 1832 over South Carolina's "nullification" of the tariffs and its attempt at secession (which really was a maneuver to protect slavery from the expanding power of the North).

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Yes, the conflict between North and South over the Mexican-American war wasn't "direct and sustained," no blood was shed. It was nonetheless very real.

Slaveowner president Polk got elected in 1844 promising to expand America North and South according to the slogan just introduced into American politics of "Manifest Destiny." The South would get Mexican territory, the North would get the whole of the Oregon Territory, including what is now called British Columbia.

Right after he was elected, Texas was finally annexed, over the objections of both the official leader of the Democratic Party, Van Buren, and the party of the northern bourgeoisie, the Whigs. Patriotic expansionist sentiment temporarily overrode all opposition. And northern journalists came up with the slogan "54' 40" or fight," that being the southern boundary of Alaska, and northerners were expecting that the US would go to war with England again if England did not cooperate.

But the first thing Polk did when elected is sign a peace treaty fixing the US-Canada border once and for all, and the second thing was to go to war with Mexico. And the Northern capitalists felt betrayed, and that is where true North-South conflict finally began.

The attitude of the Whigs, the party of the bourgeoisie, to the war was rather like that of the Democrats to the Bush wars vs. Iraq. A range from skepticism to outright opposition, with Lincoln playing the role of the Barack Obama of the 1840s. A comparison Obama of course is deeply aware of.

And then the moment the war was over virtually the entire Northern congressional delegation, Democrat or Whig, came out in support of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery from all territory seized from Mexico during the war, without exception. Passed the House with its Northern majority, blocked in the Senate with a Southern majority.

And from then to the Civil War was a slow, logical, inexorable process. The conflict had become, as Seward soon put it, "irrepressible."

And 1832 was hardly a maneuver to protect slavery from the government of slaveholder Andrew Jackson. It was over an essentially trivial tariff issue. And in fact, once Jackson got full satisfaction out of intimidating the rich coastal rice planters of South Carolina, quietly Congress passed a tariff bill that the South was quite happy with, and he got on with kicking out the Cherokees, tremendously beneficial to his native Tennessee slaveholders, Georgia, Alabama, indeed every nearby state except South Carolina, none of which as it happens was Cherokee territory.

Over the opposition of the Whigs, not so much because they were great Indian lovers as that his actions were illegal and unconstitutional (duly certified as such by the Supreme Court), and an ideal stick to beat him with politically.

In general, the New England capitalists who were the backbone of the Whigs were less enthusiastic Indian fighters than other ruling class elements in America, as many of them made a lot of money off the fur trade with the Indians. America's first millionaire, John Jacob Astor, was a fur magnate.