Stirnerian
13th April 2016, 01:32
I've just 'discovered' a remarkable book that anticipates a great deal of subsequent development in Marxist class analysis, a book written by a Southern opponent of slavery, The Impending Crisis Of The South (http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html), first published in 1857. Except for the fact that its author, Hinton Helper, was advocating for industrial capitalism and not socialism (and was certainly no racial egalitarian - he seems to have become a vitriolic white supremacist after the American Civil War), the text certainly anticipates the subsequent class analysis of Marx.
This may well not be news to many of our more well-educated posters, but I find it extremely useful in demonstrating the validity of historical materialism, and from a source which would be not at all sympathetic to the philosophy as applied by us.
Some excerpts:
Our repugnance to the institution of slavery, springs from no one-sided idea, or sickly sentimentality. We have not been hasty in making up our mind on the subject; we have jumped at no conclusions; we have acted with perfect calmness and deliberation; we have carefully considered, and examined the reasons for and against the institution, and have also taken into account the propable consequences of our decision. The more we investigate the matter, the deeper becomes the conviction that we are right; and with this to impel and sustain us, we pursue our labor with love, with hope, and with constantly renewing vigor.
- Helper here opposes his methodology to the purely moralistic approach of Northern abolitionists, in a way not at all dissimilar to the argument taken by Marxists against idealistic socialists.
The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the "poor white trash," the great majority of the Southern people, know of the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing. The truth is, they know nothing of public measures, and little of private affairs, except what their imperious masters, the slave-drivers, condescend to tell, and that is but precious little, and
even that little, always garbled and one-sided, is never told except in public harangues; for the haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh.
Whenever it pleases, and to the extent it pleases, a slaveholder to become communicative, poor whites may hear with fear and trembling, but not speak. They must be as mum as dumb brutes, and stand in awe of their august superiors, or be crushed with stern rebukes, cruel oppressions, or downright violence. If they dare to think for themselves, their thoughts must be forever concealed. The expression of any sentiment at all conflicting with the gospel of slavery, dooms them at once in the community in which they live, and then, whether willing or unwilling, they are obliged to become heroes, martyrs, or exiles. They may thirst for knowledge, but there is no Moses among them to smite it out of the rocks of Horeb. The black veil, through whose almost impenetrable meshes light seldom gleams, has long been pendent over their eyes, and there, with fiendish jealousy, the slave-driving ruffians sedulously guard it. Non-slaveholders are not only kept in ignorance of what is transpiring at the North, but they are continually misinformed of what is going on even in the South. Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority, and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged.
- This reads almost like an early evocation of our idea of false consciousness, though of course applied to a relatively narrow stratum of non-slaveowning whites, "white trash".
I can't recommend this book highly enough to Marxists of any persuasion. Though Hinton Helper was at bottom a racist, his methodology in the book is incredibly useful, both as an example of a decidedly non-Marxist thinker arriving at a basically materialist methodology independently of any influence and as a look at the social forces of the antebellum world.
This may well not be news to many of our more well-educated posters, but I find it extremely useful in demonstrating the validity of historical materialism, and from a source which would be not at all sympathetic to the philosophy as applied by us.
Some excerpts:
Our repugnance to the institution of slavery, springs from no one-sided idea, or sickly sentimentality. We have not been hasty in making up our mind on the subject; we have jumped at no conclusions; we have acted with perfect calmness and deliberation; we have carefully considered, and examined the reasons for and against the institution, and have also taken into account the propable consequences of our decision. The more we investigate the matter, the deeper becomes the conviction that we are right; and with this to impel and sustain us, we pursue our labor with love, with hope, and with constantly renewing vigor.
- Helper here opposes his methodology to the purely moralistic approach of Northern abolitionists, in a way not at all dissimilar to the argument taken by Marxists against idealistic socialists.
The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the "poor white trash," the great majority of the Southern people, know of the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing. The truth is, they know nothing of public measures, and little of private affairs, except what their imperious masters, the slave-drivers, condescend to tell, and that is but precious little, and
even that little, always garbled and one-sided, is never told except in public harangues; for the haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh.
Whenever it pleases, and to the extent it pleases, a slaveholder to become communicative, poor whites may hear with fear and trembling, but not speak. They must be as mum as dumb brutes, and stand in awe of their august superiors, or be crushed with stern rebukes, cruel oppressions, or downright violence. If they dare to think for themselves, their thoughts must be forever concealed. The expression of any sentiment at all conflicting with the gospel of slavery, dooms them at once in the community in which they live, and then, whether willing or unwilling, they are obliged to become heroes, martyrs, or exiles. They may thirst for knowledge, but there is no Moses among them to smite it out of the rocks of Horeb. The black veil, through whose almost impenetrable meshes light seldom gleams, has long been pendent over their eyes, and there, with fiendish jealousy, the slave-driving ruffians sedulously guard it. Non-slaveholders are not only kept in ignorance of what is transpiring at the North, but they are continually misinformed of what is going on even in the South. Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority, and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged.
- This reads almost like an early evocation of our idea of false consciousness, though of course applied to a relatively narrow stratum of non-slaveowning whites, "white trash".
I can't recommend this book highly enough to Marxists of any persuasion. Though Hinton Helper was at bottom a racist, his methodology in the book is incredibly useful, both as an example of a decidedly non-Marxist thinker arriving at a basically materialist methodology independently of any influence and as a look at the social forces of the antebellum world.