Marx in support of capitalist war

[Chris Burford]

"The North came to the theatre of war reluctantly, sleepily, as was to be
expected considering its higher industrial and commercial development. The
social machinery there was far more complicted than in the South, and it
required far more time to get it moving in this unusual direction. The
enlistment of volunteers for three months was a great, but perhaps
unavoidable mistake. It was the policy of the North to remain on the
defensive in the beginning at all decisive points, to organise its forces,
to train them through operations on a small scale and without risk of
decisive battles, and, as soon as the organisation had become sufficiently
strong and the traitorous element had simultaneously been more or less
removed from the army, to go on to an energetic, unflagging offensive and,
above all, to reconquer Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina.
The transformation of civilians into soldiers was bound to take more time
in the North than in the South. Once effected, one could count on the
individual superiority of the Northern men."

Marx and Engels, March 1862 in the liberal Viennese paper Die Presse.

Now it may be argued that Marx was supporting the bourgeoisie at a time and
in a situation of rising capitalism, in which the bourgeoisie was
progressive. His articles in Die Presse seem to say little that is
anti-capitalist and that may be because he needed the commissions. Yet he
would have known that without the active support of Northern capital the
war could not have been fought and won.

His seemed to see the defeat of slavery as a progressive cause, even though
he would have known that in terms of state power this was a war between one
exploiting class and another for the control of the entire nation state,
its resources and its markets. The head of the executive committee of the
bourgeoisie, Lincoln, he described positively as a man of average good will
and praised his historic contribution.  

The war was the first with really massive loss of life. It could well be
presented as a war of two exploiting classes. Capitalism was consolidated
on a unitary basis in the land later to become the superpower of the world.
The working class were enlightened fodder for this enterprise. Surely the
only revolutionary course would have been for the working class of each
state to have united with the slaves and small farmers and had a revolution
against their exploiting classes. A few proclamations from a centre of
marxist leadership would have been sufficient for the revolution to start,
providing that centre of marxist leadership was not occupied by a class
traitor who propagated conciliation with the ruling class.... 

But for Marx the bungles and mistakes at the beginning of the war are
associated with the difficulty of  a more sophisticated democracy turning
to war. Just as some of the most imperialist features of the present war,
the massive bombing of Serbia, is also a feature of the difficulty of
getting consensus among 19 democratic states for what would be more
focussed and less destructive, a ground war limited as much as possible to
Kosovo.

Now there must be a number of subscribers on this list who know Marx's
writings on the American Civil War quite closely.

But as for Marx's would be followers, who are followers without reading
Marx closely, they must be turning today in their graves - intellectual
graves that is. Corporeally alive, but dialectically dead.

Chris Burford

London