> But his pal Engels nailed it:
>
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92_01_06.htm>
>
> There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The
> divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in
> that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are
> represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality,
> and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its
> representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree,
> though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the
> whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the
> Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is
> what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering
> of the government that flourish there so beautifully.
Yup, this is acute. These sketchy intuitions are developed systematically in - though I doubt they're the direct inspiration for - Richard Bensel's _Sectionalism and American Political Development_ and _The Political Economy of American Industrialization_.
> Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of
> the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more
> difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time
> come, with peaceful development, for a third party.
Well, that didn't happen.
> The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback
> humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-
> Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a
> superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by
> religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of
> which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.
Ha. When the US finally formed a Communist Party, where do you think all those native-born comrades came from - i.e., James Cannon, Earl Browder, etc? They were all the sons of Populist-Greenbackers whose heads were filled with "philosophical and economic absurdities"!
BTW, the dismissal of Greenbackery is part and parcel of M&E's general dismissal of money and finance as somehow external to "the real inner workings" of capitalism.
SA