On Marx on the American Civil War:
I think that, while I remain sympathetic to the Union side in the American Civil War, history shows that crushing slavery in the American South, the degree to which it did not lead simply to the strengthening of the American workers' movement and overcoming capitalism in the U.S., was a highly ambivalent phenomenon. In many ways Jim Crow racism combined with intensive capitalization in the South was indeed "worse than slavery" (they had a privatized "criminal justice" system that involved slavery-like un-remunerated industrialized labor, chain gangs etc., which routinely worked people to death, i.e., was a death sentence, as opposed to the predominantly patriarchal household, i.e., not plantation, slaveholding that prevailed in the Antebellum South. This does not mean that it was not good that the Union won, only that Marx's support for it was not simply on its own basis, but by how he thought it advanced (or could) the revolution. Without this, the
"gain" it represented was not unambivalently that, at least not for almost a hundred years (when the post-Reconstruction reactionary status quo in the South was finally liquidated, largely as a result of migration out, and then by Civil Rights reforms), and, arguably, is not even so today.
We had an internal discussion in Platypus a couple of months back on Marx's curious letter to Lincoln congratulating him. This seemed an odd gesture, except the degree to which it was apparent that Marx et al. sought to endorse the U.S. Republican Party only as a means towards eventually splitting it, seeing in its radical Abolitionist wing (e.g., Frederick Douglass, et al.) the basis for a socialist workers' movement in the U.S. Marx didn't simply "take sides," but sought to mold and transform political realities in the direction he wished to pursue. Everything he did was tactical and strategic in this regard, which can then strike people with wooden "principles" for thinking as being the result of Marx "changing his mind."
-- Chris
--- On Thu, 4/8/10, Christopher Cutrone <ccutrone at speedsite.com> wrote:
> From: Christopher Cutrone <ccutrone at speedsite.com>
> Subject: Platypus: what we are, what we do, and why
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010, 8:36 AM
> (I'm glad to see that Platypus
> instigates such debate!)
>
> I think we make a fundamental mistake if we try to
> attribute to Marx (and Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, et
> al.) motives that are really our own.
>
> To put it simply: Marx was not concerned with a passive,
> contemplative judgment of politics or of historical
> development but he was about changing the world. Hence, his
> (their) judgments were about not about phenomena in and of
> themselves, but rather what potentially advanced or blocked
> the changes he (they) wanted to politically pursue. For
> instance, this usually hinges on a false historical
> estimation of when capitalism/national wars/imperialism were
> "progressive" vs. when they became "reactionary." But what
> this leaves out is the force of the Left to potentially
> change the world in an emancipatory direction, which was the
> crucial factor in the estimations of Marx (and his best
> followers), e.g., what made the U.S./union side in the
> American Civil War "progressive" was in large part a
> function of Marx's estimation of the European workers'
> willingness to support it, over and above their immediate
> "material" (socio-economic, within their national labor
> markets) interests. It was a political judgment, not an
> analytic one.
>
> In this way Marx (and his best followers) were responsible
> in a way that today's pseudo-"Left" is not. Marx appears to
> be ambivalent on e.g. the British Empire only to those who
> think that Marx thought the British Empire would do his job
> for him. He didn't think so, and so he wasn't ambivalent. He
> wanted to overthrow the British Empire, but what the British
> Empire did and didn't succeed in doing, and what its
> opponents did or didn't succeed in doing needed to be judged
> on a case-by-case basis, in terms of what potentially
> promoted or retarded the revolution. Such judgment is open
> to debate, the very essence of politics. Platypus exists
> because we find that in place of judgment and politics,
> schematic (and black-and-white, either-or) thinking
> prevails, in the absence of true politics. The fake
> "politics" on the pseudo-"Left" to us is almost entirely
> about spurious agreements and disagreements, hence it is
> necessarily dogmatic and sectarian. This is
> because no one is really trying to change the world, just
> justify (rationalize) to themselves how they feel about it.
> We in Platypus favor instead a stone-cold sobriety about the
> rather dim realities we face.
>
> Whatever else may be fallacious about their thinking, one
> thing that speaks to the rationality of the positions taken
> by such types as Hitchens, Makiya, Glavin, et al. is their
> recognition that their is no effective Left politics, i.e.,
> that there is no real potential progressive
> "anti-imperialist" politics that provides an actual
> emancipatory alternative to U.S. policy (not that I agree
> with the conclusions they draw from this observation, but
> this factor still needs to be faced and processed).
>
> To get back to Marx: Marx did not change his mind on India;
> he was ambivalent about an ambivalent phenomenon, the
> destruction of traditional society by capital effected
> through the British. But Marx didn't think the Sepoy
> rebellion was anti-capitalist or even had any realy hope of
> success, rather, it signified that there would be other
> forces of potential historical (ambivalent) "progress" in
> India besides the British, and that India (like Ireland)
> could come to figure more prominently in British politics in
> ways that could hasten the downfall of British
> capitalism/imperialism. (Again, I think Marx's judgment on
> this could be disputed, but we need to understand its basis,
> which included first and foremost estimations of the
> strength of the potential anti-capitalist politics of the
> British and broader European workers' movement, which Marx
> was active in shaping.) Does anyone really think this is
> true of the Taliban, et al. today?
>
> -- Chris
>
> Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 12:52:44 +0100
> From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Platypus: what we are, what we do, and
> why
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Message-ID:
> <C99FA0C689F44883A732CDB02B0D05AE at JamesPC>
> Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Joseph Catron wrote (unless I have misread the
> text-clipping)
>
> >Like the assumptions packaged in posts about the Civil
> War sent to this very
> >list within the last few hours? (For some reason, many
> on the left resort
> >to crude moralistic appeals in this one unique instance
> - slavery in the
> >American South - while disregarding their modern
> equivalents, like the
> >subjugation of women in Afghanistan. For the record, I
> find both instances
> >of imperialist propaganda equally and identically
> troublesome.)
>
> Help me out, Joe. Are you saying that the cause of
> anti-slavery was mere propaganda in the case of the U.S.
> civil war? In which case, I disagree. Or have I
> misunderstood.
>
> Crushing the confederacy, and slavery with it, seems like a
> good thing, to me.
>
>
>
>