> Chris C. writes:
>
> '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" '
>
JH:
> It would be wrong to say that the Jim Crow laws in any way qualified the advance that the northern victory in the Civil War represented, any more than Stalin's reaction qualified the 1917 revolution. Jim Crow was the reaction against the advances made in the first years of the reconstruction, and the latter is not reducible to the former.
>
Yes. The Republicans' intention was to revolutionize the South, not to leave behind a Jim Crow state. (C. Vann Woodward showed decades ago that Jim Crow only began after the crushing of Populism, in 1896-1900.) It turned out, though, that they had underestimated how revolutionary they needed to be to achieve their ends - e.g., they would have needed to redistribute property. Nothing in the American political tradition prepared them to do any such thing, so while a few of the most advanced Republicans supported such radical steps, the bulk of Northern opinion felt that with Reconstruction they had stumbled a "quagmire" and that they needed an "exit strategy."
That brings me to another point.
Joseph Catron wrote:
> Based on
> your recent posts, I take it your reason for opposing the Afghanistan war is
> your belief that nothing good can be accomplished there. This isn't a
> perspective I'm currently interested in arguing against, but it doesn't
> entail the same kind of principled basis for opposing imperialism we see in
> what currently pass for Marxist parties - although they, too, curiously
> exempt the Civil War.)
Joe raises a good question. If one adopts a *principled* stand against imperialism - as opposed to a pragmatic, case-by-case opposition - how can the Civil War and Reconstruction be justified? I don't think this is a mindless "gotcha" question.
SA