[lbo-talk] Catalonia the latest flashpoint in the Euro crisis

[Wojtek S]

Carl: "announcing that he thought the Confederacy should have been
allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was
historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would
have been more natural; American expansionism would have been checked;
Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac..."

[WS:] Interesting argument, one that I voiced myself on various
occasions.  However, to be a true counterfactual, we would need to
hypothesize plausible consequences of this alternative history.  The
issue at hand is the existence of a labor party and public social
protections.  We also need to consider what actually happened - the
end of the civil war led to the creation of rather generous by the
standards of the times public welfare provisions for Union soldiers
and their families (loosely defined) which keep expanding to the
beginning of the 20th century, whose purpose was mainly dispensation
of patronage to the North  (the source of this information is Theda
Skocpol, "Social Policy in the United States" and 'Protecting Soldiers
and Mothers").  These social provisions withered only in the 1910s.

It could be argued that in the case of Union defeat - which in this
case means allowing the Southern secession - this patronage based
dispensation of social welfare would not have taken place, which would
have weakened patronage and its demobilizing effect on the working
class.  What is more, labor was in a much stronger position in the
industrialized North than in the rural South.  Therefore, it is
possible - although I am not sure how likely - that the counterfactual
United States of the North would have a labor party along the lines
similar to other ex-British  colonies.

The real question is what would have happened in the Unites States of
the South.  My guess is a development similar to that in South Africa
- the development of an apartheid state.  The stability of that state
would pretty much depend on the position taken by the US of the North
- but one possible outcome is that apartheid would have solidified
world-wide e.e. by forming a, "apartheid axis" based on US of the
South, South Africa, Rhodesia and may be a few smaller colonial
states.  Not a nice prospect, to say the least.

With that in mind, I am not sure that the counterfactual separatist
route would have been an improvement to the actual development, and
chances are it would have been something much worse for a lot of
non-white people.

-- 
Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."