Karl Marx on the US Civil War

[DBoon]

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels both reported extensively on the US Civil War as it happened. They wrote both for the New York Tribune (founded in 1841 by editor Horace Greeley) as well as the Vienna (Austria) Die Presse and .in private letters.

As many contemporary anti-racism movements are maliciously accused of being Marxist, I thought it would be interesting to see what the original Marxist had to say about the war over African-American slavery.

Marx's take on slavery is vastly different from contemporary writings. His emphasis was on slavery as an institution supported by a slave-owning oligarchy bent on military conquest of most of North America and the violent suppression of anti-slavery forces. Attempts to tag Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project as Marxist are malicious propaganda.

The logic of Confederate succession requires the conquest of non-slave territories, as coexistence of free and slave societies is impossible:

"The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it." With this battle-cry the secessionists
fell upon Kentucky. By their "entire territory" they understand in the first place all the so-called border
states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas.
Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of
Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than
three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed
is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called
border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave
states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system
of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and
North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of
defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.

Slavery was supported by a small oligarchy controlling the governments of Confederate states. Much of the White population opposed slavery and their political voice had to be suppressed to maintain the institution of slavery:

Even the actual slave states, however much external war, internal military dictatorship and slavery give
them everywhere for the moment a semblance of harmony, are nevertheless not without oppositional
elements. A striking example is Texas, with 180,388 slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of 1845,
by virtue of which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state, entitled it to form not merely one,
but five states out of its territory. The South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in
the American Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in the Senate was a major object of its
policy at that time. From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up Texas,
where the German population plays an important part, into even two states without giving the party of
free labour the upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the best proof of
the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in Texas itself

The long term goal of the Confederacy was to re-organize society into a slave state, where the population would be subjugated to the slave owning oligarchy:

What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a
reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The
plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal speakers of the South at the
Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which leaves it open to
every state of the old Union to join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole
Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class
would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly
proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of
the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct
descendants.

The slave society described by Marx was found in 20th century dictatorships, particularly in Nazi Germany. The attempt to reorganize American society into a tightly controlled oligarchy devoid of democratic rights is the basis of much current right wing politics, having considerable support in the former Confederacy.

From https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Engels_Writings_on_the_North_American_Civil_War.pdf

[Sneederbunk]

1. He's no Tocqueville. Never visited US.

[brush]

2. Thanks for posting...interesting thoughts of Marx.