Talk of an impending “second Civil War” is everywhere, but it shouldn’t be dismissed as idle threat. Marx would have predicted as much, given how far capital has captured the state in early 21st century America. The only period in American history more captured by capital was the period before the last Civil War. If Marx’s writings about America from 1852 to 1865 are any predictor, a second Civil War is not only likely, but inevitable.
In GWU professor Andrew Zimmerman’s 2016 volume, The American Civil War, Karl Marx & Freidrich Engels, Zimmerman’s forward pays tribute to the editors before him who suffered exile and their careers’ destruction for daring to translate and publish the contemporaneous correspondence of Marx and Engels during our Civil War.
“They have made it relatively safe, at least for the time being, for me to publish the present edition of Marx and Engels’s writings on the Civil War under my own name even when a pseudonym could not protect my predecessor from government persecution in the United States of America.”
It is widely known that Marx wrote in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune before and during the war, largely as Greeley’s London correspondent on things Europe. After Ft. Sumter, Marx’s focus turned decidedly across the pond for the first 2 years of the Civil War. Most of Marx’s published work in this period appeared in German in the Vienna paper Die Presse. They are most valuable because they were written for an audience which knew nothing of antebellum America. Thus, they travel well through time to today, for another audience which knows (almost) nothing about the era.
In the Die Presse writings, Marx forensically details how capital captured American government to protect (and grow) profit from exploiting unpaid involuntary labor as a constitutional right. Closely, eerily, mirroring our generations’ 40 years of Reagan Thatcher neoliberal global domination by capital of the state, Marx dissects slavery’s decades long expansion via control of US government by a tiny faction of aristocratic slaveholders, who Marx calls “the slaveholder party”.
Marx foresaw white working class exploitation
Perhaps the most powerful of Marx’s writings in Die Presse was published Nov. 7, 1861 (which you can read here). A tour de force typical of his style, Marx demolishes the notion that the Civil War was about anything but slavery. State by state, Marx dives deep into the Confederacy, counting heads, slaves, votes, congressmen, senators, concluding that not only was the war about, and only about, slavery, but that slavery was expanding, not contracting, and would forever expand if not destroyed.
Marx boils the Civil War down to a battle of ideas. Two value systems clashed, slavery versus free labor, and only one would survive. Marx was under no illusion which system, facing life or death, went on the attack in a “war of conquest”.
“The South” … is not a country at all, but a battle slogan…not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.”
In the Nov. 7 1861 piece, you can hear Marx draft his later declaration in Capital that “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” In 1861, Marx declares that should the Confederacy prevail, color of skin would eventually be no matter whatsoever.
“…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 labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German or Irishman, or their direct descendants.”
Marx bases it all in a historical analysis of American government’s capture by capital from its founding. From the 3/5 compromise, through the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Mexican War, the 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act, to the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court in 1857, Marx gives chapter and verse how a tiny landed gentry captured every organ of power in pursuit of legal protection of its constitutional right to the highest possible profit. Not a thing has changed. In fact, the road map the NRA uses today to protect its own constitutional right to profit in a private property (guns) leaps off the page from Marx in 1861.
Marx foresaw the Civil War’s unfinished victory
Zimmerman in 2016 not only published Marx’s writings in Die Presse, but the letters between Marx and many others but mostly Engels, who helped Marx research American politics & military matters of the period. Military historians will immediately recognize that Marx predicted precisely how the Union would win the war — by cutting the Confederacy into pieces, relying militarily on the northwestern states and their immigrants for manpower, and politically for their ideological support to win crucial elections during the war.
Reconstruction disappoints both Marx and Engels immediately. Jim Crow’s embryonic ugliness did not escape note, causing Marx to issue a warning to the US in October, 1865, which today is haunting.
“As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease…If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood…We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.”
Another such letter is from Marx in 1870 to German friends in New York, in which Marx seems to have travelled forward in time to watch Fox News;
“This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organization. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.”
In the end, Marx was a cheerleader for America
Zimmerman also publishes the First International’s correspondence with Abraham Lincoln in 1864 (which Marx wrote himself) congratulating Lincoln on his re-election, despite the constant backbiting of “loyal slaveholders” in border states, who Marx mercilessly mocks, or northern capital manifested politically by the Copperheads, “pro-Union” businessmen who desperately wanted to keep their profit off unpaid involuntary labor alive (on Wall Street, in textile mills, in every industry in the country) by preserving the Union as it was, rather than without slavery.
Despite the trials, Marx’s confidence that America would prevail over capital in the Civil War is almost touching throughout, as if he were a giddy schoolchild cheering on the good ol’ US of A. Should a second Civil War come, between America and capital, Marx laid out a road map for all to know how it came, how it played out, and how it would end. A hopeful road map.