Marxism and America

New appraisals

Christopher Phelps, Robin Vandome, Christopher Phelps, Robin Vandome

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526149763
• eBook ISBN: 9781526149756
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Marxism and America, an accomplished group of scholars reconsiders the relationship of the United States to the theoretical tradition derived from Karl Marx.In brand new essays that cover the period from the nineteenth century, when Marx wrote for American newspapers, to the present, when a millennial socialism has emerged inspired by the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, the contributors take up topics ranging from memory of the Civil War to feminist debates over sexuality and pornography. Along the way, they clarify the relationship of race and democracy, the promise and perils of the American political tradition and the prospects for class politics today. Marxism and America sheds new light on old questions, helping to explain why socialism has been so difficult to establish in the United States even as it has exerted a notable influence in American thought.

1

The blue and the gray and the red: Marxism and Civil War memory

Matthew E. Stanley

The template for the Marxist memory of the U.S. Civil War began while the conflict was still underway. Covering the war era for the New York Tribune and Vienna’s Die Presse, Karl Marx imagined the struggle as being between two social systems, one of which, the Confederate, was part of a “crusade of property against labor.”¹ He also predicted the losing prospects of such a cause. The Confederacy, far from constituting a “solid” bloc, Marx insisted, was an oligarchical faction attempting an improbable coup d’état. Anticipating the guerilla conflicts, food riots, anti-conscription upheaval, mass soldier desertions, and, most especially, the “general strike” of enslaved peoples that came to characterize rebel defeat, Marx underscored the Confederate project’s fundamental regressiveness and internal contradictions—its class conflict and popular discontent. Scholars since have scrutinized what they view as Marx’s overly sympathetic view toward Lincoln, his inflation of antislavery sentiment among Northern workers, the way his taxonomy of workers perhaps prioritized (mostly white) wage earners, and his overlooking of the imperial nature of the Union war effort, especially in the West.² Nevertheless, Marx reckoned correctly that the South’s cabal of “slaveocrats” would only yield to a revolutionary waging of war that might unleash the socially disruptive potential of those disaffected classes—chiefly through the destruction of chattel bondage.³

Marx also recognized the agency of common people and grew increasingly influenced by what Herbert Marcuse described as “living workers changing living reality by their action.”⁴ Penning his masterwork as he analyzed the political situation in North America, the War of the Rebellion came to have a considerable impact on the nature and structure of Capital. As Raya Dunayevskaya explained, “It was under the impact of the Civil War and the response on European workers … that the International Working Men’s Association, known as the First International, was born.”⁵ The book’s “American roots” are perhaps best characterized by the author’s maxim that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded,” and his observation that slavery’s death created new possibilities for interracial class-based solidarity, particularly in the form of the eight-hour workday. This held international significance. For Marx, the Civil War was nothing less than “world-transforming,” and the destruction of chattel slavery alongside agitation against serfdom in Russia constituted “the most momentous thing happening in the world.”⁶

While Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels did not view the Union cause as synonymous with proletarian revolution, they did understand the triumph of political democracy and bourgeois capitalism as stepping stones toward working-class liberation. The war provided an organizational impetus for the international workers’ cause.⁷ In the International’s 1864 address to Abraham Lincoln, Marx predicted that chattel slavery’s dismantling would inaugurate a “new era of emancipation of labor,” fostering liberal capitalism and, eventually, the requisite class consciousness needed to overthrow the economic system.⁸ Praising Ohio Senator Benjamin F. Wade’s call for a “more equal distribution of wealth” in his preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx avowed that the war had “sounded the alarm bell” for the European working class and that the “eyes of Europe and the world” were “fixed upon” the events of Reconstruction.⁹ In his letter to the National Labor Union in May 1869, just as the world’s first experiments in large-scale interracial democracy were playing out in the South, Marx explained that Union victory had “opened up a new epoch in the annals of the working class … now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history.”¹⁰

Having witnessed the contact between German-speaking Union soldiers and African Americans in what was perhaps “the earliest collaboration between socialists with a self-emancipating proletariat,” Marx foresaw the prospect of a multi-ethnic movement among the world’s most diverse working class arising from slavery’s collapse.¹¹ He deemed the postwar era a “revolutionary phase” and hoped it might bring about “the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”¹² Marx’s radical counterparts across the Atlantic agreed that emancipation meant little without economic as well as political democracy, including access to land, safer working conditions, and greater control over their own labor and its profits. But even Marx’s disappointment with the abandonment of Reconstruction and the failure of the U.S. political system to produce a viable labor party could not conceal his appreciation for the wartime gains made by workers, including freedpeople.¹³ As Robin Blackburn explains, for Marx and Engels, “every revolutionary effort, when analyzed properly, laid the groundwork for ever more successful revolution.”¹⁴

Marx was hardly alone in forging historical consciousness with a view toward the future. Nor was he distinctive in his urge to dispense with unavailing remnants of the past, famously asserting in The Eighteenth Brumaire that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”¹⁵ Likewise, Marxist historiography is not exceptional in its drift toward teleology. Yet Marxist Civil War memory is unique in its emphasis on modes of production (denaturalizing capitalism) and the war as an ongoing project of transformation from below, or what Enzo Traverso labels a “strategic memory of past emancipation struggles, a future-oriented memory.”¹⁶ Indeed, although Reconstruction’s downfall precluded the larger transformation of capitalist relations and landed property, what Marx termed the “American Anti-Slavery War” galvanized nineteenth-century workers’ movements much as the American Revolution had inspired the bourgeois revolutions of previous generations. American Marxists since Marx have shared the great thinker’s interest in the Civil War owing to its continuous contemporary relevance related to class injustice, inequality, and, above all, the unfinished matter of black civil rights.¹⁷ A synthesis and reinterpretation of Marxist Civil War memory and leftist historiography reveals a variety of radical remembrances and their residual impact on scholarly paradigms, with implications for the significance of class in the study of memory.

Beyond an expressed adherence to Marxism, socialism, or revolutionary politics, the red memory of the war possessed certain hallmarks, emphasized by its progenitors in various proportions: materiality, workers, internationalism, and futurism. Above all, Marxians spotlighted proletarian agency. In their view, the war may have begun over wider issues, especially the clash between free and slave labor systems, but it was fought by masses of working people. More critically, its liberationist elements could be made to serve the interests of workers through a self-emancipation movement led by workers. Because regional and national identities hindered class consciousness, Marxists at the time tended to view the war’s pivotal intellectual and historical linkages as international, rather than sectional or national, and later socialists worked to situate the contest into a transnational schema. This emphasis on internationalism contained elements both empirical and aspirational. In other words, not only had the war been part of a world-historical process that broke the power of landed aristocracy even as it ushered in new forms of capital aggregation and economic dominion, its emancipatory program was the precursor to a broader deliverance from “wage slavery” and therefore heralded a left future.

The Civil War has always provided socialists a means of understanding historical process and Americanizing their cause. While Marx and Engels were perhaps correct to identify political liberalization (emancipation and Radical Reconstruction) in the world’s fastest-growing industrial economy with the potential for accelerated class struggle, they failed to grasp the extent to which racial and ethnic animosities, entrenched ideas regarding merit and mobility, a dynamic bourgeoisie, and the success with which elites were able to paint socialism as a violent immigrant conspiracy would become roadblocks to the consciousness and institutional and political coherence of a self-defined working class. Yet the appropriation of popular historical memory proved a way to facilitate the class solution by bridging the tenets of European socialism and the traditions of American reform. As Paul Buhle notes, “textualist” Marxists, whose immigrant backgrounds, theoretical inclinations, and somewhat provincial ethnic institutions limited their exposure to wider U.S. culture, needed a way to meld their revolutionary movement with indigenous radicalism. Through the efforts of “Americanizing” socialists, the Civil War’s lessons became a way for early Marxists to appeal to white veterans, African Americans, women’s rights advocates, and homegrown reformers of various stripes with backgrounds in abolitionism, transcendentalism, spiritualism, or anti-monopolism.¹⁸

Indeed, the postwar labor movement was, to some extent, “abolitionized”—refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of the sectional conflict. Marxists in particular invoked the language and imagery of emancipation; elicited the sectional impulse and entreated the veteran; and looked to abolitionism and Radical Republicanism as symbolic and organizational templates, often viewing the liberation of black slaves as not a threat, but a model of broader worker liberation.¹⁹ Although many understood black liberation as unrelated or even a hindrance to the fuller “emancipation of [white] labor,” myriad white workers also saw the destruction of slavery—what Marx termed the “movement of slaves” into the greatest slave rebellion in world history—as a blueprint for their own emancipation.²⁰ Rejecting the notion of “free labor” as the mere absence of legal enslavement, countless industrial laborers used collective memory to challenge property rights beyond property in man. Rather than recalling the abolitionist movement, as many antebellum workers had, as altogether bourgeois, or viewing slavery’s opponents as mere pragmatic allies whose aim of free labor converged with their own, organized workers—and revolutionary socialists in particular—saw themselves as postscripts to the abolitionist cause. In appropriating the antislavery spirit, they forged their own internationalist and revolutionary vein of Civil War memory, constructing “red Abe Lincolns” and “red John Browns” as symbolic threats to exclusive property rights and harbingers of a greater social upheaval.

This discourse emanated not only from the top down, from labor leadership to the shop floor, but also from the bottom up, as workingmen converted rural mills, urban docks, factory yards, campaign stumps, convention halls, and printing houses into critical sites of memory production, framing their struggle as a “second civil war” or a “third American revolution.” Wielding war memories, labor ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface – Nelson Lichtenstein
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the Marx–America dialectic
• 1 The blue and the gray and the red: Marxism and Civil War memory
• 2 “What is the correct revolutionary proletarian attitude toward sex?”: red love and the Americanization of Marx in the interwar years
• 3 Marxism and Americanism: A. J. Muste, Louis Budenz, and an “American approach” before the Popular Front
• 4 Women, the family, and sexuality in U.S. Communist Party publications: refashioning Marxism for the Popular Front era
• 5 Rethinking Karl Marx: American liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War
• 6 Black Marxism off the color line: W. E. B. Du Bois and Oliver Cromwell Cox as democratic theorists
• 7 “Not picketing in front of bra factories”: Marxism, feminism, and the Weather Underground
• 8 A people’s history of Howard Zinn: radical popular history and its readers
• 9 Class, commodity, consumption: theorizing sexual violence during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s
• 10 Will the revolution be podcast? Marxism and the culture of “millennial socialism” in the United States
• 11 Does the American experience refute Marxism?
• Index