ETHER
Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619 - CounterPunch.org
Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619
Branding Slaves, from William O. Blake’s The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.
It must have enraged the historians who signed Sean Wilentz’s open letter to the New York Times and their World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) allies to see Abraham Lincoln knocked off his pedestal. How insolent for Nikole Hannah-Jones to write in her introductory essay for Project 1619 that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.” Lincoln was not only an iconic figure for the average American. Karl Marx admired him as well for his war on slavery. Since the primary goal of the critics of Project 1619 was to prioritize class over “identity”, naturally Karl Marx was just the authority to help make their case against the bourgeois New York Times intent on dividing the working-class.
Since the WSWS sets itself up as a Marxist gate-keeper par excellence, we can assume that the historians also had the Karl Marx-Abraham Lincoln in mind when they hooked up with the Trotskyist sect. James McPherson is probably the closest to WSWS ideologically, having granted them interviews over the years. When they asked him if he read Karl Marx’s writings on the Civil War, the historian replied, “Well, I think they have a lot of very good insight into what was going on in the American Civil War. Marx certainly saw the abolition of slavery as a kind of bourgeois revolution that paved the way for the proletarian revolution that he hoped would come in another generation or so. It was a crucial step on the way to the eventual proletarian revolution, as Marx perceived it.”
In this article, I will look critically at what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about these questions. Although I have been a Marxist for 52 years, I have little patience with those who put him (or Lenin and Trotsky) on a pedestal. I believe that Nikole Hannah-Jones had good reasons to question his sanctity. More to the point, I will argue that Marx and Engels lacked the political foresight to see how black Americans would be short-changed after the Civil War. Keeping in mind that the first socialist international was located in the United States, we must examine its relationship to the newly emancipated black population. Based on my reading of Timothy Messer-Kruse’s “The Yankee International,” my conclusion is that it fell short.
Messer-Kruse’s 1998 book explores the split between the orthodox Marxist faction led by Friedrich Sorge and the decidedly non-orthodox faction led by Victoria Woodhull. While obscure perhaps to many CounterPunch readers, the two symbolize opposing poles on the American left. Sorge is a forerunner to the Socialist Equality Party that publishes WSWS. In the same way that they smeared the Black Lives Matter movement as embodying a “racialist perspective…mired in the dead-end of identity politics,” so did Friedrich Sorge demonstrate a preference for organizing white Irish workers over newly emancipated blacks.
The first question that might occur is whether Sorge was acting on a misinterpretation of Marx’s writings. To provide an answer, it is necessary to look at what Marx wrote in a well-known salute to the Republican president on behalf of the first socialist international that would soon relocate to the United States. Written on January 28, 1865 and presented to the American ambassador in London, it begins, “We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”
The next to last paragraph is a bit more worrisome:
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
A careful reading might suggest that slavery held back the “white-skinned laborer” that Marx saw as the revolutionary subject. He certainly understood that slavery was evil, but Marx was no moralist. He was a historical materialist searching for the class forces that could lead to socialism and, as such, might have little identification with the religious motivations of a John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison.
Granted that Marx and Engels might have considered their correspondence to be a strictly private matter, it does shed light on their racial outlook when we read a letter Engels wrote to Marx on July 15, 1865. By this date, Andrew Johnson had succeeded Lincoln, who died three months earlier at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Engels wrote, “Mr Johnson’s policy is less and less to my liking, too. ******-hatred is coming out more and more violently, and he is relinquishing all his power vis-à-vis the old lords in the South.” One possibility of defeating Johnson’s bid to restore the slavocracy to its former status was “coloured suffrage.” But a more likely outcome will be northerners coming south and buying land on the cheap. In such an event, what will happen to the emancipated blacks? Engels coolly appraises the situation: “The ******s will probably turn into small squatters as in Jamaica. Thus ultimately the oligarchy will go to pot after all, but the process could be accomplished immediately at one fell swoop, whereas it is now being drawn out.”
To give you an idea of how racism could infect the left, a presumably Communist Party editor of the collected Marx-Engels added this footnote: “’******’ did not have quite the pejorative meaning in 19th Century England that use of the word later acquired.” As if the “quite” might assuage the reader.
From the very beginning, there was both a cultural and political clash between the Americans and the foreign-born Marxists over how to build a socialist movement in the USA. For people like Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, the movement rested upon prior struggles, especially the abolitionist movement. Friedrich Sorge, an old friend of Marx and Engels, had little experience in the U.S. He was undoubtedly a dedicated revolutionary who took up arms in the 1848 struggle against a feudal state in Germany. After living precariously in Europe for the next four years trying to avoid German executioners, he relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey where he became a music teacher. A year after Marx and Engels founded the first socialist international in 1864, called the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), Sorge began building “sections” in the U.S. They generally attracted European immigrants who often had experiences taking up arms against the monarchies.
Until 1871, the IWA had limited growth. All that changed after the Paris Commune. Despite its defeat, it became an inspiration to both foreign-born workers and the people Messer-Kruse dubbed as Yankees. He gives an example of how veteran abolitionists hailed the Commune:
Amidst the tidal swell of denunciation that roared from American presses, the formerly abolitionist journals stood apart in their uncompromising support for the Commune. The National Anti-Slavery Standard, for example, featured the Paris dispatches of W.J. Linton, a radical who had cut his teeth in the struggles of Chartism in Britain and who was one of the most outspoken defenders of the Commune in America. Linton’s articles explained the Commune not as the anarchic government of a mad rabble bent on looting, but as the rebellion of republicans against dictatorship and aristocracy. Linton provided many a radical with debating points by carefully exposing the distortions and lies of the daily press. The Standard kept its readers abreast of the progress of the trials and sentencing of the Commune leaders. Taking a literary turn, it featured a sympathetic poem on its front page, entitled “A Woman’s Execution, Paris, May, `71,” which ended with the slogan, “Vive la Commune!”
However, the Yankees couched their enthusiasm in terms that failed to meet Friedrich Sorge’s ideological litmus test. The radical movement in the U.S. was a product of various strands that did not qualify as “scientific socialism.” First and foremost, there was a strong spiritualist component that Mark Lause examined in his 2016 “Free Spirits: “Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era.” Lause, a veteran socialist, got it right when he wrote:
Unlike other “faiths,” spiritualism proposed to place religion within a rational understanding of the natural, material world. Then, too, faith that human affairs formed part of the natural world fostered an assumption that scientific inquiry into the human condition might produce new insights with far-reaching implications. Most fundamentally, a generation before Karl Marx’s socialism presented itself as a scientific approach to the human condition, spiritualism offered a strangely rational intellectual challenge to the fundamental hierarchies of civilization. The spiritualist embrace indicated their adoption of Benjamin Franklin as a spirit guide and the technological language of “the telegraph.”
This sort of thing gave Friedrich Sorge the heebie-jeebies. It also didn’t help that Victoria Woodhull, the leader of the Yankee faction, was a professional spiritualist who operated in much the same manner as those little shops in New York with their mediums that can con you out of your hard-earned money. One of the people Woodhull might have “healed” was none other than the 73-year old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the nation’s richest man. So smitten was he by Woodhull and her sister Tennessee that he advanced them the funds they needed to open the first woman-owned stock brokerage on Wall Street. The money they earned allowed them to start the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly that not only defended the Paris Commune but the need for socialism—at least how they understood it. In addition, they were suffragists and advocates of “free love.” Way ahead of her time, Woodhull wrote:
To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold…
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619 - CounterPunch.org
Marx, Lincoln and Project 1619
Branding Slaves, from William O. Blake’s The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.
It must have enraged the historians who signed Sean Wilentz’s open letter to the New York Times and their World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) allies to see Abraham Lincoln knocked off his pedestal. How insolent for Nikole Hannah-Jones to write in her introductory essay for Project 1619 that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.” Lincoln was not only an iconic figure for the average American. Karl Marx admired him as well for his war on slavery. Since the primary goal of the critics of Project 1619 was to prioritize class over “identity”, naturally Karl Marx was just the authority to help make their case against the bourgeois New York Times intent on dividing the working-class.
Since the WSWS sets itself up as a Marxist gate-keeper par excellence, we can assume that the historians also had the Karl Marx-Abraham Lincoln in mind when they hooked up with the Trotskyist sect. James McPherson is probably the closest to WSWS ideologically, having granted them interviews over the years. When they asked him if he read Karl Marx’s writings on the Civil War, the historian replied, “Well, I think they have a lot of very good insight into what was going on in the American Civil War. Marx certainly saw the abolition of slavery as a kind of bourgeois revolution that paved the way for the proletarian revolution that he hoped would come in another generation or so. It was a crucial step on the way to the eventual proletarian revolution, as Marx perceived it.”
In this article, I will look critically at what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about these questions. Although I have been a Marxist for 52 years, I have little patience with those who put him (or Lenin and Trotsky) on a pedestal. I believe that Nikole Hannah-Jones had good reasons to question his sanctity. More to the point, I will argue that Marx and Engels lacked the political foresight to see how black Americans would be short-changed after the Civil War. Keeping in mind that the first socialist international was located in the United States, we must examine its relationship to the newly emancipated black population. Based on my reading of Timothy Messer-Kruse’s “The Yankee International,” my conclusion is that it fell short.
Messer-Kruse’s 1998 book explores the split between the orthodox Marxist faction led by Friedrich Sorge and the decidedly non-orthodox faction led by Victoria Woodhull. While obscure perhaps to many CounterPunch readers, the two symbolize opposing poles on the American left. Sorge is a forerunner to the Socialist Equality Party that publishes WSWS. In the same way that they smeared the Black Lives Matter movement as embodying a “racialist perspective…mired in the dead-end of identity politics,” so did Friedrich Sorge demonstrate a preference for organizing white Irish workers over newly emancipated blacks.
The first question that might occur is whether Sorge was acting on a misinterpretation of Marx’s writings. To provide an answer, it is necessary to look at what Marx wrote in a well-known salute to the Republican president on behalf of the first socialist international that would soon relocate to the United States. Written on January 28, 1865 and presented to the American ambassador in London, it begins, “We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”
The next to last paragraph is a bit more worrisome:
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
A careful reading might suggest that slavery held back the “white-skinned laborer” that Marx saw as the revolutionary subject. He certainly understood that slavery was evil, but Marx was no moralist. He was a historical materialist searching for the class forces that could lead to socialism and, as such, might have little identification with the religious motivations of a John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison.
Granted that Marx and Engels might have considered their correspondence to be a strictly private matter, it does shed light on their racial outlook when we read a letter Engels wrote to Marx on July 15, 1865. By this date, Andrew Johnson had succeeded Lincoln, who died three months earlier at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Engels wrote, “Mr Johnson’s policy is less and less to my liking, too. ******-hatred is coming out more and more violently, and he is relinquishing all his power vis-à-vis the old lords in the South.” One possibility of defeating Johnson’s bid to restore the slavocracy to its former status was “coloured suffrage.” But a more likely outcome will be northerners coming south and buying land on the cheap. In such an event, what will happen to the emancipated blacks? Engels coolly appraises the situation: “The ******s will probably turn into small squatters as in Jamaica. Thus ultimately the oligarchy will go to pot after all, but the process could be accomplished immediately at one fell swoop, whereas it is now being drawn out.”
To give you an idea of how racism could infect the left, a presumably Communist Party editor of the collected Marx-Engels added this footnote: “’******’ did not have quite the pejorative meaning in 19th Century England that use of the word later acquired.” As if the “quite” might assuage the reader.
From the very beginning, there was both a cultural and political clash between the Americans and the foreign-born Marxists over how to build a socialist movement in the USA. For people like Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, the movement rested upon prior struggles, especially the abolitionist movement. Friedrich Sorge, an old friend of Marx and Engels, had little experience in the U.S. He was undoubtedly a dedicated revolutionary who took up arms in the 1848 struggle against a feudal state in Germany. After living precariously in Europe for the next four years trying to avoid German executioners, he relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey where he became a music teacher. A year after Marx and Engels founded the first socialist international in 1864, called the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), Sorge began building “sections” in the U.S. They generally attracted European immigrants who often had experiences taking up arms against the monarchies.
Until 1871, the IWA had limited growth. All that changed after the Paris Commune. Despite its defeat, it became an inspiration to both foreign-born workers and the people Messer-Kruse dubbed as Yankees. He gives an example of how veteran abolitionists hailed the Commune:
Amidst the tidal swell of denunciation that roared from American presses, the formerly abolitionist journals stood apart in their uncompromising support for the Commune. The National Anti-Slavery Standard, for example, featured the Paris dispatches of W.J. Linton, a radical who had cut his teeth in the struggles of Chartism in Britain and who was one of the most outspoken defenders of the Commune in America. Linton’s articles explained the Commune not as the anarchic government of a mad rabble bent on looting, but as the rebellion of republicans against dictatorship and aristocracy. Linton provided many a radical with debating points by carefully exposing the distortions and lies of the daily press. The Standard kept its readers abreast of the progress of the trials and sentencing of the Commune leaders. Taking a literary turn, it featured a sympathetic poem on its front page, entitled “A Woman’s Execution, Paris, May, `71,” which ended with the slogan, “Vive la Commune!”
However, the Yankees couched their enthusiasm in terms that failed to meet Friedrich Sorge’s ideological litmus test. The radical movement in the U.S. was a product of various strands that did not qualify as “scientific socialism.” First and foremost, there was a strong spiritualist component that Mark Lause examined in his 2016 “Free Spirits: “Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era.” Lause, a veteran socialist, got it right when he wrote:
Unlike other “faiths,” spiritualism proposed to place religion within a rational understanding of the natural, material world. Then, too, faith that human affairs formed part of the natural world fostered an assumption that scientific inquiry into the human condition might produce new insights with far-reaching implications. Most fundamentally, a generation before Karl Marx’s socialism presented itself as a scientific approach to the human condition, spiritualism offered a strangely rational intellectual challenge to the fundamental hierarchies of civilization. The spiritualist embrace indicated their adoption of Benjamin Franklin as a spirit guide and the technological language of “the telegraph.”
This sort of thing gave Friedrich Sorge the heebie-jeebies. It also didn’t help that Victoria Woodhull, the leader of the Yankee faction, was a professional spiritualist who operated in much the same manner as those little shops in New York with their mediums that can con you out of your hard-earned money. One of the people Woodhull might have “healed” was none other than the 73-year old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the nation’s richest man. So smitten was he by Woodhull and her sister Tennessee that he advanced them the funds they needed to open the first woman-owned stock brokerage on Wall Street. The money they earned allowed them to start the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly that not only defended the Paris Commune but the need for socialism—at least how they understood it. In addition, they were suffragists and advocates of “free love.” Way ahead of her time, Woodhull wrote:
To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold…
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
