Sir,
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 warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.
— Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln, November 1864
Of all the positions taken by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their half-century of founding and guiding the revolutionary socialist movement, one of the most challenging for modern socialists to grasp is their eager and enthusiastic support for the United States in its war against the Confederacy.
After all, even in 1861, before it ascended to its place at the top of the capitalist world order, the US was one of the centers of burgeoning bourgeois power, with all the injustice, exploitation, and bloodshed that implies. The industrial revolution was in full swing, with the capitalist class of the US busy accumulating enormous wealth off the backs of the nascent working class. Furthermore the young nation was very much in the midst of a bloody settler-colonial campaign against the Native inhabitants of North America, and had already established itself as an imperialist power with its land-grabbing war against Mexico.
Marx and Engels staunchly opposed the politics, the exploitative practices, and the entire worldview of the capitalist classes of the Northern states. They considered the capitalists of New York and Boston their mortal enemies as much as their counterparts in Europe.
Despite being removed from the conflict, and despite lacking the wide-angle view of modern historians, Marx and Engels’s ability to assess the material and social factors behind the war makes their takes on it sharper and more insightful than most textbooks or TV documentaries even today.
And yet, for Marx and Engels, Abraham Lincoln’s war against the rebellious Southern states represented something much more than a civil conflict between regions or between wealthy classes. It represented a revolutionary potential, a social rupture that held potent significance for the struggle against class society around the world.
To these revolutionary theorists, the US Civil War was, in its implications and potential, a revolutionary peoples’ war against the South’s “slaveocracy” — the inhuman system of extractive agriculture and bondage lorded over by an oligarchy of slave owners. This slaveocracy was locked in mortal combat with the North’s comparatively progressive order based on free labor.
As Marx put it in 1861,
The present struggle between the North and the South is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.
Marx and Engels saw the Civil War as the latest theater in a global revolutionary struggle against human bondage. This included the revolutions against the decaying feudal order that had swept Europe in 1848 — which they had taken part in themselves. As Marx wrote to Engels in 1860, “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement.”
They had to make these arguments against shortsighted Northern leaders — including Lincoln himself at first — who saw it as a war to preserve the Union and not one to overthrow slavery. Lincoln’s change of heart from a “constitutional” to a “revolutionary” commander-in-chief in the middle of the conflict earned the acclaim of Marx and Engels and many other radicals around the world.
That they made these arguments as the war raged, while suspending if not setting aside their objections to the bourgeois government and ruling class of the Union, has important implications for how Marxists approach the questions of war and national liberation even today.
Indeed, in some respects Marx and Engels saw the Civil War as a war of liberation — though an inverted one, as they did not recognize the cause of the Southern rebels seeking to form a new nation as just. Instead they saw it as a war for the liberation of the unfree workers of the South — the 3.5 million enslaved Black people who made up over 60 percent of the population of the Confederate States.
For this reason, Marx and Engels were intensely interested in the Black struggle in the conflict — from the withholding of slave labor after the outbreak of the war which crippled the economy of the South, to the heroic all-Black units in the Union army that struck terror into the Southern forces.
Marx and Engels’s writings on the war were compiled and published in a volume entitled The Civil War in the United States in 1937, and republished in 2016 in a new edition edited by Angela Zimmerman.
The volume is made up of the pair’s commentary on the war in newspaper articles (including the Vienna-based Die Presse and the New York Tribune) as well as private correspondence between Marx and Engels, who spent the war years in London and Manchester respectively.
The Civil War in the United States is a must-read for those seeking a Marxist understanding of the most pivotal conflict in US history, as well as the relationship between racial oppression and labor struggle. In fact, Zimmerman’s introduction makes a powerful case for the centrality of Marx and Engels’s analysis of the Civil War to the development of Marxism itself:
The Civil War was one of the signal events that suggested to Marx and Engels new political possibilities and strategies, culminating in the founding of the International Working Men’s Association, known today as the First International, in 1864. It was also during the years of the Civil War that Marx completed much of his work on the three volumes of Capital, the first of which was published two years after the end of the conflict, in 1867. The influence of the American Civil War on Capital is unmistakable.
“A precocious understanding”
In their journalism and correspondence in the Civil War era, it’s impressive how informed Marx and Engels were about the politics, history, and even the geography of the US, a country neither had ever visited (Engels eventually traveled to the US in later years, after Marx’s death).
Despite being removed from the conflict, and despite lacking the wide-angle view of modern historians, their ability to assess the material and social factors behind the war makes their takes on it sharper and more insightful than most textbooks or TV documentaries even today. As Zimmerman says, the pair showed a “precocious understanding of the conflict both in its details and its broader implications.”
In one article, Marx recaps the history of constitutional democracy in the US back to 1787 in order to illustrate the pivotal importance of slavery to the young nation. In another he goes into detail about how the geography of the Appalachian regions of the South dictated class conflict between the lowland slave owners and the poor white farmers of the mountains. This cultural divide between the Appalachian region and the rest of the country still prevails, and it’s striking how well Marx understood it so long ago, and from a distance.
Simply by reading newspaper accounts and studying maps, Engels was able to correctly foresee — even before the Union’s military leadership — that the Western theater of the war was far more strategically important than the movements of the main armies on the Atlantic seaboard, and that the capture of the Southern railways would prove decisive.
Zimmerman shows the extent to which the antislavery movement was an influence on Marx and Engels’s theories of labor — especially in their use of terms like the “emancipation” of labor and the “abolition” of bourgeois property.
Reading their exchanges with each other, the two friends’ personalities come to life and their areas of relative expertise become more apparent. Buried in his work on Capital, Marx commanded the economic aspects of the war. Illustrating a nuanced point about the economy of slavery in one article, he includes a helpful table of cotton prices — amusingly echoing modern memes about his nerdy focus on the costs of wholesale goods.
Engels, the professional soldier, displays a charmingly boyish passion for military strategy and tactics. His insights into troop formations, artillery gauges, and military engineering served him well in his analysis. But it also hampered him at times, making him pessimistic about prospects for victory, especially when weighing up the Union army’s bungling versus the strategic ability of the Southern officer corps.
Marx was quick to scold his friend: “It strikes me that you allow yourself to be influenced by the military aspect of things too much.” Throughout the war, Marx remained unwaveringly optimistic that the South must be defeated and slavery must end — because it was an unsustainable economic system.
An international struggle
The US Civil War was significant to Marx and Engels not only as a turning point in the struggle against slavery, but as a beacon of hope for revolutionaries in the frustrating years after the incomplete or failed revolutions of 1848. The bloody counterrevolutions led by the newly empowered bourgeois class in France, Germany and elsewhere caused thousands of refugee radicals, including Marx and Engels themselves, to flee the continent.
These were bitter years for the young revolutionary socialist movement. As Zimmerman writes, Marx and Engels were forced to evolve their views of social revolution in the aftermath of these defeats, particularly regarding the betrayals of the bourgeoisie and the need for the proletariat to take revolutionary struggle into their own hands. The US Civil War helped them expand on their theory of revolution, much as the Paris Commune did in the following decade.
There was also a more material impact of the European revolutionary movement on the war. Tens of thousands of their German revolutionary comrades ended up immigrating to the US. They played an outsized role in the radical wing of the abolition movement before the war, and many also took up arms for the Union during the war.
This participation by the “48ers” (several of whom became officers and led troops into battle) naturally lent the struggle a more revolutionary character wherever they were involved.
This is just one aspect of the international nature of the Civil War. Though it was contained within the borders of what is now the United States, the war had important implications for world politics. Not only did European radicals including Marx and Engels observe and comment on the war, they also organized workers to support it.
As Marx wrote, “The South is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.”
The Northern blockade of Southern shipping during the war impacted the world supply of cotton, and was especially crippling for the British textile industry. For this reason many in the British ruling class and media agitated in favor of intervening on the side of the Confederacy. But the British working class largely supported the Northern cause and abolition — heroically, given that the blockade left many of them out of work, impoverished, even starving, in what was known as the “Cotton Famine.” Massive demonstrations of workers for the Union and against slavery in London, Manchester, and Sheffield were crucial in forestalling an intervention.
Regarding this impact of the war on both sides of the Atlantic, Marx wrote, “As long as the English cotton manufactures depended on slave-grown cotton, it could be truthfully asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic.”
The war also had international implications in that Confederate leaders were scheming to expand the slaveocracy to the Caribbean or even to South America. This imperialist expansionism had already led to the Mexican-American War of 1846, in which the US fought to secure the annexation of Texas and the Southwest territories, mainly for the benefit of the Southern planting class and the production of rice and cotton. Additionally, the instability of the US Civil War allowed the French government to opportunistically invade Mexico in 1861.
The emancipation of labor
The outbreak of the war in April of 1861 was far from surprising for Marx and Engels. Along with many other radicals in their network, for years they had observed and commented on slavery in the US, as well as the abolition movement, which they staunchly supported. They saw the war as merely a new, more intensified phase in a violent conflict between two economic systems that had been escalating for years if not decades.
This corresponded to their outlook on capitalism in general. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that capitalism is “more or less a veiled civil war, raging within existing society.”
Marx’s antislavery polemics were even available to American readers for a time. Beginning in 1852, Marx wrote for the New York Tribune, a relatively progressive newspaper, and while he mainly covered European affairs, he also used his platform to argue for radical abolitionism.
Zimmerman shows the extent to which the antislavery movement was an influence on Marx and Engels’s theories of labor — especially in their use of terms like the “emancipation” of labor and the “abolition” of bourgeois property.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, published in 1847 (predating the Communist Manifesto), Marx draws the connection between chattel slavery in North America and the rise of capitalism — still a fundamental principle of anticolonialism and antiracism:
Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.
As Zimmerman puts it, “for Marx and Engels, the struggle against slavery was central to the struggle against capitalism.” Slavery was an evil in itself, but it also served as a metaphor for the exploitation of the entire working class including wage workers. It was not only a kind of oppression, but also a kind of labor that shed light on the general condition of labor.
Marx is lucid on this point in The Poverty of Philosophy: “Modern nations have only been able to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.”
Marx on the real causes of the Civil War
The causes of the Civil War are still contested today — though they shouldn’t be. The question of whether it was primarily about slavery is not a serious one. The Confederacy’s leaders themselves were upfront about fighting to preserve the slave system. The still-persistent nonsense that it was a war for “states’ rights” or against “Northern aggression” is part of a revisionist history that seeks to downplay the legacy of slavery, as well as the racism and white supremacy that are still so firmly entrenched in US society.
Marx and Engels saw right through all this. True to form, Marx used economics and historical materialism to demonstrate why the system of chattel slavery could not be sustained — and why the slaveocracy was thus driven to expand its territory and entrench its power over the US government. In a pair of articles for Die Presse written in 1861, when the war was still in its early stages, he showed how the highly extractive form of agriculture practiced by enslavers had a tendency to exhaust the soil, as well as the captive workers.
The Southern oligarchy recognized early on that it would need to keep expanding on more and more land in order to survive. As Marx wrote, “Continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.”
Marx and Engels continually argued in favor of a “revolutionary” war — a war to defeat the slaveocracy, free the slaves, smash the social relations of the South, and build a new economic system based on equality and free labor. By contrast, the “constitutional” war was a war to preserve the status quo.
Thus the years-long political battle to introduce slavery into new US territories and make them into states. Eventually this became an actual battle, with violent clashes in “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s between Southern settlers and antislavery Northern settlers (famously including John Brown).
This desperate push for new slave states was also to ensure that the South, with a much lower population than the North, kept control of the undemocratic Senate.
For years, the Southern ruling class’s power in the US government was disproportionate, from their influence over Northern Democrats to the pivotal Supreme Court cases that legalized slave-catching in the North. As Marx wrote, “What it lacks in numbers, the slaveholders’ party makes up in the means of power that many years’ possession of all state offices, hereditary engagement in political intrigue and concentration of great wealth in few hands have secured for it.”
But there was only so far they could go within the status quo, with the population of the North exploding and the abolition movement gaining strength every year. By 1854, the abolitionists had founded the Republican Party, which quickly grew popular enough to challenge for the White House, and this instilled in the slaveocracy a sense of emergency.
As Marx showed, these two intertwined agendas of the Southern states — an insatiable thirst for fertile new land to produce on, and a critical need to maintain political sway over the US — were the real causes of the Civil War.
The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln was enough to provoke secession, even though Republican policy was mere containment of slavery to existing slave states. As Marx proved, mere containment would spell the death of the slave system.
“The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defense,” he wrote, “but a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.” As he pointed out, the border states and territories demanded by the Confederacy made up three-fourths of the country.
In exposing the absurd falsehood of “Northern aggression,” Marx proved that the war was instead one of Southern aggression — an imperialist drive to expand slavery to the Pacific Ocean and to politically dominate the entire country for its own ends. “What would in fact take place [if the North ceded] would be not a dissolution of the Union but a reorganization of it, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy.”
“The South is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.”
Marx also emphasized the unpopularity of the slave oligarchy among the poor white population of the South, and the “deception, intrigue and terror” by which secession was carried out. Through secret ballots or outright fraud, the rulers of each Southern state dragged the majority who were either ambivalent or who actively supported the Union into a war they didn’t want. In many places, especially in the mountainous regions of Appalachia where poor white farmers were concentrated, it was necessary to impose their will via military occupation and martial law.
Constitutional versus revolutionary war
Much of Marx and Engels’s writing about the war was concerned with opposing the “constitutional” strategy. For them, the Union leadership’s dithering about what exactly they were fighting for was at once a moral, a political, and a military problem. They felt that the righteous cause of abolitionists, Northern workers, and the enslaved people of the South — the proletarian majority of the nation — was being held back by the Union’s leadership. As Zimmerman says, this put radicals in an unusual position: “[supporting] the Union while disagreeing with many of its leaders and, in a way concurring with their Confederate enemies that slavery was the primary issue of the war.”
Marx and Engels continually argued in favor of a revolutionary war — a war to defeat the slaveocracy, free the slaves, smash the social relations of the South, and build a new economic system based on equality and free labor. By contrast, the constitutional war was a war to preserve the status quo — slavery was, after all, legally enshrined in the US Constitution. Marx and Engels were convinced that only an approach to the war that transcended what was legally possible would ensure victory on the battlefield — and they were eventually proven correct about this, though hundreds of thousands died before Lincoln and his generals came to the same realization.
These opposing constitutional and revolutionary tendencies were embodied in two Union generals: George B. McClellan, the Union commander-in-chief in the early part of the war; and John C. Frémont, who was in charge of the armies in the West (and also the Republican candidate for president in 1956). McClellan was a Washington insider who prosecuted the war with infamous caution — as the old saying goes, he seems to have been more afraid of victory than of defeat. Significantly he was also opposed to abolition.
Frémont, on the other hand, was a staunch abolitionist. In 1861 Frémont unilaterally freed the enslaved people under his command in Missouri — an action which caused him to be fired from his position by Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward. This was less than two years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Marx spoke glowingly of Frémont as “an obstacle to the makers of compromises.”
Other Union officers, especially those in the West, agitated against their commanders in favor of paying freed African Americans wages, or arming them. It’s worth noting that many soldiers in the West were the radical German 48ers.
A major blind spot for Marx and Engels was the US’s genocidal displacement of Natives — the very thing that made the acquisition of “new” territory possible for both the slaveocracy and antislavery settlers. In his letter to Lincoln, Marx even uses the unfortunate term “virgin soil” to describe those territories.
Marx and Engels were explicit about the political nature of these internal conflicts in the Union forces. Many modern accounts speak of McClellan’s reticence in battle as if it were a character flaw, while downplaying or leaving out the fact that he was a Democrat and opposed Lincoln’s entire political project (McClellan unsuccessfully ran against Lincoln for president in 1864).
But it’s more to the point that, despite their differences, McClellan was simply carrying out Lincoln’s stated policy and fighting for the status quo.
Marx was scathing in his frustration with Lincoln. In lambasting the dismissal of Frémont, he wrote: “Lincoln, in accordance with his legal tradition, has an aversion for all genius, anxiously clings to the letter of the Constitution and fights shy of every step that could mislead the ‘loyal’ slaveholders of the border states.”
As Engels wrote to Marx, “Unless the North instantly adopts a revolutionary stance, it will get the terrible thrashing it deserves.”
Lincoln the revolutionary?
Lincoln eventually lost patience with the “constitutional” strategy. After the apocalyptic battle of Antietam in September 1862, where the North repelled the South’s invasion of the border state of Maryland in the bloodiest single day of fighting in US history (with almost 4,000 killed), McClellan once again refused to pursue the retreating Confederates. An enraged Lincoln sacked McClellan as commander-in-chief, taking on that title himself. He also cleaned house in Washington, getting rid of many of McClellan’s allies, and gave the Western generals license to prosecute the war as they saw fit.
Most importantly, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people in territory not belonging to the Union. It was a small step, but it finally turned the conflict into a war against slavery. A few months later the final Emancipation Proclamation allowed for the arming of 180,000 Black soldiers — a move that was pivotal for both ideological and material reasons.
Unlike McClellan, the generals placed in charge by Lincoln late in the war, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, fought to win — and especially in the case of Sherman, were willing to wage total war against the South, destroying its infrastructure and production in order to subdue it completely.
It’s important to point out that neither Grant nor Sherman were abolitionists before the war, but along with the rest of the ruling class of the North, they had come to realize that the only way to defeat the South was to defeat slavery. This is a crucial point. In a way, the social revolution exerted itself on the Northern ruling class, which turned it into a weapon in its favor during a state of emergency.
All of this was much to Marx and Engels’s admiration. As Marx wrote:
President Lincoln never ventures a step forward before the tide of circumstances and the general call of public opinion forbid further delay. But once ‘Old Abe’ realizes that such a turning point has been reached, he surprises friend and foe alike by a sudden operation executed as noiselessly as possible.
Amid the approval, there’s a note of satire here about Lincon’s motivations, which reveals an important political point. Lincoln’s turn to a more revolutionary strategy was not really because of some great vision or strength of character possessed by him. Rather it was the manifestation of popular revolutionary demands, along with wartime expediency. This view is evident in Marx’s appraisal of Lincoln’s place in history, which he felt had much to do with the president’s working-class upbringing, something unheard-of in European heads of state at the time:
This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance — an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!
Marx’s attitude toward Lincoln was complex to say the least. His 1864 letter to the president (written on behalf of the First International) is a fascinating document. Only Karl Marx could have written such a letter to a US president, and only Lincoln could have been the recipient. It combines 19th century courtesy, sincere enthusiasm for Lincoln’s commitment to victory over the slaveocracy, and communist polemics that verge on lecturing, setting Lincoln straight on the true nature of the war, and on class struggle in general:
While the working men, 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.
The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Polite and gracious words notwithstanding, the philosopher understood more than most that the victory was not Lincoln’s but the people’s.
Yet there is something in all of this that shows Marx and Engels had some evolving to do when it came to their revolutionary theory, as well as their outlook on oppression.
A major blind spot for Marx and Engels was the US’s genocidal displacement of Natives — the very thing that made the acquisition of “new” territory possible for both the slaveocracy and antislavery settlers. In his letter to Lincoln, Marx even uses the unfortunate term “virgin soil” to describe those territories.
Marx was certainly aware of the horrors of colonialism — he wrote at length about the violence of primitive accumulation in the New World in Capital. But Zimmerman rightfully points out that Marx and Engels didn’t give the US’s settler-colonial nature the attention it deserved with regards to the Civil War.
The failure of Reconstruction was a bitter anticlimax to the promise of the Civil War for Marx and Engels. Just as the European counterrevolutions of 1848–49 had taught them harsh lessons about class struggle, so did the counterrevolution against Reconstruction. They would find renewed hope in the revolutionary workers of Paris in 1871.
Zimmerman also argues that Marx and Engels’s views on race were shortsighted. Though they were appreciative of the important role played by Black soldiers in the struggle, they somewhat deprived them of agency when they referred to them as “the last card up [the Union’s] sleeve,” in Marx’s words.
They placed more emphasis on the efforts of white soldiers and workers, and failed to grasp the full significance of the Black general strike. Thus in some important respects they didn’t see the Black self-liberation that has been more clear to modern historians, beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois and his epochal 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America.
But while Du Bois contributed more than any scholar to our understanding of the Black struggle in the Civil War, he also gave credit to Marx for his antiracism and his staunch support of abolition. In 1933, in an article arguing for the relevance of Marxism to the Black struggle, he wrote that he was seeking to “bring before American Negroes the fact that Karl Marx knew and sympathized with their problem.”
The contradictions embodied by Lincoln (unlikely to ever be repeated in a US president!) don’t need resolving as such. As Marxists, we can recognize that he played an important role in the liberation of enslaved people and was an oppressor of Natives at the same time. If we view the Civil War first and foremost as a liberation struggle, as we should, it makes more sense that we would support Lincoln and the Union’s military efforts critically, just as we do with other liberation struggles.
Engels made the nature of his critical support clear in an 1862 letter to Marx:
Desirable though it may be, on the one hand, that the bourgeois republic should be utterly discredited in America too, so that in future it may never again be preached on its own merits, but only as a means towards, and a form of transition to, social revolution, it is, nevertheless, annoying that a rotten oligarchy, with a population only half as large, should evince such strength as the great fat, helpless democracy.
The aftermath of the Civil War and the disappointments of Reconstruction
Engels’s wartime ambivalence about a bourgeois republic as a means for liberation was fully warranted, of course. After a hopeful 12 years of radical reform and unprecedented Black empowerment during the Reconstruction period, the US government withdrew the last of its occupation forces from the South in 1877. They left behind a white Southern ruling class that quickly established a new system of racial oppression based not on slavery but on white supremacy under capitalism.
To the Northern capitalist class, racial equality was no longer a priority during the Gilded Age of wealth accumulation and war on the workers’ movement. The result was the 90-year nightmare of Jim Crow — a counterrevolution, as Zimmerman rightfully calls it.
The failure of Reconstruction was a bitter anticlimax to the promise of the Civil War for Marx, Engels and their fellow revolutionaries. Just as the European counterrevolutions of 1848–49 had taught them harsh lessons about class struggle, so did the counterrevolution against Reconstruction.
They would find renewed hope elsewhere, especially in the revolutionary workers of Paris in 1871. As Zimmerman writes, “If the American Civil War was the answer to the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, for Marx, was the answer to the disappointment of Reconstruction.” The Commune was a pivotal moment for the international workers’ struggle, and the further development of their revolutionary theory that it inspired in Marx and Engels went a long way towards addressing the flaws in their analysis of the US Civil War.
Nevertheless, the US Civil War remained a tremendous influence on them. It’s no coincidence that Marx titled his pamphlet on the Commune The Civil War in France, nor that he described the French workers’ struggle as “the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history.”
In 1866, Marx wrote to Engels, “The phase of the Civil War over, only now have the United States really entered the revolutionary phase.”
The counterrevolution of white supremacy in the South — which, to be clear, ensured white supremacy would also endure in the North and across the US — means the Civil War is an unfinished revolution to this day.
As Zimmerman writes, “In that sense, the American Civil War still rages on.”
What Du Bois wrote 90 years ago is still true: the Marxist method is still the best hope of winning that war — especially because of what it teaches us about solidarity between workers and the oppressed. As Marx wrote in Capital: “Labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where in the black skin it is branded.”
Image: Detail of Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1884. Bronze relief sculpture. 11 x 14’. Boston, MA.
