An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

268 Pages·2011·1.7 MB·English

by  Karl Marx

Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution

Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution
Robin Blackburn
London • New York
First published by Verso 2011
© the collection Verso 2011
Introduction © Robin Blackburn 2011
All rights reserved
Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-722-1
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Contents
Introduction 1
Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address 105
Emancipation Proclamation 115
Gettysburg Address 119
Second Inaugural Address 121
Karl Marx
Th e North American Civil War 127
Th e American Question in England 139
Th e Civil War in the United States 151
Th e American Civil War 161
A Criticism of American Aff airs 173
Abolitionist Demonstrations in America 177
Letters
Letter from Marx to Annenkov 185
Letters between Marx and Engels 189
Letters between Marx and Lincoln 211
Articles
Woodhull & Clafl in 219
Independence vs. Dependence! Which? 219
Th e Rights of Children 222
Interview with Karl Marx 225
Conclusion to Black and White 233
Th omas Fortune
Preface to the American Edition of Th e Condition 239
of the Working-Class in England
Frederick Engels
Speeches at the Founding of the Industrial 251
Workers of the World
Lucy Parsons
Acknowledgments 259

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution
In photographs Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln both look the
part of the respectable Victorian gentleman. But they were almost
diametrically opposed in their attitude toward what was called at
the time the social question. Lincoln happily represented railroad
corporations as a lawyer. As a politician he was a champion of free
wage labor. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was a declared foe of
capitalism who insisted that wage labor was in fact wage slavery,
since the worker was compelled by economic necessity to sell his
defi ning human attribute—his labor power—because if he did not,
his family would soon face hunger and homelessness.
Of course Marx’s critique of capitalism did not deny that it had
progressive features, and Lincoln’s championing of the world of
business did not extend to those whose profi ts stemmed directly
from slaveholding. Each man placed a concept of unrewarded
labor at the center of his political philosophy, and both opposed
slavery on the grounds that it was intensively exploitative. Lincoln
believed it to be his duty to defend the Union, which he saw as the
momentous American experiment in representative democracy, by
whatever means should prove necessary. Marx saw the democratic
republic as the political form that would allow the working class
to develop its capacity to lead society as a whole. He regarded US
political institutions as a fl awed early version of the republican ideal.
With their “corruption” and “humbug,” US political institutions did
not off er a faithful representation of US society. Indeed, too often
they supplied a popular veneer to the rule of the wealthy—with a
2 an unfinished revolution
bonus for slaveholders. But Marx’s conclusion was that they should
become more democratic, broadening the scope of freedom of asso-
ciation, removing all forms of privilege, and extending free public
education.1
As a young man Marx had seriously considered moving to the
United States, perhaps to Texas. He went so far as to write to the
mayor of Trier, the town where he had been born, to request an
Auswanderungschein, or emigration certifi cate. In the following year
he wrote an article considering the ideas of the “American National
Reformers,” whose comparatively modest original aims—the dis-
tribution of 160 acres of public land to anyone willing to cultivate
it—he recognized as justifi ed and promising: “We know that this
movement strives for a result that, to be sure, would further the
industrialism of modern bourgeois society, but that … as an attack
on land ownership … especially under the existing conditions
… must drive it towards communism.”2 (Th e idea of distributing
public land in this way did indeed have explosive implications, as
we will see, and the new smallholders did often lack the resources
needed to fl ourish, as Marx predicted, but his idea that they would
therefore embrace “communism” was more than a stretch.) In 1849,
writing as editor of Germany’s leading revolutionary democratic
journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx praised the frugal budget
and republican institutions of the United States in comparison
with the bloated bureaucracy and unaccountability of the Prussian
monarchy. 3
Subsequently Marx remained fascinated by events in the US, and
for ten years—1852 to 1861—he became the London correspond-
ent of one of its leading newspapers, the New York Daily Tribune.
Th e invitation to write for the Tribune came from Charles Dana,
its editor, who had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 when Marx was
in charge of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx accepted Dana’s
1 August Nimtz, Marx and Engels: Th eir Contribution to the Democratic
Breakthrough, Albany 2000.
2 Karl Marx, “American Soil and Communism,” in Karl Marx on America
and the Civil War, Saul Padover, ed., New York 1971, pp. 3–6.
3 Karl Marx, “Th e American Budget and the Christian-German One,” in
Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, pp. 9–12. For Marx’s emigration
plans, see Padover’s Introduction.