Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The Absolute Democracy: or Defiled Republic:

285 Pages·2013·1.46 MB·English

by  August H. Nimtz

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Published in the United States of America
by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

PO Box 317
Oxford
OX2 9RU, UK

Copyright © 2003 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nimtz, August H.
Marx, Tocqueville, and race in America : the “absolute democracy” or “defined
republic” / August H. Nimtz, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9780739157541
1. Slavery—Political aspects—United States—History—19th century. 2. United
States—Race relations—Political aspects. 3. United States—Politics and
government—1783—1865. 4. United States—Politics and government—1861—
1865. 5. Reconstruction. 6. Democracy—United States—History—19th century.
7. Marx, Karl, 1818—1883—Political and social views. 8. Engels, Friedrich,
1820-1895—Political and social views. 9. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859—
Political and social views. I. Title.
E449.N76 2003
320.973’01—dc21
2003009952

Printed in the United States of America

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface - “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic”?
1 - Democracy in America
2 - Toward the “General Conflagration”
3 - “A Last Card Up Its Sleeve”
4 - A Dream Deferred
Conclusion
Appendix - Thomas Messer-Kruse’s, The Yankee International
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Preface
“Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic”?
Marx, Tocqueville, and
Race in America

Just when Republican Senator Trent Lott thought it was safe to publicly
celebrate the “good old days” of Jim Crow, political reality rudely interrupted
his nostalgic yearnings. Fresh from the gains his party made in the November
2002 elections he no doubt thought he had license to wax fondly about the
bygone era of official racial segregation. The 100th birthday party for fellow
Senator Strom Thurmond, Jim Crow’s 1948 presidential standard bearer, seemed
to be the perfect occasion. Lott was, after all, the most prominent product of the
party’s so-called “southern strategy.” This was the line the Republican Party
adopted in the 1960s to woo southern whites away from the Democrats with the
not-too-subtle message that a White House and Congress in its hands would be
sympathetic to their “way of life.” The strategy seems to have worked given the
increasing number of elected Republican officials in the South. But the
Mississippi politician mistook successes in the electoral arena for the basic facts
of American political life and his “faux pas” cost him dearly, his Senate Majority
Leader post.
A few days after Lott’s demise a New York Times article tried to put the affair
in perspective. Racial segregation it correctly argued was not unique to the
South. The North had, in fact, a long history of such practices. As evidence, the
article cited the observation of Alexis de Tocqueville during his travels to the
United States in 1831 and 1832: “ ‘The prejudice of race appears to be stronger
in the states that have abolished slavery than those where it still exists.’”1 What
the French traveler suggests is that the oppression that Blacks faced in the North
was unrelated to the peculiar institution in the South and that it made no
difference to them where they lived; both parts of the country were equally
repressive. Neither suggestion could be further from the truth.
Most problematic with Tocqueville’s observation is the context from which it
is taken, the last chapter of the first volume of his almost revered Democracy in
America. Only there did he discuss the situation of Blacks in America.
Tocqueville began with the bold assertion that the United States is an “absolute
and immense democracy.” As for the realities of the “Negroes,” such “topics,”
Tocqueville continued, “are collaterally connected with my subject without
forming a part of it; they are American without being democratic, and to portray
democracy has been my principle aim.”2 Yet at that very moment, 1835, the year
in which the book was published, the slave owners were consolidating their rule
both regionally and nationally. For Tocqueville, racial oppression and chattel
slavery were marginal concerns in his account of the U.S. political system. But
the Lott affair revealed, if anything, just how central race is in a real
understanding of America’s political reality. To assume, then, as the editors of
the New York Times evidently do, that Tocqueville can be employed to bring
clarity to the politics of race in the United States is naive at best.
For Karl Marx, on the other hand, chattel slavery in the United States and
what he called the “branding” of Blacks—their racial subordination—were key
in understanding economic and political developments not only in America but
worldwide. Shortly after arriving at his new communist worldview in 1844, the
young Marx declared that Britain’s industrial preeminence, specifically, its
textile industry, was largely the product of slave labor, that is, cotton production
in America’s South. In the United States itself, he held—unlike Tocqueville—
that the democratic quest had been hampered by the presence of the peculiar
institution. This is just what his letter to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 emphasized.
Addressing the president on behalf of the newly formed International Working
Men’s Association (the First International), Marx congratulated him on his
reelection and the progress he was making in the Civil War against the slave
owners. Until the war, he wrote, “the working men, the true political power of
the North, allowed [Negro] slavery to defile their own republic” and, thus, “were
unable to attain the true freedom of labour.”3 Real democracy in America, Marx
argued—what the editors of the New York Times could never acknowledge—
required freedom for all working people.
America in the middle of the nineteenth century—the “absolute democracy”
or the “defiled republic”? My basic argument is that Marx and his partner
Frederick Engels had a far more accurate, and, thus, insightful, reading of
democracy in the United States than Tocqueville because they understood that
the overthrow of slavery and racial oppression were central to its realization. For
Tocqueville, these were at best tangential issues having little to do with his
portrait of American democracy.
I also intend to show how the grasp of “really existing” democracy in the
United States by Marx and Engels played a crucial role in the conclusions they
reached on the road to becoming communists. For Marx, Tocqueville’s reading
of the United States, I argue, served as a major foil for his political development.
Marx and Engels were more accurate because—my second argument—of their
method, what they called the “materialist conception of history.” Rather than
treating them as “mores” and customs, as Tocqueville did, slavery and racial
oppression were fundamentally grounded in material reality—the exploitation of
labor. Most importantly, the method employed by Marx and Engels informed
their efforts to advance the democratic struggle in the United States, actions
which, I hope to demonstrate, were not inconsequential. As communists, Marx
and Engels recognized that theoretical and political insights were useful only if
acted upon. They profoundly understood that they had to actively put into
practice what they wrote and to learn from practice what to write—a modus
operandi that today’s progressives would do well to emulate. Finally, their
superior reading, I also argue, allowed them to more accurately anticipate the
course of American democracy, even up to the present. The two very different
perspectives of Marx and Tocqueville are at the heart of the debates about race
and democracy in America today, as I posit in the conclusion.
I begin in chapter 1 with Marx’s appreciation of the American reality and
compare and contrast it to what Tocqueville had to say. It is here that I make the
case for my claim that Marx’s reading of the accounts of Tocqueville and others
about the United States was crucial in his route to communism. If America was
the best that liberal democracy had to offer, then clearly, more was required to
realize what the young Marx called “true” or “real” democracy. Hence, I
challenge the oft-made claim that “Marx never integrated America into his
account of the world-historical future of capitalism.”4
In chapter 2, I show how Marx and Engels’s class-analytic perspective
informed their efforts to bring about “real democracy” and contrast their practice
to that of Tocqueville. The specific focus is on the activities they and their co-
thinkers in the United States carried out leading up to the Civil War to assist the
struggle against slavery. Chapter 3 details the practice of the “Marx party,” as it
came to be known, during the war on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the
period when Marx was clearest and most explicit about the necessity of ending
racism against Blacks, or as he called it, the “branding” process, in order for
“labor to emancipate itself”—the prerequisite for “real democracy.”