Historical Materialism 19.4 - Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 brill.
nl/hima
The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under

Neoliberal Capitalism
Peter Drucker
International Institute of Research and Education
polias@antenna.nl
Abstract
Historians have linked the emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities to the development
of capitalism. A materialist approach should also look at different forms of sexual identity, and
their connections with specific phases of capitalist development. Marxist long-wave theory can
help us understand how the decline of Fordism contributed to shifts in LGBT identities, speeding
the consolidation of gay identity while fostering the rise of alternative sexual identities. These
alternative identities, sometimes defined as ‘queer’, characterised by sexual practices that are
still stigmatised, by explicit power-differentials and above all by gender-nonconformity, are
particularly common among young and disadvantaged working-class strata. The growing
diversity of identities is a challenge to any gay universalism that neglects class, gender, sexual,
racial/ethnic and other differences, to the currently dominant forms of lesbian/gay organising,
and ultimately to the prevailing division of human beings into gay and straight.1
Keywords
Fordism, LGBT, long waves, neoliberalism, queer, sexuality
Sexuality, once a largely unexplored continent for historical materialism, has

long since ceased to be so. In the 1970s and early ’80s lesbian/gay historians,
using Marxist and feminist analytical tools among others, began to chart the
1. Some initial thoughts for this article originated as a talk at the IIRE Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual
Strategy Seminar in Amsterdam in August 2000; many thanks to the 2000, 2002 and 2009 IIRE
Seminar participants for their comments and ideas. Criticisms and observations by Nina Trige
Anderson, Pascale Berthault, Terry Conway and Jamie Gough, and especially comments,
suggestions and written exchanges with Alan Sears, were particularly helpful. Thanks as well to
David Fernbach and to the editorial committee of Science & Society for comments on earlier
versions, to Christopher Beck for his support and stimulating comments and questions, and to
Historical Materialism board-members, especially Paul Reynolds, for their comments and
suggestions. This article is dedicated to Torvald Patterson (1964–2005), in-your-face revolutionary
queer, in loving memory.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X606412
4 P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32
emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities.2 Although historical-

materialist categories have been supplemented and then to a large extent
supplanted in the field by Foucauldian approaches since the 1980s and queer
theory since the 1990s, elements contributed by the first, Marxist-influenced
generation of historians and theorists still survive to some extent within a
broad range of social-constructionist perspectives. Most historians and
theorists – if not necessarily most lesbian and gay laypeople – agree that
modern lesbian/gay identities are unique, clearly distinguishable from any of
the same-sex sexualities that existed before the last century or so and from
many that still exist in various parts of the world.
Whether they cite Marx, Foucault, or both, historians’ analysis of lesbian/
gay identity has linked its emergence to the development of modern,
industrialised, urbanised societies. Some historians3 have linked its emergence,
in a more-or-less explicitly Marxist way, to the development of capitalism.
This connection has continued to be made by writers working within a Marxist
framework.4 Recently, Kevin Floyd has detected more broadly a ‘greater
openness [in queer thought] to the kind of direct engagement with Marxism
that emphasizes its explanatory power’.5
Yet some theorists have seemed uneasy in recent years about the questions
that were initially not asked in these accounts. Once this specific form of
lesbian/gay identity has been explored and its emergence mapped, the question
arises: is this the end of the story? Especially as more writings have charted the
spread of LGBT communities in Asia and Africa, some have wondered whether
all other forms of same-sex sexuality are surrendering to what Dennis Altman
has critiqued as the triumphant ‘global gay’, a monolithic figure riding the
wave of capitalist globalisation.6 In much the same way that homo sapiens was
once naively viewed as the culmination of biological evolution, and liberal
democracy (according to Francis Fukuyama) as the culmination of human
history, one might have sometimes imagined that all roads of LGBT history
2. For example, Fernbach 1981; D’Emilio 1983a and 1983b. A word on terminology: the
term ‘lesbian/gay’ in this article refers to a historically specific phenomenon, defined in Section
I below. ‘LGBT’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is used as a broader term for people with
same-sex sexualities or identities. Although the word ‘queer’ is sometimes used by others to refer
generally to LGBT people, I try to reserve the word in this article to those who self-identify as
queer, who are often rebelling, not only against the heterosexual norm, but also against the
dominant forms of lesbian/gay identity. I sometimes use ‘gay’, ‘lesbian/gay’ or ‘LGB’ particularly
to refer to more ‘respectable’ people who emphatically do not identify as queer.
3. See, for example, D’Emilio 1983a.
4. See, for example, Hennessy 2000; Sears 2005.
5. Floyd 2009, p. 2.
6. Altman 2003.
P. Drucker / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 5
led to Castro Street in San Francisco. A few queer theorists have tried to
undermine any such monolithic vision of gay identity, rejecting the one-
dimensional focus on gender-orientation that underlies it.7 But, despite their
abstract championing of ‘difference’, they have rarely engaged concretely with
the historiography that sometimes seems to suggest that LGBT history is a
one-way street. In Paul Reynolds’s words, they have ‘centred on the social
production of categories discursively rather than determinantly through
essential causality and power of the social relations of production’.8
This article argues that there are socioeconomic forces that have been leading
LGBT people to question lesbian/gay identity as it took shape by the 1970s.
A historically-based, social constructionist, Marxist approach9 can examine
historically different sexual identities under capitalism, without privileging any
particular form of identity; can chart not only the emergence of lesbian/gay
identities, but also shifts in sexual identities in recent decades, exploring
connections between shifting identities and successive phases of capitalist
development. One useful tool is the Marxist theory of capitalist long waves,
and specifically Marxist analyses of the mode of capitalist accumulation that
was on the upswing until the early 1970s and turned sharply downward with
the recessions of 1974–5 and 1979–82.10 A historical-materialist analysis of
this kind may provide a more solid theoretical basis for addressing a central
political concern of recent queer theory – the defence of nonconformist or less
privileged LGBT people against ‘homonormativity’11 – than queer theory
itself offers, while helping to lay the foundation for a queer anticapitalism.
It is by now nothing new to link the rise of what might be called classic
lesbian/gay identity to the rise of a ‘free’ labour-force under capitalism. This
has taken centuries, and historians have generally looked at it as a long process.
But the breakthrough of gay identity as we know it on a mass-scale is in fact
very recent, more a matter of decades than of centuries. On closer examination,
7. For example, Seidman 1997, p. 195.

8. Reynolds 2003.
9. This article uses the term ‘social constructionism’ simply as the opposite of ‘essentialism’
(a view of sexual identities as biologically determined or otherwise transhistorical), not to refer
to a specific school of thought contrary to Marxism. Although Marxists such as Klara Zetkin and
Alexandra Kollontai wrote insightfully about sexuality within a purely Marxist framework, more
recent Marxist treatments of the subject have almost always engaged critically with other
approaches, such as psychoanalysis, feminism, Foucauldianism, post-colonialism and queer
theory. I believe that a rigorous Marxist approach to sexuality is not only compatible with an
engagement with other social-constructionist approaches, but in fact requires it.
10. Mandel 1978 and 1995.
11. Lisa Duggan has defined ‘homonormativity’ as a set of norms that ‘does not contest
dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them’
(Duggan 2002, p. 179).
the consolidation and spread of gay identity, especially among the mass of
working-class people, took place to a large extent during what some Marxist
economists refer to as the expansive long wave of 1945–73. Gay identity on a
mass-scale, emerging gradually after a period of repression from the 1930s to
the 1950s,12 was dependent on the growing prosperity of the working and
middle-classes, catalysed by profound cultural changes from the 1940s to the
1970s (from the upheavals of the Second World-War13 to the mass-radicalisation
of the New Left years) that prosperity helped make possible. This means that
gay identity was shaped in many ways by the mode of capitalist accumulation
that some economists call ‘Fordism’: specifically by mass-consumer societies
and welfare-states.14
The decline of Fordism has also had implications for LGBT identities,
communities and politics. The decades of slower economic growth that began
with the 1974–5 recession had a differentiated impact on LGBT people and
their communities. On the one hand, commercial gay scenes and sexual
identities compatible with these scenes advanced and were consolidated in
many parts of the world, particularly among middle-class layers. On the other
hand, commercial scenes have not been equally determinant for the lifestyles
or identities of all LGBT people. In the dependent world, many poor people
simply have a hard time taking part in commercial gay scenes. In developed
capitalist countries, while commercial scenes are more accessible to even lower-
income LGBTs, growing economic inequality has meant increasingly divergent
realities in LGBT people’s lives. Alienation has mounted among some LGBT
people from the overconsumption increasingly characteristic of many aspects
of the commercial gay scene, which inevitably marginalises many LGBT
people. Alternative scenes of various sorts (not always necessarily less
commercial) have proliferated.
There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between economic and
social developments and shifts in sexual, cultural and political identities. In
LGBT communities, as in the world at large, there is a whole set of institutions
that produce (among other things) lesbian/gay ideology and identity, mediate
the underlying class and social dynamics, and represent ‘the imaginary
12. See, for example, Chauncey 1994, pp. 334–46.

13. Bérubé 1983.
14. The concept of Fordism has been largely associated with the French ‘régulation’ school,
the current of Marxist economics relied on by, for example, Floyd (Floyd 2009). Many of the
basic elements of what regulationists call the Fordist mode of accumulation are also to be found
in Mandelian long-wave theory or the ‘social structure of accumulation’-approach. These
different schools differ with each other particularly about the causes of the rise and decline of
different modes of accumulation. While important, these debates are not directly relevant to this
article.
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.15 To analyse

how all these institutions – from newspapers and magazines to porn-video
producers to (divisions of ) publishing houses to websites and chat-rooms to
lesbian/gay-studies departments to small-business associations to sports clubs
and beyond – functioned ideologically under Fordism, and tended to function
differently with the rise of neoliberalism, would go beyond this article’s scope.
Nevertheless, no aspect of capitalist culture, including sexual culture, exists in
complete isolation from the mode of production as a whole; fundamental
shifts in capitalism are detectable, however indirectly, at the level of gender
and sexuality as at other levels of the systemic totality.16 This basic understanding
can give us the audacity, even in the absence of fully worked-out mediations,
to point out some trends that correspond to changing class-dynamics in LGBT
communities.
A large proportion of the institutions that define LGBT communities and
produce their self-images tend to reproduce and defend a unifying lesbian/gay
identity in apparent continuity with the identity that took shape by the 1970s.
But even a schematic analysis can show that classic lesbian/gay subcultures and
identities were put under pressure or into question in various ways by the
decline of Fordism. Ultimately, as the class and social reality of LGBT
communities became more fragmented and conflict-ridden, so did their
ideological and even sexual expressions. In the end, the ‘mode of production
of material life condition[ed] [their] social, political and intellectual life process
in general’; their ‘social being . . . determine[d] their consciousness’.17
The changes have included development of a queer identity seen at least in
part as in opposition to existing lesbian/gay identities, a growing visibility of
transgender identities, and the proliferation of a variety of other identities
linked to specific sexual practices or rôles. Despite these identities’ extraordinary
diversity, their rootedness in characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be
detected in a number of more-or-less common features. Whether or not they
are explicitly defined as queer, they respond to the increasingly repressive
character of the neoliberal order through their stubborn affirmation of sexual
practices that are still – or are increasingly – stigmatised. They also reflect the
growing inequality and polarisation of neoliberal capitalism by making sexual
power-differentials explicit, and above all through gender-nonconformity.
To understand these features better, this article looks briefly, first, at the
material basis of the emergence of lesbian/gay identity by the 1970s, and
second at the material basis of factors that have been fracturing it. It then
15. Althusser 1971, p. 162.

16. Floyd 2009.
17. Marx 1968, p. 182.
examines the ways in which economic changes have been ideologically

mediated in new expressions of gender and sexual identity, particularly among
transgendered and other queers. The last section discusses the political
implications of these changes and the challenges facing twenty-first-century
LGBT communities.
I. Classic gay identity

Classic lesbian/gay identity, as opposed to the many other forms of same-sex
identity that have existed in human history, is (or was) an identity reserved for
people whose primary sexual and emotional ties are with their own sex; who
generally do not conclude heterosexual marriages or form heterosexual families
(unlike, say, latter-day gay icon Oscar Wilde); who do not radically change
their gender-identity in adopting a lesbian/gay sexuality (unlike transgendered
people in a great variety of cultures); and in which both partners in relationships
consider themselves part of the same lesbian/gay community (a bizarre notion
to millions of men around the world who fuck men or boys without considering
themselves gay, and to millions of women at the less explicit end of the ‘lesbian
continuum’).18
This kind of gay identity emerged in developed capitalist countries in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries mainly among middle-class
layers (middle-class consumption was particularly crucial to capital-
accumulation in the expansive long wave that lasted from the mid-1890s to
the mid-1910s). In this same period, declining birth-rates and advancements
in birth-control made procreation less crucial as a focus of at least middle-class
sexuality, and sexual desire and object-choice more crucial. The growing
importance of consumption and desire helped foster a shift in the construction
of gender under capitalism, from conceptions of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’
focused on the innate character required for production and reproduction, to
conceptions of masculinity and femininity that were (in Judith Butler’s term)
more ‘performative’,19 defined to a greater extent by patterns of consumption,
dress and everyday behaviour.20 In this same period, middle-class men and
women (particularly women with education and professions) increasingly had
18. Rich 1983; Wekker 1999. Fernbach (Fernbach 1981, pp. 71–5) gave an early and clear
account of the uniqueness of lesbian/gay identity among historically existing forms of same-sex
sexuality. Greenberg 1988 provides the most comprehensive survey available of the range of
same-sex sexualities.
19. Butler 1999.
20. Floyd 2009, pp. 57–66.
the economic and social resources to live independently of their families and
to defy convention.
As John D’Emilio explained in a seminal article, capitalist development in
this way created the conditions for the rise of gay identity.21 The result was the
reification of sexual desire based on gendered object-choice, the rapid spread
among the middle-classes of medical and later specifically psychoanalytical
visions of sexuality,22 and ‘the invention of heterosexuality’ as well as
homosexuality as sexological and social categories.23 Working-class and poor
people even in developed countries, by contrast, tended well into the twentieth
century to focus on conceptions of manhood and womanhood rather than
reified conceptions of sexuality.24 Working-class men in the US in particular
continued to form relationships between transgendered people (‘fairies’) on
the one hand and non-transgendered, often married men on the other,25 or to
engage in sex with other men for money or social benefit without taking on
any distinctive sexual identity. In the same period in Germany, a homosexuality
defined as masculine was notably championed by the middle-class ‘Community
of the Special’, while Magnus Hirschfeld’s studies of same-sex relations among
largely working-class men led him to uphold a transgender ‘third sex’-model.26
After 1945, however, working-class living standards in capitalist countries
went up rapidly under the Fordist order, in which increases in labour-
productivity were matched to a large extent by increasing real wages that
sustained increasing effective demand, and various forms of social insurance
cushioned the blows that hit working people during dips in the business-cycle.
As a result, for the first time masses of working-class people – living off what
D’Emilio, following Marx, calls ‘free’ labour – as well as students and others
were also able to live independently of their families, and give sexual object-
choice a greater rôle in their lives and identities.
Working-class family-structures and gender-rôles also changed. For the first
time since the mid- to late-nineteenth century – when the family-wage had
become a cherished ideal, and sometimes a reality, for broad working-class
layers – the Second World-War made waged work at least temporarily normal
for even respectable working-class and middle-class women. This made a dent
in the pronounced gender-polarisation that had been characteristic of both
working-class heterosexuality and homosexuality in the first decades of the
21. D’Emilio 1983a.

22. Floyd 2009, pp. 43–5, following Foucault 1978, pp. 118–23.
23. Katz 1995.
24. Foucault 1978, p. 121.
25. Chauncey 1994.
26. Drucker 1997, p. 37.
twentieth century. In fact, as evidence from both the US and the Netherlands
shows, emerging lesbian/gay communities and organisations in the postwar
period tended increasingly to squelch effeminacy among gay men and
masculinity among lesbians.27 At the same time, higher funding for education
and expansion of a social safety-net (in developed countries at least) decreased
people’s economic dependence on parents to support them as students or
young people, on spouses to help pay the rent, and on children to save them
from poverty in old age. Full employment meant more job-opportunities for
some people who had previously been marginalised.
The combination of increased economic possibilities and a reconfiguration
of gender-rôles helped many more people in the 1950s and 1960s shape a
sexually hedonistic culture extending beyond the largely middle-class limits of
the earlier nonconformist milieu of the 1910s and 1920s. Within this broad
hedonistic culture it became possible for a growing minority to form same-sex
relationships and networks. While ‘Fordist mass consumption was, above all,
an attempt to secure a broad and sustained accumulation of capital’, the
diversification of consumer-marketing that it entailed created space for an
‘underground circulation of homoerotic images’ in ‘an increasingly less
underground gay male [and lesbian] network’.28
What remained to prevent people from living openly lesbian/gay lives were
the constraints of the law, police, employers, landlords, and social pressure of
many sorts. The lesbian/gay movements of the 1960s and ’70s rebelled against
these constraints, inspired by a wave of other social rebellions: black, youth,
anti-war, feminist and (at least in some European countries) working-class.29
Supplementing the attempts of early lesbian/gay groups to discipline their
members’ gender-norms, the second wave of feminism was key in drastically
reining in the butch-femme patterns that were still largely hegemonic in 1950s
lesbian subcultures (or at least in turning them into ‘a subterranean game’).30
The first lesbian/gay legal victories in the 1970s made mass, open lesbian/
gay/bisexual (LGB) communities possible in the developed countries for the
first time in history. Among the preconditions for these communities were the
general increase in people’s living standards and economic security, which
made autonomous lesbian/gay lives possible; the fact that the millions of
people who came out around the 1970s had a certain relative social
homogeneity, thanks in part to generational bonds of the baby-boom and in
part to the narrowing of economic divides in the 1950s and ’60s, so that there
27. Warmerdam and Koenders 1987, pp. 125, 153, 169; Floyd 2009, pp. 167–8.
28. Floyd 2009, p. 174.
29. D’Emilio 1983b.
30. Califia 2003, p. 3.
were fewer barriers to a common sense of identity; and a relatively favourable

political/cultural climate.
The homogeneity of 1970s lesbian/gay communities was of course relative.
Class and sexual differences always existed. The relative ease with which
women and men coexisted in the early years of gay liberation lasted only until
women became too fed-up with the treatment they often received at the hands
of gay men. Although gender-norms relaxed to a certain extent in the 1960s
and ’70s, this led to a true devaluation of masculinity and femininity only in
the context of a radical-feminist critique, which was never hegemonic;31 even
in the New Left, gender-relaxing countercultural influences coexisted with
Third-Worldist macho posturing.32 Racism was always a reality. Differences
that existed in the 1970s became far greater in the 1980s and 1990s, however,
for reasons that go deeper than an inevitable sorting-out.
II. Gays in the post-Fordist economy

The depressive long wave that began by 1974–5 was met by the late 1970s
with a neoliberal offensive. This offensive included (to be very schematic): a
shift to ‘Toyotist’ production-techniques and to ‘lean production’ generally;
economic globalisation, liberalisation and deregulation, taking advantage of
new technologies that ‘accelerated the speed and dispersed the space of
production’;33 privatisation of many public enterprises and social services; an
increase in the wealth and power of capital at labour’s expense; an increase in
inequality among countries (through the debt-crisis and structural-adjustment
policies) and within countries (through regressive tax and welfare-‘reforms’
and attacks on unions), and luxury-consumption that increasingly replaced
mass-consumption as a motor of economic growth. This offensive among
other things fragmented the world’s working classes. Big differences (re)
surfaced between better and worse-paid workers, permanent and temporary
workers, white and black, native-born and immigrant, employed and
unemployed.34 The less pronounced differences in income and job-security in
31. See Floyd 2009, pp. 177–8.

32. Floyd 2009, pp. 168–9.
33. Hennessy 2000, p. 6.
34. One study of wage-trends shows that among manufacturing workers in the US, ‘inequality
soared in the 1970s and 1980s, reaching levels far higher than those existing during the
Depression. The recovery after 1994 brought inequality down again, but only to just below that
of the worst years of the 1930s’ (Galbraith and Cantú 2001, p. 83). Mike Davis noted ‘extreme
income/skill polarization’ in the growing US healthcare, business-service, banking and real-estate
sectors, resulting in a ‘split-level economy’ and ‘reshaping the traditional income pyramid into a
national working classes in the 1960s, which were the backdrop to the rise of
lesbian/gay identity, became a thing of the past.
One factor complicating the neoliberal offensive was the difficulty of rolling
back some of the achievements of black, women’s and lesbian/gay movements.
The contradictions of these emancipatory movements in a time of working-
class weakness and growing inequality were played out in many of the
ideological debates of the 1980s and ’90s. Women’s equality and racial equality
became steadily more established as political commonplaces (in rhetoric if not
in reality) at the same time that redistributive and counter-cyclical economic
policies, far less controversial 40 years ago, were dismissed as outmoded and
counterproductive (until the 2008 crisis prompted massive redistribution of
wealth to the world’s biggest banks and various forms of stimulus).
What has the effect of all this been on LGBT people, communities and
movements?
The end of the Fordist expansive long wave was not bad news for everyone
by any means, and not for all LGB people specifically. Particularly among
some middle-class and upper-working-class social layers that prospered in the
1980s and ’90s, especially but not only in developed capitalist countries,
commercial gay scenes continued to grow, continuing to underlie lesbian/gay
identity.35
Market-friendly lesbian/gay identities prospered in commercialised spaces,
in the construction of two-income households among better-off gays and to a
lesser extent lesbians, and in the tolerant public space fostered by gay-rights
victories. Many relatively better-paid lesbian/gay people who benefited from
both economic success and gay-rights reforms have some cause to be contented
with the progress they have made: ‘inside a cozy brownstone, curled up next
to a health-insured domestic partner in front of a Melissa Etheridge video on
MTV, flipping through Out magazine and sipping an Absolut and tonic,
capitalism can feel pretty good’.36 While all social relations under capitalism
are reified – distorted so that relations between people are perceived as relations
with or even between things – the shift under neoliberalism to economic
growth founded increasingly on middle-class overconsumption raised the
reification of human relations among neoliberalism’s beneficiaries to new
heights. This applied notably to sexual and emotional relations among middle-
class gay men and lesbians.
new income hourglass’ (Davis 1986, pp. 214–18). Figures from the US Federal Reserve show
that income-inequality increased further at the end of the 1990s (Andrews 2003).
35. Altman 1982, pp. 79–97.
36. Gluckman and Reed 1997, p. xv.
The 1970s, ’80s and ’90s and the first decade of the new millennium were
also years in which open LGBT communities and identities became more
prominent in much of the dependent world, first in Latin America and later
in many Asian and African countries. Given that dependent countries as a
whole have suffered especially with the decline of the old forms of capital-
accumulation, communities and identities there have taken on very contrasting
forms.37 The period of slower growth and neoliberal reaction in the global
North was a time of recurrent and devastating crisis in many parts of the
South even before the generalised crisis of 2008 (notably in Latin America
after 1982, in Mexico again after 1994, in much of Southeast Asia after 1997,
in Brazil for several years after 1998, and in much of Africa with scarcely a
breathing-space). But this did not prevent the growth of middle-classes in the
South with incomes far above their countries’ averages and linked to global
consumer-capitalism – including gay consumer-capitalism.
Commercialised, Western-oriented lesbian/gay identities seem in this
context to have a complex and contradictory relationship with other same-sex
sexualities that co-exist with them in the dependent world. In many ways ‘gay’
and ‘lesbian’ are still largely middle or upper-class, US or Eurocentric concepts,
even if in other ways they provide a reference-point in struggles for sexual
emancipation.38
In both developed and dependent capitalist countries, the ideological and
cultural sway of gay identities in LGBT communities has spread beyond the
more privileged social layers in which people’s lives fit these identities most
comfortably. LGBT media in dependent countries rely to some extent on
lesbian/gay media in the capitalist metropoles for their material and imagery.39
In the developed capitalist countries, despite the proliferation of websites and
zines defining identities and subcultures for minorities within the minorities,
the most widely circulated books, periodicals and videos tend to be those most
closely linked to the new, predominantly middle-class, gay mainstream. Even
those who are economically least well-equipped for the commercial gay scene
are often dependent on it as a market for potential (short or long-term)
partners; more fundamentally, even celibate or monogamous people who are
at least temporarily not in the market for a partner still tend to define
themselves in the culturally hegemonic categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual or
straight. Even poor transgendered and queer people whose lives are most
remote from the images of the gay mainstream sometimes incorporate aspects
of gay mainstream-culture into their aspirations and fantasies, constructing
37. Drucker 2009, pp. 826–8.

38. Altman 2000; Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8.
39. Drucker 2000a, pp. 26–7.
their identities in part from images that may be borrowed and adapted from
very different social realities.
This hegemony of lesbian/gay identity over much of the LGBT world, and
the physical coexistence of LGBT people of different classes in lesbian/gay
spaces, provides arguments to those who downplay the importance of class in
‘mixed-class’ LGBT communities.40 It is true that the class-segregation that
characterised early-twentieth-century LGBT scenes eased in the Fordist
period. But cultural commonalities and cross-class relationships do not make
lesbian/gay identity and spaces class-neutral, any more than the existence of
sexual relationships between masters and slaves meant that slavery was not a
significant factor in them. ‘ “Undifferentiated” accounts of gay life tend to
narrate relatively well-resourced and privileged experience as gay experience,
and normatively promote this as a script for how gay life should be conceived
and lived.’41 Lesbian/gay spaces are not islands, but heavily influenced by the
structures of class in the surrounding societies: research on young LGBT
people’s schooling in Britain, for example, identifies ‘social class as a major axis
of power which positions LGBT people unequally and unjustly’.42 Moreover,
as the next section shows, the fracturing of LGBT scenes in recent decades also
has a class-dimension.
Both in the centres and at the margins of the world-capitalist system,
three aspects of the lesbian/gay identity that stabilised by the early 1980s fit
well with the emerging neoliberal order: the community’s self-definition as a
stable minority, its increasing tendency towards gender-conformity, and
marginalisation of its own sexual minorities.
Lesbians’ and gay men’s self-definition as a minority group, which built on
the reification of sexual desire that progressively consolidated the categories of
gay and straight over the course of the twentieth century, at the same time
expressed a profound social fact about lesbian/gay life as it took shape
specifically under neoliberalism. To the extent that lesbians and gays were
increasingly defined as people who inhabited a certain economic space (went
to certain bars, bathhouses and discos, patronised certain businesses, and, in
the US at least, even lived to some extent in certain neighbourhoods), they
were more ghettoised than before, more clearly demarcated from a majority
defined as straight. The fact that a fair proportion of those in the bars and
bathhouses were always people with at least one foot in the straight world,
sometimes even married people with children, was always an open secret, but
one which few people announced with fanfare; they were generally seen as
40. For example, Seidman 2011.

41. Heaphy 2011.
42. McDermott 2011, p. 64.
people who were still half ‘in the closet’, tended to be discreet in order to avoid
unpleasantness, and were in any event generally marginal to the developing
lesbian/gay culture. The fact that people continued to come out and join the
community at all ages – or, for that matter, sometimes form heterosexual
relationships at later ages and as a result often decrease their participation in
the community – was also none too visible.
The tendency of many early theorists of lesbian/gay liberation to question
the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, emphasise the fluidity of
sexual identity and speculate about universal bisexuality tended to fade away
with time as the community’s material reality became more sharp-edged. The
lesbian/gay-rights movement accordingly ran less risk of seeming sexually
subversive of the broader sexual order of gendered capitalism.
The decline of butch/femme rôle-playing among lesbians and of camp
culture among gay men also contributed to a hardening of the gender-
boundaries that remain central to capitalist societies. The drag queens who,
rebelling against the postwar tightening of gender-discipline, had played a
leading rôle in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion found that as social tolerance of
lesbians and gays in general began to increase in the 1970s, social tolerance for
gender-nonconformity in many lesbian/gay spaces decreased once more. In
the earlier, smaller community of the immediate post-Stonewall years, non-
gender-conforming gay men and lesbians, less able or less inclined to hide,
had been a higher proportion of the visible lesbian/gay milieu; as lesbian/gay
communities expanded, the influx of more ‘normal-seeming’ lesbians and gay
men diluted the prominence of transgendered people. In addition, the less
polarised gender-rôles in the broader culture, which had initially facilitated
the emergence of lesbian/gay identities, now increasingly restricted the room
available for more gender-polarised lesbian/gay identities. Although the
temporary relaxation of gender-norms in the 1960s had created some space
for playful gender-bending, full-fledged drag often seemed anomalous and
even embarrassing in the context of the androgynous imagery that was in
vogue in the early 1970s.
LGB communities thus increasingly defined themselves in ways that placed
transgendered people – whose communities predated the new lesbian/gay
identity by millennia – and other visible nonconformists on the margins, if
not completely out of bounds. Kevin Floyd’s identification of ‘an ongoing,
radical uncertainty about whether gay male sexual practice necessarily feminizes
any of the men involved’43 does not do justice to the ways in which the relation
between gender and sexuality is configured differently at different times and
43. Floyd 2009, p. 64.

locations within a global-capitalist totality that is neither static nor uniform,

but rather strongly differentiated by period, class, gender, and the processes of
combined and uneven development. We have seen, for example, that
transgendered sexuality was more common in the working class than in the
middle-class in developed countries in the early-twentieth century, as it still
tends to be in some parts of the dependent world. The late 1970s, at the cusp
of the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism, was the time in developed
countries when space for transgendered sexualities (and thus Floyd’s ‘radical
uncertainty’) was at its historical nadir.
While gay-male sexuality was masculinised and lesbianism feminised, the
increased centrality of consumption to LGB identity resulted in a series of
shifts in its sexual contours, some already apparent by the late 1970s and early
’80s, others emerging only in the ’90s or later. Obviously these shifts did not
reflect an instantaneous, spontaneous sea-change in all LGBT people’s felt
desires or sexual practices. Individual desire and psychology are more resilient
than that and are shaped over the course of lifetimes, not totally transmuted
by the social developments of a decade or two. In some cases the winds of
erotic fashion undoubtedly have shallower causes than profound socioeconomic
change, and it would be a mistake to read too much into them. But when
sexual identities and imagery took on more unequal and gender-polarised
forms at just the time when the surrounding societies were undergoing a sharp,
long-term rise in inequality, it would be implausible to dismiss the correlation
as pure coincidence.
In any event, as the decline of Fordism put welfare-state programmes under
pressure, a renewed emphasis on the centrality of the family to social
reproduction helped put a brake on the relaxation of gender-norms that had
characterised the 1960s. This conservative turn in the broader society was
accompanied by a shift among gay men from the largely androgynous imagery
and occasional gender-bending of the early 1970s to the more masculine
‘clone’-culture that took hold by the early ’80s. Feminine forms of self-
presentation that lesbian feminists once frowned on had also become more
common and acceptable among ‘lipstick-lesbians’ by the 1990s – a ‘celebration
of femininity’ that Gayle Rubin, for example, thought could ‘reinforce
traditional gender roles and values of appropriate female behavior’.44 A higher
degree of gender-conformity among LGB people facilitated their incorporation
into a neoliberal social and sexual order.
This conformity was congenial for the growing number of gay men and
lesbians who pursued professional, business or political careers in a number of
44. Rubin 1982, p. 214.

capitalist societies, without necessarily renouncing or hiding their sexuality

but preferably without ‘flaunting’ it. Even the lesbian/gay middle-class layers
that live off gay businesses and nonprofits – far from all of whom were among
the real economic winners of recent decades, but who tended to be spoken for
by those among them who were – preferred in general to keep LGB community-
expressions culturally inoffensive. Another layer of middle-class or middle-
class-identified lesbian/gay people, who were making their careers inside
mainstream businesses and institutions, sometimes cringed at manifestations
of a lesbian/gay community that marked them off too much from other people
of their class. Many of these people would like to be able to pursue their
careers in straight companies and institutions while being open about their
same-sex relationships – fewer people are willing to contract heterosexual
marriages these days and to keep their homosexual lives completely hidden
and marginal – and for the rest deny or minimise differences between them
and middle-class straights.
This professional layer has provided the solid social base for the most
moderate currents of LGB movements, which have often seen same-sex
marriage as the culminating moment in the process of gay emancipation. And,
in fact, same-sex marriage and adoption can be the culmination of some
LGBT people’s integration into the productive and reproductive order of
gendered capitalism. Paradoxically, while neoliberalism has in many ways
undermined the direct and obvious domination of wives and daughters by
husbands and fathers under the original Fordist gender-régime,45 neoliberal
cutbacks in social services, by privatising the provision of basic needs, have
been restoring the centrality of the family-unit to the social reproduction of
labour – in classed ways. While legal same-sex marriage or partnership can in
this context secure new benefits for middle-class and privileged working-class
lesbians and gays, for those most dependent on the welfare-state in countries
such as Britain and the Netherlands legal recognition of their partnerships can
lead to cuts in benefits.46
As the number of children being raised in households headed by same-sex
couples has risen, same-sex marriage and adoption can serve to legitimise and
regulate the growing rôle that lesbian and gay couples are playing in social
production, consumption and reproduction. Yet the rise of same-sex-couple-
headed nuclear families redefines and even reinforces rather than overcomes
the gay-straight divide, since the ways in which lesbians and gay men form
45. Brenner 2003, pp. 78–9.

46. Browne 2011.
families (through sperm-donorship, adoption, the break-up of straight families

or other trajectories) necessarily remain distinctive.
In the twenty-first century, an ideological factor has also played a crucial
rôle in integrating lesbian/gay people into the neoliberal order: the
instrumentalisation of lesbian/gay rights in the service of imperialist and
Islamophobic ideologies, which Jasbir Puar has defined as ‘homonationalism’.47
Particularly but not only in countries such as the Netherlands48 and Denmark,
where both same-sex partnership-rights and anti-immigrant racism are strongly
developed, this homonationalism has been key to consolidating and taming
lesbian/gay identity.
III. Social and sexual roots of alternative identities

The apparent uniformity of lesbian/gay culture in the mid-1970s in fact helped
disguise social and economic fractures opening up among LGB people. As a
result, the relatively homogeneous lesbian/gay identities that had taken shape
in North America and Western Europe by the 1970s were challenged and
fragmented over the following decades, though to different degrees in different
countries. There has been, in particular, a proliferation of alternative sexual or
gender-identities, more-or-less outside of the mainstream commercial scene.
Some, though far from all, of these alternative identities represent challenges
to the basic parameters of the gay/straight divide that emerged and was
consolidated through much of the twentieth century.
Contrary to much right-wing anti-gay rhetoric, the prosperous couples
focused on by glossy lesbian/gay magazines were never typical of LGBTs in
general. Data gathered by the US National Opinion Research Center’s General
Social Survey in the 1990s suggested that lesbian and bisexual women were
still far less likely than other women to have professional or technical jobs and
more likely to have service or craft/operative jobs, while gay and bisexual men
were more likely than other men to have professional/technical, clerical/sales
or service-jobs but less likely to have managerial jobs.49 The heteronormative
constraints of many economic sectors – the pressures to abide by a heterosexual
norm of behaviour – seems to drive many ‘low-wage service workers . . . to
accept a lower wage than they would be paid elsewhere in exchange for the
relative comfort of working in a queer environment’.50
47. Puar 2007, pp. xxiv, 38–9.

48. Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010.
49. Badgett 1997, p. 81.
50. Sears 2005, p. 106.
Whatever the causes (less ability or willingness to meet gendered job-

expectations, migration to more competitive job-markets, discrimination),
the net result (contrary to unfounded claims made not only by anti-gay
ideologues but also by some gay publications) was that, at least in the US,
both gay men and lesbians were under-represented in the higher-income
brackets (with family-incomes of $50,000 or more), while gay men in
particular were over-represented in the lower-income brackets (with family-
incomes of $30,000 or less).51 A more recent study showed that men in same-
sex couples were still earning significantly less on average than their straight
counterparts in 2005 ($43,117 compared to $49,777); while women in same-
sex couples earn more on average than straight married women, their income
is, of course, less than men’s.52 Transgendered people are even worse off: a
2006 study found that in San Francisco 60% of them earned less than $15,300
a year, only 25% had fulltime jobs, and nearly 9% had no source of income.53
The expansion of LGBT communities centred on gay commercial scenes
did not improve the situation of lower-income LGBTs. On the contrary,
Jeffrey Escoffier has noted that ‘the gay market, like markets in general, tends
to segment the lesbian and gay community by income, by class, by race and
by gender’.54 This is especially true of same-sex couples, particularly same-sex
couples raising children together, since two women living together are in a
sense doubling the economic disadvantages they both experience as women.
LGBTs are, moreover, more likely to be cut off from broader family-support
networks, and as the social safety-net has frayed, inequalities resulting from
wage-differentials have affected them with particular intensity.55
Across the capitalist world, the welfare-state has been shredded, unions have
been weakened, and inequality has grown. In this context, polarisation within
LGBT communities has been particularly great. Lower-income LGBs,
transgendered people, street-youth and LGBT people of colour have been
under assault in various ways in recent decades, as attacks on poor people and
minorities have multiplied, racism has intensified even more in the US, and
new forms of antagonism to black and immigrant communities (especially of
Muslim origin) have grown up in European countries. Young LGBTs and sex-
workers in particular have been victims of intensified forms of coercive
51. Badgett and King 1997, pp. 68–9.

52. Romero, Baumle, Badgett and Gates 2007, p. 2, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 241.
53. Transgender Law Center and San Francisco Bay Guardian 2006, cited in Wolf 2009,
p. 147.
54. Escoffier 1997, p. 131.
55. Jacobs 1997.
policing.56 Social polarisation within LGBT communities has coincided with

greater prominence for forms of sexual identity and practice that focus
explicitly on gender and power-differences and rôle-playing.
One of the first notable mutations in LGBT identity with the rise of
neoliberalism was the rôle that SM and leather played in the more masculine
culture that took hold among gay men by the early 1980s. While one gay-
male leather-bar opened in New York as early as 1955 and many more followed
by the early 1970s, only from 1976 on did leather-culture become a subject of
attention and debate in the broader lesbian/gay community.57 Soon SM came
‘to be linked with male homosexuality in the eighties as firmly as effeminacy
and an attack on gender roles was in the sixties and early seventies’,58 while SM
clubs such as New York’s Mineshaft became ‘an arena for the masculinization
of the gay male’.59
Paradoxically at this stage, while divisions between ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ that
would earlier have been widely rejected on liberationist grounds became
acceptable and sometimes blatant, virtually all the men in the scene were
masculinised in the process. It was as if SM, while celebrating ‘difference and
power’, served, in Dennis Altman’s term, as a ritual of ‘catharsis’, of both acting
out and exorcising the growing violence and inequality of the broader society.60
As Gayle Rubin put it, ‘class, race, and gender neither determine nor correspond
to the roles adopted for S/M play’.61
By the early 1980s, forms of sexuality that diverged from the perceived
feminist norm also affected the previously hegemonic lesbian-feminist culture.
Lesbian-feminist culture in a sense already struck a divergent note in the
1970s. The sense has persisted that lesbians in general play less of a rôle in
commercial scenes and persevere more in trying to sustain alternative scenes.
While of course some lesbians, like some gay men, are middle-class or rich, the
fact that women trying to survive independently of men have lower incomes
on average and are thus more likely to be working-class or poor has contributed
to this sense.
But while lesbian feminists had put working-class and poor women under
great pressure in the 1970s to abandon butch-femme relationships that had
been common among them for decades, some lesbians began in the 1980s to
56. Sears 2005, p. 103.

57. Rubin 1982, p. 219; Califia 1982, pp. 280, 244–8.
58. Altman 1982, p. 191.
59. Ira Tattleman, ‘Staging Masculinity at the Mineshaft’, cited in Moore 2004, p. 20.
60. Altman 1982, p. 195.
61. Rubin 1982, p. 222.
defend butch-femme vigorously.62 At about the same time some lesbians took
a visible part in SM culture, particularly in San Francisco. This dovetailed with
a general upheaval in the lesbian world through conflict between currents that
defined themselves as ‘anti-pornography’ and others that defined themselves as
‘pro-sex’.63
The most explosive issue in the ‘sex-wars’ was, briefly, the issue of
intergenerational sex, which was the subject of a major confrontation during
the organisation of the first US national lesbian/gay-rights march in 1979.
Going beyond understandable and legitimate concerns about coercion and
abuse of authority, some currents perceived power-differences between adults
and youths as precluding the possibility of consent to sex.64 However, the very
explosiveness of the issue quickly placed it beyond the pale of discussion.
In hindsight, the ‘clone’ and SM subcultures, lipstick-lesbianism and
sex-wars of the 1980s were only an initial phase in a longer-term fracturing
of LGBT identity. The consolidation of Reaganism and Thatcherism by the
mid-1980s coincided for LGBT people with the onslaught of the AIDS
epidemic, a trauma experienced as a sharp generational break. While some
men who survived the epidemic followed a gay variant of the trajectory of the
middle-class baby-boom generation, many younger people who came of age
in the era of AIDS and neoliberalism found the road to a safer middle-class
existence strewn with obstacles.
Beginning in the mid-1980s a queer social milieu emerged, made up to a
large extent of young people on the bottom of the unequal social hourglass
that had resulted from economic restructuring.65 One aspect of the underlying
social reality is that the lower young queers’ incomes were and the more meagre
their job-prospects, the less on average they identified with or wanted to join
the lesbian/gay community that had grown up since the 1960s and ’70s.
‘Economic changes . . . meant more part-time and contract work, especially for
young people, which left many unable to see a place for themselves in the by
then established gay middle class.’66
Above all initially in English-speaking developed-capitalist countries – the
developed countries where social polarisation is greatest – young queers
resisted disco-culture, a bar-centred ghetto, and the kind of segregation that fit
62. Nestle 1989; Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, pp. 397–404.

63. Vance (ed.) 1989; Linden, Pagano, Russell and Star (eds.) 1982; Califia 1982, pp. 250–9.
64. The state enforces a related point of view, as shown in hundreds of prosecutions of LGBT
people each year under age-of-consent laws, the repeated prosecutions of the Canadian gay paper
Body Politic for discussing the issue in print, and US Senator Jesse Helms’s successful move to
block UN recognition of any LGBT group that condones ‘paedophilia’.
65. Drucker 1993, p. 29.
66. Patterson 2000.
with ethnic-style minority-group politics. Self-identified queers refused ‘to be

comfortable on the social periphery – in the ghettos’.67 English-speaking queer
scenes have been echoed in some ways by queers in squatters’ milieus in
continental Western Europe. This generation had also grown up in far more
diverse and changeable family-structures, which made the notion of modelling
lesbian/gay households on traditional straight ones all the more implausible
for them. In some milieus of young rebels, gender and sexual categories have
become more fluid than would be usual in mainstream straight, gay male or
lesbian scenes.
Economic marginalisation and cultural alienation were closely interlinked
in the emergence of a queer milieu, making it hard in many cases to say to
what extent poverty was a cause of alienation, to what extent the choice of a
queer lifestyle contributed to more-or-less voluntary poverty, and to what
extent some queers were middle-class gays – particularly students and
academics – dressing and talking like down-and-outs, in some cases perhaps
only for a period of a few years of ‘float[ing] in and out of deviance or
propriety’.68 In other cases queerness may be defined so much by dress, style
or performance that it becomes as much a matter of consumer-choice and an
expression of reification as the middle-class gay identities it rejects.69
Nevertheless, the overall correlation between lower incomes and queer self-
identification seems clear.
If economic pressures made integration into the dominant lesbian/gay
culture a dubious proposition for many young and disadvantaged queers in
developed countries, the barriers have been all the greater for poor and
working-class LGBTs in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Dependent capitalist
countries have been the site over the last forty years of social constructions of
sexuality that are neither completely different from the predominant lesbian/
gay identities in imperialist countries in the 1970s nor merely expressions of a
single ‘modern’, globalised identity.70 Sexualities that were indigenous to the
dependent world’s precapitalist or early-capitalist social formations (such as
the traditional transgender identities of Southeast Asia and Latin America)
have persisted, while coexisting with lesbian/gay identities.
The result of this intersection of dependent development, sexuality and
culture was that poor and working-class LGBT people in the dependent
world were less likely than middle-class LGBs to have identities (let alone
incomes) that facilitated their integration into a Westernised, commercialised
67. Seidman 1997, p. 193; Drucker 1993, p. 29.

68. Califia 2003, p. xiv.
69. Hennessy 2000, pp. 140–1.
70. Drucker 1996.
gay scene.71 They were more likely to be transgendered people, more likely to
be subject to violence, and more likely to be dependent on family and/or
community-structures for their survival. The economic marginalisation that
they experience tended to make post-Fordist lesbian/gay identity at least as
problematic and alien for them as for young self-identified queers in North
America or Britain.
Marginalisation of millions of LGBT people worldwide because they are
poor, young or black has impelled many of them towards developing or
adopting identities that have broken to some extent with the dominant
patterns of post-Fordist gay identity. As we have seen, the dominant trend
since the 1980s, based particularly on the reality of more prosperous LGB
people’s lives, was for the lesbian/gay community to define itself as a stable and
distinct minority, tend increasingly towards gender-conformity, and marginalise
its own sexual minorities. By contrast, the nonconformist sexual and gender-
identities that have grown up among more marginalised layers have tended to
be non-homonormative: to identify with broader communities of oppressed
or rebellious people, to fail to conform to dominant gender-norms, and/or to
emphasise power-differentials that dominant lesbian/gay imagery tends to
elide. While these counter-identities have shown little sign of coalescing into
any overarching alternative identity – on the contrary, different counter-
identities can and do clash with each other72 – they do share a number of
features that correspond to structural similarities in their bearers’ positions
under neoliberal capitalism.
Non-homonormative identities defined by marginalisation on the basis of
age, class, region and/or ethnicity have overlapped with the growth or
persistence of subcultures that have been marginal in the commercial scene
because they constitute (sometimes extensive) niche markets at best and illicit
ones at worse. The relationship between alternative identities and marginalised
sexual practices is elusive, but there does appear to be a correlation. There are,
of course, many LGBTs who limit their sexual rebellion to the safety of a
particular brand of bar. But the more attached people are to their sexual
identities, the more reluctant many of them become to give them up at work
or in public.
Not coincidentally, the more visible transgendered people are, the less likely
they are in most societies to get one of the well-paid, permanent, full-time jobs
that have become scarcer and more coveted commodities in post-Fordist
economies. Moreover, some people are virtually or entirely incapable of hiding
71. Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8.

72. See, for example, Drucker 1993, p. 29.
aspects of their identities, particularly effeminacy in men or butchness in

women, that are often rightly or wrongly associated with sexualities that are
neither hetero- nor homonormative. Voluntary or involuntary, tell-tale signs
of sexual deviance often lead to management’s excluding people from
professional or service-jobs or to fellow workers’ hostility that impels people to
avoid or flee certain workplaces. Paradoxically, in the absence of general
guarantees for workers’ job-security or free expression at work, anti-
discrimination laws that protect LGB people in general may be of less than no
use to the sexually marginalised, as Ruthann Robson has noted: ‘If a company
employs four lesbians, a new manager can fearlessly fire the one who has her
nose pierced or who is most outspoken or who walks the dykiest.’73
These factors help explain the correlation that exists between subaltern
social positions and various alternative sexual scenes and identities that do not
fit into standard post-Fordist lesbian/gay moulds. This is not a straightforward
correlation between non-homonormative identities and working-class
affiliation. On the contrary, working-class lesbians and gays and lesbians and
gays of colour (sometimes, of course, the same people) have sometimes reacted
against self-defined queer or other sexually dissident groups when such groups
demanded visibility of them that would make their lives more difficult in
particular workplaces or communities.74 The correlation has been rather with
particular sectors of the working class – on average younger, less skilled, less
organised and lower-paid – that have expanded since the 1970s.
Part of the younger queer generation has taken up, and to some extent
recast, claims for some of the stigmatised sexual practices that were made
during the sex-wars of the early 1980s. In doing so they have rebelled against
homonormative ‘confining straightjackets that inserted some queers as the
tolerated “others” within the existing social relations of gender and sexuality
and marginalized others’.75 ‘ “Queer” [thus] potentially includes “deviants”
and “perverts” who may traverse or confuse the homo/hetero division’.76
By contrast with the earlier period, SM has been less in the forefront – SM
seems less politically laden now than it was in the sex-wars of the early 1980s –
and gender-bending and transgender all the more. SM seems to have become
less central to LGBT culture as it has increasingly, in diluted form, come to
permeate the broader sexual culture, as seen in the spread of piercing, tattooing,
and leather-fashion and accessories. Among LGBTs, the queer generation has
73. Robson 1992, p. 87, cited in Robson 1997, p. 175, n. 13.

74. Drucker 1993, p. 29.
75. Sears 2005, p. 100.
76. Hennessy 2000, p. 113.
tended more to play with issues of inequality and power-difference in other

ways that expose their artificiality and facilitate their subversion.
The contradictions of gender and power have been particularly visible in
transgender and gender-bending subcultures since the 1990s. As Dennis
Altman points out, drag has always to a certain extent subverted mainstream
gender-rôles through ‘veneration of the strong woman who defies social
expectations to assert herself ’;77 and Judith Butler has argued that drag subverts
gender by exposing it as a ‘performatively enacted signification’.78 Forms of
gender-bending have shifted over the decades, however. In the 1980s, Amber
Hollibaugh proclaimed that her vision of butch/femme was not a reaffirmation
of existing gender-categories but a new system of ‘gay gender’. More recently,
younger transgendered people seem more likely to take on gender-identities
that are difficult to subsume (if at all) under existing feminine or masculine
rôles. ‘Today lesbian butch/femme is acquiring more flexibility than it had in
the ’70s when I came out’, says Patrick Califia, thanks in part to a cross-
pollination of butch/femme with SM which creates space for ‘butch bottoms’
and ‘femme tops’.79 These more flexible and ambiguous forms of transgender
can be associated simultaneously with the myriad forms of transgender that
have existed for millennia around the planet, and with queer milieus that have
only emerged since the late 1980s in rebellion against the lesbian/gay
mainstream. They are thus, in a sense, very old and very new.
New forms of transgender contrast with the forms of transexuality, which
themselves arose only in the 1950s and ’60s, as defined by a wing of the
medical establishment. The medical experts not only tend to prescribe sex-
reassignment surgery as the standard cure for intense gender-nonconformity
but also tend to urge transexuals to adapt (perhaps somewhat less rigidly than
in the past) to the norms of their ‘new gender’.80 Queer-identified transgendered
people do not necessarily reject hormone-treatments or surgery, but they can
be selective in what they do or do not choose for themselves. Califia links this
new trend among transgendered people to SM people’s attitude towards
‘body-modification’: ‘A new sort of transgendered person has emerged, one
who approaches sex reassignment with the same mindset that they would
obtaining a piercing or a tattoo’.81 Often these transpeople do not see
themselves as transitioning from male to female or vice versa, but rather as
transgendered as opposed to male or female.
77. Altman 1982, p. 154.

78. Butler 1999, p. 44.
79. Califia 2000, pp. 186–9.
80. Califia 2003, pp. 52–85.
81. Califia 2003, p. 224.
More traditional poor and working-class transpeople for their part can
often struggle for years to save the money for their operations, including in
dependent countries, or simply change each others’ genitals without resorting
to official medicine. The thousands of transgender hijras in South Asia,
increasingly visible and militant among the poorest people of their region and
notably at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, do not often seem to
share European and North American queers’ interest in transcending or
blurring gender-categories. For that matter, even many intersex people (born
with genitals that do not identify them as unambiguously male or female) ‘are
perfectly comfortable adopting either a male or female gender identity’.82
Just the same, many LGBTs in dependent countries have been trying in
their own ways to resist pressures to claim them for a homogeneous, middle-
class-dominated lesbian/gay community, purge them of ‘old-fashioned’ aspects
of their identities, or make them come out in ways that would tear them away
from their families and communities without providing them with equivalent
support-systems. Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, for example, has expressed
his identification with Santiago’s downtrodden locas [transvestites] and his
rejection of the gay-male model he encountered in New York.83
To a greater or lesser extent, different forms of transgender are radically
subversive of the lesbian/gay identity that emerged under Fordism, in a way
that the would-be all-encompassing acronym LGBT fails to successfully
subsume in a single social subject. Transexuals who identify as straight (albeit
‘born in the wrong body’) often question what they have in common with
lesbians, gays or bisexuals. South Asian hijras, identifying with neither gender,
cannot be legitimately classified as either gay or straight. Nor can transgendered
queers who insist that they have moved beyond male and female.
In capitalism both North and South in this time of crisis, then, lesbian/gay
identity has been undergoing simultaneous construction and fracturing.84 A
very diverse and diffuse set of alternative sexual identities has been diverging
more and more from the post-Fordist, gender-conformist, consumerist lesbian/
gay mainstream, and in some cases challenge the very social and conceptual
basis of straight or lesbian/gay self-definition.
IV. Implications for liberation

Recognising the deep roots of the fracturing of same-sex identities necessarily
puts in question any universalism that ignores class, gender, sexual, cultural,
82. Herndon 2006, p. 1, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 230.

83. Mansilla 1996, p. 23, cited in Palaversich 2002, p. 104.
84. Drucker 2000a.
racial/ethnic and other differences within LGBT communities. These

communities and identities are being fractured in large part by fundamental
changes in the productive and reproductive order of gendered capitalism.
Young queers, working-class and poor LGBTs, transgendered people and
other marginalised groups have increasingly found themselves in objectively
different situations from people in the consolidating gay mainstream. It is thus
no surprise that they have tended to some extent to define distinct identities.
The forms taken by alternative, non-homonormative sexual identities do
not necessarily win them easy acceptance among feminists or socialists. The
lesbian/gay identity that emerged by the 1970s had much to commend it from
the broad-Left’s point of view (once the Left had largely overcome its initial
homophobia). By contrast, transgendered and other queers can raise the
hackles of many on the Left, since their sexuality strikes many as at variance
with the mores to be expected and hoped for in an egalitarian, peaceful,
rational future.
One may doubt, however, whether any sexuality existing under capitalism
can serve as a model for sexualities to be forecast or desired under socialism.
Nor is it useful to privilege any particular existing form of sexuality in
present-day struggles for sexual liberation. Socialists’ aim should not be to
replace the traditional ‘hierarchical system of sexual value’85 with a new
hierarchy of our own.
As Amber Hollibaugh pointed out many years ago, sexual history has first
of all to be ‘able to talk realistically about what people are sexually’.86 And in
radical struggles over sexuality, as in radical struggles over production, the
basic imperative is to welcome and stimulate self-organisation and resistance
by people subjected to exploitation, exclusion, marginalisation or oppression,
in the forms that oppressed people’s own experience proves to be most
effective.
This is not to say that Marxists should simply adopt a liberal attitude of
unthinking approval of sexual diversity in general, in a spirit of ‘anything
goes’. Our central concern must be to advance the sexual liberation of
the working class and its allies, who today include straights, LGBs and –
particularly among its most oppressed layers – transgendered and other queers.
Resisting the retreat from class in LGBT activism and queer studies, Marxists
should combat heterosexism and bourgeois hegemony among straights,
homonormativity and bourgeois hegemony among LGBs, and blanket
hostility to straights and non-queer-identified gays where it exists among
85. Rubin 1989, p. 279.

86. Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, p. 396.
self-identified queers. This will require seeking new tactics and forms of
organising within LGBT movements.
The post-Stonewall lesbian/gay movement waged an effective fight against
discrimination and won many victories on the basis of an identity widely
shared by those engaged in same-sex erotic or emotional relationships. But
this classic lesbian/gay identity has not been the only basis in history for
movements for sexual emancipation. In the German homophile-struggle from
1897 to 1933, for example, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee, the wing of the movement closer to the social-democratic Left,
tended to put forward polarised ‘third sex’-theories.87 This is what one might
predict on the basis of the evidence that egalitarian gay identities were at first
primarily a middle-class phenomenon, while transgender and gender-polarised
patterns persisted longer in the working class and among the poor.88 Today
in the dependent world as well, transgender identities seem to be more
common among the less prosperous and less Westernised.89 Rather than
privileging same-sex sexualities more common among the less oppressed,
however superficially egalitarian, the Left should be particularly supportive of
those same-sex sexualities more common among the most oppressed, however
polarised.
Another important consideration is the challenge that alternative, non-
homonormative sexualities can sometimes pose to the reification of sexual
desire that the categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight embody. Marxists
question the fantasy of consumers under neoliberalism that obtaining the
‘right’ commodities will define them as unique individuals and secure their
happiness; we should not uncritically accept an ideology that defines individuals
and their happiness on the basis of a quest for a partner of the ‘right’ gender.90
How will LGBT communities and movements be structured in a time of
increasingly divergent identities? Self-defined queer activist-groups, which
emerged initially in the US and Britain in the early 1990s, have also appeared
in recent years in a number of countries in continental Europe. They pose a
87. See Fernbach 1998, p. 51; Drucker 1997, p. 37.

88. Chauncey 1994.
89. Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8.
90. Kevin Floyd argues that ‘the reifying of sexual desire needs to be understood as a condition
of possibility for a complex, variable history of sexually nonnormative discourses, practices, sites,
subjectivities, imaginaries, collective formations, and collective aspirations’ (Floyd 2009,
pp. 74–5). Having earlier recalled Lukács’s later criticism of the conflation of objectification and
reification in his History and Class Consciousness, Floyd here reproduces it upside down, celebrating
both as Lukács had rejected both. Objectification, the alternate adoption of subject and object-
positions in an interplay between different human individuals, is inherent to sexuality; reification,
the petrifaction of specific rôles and sexual identities, is not.
radical challenge to mainstream lesbian/gay organisations, although they have

yet to show much of an orientation towards large-scale mobilisation, to take
root among the racially and nationally oppressed, or to prove their adaptability
to the dependent world.91 In countries where civil rights and same-sex marriage
have been won, the process of seeking new horizons and finding appropriate
forms of organising seems likely to be a prolonged one – especially since the
LGBT social and political landscape seems likely to remain more fragmented
and conflict-ridden than it was in the immediate post-Stonewall period. While
lesbian/gay identity has lost the central place it occupied in the LGBT world
of the 1970s and ’80s, it is still far from marginalised; on the contrary, the new
homonormativity shows no signs of succumbing to queer assaults in the
foreseeable future.
In the dependent world particularly, the diversity of LGBT communities
has resulted in an alliance-model of organising as an alternative or a supplement
to the model of a single, broad, unified organisation. The broadest possible
unity across different identities remains desirable in basic fights against
violence, criminalisation and discrimination as well as more ambitious
struggles for equality, for example in parenting. On other issues, LGBT rights
can be best defended by working and demanding space within broader
movements, such as trade-unions, the women’s movement and the global-
justice movement.92 At the same time, an alliance-model has in some cases
facilitated the process of negotiating unity among constituencies – such
as transgendered people on the one hand and lesbian/gay people on the
other93 – who are unlikely to feel fully included in any one unitary structure.
It can constitute a united front between those whose identities fit the basic
parameters of the gay-straight divide and those whose identities do not,
fostering the development of a truly queer conception of sexuality that, in
Gloria Wekker’s words, is ‘multiple, malleable, dynamic, and possessing male
and female elements’.94
In a more visionary perspective, developing an inclusive, queer conception
of sexuality can be seen as a way to move towards that ‘truly free civilization’
that Herbert Marcuse described a half-century ago in Eros and Civilization, in
which ‘all laws are self-given by the individuals’, the values of ‘play and display’
triumph over those of ‘productiveness and performance’, the entire human
91. For discussions from an anticapitalist perspective of the potential and limits of queer
radicalism, see Drucker 1993 and Drucker 2010.
92. On sexual politics in the global-justice movement, see Drucker 2009.
93. Califia 2003, p. 256.
94. Wekker 1999, p. 132.
personality is eroticised, and the ‘instinctual substance’ of ‘the perversions . . .

may well express itself in other forms’.95
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Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 33–44 brill.nl/hima
A Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery
Steve Edwards
Open University
s.j.edwards@open.ac.uk
Abstract
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, Historical
Materialism has brought together some of the most significant Marxist scholars working in this
area to debate the issues. This text introduces some of the questions raised by the Civil War and
Southern slavery for Marxists and introduces the essays that follow.
Keywords
American Civil War, slavery, Marx, mode of production
Marxist historians have frequently taken revolutions, civil wars and large-scale
conflicts as their focus of attention. There is obviously a point of subjective
identification in this concentration on points of heightened conflict; more
substantively, this spotlight on social upheavals has allowed Marxists to reflect
on economic and social transitions or transformations; to think about class-
agency; and compare modes of production and forms of exploitation. The
American Civil War is a case in point, drawing attention, inter alia, to
distinctions between free and unfree labour and their compatibility or lack of
fit with capitalism; dynamics of technical development and ideologies of
personhood and property.
For a long period from the 1960s, there was a strong Marxist presence in
debates concerned with slavery and the Civil War. This included landmarks of
Marxist history-writing: key works in the tradition of ‘history from below’
belong to this group, such as Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll and
Herbert G. Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925;
there have been important studies of modes of production, such as The Fruits
of Merchant Capital by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese and
Robin Blackburn’s significant volumes, The Making of New World Slavery:
From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 and The Overthrow of Colonial

34 S. Edwards / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 33–44
Slavery: 1776–1848; as well as studies of the political aftermath of the conflict

and the failed attempt to reconfigure the Southern states by Peter Camejo and
the impressive book by Eric Foner on this subject.1 In recent years, Marxist
work has been largely displaced in historical scholarship. Some historians have
focused on ethno-religious conflict, and while this is often disassociated from
patterns of class-exploitation, there is much to be learned from the best of this
work. Prominent current research also involves a rebooted political history
concerned with the doings of a political élite and a born-again empiricism. Of
course, there have always been studies that claimed that the Civil War was an
avoidable error, family feud, or a mere sectional dispute unconnected with
slavery or the class-character of society.
The Marxist engagement with slavery and the Civil War has recently
received a significant boost with the publication of John Ashworth’s magnificent
two-volume study, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic.2
Across more than 1,000 pages, Ashworth puts class-struggle and the conflict
between rival modes of production back at the centre of the picture. In his
first volume, published in 1995, he looks at the period between 1820 and
1850; the second volume, which appeared in 2007, considers the immediate
descent into war. We take the opportunity of the 150th anniversary of the
commencement of the Civil War to take up the issues raised by this important
work. Ashworth argues that the South was predicated on a form of precapitalist
commodity-production and that the resistance of slaves must be taken as a
key factor in the development of the conflict, emboldening Northern
abolitionists and frightening and entrenching the Southern planter-class who
came to see no possible reconciliation with antislavery ‘fanatics’. It is one of
the great strengths of these volumes that the author develops a conception of
class-struggle that can encompass what he calls the ‘potential’ for resistance as
well as more overt forms of social conflict. Slaves did occasionally rebel, as in
the 1831 insurrection in Virginia led by Nat Turner; sometimes there were
acts of defiance on the plantation and (more frequently) acts of flight, but,
almost perpetually, slaves took to skulking: this involved working badly,
damaging implements or injuring livestock, stealing and acting dumb; this
was a serious impediment to manufacture. Ashworth believes that these forms
of resistance shaped attitudes to slavery, and, we should note, we live with
their aftermath in the form of the racist imaginary in which African-Americans
still figure as lazy and slow-witted. For Ashworth, the stubborn recalcitrance
of slaves shaped the social fantasies of Southern planters and Northern
1. Genovese 1976; Gutman 1977; Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983; Blackburn 1998;
Blackburn 1999; Camejo 1976; Foner 1988.
2. Ashworth 1995; Ashworth 2007.
S. Edwards / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 33–44 35
abolitionists; we have to take seriously this kind of ideological projection. It is

fair to say that he is probably one of the most theoretically adventurous of
current Marxist historians and a notable student of ideology. In this work, he
pays close attention to the impact of struggles from below on the political
ideas of ruling classes.
In a brilliant instance of symptomatic reading, he considers the ‘absent
slave’ as constitutive of American democratic thought. That is to say, he focuses
in on the blind spots in American political thought where the slave ought
to be and finds an absence, a blank. This argument, which puts him close
to Domenico Losurdo’s account of liberalism as a Herrenvolk-democracy,3
suggests that the racialised slave was the invisible glue for a democratic politics.
This weird absence generated the paradox that Southern slaveholders
(Jefferson, Taylor) could become the most outspoken proponents of
egalitarianism, precisely because the ‘Slave Power’ associated the democracy
with an exclusively white people. In contrast, Northern politicians were
looking over their shoulder at exploited wage-labour, and this necessarily
restrained their advocacy of democracy. This compelling argument gives us
a subtle vision of class-struggle with racialised categories at its heart. Any
account of the Civil War and, indeed, of the formation of American democracy
will have to reckon with this argument about the absent slave. At the same
time, those concerned with the politics of race and racialisation need to
consider the way in which the absent slave underpinned a class-purview.
Ashworth looks at the attempted expansion of slavery into new territories;
the rise of the Republican Party, the association of land and economic
independence with freedom in Republican thought; the shift among Southern
ideologists from seeing slavery as ‘a necessary evil’ to open advocacy of the
‘peculiar institution’; and the secession from the Union. He also rejects the
claims of revisionist economic historians and others to erroneously find
dynamism in the Southern economy that probably was not there. Ashworth
argues that the planters were not committed to ‘profit-maximisation’, and
insists on the need to distinguish between free labour and wage-labour.
There were forms of free labour in the North that were distinct from wage-
labour (subsistence-farming and petty-commodity production), but, once we
contrast Northern wage-labour, rather than all free labour, with slavery, the
former is much more efficient and productive. He contends that class-struggles
between, on the one hand, slaves and slave-owners and, on the other, capitalists
and wage-workers, was containable, but only at the immense cost of pitting
the Northern and Southern ruling classes against one another in irreconcilable
3. Losurdo 2011.
conflict. The price of neutralising the very different class-conflicts in the North
and South was to heighten the tension between the societies separated across
the Mason-Dixon line and draw them into war. Morals and values were at the
forefront in the clash that left countless dead, but these values were rooted in
distinct ways of organising production and society. The class-struggle produces
a disturbance in the field of ideas or values. It should be noted that this
argument is a retort to revisionists and those intellectual and cultural historians
who have emphasised the errors and misapprehensions of politicians or
the rôle of religious convictions. Ashworth is able to accept many of the
revisionists’ claims, while rooting them in distinct forms of exploitation and
class-practices. The result of the clash was a bourgeois revolution which
reconstructed America under the hegemony of Northern bourgeois values.
For Ashworth, the economic inferiority of Southern slave-production was a
decisive factor in this outcome. None of this conveys the immense richness
of Ashworth’s study, which spans a rich gamut of topics ranging from the
shift from property to conscience as a qualification of democracy to the
‘nativism’ of the Know Nothings; from the ideologies of slavery to the growth
of wage-labour in the North.
While this symposium is not a direct response to Slavery, Capitalism, and
Politics in the Antebellum Republic, we are fortunate to have John Ashworth
kick-off the discussion with a short text aimed at a broad Marxist audience.
Charles Post follows with a substantive engagement with Ashworth’s work
from the perspective of ‘political Marxism’. For Post, Ashworth’s account is
based on ‘neo-Smithian assumptions’ or a ‘commercialisation’-model of the
development of capitalism. He rejects the claims for slave-resistance as a
determinant on the conflict, insists that territorial expansion and its blockage
was a defining issue, and argues that the market was an outcome of commodity-
production, and not the reverse. Post outlines an alternative American road to
capitalism which puts less weight on ideology and examines the conditions for
the transformation of ‘social-property relations’ in the North.4 In the process,
he rejects the idea of bourgeois revolution as a hang-over from the early Marx;
only by shifting to outcomes, he suggests, can the idea of bourgeois revolution
in America be meaningful. Post provides a powerful and insightful account
and, it should be noted, there is a strong political imperative to his insistence
that capitalism is necessarily territorially expansive. Some questions might be
asked of this account. Firstly, the rejection of Ashworth’s account of slave-
resistance takes him close to the ‘paternalism’-thesis of Genovese, but, as
Ashworth notes, historians now largely concur that slaves did not wish to be
4. See also Post 1982.

slaves. Second, in line with Brenner and Wood, Post rejects the idea of
articulations of modes of production; that is to say, the imbrications of distinct
forms of production in a larger division of labour under the hegemony of one
form.5 As Jairus Banaji puts it: ‘the history of capitalism comprises a series of
configurations of capital’.6 However, Post’s account of merchant-capital and
banking is, at least, open to the alternative suggestion that unfree labour in the
South was a component of American capital-accumulation or of British
accumulation (on the eve of the Civil War, the plantations of the South
produced as much as 70 per cent of the raw cotton for British manufacture).
On this reading, the upheaval of 1861–77 would be viewed as a disarticulation
or re-articulation of forms of labour-exploitation in the circuits of capital; the
Civil War disrupted the relation between the South and Britain, and produced
a new configuration under the hegemony of Northeastern capital.
Drawing on continuing work concerned with the reconstruction of the
concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’, Neil Davidson sets the Civil War in a wider
frame and offers a criticism of Ashworth’s book. Davidson appreciates
Ashworth’s return to the idea of bourgeois revolution, but finds an anomaly in
his focus on the motivations of Northern capitalists, rather than attention to
the consequences of the Civil War. If the conflicting values were unconnected
to the social organisation of production, he suggests, the War may have been
a territorial dispute between two capitalist powers ‘distinguished by the nature
of their political régimes’. This may underestimate the novelty of Ashworth’s
account of ideology. Nevertheless, Davidson has much of importance to say
about the pattern of bourgeois revolutions and the ways in which the American
Civil War relates to, and differs from, the other instances in the series – it is a
very late example of active bourgeois involvement in a bourgeois revolution.
Like Post, Davidson argues that an account of revolutionary transformations
must shift from agency to outcomes; from class-leadership to clearing conditions
for independent centres of capital-accumulation. However, reconfigured in this
way, he defends the idea of ‘bourgeois revolution’.7 He rejects the thesis, common
since the work of the Beards in the 1920s, that the events of the War and the
subsequent reconstruction represent a second American Revolution, completing
unfinished business.8 The War of Independence was not a bourgeois revolution,
because there was no feudalism in place. The real blockage on capitalist
5. See, for example, Wood 2003.

6. Banaji 2010, p. 11, although we should note that Banaji himself rejects ‘articulation’-
models.
7. See Davidson 2003; Davidson 2005a; Davidson 2005b.
8. Beard and Beard 1927.
development was not feudalism, or feudal impediments to capital-

accumulation, Davidson argues, but slavery. He combines Moses Finley’s
characterisation of five such societies (Ancient Greece, parts of the Roman
Empire, the American South, Cuba and the West Indies) with Robin
Blackburn’s suggestion that the South was a ‘systemic’ slave-society, rather
than a society employing slave-labour.9 This is an important point, because,
arguably, a mode of production has to be characterised, not by the variety of
forms of exploitation it contains, and not even by the numerical preponderance
of any of those forms, but by the particular relation of exploitation from
which the ruling class draws its surplus. By this definition, the South was a
noncapitalist mode of production. Davidson argues that, while slavery is
perfectly compatible with capitalism under certain conditions (Jamaica,
Barbados), the particular limitations in the South made the plantation-
economy a noncapitalist form of production structurally incapable of adopting
to capitalist laws of motion. For him, the decisive conflict was between a
Northern capitalist-class and a civilisation in the South that was hamstrung by
both its internal settlement between planters and poor whites (what has come
to be called ‘the wages of whiteness’)10 and the paradoxes of the need for
territorial expansion. Slave-production, or ‘production corresponding to the
slave’, was integrated into an international-capitalist market and was ‘capital-
producing’, but this was an ‘entire society’ predicated on racialised slavery that
could not be reformed; in fact, it was aggressive and expansionist. The conflict
was thus unavoidable, and the outcome was a subordination of the South and
surviving forms of noncapitalist labour to capitalist reproduction throughout
the Republic. Davidson makes the novel claim that the South was sui generis a
non-capitalist mode of production, but also not a slave-mode of production.
Instead, it was an arrested transitional form. One immediate problem with
this proposition is that it incorporates a smooth sense of progression across
time; nevertheless, it is an important thesis which requires careful consideration.
It will be apparent that Ashworth, Post and Davidson are, at various points,
close to and distant from one another, working over the problems in
kaleidoscopic patterns.
Essays by August Nimtz and Robin Blackburn both explore the thought of
Marx in relation to the Civil War. Blackburn compares the views expressed by
Marx with those of Abraham Lincoln, and points out just how unusual was
the former’s antislavery conviction and support for the North, even among
progressive thinkers. Blackburn assesses the equivocal attitude to slavery on
9. Finley 1983; Blackburn 1998; Blackburn 1999.

10. Roediger 2007; Allen 1997.
the part of Lincoln and other Northern Republicans, and considers the factors
that led to the Emancipation Acts of 1863. These issues included ‘contraband’
(slaves fleeing to free territory); the emergence of black fighting regiments
and, drawing on the work of Bruce Levine, the presence of German-radical
exiles from 1848, who broadened the antislavery appeal beyond evangelical
and teetotal circles (they were fond of beer).11 The German ’48ers played an
active rôle in the re-election of Lincoln and drove an explicitly antislavery
agenda. Many of them saw active frontline-action in the War, with allies of
Marx and old Communist League members rising to senior rank in the
Northern army. Blackburn reminds us that the word ‘emancipation’ re-emerged
in the vocabulary of Marx with this struggle (it is absent from the Communist
Manifesto). August Nimtz argues that Marx’s writings on the Civil War are
exemplary applications of historical-materialist method. He suggests that
reflection on the War was significant enough to lead Marx to postpone work
on Capital (although this was only one more postponement); in the process,
Marx considered the race/class-relation for the first time.12 Nimtz argues that
two key advances stem from this engagement. First, Marx and Engels
abandoned the idea of a progressive rôle for imperialism, which they had
advocated in 1848 and 1849, and shifted to a defence of Mexico against
US aggression. Second, they recognised that the abolition of chattel-slavery
was a condition for the emancipation of the working class. Slavery and racism
were inherently oppressive for labour in ‘black skin’, and also demobilising for
the Northern working class and poor whites in the South. The ‘wages of
whiteness’ represented a major impediment in the struggle against capitalism.13
These essays include fascinating reflections on a letter Marx wrote to Lincoln
on behalf of the International. Finally, Eric Foner – one of the major historians
of the period, offers his reflections on these contributions.14
The views of Marx are no substitute for historical research, but it is worth
turning to his work for some questions, if not answers. As we have seen, Marx
and Engels were strong advocates of the Northern cause and pushed for
abolition. Marx wrote a series of significant commentaries to this effect in the
New York Tribune and the Viennese liberal paper Die Presse. There are also
comments and reflections to be found throughout his writings. However,
there is no systematic consideration of slavery in Marx’s writing, and many of
his observations are asides meant to clarify the specificity of capitalist
production. What is more, Marx appears to classify slavery in the American
11. Levine 1992.

12. See also Anderson 2010, pp. 79–114.
13. Roediger 2007; Allen 1997.
14. Unfortunately, Professor Foner was unable to address Davidson’s contribution.
South in incompatible ways. At times, he describes this production as ‘a mode

of production corresponding to the slave’;15 he also refers to a ‘slave or
plantation economy’.16 In this vein, he wrote:
The present struggle between the South and the North is, thus, nothing less than
a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free
labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer
peacefully co-exist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the
victory of one system over the other.17
It should be noted that Marx does not use the phrase ‘slave-mode of production’;
nevertheless, these formulations correspond to Davidson’s inter-systemic
struggle. In these instances, Marx counterposes a noncapitalist mode (a ‘slave
or plantation-economy’) in the South to Northern capitalism based on free
labour. Yet he also described Southern plantation-owners as a capitalist class.
In the Grundrisse, he suggests: ‘The fact that we now not only call the plantation
owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their
existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’18 Elsewhere,
Marx characterised the plantations as centres of ‘commercial speculation’
where ‘a capitalist mode of production exists, if only in a formal sense. . . . The
business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists’.19 He further
described the exploitation of slaves as geared to produce ‘surplus value’.20 There
is more of the same order. In a third proposition (also cited by Davidson
below), he writes:
Direct slavery is as much a pivot of our industrialism today as machinery, credit,

etc. Without slavery no cotton; without cotton no modern industry. Slavery has
given value to the colonies; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is
the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Thus before the traffic in
Negroes began, the colonies supplied the Old World with only very few products
and made no visible change in the face of the earth.21
This is a key example of what Marx calls the ‘colonial system’, a process
through which merchant-capital, raw materials, precious metals and access to
markets fed the accumulation of capital in its core-centre. The point is that
15. Marx 1973a, p. 98.

16. Marx 1959, p. 791.
17. Marx 1973b, p. 351.
18. Marx 1973a, p. 513.
19. Marx 1968, pp. 302–3, cited in Banaji 2010, p. 67.
20. Marx 1954, pp. 226–7.
21. Marx 1955, pp. 49–50.
this system cemented, rather than dissolved, unfree labour. Once the capitalist
world-market has impacted on other forms of production, it makes sense to
suggest that we are dealing with noncapitalist and not precapitalist forms of
production.
Citing further examples would only amplify the problem, which is familiar
enough; Marx is working out concepts and thinking aloud; he was also
working across distinct genres of writing, from the notebook to the journalistic
intervention aimed at shaping opinion. These determinations should not be
ignored; Marx was garnering liberal support in his journalism, and it is possible
that he strategically argued that the South was precapitalist. The one thing we
can say is that there is no definitive version of his views on the American
South, instead, we have three variant descriptions. The South is: (i) a
noncapitalist mode of production predicated on slavery; (ii) a variant form of
capitalism producing key commodities for the world-market on the basis of
slave-labour; (iii) a component of the international division of labour,
subordinate through the world-market to British industrial capitalism (the
colonial system). Each formulation has something to be said for it (and
concomitant implications for understanding the Civil War), and there are
problems whichever way we turn. Are we really going to characterise the
American South as a slave-mode of production in the middle of the nineteenth
century? Could there really be such a system with this scale of commodity-
production for trade on the world-market? Yet this was a society with a
predominance of unfree labour, restricted investment in industry and restricted
consumption via the market. If this is capitalism, it is indeed a ‘peculiar
institution’. Marx’s suggestion that we view the colonial system as an aspect of
international-capitalist production is insightful, and helps explain why the
British bourgeoisie would probably have intervened to aid the slaveholders’
revolt had the sacrifices of the British proletariat not made this course of action
impossible for them. Nevertheless, well before the War, the slave-society of the
South had clearly taken on its own powerful ‘law of motion’, and Marx does
not address this.
Aware of some of these conundrums, Neil Davidson suggests that we should
return to first principles, which is an excellent proposition as long as we can
agree on what they are. Centrally, this turns on two questions: is capitalism to
be defined by: (i) the commodification of ‘free’ wage-labour, which requires
the development of a market in labour or by production of commodities for
the market; (ii) by national-economic units or international circuits of
production and exchange? This is to recap old debates between Dobb and
Sweezy and their recurrence that has pitted political Marxists against world-
system-theorists, among many other related disputes. The polarities are, of
course, probably false, the result of trying to apply Marx’s abstract determination
to actual social formations; of taking the British road to capitalism as the

model; or studying national formations in isolation. Recent historical research
in the Marxist tradition is increasingly complicating these propositions by
shaking up the story of bourgeois revolutions and successive modes of production;
by (re)considering the varieties of labour-exploitation simultaneously configured
in different societies or looking at the articulation of modes of production. All
of this requires much more theoretically reflexive consideration and careful
historical research.
All that we can say here is that Marxist historians have moved back-and-
forth between these perspectives; perhaps it is fairer to say that the points of
view have always had their advocates, sometimes one line of research has been
in the ascendancy, only to wane before another (re)emerges. Ever since the
pioneering work of Eric Williams, some historians have seen the slave-
plantations as an integral part of a world-capitalist market.22 We need not go
as far as Williams in suggesting that slavery provided the capital for industrial
take-off in Britain, or that it was abolished when it suited capitalist interests,
but there can be no doubt that it contributed significantly to generating
banking-capital and gave a fillip to the maritime interest. Among the ‘idyllic
proceedings’ that characterise primary or so-called primitive accumulation,
Marx lists ‘the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting
of blackskins’.23 Of course, Immanuel Wallerstein and other world-systems-
analysts also belong to this camp.24 In contrast, Fox-Genovese and Genovese
insisted that the slave-South was a noncapitalist social form, although they
also acknowledged the compatibility of slavery with capitalism in the West
Indies.25 Yet other authors have argued that the Southern plantations were
forms of capitalist production, such as Mintz, Patterson, Fogel and Engerman,
and Banaji.26 Those who advocate the position that the South was a noncapitalist
mode of production currently have the upper-hand, and this point of view has
received a strong boost from Ashworth’s major book. All of the historians in
this symposium share some variant of this perspective, but the debate is far
from being closed.
Marxist theory is emerging from the doldrums of the long 1980s, but this
process is uneven, and arguably Marxism has been on the back-foot in history-
departments more than in some other areas. Historical Materialism envisages
22. Williams 2005.

23. Marx 1979, p. 915.
24. Wallerstein 1983.
25. See ‘The Slave Economies in Political Perspective’, in Fox-Genovese and Genovese
1983.
26. Mintz 1969; Patterson 1979; Fogel and Engerman 1995; Banaji 2010.
this symposium as a contribution to ongoing historical scholarship across

different trends in the Marxist tradition. The journal has recently published a
symposium on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and
the Mediterranean, 400–800,27 and there are plans for similar collections of
essays on Soviet history and on Jairus Banaji’s Theory as History. Discussions of
this type offer a platform for further debate in particular fields of study and to
help clarify and refine the conceptual armoury of historical materialism. We
welcome further contributions to these debates and research in historical
subjects drawing on the Marxist tradition.
References
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Oppression in Anglo-America, London: Verso.
Anderson, Kevin B. 2010, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western
Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ashworth, John 1995, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume 1:
Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— 2007, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume 2: The Coming of
the Civil War, 1850–1861, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Banaji, Jairus 2010, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, Historical
Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard 1927, The Rise of American Civilization, New York: The
Macmillan Company, Inc.
Blackburn, Robin 1998 [1988], The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848, London:
Verso.
—— 1999 [1997], The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–
1800, London: Verso.
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II, 43: 113–71.
Camejo, Peter 1976, Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861–77: Marxist Analysis of the Rise and Fall
of Radical Reconstruction, New York: Monad Press.
Davidson, Neil 2003, Discovering the Scottish Revolution, 1692–1746, London: Pluto.
—— 2005a, ‘How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?’, Historical Materialism, 13,
3: 3–33.
—— 2005b, ‘How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Continued)’, Historical
Materialism, 13, 4: 3–54.
Finley, Moses 1983, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman 1995, Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro
Slavery, New York: W.W. Norton.
Foner, Eric 1988, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, New York: Harper
and Row.
27. Historical Materialism 2011.

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and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
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Books.
—— 1988, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, Hanover, NH.:
Wesleyan University Press.
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Vintage.
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the Civil War, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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Wishart.
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Draft), translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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edited by Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
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Class, Revised Edition, London: Verso Books.
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Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2003, Empire of Capital, London: Verso.
Towards a Bourgeois Revolution?

Explaining the American Civil War
John Ashworth
University of Nottingham
john.ashworth@nottingham.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1
to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand,
Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers.
It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the
point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable.
However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of
intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a
‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system
of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of
Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core.
Keywords
Slavery, American Civil War, mode of production, ideology, bourgeois revolution
I
The American Civil War has attracted an enormous amount of attention from
historians, the great majority of whom have, of course, written from outside
the Marxist tradition. Nevertheless, some Marxist scholars have addressed the
subject and have concluded that the War marked a revolution, indeed a
bourgeois revolution. Out of four years of warfare, with an unprecedented
amount of slaughter and bloodshed, came the emancipation of more than
three million slaves, the consequent confiscation of more than three billion
dollars of ‘property’ in those slaves, and a transformation in the politics of the
country. The revolutionary nature of the struggle has been relatively easy to
demonstrate; some scholars have insisted that the War paved the way, indeed

46 J. Ashworth / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 45–57
was indispensable in securing the necessary conditions, for the growth of

capitalism in the United States. Hence the ‘bourgeois revolution’.2
In a two-volume work concerned essentially with the years from 1820 to
the outbreak of war in 1861 I have tried to advance an explanation of the
origins of the Civil War, an explanation of the destruction of slavery, and a
re-interpretation of the War as a bourgeois revolution. This work was written
within an explicitly Marxist framework, though it offered an interpretative
schema different from that which Marx himself (who did of course live
through, observe, and comment on these events) put forward, and different
too from that which other Marxists have presented. The subject is of course
an important one, for Marxists and non-Marxists alike, and it was perhaps
inevitable that my interpretation would provoke dissent from different points
on the political spectrum. The purpose of this essay is to restate that argument,
to make it accessible, not merely to historians of the United States but also,
more generally, to those working in other areas within the Marxist tradition,
and to stimulate debate amongst other Marxists working in this area.3
II
Let us look first at the causes of the War. My argument stresses the resistance,
actual or potential, of the subordinate classes in both the North and the
South. Social historians, who have in the last few decades re-examined
slavery minutely, have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the
overwhelming majority of slaves did not wish to be slaves.4 They yearned for
freedom and adopted various forms of resistance. These included shirking
duties, sabotaging tools and machinery, treating livestock badly, and feigning
illness. More dramatic was flight; some slaves ran away, in the most extreme
cases in an attempt to reach the North and freedom. Most dramatic of all were
acts of aggression and violence, ranging from arson to poisoning to servile
rebellion. Some of these forms of resistance, such as insurrection, were rare in
the United States. The fear of them, however, was extremely widespread and it
drove the masters to take a whole series of actions, some of which marked
important stages on the road to civil war. At these moments the slaveholders
2. On Marxist interpretations of the Civil War see, for example, Pressly 1962; Novack (ed.)
1976; Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983; Genovese 1967; Post 1982.
4. Strange though it may now seem, this ‘discovery’ was really only made by mainstream
historians in the aftermath of World-War II. A landmark publication was Stampp 1956.
J. Ashworth / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 45–57 47
were responding to the potential for resistance as much as, or more than, to
acts of resistance themselves.
It would, however, be quite mistaken to argue that the slaves were on the
verge of revolution in 1861, when war broke out. On the contrary, the
slaveholders were able to contain their slaves and neutralise their resistance.
The crucial point, however, is that this could only be done at a huge price. The
price would be their continued survival.
This effect was achieved by virtue of an increasing enmity with the North.
Once again it is essential to look at the relations between the dominant and
the dominated classes, this time in the free states. Here a decisive development
was the growth of wage-labour, which by the 1850s probably accounted for a
majority of the Northern workforce.5 It is vital to understand that the wage-
worker had traditionally been viewed, in European thought, as akin to a slave,
someone who was simply too dependent on the employer to be a fit citizen of
a republic. The American tradition was itself heir to these views; its founders
Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had extolled not the wage-worker but
instead the yeoman farmer, who owned his own land and was thus, it was
claimed, ‘independent’.6 This tradition had ironically offered support to the
slaveholder, not overtly in the form of an explicit celebration of slavery (though
this was sometimes heard), but instead covertly, by a rhetorical and ideological
assimilation of slavery to farming. The slaveholder was presented as another
worthy and independent citizen of the agrarian republic. ‘Democracy’, which
meant in these years the conferring of political rights on adult white males,
rested on the agrarian interest, with the slaveholder viewed as a farmer, and the
slave scarcely viewed at all. This was the ideology of the Democratic Party,
generally in the vanguard of movements to widen the suffrage to include all
adult white males.7
The growth of wage-labour, however, brought major changes in its wake.
Given that huge numbers of these labourers had the vote, it was necessary for
Northerners to explain, both to others and to themselves, that these workers
were not the threat to a democratic polity that had once been thought. It was
necessary to explain why they could be trusted and, above all, perhaps, to
state what the Northern economy, Northern society, and the Northern political
system had to offer them.
Just as the slaveholders in the South were able to contain both the actual
and potential resistance offered by their slaves, so Northern élites were able to
5. Lebergott 1961, pp. 290–1.

6. The classic statement of this position is Jefferson 1964, p. 157. Many other examples from
later decades can be found in Ashworth 1987.
7. Ashworth 1995, pp. 21–40.
contain both the actual and potential resistance offered by their wage-workers.
In 1861 there was no revolutionary proletariat in the North. On the contrary,
the Northern labour-system was more successful, and perhaps more stable,
than it had ever been.
There was, however, a major, indeed insuperable, problem. Although the
dominant classes in each section could contain the potential for opposition
from below, as it were, they could do this only by subscribing to values and
practices that aggravated opposition from across the Mason-Dixon line. In
other words, intrasectional conflict could be contained, but only by making
intersectional conflict increasingly severe. Integration and stability within a
region (section) of the nation made for disruption and instability within the
nation as a whole. The Civil War marked the culmination of this process.
III
What were these values and practices? First, the economic practices: All
scholars recognise that the antebellum South lagged far behind the North in
the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. The task, however, is to
explain this lag. I suggest that slave-resistance is the key constraint. Slaves in
industry often treated machinery badly and this may have inhibited the
tendency to invest in such machinery. Moreover, many industrial and urban
settings gave the slave what was, from the masters’ standpoint, too much
freedom; he might associate with unruly elements: free white workers, free
blacks (a most undesirable class in the eyes of the slaveholder), even itinerant
Northerners who might harbour antislavery sentiments. Flight was easier in
urban settings. Although some slaves were indeed used in industry, influential
Southerners were wont to complain that the slave who was ‘made a mechanic’
was immediately ‘more than half freed’.8
If such fears did indeed constrain the development of Southern industry,
they simultaneously deepened Northern opposition to Southern slavery.
Northerners, especially in the final decades of the antebellum Republic,
congratulated themselves on the progress of their economy and on its
superiority (in terms of developmental momentum and potential) to that of
the South. Here was a means of integrating Northern society. All Northerners,
whether manufacturers, merchants, farmers or wage-workers, were invited
to participate in these celebrations. Northern economic development was
thus a force for integration within the North, just as its absence within the
South played the same rôle there. The result was growing sectional conflict as
8. Ashworth 1995, pp. 80–121.

virtually every Northern enemy of slavery, from the most moderate to the
most radical, in these years stressed its damaging effects on the Southern
economy.9
Like other Northerners, wage-earners were constantly told that they had a
deep stake in the Northern economy. This was not simply because of its
developmental potential, but also because of the unprecedented opportunities
it offered for social mobility. Even if poor, the wage-worker, as Abraham
Lincoln observed repeatedly, did not need to remain poor. Nor did he need to
remain a wage-worker. Instead he might become first an independent craftsman
or farmer, and then finally an employer of wage-earners in his turn. Here was
an ideological claim of enormous power and importance. Yet once again,
however much its integrative effects might promote Northern stability, this
could only be done by creating still greater scorn for Southern slavery. The
slave had little opportunity to become anything other than – a slave.
Southerners became increasingly concerned, in the final years of the antebellum
Republic, with the dangers posed by free blacks and they made it increasingly
difficult for slaveholders to manumit their slaves. The vast majority of course
did not even wish to do so. But if the denial of opportunities for freedom was
necessary to maintain the stability of the slaveholders’ régime it once again
made slavery seem retrograde and anachronistic and thus threatened the
stability of the nation. The slave simply lacked the incentives for labour that
so invigorated the free worker and, as a result, energised the entire Northern
economy. Here was another cause of the conflict between North and South.
IV
Alongside these economic practices and values were a number of moral issues,
whose impact can be understood in the same way. As we have seen, Southerners
had to contend with the possibility that their slaves might flee. As a result
they demanded, and received in 1850, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law.
This required all Northerners to aid in the rendition of fugitive slaves, and
indeed presented this duty as a constitutional obligation. Here was a direct
response to the problems posed by slave-resistance. But once again it challenged
key Northern values. Many Northerners, having abandoned the notion that
the ownership of property was the key to social stability and the prerequisite
for political rights, had come to believe instead that the conscience was the
all-but-infallible guide to human action. This too was an integrative force in
the North, in the sense that all Northerners, whether they owned property or
9. Ashworth 1995, pp. 157–68; Ashworth 2007, pp. 265–303.

not, whether they worked for wages or not, were invited to celebrate their
right to follow the voice of the conscience within. But the new Fugitive Slave
Law required Northerners to put their moral scruples aside when coming to
the aid of the slaveholder who sought to recover his slave in the North.
Although many were certainly prepared to do so, many were not, and they
cited the absolute and unconditional need to follow the conscience as grounds
for disobeying the new law. These men and women were among the most
resolute enemies of Southern slavery.10
In much the same way, it was almost inevitable that a society in which
increasing numbers of men and women took this view of their conscience
should come to view slavery itself, and not merely the rendition of fugitive
slaves, as grossly immoral, indeed ungodly. The essence of slavery, after all, was
that the slave could not respond to the dictates of his conscience. Instead he
was a mere instrument, someone who was required to obey the will of another.
The Fugitive Slave Law was thus, as one radical antislavery senator observed, a
‘Heaven-defying bill’. Although only a minority of Northerners were ever
prepared to go so far, these abolitionists had a disproportionate influence in
convincing Southerners of the impossibility of dealing with Northern
‘fanaticism’ and thus in inflaming sectional hostilities.11
Northerners of this persuasion revered, along with the conscience, the
family. One of the effects of Northern economic development, and more
specifically of the growth of wage-labour, was an increasing separation between
the world of work and the world of the family. Some Northerners viewed the
family and the home as a refuge, a ‘haven in a heartless world’. It was a vital
source of order and harmony for the wider society. But where did this leave
slavery? The slave lacked a family; under slavery, marriage had no legal status,
partly because the master wanted to use the threat of its break-up to discipline
his slaves. Thus the family might be broken up; parents had no right to keep
their children. According to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, the greatest work of antislavery propaganda of the nineteenth century,
‘the worst abuse of the system of slavery is its outrage upon the family’.12 Once
again, these values had an integrative effect within the North just as their
denial to the slaves helped maintain discipline and stability in the South. Once
again, they could only result in a deepening of the sectional divide. It was
possible to invite the Northern wage-worker to enjoy and celebrate the right
to follow his conscience and his right to ‘a family non-marketable’. But if this
10. Ashworth 1995, pp. 168–74.

11. Sumner 1870–83, p. 404.
12. Stowe 1854, p. 257.
invitation were accepted, the result was likely to be an increasing revulsion

from chattel-slavery.13
V
Finally, there was a series of political confrontations between North and South
which revealed a similar pattern or set of processes. When antislavery emerged,
or rather re-emerged in the early 1830s, it posed a challenge to Southerners.
As they acknowledged, they did not want their slaves to be contaminated by
abolitionist doctrines. Hence they took steps to ensure that this did not
happen. At the same time, and responding to the fears of slave-insurrection
that would periodically grip the Old South, they took steps to ensure that
rebellions did not occur. For example, and especially in the Deep South, they
curtailed freedom of speech. In Congress, they tried to suppress debate on the
antislavery petitions that in the mid-1830s began to flood the nation’s
legislature. When in the early 1840s there were signs of British antislavery
activity in Texas, they moved to annex Texas. And fearful of Northern voting
power in Congress, they made a series of attempts to acquire additional states,
most notoriously in Kansas in the mid-1850s.14
Some of these attempts were successful, others were not. But the key fact is
that they all incurred an enormous degree of hostility and resentment in the
North. These Southern responses had one thing in common: each challenged
the liberties not merely of the slave but also of the free Northerner. Restrictions
on free speech, on the right to petition, and on the power of the majority
threatened white Northerners, who were themselves being taught that their
democratic rights were a precious heritage of freedom. Did not demands for
additional territory for slavery (which seemed to many Northerners merely
a minority interest in a minority section of the Union) confirm that the
nation was, in reality, being governed by an aristocratic ‘Slave Power’ bent on
subduing the liberties of white Americans as well as slaves? Here was yet
another challenge to the Northern ideals which were so important to the
integrative process there, a challenge that was mounted in order to maintain
the stability of slavery in the South.15
13. Ashworth 1995, pp. 174–81; Ashworth 2007, p. 238.

14. These themes are treated in most of the standard surveys of the antebellum years, but
nowhere more perceptively than in the works of William W. Freehling. See, especially, Freehling
2007.
15. Ashworth 1995, pp. 142–3, 464–6; Ashworth 2007, pp. 244–64.
VI
Historians used to believe that the sectional controversy could be understood
with little or no reference to the slaves themselves, whose aspirations for
freedom they either did not recognise or could not relate to the politics of the
era. Similarly, such class-conflict as there was in the North has seemed to many
scholars to have been largely unrelated to the sectional conflict and to the
subsequent eradication of Southern slavery, achieved as it was by the triumphant
Northern armies.
It is also fair to say that even some Marxist scholars have operated within a
framework that has obscured these forms of class-conflict. In the schema I
have proposed, class-conflict is potential as well as actual. Actions taken by
élites to prevent such conflict, either with Northern wage-earners or with
Southern slaves, are as important and as consequential as the conflict itself.
Moreover, for class-conflict to occur there is no need for either slaves or wage-
workers to feel class-consciousness. Indeed there is little evidence that the
slaves in the South had such consciousness while in the North the antislavery
thrust came from groups who believed that the glory of the North was its very
classlessness. Concerted collective action on the part of groups who are
conscious of a shared class-position and determined to struggle to improve
that position is one way that class can make itself felt in history, but it is only
one, and almost certainly not the commonest one. Assuredly the American
Civil War cannot be explained in these terms. A brief narrative of the events
of the sectional controversy may, however, serve to suggest that it can instead
be explained in terms of the processes I have described above and with the
understanding of class and class-conflict that I have proposed.16
VII
Slavery had provoked controversy since, indeed before, the founding of the
Republic. But this conflict had been muted because in the era of the American
Revolution most Southern leaders had believed, with Thomas Jefferson, that
slavery would, and should, die out gradually and peacefully. This was in fact
the course it took in the decades after independence in the Northern states,
where it had existed but where it had not been critical for the regional economy.
But in the South the process was radically different. A conjuncture of
developments took place which, by 1820 at the latest, confirmed to all careful
16. This understanding of class is not, of course, original; it does, however, depart from the
views of distinguished Marxist scholars such as E.P. Thompson. See Thompson 1968.
observers that slavery was not merely stable in the South but that it was
expanding. Technical innovations, such as the invention of a new cotton gin
in the 1790s, combined with a new availability of land on which cotton and
other crops could profitably be grown and with a growing demand for those
crops from Europe. The result was a huge opportunity for Southern planters,
one that they would eagerly grasp.
A new era for slavery quickly ushered in an equally new era for antislavery.
Abandoning his previous faith in colonisation (the voluntary repatriation of
slaves, or freed blacks to Africa), William Lloyd Garrison was the first and
most conspicuous of those Northerners who in the early 1830s demanded the
immediate abolition of slavery. Abolitionists expounded many of the views we
have already considered. They condemned the Southern economy for its
backwardness, which they attributed unhesitatingly to slavery; they condemned
the political power of the slaveholders (the ‘Slave Power’) for the threat it
posed to freedom in the South and throughout the nation. Above all, however,
they focused on the immorality of slavery, the violence it did, not so much
physically to the slave, but morally, by depriving him of home, family and the
right to follow his conscience.17
The next twist in the story came with the Southern response to abolitionism.
But it is important to note that the abolitionist enterprise could not have been
even remotely viable if the slaves had not wanted their freedom; the antislavery
cause was difficult enough as it was. And the same thirst for liberty, the same
desire to resist enslavement, resulted in a highly conspicuous attempt at servile
insurrection in Virginia, led by Nat Turner in 1831. Abolitionism and the
Turner revolt served to convince some Southerners – and their numbers would
steadily rise over the coming years – that they could not afford to stand by and
watch the antislavery phalanx augment its power in the North, and the North
augment its power in the nation. There then followed a series of actions which,
whilst attempting to shore up the power of slavery, in fact deepened antislavery
sentiment in the North, by linking the cause of antislavery with that of white
freedom. Southerners experimented in the early 1830s (unsuccessfully) with
the idea of nullifying federal laws, tried in the late 1830s and early 1840s
(successfully for a time) to negate the right of petition to Congress, and
curtailed (for the entire lifetime of slavery) freedom of speech and opinion in
the South, and especially the Deep South. They even closed the mails to
abolitionist pamphlets.18
17. Ashworth 1995, pp. 125–91.

18. Ashworth 1995, pp. 369–414.
Into this maelstrom came the question of territorial expansion. Here the
rôle of the Democratic Party was critical. Some Southerners made it clear that
they wanted additional territory for slavery, fearing, probably mistakenly, that
on purely economic grounds the institution must either expand or perish.
Others made the same demand, but out of an essentially political fear that if
the North were able to acquire additional free states the time would eventually
come when Northerners would not merely control the federal government
but would have sufficient voting power to alter the constitution and abolish
slavery everywhere within the nation. The Democratic Party proved a
hospitable home for these Southerners and proved for a time a potent
instrument through which to press for the extension of slavery. The big gain
came when Texas was annexed to the Union in 1845, under Democratic
auspices.
This gain was not secured, however, on explicitly proslavery grounds.
Instead mainstream Democrats claimed that the agrarian republic could and
should be perpetuated by territorial acquisitions. This ideology, which had a
genuine appeal to many who had little interest in protecting slavery, served to
legitimate territorial expansion into the Southwest, where slavery could either
be protected or introduced, as well as into the Northwest, in much of which
it was prohibited. Here the ideology of ‘Democracy’, with its assimilation of
the planter to the slaveless yeoman farmer, came once again to the aid of the
slaveholder.
An increasing number of Northerners, however, argued instead that the
North must itself expand and that Northern capitalism was profoundly
threatened by the prospect of plantation-slavery in the West. Some of these
Northerners sometimes also expressed a concern for the welfare of the slave,
but others confessed their indifference to the moral dimension of slavery and
acknowledged that they were solely motivated by their concern for the
economic opportunities and political rights of whites. By 1850 there were
signs that the two groups would be able to coalesce and, within a relatively
short time, perhaps, control the North and the nation.19
The following decade saw a political transformation. When Southerners
tried yet again to open the way to the expansion of slavery, this time into
Kansas, and some Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, showed
themselves prepared to acquiesce, the result was the collapse of one party, the
Whigs, and the creation of another, the Republicans. With the Democratic
Party reduced to increasing impotence in the North (though stronger than
ever in its political heartland, the South), the way was clear for the triumph of
19. Ashworth 1995, pp. 414–92.

the Republican Party in 1860. The Republican presidential candidate of that

year, Abraham Lincoln, was committed to the ultimate abolition of slavery,
though he had no blueprint as to how it was to be achieved and acknowledged
that it might take many decades. This, however, was enough for the states of
the Deep South, which then left the Union. With the Lincoln administration
refusing to accept secession, and the newly formed Confederacy insisting on
the right to control the forts formerly owned by the Washington government
but existing within its boundaries, the confrontation at Fort Sumter, with the
Confederates firing the first shot, was the signal for the outbreak of civil war.20
The rôle of the economy here needs to be elucidated. It was not that there
was a direct conflict between Southern slavery and Northern capitalism, since
each could prosper together. Indeed each did prosper in these decades; the
Northern and Southern economies were, to a significant degree, interdependent.
However, economic growth deepened the commitment of each section to its
labour-system. The processes of commercial development strengthened the
attachment of the South to its agrarian economy, while at the same time
furthering the development of capitalism (understood as entailing a widespread
employment of wage-labour) in the North.
There were other economic processes at work, too. Some scholars working
within or outside the Marxist tradition have noted the changing patterns of
trade in the 1850s. Links between the Northeast and the Northwest grew
stronger, with the development of a sophisticated railroad-network, for
example, binding the regions as never before. The growing maturity and
increasing integration of the Northern economy has seemed to many scholars
to be linked to the region’s growing political integration, as demonstrated in
the rise to dominance in virtually the entire North of the Republican Party.
The question is, however, how the economic changes related to the political.
It is in the realm of party-politics that the answer is to be found. Within
the North, the groups with the closest economic links to the South were
probably the conservative Whigs, often revealingly referred to as ‘Cotton’
Whigs because of their attachment to, and dependence upon, the South. But
as the importance of these economic ties diminished (at least in relative terms)
so a brake upon the growth of antislavery sentiment in the North was removed.
The result was to facilitate the Republican rise to power and to deepen
Northern hostility to slavery.
The conflict between North and South, however, although rooted in
economic practices, was essentially over values, or world-views. The values
20. An account of these events can be found in many works. One of the best is in McPherson
1988, pp. 3–307.
that supported the free-labour (increasingly dominated by wage-work) society

of the North came into collision with the values and practices needed to
sustain slavery in the South. We have noted these values; they centred on the
home, the family, the conscience, the potential for social mobility and
economic development, the right to freedom of speech, the right of the
majority to rule. Each either threatened or was threatened by the South.
Sectional conflict and ultimately civil war would be the result.
VIII
The War witnessed the destruction of slavery and the freeing of more than
three million slaves. This had not been a priority of the Lincoln administration
at the outset. Lincoln, although insisting on the ultimate eradication of slavery,
had had no clear understanding of the way in which this might be achieved.
But in the War, the weaknesses of slavery, rooted in the reluctance of the slaves
to be slaves, came decisively into play. The long-term constraint imposed by
slavery on Southern economic development proved catastrophic for the
Confederacy, which simply could not match the economic power of the North.
Moreover, the opposition of the slaves to the régime resulted, in the final years
of the War, in the disintegration of the Southern social system, as the slaves
took advantage of unprecedented opportunities for flight. In their tens of
thousands they escaped and joined the advancing Union armies. At this point
the slaves were finally able to play a direct, rather than an indirect, rôle in the
destruction of chattel-slavery in the United States.21
The result was in a real sense a bourgeois revolution. It was not that the
Northern economy had had in plantation-slavery a major obstacle to its future
development, whose removal had been necessitated by war. It was not even the
case that the postbellum South would fall into line with the rest of the nation;
instead, the South would be for three generations a backwater outside the
national mainstream and, in stark contrast with the antebellum years, able to
exert relatively little influence on the nation’s development. But the exclusion
of the South from that mainstream provides the key to the rôle of the Civil
War and the struggle over slavery. The demise of the Confederacy meant
not merely the end of slavery but the triumph of Northern values, their
incorporation into the very fabric of the nation. After the War the values of the
Republican Party, which stressed the compatibility, indeed the inseparability,
of democracy and capitalism, became the values of the nation. They achieved
national hegemony.
21. Ashworth 2007, pp. 628–72.

This was not an economic gain in the sense of a readily measurable addition
to wealth. But it was a legitimation of the economic system of the North and
indeed the nation as a whole, from which the dominant groups in the nation
would derive an incalculable benefit, economic, political and ideological. It
would indeed complete the creation of a bourgeois republic in the United
States.
References
Ashworth, John 1987, ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology in the United States,
1837–1846, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— 1995, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume 1: Commerce and
Compromise, 1820–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freehling, William W. 1991, The Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— 2007, The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene D. Genovese 1983, The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery
and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1967, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society
of the Slave South, First Edition, New York: Vintage.
Jefferson, Thomas 1964 [1783], Notes on the State of Virginia, New York: Harper and Row.
Lebergott, Stanley 1961, ‘The Pattern of Employment Since 1800’, in American Economic
History, edited by Seymour Harris, New York: McGraw-Hill.
McPherson, James M. 1988, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Novack, George (ed.) 1976, America’s Revolutionary Heritage, New York: Pathfinder.
Pressly, Thomas J. 1962, Americans Interpret their Civil War, New York: Free Press.
Stampp, Kenneth M. 1956, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, New York:
Vintage Books.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1854, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Boston: Jewett.
Sumner, Charles 1870–83, The Works of Sumner, Volume 2, Boston: Lee and Shepard.
Thompson, Edward Palmer 1968, The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth:
Pelican.
Social-Property Relations,
Class-Conflict and the Origins of the US Civil War:
Towards a New Social Interpretation*
Charles Post
City University of New York
cpost@bmcc.cuny.edu
Abstract
The origins of the US Civil War have long been a central topic of debate among historians, both
Marxist and non-Marxist. John Ashworth’s Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum
Republic is a major Marxian contribution to a social interpretation of the US Civil War. However,
Ashworth’s claim that the War was the result of sharpening political and ideological – but not
social and economic – contradictions and conflicts between slavery and capitalism rests on
problematic claims about the rôle of slave-resistance in the dynamics of plantation-slavery, the
attitude of Northern manufacturers, artisans, professionals and farmers toward wage-labour, and
economic restructuring in the 1840s and 1850s. An alternative social explanation of the US
Civil War, rooted in an analysis of the specific path to capitalist social-property relations in the
US, locates the War in the growing contradiction between the social requirements of the
expanded reproduction of slavery and capitalism in the two decades before the War.
Keywords
origins of capitalism, US Civil War, bourgeois revolutions, plantation-slavery, agrarian petty-
commodity production, independent-household production, merchant-capital, industrial capital
The Civil War in the United States has been a major topic of historical debate
for almost over 150 years. Three factors have fuelled scholarly fascination with
the causes and consequences of the War. First, the Civil War ‘cuts a bloody
gash across the whole record’ of ‘the American . . . genius for compromise and
conciliation’.1 The four years of armed conflict undermine claims that US
capitalist democracy has the capacity to resolve any and all social conflicts
* The author would like to thank John Ashworth, Robert Brenner, Vivek Chibber, Teresa
Stern, Ellen Meiksins-Wood and the participants in a panel on this topic at the Historical
Materialism conference in London, November 2009, for comments on an earlier version of this
essay.
1. Moore 1966, p. 113.
C. Post / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 58–97 59
peacefully. Second, the Civil War marked two major phases in US socioeconomic
development. Whether described as ‘agrarian’ and ‘industrial’, or ‘traditional’
and ‘modern’, there is little debate that production and exchange in the
US was radically transformed after the Civil War. Finally, the abolition of
slavery during the War altered the social and economic position of African-
Americans – the origins, course and outcome of the War was intimately linked
to the changing character of race and racism in the US.
The existing historical literature on the origins of the Civil War grapples,
directly or indirectly, with one central question – why did the existence and
expansion of plantation-slavery become the central and irreconcilable political
question in the 1840s and 1850s? Put another way, why had political leaders
and the social groups they represented been able to reach enduring compromises,
create stable national parties which competed for support in both the slave-
South and ‘free labour’-North, and marginalise debate on slavery and its
expansion before the mid-1840s? Why did the question of slavery-expansion
become irrepressible afterwards, creating regionally based parties, leading to
Southern secession and war?
Charles and Mary Beard2 produced the last systematic, synthetic social
explanation of the US Civil War – an explanation that situates the political
conflicts leading to secession and war in socioeconomic processes and forces.
According to the Beards, the antebellum industrial revolution unleashed a
process of economic diversification and growth in the commercial Northeast
and agrarian Northwest, while reinforcing cotton-monoculture and economic
stagnation in the plantation-South. The divergent paths of economic
development led to conflicts between Northeastern ‘business’-groups who
wanted federally funded transport-construction (‘internal improvements’), a
national banking and monetary system, public-land policies that discouraged
agrarian expansion, and protective tariffs for US manufacturers; and Southern
planters who opposed all of these policies. Caught between Northern business
and Southern agriculture were the independent family-farmers of the
Northwest, who opposed a protective tariff and national banks, but wanted
inexpensive land and federally financed transportation-construction.
Prior to the 1840s, the Democratic Party built an agrarian alliance of
Southern planters and Northwestern farmers against Northeastern businessmen
grouped in the National-Republican and Whig parties. After the annexation
of Texas in 1844, the Democratic alliance collapsed as the Northwest’s
diversified agriculture was integrated into Northeastern commerce and
manufacture. The new economic alignment led the slaveholders to oppose the
2. Beard and Beard 1927, Chapters XV–XVIII.

60 C. Post / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 58–97
free distribution of public lands to small farmers (Homestead Act) and federal
subsidies of road, canal and railroad-construction. The new Republican Party
of the 1850s brought together Northeastern business and Northwestern
agriculture on a platform of protective tariffs, free homesteads, a federally
subsidised transcontinental railroad, and ‘free soil’ – a Congressional ban on
slavery’s expansion into the territories in the West.3 The Republicans’ victory
in 1860 led to the Civil War and the triumph of Northeastern business over
both the Southern planters and the Northwestern farmers.
Beginning in the 1940s, historians identified a number of empirical
problems with the Beards’ social explanation of the Civil War. Some4 challenged
the Beards’ claim that Northeastern business was united in support of national
banks, protective tariffs and ‘free soil’. Merchants and manufacturers were
often on opposite sides of the debates on monetary policy, tariffs and the
expansion of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. Other historians5 documented
long standing tensions within the Democratic-agrarian alliance between
Northern family-farmers and Southern-slaveholding planters, differences that
predate and explain the farmers’ support for the Republicans in the late 1850s.
Since the 1950s, two non-social explanations of the US Civil War have
dominated historical writings. Both the ‘revisionist’6 and ‘new political’7
historians reject any attempt to provide a materialist explanation of the US
Civil War. For the revisionists, the political conflicts leading to the Civil War
were repressible. Antislavery and proslavery agitators forced the question of
slavery-expansion onto the national-political arena. No insolvable conflict –
political, ideological or economic – existed between the North and South. The
political crisis that culminated in war could have been avoided if moderate
and clear-sighted political leaders had displaced the ‘blundering generation’ of
demagogic politicians who appealed to ‘sectional fanaticism’ in the 1840s and
1850s. Such a political leadership could have allowed a peaceful resolution of
the minor differences that divided the North and South, avoiding four years
of senseless and purposeless carnage.
3. In the United States, new areas annexed through conquest or purchases (or some
combination of both) were initially organised as ‘territorial governments’. While settlers in these
territories elected legislatures, the president appointed territorial governors who had veto-power
over territorial laws, and the territories did not have representatives in Congress. After achieving
a certain population, territories applied for ‘statehood’ from Congress, which conferred the right
to elect their own governors and legislatures and have representatives in Congress.
4. Foner 1941; Sharkey 1958; Unger 1964.
5. Berwanger 1967; Foner 1969; Morrison 1967.
6. Randall and Donald 1961; Craven 1966.
7. Holt 1969; Holt 1978; Holt 1999.
The ‘new political’ historians agree that there was no social foundation for
the sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery into the Western territories
in the 1850s. However, they reject the idea that blundering political leaders
aggravated the sectional tensions which culminated in the Civil War. Instead,
these historians argue that the sharp increase in Irish-Catholic migration in
the two decades before the War produced new, ethno-cultural conflicts. The
increasing polarisation of politics in the 1850s over the right of Catholic
immigrants to become citizens and hold public office, and restrictions on the
production and sale of alcohol, destroyed the national Whig Party. While
neither nativism nor temperance remained at the centre of political life after
1855, the collapse of the Whigs opened the way to the development of
sectional parties – the Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. These
new parties deepened sectional divisions, and opened the way to Lincoln’s
election, Southern secession and war.
In the past three decades, there have been some small steps toward the
construction of a new social interpretation of the US Civil War. The work of
Eugene Genovese8 on the slave-South inspired new attempts to locate the
origins of the Civil War in broad social and economic developments. Eric
Foner9 revealed that the Republican rejection of slavery was rooted in their
idealisation of the dynamic Northern capitalist economy of the 1840s and
1850s. More recently, the work of Charles Sellers10 on the ‘market-revolution’
of the 1820s and 1830s has inspired Bruce Levine’s11 and Christopher Clark’s12
efforts to revive a social interpretation of the Civil War.
John Ashworth’s two-volume Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the
Antebellum Republic13 marks a qualitative breakthrough in the renewal of a
social explanation of the US Civil War. Ashworth makes the regional uneven
development of class-relations – plantation-slavery in the South and capitalist
manufacture and commercial family-farming in the North – central to his
analysis of the political and ideological conflicts that culminate in the Civil
War. From his vigorously materialist perspective on politics, he provides a
convincing critique of both revisionist and ‘new political’ historians. Ashworth
acknowledges that political leaders in the 1840s and 1850s misperceived the
motives and goals of their political opponents. However, these errors of
perception and the deepening sectional conflict were not random and
8. Genovese 1967.
9. Foner 1970.
10. Sellers 1991.
11. Levine 1992.
12. Clark 2006.
irrational, but flowed from the political leaders’ socially determined world-
views. Ashworth also brilliantly analyses the rise and decline of ethno-cultural
conflicts in the mid-1850s, demonstrating that these divisions need not have
caused the disruption of the national political parties. Instead, the conflict
over slavery and its expansion was the root-cause of the realignment of political
and social forces that led to the War.
Arguing that ‘the origins of the Civil War are best understood in terms
derived from Marxism, but [that] existing Marxist historical writing has not
yet adequately considered the problem’,14 Ashworth provides a provocative
political-ideological explanation of the US Civil War. However, the absence
of a theoretically rigorous and historically concrete analysis of the origins of
capitalism in the US ultimately limits Ashworth’s magisterial study. In what
follows, we present a critique Ashworth’s complex analysis of the social origins
of the US Civil War. We conclude with an outline of an alternative social
explanation of the US Civil War, based upon our analysis of the origins of
capitalism in the US.15
A critique of Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the

Antebellum Republic
Ashworth’s thesis
For Ashworth, the US Civil War was the inevitable result of a political and
ideological polarisation rooted in the growing uneven development between
the slave-South and capitalist North over the course of the first half of the
nineteenth century. Specifically, the social relations of capitalism and slavery
made possible very different ideological accommodations to the real or potential
challenges of the direct producers (wage-workers and slaves), which produced
a sharpening political and ideological conflict between slaveholders and
capitalists in the last decades of the antebellum republic. Ashworth takes great
pains to argue that there were no direct economic contradictions between the
development of capitalism and plantation-slavery. However, the political and
ideological conflicts that culminated in secession and war ‘can only be
understood in terms of the differences between capitalist and slave modes of
production’.16
14. Ashworth 1995, p. x.

15. Post 1982; Post 1995; Post 2003; Post 2009.
16. Ashworth 1995, p. ix.
Ashworth argues that slavery was an inferior form of social labour to

capitalism because of the slaves’ continuous resistance to their unfree legal
status. The masters’ inability to accommodate this resistance led, not only to
the South’s economic underdevelopment, but the planters’ profound political
and ideological defensiveness in the face of an economically prosperous and
ideologically self-confident North. Bi-sectional political parties were able to
contain sectional conflicts over slavery and capitalism during the economic
expansion of the 1820s and 1830s. The Democrats constructed a coalition of
‘agriculturalists’ that erased the difference between slave-holders and family-
farmers; and the National Republicans/Whigs forged an alliance of merchants
and large planters committed to political policies that could harmonise
sectional and class-interests.
The economic expansion of the 1820s and 1830s unleashed a ‘market-
revolution’ that radicalised Northern antislavery sentiment. Traditionally,
republican politics in Britain and the US saw property-owners (merchants,
manufacturers, planters, artisans, farmers) as capable of self-government,
while the propertyless (slaves and wage-workers) were not. Early antislavery
thought in the US defended ‘free labour’ – self-earned property – as morally
and economically superior to both chattel and wage-‘slavery’. According to
Ashworth, abolitionists in the 1830s – and later the Free Soilers and
Republicans in the 1840s and 1850s – embraced wage-labour as compatible
with republican government and economic progress.
The new, militant antislavery politics of the abolitionists in the 1830s and
1840s produced a defensive Southern radicalisation, leading to the suppression
of free speech in the South and the struggle to secure new regions for slavery’s
expansion – the territories conquered from Mexico in the late 1840s, Kansas
in the mid-1850s, and parts of Central America and the Caribbean in the
late 1850s. The aggressive ‘Slave Power’ and its dominance of the federal
government led, according to Ashworth, to a growing radicalisation of
Northern public opinion where a majority embraced the call for ‘free soil’ –
the ban on slavery’s geographic expansion. New patterns of trade marginalised
the forces of sectional compromise – the Northern Democrats and Conservative
Whigs – opening the road to a political polarisation between antislavery
Northern Republicans and proslavery Southern Democrats. The growing
political-ideological, but not economic-material contradictions between slavery
and capitalism culminated in the election of Lincoln in 1860, the slaveholders’
bid for political independence and the Civil War – a bourgeois revolution that
secured the dominance of liberal-bourgeois politics and ideology in the US.
John Ashworth’s book represents a new benchmark for social historians of
the US Civil War. His insistence that social and material factors rooted in the
different class-relations of slavery and capitalism led to the political crisis of

the 1850s is a welcome alternative to claims that sectional fanaticism or ethno-
religious conflicts allowed the slavery-controversy to dominate late-antebellum
politics. Recognising that Northern and Southern political leaders seriously
misperceived the goals and motivations of their sectional opponents at crucial
junctures of the sectional crisis, Ashworth convincingly argues that these
misperceptions were rooted in the growing divergences between capitalism
and slavery. Similarly, he recognises the sharpening ethno-political conflict of
the mid-1850s, but demonstrates that the slavery-expansion controversy – not
the struggles over the naturalisation of immigrants and temperance – ultimately
destroyed the bi-sectional Democratic and Whig parties.
However, key elements of his social interpretation of the origins of the Civil
War are conceptually and historically flawed. Ashworth’s claim that slavery
was an inferior form of exploitation to capitalism because of the slaves’
resistance to enslavement is theoretically and empirically questionable.
Similarly, his argument that abolitionism and Republicanism embraced wage-
labour, radicalising antislavery ideology and politics after the 1830s and
unleashing the sectional polarisation of the 1840s and 1850s, is also open to
challenge. Finally, his explanation of the marginalisation of the advocates of
sectional compromise is inadequate.
The roots of slavery’s ‘weaknesses’

Central to Ashworth’s social interpretation of the US Civil War is that slavery
was ‘a weaker form of exploitation than wage labour’17 because of the slaves’
resistance to their unfree legal status. First, ‘the fact that so many slaves did not
wish to be slaves, did not wish to see the fruits of their labour appropriated by
another, and therefore attempted, in various ways to resist this exploitation’18
led to Southern economic underdevelopment. The slaves’ unwillingness to
work and their masters’ unease about trusting them with complex tools and
machinery blocked technical innovation in plantation-agriculture and limited
the use of slaves to simple, repetitive, unskilled tasks. Planters’ fears about the
lack of supervision of slaves in urban and industrial settings blocked the
growth of cities and manufacturing. Second, Ashworth argues that slavery was
much more vulnerable to class-conflict than capitalism. While the legal
equality of capital and wage-labour masks exploitation and makes all labour
appear as paid labour, the slaves’ unfree legal status makes all labour appear to
17. Ibid.
18. Ashworth 1995, p. 92.
be unpaid labour.19 Not only do slaves not have the opportunities for individual
social mobility available to wage-workers, there is no possibility of masters
appealing to their slaves’ shared world-view, a shared set of ideological values.
Ashworth’s explanation of Southern economic development is a variant
of what we have called the ‘non-bourgeois civilisation model’ of slavery.20
Like Genovese and others, Ashworth places the slaves’ lack of juridical freedom
at the centre of his explanation of technical stagnation and economic
underdevelopment in the antebellum South. Unfortunately, the notion that
the slaves’ unfreedom made them recalcitrant workers, incapable of developing
skills, using complex tools or working in non-agricultural pursuits, is not
historically accurate. Slaves in both classical antiquity and the plantation-
regions of the Americas made up a large proportion and, in some areas, the
majority of skilled urban and rural artisans. While sugar and tobacco-
plantations, with their more extensive processing and storage-facilities,
required more skilled workers than cotton-plantations, slaves could be found
working on almost all New World plantations as skilled teamsters, blacksmiths,
harness-makers, boatmen, stable and barrel-makers, sawyers and carpenters.
On the Caribbean sugar-plantations, slave-artisans directed the complex
process of boiling and curing sugar before the introduction of the vacuum-pan
in the mid-nineteenth century. All of these crafts required extensive training,
considerable technical knowledge and judgement, and often involved the
slaves working under their own supervision.
Nor did the slaves’ unfreedom prevent them from working effectively in
non-agricultural pursuits. In ancient Greece and Rome, most slaves were
employed in mining and urban handicrafts, where their labour could be
utilised year round, rather than in agriculture, with its fluctuating seasonal
labour-requirements. In the South, nearly one in twenty slaves worked in
industrial settings (coal, lead and salt-mining, cotton-spinning and weaving,
iron-smelting and forging, leather-tanning, tobacco, hemp and cloth and
rope-making, lumbering). Not only did they work effectively with industrial
machinery, there is little evidence that urban or industrial slaves were any
more likely to flee their masters than slaves on rural plantations.
The notion that the slaves’ unfree legal status made them recalcitrant,
unmotivated and untrainable workers also tends to idealise the condition of
legally free wage-workers under capitalism.21 Unlike household-producers
19. Marx 1974, pp. 42–3.

20. Most of what follows is drawn from Post 2003, pp. 303–10.
21. This is not surprising, given the origins of these arguments in the work of Adam Smith
(Smith 1937, pp. 365–8), the founder of liberal economics, and John Cairnes (Cairnes 1968),
(peasants and artisans), neither slaves nor wage-labourers have control over or
an interest in the outcome of the production-process. Both slaves and wage-
workers confront a labour-process whose timing, pace and technical character
have been organised by the non-producers. Thus, the problems of ‘labour-
discipline’ and supervision – ensuring concerted work – exist under both
slavery and capitalism. While the goals and forms of the slaves’ struggle differ
from those of the wage-worker, many historians have noted the similarities
between slaves’ and workers’ struggles in the production-process:
The conflict between master and slave took many forms, involving the organization
of labour, the hours and pace of work, the sexual division of labour, and the
composition of the labour force – all questions familiar to students of free
workers. The weapons that workers employed in such conflicts – feigning
ignorance, slowing the line, minimizing the stint, breaking tools, disappearing at
critical moments, and, as a last resort, confronting their superiors directly and
violently – suggest that in terms of workplace struggles, slaves and wage workers
had much in common. Although the social relations of slave and wage labour
differed fundamentally, much can be learned about slave life by examining how
the work process informed the conflict between wage workers and their employers.
For like reasons, the processes of production were as much a source of working
class culture for slave workers as for free workers.22
Wage-workers’ lack of motivation, their indifference to the outcome of the

production-process, has not been an obstacle to the introduction of new,
complex, labour-saving machinery under capitalism. Rather than raising the
level of skill and intelligence required of most workers, the division and
simplification of tasks and the mechanisation of production have systematically
lowered the general level of skill under capitalism over the past four centuries.23
In sum, the slaves’ unfree legal status and her lack of motivation and
commitment to the labour-process – features shared with wage-labourers
under capitalism – cannot explain the absence of technical innovation in
agriculture or the relative underdevelopment of urban industry in the
antebellum South.
The claim that the absence of the possibility of individual social mobility
under slavery made this form of social labour inferior to capitalism does not
withstand historical interrogation. Few if any slaves in the plantation-South
could hope to purchase their own freedom and become independent farmers
an Irish liberal economist and opponent of British intervention on the Confederacy during the
US Civil War.
22. Berlin 1998, p. 11.
23. Braverman 1974; Marx 1976, Chapter 15; Montgomery 1992; Thompson 1993.
or even slave-owners after 1700.24 However, there were opportunities for

individual slaves to ‘rise in the world’. While we need not accept their claim
that such opportunities imbued a ‘Protestant work-ethic’ in Southern slaves,
Fogel and Engerman25 point out:
. . . slaves had the opportunity to rise within the social and economic hierarchy
that existed under bondage. Field hands could become artisans or drivers. Artisans
could be allowed to move from the plantation to town where they would hire
themselves out. Drivers could move up to the position of head driver or overseer.
Climbing the economic ladder brought not only social status, and sometimes
more freedom; it also had significant payoffs in better housing, better clothing
and cash bonuses.
Ashworth’s claim that slavery was an inferior form of exploitation because

masters and slaves did not share common ideological values is also open to
challenge. In his brilliant study of slave-life and culture, Roll, Jordan, Roll,26
Eugene Genovese persuasively argues that paternalism provided a common set
of ideological values for both masters and slaves. The planters were able to
appeal to their slaves as members of an extended ‘family’, in which all members
of the family had reciprocal, although different, responsibilities.27 Just as
capitalist appeals to shared ideological references – equality, freedom,
democracy, individual opportunity – do not eliminate working-class resistance
and struggle, nor did planters’ appeals to their ‘black family’ eradicate slave-
resistance and struggle. Like all hegemonic world-views, planter-paternalism
attempts to harmonise conflicting classes, but rarely succeeds in eliminating
materially based conflict.
The roots of slavery’s weaknesses – technical stagnation in agriculture and
underdevelopment of urban industry – are found, not in the resistance of the
slaves, but in the structure of the master-slave social-property relation.28 In
both slavery and capitalism, the propertyless direct producers have no control
over or stake in the outcome of production, making possible and necessary a
centralised labour-process under the control of the non-labourers or their
24. Breen and Innis 1980 describe one of the last examples of such a transformation before
the consolidation of plantation-slavery.
25. Fogel and Engerman 1995, p. 149.
26. Genovese 1972, Book 1.
27. Ashworth 1995, p. 115, in fact discusses the social foundation for such a world-view in
his analysis of the similarities between plantation-slavery and independent-household production:
‘The home tends to remain the center of production, with the characteristics of the family farm,
or plantation’.
28. This section is drawn from Post 2003, pp. 310–18. The concept of social-property
relations is drawn from Brenner 1985a and 1985b.
agents. The key difference between capitalism and slavery is that capitalists
purchase the workers’ labour-power, their ability to labour for a set period of
time; while masters purchase the labourer, giving them an unlimited claim
on the slaves’ ability to work. Thus, slaves are ‘means of production in human
form’, a constant element of the production-process.
The ‘capitalisation of labour’ has two crucial implications for the labour-
process under slavery. First, the slave must be maintained whether or not they
labour in order to preserve their value as a form of constant capital. Thus, the
threat of unemployment, the main means by which capitalists discipline wage-
labourers, is not available to the masters. Instead, they must rely on physical
coercion to ensure that slaves labour. Even more importantly, the master-
slave social-property relation makes technical innovation – in particular
the replacement of human labour with new and more complex tools and
machinery – an episodic process at best. Laying-off ‘redundant workers’ and
expanding the size of the reserve-army of labour allows capitalists to easily
adjust the size of their labour-force in order to adopt labour-saving tools
and machinery. By contrast, masters could not easily ‘expel labour from
production’ – they would need to find buyers for any surplus-slaves – and
adopt labour-saving technology. Put simply, it was the fixed and inflexible
costs of reproducing the slave-labour force – not the slaves’ reluctance to
labour – that prevented relatively continuous technical innovation under
slavery. Generally, the introduction of new crops or expansion to new regions
provided masters with the only opportunity to introduce labour-saving
technology, fundamentally altering the relatively fixed relationship between
labour, land and tools.
The structure of the master-slave social-property relation, rather than slave-
resistance to bondage, also explains the underdevelopment of Southern cities
and manufacturing. The absence of continuous technical innovation in
plantation-slavery severely limited the market for manufactured tools and
machinery in the South. The masters’ need to ensure that their slaves were
constantly working, even in the ‘slack seasons’ between cotton-crop cycles,
encouraged plantation self-sufficiency in food and other consumer-goods. The
resulting absence of a ‘home-market’ for industrial production, not the masters’
fears of an urban environment, prescribed the growth of industry and cities in
the South.
The distinctive structure of the master-slave social-property relation shaped
‘rules of reproduction’29 of this form of social labour that led, inexorably, to
geographic expansion. Unable to reduce the amount of necessary labour that
29. Brenner 1989.

the slave performed through mechanisation, the planters had few options to
increase the volume of production or reduce costs in the face of world-market
competition. On the one hand, the planters could attempt to increase the
intensity and pace of work by increasing the acreage each slave or slave-gang
tilled in a given period of time. On the other, the planters could add more
slaves and more land (preferably more fertile lands) in order to increase output
and reduce costs. In sum, geographic expansion was the necessary form of the
expanded reproduction of the master-slave relation of production.
Ashworth points out that the planters articulated their struggle to secure
the political and legal conditions for slavery’s geographic expansion in very
different terms. While the planters correctly equated the geographic
containment of slavery with its eventual destruction, they argued this on
ground of political representation – ‘the political need for additional slave-
states’ and profitability: ‘. . . the slave population was increasing at a rate which,
in some parts of the South at any rate, was highly alarming. . . . They had
serious doubts whether the anticipated number of slaves, if confined to the
present boundaries of the South, could be profitably used by their masters.’30
Ashworth, however, doubts whether the geographic expansion of slavery was
either necessary or possible in the late-antebellum period. Geographic expansion
was unnecessary because ‘vast supplies of land were available in the South in
1860’.31 Ashworth also questions the possibility of slavery-expansion because
of natural conditions: ‘Only where large-scale agriculture was possible, in highly
favorable climatic conditions and where there was massive overseas demand
for the staple crops produced, did the institution thrive and expand. Thus it
proved unable to compete across much of the West even where white opinion
was utterly indifferent to the welfare of the African-American population.’32
The ‘vast supplies of land available in the South’ were primarily in the
‘upcountry’ (hill and mountain) and pine-barrens. The inferior soil-fertility
and rough terrain made large-scale plantation-agriculture difficult, leading the
planters to leave these areas to non-slaveholding white farmers who engaged in
subsistence-production before the Civil War.33 Nor were there any ‘natural
limits’ of climate and soil to slavery. Slavery, in both classical antiquity and the
Americas, had been utilised successfully in a wide variety of crops, including
grains, in the grazing of livestock, and mining. While the Western territories
may not have been suitable for cotton, tobacco or hemp, there were ample
30. Ashworth 2007, p. 49.

31. Ashworth 2007, p. 148.
32. Ashworth 2007, p. 634.
33. Hahn 1983, Part I.
opportunities for masters to use slaves in ranching and mining.34 In sum, the
geographic expansion of slavery into the Western territories – and beyond to
Cuba and Central America – was both possible and necessary for the future of
slavery as a distinct form of social labour.
Abolitionism, Republicanism and wage-labour

For Ashworth, the abolitionist and Republican embrace of wage-labour as
compatible with republican institutions produced a more aggressive and
radical Northern antislavery sentiment and politics, which sparked the growing
polarisation over the geographic expansion of slavery in the two decades before the
Civil War. For Ashworth, ‘the growth of capitalism in the North generated
the economic critique of southern slavery’35 that brought a radical ideological
and political shift – away from viewing wage-labour as ‘wage-slavery’, a social
form incompatible with the stability of republican institutions.
Ashworth’s case concerning the abolitionists rests on a rather thin
foundation. He cites only one abolitionist – Lydia Maria Child – who explicitly
speaks about ‘labourers’ who work for wages as distinct from self-employed
artisans and farmers.36 His case for the Republicans rests on stronger evidence.
Most Republicans, like Lincoln, viewed wage-labour as superior to slave-
labour because free workers could rise into the ranks of the self-employed.
However, Ashworth cites other Republicans who argued that, whether or not
workers remained wage-labourers their entire life, wage-labour was superior to
slavery and a sound foundation for republican institutions.37
Ashworth understands that the Republican vision of wage-labour did not
embrace large-scale, mechanised production with armies of unskilled workers.
Instead: ‘When Republicans extolled their society as one in harmony with
human nature, it was the small shop, the village artisan and the small-scale
manufacturing enterprise with an average of perhaps ten employees, they had
in mind. This was the wage labour system as Republicans understood it on the
eve of the Civil War.’38 However, the Republican vision of a ‘free labour’-
society not only envisioned small-scale production, but manufacturing, where
skilled workers still organised and controlled the labour-process. In his study
of debates in antebellum political economy, Allen Kaufman39 argued that ‘the
34. Genovese 1967, pp. 251–64, presents the classic critique of the ‘natural limits’-thesis.
35. Ashworth 1995, p. 115.
36. Ashworth 1995, pp. 165–8.
37. Ashworth 2007, pp. 267–97.
38. Ashworth 2007, p. 298.
39. Kaufman 1982, pp. 43–4, emphasis added.
economists of the American school’ – Daniel Raymond, Matthew Carey and

Henry Carey who helped to shape the Northern Whig and Republican world-
view – did not equate the promotion of manufacture with what we understand
as industrialisation:
Both processes conjure in our imagination the emergence of the factory system,
the formation of an industrial working class. . . . But the crucial distinction
between the American school’s concept of that process and our own (which
consequently differentiates their notion of promoting manufacturing from our
notion of industrialization) is that for the American school the labourer was not
separated from the direct control of the production process. Certainly, these theorists
accepted the accumulation of land and capital as a natural consequence of
increasing wealth and in so doing underwrote the formation of the working class.
However, they hoped to prevent the development of an impoverished working
class by restricting and ensuring its skill composition. The American school could
thus assume that, over time, independent labour would fundamentally structure
the economy. In this theory capital neither organised production for its own
profit nor acquired any productive characteristics . . .
Put another way, it was not the small scale of production that Republicans
idealised, but the skilled workers’ control over the labour-process – their
independence from capital in the organisation of production. The degradation
of slavery was not simply the slaves’ unfreedom or their inability to experience
individual upward social mobility, but that they were subject to the will of
their masters in the plantation-labour process.
The Republican vision of skilled wage-labour as a form of independent
labour was an accurate ‘mental road map of lived experience’40 of capitalist
manufacture – with its formal subsumption of labour to capital 41 – in the
antebellum US. With the exception of the cotton-textile industry, skilled
workers organised and directed almost all of antebellum Northern capitalist
manufacturing.42 Even more importantly, the vast majority of antebellum
manufacturing capitalists had emerged from the ranks of the artisanal petty-
producers.43 Even after the Civil War, skilled workers often controlled the
labour-process and hired and supervised apprentices and helpers in the
production of iron, steel and machinery.44
For the Republicans, the containment of slavery, a Homestead Act and a
protective tariff would promote the growth of manufacturing – ensuring the
40. Fields 1990, p. 110.

41. Marx 1976, Chapter 14, Appendix.
42. Taylor 1951, pp. 207–20; Clark 1929, pp. 367–76.
43. Beckert 1993, Chapter 2; Livesay and Porter 1971; Wilentz 1984, Chapter 3.
44. Clawson 1980; Montgomery 1992.
continued independence of the skilled worker in command of the labour-

process, and short-circuit the emergence of a permanent, potentially politically-
radical proletariat in the US. According to Beckert,45 most manufacturers in
New York and the rest of the North embraced this vision in the 1850s, and
believed in the mutual interest of capital and labour, a belief that came naturally
to a group of employers in close contact with their workers. They expected that
for skilled, temperate, and native-born workers, wage labour was to be merely a
way station en route to economic independence. If jobs were lacking, agricultural
expansion in the West would provide a new route to realise their independence.
As long as there was opportunity, there would be no permanent proletariat, and,
correspondingly, no permanent poverty. Opportunity, as industrialists saw it, was
a right of the citizens of the republic.
The emergence of specifically capitalist social-property relations in the North

did not create a radically new critique of slavery. Most of the abolitionist and
Republican political, economic and moral arguments against slavery were
present in the debates over the admission of Missouri in 1819–21. However,
the development of capitalism in the North – the result of the transformation
of Northern rural-household production – made the demand for the geographic
containment of slavery the ‘common sense’ of the majority of Northern farmers,
manufacturers, artisans and skilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s. These
new social relations of production also created an irreconcilable political
conflict over the future class-relations of the geographic expansion of
commodity-production.
Economic transformation and political crisis

Ashworth argues that, while the economic expansion of the 1820s and 1830s
allowed ‘sectional peace’ and the marginalisation of debate on slavery’s existence
and expansion on a national level, the growth of the 1840s and 1850s thrust
this debate to the centre of the political stage and marginalised all political
forces seeking ‘sectional’ compromise. The growth of commerce, the ‘market-
revolution’ of the 1820s and 1830s, ‘inevitably’46 brought the growth of
capitalism in the North, while reinforcing the dominance of slavery in the
South. By the 1840s and 1850s, the growing economic gap between the North
and South fuelled both pro- and antislavery political agitation. By that point,
the patterns of interregional trade had also shifted as a result of canal and
railroad-construction, strengthening ties between Eastern industry and
45. Beckert 1993, p. 73.

46. Ashworth 1995, p. 79.
Western agriculture. Because ‘the economic ties between North and South
had traditionally operated as a counter-tendency’ to a polarisation over slavery,
with the weakening of these economic ties ‘a barrier to the further growth of
anti-slavery in the North was removed’.47 The social groups enmeshed in these
economic ties – primarily Conservative Whigs and Northern Democrats –
were weakened politically.
Ashworth’s argument that the growth of markets inevitably led to the
development of capitalism in the North essentially reverses the historical and
theoretical sequence of causation – it was the growth of capitalism that generated
the growth of markets, not vice-versa. Although he never explicitly discusses
the mechanism by which commercial development leads to capitalism,
Ashworth’s descriptions of how expanding markets lead to wage-labour is
compatible with what Brenner48 and Meiksins-Wood49 have called the ‘neo-
Smithian’ or ‘commercialisation’-model of the origins of capitalism. In this
model, the growth of trade provides new opportunities for independent
producers – land-owning farmers unencumbered by legal restrictions on their
freedom (serfdom) – to specialise output, introduce labour-saving technology
and accumulate land, animals and tools in order to maximise income and
reduce costs. As these profit-maximising farmers specialise output, they
cease to produce much of their own subsistence (other than food), creating
markets for manufacturers of consumer-goods. The farmers’ continuous search
for labour-saving tools and machinery also creates markets for specialised
producers of capital-goods. Competition leads to deepening social inequality
in the countryside, with successful farmers accumulating land and capital, and
unsuccessful farmers losing land and becoming wage-labourers in agriculture
and industry.
The historical record of ‘peasant-agriculture’ in pre-industrial Europe (and
most of the world prior to the late-twentieth century) and the colonial and
antebellum US directly contradicts the causal predictions of the ‘neo-Smithian’
or ‘commercialisation’-model.50 As long as the independent farmers are able to
obtain, maintain and expand landed property outside of market-competition,
they are under no compulsion to specialise output, introduce new techniques
or accumulate land and capital. When prices are rising, independent-household
producers increase the production of physical surpluses to sell in order to
purchase the items of consumption which they or their neighbours cannot
47. Ashworth 2007, pp. 623–4.

48. Brenner 1977.
49. Meiksins-Wood 1999.
50. For pre-industrial Europe, see Brenner 1985b. For the colonial and antebellum US, see
Post 1995 and Post 2009, pp. 458–62, 471–4.
produce. When prices fall, such producers simply cut back the production of
surpluses and restrict their consumption. They are, however, under no threat
of losing their possession of landed property if they fail to specialise output,
introduce cost (and labour-)saving tools and machinery, and accumulate land
and capital. Only when the conditions under which household-producers
obtain, maintain and expand landholdings are transformed – when producers
are compelled to ‘sell to survive’ – do household-producers specialise, innovate
and accumulate. Such ‘pre-capitalist commodity-production’ – independent-
household production – was the dominant form of rural production in much
of the rural North before the 1840s. As we will see, the transformation of this
form of social labour into petty-commodity production – where household-
producers were subject to ‘market-coercion’ – was not the ‘inevitable’
consequence of the growth of commerce, but of class-conflicts over conditions
of landownership that began in the 1780s and culminated in the 1830s.
Ashworth’s analysis of shifts in interregional trade in the 1840s and 1850s,
which explains the growing irrelevance of the Northern Democrats and
Conservative Whigs, is also open to historical challenge. Ashworth essentially
reprises Douglass North’s51 thesis that Southern export of cotton fuelled
economic growth in the US in the 1820s and 1830s:
. . . a major consequence of the expansive period of the 1830’s was the creation of
conditions that made possible industrialization in the Northeast. Transport
facilities developed to connect the East and West more efficiently; a new market
for western staples developed in the rapidly industrializing East and, sporadically,
in Europe. The dependence of both the Northeast and the West on the South
waned.
Albert Fishlow’s52 research challenged North’s claim that the completion of

canals and railroads in the late 1830s shifted the main axes of interregional
trade from West to South (food-cash) and South to East (cotton-shipping) to
West to East (food-manufactured goods). Fishlow firstly discovered that the
bulk of Western foodstuffs marketed during the 1820s and 1830s were
destined for Eastern urban markets. The Southern plantations were already
self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Food shipped down the Mississippi River was
re-exported from the port of New Orleans to New York, Boston and
Philadelphia. Even more important, investments in railroads and other
transportation-facilities tended to follow, rather than lead to increased
51. North 1961, pp. 69–70.

52. Fishlow 1965a, Chapters III–IV; Fishlow 1965b, pp. 187–200. Ashworth 2007, p. 621,
n. 294, cites this work.
commodity-production in agriculture. Put another way, the building of

railroads and canals did not cause the growth of markets and commodity-
production, instead they were its consequence.
In sum, Ashworth’s analysis of the social roots of the growing political and
ideological polarisation over slavery-expansion is highly problematic. Slavery’s
economic weaknesses were not rooted in the resistance of the slaves, but in the
structure of the master-slave social-property relation – whose ‘rules of
reproduction’ made geographic expansion the necessary form of the expanded
reproduction of this form of social labour. Nor did the abolitionists and
Republicans substantially radicalise antislavery arguments with an embrace of
wage-labour, sparking the sectional polarisation of the 1840s and 1850s. The
Republicans preserved the traditional republican hostility toward a propertyless,
impoverished class of wage-labourers subject to the will of others in their
work-lives. Their innovation, following the American-school economists, was
to envision a society where manufacturing – in which skilled labourers
organised and controlled the labour-process – prospered under the protection
of tariffs and a Homestead Act. The development of Northern capitalism was
not the ‘inevitable’ result of the growth of trade, nor did patterns of interregional
trade change in the way Ashworth asserts in his account of the marginalisation
of the forces of compromise. Ultimately, all of these problems flow from the
absence of a theoretically rigorous and empirically rooted analysis of the origins of
capitalism in the US. Lacking such an analysis, Ashworth’s important insights
into the political and ideological dimensions of the conflicts leading to the
Civil War remain unexplained.
Toward a new social interpretation of the US Civil War
The transformation of Northern agriculture53

The roots of the catastrophic class-polarisation over the social character of the
expansion of commodity-production in the US during the 1840s and 1850s
are found in the transformation of Northern rural-household production
between 1800 and the late 1830s. As Meiksins-Wood54 points out, the British
expansion into the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
was the first example of a specifically capitalist imperialism – where the
reproduction of capitalist social-property relations governed the process of
53. This section is based on Post 1995, pp. 415–36; and Post 2009, pp. 464–6, 471–80.
54. Meiksins-Wood 2003, Chapters 4–5.
geographic expansion. However, the first experiment in capitalist imperialism

was unable to recreate capitalist social-property relations in British North America.
Although the British state granted legal title to wide swaths of land in the
North-American colonies to private individuals and corporations, the
undeveloped colonial state-institutions, in particular the military, made it
impossible for land-owners to enforce effectively their claims to landed
property. As a result, the majority of rural households in the North (and the
majority of non-slaveholding households in the South) were ‘squatters’ –
occupying land without legal title or payment. Even when landholders
were able to force squatters to purchase land, the relative strength of the
farmers rather than market-forces set the price of land. As a result, most rural
households were able to obtain, maintain and expand land-holdings without
successfully competing in the market. In sum, while large-scale commodity-
production on the basis of plantation-slavery was established in the British
Caribbean and Southern-mainland colonies by 1700, the British were
unable to reproduce capitalist social-property relations in the Northern colonial
countryside.
Free from ‘market-coercion’, rural households in the Northern British
mainland-colonies organised production the way peasants – independent-
household producers – had for millennia. Northern farmers engaged in ‘safety-
first’ agriculture, raising a wide variety of crops and animals for the consumption
of themselves and for non-market exchange with their neighbours, marketing
only physical surpluses. Technological change was highly episodic, with North-
American farmers using tools and methods that contemporary capitalist
farmers in Britain had already abandoned. Land-holdings tended to become
fragmented over time as land was divided among adult sons who formed their
own households. Only the relatively continuous expropriation of Native
Americans, which provided new lands for European colonial settlement,
prevented the sorts of demographic collapses that resulted from fragmented
landholdings in continental Europe in the seventeenth century. In sum, the
Northern farmers’ ability to obtain, maintain and expand landholdings
without successful commodity-production freed them from any compulsion
to specialise output, introduce labour-saving tools and methods, and
accumulate land.
Colonial merchants and land-speculators constantly sought to increase the
Northern farmers’ volume of commodity-production and enforce legal claims
to lands on the frontier – to augment mercantile profits from buying and
selling agricultural goods and land – before the American Revolution.
However, as long as the colonial militia remained small and staffed mostly
by small farmers, independent-household producers were able to obtain and
keep land at no, or minimal, cost. Thus, they were able to continue marketing
only the physical surpluses they and their neighbours did not consume.
The American Revolution and its immediate aftermath radically changed
the relationship of forces between the Northern farmers and the merchants
and speculators. State-government requisitions of food, cloth and other
supplies usually produced and consumed in Northern rural households
disrupted their non-market reproduction during the War. More and more
Northern farmers fell into debt to local merchants to purchase goods that
they had previously produced themselves. These debts became particularly
burdensome after the War, as newly independent Northern state-government
raised land-taxes to fund the enormous public debt accrued to finance the
Revolutionary War. The combined growth of debts and taxes forced Northern
households to market larger-and-larger portions of both their subsistence and
surplus-output in order to maintain their landed property in the 1780s.
The threat of the loss of possession of landed property as the result of debts
and taxes produced a wave of rural unrest in the 1780s and 1790s. Beginning
with Massachusetts’ Shay’s Rebellion in 1787, Northern farmers physically
confronted local and federal courts, tax-collectors and land-speculators in
defence of their self-earned – non-market-appropriated – landed property.
The new federal state, the product of the merchant and planters’ ‘Constitutional
Settlement’, was able to create a national army capable of defeating the
Northern independent-household producers and enforcing legal claims to
landed property. By closing off access to cheap or inexpensive land on the
frontier, the merchants’ newly established political hegemony ensured that the
farmers marketed both the ‘surplus’ and portions of their ‘subsistence’-output.
Put simply, farmers in the Northeastern US became dependent upon successful
market-competition for their economic survival – they became agrarian petty-
commodity producers in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.
The class-struggles of the 1780s and 1790s effectively ended independent-
household production in the original area of colonial settlement, but did not
spell the end of this form of social labour in the US. The dominance of
plantation-slavery in the South allowed the reproduction of independent-
household production among non-slaveholders in the region. In the Ohio
Valley and Great Plains, independent production developed as Native
Americans were ‘removed’ and white settlers occupied land at little or no cost.
Even when the federal public-land system gave legal title to land-companies,
‘squatters’ were able to organise ‘claims-clubs’ to force landowners to sell the
land to the settlers at well below market-prices. As a result, most farmers in
the Northwest prior to the 1830s were able to market only physical surpluses
and produce most of their own food, clothing and simple tools.
However, the outcome of the class-conflicts of the 1780s and 1790s sharply
limited the reproduction of independent-household production in the
Northwest. In particular, the development of the federal public-land system
transformed the conditions under which household-producers obtained,
maintained and expanded landed property in the first four decades of the
nineteenth century. As Native Americans were expelled, the federal public-
land office surveyed and auctioned land in the trans-Allegheny West. While
minimum prices and acreage were progressively reduced during the antebellum
period, no maximum price or acreage-limits were ever imposed. Federal land-
auctions promoted successive waves of land-speculation during the antebellum
period, as land-companies, railroad and canal-companies and wealthy
individuals bought up large tracts of land for profitable resale to actual settlers.
Particularly in the 1830s, settlers found themselves either having to obtain
mortgages to purchase land (older farmers with some capital), or become
temporary tenants in order to accumulate enough cash for a down-payment
(younger farmers with no capital).
The commercial depression of 1837–42 not only left most farmers in the
Northwest with crushing debts accrued to obtain land, but led to a sharp
increase in state-taxation. Most Northern state-governments had subsidised
canal and railroad-construction with public funds. As railroad and canal-
companies failed, state-governments were forced to raise taxes – in particular,
taxes on landed property – and expand the numbers of tax-collectors and
assessors in order to fund their public debts in the 1840s.
Increased land-prices, the burden of mortgages and rising taxes completed
the transformation of Northern rural-household production in the two
decades before the War. Payment of debts and taxes became the conditions for
obtaining, maintaining and expanding landed property in the Ohio Valley
and Great Plains 1840s and 1850s. To obtain sufficient cash to meet obligations,
farmers were compelled to specialise output, introduce new and labour-saving
tools and methods, and accumulate landholdings. Put another way,
Northwestern rural households in the two decades before the Civil War found
themselves in the same position as Northeastern farmers after 1800 – they had
to engage in successful market-competition in order to survive as property-
owning agrarian producers. The result was the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the
1840s and 1850s – the growth in the size and proportion of output produced
as commodities, increasing specialisation in cash-crops, rising labour-productivity
with the introduction of new seeds, fertilisers and improved implements and
machinery, and growing social inequality among farm-households.
The completion of the transformation of Northern farmers from
independent-household to petty-commodity producers was the main cause of
the sharpened pace of capitalist-manufacturing growth in the two decades

before the Civil War. As Northern farmers were compelled to ‘sell to survive’,
they became a growing home-market for capitalist-produced consumer and
capital-goods. Family-farmers specialising in cash-crops found themselves
purchasing a wide variety of consumer goods (cloth, shoes and boots, etc.)
which they and their neighbours had previously produced. In their struggle
to reduce production-costs through technical innovation, farmers began
to purchase the most advanced tools and machinery, rather than producing
these implements themselves or procuring them from local blacksmiths.
The importance of the rural home-market on capitalist industrialisation is
evident in the development of the US ‘agro-industrial complex’.55 Unlike
Britain, cotton-textile and shoe and boot-production were not central to
the US industrial revolution. Instead, industries producing farm-machinery,
tools and supplies, and processing agricultural raw materials (meat-packing,
leather-tanning, canning, flour-milling, baking, etc.) were the axis of US
industrialisation in the mid-nineteenth century.
From merchant to industrial capital

The transformation of Northern agriculture – the subordination of rural-
household production to the discipline of competitive markets – and the
subsequent formation of a home-market for industrial capital also brought
about a radical alteration in the structure of the US economy as a whole.
Before the crisis of 1837–42, the dominance of noncapitalist forms of social
production in all regions of the US – plantation-slavery in the South,
independent-household production in the North – made the activities of
merchant-capital the main stimulus to commodity-production and circulation.
Northern and Southern merchants and bankers financed slave-based cotton-
cultivation and organised the sale of raw cotton to textile-manufacturers in
New England and Great Britain.56 Small and medium-sized merchants across
the Northwest gathered up agricultural surpluses for shipment through New
Orleans to the Eastern urban centers.57 Land-speculators purchased land from
the federal government at public auction and resold to family-farmers in the
North and planters in the South.58
The dominance of merchant-capital in the US prior to the 1840s was rooted
in the noncapitalist character of commodity-production and the resulting
55. Headlee 1991, pp. 28–38; Post 1982, pp. 121–6; Pudup 1983.
56. Foner 1941, Chapters 1–2; Woodman 1968, pp. 30–50.
57. Clark 1966, Chapters I–II; Fishlow 1965b.
58. Opie 1991, Chapters 4–5.
shallow social division of labour.59 The dominance of merchant-capital

required no specific social-property relations, only the production and
circulation of commodities. As a result, the geographic expansion of plantation-
slavery was a spur to the growth of commodity-circulation in the US before
the mid-1840s.60 Growing exports of slave-produced cotton to Britain allowed
Northern merchants to accumulate capital directly from the cotton-trade, and
to import British capital. The accumulated merchant-capital fuelled the
continued geographic expansion of commodity-production in the US through
the 1830s, as merchants financed the purchase of land and slaves in the
South and provided capital for land and transport-infrastructure speculation
in the North.61
The fruit of land-speculation in the Northwest was the completion of the
subordination of rural-household producers to ‘market-discipline’ in the
1840s and 1850s. The dominance of agrarian petty-commodity production in
the North created a home-market for industrial capital, qualitatively
transforming the US economy as a whole. Put another way, the unintended
consequence of the merchants’ pursuit of their own, noncapitalist strategy for
reproduction – buying land cheap and selling it dear – created the condition
for the development of industrial capitalism in the US. After c. 1837–42, the
activities of manufacturers and commercial family-farmers became the main
stimulus of commodity-production and circulation. The geographic expansion
of agrarian petty-commodity production encouraged the growth of capitalist
manufacturing of capital and consumer-goods, while the growth of
manufacturing and cities induced further rural specialisation, innovation and
accumulation. These new social-property relations not only stimulated
increased investment in railroads, but transformed the rôle of Northern rural
merchants. Large, specialised grain and livestock-merchants located in the
growing rail, river and lake-cities of the Ohio Valley and Great Plains displaced
local merchant shop-keepers who had gathered up marketable surpluses and
often prepared them for shipping (milling, meat-packing). Most Western
grain and livestock-merchants became agents of manufacturing capitalists in
flour-milling and meat-packing during the 1840s and 1850s.62
The transformation of Northern social-property relations deepened the
social division of labour and led to the subordination of merchant to industrial
capital. After the crisis of 1837–42, Northern merchants increasingly became
agents of manufacturing capitalists, and manufacturers became financially
59. Marx 1981, Chapter 20.

60. Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, pp. 3–25.
61. North 1956; North 1961, Chapter VII.
62. Clark 1966, Chapters III–VII, X–XIII.
independent of the merchants, with banks becoming the main source of credit
for both manufacturers and farmers.63 While the merchant-capital’s condition
of existence was the exchange of commodities independently of social-property
relations, the dominance of industrial capital required capitalist or petty-
commodity social-property relations. Thus, as industrial capital became the
dominant form of capital in the 1840s and 1850s, the geographic expansion
of plantation-slavery became an obstacle to the development of capitalism
in the US.
The social origins of the sectional crisis

The roots of the catastrophic political crisis that culminated in the US Civil
War are found in the conflict between the social and political conditions of the
continued development of capitalist manufacturing and plantation-slavery
after 1840. The development of capitalism in the US rested on the continuous
expansion of agrarian petty-commodity production – household-production
subject to ‘market-coercion’ that compelled producers to specialise, innovate
and accumulate, providing a mass home-market for industrial-capitalist
production. The expansion of plantation-slavery – the necessary form of the
expanded reproduction of this form of social labour – was incompatible with the
development of petty-commodity and capitalist production in the regions
where it was dominant. In sum, the social and economic contradictions
between the development of capitalism and slavery after 1840 produced the
growing radicalisation of Northern and Southern public opinion, the
marginalisation of the advocates of sectional compromise and the collapse of
the nationally organised Whig and Democratic parties.64
63. Livesay and Porter 1971.

64. While Ashworth characterises plantation-slavery as a ‘mode of production’, we follow
Ellen Meiksins-Wood (Meiksins-Wood 1988, Chapter I) in viewing slavery as a form of social
labour whose ‘logic of process’ differs depending on the social forms in which it was embedded.
While we are agnostic on the historical debate between Meiksins-Wood (Meiksins-Wood 1988,
Chapter II) and de Ste. Croix (de Ste. Croix 1981, Chapters III and IV) over whether slavery was
the dominant form of social labour in the Ancient-Greek city-states, it is clear that the historical
dynamics of ancient and modern slavery were different. One could argue that slave-owning
planters in the Caribbean and Southern colonies responded more directly to market-imperatives
emanating from capitalist Britain than the independent-household producers in the Northern
British colonies. Clearly, the slave-plantation economies responded to these market-imperatives
in a noncapitalist manner. However, their subordination to a capitalist world-market clearly
marked these societies. In sum, we identify a specific historical contradiction between the social
conditions of the expanded reproduction of plantation-slavery and capitalism in the US in the
mid-nineteenth century, rather than a timeless, structural antagonism between slave and capitalist
modes of production. We thank Ellen Meiksins-Wood, whose comments on an earlier draft of
this essay brought this issue to our attention.
As we have seen, the structure of the master-slave social-property relation

was inimical to the growth of industry in the South. On the one hand, the
slaves’ status as ‘means of production in human form’ made it difficult for
masters to expel labour in order to introduce labour-saving tools and machinery,
limiting the market for industrially produced capital-goods. On the other, the
masters’ need to continuously employ their slaves encouraged plantation self-
sufficiency in food and clothing, limiting the market for industrially produced
consumer-goods. Nor was the dominance of plantation-slavery compatible
with the development of commercial family-farming – agrarian petty-
commodity production. The planters were able to use their superior financial
resources to appropriate the most fertile and best located lands, leaving only
the hill-regions and pine-barrens available at no or low cost to non-slaveowning
white family-farmers. As land-owners, the planters sought to maintain low
land-taxes in the South. As a result, Southern family-farmers were under no
compulsion to specialise output, technically innovate or accumulate. Put
simply, the geographic expansion of plantation-slavery would have prevented
the development of agrarian petty-commodity production in the Western
territories, retarding the development of capitalism in the United States.
To be clear, this argument does not imply either ‘that northern capitalism
had . . . come to a grinding halt in 1860, immobilised by the existence of
Southern slavery’65 or that the continued existence of plantation-slavery where
it existed in 1861 would have led to a crisis of Northern capitalism.66 Our
thesis, rather, is that capitalism and slavery in their continued development
after 1840 were incompatible. On the one hand, the continued development
of slavery required geographic expansion into new territories – a geographic
expansion that knew no ‘natural limits’. On the other, US capitalism’s
expanded reproduction required the geographic expansion of petty-commodity
social-property relations in agriculture. Put directly, the social-property relations
of plantation-slavery and agrarian petty-commodity production could not
coexist. One or the other set of social-property relations had to dominate the
geographic expansion of agricultural production in the US after 1840, making
the question of the social character of geographic expansion an explosive and
irresolvable issue on the political terrain in the 1840s and 1850s.
Mercantile hegemony and the second party system, c. 1828–44

If we view the economy as a matrix of social relations – between people and
between people and nature – then:
65. Ashworth 2007, p. 647.

66. Ashworth 2007, p. 647, n. 36, mistakenly attributes these arguments to us in Post 1982.
The historical development of the relations of production and exchange formed a

field of constraint and possibility within which political interests and action took
shape. It permitted a wide range of perception, motive, and choice and a sphere
of action that is properly political. Political action and ideology were neither
simply contingent nor the expression of idealised ‘material interests’ but resulted
from the active response of historical actors to these complex and evolving
processes.67
Before the 1840s, merchant-capital’s dominance in the US social formation

made possible the specific alliances of class-forces organised in the Democratic
and National-Republican/Whig parties and the marginalisation of national
debate on slavery-expansion. The resulting political hegemony of the merchant-
class permitted them to impose their structural indifference to the social
relations of commodity-production upon national politics, suppressing any
debate on the potentially disruptive question of slavery’s existence and
expansion for the twenty-five years after the Missouri crisis.
The Jacksonian Democrats included within their alliance, not only the
Northern independent-household producers and Southern small and medium
planters, but also Northern land-speculators.68 The speculators’ disinterest in
whether family-farmers or slave-owning planters purchased land and produced
commodities melded well with the Jacksonian world-view, which erased the
class-distinctions among ‘agrarians’. Politically, states’ rights, the abolition of
the Bank of the United States,69 low land-prices (but not the abolition of the
sale of public lands) and opposition to protective tariffs united the Democratic
alliance. The Democrats’ opposition to federal-government regulation (banks
and corporations, state-rights) and embrace of geographic expansion made
‘freedom’ the continual duplication of a ‘timeless present’ without ‘customary
restraints’ across space. Such a world-view captured the lived experience of
extensive growth of the various noncapitalist social groups – land-speculators,
middling planters and subsistence-farmers – that made up the Democratic
coalition.70
67. Tomich 1990, p. 286.

68. Pessen 1978, Chapter 11; Hammond 1957, Chapter 12.
69. Land-speculators and subsistence-farmers had very different goals in their struggle to
abolish central banking in the US in the 1820s and 1830s. Like the Democratic planters, the
subsistence-farmers believed that the destruction of the Bank of the United States would be a
first step towards the end of all banks, paper money and the scourge of land and commodity-
speculation. The land-speculators, however, wanted to end central banking restrictions on
state-banks in order to increase the money-supply and promote inflation of the land and
commodity-prices.
70. Wilson 1977, p. 201.
The National-Republican and Whig parties brought together a political

alliance of manufacturers, urban artisans, commercial farmers, and large
cotton, tobacco and hemp-planters under the leadership of Northern and
Southern merchants and bankers. The Whig notion that slavery, although
inferior morally and economically to free labour, was one of a number of
diverse interests that needed to be harmonised was quite compatible with the
merchants’ indifference to the social relations of commodity-production in the
antebellum US. The ‘American System’, which called for an interventionist
state to establish a new central bank, levy protective tariffs and raise land-prices
to ensure that only rural households with capital engaged in agriculture, spoke
to the demands of the diverse social groups most enmeshed in commodity-
production.71 The Whigs’ world-view envisioned the encouragement and
deepening of freedom over time, in which the ‘federal government . . . was a
corporate instrument for realizing a larger positive good. Qualitative change
through time rather than quantitative growth across space marked the true
destiny of a nation of freemen’.72 Just as the Democratic vision of a spatial
expansion of timeless freedom captured the planters’, subsistence-farmers’ and
speculators’ experience of extensive growth, the Whig vision of a qualitative
deepening of freedom over time corresponded to the merchants’, manufacturers’
and commercial farmers’ experience of intensive growth.
The first schisms in the second party system: the pre-emption debate of 1841
The stability of the Whig and Democratic parties depended on the economic
and political hegemony of merchant-capital in the US. The indifference of all
merchants to the social relations of commodity-production allowed different
groups of merchant-capitalists to cement alliances with different segments of
the slave-owning class in each party, preventing any debate over the existence
and expansion of slavery in the federal government. The changed field of
constraint and possibility that emerged with the dominance of industrial
capital after 1840 undermined the ability of merchants in the Democratic and
Whig parties to impose lasting compromises concerning the social character
of the geographic expansion of commodity-production on their respective
social allies. Instead, the incompatibility of the expansion of slavery and petty-
commodity and capitalist production radicalised the political demands of
Northern manufacturers and farmers, and induced the planters to make
increasingly militant demands in defence of the existence and expansion of
their form of social labour.
71. Van Duesen 1969 and 1973; Sellers 1969.

72. Wilson 1969, p. 165.
The first fissures in the second party system emerged during a debate on
public-land policy, rather than slavery-expansion. The Democrats had
traditionally advocated the rapid geographic expansion of both plantation-
slavery and independent-household production through lower minimum
prices for public land. The Whigs, as advocates of the ‘planned colonisation’
of the West by ‘improving farmers’, generally advocated higher minimum
prices for Western lands. By the early 1830s, Western farmers began to demand
a general and permanent ‘pre-emption’ – the right of those settlers who
had occupied public land to buy their land at federal minimum prices outside
of the public-auction system. Democrats had generally been favourable to
limited pre-emption laws, but opposed a permanent law which would have
effectively abolished the auction-system which nurtured land-speculation. The
Whigs tended to oppose the sale of land to ‘squatters’ below market-prices
before the crisis of 1837, and instead advocated the distribution of public-
land sale-revenues to the state-governments to finance transport-infrastructure
projects.73
The crisis and depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s fed renewed
agitation among Western farmers, now subject to ‘market-coercion’, for
a general and permanent pre-emption law.74 The Whigs’ victory in the
presidential election of 1840 and their capture of a majority of Northwestern
House and Senate seats set the stage for the Congressional debate on land-
policy in the summer of 1841.75 The Northern Whigs reversed their opposition
to pre-emption, introducing a bill that combined pre-emption and distribution.
In the debate, Northern Whigs no longer argued against ‘anarchic’ and
‘unplanned’ settlement in the West, but praised the geographic expansion of
commercial household-production for stimulating both agriculture and
industry.76 They met opposition, not only from Southern Democrats and a
minority of Northern Democrats who opposed distribution, but also from a
number of prominent Southern Whigs. While most of the opposition to
distribution centred on concerns that Congress would have to increase tariffs
to compensate for distribution, a number of prominent Southern Whigs
and Democrats attacked distribution as a violation of states’ rights, an
73. Hibbard 1924, pp. 56–115; Robbins 1976, pp. 3–50.

74. US Congress, Senate, Number of Letters on the Public Lands in Illinois, S. doc. 248,
25th Cong., 2d Sess., 1837; US Congress, House of Representatives, Memorial of Inhabitants of
Miami County, Indiana, H. doc. 178, 25th Cong., 2d Sess., 1837.
75. Robbins 1976, pp. 80–91; Stephenson 1917, pp. 44–65. US Congress, Congressional
Globe: Proceedings 27th Cong., 1st Sess., 10:1–2 for a listing of the party-affiliations of various
House and Senate delegations.
76. See, for example, US Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 27th Cong.,
1st Sess., July 6, 1841, 10:443.
‘unconstitutional’ centralisation of power and a danger to the region’s ‘peculiar

institution’.77
The House vote of 6 July 1841 on the combined pre-emption and
distribution bill clearly indicates a sharp sectional division on public-land
policy.78 All of the Northern Whigs, whether from the manufacturing East or
agricultural West, voted in favour of the bill. By contrast, the majority of
Southern representatives, Whig and Democratic, opposed the legislation.
Only nine of sixteen Upper-South Whigs supported the bill, while 14 of 16
Lower-South Whigs voted against. In sum, the alignment around the Pre-
emption Act of 1841 prefigures the sectional polarisation of the later 1840s and
1850s. The political spokespersons of manufacturers and farmers stood
together to promote the spread of capitalist and petty-commodity production.
Opposed to them were the relatively unified representatives of the planters
who perceived a threat to the master-slave social-property relation from the
use of federal funds to build transport-infrastructure. Similar divisions,
focusing on the Southern Democrats’ continued opposition to federally
financed transport-infrastructure projects sought by Northern farmers,
increased tensions within the Democratic Party in the early 1840s.79 The root
of these tensions was the same – the completion of the transformation of
Northern farmers into petty-commodity producers, which altered the attitude
of many Eastern Whigs toward the expansion of family-farming; and the
growing incompatibility of the expansion of slavery and capitalism, which
fuelled planters’ fears of a centralised federal government.
Class-conflict over the social character of the geographic expansion of commodity-

production, c. 1844–6180
The sharpening political conflicts and ideological polarisation of the 1840s
and 1850s, so well-described by Ashworth, were rooted in the incompatibility
of the expansion of social-property relations of plantation-slavery on the one
77. See, for example, US Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 27th Cong.,
1st Sess., June 30, 1841, 10:104 and July 3, 1841, 10:400.
78. US Congress, House, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 27th Cong., 1st Sess., July 6,
1841, 10:156.
House votes generally give a better indication of the alignment of different social groups on
key policy-issues because representation in the lower chamber was based on population. This was
especially true in this case because the Senate bill contained an amendment ending distribution
of land-revenues to the states if the tariff had to be raised – a provision making it more palatable
to Southern Democrats. US Congress, Senate, Congressional Globe: Proceedings 27th Cong.,
1st Sess., August 21, 1841, 10:364–370.
79. Foner 1969.
80. The following is a summary of the argument in Post 1983, Part III.
hand, and agrarian petty-commodity production and capitalist manufacture

on the other. The growing radicalisation of Northern public opinion in the
late 1840s and 1850s, manifested in the defections of Whig and Democratic
farmers, manufacturers, artisans and urban professionals to the Free Soil and
Republican Parties,81 was not simply a product of their idealisation of the
Northern free-labour society, or a response to the perceived threat of the
Slave Power. While the threat of the Slave Power and free-labour ideology
canalised Northern opposition to slavery-expansion, the increasingly militant
refusal of the Republican majority of Northern society to countenance any
further expansion of plantation-slavery corresponded to the social position of
manufacturers and commercial farmers in the North. Beckert82 argues that
manufacturers in New York and other parts of the North understood that ‘the
westward expansion of slavery was a threat both to their own well being and
to the Republic’:
American industry had experienced rapid growth, and railroads, together with
increased immigration, had helped settle the West, resulting in an expansion of
prairie agriculture based on free labour. The advent of new economic structures
facilitated the emergence of new segments of the economic elite, who based their
businesses not on the export of agricultural commodities produced by slave
labour but instead on domestic industrialization, import substitution, and the
export of agricultural commodities (especially wheat) grown by free farmers. . . .
Free labour needed free soil, a political program that brought these businessmen
into increasing conflict with an expansionist South and into coalition with other
social groups in the North.
Put simply, the continued development of the manufacturers’ form of social

labour after c. 1837–42 required the containment of slavery to the areas where
it was already dominant. Any further expansion of slavery would have
undermined the spread of agrarian petty-commodity production, and with it,
capitalist manufacture. The reproduction of the class-position of the
manufacturers and farmers made Republicans’ commitment to ‘free soil’
necessary. Whatever illusions the Republicans had about the strength of
Southern Unionism during the secession-crisis of 1860–1, their refusal to
countenance any expansion of plantation-slavery into the Western territories
was a rational expression of their social position.
Similarly, the increasing radicalism of the planters83 organised in the
Democratic Party was not simply a defensive reaction to the slaves’ resistance
81. Beckert 1993, pp. 89–97; Blue 1973; Foner 1970.

82. Beckert 1993, pp. 89–90.
83. Barney 1972.
to bondage, the planters’ inability to ideologically defend their form of

social labour, or concerns about the political loyalty of non-slaveowning
white farmers. Instead, the radical planters’ refusal to countenance any
restriction on the expansion of slavery, their advocacy of US expansion into
the Caribbean and Central America, and their championing of the demand
for a Congressional slave-code for the Western territories flowed from the
social requirements of the reproduction of their form of social labour. Geographic
expansion – the addition of more slaves and more fertile land – was the most
rational and efficient way to increase output and raise productivity under
plantation-slavery.
Small and medium planters had little uncultivated land in reserve and
were often the first to seek new and more fertile lands for their operations.
Thus, it is not surprising that the ‘middling and lesser’ slaveholders were in the
vanguard of Southern radicalism.84 However, even larger planters, with large
‘private frontiers’, would not accept any limits on the spatial extension of their
form of social labour.85 Just as the future development of capitalism in the
North required reserving the Western territories for petty-commodity and
capitalist producers, the future of plantation-slavery depended upon securing,
either within the US state or in an independent state of their own, the legal-
political conditions for the spread of slavery to new territories. According to
Schoen:86
Some voices in the Lower South, particularly in South Carolina and former Whig
circles, believed slavery’s expansion a chimera perpetuated by opportunistic
Democrats. Diverse reasons led many more to the conclusion that southern
society and regional interest actually depended on . . . more land suitable for
slavery. Simple political arithmetic suggested a contained Slave South might not
survive an expanding free soil American empire. Amateur demographers,
especially in the black belt, argued that without a vent for rapidly reproducing
slave populations the region would soon be on the brink of racial warfare. Proud
men, and not a few women, believed on principle that taking their property
anywhere in federal territories remained a natural right, the relinquishing of
which would make them second-class citizens. Others just wanted to prop up
their proslavery belief that race-based slavery could adapt to all climates and
businesses. To this traditional list must be added slaveholders’ desire, largely
economic in origin, to ensure that their progeny would have the cheap land,
84. Gates 1960, pp. 142–4; Genovese 1967, Chapter 4.

85. Contrary to Ashworth’s claim (Ashworth 1995, p. 491) that the large planters’
commitment to Whig ideology militated against their embracing Southern radicalism, it was
their large reserves of uncultivated land that made them relatively inured to the need for
geographic expansion in the short-term.
86. Schoen 2009, pp. 212–13.
labour supply, and access to commercial opportunities necessary to fulfill the

Lower South’s version of the American dream.
The changing matrix of social relations of production and exchange, the

subordination of merchant to industrial capital, also doomed the forces of
sectional compromise – the Democratic land-speculators and the Whig
merchants and large planters – to irrelevance in the political crisis of the 1840s
and 1850s. The Northern Democrats’ world-view, which collapsed family-
farming and plantation-slavery into an undifferentiated ‘agrarian’ interest, and
their embrace of ‘states’ rights’ and white male democracy were not the main
reasons they embraced ‘popular sovereignty’ and reduced the choice of class-
relations in new territories to a matter of soil and climate-determined relative
profitability. Nor was the conservative Whigs’ (and later Americans and
Constitutional Unionists’) belief that the rôle of statesmen was to balance the
diverse interests in society the main reason they strenuously argued that slavery
was not a concern of the Federal government. These political and ideological
stances were the ‘road map of the lived experience’ of merchant-capital’s
structural indifference to the social relations of commodity-production. The
inability of either the Northern Democrats or the Conservative Whigs to
impose enduring compromises on the question of slavery-expansion after
185087 was the unavoidable consequence of the subordination of merchant to
industrial capital in the US economy, which made the expansion of slavery
and capitalism irreconcilable.
The US Civil War: a bourgeois revolution?

While the changing structure of the social relations of production and exchange
created the class-conflicts that ultimately led to the disruption of the unity of
the US state and the Civil War, neither the outcome of the military conflict
nor the social relations that would emerge after the War were predetermined.
Instead, they were determined by the unpredictable and historically contingent
outcome of class-conflict. For Ashworth, slavery’s weaknesses – ‘the comparative
lack of manufacturing and the heavy reliance on a single crop, the weak
financial infrastructure, and the inferior transport network together inflicted
immense damage upon the Confederate war effort and played a key role in
bringing about Union victory’.88 He clearly recognises that the North’s
economic superiority did not guarantee military victory. Of equal importance
was the sharpening of class-conflict within the South during the War – between
87. Beckert 1993, pp. 78–93, Chapter 3; Foner 1941; Nichols 1948.
88. Ashworth 2007, pp. 632–3.
planters and non-slaveowning farmers who bore the financial and military
brunt of the War, and, most importantly, between masters and slaves. The
growing refusal of slaveless whites to continue fighting in the Confederate
army gravely weakened the Southern war-effort. The mass-flight of slaves from
the plantations as the Union army advanced dealt a death-blow to the
Confederacy after 1863.
Ashworth concludes that the US Civil War was a bourgeois revolution
because it made ‘the ideology of the victorious North, with its reconciliation
of democracy and capitalism . . . the ideology of Americanism’.89 His privileging
of the removal of ideological obstacles to the dominance of capitalism is
based on a rejection of our thesis that the continued geographic expansion
of slavery was an impediment to the continued development of capitalism
in the US. From our point of view,90 the US Civil War removed the single
most important hindrance to the expansion of capitalism – the territorial
extension of plantation-slavery to the Western territories. Although the
class-struggles during the Reconstruction period did not result in the emergence
of either capitalist plantation-agriculture or a class of African-American
petty-commodity producers, the noncapitalist form that replaced slavery –
share-cropping – did not share slavery’s spatially imperialist tendencies.
While share-cropping condemned the South to continued economic
underdevelopment,91 it did not pose an obstacle to capitalist expansion in the
rest of the US.
What, then, is the theoretical and historical status of the notion of the
bourgeois revolution? As both Meiksins-Wood and Brenner92 have argued, the
notion of the bourgeois revolution is rooted in the early Marx’s vision of
the transition to capitalism. Marx’s original analysis (which he abandoned in
his mature writings of the 1850s and 1860s), drew on Adam Smith’s vision
of the development of ‘commercial society’. In The German Ideology and The
Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that capitalism began in the medieval
cities with the activities of merchants and artisans. The growing cities provided
both a haven for peasants escaping serfdom and a market for agricultural
goods. The growth of markets encouraged peasants to specialise output,
innovate technologically and accumulate land and tools. Precapitalist
propertied classes’ hold on political power maintained old and created new
impediments (legal coercion of direct producers, state-taxation and monopolies,
etc.) to the deepening of markets. The bourgeoisie, the ascending class in
89. Ashworth 2007, p. 647.

90. Post 1982, pp. 49–51.
91. Ransom and Sutch 1977.
92. Brenner 1989; Meiksins-Wood 1995, Chapter 4.
production, leads its revolution and destroys these precapitalist remnants,

allowing the free development of their new mode of production.
We have already presented the theoretical and historical criticism of this
‘Smithian’ vision of the transition to capitalism – that the growth of market-
‘opportunities’ are not sufficient to disrupt the ‘rules of reproduction’ of
noncapitalist social-property relations. Instead, the unintended consequences of
noncapitalist social classes pursuing the reproduction of their forms of social
labour in very specific conditions of crisis and sharpened class-conflict open
the possibility of the emergence of capitalist social-property relations.93 As
Brenner94 points out, the notion of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ rooted in
the commercialisation-model actually ‘renders revolution unnecessary in a
double sense’: ‘First, there really is no transition to accomplish: since the model
starts with bourgeois society in the towns, foresees its evolution as taking place
via bourgeois mechanisms, and has feudalism transcend itself in consequence
of its exposure to trade, the problem of how one society is transformed into
another is simply assumed away and never posed. Second, since bourgeois
society self-develops and dissolves feudalism, the bourgeois revolution can
hardly claim a necessary role.’
The critique of the ‘neo-Smithian’ theory of the analysis of capitalism has
led to a re-evaluation of the notion of the bourgeois revolution. Brenner95 has
developed a new social interpretation of the English Revolution of the
seventeenth century. English agriculture was capitalist a full century before the
revolution of the 1640s and 1650s. The class-conflict between English
landlords and peasants took a very different trajectory than the conflict in
Western Europe. Like the peasants in Western Europe, English peasants were
able to gain their legal freedom in the fifteenth century. However, the English
landlords, alone in Europe, were able to impose commercial leases on their
tenants in the sixteenth century, making the latter’s continued possession
of landed property dependent upon successful market-competition. The
revolution of the seventeenth century did not pit capitalist landlords and
farmers against precapitalist aristocrats, but a new merchant-class enmeshed in
the English capitalist economy leading an already-capitalist landlord and
farmer-class against the monarchy and merchants who depend upon royal
monopolies.96
93. Brenner 2007.

94. Brenner 1989, p. 280.
95. Brenner 1993.
96. Comninel’s 1987 analysis of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century concludes
that the ‘bourgeoisie’ that led this revolution was in no sense a capitalist class. French agriculture
Ashworth’s analysis of the US Civil War as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ suffers

from the same theoretical problems as the classical schema. Ashworth denies
any material, economic contradiction between the expansion of slavery and
capitalism in the mid-nineteenth-century US. The Civil War was the product
of sharpening political and ideological conflicts – no material obstacles existed
to capital’s triumph. No arguments are offered to demonstrate how the politics
and ideology of slavery was a substantial impediment to the development of
capitalism. The Civil War – like other ‘bourgeois revolutions’ – was unnecessary
to the triumph of an already-extant and robust capitalist mode of production.
By contrast, our analysis of the social origins of the US Civil War indicates
that it, almost alone among the ‘bourgeois revolutions’ identified by the
historical-materialist tradition, actually fits the classical schema. The geographic
spread of a noncapitalist form of social labour, plantation-slavery, constituted
an obstacle to the future expansion of a vibrant capitalism. Capitalist
manufacturers and commercial family-farmers, organised in the Republican
Party, take the lead in organising the political and military struggle to remove
the impediment posed by slavery and its expansion. The classical schema,
however, remains highly problematic. The origins of capitalist social-property
relations in the US – the subordination of Northern rural-household producers
to ‘market-coercion’ in the late-eighteenth century – was the unintended
consequence of the class-conflicts that followed the American Revolution of
1776–83.97
The first American Revolution, at best, fits a minimal definition98 of the
bourgeois revolution – a revolution that creates state-institutions capable of
promoting the dominance of capitalist social-property relations. This definition
requires no prior development of capitalist social-property relations, no
precapitalist obstacles to capitalist development, nor a class-conscious capitalist
class in the lead of the revolution. A revolution is bourgeois only to the extent
that it, intentionally or unintentionally, advances capitalist development in
a given society.
remained thoroughly noncapitalist, and most of the urban merchants and professionals remained
dependent on the French absolutist state (see Comninel 1987).
97. Post 2009, pp. 474–80.
98. Mooers 1991, pp. 1–4, 33–40. Mooers effectively uses this ‘minimal’ definition to argue
that the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and German unification in the nineteenth
century were ‘bourgeois revolutions’ – revolutions that created states which advanced capitalist
development. However, his analysis of the outcomes of the French Revolution of 1789–94, the
Napoleonic Empire and the Revolution of 1848 indicates the preservation of precapitalist state-
structures, in particular, tax-farming. In our opinion, it was the Second Empire (1850–71) that
established a viable capitalist state in France.
The colonial economy was noncapitalist, based in independent-household

production in the North and plantation-slavery in the South. The activities of
a class of colonial merchants bound together various noncapitalist forms of
social labour. As these merchants organised the growing export of Northern
surpluses of grain and meat to the South and the Caribbean, and of Southern
tobacco, rice and indigo to Europe, they laid the basis for an independent
noncapitalist economy and a bid for political independence in the 1770s and
1780s. Put simply, the American Revolution was not the struggle of a capitalist
class to free themselves and their form of social labour from precapitalist
restrictions. Rather, it marked the success of precapitalist merchants and
agricultural classes to establish an independent state for their increasingly
autonomous precapitalist economy.
Nor did the merchants and land-speculators in the post-revolutionary
period seek to free capitalist production from noncapitalist fetters. Instead,
they sought to promote their position as land and commodity-traders. In the
1780s and 1790s, the merchants, with the support of the planters after Shays’
Rebellion, constructed state-institutions and a standing army that was capable
of enforcing their legal claims to landed property – not in order to establish
capitalist production, but to allow themselves to reproduce themselves as
buyers and sellers of land. The unintended consequence of the speculators’
successful struggle to enforce legal titles on land – the creation of the social
monopoly of land – was to fundamentally alter the conditions under which
Northern households obtained, maintained and expanded landholdings. The
result was the disruption of the rules of reproduction of independent-
household production and the consolidation of the rules of reproduction of
agrarian petty-commodity production and capitalist manufacture. As we have
argued, the subordination of Northern farmers to ‘market-coercion’ through
the actions of speculative merchant-capitalists in the first four decades of
the nineteenth century established the conditions for the subordination of
merchant to industrial capital and made the further expansion of slavery and
capitalism incompatible.
The American Revolution and Civil War can, at best, be viewed as bourgeois
revolutions because they established and consolidated state-institutions that
helped to secure the political and juridical conditions for the development
of capitalism in the US. Only the unintended outcomes of a revolution led
by a noncapitalist merchant-class – the development of petty-commodity
production and capitalist manufacturing in the North and the preservation of
plantation-slavery in the South, allowed the US Civil War to assume the form
of a ‘classic’ bourgeois revolution led by a self-conscious class of capitalist
manufacturers and commercial farmers struggling to remove the obstacle
posed by the geographic expansion of plantation-slavery.
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The American Civil War Considered as a

Bourgeois Revolution
Neil Davidson
University of Strathclyde
neil.davidson@strath.ac.uk
Abstract
The discussion of the American Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, reopened by John Ashworth’s
recent work, needs to be based on a more explicit conceptualisation of what the category does,
and does not, involve. This essay offers one such conceptualisation. It then deals with two key
issues raised by the process of bourgeois revolution in the United States: the relationship between
the War of Independence and the Civil War, and whether the nature of the South made conflict
unavoidable. It then argues that the American Revolution is unique for two reasons: the non-
feudal nature of Southern society and the fact that the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, unlike
their European contemporaries, were still prepared to behave in a revolutionary way.
Keywords
Bourgeois revolutions, political and social revolutions, American Civil War, American War of
Independence, capitalism, slavery
1. Introduction
Consideration of any of the great bourgeois revolutions tends to suggest
two speculative questions about the outcome: whether it could have been
more radical than the one which was actually achieved, and whether it could
have been achieved even if the revolution had not taken place. What do these
involve in the specific case of the American Civil War? The alternative ending
involves a permanent democratisation of the former Confederate states, thus
preventing the continuing oppression of the black population which in
fact took place, albeit in different forms than under slavery. The alternative
path to abolition involves a process of gradual, if reluctant, adaptation to
capitalist norms of free labour on the part of the South, rather than them
being imposed – and even then, incompletely – by military conquest. The
point of making these queries is not, of course, to indulge in the type of
‘alternative history’ most frequently associated with figures of the political
N. Davidson / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 98–144 99
Right from Winston Churchill to Niall Ferguson, but to explore the balance
between the objective limits and subjective possibilities present in this
revolutionary situation. These limits and possibilities depended, not only on
developments internal to the United States of America (US), but also on
external pressures exercised by the expansion of the capitalist economy on a
global scale and the emergence of a states-system whose main component
parts were increasingly being reconfigured as centres of capital-accumulation.
In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that, while the first alternative was at
least conceivable, the second was not.
1.1. Marxism and the American Civil War

Marxist interpretations of the Civil War fall into two broad historical periods,
both with their own characteristic approaches. In the first, which encompassed
the overlapping eras of the Second and Third Internationals, it appeared as
an uncomplicated conflict between two opposed and incompatible social
systems – although, paradoxically, what most distinguished the South as
a distinct society, namely chattel-slavery, received little attention. As a
consequence, discussion of racism was perfunctory at best, and the rôle of
slaves or former slaves in achieving their own liberation tended to be dismissed.1
Whatever other virtues these works possess – and I am not suggesting that
these are entirely negligible – they were strongly economistic, often to the
point of implying that the outcome of the War was inevitable. The second
period is coextensive with the emergence of the New Left in the US. The
main movements of the time, the struggle for black civil rights and opposition
to the Vietnam War, inevitably influenced the attitude of those writing
about the Civil War. In the case of the civil-rights movement, it helped to
refocus attention onto the situation of the slaves themselves, both before and
after emancipation. In the case of the antiwar movement, opposition to
contemporary US imperialism began to influence retrospective judgements on
the rôle of the North. Above all, the fact that the North did not initially enter
the War to free the slaves and subsequently abandoned the freed black
population after 1877 seemed to confirm the view that the US had always
been a self-interested power, and that the motives of its leaders should,
throughout history, always be treated with the greatest suspicion. The most
important of these interpretations have not, however, dealt so much with the
Civil War as with the societies which entered and emerged from it, with
perhaps the two single greatest achievements of the historiography dealing
respectively with the nature of antebellum-Southern slave-society and the
1. The major exceptions are Schlüter 1965, Du Bois 1969 and Mandel 2007.
100 N. Davidson / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 98–144
failure of Reconstruction.2 So great is the continuing sense that the War was
(in the slogan of the time) ‘a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight’ that it is
still possible to produce books – often excellent in their own terms – dealing
solely with the experience of ‘the people’, and in which the actual issues at
stake in the outcome are treated merely as which ‘élite’ would emerge victorious
from its ‘centre of power’.3
In both periods, the dominant ‘bourgeois revolution’-interpretations of the
Civil War were not of Marxist origin, nor did they employ the actual term.
The first, dating from the late twenties, was the work of Charles and Mary
Beard, historians who explicitly rejected Marxism for a politics which bridged
progressivism and moderate reformist socialism while espousing their own
brand of economic determinism.4 Their conceptualisation of the Civil War as
a ‘second American Revolution’ which finally allowed the unfettered expansion
of capitalism on the basis of industrialisation and free farming was – as we
shall see – not original to them, but their version became the dominant
explanatory framework through which the period was understood by the Left.
A comparison between the Beards’ version of the Civil War in The Rise of
American Civilization (1927–30) and the nominally Marxist account by Louis
Hacker in The Triumph of American Capitalism (1940), for example, does not
reveal any fundamental differences of approach.5 The Beards’ influence spread
far beyond the ranks of orthodox Communism, being accepted by later left-
wing professional historians, independent Marxist scholars and Trotskyists.6
Followers of the Beards among professional historians also established
the theoretical perspective on Reconstruction. Comer Vann Woodward placed
the events explicitly in the context of comparable cases in earlier periods,
specifically the French, describing Reconstruction as the ‘final phase of the
revolution, the phase the French refer to as Thermidor’ and writing that ‘if the
Men of 1787 made the Thermidor of the first American Revolution, the Men
of 1877 played a corresponding part in the Second American Revolution’.7
This account too had an influence on the revolutionary Left.8 The other
interpretation, dating from the mid-sixties, was produced by Barrington
Moore, who belongs to that tradition of radical sociology which is influenced
by Marxism, but by no means committed to the core-doctrines of historical
2. Genovese 1972b; Foner 1988.

3. See, for example, Williams 2005, p. 12.
4. Novick 1988, pp. 95–6, 155.
5. Compare Volume 2 of Beard and Beard 1935, pp. 52–121, and Hacker 1940, pp. 280–400.
6. See, for a selection, Camejo 1976, p. 13; McPherson 1991, pp. 10–22; Mandel 2007,
p. 202; Novack 1976, p. 16.
7. Woodward 1951, pp. ix, 215.
8. See, for example, Camejo 1976, pp. 11, 216–17, 228–32.
materialism. In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Moore

traced what he called three different roads to ‘modernity’ and expressed
scepticism about the concept of bourgeois revolution, at least as it had been
conventionally understood for most of the twentieth century.9 Nevertheless,
he wrote that ‘the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on
the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgeois capitalist
democracy’.10 Moore himself referred back to the Beards, and many writers
who have been influenced by them treated his work as a confirmation of, or
supplement to, their earlier analysis, although in many respects Moore is more
subtle, allowing – correctly, in my view – the possibility that the South might
have won.11
John Ashworth’s outstanding work on the origins of the Civil War must
therefore be welcomed as an important attempt to deal with the sources of the
conflict in explicitly Marxist terms. His first volume traces the growing
divergence between North and South, and concludes by anticipating the
outcome of their antagonism: ‘The result would be war, emancipation, social
upheaval – and the consolidation of capitalist relations of production in the
United States. In other words the result would be a bourgeois revolution’.12
Yet, in his second volume, an element of ambiguity enters. Ashworth shifts his
focus from consequences of the War (‘the consolidation of capitalist relations
of production’) to the motivations of those who defended the Union,
highlighting in particular their ideological support for wage-labour and
opposition to slavery: ‘Slavery was criticised, condemned, and finally destroyed
in the United States essentially because by the norms of northern society it was
increasingly unacceptable. These were the norms of northern free-labour
northern society, one characterised by “bourgeois social relations”, as they are
often termed, with wage labour at their core.’13
According to Ashworth, in economic terms the North was not in crisis
before the War (although there was a high level of internal class-struggle) and
the further development of industrial capitalism would not have been
constrained by the continued existence of agrarian slavery in the South,
however much of an abomination many Northerners found it. Indeed, as far
as the South itself was concerned, conditions after the War were scarcely more
advantageous to capitalism than before – a situation which would take decades
9. Moore 1969, pp. 427–8.

10. Moore 1969, p. 112.
11. Moore 1969, pp. 149–52; Anderson 2010, p. 263, n. 1; Genovese 1972b, pp. 345–8;
McPherson 1991, pp. 9–10.
12. Ashworth 1995, p. 498.
13. Ashworth 2007, p. 647.
to overcome. The triumph of the bourgeois revolution in the US was therefore

coextensive with the ascendancy on a national scale of a hitherto sectional
ideology encapsulated in the prewar Republican Party slogan of ‘free soil, free
labour and free men’.
I agree with Ashworth that the American Civil War was a bourgeois
revolution – or, more precisely, it constituted a major part of the global process
of bourgeois revolution as it unfolded within the US. Where I disagree with
him is over why this was so. Different ideologies were clearly important in the
War, but, if they did not express different means of organising social relations,
then it simply involved two essentially capitalist powers, distinguished by the
nature of their political régimes and in conflict because of overlapping
territorial claims. Such a situation is quite familiar and can be explained in a
number of ways, as an example of secessionist nationalism or geopolitical
rivalry, for instance, but it does not require a concept of bourgeois revolution.
An attempt to understand the American Civil War in this way must therefore
begin by defining the concept.
The issues at stake were clearly set out back in the sixties by a US academic
called Gerald Runkle, in one of the most comprehensive attempts by a non-
Marxist to assess the writings of Marx and Engels on the Civil War. Runkle
argued that the very validity of historical materialism turned on whether the
concept of revolution as understood by Marx and Engels was applicable to
events between 1861 and 1865. What did Runkle understand this to
involve?
According to the basic Marxian theory, revolutions occur when the mode of
production of a society becomes incompatible with the forces of production of
that society. But that this was not so in the South is evident from the almost total
absence of bourgeois development there. The ‘revolution’ came from without,
not from within. . . . The ‘class struggle’ was indeed an unusual one, for one class
was supreme in the South (and virtually non-existent in the North), another was
powerful in the North (and virtually non-existent in the South). The great
enemies of the privileged class in the South were not the people directly exploited
by that class, the Negroes and the ‘poor whites’, but the people in the North! . . .
That great changes occurred in the North before, during, and after the war does
not mean that the North was spear-heading a revolution in the Marxian sense.
Marx’s mistake here (and elsewhere) is to mistake the results of the war with the
cause of the war. He anticipated very well the results of the war. A more capitalistic
America did emerge. The ‘forces of production’ developed rapidly during the war,
industry grew, and fortunes were made. The bourgeoisie entered into a period of
almost unchallenged supremacy. The economy and society of America were
indeed revolutionized. This does not mean, however, that the growing strength of
industrial capitalism brought about the war. Many other factors operated with it
to bring about the war which was in turn a great causal factor for modern
capitalism. In short, the advance of capitalism was a conspicuous, but not the
only, result of a war which was brought about by many factors of which bourgeois
development was only one.
Consequently, the question of why Marx did not continue to develop his
analysis of the Civil War after it concluded presents no great mystery: ‘One
suspects that the American Civil War did not, therefore, lend itself
to the kind of interpretation that would enhance or confirm dialectical
materialism. If this is so, then the war constitutes a tacit refutation of basic
Marxian theory.’14
It is true that some care needs to be exercised in trying to extrapolate a
general view of the Civil War from his contemporary writings. Marx and
Engels expressed their views on the subject in three places: personal
correspondence between the two men (much of which is taken up with analysis
of the military conduct of the War, a subject over which they regularly disagreed
until the very final stages); reports for the abolitionist Horace Greeley’s paper,
the New York Daily Tribune, and the Viennese Die Presse; and two public
pronouncements, in the form of letters to Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, on
behalf of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA).15 Each of
these presents their own difficulties. In the private letters, a number of shared
assumptions were obviously taken for granted and this theoretical context has
to be recreated by the reader. In the articles, certain complexities were omitted
for a general newspaper-audience, which tends to give an oversimplified
picture of their views. In the open letters, the need to define a working-class
position in relation to the conflict inevitably took precedence over the
requirements of theory. In addition, the sources on which Marx and Engels
based their analysis were limited to often inaccurate newspaper-reports and
a handful of books on the subject of the South, the two most important of
which appeared only during the first year of the War.16 Their correspondence
suggests that they also received updates from German émigrés in the North
such as August Willich, who fought for the Union. The resulting inconsistencies
and flaws in their writings have led to accusations of, among other things,
their being over-sympathetic to Lincoln, of neglecting the imperial dimension
of Northern war-aims on the one hand and the popular character of Southern-
smallholder resistance to them on the other, of exaggerating working-class
14. Runkle 1964, pp. 138–41.

15. A third letter from the IWMA, ‘To the People of the United States’, emphasising the need
for blacks to be granted full equality, was not written by Marx but by one of the International’s
trade-unionist leaders, William Cremer. See Anderson 2010, pp. 193–4.
16. Cairnes 1862; Olmstead 1862.
opposition to slavery in the North and in Britain, and of succumbing to

economic reductionism.17
In fact, although much of their work remains of interest, a coherent Marxist
analysis is more likely to emerge by starting from first principles rather than
from trying to synthesise these fragments. Such an analysis should be able to
demonstrate that the elements which Runkle claimed disproved historical
materialism – the lack of internal class-contradiction within Southern society,
the external imposition of revolutionary change, the lack of causal connection
between the Northern victory and subsequent capitalist development – do
nothing of the kind. Although Marx and Engels did have a very general theory
of revolution as resulting from the conflict between the forces and relations of
production, they conceived of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as taking
very different forms. In the first part of this article I will therefore offer a
general definition of bourgeois revolutions, abstracted from their development
down to the 1870s, but excluding from consideration at this stage either the
American Civil War era or earlier revolutionary periods in US history. In the
second, I will attempt to show that the real cause of the War, what made it
inescapable, was not so much capitalist development in the North as – to
employ a term used by the slave-owners themselves – the ‘peculiar’ nature of
class-society in the South.
2. What were the bourgeois revolutions?

The ‘bourgeois revolution’ is a concept, a way of identifying historical processes
that belong to the same class or category: the difficulty is that there is no
agreement about what the essential qualities of the concept are. One solution
might be to adopt the procedure Marx outlined in the Preface to the first
edition of Capital; in other words, select the ‘classic’ case where the fundamental
characteristics of the concept are most fully developed, as he did in relation to
the development of capitalism in England.18 In one sense, this is exactly what
Marx and particularly Engels did in relation to bourgeois revolutions, where
the ‘classic’ case is taken to be that of France.19 The French Revolution can
indeed yield many insights into the dynamics of subsequent revolutionary
movements in which mass-mobilisations are central; but the most important
of these cases, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of
1978–9, were not bourgeois revolutions. In other words, the French Revolution
17. Anderson 1992a, p. 106; Fernbach 1973, pp. 31–2; Genovese 1972b, pp. 321–35.
18. Marx 1976, p. 90.
19. Marx and Engels 1973, p. 69, n. 15; Engels 1990, pp. 302–3.
illuminates the process of revolution from below in a general sense, but it

cannot do so in relation to the underlying nature of the bourgeois revolutions
as a specific category, precisely because one of the questions at issue is whether
they necessarily involve popular mobilisations.
The key problem, in this context, is the general applicability of the procedure
outlined by Marx and Engels. It is certainly appropriate when discussing the
capitalist mode of production, which by definition has certain indispensable
characteristics such as generalised commodity-production or the self-expansion
of capital. It would be equally appropriate in a discussion of any other
embodiment of structured social relationships, such as the absolutist state,
where the French case before 1789 can also be treated as ‘classic’. But the
bourgeois revolution is not the embodiment of a structured relationship, like
those of wage-labour to capital, or peasants to the tax-collector; it is the
unfolding of a process. Consequently, to treat the characteristics of the French
case as the highest level of bourgeois-revolutionary development is to imply
that countries which do not display these characteristics have either undergone
an incomplete experience or failed to undergo the experience at all.20
Perhaps another revolution might be more suitable as a ‘classic’ case, then?
Geoff Eley has argued that the German experience, in avoiding the ‘volatile
scenario of the English and French Revolutions’, is actually a better model
than them.21 But is Otto von Bismarck any more of a representative figure
than Oliver Cromwell or Maximilien Robespierre? In fact, the German
experience of territorial expansion by military conquest at the hands of an
internally transformed absolutist state has close parallels only with the
contemporary events of the Italian Risorgimento.
2.1. Essential and inessential characteristics

The problem is irresolvable so long as we treat ‘bourgeois’ as referring to the
dominant agency and ‘revolution’ as taking a particular form. An alternative
approach would be to place the concept of bourgeois revolution on the terrain
of what Andrew Abbott calls ‘turning-point’ analysis, in which ‘neither the
beginning nor the end of the turning point can be defined until the whole
turning point has passed, since it is the arrival and establishment of a new
trajectory . . . that defines the turning point itself ’. Consequently, ‘turning point
analysis makes sense only after the fact’.22 What would the ‘turning-point’
20. See, for example, in relation to the Meiji Restoration, Hobsbawm 1975, p. 151, and
Soboul 1977, pp. 167–8.
21. Eley 1984, p. 85.
22. Abbott 2001, p. 250.
be in the case of bourgeois revolutions? Alex Callinicos has argued that we

should ‘judge a bourgeois revolution by the degree to which it succeeds in
establishing an autonomous centre of capital accumulation, even if it fails to
democratise the political order, or to eliminate feudal social relations’.23 The
test is therefore whether it can be empirically demonstrated that a particular
sequence of events (‘a bourgeois revolution’) led directly to an outcome (the
establishment of ‘an independent centre of capital accumulation’), which
would not otherwise have taken place at that point in history. Since the two
characteristics which Callinicos cites as non-essential to the completion of the
bourgeois revolution – democratisation of the political order and the
elimination of feudal and other precapitalist social relations – are central to
the American case, their lack of relevance requires some elaboration.
What is the relationship of democracy to the bourgeois revolutions? In
his writings before April 1917 Lenin referred to the forthcoming Russian
Revolution as bourgeois-democratic, a compound term which had not appeared
in the work of Marx or Engels. By this, he meant that the Russian Revolution
would be both bourgeois in content (i.e. it would establish the unimpeded
development of capitalism) and that it would introduce democratic politics
which the working class could use to further its own demands.24 In the early
1920s, the Communist International, which was still a revolutionary
organisation at that point, extended this analysis to the colonial or semi-
colonial world in which, with the important exception of China, the working
class was even weaker than it had been in Russia. In these countries socialism
was not immediately on the agenda, but democratic rights were a necessary
prerequisite for the organisation of movements for socialism and national
liberation. In the early theses on the subject, Lenin insisted that the phrase
‘bourgeois-democratic’ be replaced by ‘national-revolutionary’, as the former
tended to disguise the reformist, if not totally accommodating rôle which the
local bourgeoisies played in relation to the colonial powers.25
As the Communist International degenerated along with the Russian
Revolution which gave it birth, however, the concept of the ‘bourgeois-
democratic revolution’ began to shift from one which advocated allying with
bourgeois (or even pre-bourgeois) forces only where they were genuinely
involved in fighting imperialism, to a stages-theory in which support had to
be given to the supposedly ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie as a matter of course.
The ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ was a necessary historical stage which
each country has to experience in preparation for the subsequent stage of the
23. Callinicos 1982, p. 110.

24. See, for example, Lenin 1962, pp. 75–6.
25. Lenin 1977, pp. 110–11.
socialist revolution. The notion of a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolutionary

stage was now read back into history and applied to England, France, and the
other countries where bourgeois revolutions had been identified. Democracy
had of course been an aspect of popular intervention in these revolutions,
debated in the English Putney Debates of 1647 or embodied in the Parisian
Sections from 1789 to 1794; but only in France was it a relatively stable legacy
of the revolutions themselves. In the other cases, the establishment of
representative democracy almost always followed them, often at a considerable
distance in time. In fact, if we take bourgeois democracy to involve, at a
minimum, a representative government elected by the adult population, where
votes have equal weight and can be exercised without intimidation by the
state, then it is a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism. Far
from being intrinsic to bourgeois society, representative democracy has largely
been introduced by pressure from the working class, often involving the threat
of revolution, and extended by pressure from the oppressed.26 There are, of
course, still important unresolved democratic issues in many countries,
including those in the heartlands of the global system, but they have nothing
to do with consolidating or furthering capitalist development.
The possibility of feudalism in any form surviving a bourgeois revolution is
a more controversial issue. For, if one outcome can be expected of bourgeois
revolutions, surely it is to eliminate feudal and other precapitalist modes of
production? In fact, this need not be the case. As Geoffrey de Ste Croix has
pointed out, the key issue in determining the class-nature of any society is not
necessarily how most labour is performed, but rather how the labour which
produced the surplus accruing to the ruling class is performed.27 It is therefore
quite conceivable that a postrevolutionary society might contain precapitalist
social relations, perhaps even involving a majority of the direct producers, as
long as the ruling class – which, by definition, includes those in ultimate
control of the state – occupied their position through the competitive
accumulation of capital based on wage-labour. In practice, of course,
precapitalist and capitalist modes of production have not co-existed in some
dualist fashion, as the former would be subject to capitalist laws of motion –
indeed, another way of defining a bourgeois revolution might be the
process by which political obstacles to their unimpeded sway are removed.
Jarius Banaji once argued that Marx used the term ‘mode of production
[Produktionsweise]’ in two ways: one to refer to the technical process of
production, or the labour-process more generally; the other to encompass an
26. Acemoglu and Robinson 2000, pp. 1182–6; Therborn 1977, pp. 4, 17.
27. Ste Croix 1981, p. 52.
entire epoch in the history of the social organisation of production. The

existence of wage-labour, for example, does not necessarily signify the
emergence of the capitalist mode of production; wage-labour also took place
under feudalism, but primarily as a means of meeting the consumption-
requirements of the lords rather than contributing to the self-expansion of
capital. It is rather that the existence of the capitalist mode of production
determines that wage-labour becomes the central means through which
surplus-extraction takes place. Equally, however, various types of unfree labour
associated with precapitalist modes of production, including slavery itself, can
also take place within the context of the capitalist mode of production and, in
the terms Marx uses in the Grundrisse, both posit and produce capital.28 The
relevance of this argument to our theme is that it is perfectly possible for
feudal, absolutist or tributary states to be overthrown, thus removing the last
obstacle to establishing ‘an independent centre of capital accumulation’, while
some social relations remain, initially at least, those associated with precapitalist
modes in the purely technical sense.
2.2. Agency, motivation, direction

There is one final consequence of shifting the definition of bourgeois
revolutions onto their outcomes, which relates to the bourgeoisie itself. In this
interpretation it is always the beneficiary of the bourgeois revolutions, but not
always the agency which brings them about.29 I am not, of course, claiming
that the bourgeoisie has never played a revolutionary rôle, simply that there is
no necessity for it to do so in order for a revolution to qualify as bourgeois.
Does this not contradict the notion of class-struggle which is central to
Marxism? It is surprising how often the complexity of the Marxist position is
ignored in favour of treating the opening paragraphs of the Manifesto of the
Communist Party as the last word on the subject. As we know: ‘The [written]
history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’.30 In the
paragraphs which follow, Marx and Engels give a list of pairs of antagonistic
classes: ‘freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
and journeyman’. The list is so familiar, the rhetoric in which it is presented so
overwhelming, that the difficulties it represents are often overlooked. Partly
these stem from inconsistencies within the pairings: as Ste Croix has pointed
28. Banaji 1977, pp. 4–5, 30–1; Marx 1973b, p. 463. See also the useful summary of Banaji’s
position in Bakan 1987, pp. 75–7.
29. Callinicos 1989, pp. 124–7; Davidson 2005, pp. 27–32; Stedman Jones 1977, p. 86. For
a recent, tentative acceptance of this position by a non-Marxist, see Beik 2010, p. 122.
30. Marx and Engels 1973, p. 67.
out, in so far as the opposing classes are divided between exploiters and
exploited, the first couple identified by Marx and Engels should be slave-
owners and slaves, rather than freemen and slaves.31 Nevertheless, with this
exception, the pairs listed are indeed ‘exploiter and exploited’. Marx and
Engels, however, refer to them as ‘oppressor and oppressed’. Furthermore,
they claim that these are binary oppositions in which the victory of one side is
associated with ‘either a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in
the common ruin of the contending classes’.32 I will return to the reason for
the absence of the bourgeoisie from the list below.33
A more general problem is that we are invited to view history, not only as
involving a series of class-struggles, but as involving a series of class-struggles
in which one hitherto subordinate class overthrows and takes over from its
predecessor, until the working class, the ‘universal class’, overthrows the
bourgeoisie and puts an end to the process by initiating the dissolution of all
classes. It is indeed important to understand that the history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class-struggles, but it is equally important to
understand that these struggles have taken two different forms, identified by
Claudio Katz as exemplifying, respectively, ‘[t]he antagonism within a class
system and that between class systems’.34 One is where the classes involved are
exploiter and exploited. The issues here are relatively straightforward. Slave-
owners extract surplus-value from slaves, feudal lords and tributary bureaucrats
do the same to peasants, and capitalists do the same to workers. In each case,
the exploited class resists to the extent that material conditions allow, but it is
not always possible for them to go beyond resistance to create a new society
based on a different mode of production. Exploited classes, in other words, do
not always have the structural capacity to make a social revolution: slaves did
not; the majority of peasants did not; the working class does, and in this
respect – among several others – it is unique among the exploited classes in
history. The other is where the classes involved are oppressor and oppressed.
The issues here are considerably more complex. For one thing, while all
exploited classes (slaves, peasants, workers) are oppressed, not all oppressed
classes are exploited and they may even be exploiters themselves. The class-
struggle can therefore be between two exploitative classes, but nevertheless
still be the means of bringing about social revolution, provided that the modes
of production represented by these classes are different and one is more
31. Ste Croix 1981, p. 66.

33. The bourgeoisie were included in an earlier version of this list. See Marx and Engels
1976a, p. 432.
34. Katz 1989, p. 181.
‘progressive’, in the Marxist sense of involving the greater development of

the productive forces. However, the number of oppressed classes which
have the capacity to remake society is as limited as the number of exploited
classes with that capacity. Among oppressed classes, it is the bourgeoisie which
is unique.
But, although the bourgeoisie are the bearers of a new society, this does not
necessarily mean that, as revolutionary actors, they are consciously seeking
to bring it about. The hymns of praise to the bourgeoisie with which the
Manifesto itself opens refer to its economic and social achievements, not to its
political capacity for seizing power. In general, this was a realistic assessment.
Following Lucien Goldmann, Michael Mann has suggested that the schema
supposedly advocated by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? (1902), whereby
ideological leadership can only be provided to the working class ‘from outside’,
might in fact be applicable to the bourgeoisie: ‘Left to itself the bourgeoisie
was only capable of economism – in the eighteenth century of segmental
manipulative deference’.35 It is not clear, however, that this was true before the
late-eighteenth century. The earliest successful examples of bourgeois
revolution, in the United Netherlands and England, did involve leadership
by mercantile, agrarian and even industrial capitalists, although the latter
tended to be based in the colonies rather than the metropolitan centres. Their
motivations, however, tended to be more concerned with religious or
constitutional liberties than with removing absolutist impediments to
exploiting their workforce more effectively, although that was ultimately one
of the results they achieved. The potential for this discrepancy between
intention and result lies in the very fusion of the economic, political and
ideological which was characteristic of feudalism, and which reached it apogee
under the absolutist state. Regardless of what reasons various groups had for
opposing absolutism, if they were successful in destroying it the integrated
structures associated with that state-form would also be removed, making it
possible for capitalism in all its initial myriad forms to experience unimpeded
expansion. Full class-consciousness was not required, then, only the
combination of a revolutionary movement opposed to feudal absolutism,
often on religious grounds, and pre-existing capitalist economic development.
The revolutionaries and the capitalists did not need to be the same people, and
often were not.
Under these conditions, government could always be delegated provided
that the state was rededicated to the accumulation of capital. In England,
therefore, the New Model Army could act as a substitute for a capitalist class
35. Mann 1993, p. 229. See also Goldmann 1964, p. 117.

which, although economically dominant within society, was not yet capable of
assuming political leadership within the state. The Restoration of the Stuart
dynasty in 1660 was brought about by an English ruling class united by a fear
of social anarchy on the one hand and an inability to overcome their internal
differences on the other; but the monarch proved perfectly acceptable to the
bourgeoisie until the régime began to rebuild the structures of absolutism
which once again conflicted with capitalist interests.
Yet, precisely because these capitalist revolutionaries also belonged to a
minority exploiting class, albeit one broader than their feudal predecessor,
they needed to involve other social forces to expel the Spanish and overthrow
the English absolutist state. Consequently, in so far as they were conscious of
their underlying economic aims, they could scarcely declare these openly to
their allies among the other classes, who were the very ones likely to find
themselves simply with a change of masters at the end of the process.
Furthermore, the necessity for alliances brought with it the danger that these
allies would seek to pursue their own interests. The English capitalist class had
learned the lesson as early as 1688, when it called on an invasion by the régime
of their Dutch predecessors to complete their revolution for them and thus
avoid the upheavals that had characterised the years 1640–60. For the
European bourgeoisie which developed later, it was the Great French
Revolution which provided the same lesson. In France, too, the leaders of the
Revolution had to mobilise the masses under ultimately deceptive slogans of
universal right, necessary for a minority class to lead the coalitions which
overthrew the old régimes, but disguising, or simply avoiding, the fact that
exploitation would continue, albeit in new forms. But there was more than
deception involved here. The plebeians – it would be too early to refer to the
majority as workers – had an interest in overthrowing absolutism, and their
methods were required to achieve and defend the Dutch, English and French
Revolutions, methods from which the leaderships of these revolutions
themselves often shrank.
There was nevertheless a difference between the French Revolution and
its predecessors. Depending upon which stage of the transition a specific
bourgeois revolution takes place, it can be either a means of consolidating the
development of capitalism or of establishing the conditions for its development;
but in no case was capitalism either completely dominant or completely
non-existent. Early capitalist developments had been thrown back in the
Italian city-states, Bohemia and the German Länder, and, once the initial
breakthroughs took place in the Netherlands and England, the representatives
of European absolutism mobilised to prevent any similar revolutions taking
place. Consequently, in no other country after England did a capitalist
economy grow up relatively unhindered until the point where the classes
associated with it could lead an assault on feudal absolutism. Even in the case
of England, the French state tried for decades to undo the effects of 1688,
mainly by supporting Jacobite reaction in Scotland, an intervention which
only stopped with the decisive defeat of that movement at the Battle of
Culloden in 1746. As a consequence of the relative success of the absolutist
régimes in retarding the development of capitalism, France was less developed
in 1789 than England had been in 1640. But even those capitalists who
had emerged in France were more inclined to reform than their predecessors,
not least because of the risk which revolution posed to their property,
which tended to be more industrial than agrarian or mercantile. From the
1790s on, therefore, Mann’s argument has greater validity, as the nature of
leadership in the bourgeois revolutions became increasingly removed from
capitalists in the class-structure, shifting over time from members of the
bourgeoisie more generally, to fractions of the existing feudal classes, to
military and party-bureaucrats.
Take the first shift: what does it mean to say that leadership shifted from
capitalists to members of the bourgeoisie? All capitalists, in the literal sense of
those who own or control capital, are members of the bourgeoisie, but not all
members of the bourgeoisie are capitalists. Hal Draper describes the bourgeoisie
as a whole as involving ‘a social penumbra around the hard core of capitalists
proper, shading out into the diverse social elements that function as servitors
or hangers-on of capital without themselves owning capital’.36 It is important
to understand that the components of this ‘penumbra’ are not members of
the petty bourgeoisie, who stand outside the capital-labour relationship and
‘earn their living by dint of their own labour and their own property’.37 On the
contrary: according to Perry Anderson, membership of the noncapitalist
bourgeoisie ‘is typically composed . . . of the gamut of professional,
administrative and technical groups that enjoy life-conditions similar to
capitalists proper – everything customarily included in the broader term
“bourgeoisie” as opposed to “capital”’. They did, however, have a relationship
with the petty bourgeoisie, which often provided the foot-soldiers for the
struggle with feudal absolutism. As Anderson continues, ‘this same bourgeoisie
will normally lack a clear-cut frontier with layers of the petty bourgeoisie
below it, for the difference between the two in the ranks of the small employer
is often quantitative rather than qualitative’.38 Again, this relationship is
36. Draper 1978, p. 169.

37. Draper 1978, p. 289.
38. Anderson 1992a, p. 112.
strongest in the period before the transition from agrarian and mercantile
capitalism to industrial capitalism, as Gareth Stedman Jones explains: ‘In
general, the more industrial capitalism developed, the stronger was the
economic power of the grande bourgeoisie in relation to the masses of small
producers and dealers from which it had sprung, and the greater the distance
between their respective aims. Conversely, the less developed the bourgeoisie,
the smaller the gulf between “bourgeois” and “petit bourgeois”, and the greater
the preponderance and cohesion of the popular movement.’39
From 1789 to 1848 in Western and Central Europe, and from 1848 to
1905 in Eastern Europe, the most decisive bourgeois leaderships therefore
tended to emerge from those sections of the class without direct material
interests in the process of production, and who were simultaneously less
concerned with the destructive effects of revolutionary violence but more able
to overcome the competitive economic divisions within their class: Robespierre
was a lawyer, Danton a journalist, Roux a priest; only a very few of the leading
French revolutionaries, of whom Roederer was the most important, could
seriously be described as capitalists.
One of the proofs of the capitalist nature of the societies which revolutionaries
wished to establish, in all the cases down to and including the French, was the
way in which they acted to attack feudalism outside their own borders. The
intervention of the New Model Army in Scotland between 1651 and 1660 is
the first example of this externalisation of the revolution; far more significant,
however, was the attempt by the French ‘people’s armies’ to crush the local
nobility, abolish feudal tenures and jurisdictions, and generally rationalise
economy and society throughout Europe, even after the internal reaction
began with Thermidor. Their failure to do so permanently was an important
factor in determining why capitalist stabilisation had to take place on the
conservative basis of a restored monarchy, as it had in England beforehand.
The extent to which the French were able to establish sister republics in
conquered Europe depended on whether indigenous forces existed which were
willing to be involved in the process of reform; but, precisely because of their
isolation, their minority status, they were not necessarily those with popular
followings, as the Spanish rebellion against France and its local supporters
after 1808 was to prove. Although the Napoleonic armies which invaded
Spain in 1809 were clearly the bearers of a more advanced social system than
the Bourbon monarchy they sought to overthrow, the fact that change was
being imposed at bayonet-point provoked a popular resistance which ultimately
aided the reactionary alliance against France. Where there were social forces
39. Stedman Jones 1977, p. 87.

committed to republican politics, it tended to be in those areas, principally

Holland, where bourgeois revolutions had already taken place and consequently
where these forces were opposed to the imperial rôle of the French armies. In
Britain, the most advanced of all, the majority of the ruling class were violently
opposed to France and prepared to ally with absolutist reaction to defeat her,
partly because the British bourgeoisie feared a successful rival – as they had the
Dutch in the 1650s – and partly because the very violence of the revolution
had acted as an inspiration to nascent working-class forces in England and
Scotland, and to bourgeois revolutionaries in Ireland. In some territories, such
as Hanover and Westphalia in 1807, the French abolished serfdom only for it
to be restored after Napoleon withdrew in 1813. In other parts of the German
lands, notably in the Rhineland, it proved impossible to restore seigniorial
rights, but these examples were too few to be the immediate basis for a Europe
of independent states on the French model.
Further shifts in agency followed in the second half of the nineteenth
century. One was that the noncapitalist sections of the bourgeoisie, which had
previously given revolutionary leadership and which might have been less
paralysed by fear of the working class, were increasingly integrated into a
society in which their former frustrations and humiliations were rapidly
becoming things of the past. The other was that sections of the existing ruling
classes of Europe and Japan, such as the Prussian landlords led by Bismarck,
which had previously resisted revolution, now embraced a top-down version
in order to make their states capable of resisting military competition from
their rivals – or, in the case of Japan, to avoid the fate of colonisation and
dismemberment which had befallen China. But the Prussian, Piedmontese
and Japanese ruling-class fractions which now moved to establish unified
states in the 1860s did so on the basis of economies which were even less
developed then than France had been in 1789. Evidently, the relationship
between the revolution and the state has changed. Before 1848, insurgent
populations sought to seize control from absolutist or colonial state-
bureaucracies; after 1848, state-bureaucracies themselves acted as the agencies
of change through military force. The difference is usually described as
involving a shift from bourgeois revolutions ‘from below’ to those ‘from
above’.40 Treated, not as an absolute distinction, but as an indication of
two tendencies within the overall trajectory of bourgeois revolution, the
demarcation is helpful; but nevertheless, qualifications need to be introduced.
These are necessary, not so much because of the existence of elements ‘from
40. Anderson 1974, p. 431; Anderson 1992a, pp. 110–11; Callinicos 1989, pp. 136–59;
Davidson 2003, pp. 9–15.
below’ in the later revolutions, since the exploits of Garibaldi’s Legion were
not decisive in the Italian Risorgimento, nor were Japanese peasant-revolts a
major factor in the Meiji Restoration. The issue is rather the far more weighty
contribution ‘from above’ in the earlier revolutions. The decisive moment in
the English Revolution, for example, was the military coup by the New Model
Army between December 1648 and January 1649; in other words, the exercise
of state-power by its most characteristic institution. Similarly, if we take the
French Revolution as a whole from 1789 and 1815, then the entire process
from 1794 at the latest is mainly state-directed. And, as we have seen, in both
cases the consolidation of the régime was accompanied by the externalisation
of the revolution, not only from above, but ‘from outside’; to Scotland in the
case of Cromwell, Central and Western Europe in that of Napoleon.
If the historical rôle of the bourgeoisie is contingent in an outcome-based
definition of bourgeois revolution, then it should be clear from the preceding
discussion that the transformation of the state is necessary in each case. The
state was central to both the process and the outcome, since the seizure of
state-power was the goal of the revolutionaries and, if achieved, it ensures
that the territory they control can become the site of ‘an autonomous centre
of capital accumulation’: this theme remains constant across the overlapping
periodisations in the overall pattern of development down to that date.
The first period, characterised by revolutions primarily from below, encompasses
those in the United Netherlands and England, where economic life was already
subject to capitalist laws of motion and only the absolutist state needed to be
overthrown to complete the process of transition. The second, still characterised
by revolutions primarily from below, begins with the French Revolution
and includes all the subsequent, mainly unsuccessful revolutions which
followed it down to 1848, where capitalism was still subordinate to feudal
laws of motion in addition to the bourgeoisie being politically subordinate to
the absolutist state. The third, now characterised by revolutions primarily
from above, was compressed into the years between 1859 and 1871, which
saw the Italian Risorgimento, German unification, the Japanese Meiji-
Restoration, Canadian Confederation, and, less decisively, the liberation of
the serfs in Russia. In these cases, levels of capitalist development were mixed,
extensive in Canada outside of the former French colonies, minimal in Japan
and Russia; but the impetus for change comes from a ruling-class fraction
within the absolutist state or, in the case of Canada, the colonial state. The
central paradox of this shifting trajectory is that, as the outcome of capitalist
and, particularly, industrial capitalist development becomes more explicit,
the agents of revolution become further and further removed from the
capitalist class.
There were, however, two revolutions which do not fit these periodisations.

Separated from each other in both scale and time, they are linked by virtue of
being the only two examples where a fully conscious bourgeoisie set out to
establish capitalism in a part of the sovereign territory of the state from which
it had previously been excluded, and in both cases their ability to do so was
dependent on prior control of a centralised military and juridical apparatus.
One was the Scottish Revolution, during the suppression of the Jacobite
Rising of 1745–6 and the transformation of agricultural relations in the
decades that followed – a process which seems to have been the first example
of the bourgeois revolution from above characteristic of the mid-nineteenth
century. Although in no sense a prototype or model for its successors, it did
involve the same set of elements which produced them: a favourable geopolitical
context (the global inter-systemic conflict between Britain and France), a
centralising and expansionist capitalist territory seeking to unify a new nation-
state (England and Britain), and the formation of a new ruling class drawn
from those of the previously existing nations (England and Scotland).41 The
other was, of course, the American Civil War era, to which we can now
return.
3. The USA in the history of the bourgeois revolutions:

contrasts and comparisons
The first problem for any Marxist analysis of the bourgeois-revolutionary
process in the United States is to set its chronological parameters. We should
not be constrained by the time-periods deployed in conventional narratives of
national history. The English Revolution does not correspond to the period of
the Civil Wars (i.e. 1642–9), but encompasses the entire period from the
beginning of Scottish resistance to Charles I in 1637 through to the restoration
of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, together with the Glorious Revolution of
1688–9. Similarly, the duration of the American Revolution cannot be
restricted to the period of the Civil War, but must include the subsequent
period of reconstruction, since it was during the postwar years to 1877 that
the form taken by the US as a capitalist nation-state was finally established.
Chronologically, then, it falls into the last period, the period of revolutions
from above, and has one important characteristic in common with most of
them. Prussia, Piedmont and Upper Canada (i.e. modern Ottawa) successfully
incorporated, by a variety of means, a range of smaller, less-powerful or
41. Davidson 2010, pp. 345–6. For a detailed account, see Davidson 2003, pp. 73–285.
economically developed regions into the new nation-states of Germany, Italy

and Canada. The North played the same rôle in relation to the US, although
here the objective was to prevent the secession of a major part of the existing
nation-state, rather than to initiate state-formation. Yet, in other respects, the
Civil War era has more in common with earlier periods of bourgeois revolution,
in terms of increasing political radicalisation and popular involvement,
military suppression and juridical abolition of precapitalist social relations –
and a conservative resolution which disappointed radical hopes and failed to
complete the liberation of the oppressed.
3.1. The War of Independence as a political revolution

What does dating the American Revolution from 1861 to 1877 mean for our
assessment of the most important episode in American history prior to the
Civil War, the one officially regarded by the US state as ‘the Revolution’? One
approach would be to regard these conflicts as the opening and closing
moments of a prolonged period of revolutionary transformation, a view first
expressed in the aftermath of the Civil War by several of the participants.
Here, for example, is the Northern military commander and twentieth
President of the USA, James Garfield: ‘It will not do to speak of the gigantic
revolution through which we have lately passed as a thing to be adjusted and
settled by a change in administration. It was cyclical, epochal, century-wide,
and to be studied in its broad and grand perspective, a revolution of even
wider scope, so far as time is concerned, than the Revolution of 1776.’42
This conception of a prolonged process has some Marxist support. Mike
Davis, for example, writes: ‘It is possible to see the Revolution of 1776 . . . as
very much a civil war against Loyalist comprador strata, and the Civil War as a
continuing revolution against an informal British imperialism that had
incorporated the cotton export economy of the South in an alliance of neo-
colonial dependency’.43 More commonly, however, the two wars have been
treated as distinct episodes, with the second resolving the issues left unfinished
by the first. Although the interpretation of the Civil War as a ‘second American
Revolution’ was made famous by the Beards, it too goes back to the Civil War
itself and, indeed, predates it. ‘Revolutions never go backward’, wrote the
abolitionist James Redpath, in the wake of the mini civil war in Kansas:
42. Garfield 1881, p. 161.

43. Davis 1986, p. 12.
The Second American Revolution has begun. Kansas was its Lexington. Texas will
be its Bunker Hill, and South Carolina its Yorktown.44
During postwar reconstruction the French Radical Georges Clemenceau,

who had lived and worked in the US between 1866 and 1869, described the
leading Radical Republican Thadeus Stevens as the ‘Robespierre’ of the ‘Second
American Revolution’.45 And, as we have seen, the notion has subsequently
exercised a wide influence over both professional historians and Marxist
revolutionaries. More recently, the notion of a ‘second revolution’ has been
generalised by Anderson to encompass all the major states to have experienced
bourgeois revolutions.46 Nevertheless, there are two difficulties involved in
seeing the Civil War as either the culmination of a prolonged process or a
‘corrective’ second revolution.
One is that, from referring to decisive turning-points which removed
obstacles to capitalist development, the concept of bourgeois revolution is
stretched to include subsequent alterations in the form of the existing capitalist
state which brings it into more-perfect alignment with the requirements of
competitive accumulation – realignments to which there can be no foreseeable
end this side of the socialist revolution. Why, then, could there not be a third
American Revolution in the form of the New Deal, or – given the way in
which the Civil War and Reconstruction notoriously failed to achieve equality
for the former slave-population – a fourth in the form of the civil-rights
movement? Nor need we stop at this point: some Marxists have referred to the
neoliberal ascendancy since the late seventies in general terms as a ‘bourgeois
revolution from above’.47
The other difficulty, which again has particular resonance for the US, is that
it presupposes that the first bourgeois revolution did at least begin to remove
barriers to capitalist development, yet this is precisely what is at issue in the
case of the War of Independence. The Dutch Revolution and, to a far greater
extent, the English Revolution both involved two distinct movements which
temporarily converged in opposition to foreign or native absolutism. One
successfully consolidated the supremacy of capitalist relations of production;
the other failed to achieve equality of condition, a goal which was, implicitly
at least, directed as much against the new capitalism as the old feudalism. The
American War of Independence was different. It certainly involved the second
44. Redpath 1859, pp. 300–1.

45. Clemenceau 1928, p. 226.
46. Anderson 1992b, pp. 155–6. See also, specifically in relation to the US, Callinicos 1989,
pp. 153–4.
47. See, for example, Panitch 2001, pp. 21, 40.
type of movement and, in this context, socialists have rightly emphasised the
element of internal class-struggle within the independence-movement,
together with the often contradictory rôle of minorities. These accounts have
provided a necessary corrective to a bourgeois historiography which tends to
argue that economic or social issues were largely absent from the War, and that
the key motives of the revolutionaries were entirely political and ideological.48
Marxists have occasionally expressed similar views, albeit linked to different
value-judgements, where they have allowed their hostility to contemporary
US imperialism to overwhelm their historical judgement.49 This essentially
conservative conception has more recently allowed the American Revolution
to be celebrated by neoliberal ideologues as providing a model of revolution
which, unlike its French and Russian successors, did not involve any utopian
attempts at fundamental social transformation.50 But valuable though
alternative accounts are, they do not answer the question of whether or not
events between 1776 and 1783 constituted a bourgeois revolution, since
popular insurgencies during these years tended to be concerned either with
the defence or extension of the franchise, or with resisting the inequalities
resulting from existing capitalist relations of production.
Unlike the Dutch or the English, the Americans did not have to liberate
themselves from a feudal-absolutist state, but rather from the constitutional
monarchy which emerged from the settlement of 1688, which they were
accused of betraying by behaving in a despotic and tyrannical manner. William
Gordon, author of one of the first histories of the Revolutionary War, argued
in 1776 that property-qualifications for voting were ‘the most hurtful remnant
of the Feudal Constitution’.51 The most detailed discussion of the question
was, however, by John Adams in a series of articles published in the Boston
Gazette in 1765 and eventually published as ‘A Dissertation on the Canon and
Feudal Law’. Adams cited Kames and Rousseau as authorities to prove that
‘the feudal system [was] inconsistent with liberty and the rights of mankind’.
His main point, however, is to demonstrate that the British monarchy was
intent on imposing feudalism on the colonies. What he meant by this, however,
was mainly the imposition of the Stamp Act.52 Alas, both restrictions on the
franchise and interference with the freedom of the press are compatible with,
or even characteristic of, capitalist societies.
48. See, for example, Wood 1992, pp. 175–6.

49. See, for example, Stedman Jones 1970, pp. 63–5.
50. See, for example, The Economist 1989.
51. Independent Chronicle, 5 September 1776, quoted in Douglass 1955, p. 153.
52. Adams 1851, pp. 454–5, 464.
It is true that capitalist development was uneven across the colonies. It is

also true that there were three genuine attempts to install or ‘revive’ systemic
feudalism in the new colonial context, in New York, Maryland and the
Carolinas – the latter with a constitution involving hereditary serfdom drawn
up by Mr Agrarian Capitalism himself, John Locke. All were resisted; all failed.
The main feudal mechanism which landlords consistently attempted to impose
was the charging of quit-rents in lieu of certain kinds of labour-service or
other obligations. But, since these obligations had not, in most cases, been
performed by tenants in the first place, this represented less the introduction
of feudalism and more a device by absentee-capitalist owners to supplement
the rent paid by their tenants.53 The real obstacle to capitalist development in
North America was not feudalism but slavery. Slavery is not, of course,
necessarily incompatible with capitalism, nor was it in the US where, even in
the North, many sectors of the economy such as the New England textile-
mills assumed the existence of slavery in the South. But there are definite
structural limits to how far capitalist self-expansion can proceed on this basis.
More importantly, as we shall see, in the South slavery became the basis of an
entire society, and ultimately of a short-lived state (the Confederacy), the
expansionist aims of which, had they been successful, would have blocked and
even rolled back the development of capitalism in the Americas, and perhaps
even beyond. The continued existence of slavery is, therefore, the main
objection to regarding the War of Independence as a bourgeois revolution,
even an incomplete example. For, if the definition of a bourgeois revolution is
that it allows the unimpeded development of capitalism, then it is difficult to
see how a conflict which also strengthened and allowed the extension of a
rival, noncapitalist mode of production can be described in this way.
Bourgeois revolutions are a type of social revolution, a struggle to consolidate
the transformation of one type of society into another, which involves not
merely seizing, but transforming the state itself. Historically, social revolutions
are extremely rare and, if we leave aside the transition to feudalism as not
involving a revolution (except in a metaphorical sense), and the socialist
revolution on the grounds that it has not yet been permanently achieved, the
bourgeois revolutions are the only successful examples that we have. As this
degree of rarity suggests, most revolutions are not social, but political.54
Political revolutions are struggles within society for control of the existing
state, but which leave the nature of that state, and economy and society
fundamentally intact. They may involve more-or-less popular participation,
53. Berthoff and Murrin 1973, pp. 261–86; Byres 1996, pp. 165–86.
54. Draper 1978, pp. 17–21.
may result in more or less improvement in the condition of the majority, but
ultimately the class which was in control of the means of production at the
beginning will remain so at the end (although individuals and political
organisations may have been replaced on the way), and the class which was
exploited within the productive process at the beginning will also remain so at
the end (although concessions may have been made to secure its acquiescence
or participation). The French Revolution of 1848 and, in more recent years,
the Iranian Revolution of 1978, the displays of ‘people power’ in the
Philippines, Thailand and Serbia, and the ‘colour-revolutions’ in the former
republics of the USSR were all revolutions of this type. Political revolutions
sometimes have social aspects and social revolutions always have political
implications, but the terms indicate an essential difference. The relation
between political revolutions and the bourgeois revolutions is therefore a
complex one. Some revolutions which, taken by themselves, appear to be
merely political are in fact parts of a more extended bourgeois revolution: the
English Revolution of 1688, for example, has this relationship to the revolution
of 1640. By 1688, the overwhelming majority of the English ruling class faced
an absolutist régime with virtually no support within the country itself.
Consequently the Stuarts had to seek support internally among the more
peripheral or colonial areas ruled by the composite monarchy in Scotland and
Ireland, and externally among the feudal-absolutist rivals to English power in
Continental Europe, above all, France. In 1861 the Northern ruling class
faced a vibrant and expansive society which, since secession, had established its
own rival state. In other words, unlike 1688, 1861 was not the final move in
a game in which the course of play has already decided the nature, if not the
timing, of the outcome; it signalled the opening of the game itself. Interestingly,
the Beards themselves seem to have come to this conclusion, writing in their
major work, not only that ‘the so-called civil war was in reality a Second
American Revolution’, but also that it was ‘in a strict sense, the First’.55
The War of Independence is therefore best understood as a political
revolution, more akin to 1688 or 1830 than 1640 or 1789. In the case of
America, the chronological order of importance is reversed: it is the latter
period which is decisive. The Civil War did not ‘complete the unfinished tasks
of the War of Independence’ because, except for a minority of radicals, the
latter was never intended as a means of accomplishing these ‘tasks’ in the first
place. Instead, the end of British rule allowed all of the social relations which
existed in America – including small-commodity production, capitalism and
slavery – to continue as before, but without the interference of the Crown in
55. Volume 2 of Beard and Beard 1935, p. 54.

Parliament. But of all the different types of social relations it was capitalism
which was initially the weakest. As Michael Merrill has pointed out, the
principal difference between the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists
following the achievement of independence was in their attitude to ‘commercial
society’. Adam Smith could be invoked by both sides, of course, but in so far
as he was in favour of a stable agrarian society in which the main economic
actors were yeoman farmers and landowners (slave-owners were a different
matter), this could be done with greater credibility by the former. The latter,
above all Andrew Hamilton, were interested in developing something closer to
what we would now think of as capitalism – although, as Merrill notes, this
was largely as a means to an end, the end being the elevation of the monied
commercial and industrial interest as a base to provide revenue through tax
and customs to construct a viable state-power.56 As one of Hamilton’s
biographers observes, unlike the other founders of the republic, who ‘were
content merely to effect a political revolution’, Hamilton saw the rôle of
lawgiver differently: ‘He set out to effect what amounted to a social revolution’.57
In this respect, there are interesting parallels with the later careers of Bismarck
and Cavour as instigators of revolution from above, but, unlike them, he did
not succeed as, in the short-term at least, it was the agrarians organised in the
Democratic Republican Party who won out, following the victory of Thomas
Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800.
3.2. The uniqueness of the Old South

The ‘social’ nature of the impending conflict was well understood on both
sides of the Mason-Dixon line long before the Confederate attack on Fort
Sumter. Southern ideologists were quite aware of the threatening historical
precedents. One author, William Drayton, compared abolitionists to English
puritans during the days of the Commonwealth: ‘Their columns are almost
nasal with cant; and it might be supposed, from the aspect of their publications,
that the days of Cromwell were revived, and that his fanatical followers, heated
into tenfold fury, were abroad in the land’. He argued that, if abolitionists
succeeded in freeing the slave-population, it would lead to a repetition of the
Haitian Revolution: ‘Have they studied the history of St. Domingo; and are
they prepared to let loose upon the refined and innocent ladies of the South,
the savage Negro, incapable of restraint, and wild with ungovernable passions?’
Finally, Drayton saw parallels with the French Revolution, claiming that once
the opponents of slavery had established equality for blacks, the next stage in
56. Merrill 1990, pp. 481–93.

57. McDonald 1979, p. 3.
their madness would be to establish it for women! Naturally, a quotation from

Burke fell to hand to support his case:
The French revolutionists, from whom the fanatics derive their notions of
abolition, directly undertook to assert the rights of women. The French legislature
took up this subject in 1789. ‘Succeeding Assemblies’; says Burke in his Regicide
Peace, ‘went the full length of the principle, and gave a license to divorce at the
mere pleasure of either party, and at one month’s notice’. The reason alleged was
‘that women had been too long under the tyranny of parents and husbands’. To
such lengths will these abstractionists carry their insane zeal.58
Interestingly, Georgian secessionists actually described the establishment of

the Confederacy as a ‘political revolution’, which had been made necessary to
forestall the social revolution which the abolitionists would otherwise unleash
upon them.59 The more radical elements in the North were clear that this was
exactly what they were planning, although they tended to hold the South
responsible for forcing such a course of this action upon them. In the debates
on confiscation of slave-holder property from the second session of the
37th Congress in 1862, for example, Senator Morrill of Maine offered a
robustly materialist explanation for the conflict: ‘Sir, what we are witnessing
and encountering is the old struggle of a class for power and privilege which
has so often convulsed the world repeating itself in our history. A class
identified with a local and exceptional institution, grown powerful through
political representation, demands to govern.’60
Marx was therefore in the unusual situation, for once, of being in broad
agreement with his bourgeois contemporaries in terms of his interpretation of
events. Although Marx did not use the term ‘bourgeois revolution’ in relation
to the War, he did situate it within his conception of a struggle between two
different societies which he first raised in the ‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts’ (1844) and first made concrete in ‘The Bourgeoisie and the
Counter-Revolution’ (1848).61 In his discussion of the implications of a
Confederate victory, Marx wrote:
What would in fact take place 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 slave system would infect the whole
58. Drayton 1836, pp. 179, 180, 181.

59. Macon Telegraph, 8 November 1860, as quoted in Johnson 1977, p. 46.
60. The Congressional Globe 1862.
61. Marx 1975, p. 340; Marx 1973a, pp. 192–3.
Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the
white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This
would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races
are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the
South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their
direct descendants. The present struggle between the South and North is,
therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery
and the system of free labour. 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.62
There is little dispute about the capitalist nature of the North; but, for Marxists
at least, if the War was indeed a struggle between two expansionist social
systems then we need to consider in more detail what kind of economy and
society prevailed in the South.
All class-societies have involved the ownership of slaves at some point in
their history; but very few have been slave-societies, societies dominated by
the slave-mode of production where, in the terms used by Robin Blackburn,
slavery is not ‘ancillary’, but ‘systemic’. In effect, there have only been five.
Two were in the Ancient world: the Greek city-states and parts of the Roman
Empire, including Rome itself. Three arose during the transition to capitalism:
the South of the United States until 1865, Cuba until 1886 and Brazil until
1888. The proportion of slaves in the South was broadly similar to that in
Greece and Rome, at 30–35 per cent of the population; in Cuba and Brazil it
was higher, at nearer 40 per cent, yet it was the South which was the most
committed to slavery. Why?63
I earlier argued that it is possible for a mode of production which was
precapitalist in the technical sense to still be subject to capitalist laws of
motion: was this true of slavery in the South? Shortly before the Civil War
broke out, Marx wrote in the notebooks that would become the Grundrisse:
‘Negro slavery – a purely industrial slavery – which is besides, incompatible
with the development of bourgeois society and disappears with it, presupposes
wage-labour, and if other free states with wage-labour did not exist alongside
it, if, instead, the Negro states were isolated, then all social conditions there
would immediately turn into pre-civilised forms’.64 In a further entry he adds:
‘The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists,
but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a
62. Marx 1973c, p. 351.

63. Blackburn 1988, pp. 9, 383–4; Finley 1983, pp. 11, 80–1.
64. Marx 1973b, p. 224.
world-market based on free labour’.65 Marx is making a number of different

claims here, which superficially appear inconsistent, leading many later
Marxists to resolve them in unsatisfactory ways. David Roediger, for example,
writes that while ‘the form of appropriation makes a vital difference [between
North and South]’, ‘the logic of both systems was, for Marx, capitalist’.66 Why,
then, did Marx argue that the War was inter-systemic in nature?
The central issue here is the relationship of the South to capitalism. Marx
identified at least one contemporary society, Tokugawa Japan, as being
classically feudal.67 Clearly, the society based on chattel-slavery in the South
was not of the same order; but neither did it simply involve a variant of
capitalism. As was the case in the Americas more generally, slavery in the South
began in the seventeenth century as a way of resolving the shortage of labour
by acquiring and organising the direct producers in a particular way. As
Peter Kolchin has noted, it therefore ‘had more in common with the serfdom
that was emerging in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe than with
many of the pre-modern slaveries’.68 It is also true that both the Eastern-
European feudal estates established under the ‘second serfdom’ and American
slave-plantations produced for the world-market; yet this should not blind
us to the essential difference between them. The former was originally a
response to depopulation which eventually found a market for cereal crops
in Western Europe, but did not import manufactured goods in return. The
latter existed and expanded entirely because of the Western market for cotton
and was mainly dependent on the West for manufactured goods. In short,
they were not, as Blackburn puts it, ‘equivalently distant from the capitalist
mode’.69 The plantations were, therefore, integrated into the capitalist world-
economy, even though they did not correspond to the capitalist mode of
production in the purely technical sense, since both involved slave-labour. As
we have seen, however, this is not the only issue involved: it is also important
whether the plantations were ‘capital-positing’ and ‘capital-producing’, which
they were.
A more plausible argument for the noncapitalist nature of the plantations is
that they effectively involved a form of merchant-capital – that is, one of the
two forms of capital (the other being usury) which coexisted with virtually all
previous modes of production, where profit is realised through ‘buying cheap
and selling dear’ rather than by increasing value in production. On these
65. Marx 1973b, p. 513.

66. Roediger 1994, p. 49.
67. Marx 1976, p. 878.
68. Kolchin 1993, p. 6.
69. Blackburn 1997, p. 374.
grounds it is possible to argue, as Banaji does, that the plantations were not
fully subordinate to capitalist laws of motion, because they involved simple
reproduction, the formal subsumption of labour, and the production of
absolute surplus-value through lengthening the working day and intensifying
labour. Where expansion took place, it was not through improvements to
technological capacity, but by extending the territory of the plantation;
reproduction of the labour-force involved the external supply of slaves through
the market.70 While this is all true, I am not convinced that it proves the
noncapitalist nature of the slave-plantations. Indeed, it would only do so if
they had existed in an environment in which feudal or tributary laws of motion
otherwise prevailed, in which case the comparison with, say, medieval
merchant-capital would be truly apt.
The real issue here is not that some social relations of production in the
South had an ambiguous relationship to capitalism; it is that the South had
constructed an entire society around these relationships and that, with the
secession of the Confederacy, that society had consolidated itself in a new and
aggressive state. Although the South was not feudal, it did derive much of its
self-image from a particular romantic version of feudal society. Mark Twain
was being his usual hyperbolic self when he held Sir Walter Scott responsible
for the Civil War in Chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), but there is
no doubt that Scott’s romanticism contributed to the self-identity of the
Southerner, as did the entire mythical heritage of Scottish clanship, not least
in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan in December 1865.71 One young
Confederate, the son of a South Carolina planter, wrote to his mother during
the War: ‘I am blessing old Sir Walter Scott daily, for teaching me, when
young, how to rate knightly honour, and our noble ancestry for giving me
such a State to fight for’.72 There is a double irony here. One is that Scott, for
all his conservatism, was a characteristic figure of the Scottish Enlightenment
whose novels were intended to demonstrate to his contemporaries that, no
matter how heroic Scottish feudal society had been, the warlike pursuit of
honour was rightly doomed to be replaced by commerce and the peaceful
pursuit of money: in the South his elegies were misunderstood as celebrations.
The other is that, in due course, the Southern planters were to be destroyed in
the way that in history most closely corresponded to the demise of the
Highland chiefs and feudal lords traced by Scott in the Waverley novels.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese claim that the Old South
could have gone in two directions: either towards industrialisation, which
70. Banaji 1977, pp. 15–7.

71. Hook 1999, pp. 103–10, 193–201.
72. McPherson 1997, p. 27.
would have meant abandoning slavery and investing capital in expanded

reproduction (‘qualitative development’); or towards an expansion of slavery
where capital is essentially tied up in simple reproduction (‘quantitative
development’).73 In fact, the ruling class in the South was faced with two
related difficulties which did not exist in other societies with widespread
slavery, and which meant that the latter ‘choice’ was the only real option, as
can be seen by contrasting the Old South with other types of society which
employed forms of unfree labour. As many historians have noted, even by
mid-century, it was the South, rather than the North which most resembled
the rest of the world: free labour was still relatively rare outside of Western
Europe and the Northern states. But, although unfree labour was still more
common, it was also inescapably in retreat: ‘At the time of the American
Revolution, slavery could be found almost everywhere in the New World;
on the eve of the Civil War, far more slaves resided in the Southern states than
in all the other slave-societies combined . . . and – together with Russian
serfdom – Southern slavery had come to symbolize for much of the Western
world a retrograde system resistant to change’.74 In the same year as the
outbreak of the Civil War, the Russian Tsar began what Lenin called ‘the era
of the Russian bourgeois revolution’ by liberating the serfs.75 This was a diluted
version of a much more widespread process of ‘self-transformation’ by feudal
lords who realised that, subject to the pressures generated by an increasingly
capitalist world, the only way to halt their decline, let alone preserve their
current position, was to embrace capitalist landownership. In this way they
could at least remain members of a dominant class, albeit within a new set of
social relations and using new methods of exploitation. Prussia was at the
forefront of this process.
Terence Byres has characterised the ‘Prussian Path’ as a form of ‘capitalism
from above’ in two senses, not only because the feudal landlord-class
transformed itself into a capitalist class, but also because they consequently
controlled the process, ‘in a manner which stifled any development of the
peasant economy . . . whereby a capitalist agriculture might emerge from an
increasingly differentiated peasantry’.76 The top-down nature of the process
was then increasingly adopted by other feudal ruling classes, such as those in
Hungary and Bohemia, as the nineteenth century progressed.77 As in the
earlier case of Scotland after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, military defeat
73. Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, pp. 39–40.

74. Kolchin 1993, p. 190.
75. Lenin 1963, p. 128.
76. Byres 1996, pp. 27–8.
77. Hobsbawm 1975, p. 188.
precipitated the reform-process. In the case of Prussia, it was defeat by the

Napoleonic armies at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, the outcomes of which
seemed to demonstrate the superiority of free peasants over serfs as a source of
manpower, while the indemnities imposed by the victorious French demanded
an increase in revenues which was unlikely to be produced as long as serfdom
endured.78
Why did the Prussian Junkers and the Southern planters take such different
attitudes to the introduction of wage-labour? Slavery was widespread in the
South, but, in most cases, relatively small-scale. On the eve of War, over 97 per
cent of slaveholders owned less than 50 slaves and only 0.1 per cent had estates
with more than 200.79 But the majority of Southerners were not slave-owners
and it is not as if there were no major class-differences between the farmers
and the slave-owners. According to Fox-Genovese and Genovese, the yeoman
farmers accepted the system, ‘not because they did not understand their
position, or because they were panicked by racial fears, and certainly not
because they were stupid, but because they saw themselves as aspiring
slaveholders or as non-slaveholding beneficiaries of a slaveholding world that
constituted the only world they knew’.80 The problem for the ruling class was
not so much with the yeomen, however, as with the whites below them in the
social structure, those who did not own slaves and who had little or no chance
of ever owning them. As Theodore Allen has pointed out, it was in order to
prevent the emergence of solidarity between this group and black slaves that
the condition of racialised slavery had to be absolute: ‘If the mere presumption
of liberty was to serve as a mark of social status for masses of European-
Americans without real prospects of upward social mobility, and yet induce
them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy and enlist them actively,
or at least passively, in keeping down the Negro bond-labourer with whom
they had made common cause in the course of Bacon’s Rebellion, the
presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African-Americans’.81
Both Prussian Junkers and the Southern planters understood that
commercial success was essential if they were to continue as landed classes, but
the Prussian serfs were not a group distinct from the rest of their society and
the Junkers were consequently more vulnerable to the threat of a democratic
movement uniting all the oppositional forces against them, perhaps in the
form – long hoped-for by Engels – of a repetition of the Peasant War of 1525
alongside an urban insurrection by the modern working class. In one sense,
78. Blum 1978, pp. 362, 370; Byres 1996, pp. 105–8.
79. Kolchin 1993, pp. 99–105.
80. Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, p. 263.
81. Allen 1997, p. 249.
the Southern planters were in a stronger position than their German

contemporaries, precisely because the slaves had been absolutely separated
from all other subordinate social groups and were not in a position to make
common cause with them. But the paradox of this position was that, unlike
serfdom, slavery was not a system which could be reformed out of existence,
because the entire social structure was based on the position that blacks were
racially inferior, incapable of any rôle other than as slaves, and who could be
expected to revert to savagery and exact revenge if freed from the supposedly
paternalistic but firm restraints imposed by their masters.82 There was
manufacturing, but it too was constrained by slavery. Firms tended to be
smaller and less productive than in the Midwest, and were often operated on
a part-time basis as a supplement to income mainly derived from agriculture.
There is no reason to suppose that Southern manufacturers were intrinsically
less capable of being successful capitalists than their Northern cousins, but the
restricted market characteristic of the Southern economy acted as a barrier to
them, both in terms of the limited consumption-demands of the large
proportion of the workforce who were slaves, and the fact that the larger farms
and plantations produced their own small-scale goods for use.83 As we have
already noted, large-scale machinery was imported from Western Europe, and
especially Britain. It is not that the Southern slave-economy was incapable of
either dynamic spurts of growth or of adaptation to changing conditions,
in fact it displayed both characteristics at different times between 1783
and 1861; it is rather that a system of absolutely racialised slavery tended
towards self-imposed limits on expansion. Was there any way for the South to
circumvent them?
The fact that social relations of production were based on an absolute
connection between skin-colour racism and exploitation might have been
overcome if the South had been an imperial or colonial outpost of a
metropolitan power; but it was the metropolitan power. These two factors
made reform impossible and consequently made the South different, not only
from other societies with slaves, but other slave-societies. In these, like other
societies with unfree labour, slaves were closer to peasant-status in that they
generally had their own land with which to cultivate crops, this providing for
their own subsistence and perhaps even giving them the opportunity to sell
any surplus in local markets. In the South, even this was much restricted, as
the masters suspected any arrangements that would diminish slave-dependence
upon them.84 More importantly, while there was undoubtedly racism towards
82. Bowman 1980, pp. 783, 785–6, 795, 806–7.

83. Tchakerian 1994, pp. 519–20.
84. Kolchin 1993, p. 153.
the black slaves who worked on the sugar-plantations in, for example, the
British colony of Jamaica, whether or not they remained slaves or became
wage-labourers and peasants was not crucial to the survival of the British state
and society. In the end, slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1838 as a result of
calculations over profitability and the reproduction of the labour-force,
together with concerns over a repetition of the slave-rebellion of 1831.85 In
both of the other slave-societies of the Americas, Cuba and Brazil, the state
began to lessen the necessity for slave-labour by introducing other types of
unfree labour, which formed a bridge between slavery and free labour; in Cuba
these involved Chinese and even Spanish coolies.86 In Brazil, free blacks and
mulattoes could serve in the militia and, crucially, could own slaves themselves.87
None of this was possible in the South.
The nature of the resulting society was set out, without direct reference to
the slaves, in a diatribe by a Southern politician, delivered immediately prior
to the War and recorded by William Howard Russell, a foreign correspondent
for the London Times. Here, the anti-bourgeois, anti-urban and anti-industrial
bias of the Southern ruling class is made quite explicit:
We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have

no cities – we don’t want them. We have no literature – we don’t need any yet. We
have no press – we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and
discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no
commercial marine – no navy – we don’t want them. We are better without them.
Your [i.e. the British] ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own
vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or
manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and
our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations
with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides. But with the Yankees
we will never trade – never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the South
to their accursed cities; not one ounce of their steel or their manufactures shall
ever cross our border.88
Individual plantations could only grow by moving or adding new land; but
the same was true of the society which they supported. Slavery in one society
was never going to remain viable unless it could be guaranteed further territory.
In the North, capital expanded, labour-productivity grew and, potentially at
least, both could continue indefinitely. In the South, increased productivity
was achieved from moving operations to or extending existing plantations
85. Bakan 1987, pp. 86–91; Wright 1987, pp. 865–73.

86. Turley 1996, pp. 187–9.
87. Blackburn 1997, pp. 492–3.
88. Russell 1863, p. 179.
into more fertile soil, but, as Richard Ransom and Richard Sutch point out,
‘there is a natural limit to gains that can be achieved from geographical
relocation’:
The South, therefore, grew but did not develop. Slaveholders were capitalists
without physical capital. Their wealth was in the form of slaves and land. Slave
capital represented 44 percent of all wealth in the major cotton-growing states of
the South in 1859, real estate (land and buildings) was more than 25 percent,
while physical capital amounted to less than 10 percent of the total. Manufacturing
capital amounted to only 1 percent of the total wealth accumulated. . . . [T]he
relative shortage of physical capital in the South can be explained by the presence
of slavery. In a capitalist society physical capital is owned by private entrepreneurs
who are induced to invest in and hold capital by the flow of returns they hope to
receive. In the American South slaves were an alternative to physical capital that
could satiate the demand for holding wealth. In short, slaves as assets crowded
physical capital out of the portfolios of southern capitalists.89
Those limits could, of course, be overcome if the boundaries of Southern

slave-society were widened, up into the Northwest or South and East into the
Caribbean and the Americas beyond the US. In a speech made in Mississippi
three years before the opening of the War, Southern Congressman Albert
Gallatin Brown set out these expansionist aims, which he justified, logically
enough, on the grounds that the Republic had been founded on the theft of
land from the Native Americans:
It may seem strange to you that I thus talk of taking possession of Central
America, or any part of it, seeing, as you suppose you do, that it belongs to some
one else. Yes, it belonged to some one else, just as this country once belonged to
the Choctaws. When we wanted this country we came and took it.
After reminding his audience about the biblical endorsement of slavery and of
the happy situation of the Negro in the South compared to that of his
compatriots in Africa, Brown returned to his main theme:
I want a footing in Central America for other reasons, or rather for a continuation
of the reasons already given. I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we
must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it up for a fair
equivalent, well – if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or
two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason – for the
planting or spreading of slavery. And a footing in Central America will powerfully
89. Ransom and Sutch 1988, pp. 138–9.

aid us in acquiring those other states. It will render them less valuable to the other
powers of the earth, and thereby diminish competition with us.90
Brown was still assuming that the US, rather than an independent South,
would carry out these annexations – a reasonable assumption given the way in
which the South had dominated national politics, at least until the 1850s and
the formation of the Republican Party. Robert Fogel has pointed out that the
Confederacy could have dominated Central and South America, and even
formed alliances further afield with other slave-trading nations, although this
might have brought it into conflict with Britain which was still applying
diplomatic pressure on Brazil and in Africa.91 But given Britain’s reliance on
Southern cotton, and her tacit support for the Confederacy during the Civil
War, it is very likely that British state-managers would have overlooked these
transgressions in the spirit of compromise on which they tended to rely when
their material interests were in conflict with their moral values. There was,
however, a much more serious obstacle to territorial expansion, emblematic of
a tension between the individual and collective interests of the slave-owners.
Individual slave-owners may have wanted to increase cotton-production in
order to boost their income, but collectively they had an interest in restricting
it on the grounds that generalised increased supply would have the effect of
lowering prices. Similarly, they did not want the slave-population to grow too
quickly as this would have a comparable downward impact on the relatively
high price of slaves. As Gavin Wright notes, ‘these attitudes had roots in their
property interest and reflected the kind of economy which that property
interest had created’: ‘By slowing the growth of the regional population, both
free and slave, that property interest also retarded territorial expansion and
political weight. Since this political weight was a factor in secession, and since
sheer manpower was a factor in the South’s military defeat, in these ways
we may say that the economics of slavery contributed to its own demise.’92
This was why, as Brown’s speech suggests, it was important for the Southern
slave-owners to move into areas where crops other than cotton could be
produced on the basis of slavery; the crucial failure of that class was to
delay establishing a state until its Northern opponent was in a position to
defeat it.
What, then, was the nature of the Old South? What mode of production
exercised its laws of motion there? The societies over which the slave-owners
90. Brown 1859, pp. 594–5.

91. Fogel 1989, pp. 414–15.
92. Wright 1987, p. 863.
ruled cannot be directly assimilated to those of the Ancient world; the insertion
of the South into the emergent capitalist world-economy meant the context
for the social relations of master and slave was unimaginably different from
that of the tribal and tributary formations in which the Greek and Roman
city-states developed. But nor can the South simply be regarded as a peculiarly
backward variant of the capitalist societies which were consolidating in
Western Europe, Australasia, and the rest of North America; the surplus
accruing to the landowners did derive from the exploitation of slaves. Perhaps
the solution is to regard the South as a society transitional with respect to
capitalism, but one in which the transition had never been able to progress
beyond a certain point. The South therefore retained a form of production
with the accompanying social relations, namely chattel-slavery, which
elsewhere had been merely one, albeit crucial, element in the primitive
accumulation of capital. In other transitional societies the importance of
slavery and other forms of unfree labour diminished over time, but in the
South it remained and indeed became more central to the economic and social
structure rather than less.
Nevertheless, this case of arrested development might simply have led to the
South remaining, like the Scottish Highlands or the Italian Mezzogiorno, as
the more backward component of a ‘dual economy’, within a nation-state in
which the laws of motion were set by the capitalist mode of production. It did
not. In order to survive, the Southern ruling class established, on the basis of
this retarded early stage in the transition to capitalism, a new and expansionist
state, the Confederate States of America, and it did so with the support of the
overwhelming majority of the inhabitants who were not themselves slaves. In
most societies where the economy was transitional from precapitalist modes of
production to the capitalist mode, states remained under the control of the
precapitalist ruling class, although they adapted to the new conditions, most
typically in the emergence of absolutism: society became increasingly opposed
to the state. As we have seen, these tensions were resolved either by a direct
external challenge to the state from the new social classes created by capitalism
or, in order to avoid this outcome while enabling the ability to compete in
geopolitical terms, by internal challenge from sections of the existing ruling
class who themselves undertook the process of transforming the state – or
some combination of these two paths, with one predominating. None of these
options was possible in the South. There was no alternative ruling class capable
of overthrowing the plantocracy, but, because of the unbreakable divisions
associated with racialised slavery, neither could the slave-owners engage in
self-transformation without unleashing the very social conflicts which, in
Europe, the process had been undertaken to avoid.
Strictly speaking, the South is therefore sui generis and its ideologues were
more justified than they knew in referring to the ‘peculiarity’ of Southern
institutions. The South was exceptional; very few other societies – effectively
only Cuba and Brazil – were so absolutely dependent on one particular
transitional form of labour-exploitation and no other society became both
developmentally ‘frozen’ at such a fundamental level while embodying that
stage of development in the state-form. The South was exceptional; but it is
not therefore inexplicable in Marxist terms – providing we reject the assumption
that all immediately precapitalist states have to map tidily and conveniently
onto our categories of tributary, feudal estates, or feudal-absolutist monarchy.
3.3. Dual power and the Northern bourgeoisie

To summarise the argument so far: if slavery had been dispersed throughout
the US, then the combined pressure of abolitionist campaigning on the one
hand, and of its comparative economic inefficiencies on the other, would have
led to its supersession, perhaps through a series of staged transitions to free
labour, without the type of violence that ultimately ensued; but, because
it was territorially concentrated and the basis of a distinct society in which
labour was defined in racial terms, this solution was not available. Instead,
the Civil War acted as the resolution to a situation which Marxists would, in
other contexts, immediately understand as one of dual power, involving a
geographically based form of class-opposition to the existing nation-state.
The concept of dual power was, of course, first used after the Russian
Revolution of February 1917 to describe how the councils of workers – and
later those of the peasantry and armed forces – came to constitute an alternative
source of economic, social and political organisation to that of the state headed
by the Provisional Government. ‘Two powers cannot exist in a state’, wrote
Lenin shortly before one overthrew the other.93 Trotsky also discerned similar
experiences – involving different social classes and institutions – in earlier
revolutions such as the English and the French: ‘The two-power régime arises
only out of irreconcilable conflicts – is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary
epoch, and constitutes one of its fundamental elements’.94 He was careful to
add, however, that this situation does not arise merely where there are divisions
of interest within a ruling class, and he cited as an example the conflict between
the Junkers and the bourgeoisie in Germany under both the Hohenzollern
Empire of 1871 and the Republic of 1918. He might have added to this the
93. Lenin 1964, p. 59.

94. Trotsky 1977, p. 223.
struggle between Whig and Tory in England during the first half of the
eighteenth century. In the English and the French (although not the Russian)
Revolutions, the centres of dual power opposed to the absolutist state were in
territories seized through military onslaught or urban insurrection by forces
opposed to the régime.
In the US, two territorially bounded societies, within the same state, were
in competition to determine the direction taken by a third, the West. Once
battle was joined the aims of the Confederacy were to expand slave-production
northwards to areas where it had never previously existed, retarding the
advance of industrial capitalism and free wage-labour. One unintended result
would have been to place the USA as a whole under the informal control of
the British Empire, for which most of the Southern cotton-exports were
destined. The Northern bourgeoisie were not the initiators of the struggle, but
had to respond to the act of secession and declaration of war by their enemy;
yet they were ultimately compelled to fight to a decisive conclusion. Moore’s
famous claim that the Civil War was ‘the last capitalist revolution’ involves a
rather restricted notion of capitalism, but it was the last to directly involve the
bourgeoisie, and virtually the only one to involve actual industrial capitalists.
‘Unpalatable as it is to many’, writes Andrew Dawson of this class in
Pennsylvania, ‘manufacturers constituted the revolutionary class and not their
workforce’:
Industrialists threw themselves wholeheartedly into preserving the Union. They

reserved jobs for volunteers, supported widows and orphans, sponsored the Great
Sanitary Fair and organised factory militias in case of invasion. Their finest
political achievement, though, came in 1862 with the foundation of the Union
League. The League represented the demise of the merchant class and the ascent
of manufacturing. Tirelessly publicising the northern cause, the League raised
regiments of soldiers, calling for the end of slavery and supported black civil
rights in Pennsylvania.95
The level of revolutionary commitment displayed by the bourgeoisie was

extremely unusual by this date. The Northern bourgeoisie were faced by a
factory-proletariat which had already demonstrated its militancy. After the
experience of the German Revolution of 1848–9, Marx tended to believe that
the bourgeoisie were incapable of fighting on their own behalf. The half-
hearted conduct of Northern politicians and their military commanders for
the first two years of the War only seemed to offer a further confirmation of
this tendency. In 1862, Engels wrote to Marx complaining about the ‘indolence’
95. Dawson 2003, p. 115.

and ‘indifference’ displayed in the North: ‘Where, amongst the people, is there
any sign of revolutionary vigour?’ So bad was the situation that Engels added
the most insulting comparison of which he was capable: ‘I’ve never encountered
the like of it before, not even in Germany at the worst of times’.96 Marx even
argued that the Northern bourgeoisie would have to be rescued by ‘a slave
revolution’.97 In the end, some elements of this did occur in the formation and
intervention of the black regiments, which involved 250,000 former slaves
and signalled the long-delayed adoption of decisive revolutionary tactics by
Lincoln. Indeed, one of the reasons for the somewhat-exaggerated praise with
which Marx and Engels regularly lauded Lincoln after the Emancipation
Declaration may have simply been their relief at this development.98 How was
it possible?
Within the North as a whole, the dominant reason for opposition to slavery
was the perception that its citizens were potentially or actually oppressed by
what they called the ‘slave-power’, an attitude which involved hostility to the
slave-owners without necessarily displaying any sympathy for the slaves.
Accordingly, attitudes within the working class were complex, dividing
between those who supported the War on abolitionist grounds, those who
supported it on anti-secessionist grounds (which could be quite compatible
with racism towards the slaves), those who opposed it on grounds of opposition
to the draft or the economic hardships it caused (‘a poor man’s fight’) and
those who opposed it on straightforwardly racist grounds. What the bourgeoisie
did not face was a revolutionary working class attempting to drive the
revolution forward in the North in a more radical direction, in the manner of
the ‘permanent revolution’ envisaged by Marx in 1850. Indeed, the biggest
upheavals were directed against the War and the free black population in the
shape of the New York anti-draft riots of 1863. It is in this context that the
territorial dimension assumes great importance. The fact that revolutionary
violence could be directed outwards to a now effectively external enemy,
through the mechanism of disciplined state-power, meant that a far greater
degree of radicalism could be attempted than if the struggle had been a purely
internal one conducted, as it were, by civilians. In other words, the Northern
bourgeoisie were ultimately prepared to embrace the logic of total war rather
than face defeat, even if this meant the emancipation of the slaves and
harnessing the freedmen against their former masters as part of the Union’s
military apparatus.
96. Engels 1995, p. 364.

97. Marx 1995, p. 277.
98. Probably the most balanced assessment of Lincoln by either man can be found in Marx
1984, pp. 249–51.
But these enabling conditions for the overthrow of the Confederacy also
indicate reasons for the retreat from radicalism once the War was won.
‘Nothing renders society more restless than a social revolution but half
accomplished’, wrote Carl Schurz, veteran of the German Revolution of 1848,
Northern commander and politician, at the end of the War: ‘The South will
have to suffer the evil of anarchical disorder until means are found to effect a
final settlement of the labour question in accordance with the logic of the
great revolution’.99 Yet the Northern politicians, including figures such as
Schurz himself, are usually seen as ‘leaving the social revolution unfinished’
and, in some cases, the Republican Party is accused of ‘betraying’ the former
slaves.100 As I suggested in Section 2.1 above, this seems to involve
a misunderstanding of what bourgeois revolutions in general, and this one
in particular, involve. Once the Confederacy had been defeated, once the
coherence of the South as a society had been shattered and its potential
to dominate the US ended, once actual slavery had been dismantled and
the threat of subjugation to the former British colonial power removed,
the majority of the Northern ruling class – many of whom were themselves
racists – had no particular interest in ensuring equal rights and democratic
participation for the black population. In the end, the ‘anarchy’ invoked by
Schurz – or the process of black liberation as we would see it – could not be
endured when it was no longer absolutely necessary for the security of US
capitalism, particularly if the possibility existed of black radicalism in the
former South coinciding, or even overlapping, with renewed worker-militancy
in the North. ‘The North’s conversion to emancipation and equal rights was
primarily a conversion of expediency rather than conviction’, writes James
McPherson: ‘It became expedient for Northern political and business interests
to conciliate Southern whites, and an end to federal enforcement of Negro
equality in the South was part of the price of that conciliation’.101 The necessary
importance given by socialists to the question of racism has perhaps obscured
the way in which this outcome was absolutely typical of the bourgeois
revolutions from above to which the American Revolution in most respects
belongs. The fate of the rural masses in the Italian Mezzogiorno, for example,
remained unchanged after the Risorgimento, as they continued to labour on
the same latifunda for the same landowners. Racism added another deeper
level of oppression to the black population of the South, but their abandonment
99. Schurz 1913, p. 354.

100. See, for example, Foner 1988 (‘unfinished revolution’) and Camejo 1976, pp. 169–87
(‘Republican betrayal’).
101. McPherson 1995, pp. 430–1.
by a triumphant bourgeoisie, now safely in command of state-power, was

entirely typical. Free labour as conceived in the ideology of the prewar
Republican Party was very distant from the types of labour into which blacks
were now forced, such sharecropping, let alone a prison-system in which
inmates were forcibly conscripted into production; but the latter were perfectly
compatible with capitalism – as, indeed, were several other identity-based
restrictions on the freedom of labour. As Lisa Lowe notes: ‘In the history of the
US, capital has maximised its profits not through rendering labour “abstract”
but precisely through the social production of “difference”, restrictive
particularity and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical origins and
gender. The law of value has operated, instead, by creating, preserving and
reproducing the specifically racialised and gendered character of labour power.’102
And in that sense, the actual outcome of Reconstruction foreshadowed how
US capitalism has developed ever since.
4. Conclusion
We can now return to the question of alternatives with which I began this
essay. First, the potential for a more democratic outcome to radical
Reconstruction existed: we are not dealing with a situation in which the
objective was literally impossible of realisation, like Anabaptist or Digger
attempts to achieve communism in sixteenth-century Germany or seventeenth-
century England. The issue is rather one of balance between objective and
subjective conditions. Those who refer to ‘betrayal’ by Northern politicians
have to accept the implications of this position, which is that the achievement
of equality was dependent on the actions of the reunified state and its military
and juridical apparatus. For the reasons given in the preceding section, the
Northern bourgeoisie was always collectively going to be more influenced by
the necessity for social stability than the desirable but, from its point of view,
optional quest for political equality. This is virtually an objective condition. In
these circumstances, the decisive issue was whether the former slaves could
form an alliance with the majority of non-ruling-class whites, and both groups
then allying with the organised working class in the North and forcing through
a democratic (i.e. political) revolution ‘from below’. Obviously, the Southern
ruling class did everything they could to prevent such an outcome. The
question – and this still seems to me to be an open question – is whether its
102. Lowe 1996, pp. 27–8.

success in doing so was preordained by the strength of a racism which was

impossible to dislodge in the decade following Lee’s surrender, or whether a
different strategy on the part of the Radicals could have overcome it. This at
least introduces the possibility that the subjective element might have been
determinate here.
The question of whether the War was necessary is, I think, more
straightforward. By some point in the second half of the eighteenth century –
let us say from the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 – the capitalist
system took on a purely economic momentum which made bourgeois
domination ultimately unstoppable and irreversible, regardless of the
temporary political setbacks suffered by individual revolutions such as, for
example, those of 1848–9. For most historians, therefore, Gettysburg in 1863
does not have the same significance as, for example, Culloden in 1746.
According to the Beards: ‘The main economic results of the Second American
Revolution would have been attained had there been no armed conflict for
the census returns with rhythmic beats were recording the tale of the fates’.103
McPherson concludes perhaps the greatest single-volume history of the Civil
War with essentially the same argument: ‘Of course the northern states, along
with Britain and a few countries in northwest Europe, were cutting a new
channel in world history that would doubtless have become the mainstream
even if the American Civil War had never happened. Russia has abolished
serfdom in 1861 to complete the dissolution of ancient institutions of bound
labour in Europe.’104
What McPherson ignores here is that it took the Russian Revolution of
1917 to complete the liberation of the serfs. The assumption, which I used to
accept, is that, even if the Confederacy had won that battle and gone on to
win the Civil War, the ultimate victory of industrial capitalism across the
entire territory of what is now the USA would sooner-or-later have followed,
either through a renewed attempt by the North or adaptation by the
Confederate plantocracy to the new order, in the manner of the Prussian
Junkers or Japanese Samurai.105 But this view ignores the fact that a Confederate
victory, or – what amounts to the same thing – a Northern refusal to oppose
the expansionist drive of the South in the first place, would have altered the
conditions under which capitalism would then have developed, on a continental
and ultimately global scale. The Confederacy, after all, was not intent on
preserving a compromise with the North but imposing a new and – in the
103. Volume 2 of Beard and Beard 1935, p. 115.

104. McPherson 1988, p. 861.
105. See Davidson 2003, pp. 272–5.
literal sense of the word – reactionary settlement on the US as a whole. We

should therefore recognise that the American Revolution was probably the
most decisive and significant of all the nineteenth-century bourgeois
revolutions. The issues that it left unresolved could not have been resolved by
the bourgeoisie and cannot now: they will have to be accomplished by a
genuine second American Revolution which can only be socialist in nature.
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Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln:

A Curious Convergence*
Robin Blackburn
University of Essex
robinblackburn68@hotmail.com
Abstract
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln held very different views on the ‘social question’. This essay
explores the way in which they converged in their estimation of slavery during the course of the
Civil War; Marx was an ardent abolitionist, and Lincoln came to see this position as necessary. It
is argued that the rôle of runaway slaves – called ‘contraband’ – and German-revolutionary
’48ers played a significant rôle in the radicalisation of Lincoln and the direction of the War.
Keywords
American Civil War, slavery, Marx, Abraham Lincoln, nationalism, ‘contraband’, emancipation
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln were almost diametrically opposed in their
attitude towards 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-labour and the market-revolution. Karl Marx, on
the other hand, was a declared foe of capitalism, who insisted that wage-
labour was in fact wage-slavery since the worker was compelled by economic
necessity to sell his defining human attribute – his labour-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 profits stemmed directly from slaveholding. Both men placed
a concept of unrewarded labour at the centre of their political philosophy, and
* This article is based on a lecture marking the bicentenary of Lincoln’s birth given as part of
a series organised by the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in October 2009. I would like to thank David Levine and his colleagues for the invitation and
for many helpful comments (while naturally absolving them from responsibility for particular
judgements or mistakes).
146 R. Blackburn / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 145–174
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 a
providential experiment in representative democracy that must be defended
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, albeit that he regarded US political institutions as
very flawed. With their ‘corruption’ and ‘humbug’, they lent a popular veneer
to the rule of the wealthy – with special privileges for slaveholders. Lincoln
believed that the genius of the US Constitution could cage and contain the
‘Slave Power’, until such time as it might be possible to wind it up.
In this article, I wish to explore why two men who occupied very different
worlds, and held contrary views, nevertheless coincided on an issue of historic
importance and even brought those worlds into fleeting contact with one
another. I wish to scrutinise the choices and opportunities that the Civil War
posed for Marx and the supporters of the International in both Europe and
the United States. The Civil War and its immediate sequel had a larger impact
on Marx than is often realised – and likewise, the ideas of Marx and Engels
had a greater impact on the United States, a country famous for its
imperviousness to socialism, than is usually allowed.
It is, of course, well-known that Karl Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of
the Union in the US Civil War and that, on behalf of the International
Workingmen’s Association, he drafted a message of support to Abraham
Lincoln on the occasion of the latter’s re-election in 1864 and that the US
Ambassador in London conveyed a polite but very brief response from
the president. But the antecedents and implications of this little exchange are
rarely considered.
By the close of 1864 many European liberals and radicals were coming
round to supporting the North, but Marx had done so from the outset. To
begin with, the cause of the South had a definite appeal to liberals and radicals,
partly because many of them distrusted strong states and championed the
right of small nations to self-determination. Lincoln himself insisted in 1861
that the North was fighting to defend the Union, not to free the slaves. Many
European liberals were impressed by the fact that the secessions had been
carried out by reasonably democratic assemblies; admittedly the Southern
slaves had no say in the matter, but then very few blacks in the loyal states had
a vote either, and many remained slaves. There were also minority currents
in the European labour and socialist movement who preferred Southern
agrarianism to the commercial society of the North.
If the Civil War was not about the defence of slavery then the pure argument
from Unionism was a weak one. Progressive opinion in Europe was not at all
R. Blackburn / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 145–174 147
disturbed when Belgium separated from the Netherlands in 1830, or later, in

1905, when Norway split from Sweden. Had the Netherlands or Sweden
resorted to war to defend these unions they would have been widely
condemned. Marx himself denounced Britain’s dominion over Ireland against
the wishes of its people. In December 1860 Horace Greeley, the radical editor
of the New York Tribune, a paper to which Marx frequently contributed,
declared that the secession was wrong, but should not be resisted by military
means. Veteran abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips
and William Lloyd Garrison initially welcomed secession as it would, they
believed, weaken the baleful power of slavery over the Federal state. For many
outside of North America, the attitude to the War greatly depended on whether
or not slavery was seen as a crucial stake in the conflict. Some members of the
British government inclined to recognise the Confederacy and if they had
done so this would have been a major boost to the South. But ever since 1807,
when Britain had abolished its Atlantic slave-trade, the British government
had made suppression of slave-trafficking central to the Pax Britannica. When
Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary or prime minister, negotiated a free-
trade agreement with an Atlantic state he invariably accompanied it with a
treaty banning slave-trading. If it became apparent that the Confederacy really
was fighting simply to defend slavery it would be extraordinarily difficult for
the London government to recognise it.
Marx as critic of economic explanations of the War

From the beginning, Marx was intensely scornful of those who supported
what he saw as basically a slaveholders’ revolt. He insisted that it was quite
erroneous to claim, as some did, that this was a quarrel about economic policy.
Summarising what he saw as the wrong-headed view espoused by influential
British voices, he wrote:1
The war between North and South [they claim] is a mere tariff war, a war between
a tariff system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side
of free trade. It was reserved to the Times [of London] to make this brilliant
discovery . . . The Economist expounded the theme further . . . Yes[, they argued,] it
would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question
of slavery, however, [they claim] has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
Then, as now, The Economist was a quintessentially liberal publication.
1. Marx 1961.
Marx’s unhesitating option for the North did not mean that he was unaware
of its grave defects as a champion of free labour. He openly attacked the
timidity of its generals and the venality of many of its public servants.
Nevertheless, he saw the Civil War as a decisive turning-point in nineteenth-
century history. A victory for the North would set the scene for slave-
emancipation and a great step forward for the workers’ cause on both sides of
the Atlantic. Support for the North was a touchstone-issue, he believed, and it
became central to his efforts to build the International Workingmen’s
Association.
Marx’s political choice stemmed from an early analysis of the roots of the
War, which refused to define it in the terms first adopted by the belligerents
themselves. Marx’s well-known conviction that politics was rooted in
antagonistic social relations led him to focus on structural features of the two
sections, and the emergence therein of contradictory interests and forms of
social life. Marx and Engels were quite well-informed about US developments.
Many of their friends and comrades had emigrated to the United States in the
years of reaction after the failure of the European democratic revolutions in
1848. With few exceptions, those émigrés went to the North, especially the
Northwest, not the South. Marx and Engels kept up an intense correspondence
with the émigrés, and wrote for, and read, their newspapers.
Marx and Engels were well-aware of the privileged position of slaveholders
in the structure of the US state, but believed that it was menaced by the
growth of the North and Northwest. Lincoln’s election was a threat to a
Southern stranglehold over the republic’s central institutions, as embodied
in Supreme Court judgements, Congressional alignments, fugitive-slave
legislation and gag-acts. In July 1861 Marx wrote to Engels: ‘I have come
to the conclusion that the conflict between the South and the North – for
50 years the latter has been climbing down, making one concession after
another – has at last been brought to a head . . . by the weight which the
extraordinary development of the North Western states has thrown into the
scales. The population there, with its rich admixture of newly arrived Germans
and Englishmen and, moreover, largely made up of self-working farmers, did
not, of course, lend itself so readily to intimidation as the gentlemen of Wall
Street and the Quakers of Boston.’2
One might wish this expressed a little more delicately and appreciatively –
the Quakers had played a courageous rôle in resisting the slaveholders – but it
is quite true that many of the Germans and English who sought refuge in the
United States after 1848 brought with them a secular radicalism that changed
2. Marx 1985, p. 114.

and strengthened the antislavery cause in the United States by broadening its
base of support. Before considering the nature of what might be called the
German corrective, it will be helpful to look at the evolution of Marx’s
analysis.
The clear premise of Marx’s argument is that the North was expanding at a
faster pace than the South – as indeed it was. But Marx contends that it is the
South that is consumed by the need to expand territorially. The expansion of
the North and Northwest, as Marx well knew, was a reflection of a momentous
process of capitalist industrialisation. The South might talk about ‘King
Cotton’, but the truth was that Southern growth was not at all as broadly
based as that in the North. Cotton-exports grew, but little else.
The South had three motives for expansion in Marx’s view. Firstly, its
agriculture was exhaustive and so planters were constantly in quest of new
land. Secondly, the slave-states needed to maintain their veto-power in the
Senate, and for this purpose needed to mint new slave-states just as fast as new
‘free’ states were recognised. Thirdly, the numerous class of restive young white
men anxious to make their fortune persuaded the leaders of Southern society
that they must find an external outlet for them if they were not to become
disruptive domestically.3
By itself, the argument that there was a shortage of land in the South has
limited validity. The building of further railroads could have brought more
lands into cultivation. Alternatively, the planters could have made better use
of fertilisers, as did planters in Cuba. If there was a shortage, it was a shortage
of slaves – relative to the boom in the cotton-plantation economy of the
1850s.
Combined with the third point – the mass of restless filibusters – the
shortage-argument gained more purchase. There was no absolute shortage of
land and slaves, but planters could only offer so much to their children.
Southern whites had large families and there was a surplus of ‘younger
sons’ who wished to make their way in the world. In the 1850s these young
men – with what Marx called their ‘turbulent longings’ – had been attracted
to ‘filibustering’ – expeditions aimed at Cuba and Nicaragua – just as similar
adventurers had sought glory and fortunes in Texas and Mexico. Their parents
might not always approve of freelance methods but did see the attraction of
acquiring new lands.
Undoubtedly, Marx’s clinching argument was that which referred to political
factors: ‘In order to maintain its influence in the Senate and, through the
Senate its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore requires a
3. Marx 1961, pp. 57–70.

continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible
through conquest of foreign lands as in the case of Texas and through the
transformation of the territories belonging to the United States, first into slave
territories and then into slave states.’4 Marx concluded: ‘The whole movement
was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether
the slaves in the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether
twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any
longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.’5
As social science and as journalism this might be impressive, but it did not
bring Marx to the political conclusion at which he aimed. The political
subordination of Northerners was not the equivalent of slavery and might
even be alleviated by Southern secession. Marx further insisted that it was folly
to imagine that the slaveholders would be satisfied by Northern recognition of
the Confederacy. Rather, it would open the way to an aggressive South that
would strive to incorporate the border-states and ensure slaveholder-hegemony
throughout North America. He reminded his readers that it was under
Southern leadership that the Union had sought to introduce ‘the armed
propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America.’6 The seizure of
Spanish Cuba, with its flourishing slave-system, had long been a prominent
Southern goal.
Marx’s real argument and belief was that two social systems confronted one
another – the system of slavery and the system of free labour: ‘The struggle has
broken out because the two systems can no longer live peaceably side by side
on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one
system or the other.’7 In this mortal struggle the North, however moderate its
initial inclinations, would eventually be driven to revolutionary measures.
Marx believed that the polity favoured by the Southern slave-owners was
very different from the republic aspired to by Northerners. He did not spell
out all his reasons, but he was essentially right about this. Southern slaveholders
wished to see a Federal state that would uphold slave-property, that would
return and deter slave-runaways, as laid down in the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850, and that would allow Southerners a fair share of Federal territories. The
planters were happy that the antebellum US-Federal state was modest in size
4. Marx 1961, p. 68. Here I only briefly explain and evaluate Marx’s analysis of the origins of
the Civil War, though the texts I have cited clearly enough reject economic reductionism. Marx’s
stress on the centrality of political issues can be compared with that found in Moore 1966. For
a recent account using many of Marx’s concepts, see Ashworth 2007.
5. Marx 1961, p. 68.
6. Marx 1961, p. 71.
and competence, since it meant low taxes and little or no interference with
their ‘peculiar institution’. They did not favour either high tariffs or expensive
internal improvements. But this restricted view of the state was accompanied
by provisions that affected the lives of citizens of Northern states in quite
intimate ways. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required all citizens to cooperate
with the Federal marshals in apprehending runaways. In the Southern view,
slaveholders should be free to bring slaves to Federal territories, something
seen as an unwelcome and unfair intrusion by migrants from the Northern
states, whether they were antislavery or simply anti-black. Southerners also
favoured censorship of the Federal mail, denying its use for abolitionist
literature. They supported a foreign policy that pursued future acquisitions
suitable for plantation-development. But they did not want a state that had
the power to intervene in the special internal arrangements of the slave-states
themselves. For them a Republican president, with the power to appoint
thousands of Federal officials in the Southern states, and with no intention of
suppressing radical abolitionists, spelt great danger.
As a Whig who had been brought up in Kentucky and Southern Illinois,
Lincoln was quite familiar with the tensions of the borderlands between South
and North. He and his wife had close relatives who were slaveholders, with
one of his wife’s uncles owning 48 slaves. Lincoln was ready to acknowledge
the legal and constitutional rights of slaveholders, but at the same time he
opposed the streak of lawlessness in the behaviour of the slaveholders and their
Northern allies. In his first major speech, delivered in 1838 to the Young
Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, he denounced the lynching of blacks and the
shooting of an abolitionist editor. These events violated the rule of law which
should be every citizen’s ‘political religion’.8 He also insisted that it would be
perfectly constitutional for Congress to end slavery in the Federal district at
Washington. Lincoln believed that means should be found gradually to
emancipate the slaves, with compensation for their owners and with the
former slaves being helped to settle in Africa. A number of Whig slaveholders,
notably Henry Clay, a man much admired by Lincoln, advocated what was
known as the ‘colonisation’ of African-Americans, treating them as aliens in
the land where most of them were born. Lincoln’s support for colonisation
separated him from the main currents of abolitionism, but his concern for the
integrity of the Federal state, his early disapproval of the lawlessness of the
defenders of slavery, and his distaste for the slaveholders’ demand for special
treatment, were all signal themes which, in a more developed form, were to be
taken up by the Republican Party of the 1850s. Unlike the Radicals, he did
8. Foner 2010.
not fulminate against the ‘Slave Power’, but he did nourish a new and more
demanding ideal of the nation and the Republic. Whereas antebellum US
national feeling characteristically deferred to the slaveholders, the Republicans
sponsored a new vision of the nation, which challenged the South’s burgeoning
sense of exceptionalism.
Marx did not directly compare the claims of North and South as competing
nationalisms. Instead, he questioned whether the South was a nation. He
wrote: ‘ “The South”, however, is neither a territory strictly detached from the
North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all but a battle
slogan.’9 Many who were much closer to the situation than Marx entered the
same judgement in the years before 1861, yet soon had to acknowledge that
the Confederacy did rapidly acquire many of the ideological trappings of a
nation complete with a claimed ‘moral unity’ based on exaltation of the racial
conceits and values of a slave-society, and of the conviction that white
Southerners were the true Americans. Their values were a strange mixture of
traditional patriotism and paternalism and – for whites alone – libertarianism.
Hundreds of thousands of white Southerners who owned no slaves nevertheless
fought and died for the rebellion, seeing the Confederacy as the embodiment
of their racial privileges and rural civilisation. The rebels were fighting for a
cause that embodied a way of life. Within the Union, most slaveholders had
championed minimal taxation and extensive ‘states’ rights’. The mass of slave-
less Southern whites not only had the vote, but enjoyed the ‘freedom of the
range’, that is to say that they could graze their animals and hunt on vast tracts
of public land and uncultivated private land. This privilege allowed them to
live, as they put it, ‘high on the hog’, shooting wild pig and other game. Engels
pointed out to Marx that the secession-movement had popular backing
throughout much of the South.10 Of course, blacks were excluded from the
political process, but so too were they in most parts of the North.
Southern nationalism itself responded to, and stimulated, Unionist or
Yankee nationalism. The new steam-presses poured out a torrent of newspapers,
magazines and novels, all of them summoning up rival imagined communities.11
Print-capitalism was rendered even more dynamic by cable and rail-
communications. While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin moved
the Northern reader to tears, it seemed a grotesque libel to Southerners. The
North’s imagined community could not embrace the slaveholder, let alone
the degraded slave-trader. The South’s recoiled in fear and outrage from
the abolitionist and the radical newspaper-editor, with their slurs on Southern

10. Engels 1961, p. 326.
11. Anderson 1996.
honour and their open support for slave-runaways and resistance. That
incompatible national imaginings played a part in precipitating the conflict by
no means takes away from the underlying discrepancy between two social
formations which gave birth to such imaginings.
That the Civil War was an ‘irrepressible conflict’, that its roots lay in the
different labour-régimes of the two sections, and that it crystallised in opposing
images of the good society, are not novel propositions. Different versions of them
have been entertained by, among many others, such notable historians as David
Potter, Don Fehrenbacker, Eric Foner, Eugene Genovese, and John Ashworth.12
Marxists who have studied the origins of the US Civil War have, like Marx
himself, been drawn to seeing the conflict as one that concerned not rival
economic interests but the wider political and ideological presuppositions of the
social order of the two sections. Indeed, manufacturers and merchants in Europe
and the North had no objection to doing business with Southern planters. The
clash was instead rooted in the apparent class-antagonism between slaveowners
and free or independent workers. Southern ideologues saw Northern wage-
labourers as suffering a humiliating dependence, contrasted with the ‘freedom of
the range’ and recognition enjoyed by Southern whites. The ‘free-labour ideology’
of the Northern Free Soilers and Republicans instead stressed that the industrious
Northern worker had the prospect of becoming an artisan, small master,
professional or farmer. The availability of land for settlement in the Federal
territories was a part of this promise. The availability of good public education
also helped to lend substance to the prospect of social mobility and artisanal
improvement. Such Southern values as martial valour, patriotism and honour
became pitted against Northern ideals of improvement and industry because the
social relations which produced them demanded different political structures if
they were to be sustained and reproduced.
The idea that rival nationalisms played their part is an extension of such views,
but Daniel Crofts points to the difficulty of pinpointing the exact moment of
their birth:
It is tempting to project back onto the prewar months the fiercely-aroused

nationalisms that appeared in mid-April [1861]. To do so would not be entirely
in error, but it invites distortion. The irreconcilably antagonistic North and South
described by historians such as Foner and Genovese were much easier to detect
after April 15. Then and only then could Northerners start to think in terms of a
conflict urged on behalf of ‘the general interests of self-government’ and the
hopes of humanity and the interests of freedom among all peoples and for ages
to come.13
12. Potter 1976; Genovese 1967; Foner 1970; Ashworth 1995; Ashworth 2007.
13. Crofts 2005, p. 197.
But the terms cited in this account grant too much to Unionist rhetoric. The
Union’s war-aim was quite simply the preservation of the Union, not ‘the
interests of self-government’, an idea to which the Confederacy also had
a claim. Both rival nationalisms had a markedly expansive character, the
Unionist being continental at this stage and the Confederacy one which craved
new slave-territories to the South (notably Cuba) and West. The clash was
thus one of rival empires as well as competing nationalisms.
National feeling does not validate oppression. Abraham Lincoln had
enunciated principles which had a direct bearing on the South’s right to self-
determination when he declared the following:
The doctrine of self government is right – absolutely and eternally right – but it
has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that
whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a
man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of
self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not
to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not
govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government;
but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than
self-government – that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient
faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral
right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.14
Lincoln had uttered these words in 1854 in connection with the dispute over
the right of communities in the Federal territories to establish themselves as
newly formed states. However attractive or compelling Lincoln’s argument
might seem, it could only be urged in favour of Northern resistance to secession
if the North had itself repudiated slavery. But Lincoln and the majority of
Republicans expressly condoned the survival of slavery in the Union, and only
opposed its extension to the Federal territories. Once elected, Lincoln’s main
concern was to court the slaveholding border-states and make sure that as few
of them as possible backed the rebellion. His success in this became the source
of his caution in moving against slavery. Amending the Constitution in order
to outlaw slavery would, in any case, require the support of large qualified
majorities in Congress and from the states. Given that the slaves of the South
14. Abraham Lincoln, speech in Peoria (Illinois) on 16 October 1854, responding to the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. The quote from the Declaration of Independence strikes a patriotic note,
though some might conclude that the speech also invalidated the break of 1776, given the
prominence of slavery in several North-American slave-colonies. No doubt Lincoln would have
insisted that the objection was not available to George III and his governments, since they were
massively implicated in slavery, and that at least the Founding Fathers were uneasy about
the institution.
were worth more than all the machines, factories, wharves, railroads and farm-
buildings of the North put together there was no prospect of offering
compensation. Lincoln observed in his Inaugural Address that the only major
difference between the sections referred to slavery’s expansion.
Many US historians treat the Northern decision to go to war in a fatalistic
way, echoing Lincoln’s own later phrase, ‘And the war came’.15 The Unionist
cause – US or American nationalism – is simply taken for granted as an
absolute value needing no further justification. However, Sean Wilentz takes a
bolder line, taking his cue from the First Inaugural:
above and beyond the slavery issue, Lincoln unflinchingly defended certain basic
ideals of freedom and democratic self-government, which he asserted he had been
elected to vindicate. There was, he said, a single ‘substantial dispute’ in the
sectional crisis: ‘one section of our country believes that slavery is right and ought
to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended’.
There could be no doubt about where Lincoln stood, and where his administration
would stand, on that fundamental moral question.16
But Lincoln’s formula was deliberately weak. If slavery really was a moral
outrage then he should have said that slavery was ‘wrong and ought to be
abolished ’. As for whether there could be doubt about where Lincoln stood, it
is a simple fact that many of his contemporaries, especially the Radicals and
abolitionists, did indeed doubt him and his administration.
If the new president could not come out more clearly against slavery then
he could scarcely claim that it was the overriding issue in the War to suppress
the rebellion. Lincoln was satisfied that the cause of the Union, and his oath
of office, were fully self-sufficient and amply justified resistance to rebellion.
To underline that secession was rebellion he waited until a Federal installation
had been attacked before ordering military action.
15. The phrase ‘And the war came’, taken from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, has been adopted
for many valuable accounts, but its implicit denial of Northern agency fails to acknowledge the
emergence of a new nationalism or to pinpoint the Union’s legitimacy-deficit in 1861–2 and
hence a vital factor impelling the President to remedy it. See, for example, Stampp 1970; Crofts
2005; McPherson 2007, p. 17.
16. Wilentz 2005, p. 783. Wilentz proceeds from these remarks to the conclusion: ‘the only
just and legitimate way to settle the matter [i.e. the difference over slavery-extension], Lincoln
insisted . . . was through a deliberate democratic decision made by the citizenry.’ (Wilentz 2005,
p. 763.) A riposte to this is suggested by Louis Menand’s observation: ‘the Civil War was a
vindication, as Lincoln had hoped it would be, of the American experiment. Except for one
thing, which is that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their
disagreements by killing one another.’ (Menand 2001, p. x.)
Lincoln opposed the filibustering of Southern adventurers but had been

committed to consolidation. He had opposed the Mexican War, but in 1848
he had strongly supported the presidential campaign of General Zachary
Taylor, a slaveholder and victor over the Mexicans. William Seward, shortly to
become Lincoln’s Secretary of State, broadly hinted at another powerful
consideration, namely the damage that secession would do to the global
projection of US power. Speaking in the Senate in January 1861, he declared:
The American man-of-war is a noble spectacle. I have seen it enter an ancient

port in the Mediterranean. All the world wondered at it and talked about it.
Salvos of artillery, from forts and shipping in the harbour, saluted its flag. Princes
and princesses and merchants paid it homage, and all the people blessed it as a
harbinger of hope for their own ultimate freedom . . . I imagine now the same
noble vessel entering the same haven. The flag of thirty-three stars and thirteen
stripes has been drawn down, and in its place a signal is run up, which flaunts the
device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. Men ask, ‘Who is the stranger that thus
steals into our waters?’ The answer contemptuously given is: ‘She comes from one
of the obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.’17
The secession of a limited number of rural states would, in this view, not
simply diminish US power, or hand over control of the Mississippi, but would
spell the end of the ‘empire of liberty’. Seward was speaking in the Senate and
addressing his remarks as much to moderate Southerners, who could be
deterred from joining the secession-movement, as to Northerners. If there had
been a compromise, and some sort of nominal union had been salvaged, we
can be pretty sure that it would have been sealed by territorial expansion –
most likely the seizure of Cuba.
The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, also sought to play down the
defence of slavery as the motive for the conflict and instead to harp on the
Northern threat to states’ rights and on the affronts that had been offered to
Southern honour. He stressed continuity between the ideals of the American
Revolution and their supposed latter-day embodiment in the Confederacy.
The Confederate Constitution was closely modelled on that of 1787. Davis’s
Vice President, Alexander Stephens, was not so careful and the nature of the
conflict itself was steadily to highlight the dependence on slavery. The
exigencies of war forced the Confederacy to tax and requisition the wealth of
its citizens – and to flout states’ rights – on a grand scale.
17. Quoted in Bensel 1990, p. 18. For an account of Seward’s expansionist plans and their
frustration by the larger processes set in motion by the Civil War, see LaFeber 1963,
pp. 24–32.
Of course, dissidents in the North claimed that Lincoln and the Republicans
rode roughshod over republican liberties, but this was in the service of a
Unionist nationalism to which many Democrats as well as Republicans also
subscribed. As the conflict proceeded, the salience of slavery in Southern
society itself became of decisive importance, creating severe problems for the
Confederacy and becoming a target of Unionist strategy. The Confederacy’s
very belated attempt to free a few hundred slaves and enrol them in a coloured
militia came much too late to have any impact, and still rested on a racial
compact. But implicitly it conceded that the South had built on a faulty
foundation.
The German-Americans
Let us return to the sources of the conflict and the nature of the Republican
threat. The Civil War crisis was, of course, precipitated by the growth of the
Republican Party and the election of a Republican president. Lincoln would
be able to make a host of appointments, including many in the Southern
states themselves. He would be able to veto legislation and give orders to the
executive apparatus. Moreover, civil society in the North had become tolerant
of provocations escalating from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to John Brown’s attack on
Harper’s Ferry. While Southern leaders abominated religious abolitionism,
they were even more alarmed at the growth of a secular Republican politics
that could win Northern majorities and use these to dominate the state.
This brings us to the too-often neglected contribution of the German-
Americans. Bruce Levine’s study, The Spirit of 1848, shows the transformative
impact of the huge German immigration of around the mid-century.18 At this
time, immigration was rising to new heights and Germans comprised between
a third and a half all newcomers. In the single year 1853 over a quarter-of-a-
million German immigrants arrived. The German-Americans soon became
naturalised and an important pool of votes for those who knew how to
woo them. To begin with, Democratic rhetoric had some impact, but, by the
mid-1850s, many German-Americans were attracted to the Republicans,
and themselves helped to make Republicanism and antislavery more broadly
attractive.
Protestant evangelicalism strongly influenced US abolitionism. The evangelical
repudiation of slavery was very welcome, but eventually too-close an association
served to limit the antislavery appeal. The evangelicals twinned antislavery
with temperance and Protestantism, and this diminished the appeal of
18. Levine 1992.

abolitionism in the eyes of many Catholics and not a few free-thinkers. Already
in the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison and William Channing sought to root
the antislavery critique in more rationalist varieties of Protestant Christianity.
English immigrants also inclined to antislavery.19 But the large-scale German
immigration greatly strengthened the secular culture of antislavery. With their
breweries, beer-gardens, musical concerts and Turnverein [exercise-clubs], the
German radicals furnished a strong secular current of antislavery, and even
the German Protestants had concerns which differentiated them from the
US Methodists and Baptists.
The temperance-cause loomed large for evangelicals, but had no charm
for German and Nordic immigrants. The more radical German-Americans
supported women’s rights and female suffrage, with Mathilda Anneke
publishing a German-language women’s paper. Margarete Schurz was
influential in the introduction of public kindergartens. Sometimes Marx’s
German-American followers are portrayed as deferring to the prejudices of
white, male trade-unionists, but this is unfair. When Joseph Wedemeyer,
Marx’s long-time friend and comrade, helped to found the American Workers’
League [Amerikanische Arbeitersbund ] in 1853, its founding statement of
principles declared that ‘all workers who live in the United States without
distinction of occupation, language, color, or sex can become members’.20
Today such a formula sounds entirely conventional, but in 1853 it was very
fresh. Indeed, this may be the first occasion on which a workers’ organisation
adopted it. The revolutionary German-Americans did not invent this stance
all by themselves, but did readily adopt a critique of racial and gender-exclusion
pioneered by radical abolitionists.
The mass of German-Americans were naturally hostile to the nativist
chauvinism of the Know Nothings. The Republican Party only emerged as the
dominant force in the North in the 1850s by defeating the Know Nothings
(or American Party), and repudiating its own nativist temptation. While some
19. The over-representation of British immigrants in the ranks of antislavery activists in the
1830s is brought out in Richards 1978.
20. Levine 1992, p. 125. In later decades some German-Americans did indeed soft-pedal
women’s rights when seeking to recruit Irish-American trade-unionists, but, while this should be
duly noted, it is far from characterising all German-Americans, whether followers of Marx or
not. For an interesting study, which sometimes veers towards caricature, see Messer-Kruse 1998.
This author has a justifiable pride in the native American radical tradition and some valid
criticisms of some of the positions adopted by German-American ‘Marxists’ but is so obsessed
with pitting the two ethnic political cultures against one another that he fails to notice how
effectively they often combined, especially in the years 1850–70. See Buhle 1991 for a more
balanced assessment.
Republican leaders flirted with nativist prejudice, the party itself attacked –
even demonised – ‘the Slave Power’, and not the immigrants. The presence
of hundreds of thousands of German-American voters helped to ensure this
orientation.
As the Civil War unfolded German-Americans, and their overseas friends,
continued to furnish vital support to the Northern cause. Eventually 200,000
Germans fought for the Union, with 36,000 fighting in German-speaking
units. Carl Schurz became a major-general, and later a senator. Fritz Sigel and
Alexander Schimmelfennig became generals. Marx’s friend and collaborator
Joseph Wedemeyer was a colonel, and served as a staff-officer in St Louis for
Frémont. Two other members of the Communist League who also became
Unionist officers were August Willich and Fritz Anneke. Indeed, the
correspondence of Marx and Engels is studded with references to the military
progress of these friends and acquaintances.
The military resources represented by the wider German-American enrolment
were very significant, but the same could be said of the Irish-American contingents
which grew to be just as large. The German-Americans brought with them an
openness to the antislavery idea which was to promote a new sense of the
character of the War and the way it should be fought. Reviewing a recent
collection of hundreds of letters written by German-American volunteers,
Kenneth Barkin writes: ‘the major reason for volunteering [for the Union army]
was to bring slavery to an end.’21 This new research very much vindicates Levine’s
argument in The Spirit of 1848.
Civil War strategy and politics

The veterans of 1848 saw themselves as social revolutionaries, but also as
exponents of a national idea and movement. Whatever their ambivalence – and
it was considerable – they were aware of the lessons of the Napoleonic epoch and
of the nationalist renewal which it had provoked in Germany. One of the most
striking expressions of this movement had been the doctrines of Carl von
Clausewitz – the contention that war was the continuation of politics by other
means, the attention to moral factors, and the insistence on the priority of
destroying the enemy’s main army, rather than capturing territory or capital
cities. Clausewitz’s magnum opus, On War, had been published in 1832 and its
ideas had currency amongst the 1848 veterans. Unionist military strategy at first
21. Barkin 2008, p. 71.

ignored the Clausewitzian imperatives, and instead preferred the more static
doctrine of Antoine Jomini, a Swiss military theorist.22
Lincoln had gone to great lengths to promote the widest possible alliance in
defence of the Union, accommodating moderates and making concessions to
slaveholders in the border-states. But by the summer of 1862 lack of progress,
heavy casualties and the cautious and defensive conduct of the War was inspiring
mounting criticism and a greater willingness to listen to abolitionists and Radical
Republicans, who argued for a bolder strategy, both militarily and politically.
The more Marx learned about militant abolitionism, the more impressed he
was. In an article for Die Presse of 9 August 1862, Marx wrote of the growing
attention paid in the North to abolitionist orators, and, in particular, to
Wendell Phillips, who ‘for thirty years . . . has without intermission and at the
risk of his life proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves as his battle cry’.23 He
paraphrases at length a speech by Phillips ‘of the highest importance’ in which
the veteran abolitionist indicts Lincoln’s conservative and cowardly policy:
The government [of Lincoln] fights for the maintenance of slavery and therefore
it fights in vain . . . He [Lincoln] waits . . . for the nation to take him in hand and
sweep away slavery through him . . . If the war is continued in this fashion it is a
useless squandering of blood and gold . . . Dissolve this Union in God’s name and
put another in its place, on the cornerstone of which is written: ‘Political equality
for all the citizens in the world’ . . . Let us hope that the war lasts long enough to
transform us into men and then we shall quickly triumph. God has put the
thunderbolt of emancipation into our hands in order to crush the rebellion.24
Marx and Engels had from the outset insisted on the War’s antislavery logic,
but the first eighteen months of the conflict tested their conviction. Engels
was particularly distressed by the passivity and defensiveness of the Union
commanders, and beyond that what he called ‘the slackness and obtuseness’
that appeared throughout the North, the lack of popular zeal for the republic,
contrasting with the daring and energy of the rebels. On 7 August, Marx
urged his friend not to be over-influenced by the ‘military aspect’ of matters.
Lincoln’s Provisional Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September
1862 and its coming into force in January 1863 began to inject a vital new
ingredient.
On 29 October, following the announcement of the Provisional Proclamation,
Marx was powerfully reassured. He wrote:
22. Gallagher 1998.

23. Marx and Engels 1984, pp. 233–4.
The fury with which the Southerners have received Lincoln’s [Emancipation]
Acts proves their importance. All Lincoln’s Acts appear like the pettifogging
conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter
their historic content. Indeed it amuses me when I compare them with the
drapery in which the Frenchman envelops even the most unimportant point.25
Thereafter Marx and Engels had growing confidence in Lincoln, even if they
continued to complain about the quality of the Union’s military leadership
and the need for a thoroughgoing shake-up in the republic’s ruling institutions.
The Proclamation of January 1863 went further than the provisional
proclamation of the previous September.
Lincoln’s option for the emancipation-policy was by no means a foregone
conclusion. It was advocated by abolitionists and Radicals, but openly opposed
by the loyal border-states and by many Democrats. Lincoln believed that
maintenance of the broadest Unionist coalition was essential to victory.
Democrats and moderate Republicans long-hoped to persuade the Confederacy
to come to terms and, to this end, they opposed measures that would
irrevocably alienate the South. While abolitionists and radical Republicans
railed against Lincoln’s studied moderation, it was the actions of a few thousand
slave-rebels outside of the political system which helped the Radicals in
Washington eventually to win the argument.26 In July 1862 Congress had
prepared the ground for the Emancipation Proclamation by passing the
Second Confiscation Act, providing for the freeing of slaves owned by rebels
and by a new Militia Act which dropped the stipulation, reaching back to
1792, that only white men could enrol.
The arrival of fugitive slaves in Union encampments surrounding the
Confederacy made slavery, and its rôle in the conflict, impossible to ignore.
Some Union commanders tried to return the slave-fugitives to their masters.
Others found this a perverse and impractical response. General Benjamin
Butler was the most senior Union commander to decide that these fugitives
should not be returned and that instead they should be welcomed and put to
work as auxiliaries. The legal term ‘contraband’ was soon adopted to explain
and justify this practice, though the term awkwardly implied that the (ex-)

26. Slave-resistance and black abolitionism played vital rôles in radicalising many Republicans
and Union soldiers, a development that Marx and Engels anticipated but did not thereafter write
much about. The thousands of fugitives of 1861 grew to as many as 400,000 by the end of the
War, or a little over a tenth of the slave-population, with the remainder working to meet their
own needs rather than for their owner. See Hahn 2009. The Emancipation Proclamation did not
attempt the impossible task of discriminating between loyal and rebel owners inside the
Confederacy, and, in practice, Union offices were often to accept refugees if they needed recruits
or labourers, even if these refugees might have originated from the border-states.
slaves were confiscated rebel-property. Lincoln’s initial refusal to countenance

this practice provoked abolitionist agitation. Nonetheless, the swelling number
of ‘contrabands’ exercised their own powerful pressure for an emancipation-
policy.
The emancipation-policy respected the slave-property of slaveholders in the
loyal border-states, in Tennessee, and in several other districts already occupied
by Unionist forces. Altogether, there were around 800,000 slaves who were
left in slavery while some 3.1 million would be liberated by the Proclamation’s
terms, so long as the Union army prevailed. The Proclamation was framed as
an exercise of the president’s war-powers. It justified the enrolment of
‘contrabands’ for civilian labour, and included a clause permitting their
enrolment in fighting units. Coloured soldiers were organised in special units,
under white officers, and at a lower rate of pay. Eventually the thirst for
manpower of a hugely destructive war led to the enrolment of 180,000
African-Americans in the Union army and 20,000 in the Navy (by the end of
the conflict, just over a hundred African-Americans had been commissioned
as officers of coloured units).
The emancipation-policy greatly exacerbated the problems of the
Confederacy, as it found it increasingly difficult to keep slaves working to
supply the Southern armies. The emancipation-policy also helped in Europe.
The fledgling labour and socialist movements were not completely united, but
the most dynamic and representative currents now rallied to oppose the
Confederacy. Marx and Engels based their efforts to develop the International
Workingmen’s Association on this trend.
Lincoln was dismayed when General Meade failed aggressively to follow up
the setback inflicted on the rebels at Gettysburg. Instead, Meade issued a
proclamation saying that the country ‘looks to the army for greater efforts to
drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.’ Lincoln was
aghast at the discovery that he had another general who entirely failed to grasp
the nationalist principle that ‘the whole country is our soil.’27
But above and beyond the importance of defending the whole territory
of the former Union was the claim that the North was defending a new
Union that would correspond more closely to the nation-state cherished by so
many nineteenth-century nationalists.28 In his famous address at Gettysburg,
Lincoln underlined the ‘new birth of freedom’ that must inform and infuse
the military struggle. Was this rebirth defined by slave-emancipation, or was
it simply a vindication of Unionist nationalism and American ‘principles of
27. McPherson 2008, p. 33.

28. For an account which seriously addresses the issue of Unionist nationalism, see Bensel
1990, pp. 18–47.
self-government’? Both interpretations were available. The rebirth of the

national spirit was something that many immigrants as well as natives would
be able to understand, because they came from lands where the national
revolution was as yet unconsummated – such as Germany and Ireland. (The
Irish Fenians strongly supported the North, helping to organise a number of
units.) And, as revolutionary and democratic nationalists, they were less
inclined to be fixated by given political forms, such as the US Constitution. It
was German-American militia in St Louis that prevented Missouri’s governor
from delivering the state and its huge arsenal into Confederate hands.
European nationalisms, with their dominant ethnicities and religions, had
their own problems with reconciling rival concepts and recognising minorities.
The Republicans had shied away from crude nativism but without embracing
the radical-abolitionist call for radical innovation. The formulas offered by
Lincoln at Gettysburg did not offer citizenship to the freedmen (nor to
American Indians), though Northern-European Protestant immigrants
somehow fitted in. Dorothy Ross urges that Gettysburg marks a step back
from the universalism of the Declaration of Independence: ‘Lincoln transforms
a truth open to each man as man into something he shares by virtue of his
partnership in the nation . . . Lincoln solved the moral conflict he faced between
principles and national survival by linking human rights to national allegiance,
but human rights became the subordinate partner.’29
The leaders of the North faced significant opposition. The War’s heavy toll
on life and the North’s failure to inflict decisive defeats on the Confederate
forces led ‘copperhead’-Democrats to hanker for peace-talks. Conscription led
to violent draft-riots in New York and other urban centres, with the rioters
attacking blacks as the supposed cause of the conflict. But even New England
abolitionists with impeccable patriot-credentials could doubt whether war was
the right way to impose their section’s superior civilisation. As an avowed
abolitionist and young officer who had just experienced several terrible, bloody
engagements, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. – a future Chief Justice – wrote to
his orthodox Republican father: ‘If it is true that we represent civilization wh.
is in its nature, as well as slavery, diffuse & aggressive, and if civn and progress
are better things why they will conquer in the long run, we may be sure, and
will stand a better chance in their proper province – peace – than in war, the
brother of slavery – it is slavery’s parent, child and sustainer all at once.’30
What Holmes here refers to as civilisation and progress are forces that Marx
would have seen as capitalism or the prevalence of bourgeois social relations.
29. Ross 2009, p. 346.

30. Menand 2001, p. 45.
The sentiments expressed point to pacifism rather than anti-imperialism. The

idea is that, one way or another, the North is going to prevail, so why not do
so in a kinder, gentler way? The North’s ownership of the future is down to the
extraordinary locomotive of its capitalist economy. Marx himself probably
would have agreed that the North would prevail anyway, but would have
added that 300,000 slaveholders were not going to give up their human
property without a fight.
Holmes’s letter was written in December 1862 at a time when the
consequences and character of emancipation-policy were not yet clear. Without
abandoning all of his misgivings Holmes became more committed to the War
in the next year or two. According to Louis Menand, enthusiasm for
abolitionism and the Union cause was boosted by the bravery of the black
soldiers in the assault of Fort Wagner, revulsion from the racial attacks in New
York, and, finally, the growing effectiveness of the Northern war-machine,
making it seem that, at last, all the bloodshed was to some purpose after all.31
The adoption of the emancipation-policy itself created a new abolitionist
agenda. It posed the issue of the civic status of those freed from slavery. Lincoln
had repeatedly declared that slaves were part of humankind and that it was
blasphemy to belittle or deny this, as he thought Stephen Douglas and other
Democratic leaders did. But Lincoln’s vehemence on the equal humanity of
the former slaves did not mean that they were all simply Americans or that
they were entitled, once released from slavery, to equal citizenship. He believed
that they remained a sort of alien or stranger, and should be invited to leave
North America and find a land of their own in Africa and the Caribbean.32
In a speech at Charleston on 18 September 1858 – part of his famous
debating duel with Stephen Douglas – Lincoln had insisted: ‘I am not, nor
have I ever been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to inter-marry with white people.’33 This
view of the Negro and his rights was not lightly held, but it did change in the
course of the War and as the challenges of ‘reconstruction’ presented
themselves.
The address of the International to President Lincoln

It is at this point that we can consider the brief and mediated exchange between
Marx and the US President. The two men were both averse to wordy rhetoric
31. Menand 2001, pp. 52–3.

32. Lincoln’s long attachment to the colonisation-idea is documented in Foner 2008.
33. Holzer (ed.) 1993, p. 189. This was not an off-hand remark, but forms part of a careful
introduction to his speech.
and conventional pieties, and yet both discovered an emancipatory potential

in a bloody and often-sordid Civil War. Lincoln was naturally taciturn – his
most important speeches were masterpieces of concision. When it came to
justifying slave-emancipation, Lincoln was further bound by political and
constitutional considerations, the need to retain the loyalty of the border-
states, and to take only such actions as conformed to his war-powers as
president. So neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Gettysburg
address avow an abolitionist objective, even if both had an implicit antislavery
message for those willing to hear it.
Lincoln’s course from the Emancipation Proclamation aimed, not just to
maintain and invigorate the Unionist coalition, but also to appeal to public
opinion in the wider Atlantic world and to head off the inclination of the
governments in Paris or London to recognise the Confederacy, or, later, to
offer mediation. Lincoln’s carefully constructed appeals to abolitionism were a
vital part of this. Given that the International Workingmen’s Association
(IWA) embraced several British and French trade-unions, it evidently appeared
worthy of some diplomatic acknowledgment. The General Council of the
IWA asked Karl Marx to draft a message of congratulation to Lincoln on the
occasion of his re-election. The Republican watchword, ‘Free Labor, Free Soil,
Free Men’ was designed to indict the ‘Slave Power’ and, however vaguely, to
offer rights, land and recognition to the labourer. This was not anticapitalism,
but it was, in Marx’s terms, a stride in the direction of the democratic and
social republic.
Marx found that drafting the International’s address to Lincoln was more
difficult than he had anticipated: he complained to Engels that writing such a
text was ‘much harder [to draft] than a substantial work’ since he was anxious
that ‘the phraseology to which this sort of scribbling is restricted should at
least be distinguished from the democratic, vulgar phraseology.’34 Nevertheless,
he allowed himself the following resonant, if complex, paragraph: ‘When an
oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the
annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very
spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic
had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was
issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth
century . . . then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before
the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had
given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin
for a general holy crusade of property against labour.’ The address also warned
that, so long as the republic was ‘defiled by slavery’, so long as the Negro was

‘mastered and sold without his concurrence’, and so long as it was ‘the highest
prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own
master’, they would be ‘unable to attain the true freedom of labour.’35
The repeated invocation of the cause of labour in the address thus gave its
own more radical twist to the ‘free labour’-argument characteristic of Lincoln
and other Republicans. The address observed: ‘The workingmen of Europe
feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of
ascendancy for the middle class, so the American anti-slavery 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 matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained
race and the reconstruction of the social world.’36
The US Ambassador to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, replied to the
address on behalf of the president a month later, writing: ‘I am directed to
inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which
was duly transmitted through this legation to the President of the United
States has been received by him. So far as the sentiments expressed by it are
personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he
may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has
recently been extended to him by his fellow-citizens’. It went on to declare
that ‘the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery-
maintaining insurgents as the cause of human nature and that they derive new
encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the working men of
Europe.’37 Thus both the address and the reply refer to labour with the greatest
respect and both embed the rights of labour in, respectively, the ‘rights of man’
and ‘the cause of human nature’.
Douglass and Marx on Lincoln’s progress

By the time of the Second Inaugural in March 1865, Lincoln was less
constrained than on earlier occasions and placed slavery as central to the
conflict in a way that he had previously avoided. He gave vent to his sense of

36. Marx and Engels 1961, p. 281. The meanings of the address are rarely considered, which
makes it the more regrettable when it is interpreted in a tendentious way, as is the case with
Messer-Kruse 1998, pp. 54–6, in which he has Marx complaining at the ‘bother’ of having to
write something of such little importance as the address and that he only consented to do so
because: ‘In Marx’s view, slavery had to be destroyed in order to allow for the historical
development of the white working class.’ (Messer-Kruse 1998, p. 54.)
the heavy wrong which his nation had committed by permitting an extremity
of human bondage. He declared that each side in the still-unfinished conflict
had looked for ‘an easier triumph’, but had not been able to contrive ‘a result
less fundamental and astounding’. He saw the carnage of the War as perhaps
God’s punishment for the nation’s ‘offences’, and concluded that he could
only hope and pray that ‘this mighty scourge of war’ would come to a speedy
end. He added: ‘Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled up
by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another
drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be
said, “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”’.
This passage certainly put slavery at the centre, and strikingly memorialised
its enormity as a system for the exploitation of labour. But the Second Inaugural
did not mention the black soldiers or outline any ideas as to the future fate of
the emancipated slave. In the preceding months, radical members of Congress
had urged that the freedmen should be given the vote as part of the
reconstruction of the rebel states. Lincoln had opposed this in public. Writing
to the Governor of Louisiana at a time when that state was establishing
franchise-qualifications, he gently observed: ‘I barely suggest for your private
consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in – as for
instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in
our ranks.’38 In this attempt to cajole the Louisiana governor a moderate tone
was no doubt advisable and the enfranchisement of black soldiers would
already establish a considerable block of black voters. If Lincoln had lived it
seems quite possible that, as the situation evolved, so too would his views on
this matter. James Oakes has noted that Lincoln, in the last year of his life,
went out of his way to seek out Frederick Douglass. Given the racism that
permeated the North as much as the South, Lincoln’s willingness to solicit the
views of the veteran black abolitionist and treat him as an equal was a significant
development. When Douglass was stopped at the door of the reception held
following the Second Inaugural, Lincoln went over publicly to greet him
and make clear to all how welcome the black abolitionist leader was in the
White House.39
In the last year of the War, Lincoln gave up his long-held attachment to
‘colonisation’ – the policy of encouraging freed-people to leave the United
States and find a new life in Africa. He found that colonisation was rejected by
nearly every strand in the African-American community. In the years 1863–4
38. Vincent 1976, p. 22.

39. Oakes 2007.
he had far more contact with African-Americans than in previous years,

meeting black church-leaders and abolitionists and also individual refugees.
Elizabeth Kekley, a woman of colour who was his wife’s seamstress and
confidante, was a member of the Washington Contraband Relief Committee.
Just as the ‘contrabands’ had obliged the Union authorities to take a stand on
slavery, so exposure to black opinion on the matter helped to persuade Lincoln
to give up colonisation. African-Americans had many reasons to reject
‘colonisation’. A point they often made may have had a special appeal to
Lincoln, namely the argument from ‘unrequited labour’. After all, the slaves’
toil had built the seat of government in Washington DC, and many fortunes
in both the South and North.40
Frederick Douglass later wrote: ‘Viewed from genuine abolition ground Mr
Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent but measuring him by the
sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult,
he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.’41 This verdict does not directly
refer to race, but we may assume that it is also covered by the term ‘sentiment’.
Lincoln’s attempts to reach out to Douglass in the last year of his life seem to
signal the stirring of an awareness of the need for African-American agency if
freedom was really to be won.
The assassination of Lincoln prompted the International to send another
address to the new American president.42 This address closed with the
observation that the way was now open to a ‘new era of the emancipation of
labour’. Marx and Engels were soon alarmed by the actions of Lincoln’s
successor. On 15 July 1865 Engels wrote to his friend, attacking Johnson:
His [Johnson’s] hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently . . . If things
go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in
Congress at Washington. Without colored suffrage nothing whatever can be done
there.43
40. For Lincoln’s long attachment to colonisation, see Foner 2008. Sinha 2008 documents
the African-American contribution to changing Lincoln’s mind on the question. Oakes 2008
argues that the ‘unrequited labour’ strand in Lincoln’s rejection of slavery became more marked
in the late 1850s and the War years.
41. Quoted in Fredrickson 2008, p. 126.
42. In this text Marx, who again wrote it, heaps praise on Lincoln as ‘a man neither to be
browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never
compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no
surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse; tempering stern acts by
the gleam of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his
titanic work as humbly and homely as heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence
of pomp and state. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man that the world only
discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.’ (Marx and Engels 1961, p. 358.)
The IWA General Council sent a protest to President Johnson in September

1865 and urged that the freedmen should not be denied the vote. In April
1866 Marx wrote to Engels: ‘After the Civil War the United States are only
now really entering the revolutionary phase.’44
The two men expected more from the victory of the Union than an ending
of slavery, momentous as that was. They also expected the producers to assert
new political and social rights. If the freedmen moved simply from chattel-
slavery to wage-slavery, if they were denied the right to vote, or organise, or
receive education, then the term ‘emancipation’ would be a mockery. Some
Union commanders were already settling freedmen on public or confiscated
land. However, this prospect was compromised when the new man in the
White House, making use of his presidential powers, pardoned first hundreds
and then thousands of former rebel-leaders. Clearly, if they were pardoned
there was no ground for seizing their land.
As it turned out, the era of Reconstruction did indeed bring a radical surge
in both South and North, with the Republican Party seeking to keep abreast
of events by adopting the ideas of radical abolitionists, black as well as white,
and with pressure being exerted by a shifting coalition of labour-unions, social
reformers, African-American conventions, feminists, and, last but not least,
the multiplying American sections of the IWA. The knowledge that the
martyred president had acknowledged its earlier address, and the warm, not to
say fulsome, nature of Marx’s tribute to the ‘son of the working class’ helped
to make the International a quite respectable and visible body. The post-Civil
War radicalisation in North America in some ways may be compared with the
British experience of slave-emancipation and political reform in Britain in the
1830s. In both countries abolitionism and the ‘free labour’-doctrine seemed at
one moment to consecrate wage-labour and its central rôle in the capitalist
order, only to give rise to popular movements – Chartism in Britain, a wave of
class-struggles and popular radicalism in the US – which challenged the given
form of the bourgeois order. While the banner of free labour expressed
bourgeois hegemony at one moment, it furnished a means of mobilising
against it at another. In one register the ideal of free labour encouraged the
aspiration of workers to become independent small producers, with their own
workshop or farm. Hence the Republican slogan ‘free soil, free labor, free men’
and its embodiment in the Homestead Act of 1862.45 But in the United
States of the 1860s and 1870s, as in the Britain of the 1840s, there were
increasing numbers of wage-workers who did not want to become farmers and
who looked to a collective improvement in the rights of working people.

45. The classic study of the free-labour doctrine is Foner 1970.
David Montgomery takes a sample of over 70 labour-organisers of the later

1860s about whom information is available and finds that most of them were
second-generation wage-workers, with about half of them being British
immigrants. Their efforts focused, not on acquiring land, but on regulating
the conditions of labour and securing political and industrial representation of
the working man.46 Of course some workers did take up the offer of land, but
many realised that this could prove a trap. Already by the middle and late
1860s the farmers’ Grange movement was complaining at exorbitant railroad-
freight rates and cut-throat competition from large producers.
David Fernbach points out that the Address to President Lincoln was one of
the first public acts of the International.47 Lincoln’s reply, published in The
Times and elsewhere, was a publicity-coup. Moreover, the campaign to
radicalise the resistance to Southern secession – to turn the Civil War into a
social revolution – seems to have had a major impact on Marx’s thinking and
vocabulary. The addresses written by Marx for the International, including its
Inaugural Address, make repeated use of the term ‘emancipation’, a word that
Marx used in his early writings but which did not figure in the Communist
Manifesto, or in his writings in the 1850s. Marx’s return to the concept also
involved a modification to its use by abolitionists. For most abolitionists, the
concept of emancipation conjured up the idea of an emancipator, an external
agent carrying out the process of liberation. Marx believed that the new
working class would be the agent of its own liberation. He did sometimes take
note of slave-resistance and slave-revolt, but he did not study the Haitian
example and tended to believe that slaves needed external deliverance. Given
that people of colour were a minority – albeit a large one – in the US South,
this was very likely to be the case in North America. But the notion of
emancipation also contains within it the idea that the person or social group
to be emancipated is self-standing, capable of exercising freedom and has no
need of an exploiter. Marx had always seen the modern industrial working
class as the first exploited class which – because of the social and political
rights it had, or would, conquer, and because it was schooled and organised
by capitalism itself – could take its destiny into its own hands. The agent here
was the ‘collective worker’, all those who contributed to social labour. Marx
argues in the IWA’s own Inaugural Address that ‘the emancipation of the
working class will be the task of the working class itself ’ – in a word, it will be
self-emancipation. Marx saw the fostering of working-class organisation as
the International’s most crucial task, and he believed that class-struggle would
46. Montgomery 1967.

47. Fernbach 1974, p. 14.
set up a learning process which would lead them sooner-or-later to see the
need for working-class political power.48 Even this modification of the
emancipation-concept may have had some small, unconscious echo of Lincoln
at Gettysburg, as when Marx commends the Paris Commune for embodying
‘the people acting for itself, by itself ’.49
Raya Dunyevskaya argues that the US Civil War prompted Marx to deepen
and elaborate his analysis of the length of the working day in Das Kapital,
published in 1867.50 The early labour-movement in the US, as in Britain,
sought, and sometimes won, laws limiting the length of the working day.
Some employers argued that this would be ruinous since they made all their
profits in the last two hours. Marx was able to show that the more efficient
employers would be able to thrive under such regulation. Struggles over this
issue were to play a major rôle in US labour-organising in the postbellum
world.51 In 1867 a National Labor Union was formed to spread the eight-
hour-day demand. At its first national meeting, the NLU declared: ‘The
National Labor Union knows no north, no south, no east, no west, neither
color nor sex, on the question of the rights of labor.’52 In 1868 Congress was
pressured to legislate an eight-hour-day for Federal employees.
Marx was far from admiring the US political system, which he regarded
as continuing to exhibit extreme degrees of corruption, demagogy and
humbug. However, Marx and Engels devoted little attention to aspects of
the Constitution and its functioning which rendered it so vulnerable to
abuses. For example, they did not note the vagaries of the electoral college or
the indirect election of senators. Nevertheless Lincoln’s conduct during the
Civil War crisis illustrated important points, in Marx’s view. The challenge of
a ‘slaveholders’ revolt’ justified resort to military means. Thus Karl Kautsky
and other Marxists were wont to argue that any workers’ government elected
within a bourgeois-democratic régime should expect there to be the capitalist
equivalent of a ‘slaveholders’ revolt’ and should prepare to suppress it by
any means necessary. The example of the Commune reminded Marx of
the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a term that he did not use between
1852 and 1871. Like the Romans Marx saw dictatorship as different from
tyranny, in that the dictator wielded extra-constitutional powers for a brief
48. As Carol Johnson points out, this leaves little room for long-term reformism. See Johnson
1980.
49. Draper 1986, p. 273.
50. Dunayevskaya 1971, pp. 81–91.
51. See Blackburn 2010, pp. 153–76.
52. Quoted in Messer-Kruse 1998, p. 191.
emergency-period. Lincoln was sometimes portrayed as a dictator in this

sense, as Hal Draper points out.53
The 1860s were, simultaneously, the years of Marx’s most sustained political
activity and the period where his theoretical reflections achieved their most
mature form. The backdrop of the mighty conflict in North America seems to
have helped him organise and publish some of his best work. His US readers
were to comprise an extraordinary range, from German socialists to Yankee
radicals, from labour-organisers to pioneer-feminists, from syndicalists to
military men, Frederick Sorge and Col Weidermeyer, Lucy Parsons and Samuel
Gompers, Victoria Woodhull and Eugene Debs, Richard Hinton and W.E.B.
Dubois. Despite their very different conclusions, these readers found in
Marx’s writings, whether on the Paris Commune or on the capitalist system,
something that allowed them to make sense of their country’s ‘unfinished
revolution’ – its strange mixture of victories and defeat, struggles for liberation
and robber-baron capitalism. Radical Reconstruction led to historic gains in
both South and North, but many of these were compromised or reversed in
the 1870s after momentous class-struggles.54 The present essay seeks only to
draw attention to the creative, tantalising – and still-incomplete – nature of
this extraordinary conjuncture.55
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54. See Foner 1988 and Hahn 2003, pp. 103–5.
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Foner, Eric 1970, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the
Civil War, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— 1988, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, New York: Harper and
Row.
—— 2008, ‘Lincoln and Colonization’, in Foner (ed.) 2008.
—— 2010, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, New York: W.W. Norton
and Company.
—— (ed.) 2008, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, New York: W.W.
Norton and Company.
Foner, Philip S. 1977, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, New York: Monad Press.
Fredrickson, George M. 2008, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery
and Race, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Gallagher, Gary 1998, ‘Blueprint for Victory’, in Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand,
edited by James M. McPherson and William James Cooper, Charlottesville: University of
South Carolina Press.
Genovese, Eugene 1967, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of
the Slave South, First Edition, New York: Vintage Books.
Green, James R. 2006, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement,
and the Bombing that Divided America, New York: Pantheon Books.
Hahn, Steven 2003, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from
Slavery to the Great Migration, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
—— 2009, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Holzer, Harold (ed.) 1993, The Lincoln Douglas Debates, New York: Harper-Collins.
Jack, Bryan M. 2007, The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters, Columbia:
University of Missouri Press.
Johnson, Carol 1980, ‘The Problem of Reformism and Marx’s Theory of Fetishism’, New Left
Review, I, 119: 70–96.
LaFeber, Walter 1963, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
McPherson, James M. 2007, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—— 2008, ‘A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief ’, in Foner (ed.) 2008.
Marx, Karl 1961 [1861], ‘The North American Civil War’, in Marx and Engels 1961.
—— 1985 [1861], ‘Marx to Engels’, in Marx and Engels 1985.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1961, The Civil War in the United States, Third Edition, New
York: International Publishers.
—— 1984, Collected Works, Volume 19, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Menand, Louis 2001, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Messer-Kruse, Timothy 1998, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform
Tradition, 1848–76, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Montgomery, David 1967, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Moore Jr., Barrington 1966, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Transitions to
Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press.
Oakes, James 2007, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the
Triumph of Antislavery, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
—— 2008, ‘Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look
at Lincoln and Race’, in Foner (ed.) 2008.
Potter, David M. 1976, The Impending Conflict, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E.
Fehrenbacher, New York: Harper and Row.
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Jacksonian America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, Dorothy 2009, ‘Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism,
Exceptionalism’, The Journal of American History, 96, 2: 379–99.
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2008.
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Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
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Louisiana State University Press.
Wilentz, Sean 2005, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, New York: W.W.
Norton and Company.
Marx and Engels on the US Civil War:

The ‘Materialist Conception of History’ in Action
August H. Nimtz
University of Minnesota
animtz@tc.umn.edu
Abstract
Marx’s analysis, supplemented by that of Engels, of the US Civil War is as instructive, if not
more, as any of their writings to illustrate their ‘materialist conception of history’. Because the
American experience figured significantly in the young Marx’s path to communist conclusions,
the outbreak of the War in 1861 obligated him to devote his full attention to its course. His
application of their method allowed him to see more accurately the course of the War than his
partner. Also, he was able to see what President Abraham Lincoln had to do, that is, to convert
the War from one to end secession to one to overthrow slavery, before the President himself.
Despite its contradictory outcome, Marx’s expectation that the War would put the US working
class on terra firma for the first time was justified.
Keywords
Marx, Engels, US Civil War, slavery, historical materialism, Abraham Lincoln, race
After Karl Marx’s death in 1883, it fell to his partner Frederick Engels to
defend their programme and ideas and, hence, their methodology. Youth and
intellectuals attracted to their perspective – and opponents as well – raised
questions about their ‘materialist conception of history’ which Engels had to
address. Often the issue was whether he and Marx were guilty of ‘economic
determinism’, and, if not, what would constitute contrary evidence. In
a number of responses Engels offered the example of Marx’s analysis, as
presented in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of the coup d’état of
Napoleon III in 1851 that brought an end to the Second Republic in France.1
Marx’s book, Engels argued, showed how the economic-determinism charge
was belied by concrete and nuanced political analysis in which economic
developments served mainly as a framework and/or platform for explanation.
1. See, for example, Engels’s letter to W. Borgius, in Marx and Engels 1975–2004m,
pp. 264–7.
176 A. H. Nimtz / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 175–198
I want to make the case here for another analysis that they – Marx especially –
conducted that serves just as well for illustrating the application of their
methodology, specifically, their writings on the US Civil War. I suspect that
Engels never offered that example because what they wrote, unlike the
Eighteenth Brumaire, was largely inaccessible to those who might have been
interested. Nevertheless, those writings, I argue, are as rich, if not more so, as
Marx’s analysis of the overthrow of the Second Republic. And, unlike as in
Engels’s lifetime, they are available now in a way that they have never been
before – even online.2
Exhibit A for my case is the message that Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln
in November 1864, on behalf of the newly-formed International Workingmen’s
Association (IWA), congratulating him on his re-election:
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.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of
Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their
class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to
decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of
the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time
in the annals of the world, ‘slavery’ on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the
very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic
had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued,
and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century;
when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness,
gloried in rescinding ‘the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old
constitution’, and maintained slavery to be ‘a beneficent institution’, indeed, the
old solution of the great problem of ‘the relation of capital to labor’, and cynically
proclaimed property in man ‘the cornerstone of the new edifice’ – then the
working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship
of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that
the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of
property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the
future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the
other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships
imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery
intervention of their betters – and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their
quota of blood to the good cause.
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
2. Available, for the most part, at <www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works>.

A. H. Nimtz / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 175–198 177
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 workingmen 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.3
Marx’s letter, as I intend to show, is a highly concentrated distillate of his

and his partner’s views on not just the War itself but also the overthrow of
slavery and the future course of the US social formation. It also anticipates
better-known utterances of Marx. What follows are the details that I employ
to support this claim.
Toward communist conclusions

To fully understand Marx’s letter to Lincoln, it is necessary to begin with his
larger project that commenced at least two decades earlier. It, in turn, had
roots in his reading of the US reality, a fact often under-appreciated. A brief
overview is in order.
The still-fledgling republic taught the young Marx, a radical democrat, that
even in the most politically democratic country on earth ‘human emancipation’
was not guaranteed.4 A nation without a feudal past, unlike Europe, had
quickly evolved from its inception into one rife with social inequalities.
Though his earliest comments about this side of the US reality – before he
arrived at communist conclusions – make no mention of slavery in particular,
what he read about the country was replete with references to the ‘peculiar
institution’. Clearly, political democracy was insufficient for human
emancipation or the ‘sovereignty of the people’ – a necessary conclusion in
Marx’s road to communism. The US, in other words, was very much a work
in progress.
3. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, pp. 19–20. One advantage of Marx’s letter for English
speakers is that English is its original rendering. Thus, there is no need to be concerned about the
usual translation-issues when it comes to Marx’s method – at least for that audience.
4. The key text is Marx’s On the Jewish Question. For details on the impact of the US experience
on Marx’s political trajectory, see Nimtz 2003, Chapter 1.
What explained the apparent contradiction, the coexistence of social

inequalities and the most advanced political forms?5 Various accounts of
the country revealed that private property drove social inequality, and, in
the process, placed limits on political democracy. This insight spurred
Marx’s subsequent investigation – accompanied by his new partner Frederick
Engels – into the logic of private property, that is, political economy, the
backbone of civil society and the context for understanding the political
sphere. If private property-relations were the key in the diagnosis of the
problem, the solution lied with the only class that had the interest and
capability in ending class-society itself – the proletariat. Therefore, anything
that helped to add to the ranks of the proletariat, specifically, the overthrow of
precapitalist forms such as feudalism and slavery, was in its interests. Only
with the arrival of the capitalist mode of production did the requisite material
come into place, human and non-human, to make real democracy, the
‘sovereignty of the people’, a reality for the first time.
Armed with a solution to the puzzle that was so glaring in the case of the
US, Marx and Engels set out to win workers to their new communist world-
view. Exactly because of the democratic space that existed in the US, Germans
who called themselves communists were able to operate more openly there
than in their homeland itself. This fact brought Marx and Engels into their
first intervention in US politics in 1846, around the land-question, an issue
indirectly related to slavery. The two sharply criticised a self-proclaimed
German communist for advocating land-ownership as a panacea for the still-
emerging working class. While recognising the particular reality of the US,
that the call for land-ownership enjoyed understandably wide support – thus
the popularity of the Free Soil Party – they warned against making it an end
in itself. At best, it was a necessary step toward the creation of a hereditary
working class in the US. Humanity’s emancipation, they argued, rested on the
shoulders of those who were the dispossessed, the modern proletariat. This
long-view perspective about the US working class forever informed Marx and
Engels’s practice in relation to politics in the US.
Marx noted in 1847 in his polemic on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Poverty
of Philosophy, the importance of slavery not only for the US, but for
world-capitalism:
5. One aspect of the US political system that Marx found lacking was its federal framework.
Federal government, he argued, was fragmented government, and an actual obstacle to democratic
rule. See his ‘Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality’, Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, pp.
334–5.
Direct slavery is 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 pre-condition of large-scale
industry. . . . Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries,
would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the
map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern
commerce and modern civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have
wiped America off the map of nations.6
Lest it be thought that Marx was providing a historical justification for slavery,
a few months earlier he ridiculed Proudhon for attempting to find the ‘golden
mean . . . between slavery and liberty’.7 He left no doubt that he sided with
‘liberty’. In the draft for the Communist Manifesto, written by his comrade
Engels that same year, the difference between slaves and the proletariat was
made clear. The
latter stands at a higher stage of development. The slave frees himself by becoming
a proletarian, abolishing from the totality of property relationships only the
property of slavery. The proletarian can free himself only by abolishing property in
general.8
The overthrow of slavery was the necessary first step in the full development of
the proletariat and, along with the institution of political democracy, the
necessary precondition for the struggle between capital and labour and, thus,
the road to socialist revolution and human emancipation.
Except for a brief, though insightful, comment about blacks,9 there is
virtually nothing in the writings of Marx and Engels in this period that reveals
what they thought about them and the question of race. Only with the
outbreak of the Civil War would they write in a sustained way about race and
slavery in the US.
Prelude to the ‘general conflagration’

After the end of the revolutionary wave in Europe between 1848 and 1849
and the shrinkage of the democratic space, many German veterans of those
struggles migrated to the US. Marx himself gave some thought to doing the
6. Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, p. 167.

7. Marx and Engels 1975–2004h, p. 101.
9. Marx and Engels 1975–2004c, p. 211.
same, especially since it was there at this moment where it was easier for him
to get his ideas into print – the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte being
the most notable example – than in Europe, and Germany for certain.
Hohenzollern censorship-laws enabled more German-language newspapers to
be printed in the US, another venue for Marx, than in Germany itself.
Exile-politics was affected by ongoing political debates in the country,
especially the increasingly contentious issue of the future of slavery. Of the
veterans of 1848 who emigrated to the US, none was as important for the
Marx party as Joseph Weydemeyer. Until his death in 1866, it was he who
collaborated the closest with Marx and Engels on developments in America.
His biggest contribution was to bring clarity on the slave-question to the
German-American working class. Employing Marx and Engels’s ‘materialist
conception of history’, he argued forcefully, immediately upon arrival in New
York in 1851, through the first communist organisation and newspaper on
American soil that he helped to found, that the advancement of the working
class depended on the overthrow of slavery. In so doing, he consciously
disputed the claim of the aforementioned current in German-American
working-class politics that the abolition of wage-labour was on the immediate
agenda and that the abolition of chattel-slavery was a side-issue.10
Ever on the lookout for a revival of the revolutionary movement, Marx and
Engels took to heart two events at the end of 1859. Marx declared – and
Engels concurred – ‘that the most momentous thing happening in the world
today is the slave-movement – on the one hand, in America, started by the
death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other’. Marx was referring, of course, to
the abortive rebellion of the abolitionist John Brown at Harper’s Ferry,
Virginia, a few months earlier, which in turn had stimulated at least one slave-
uprising in its aftermath. As for Russia, its ‘slaves’, that is, serfs, had also been
on the march for emancipation as he had noted the previous year. A year later,
in a move to pre-empt a revolt from below, the Czar abolished serfdom. Of
enormous significance was that the Russian movement was coinciding with
the one in the US. Precisely because they viewed the class-struggle from an
international perspective, they gave more weight to the conjuncture of struggles
in various countries than to isolated ones. The fight against slavery and other
precapitalist modes of exploitation was part-and-parcel of the democratic
revolution and a necessary step in labour’s struggle against capital. The Brown
rebellion registered the depths of the impending crisis within the US itself. For
10. For details on Weydemeyer’s activities and those of other Marx sympathisers in the US,
see Nimtz 2003, Chapter 2.
antislavery fighters it gave a needed lift to their cause, giving it a martyr for
the first time. The veterans of 1848 responded predictably.
With Weydemeyer at the helm, the Marx party played an active rôle in
advancing the antislavery cause at this very crucial moment, specifically, in
the nomination and election of Abraham Lincoln for president. Along
with another Marx-party sympathiser, Adolph Douai, Weydemeyer helped
to mobilise German-American support for Lincoln’s nomination for the
Republican Party. Though a bourgeois party, it was founded in 1854 in
opposition to slavery and consistent with the perspective of the Marx party
that the overthrow of slavery was the prerequisite for working-class hegemony.
With the German-Americans in the party as the most ardent opponents of
slavery, Weydemeyer and Douai saw their rôle as that of making sure it took
the strongest antislavery position in the upcoming presidential election and
nominate a candidate disposed to uphold that stance. The outcome of the
process was captured by Weydemeyer’s newspaper, which ‘judged the . . .
platform “certainly something short of a radical one, and a little lukewarm,”
but one nevertheless “that in general satisfies the demands we make upon it.”
It believed Lincoln was “the choice of the conservative wing of the Republican
Convention” but vowed to support him as the “lesser of two evils.” ’11 As Marx
explained to one party-member in Europe, ‘This time there seems good reason
to hope that victory . . . will go to the Republican Party.’12
Weydemeyer and Douai then threw themselves into the campaign to get
Lincoln elected. In a number of locations the German-American vote was
decisive, due in part to their efforts. With Lincoln’s victory, the slavocracy
began immediately to take the first steps toward secession. As Engels wrote to
Marx in early January 1861:
In North America things are . . . heating up. With the slaves the situation must be
pretty awful if the Southerners are playing such a risky game . . . [which] might
result in a general conflagration. At all events . . . slavery would appear to be
rapidly nearing its end . . .13
While history would prove Engels’s prediction to be true, it was far from
certain at that moment that the president-elect would stand up to the slave-
owners. Such uncertainty was clearly the sentiment of the milieu with whom
the Marx party worked closest for Lincoln’s election. Three days after the
11. Levine 1992, p. 249.

12. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 210. In the Complete Works, small capitalisation is used
to indicate the use of English in the original.
13. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 242.
election, Douai wrote in his paper that those who campaigned for Lincoln
but were not, like himself, Republican Party members had the ‘special task to
see to it that what has been achieved with our help is not again undone but is
built up still more; and if reactionary elements in the Party of Reaction [the
Democratic Party] intend to do that, we must form a counter-weight to them
and press forward to further gains.’14 The task now was to be vigilant and not
assume that the election had necessarily settled anything. In subsequent issues
he concluded that the struggle now was, as Engels had assumed, for the
complete abolition of slavery. He also argued that the ‘slave has in every
condition the right and in certain conditions even the duty to free himself by
every means possible from slavery’,15 or, as Malcolm X would say almost a
century later, liberation ‘by any means necessary’. This was clearly a stance far
beyond what the president-elect understood his mandate to be, but one that
Engels accurately predicted he would have to take.
With the slavocracy’s attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861,
the ‘general conflagration’ that Engels predicted commenced. Once again, the
Marx party would take its position alongside other working-class fighters.
‘When the Civil War began with the attack . . . most of the German radical
organizations disbanded because the majority of their members had enlisted
in the Union forces. The New York Communist Club did not meet for the
duration of the war since most of its members had joined the Union Army.’16
Not the least important of the Marx-party members to do so was
Weydemeyer.
‘A last card up its sleeve . . . a slave revolution’

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Marx and Engels gave their undivided
attention to its every detail. For Marx this meant putting the completion of
Capital on hold – testimony to the War’s significance for him. For both of
them the heart of the matter was, once again, the slavery-question. Marx
proved to be more insightful as he accurately predicted the overall course of
events within a week of the beginning of hostilities: ‘There can be no doubt
that, in the early part of the struggle, the scales will be weighted in favor
of the South, where the class of propertyless white adventurers provides an
inexhaustible source of martial militia. In the Long Run, of course, the North
14. Foner 1977a, p. 29. Holzer 2008 shows how the vigilance of such staunch antislavery
forces helped to steel the president-elect.
15. Ibid.
16. Foner 1984, p. 10.
will be victorious since, if the need arises, it has a last card up its sleeve, in the
shape of a slave revolution.’17 Marx’s view that the slaves would be the decisive
factor in the War proved to be true. His optimism would serve him well since
the South was indeed initially successful, leading many supporters of the
Union to be pessimistic about its prospects. Though also hopeful at the outset
because of the North’s sheer population-advantage, Engels too began, as will
be seen later, to harbour doubts.
As Marx put it, to defend the Northern cause in Europe, where the ruling
classes and their governments in Britain and France sympathised with the
slave-owners, required a ‘struggle in the press’, specifically, to mobilise
European working-class opinion on its behalf. This meant having to read
up intensely on US history, especially since his audience included, for about
the first year of the War, the readers of the New York Tribune, and none other
than Lincoln himself. With his historical-materialist perspective he was able to
discern the ‘general formula’ of the country’s politics from its founding. In
‘foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interests of the
slaveholders served as the guiding star.’ Specifically, efforts to acquire Cuba,
‘unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central
America’, and the conquest of Northern Mexico were all done for the ‘manifest
purpose . . . [of ] conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the
slaveholders’ rule.’18
Marx addressed another and very significant dimension of the slavocracy,
its relationship to the ‘so-called poor whites’ in the South. Since there were
‘millions’ of them – their ‘numbers have been constantly growing through
concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared
with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline’ –
how were they controlled given the relatively small number of slave-owners, a
‘narrow oligarchy’? He provided an answer: ‘Only by acquisition and the
prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions,
is it possible to square the interests of these “poor whites” with those of the
slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to
tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.’
The forcible incorporation of Northern Mexico into the US was clearly on
Marx’s mind.
The same logic that drove the slave-owners to extend their mode of
production regionally, therefore, would lead them to do the same nationally.
Thus, Marx concluded,

18. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 37–8.
The present struggle between the South and North is . . . nothing but a struggle
between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour.
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.19
More than any other, it was this claim that informed all of Marx’s judgements
about the War, its course and outcome. It recognised that the North, regardless
of how the Lincoln administration explained or even saw its actions, was
objectively pursuing a war to overthrow slavery, ‘the root of the evil. . . . Events
themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan – emancipation of
the slaves.’ On display was one of the key features of Marx and Engels’s method,
specifically, the assumption that a socio-historical process can have a reality
independently of how its protagonists understand their rôle in it. But for
this particular example the qualifier ‘can’, or ‘possibly’, is appropriate. At a
certain stage, to be seen shortly, consciousness on the part of Lincoln became
decisive. The slavocracy, Marx declared, was far more conscious of its tasks at
the outset than Lincoln. For Lincoln to be successful, his consciousness, Marx
knew, would have to catch up with reality.
There are two quite important issues that Marx raised in his arguments that
are worth pursuing at this time. One concerns the issue of race, class and
colour. For the first time, at least in the US context, Marx addressed this most
contentious of issues, albeit in the form of only a few but nonetheless pregnant
comments. In regard to the subjugation of the non-slaveowning whites of the
South to the slavocracy, he wrote: ‘Between 1856 and 1860 the political
spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders’ party had
already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather
that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born
to slavery.’ Then, three paragraphs later, in regard to the claim that the logic of
the slave-owners was to extend their system to the North, he wrote: ‘In the
Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice impossible, the white
working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry [that is,
the Helots of Sparta]. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed
principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual
labour is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the
German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.’20
The two comments are most instructive. They offer a window onto
Marx’s thinking and approach to the race-class nexus, thoughts that anticipate
19. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, p. 50.

better-known subsequent pronouncements. Both reveal Marx’s view that the

exploitation of labour, or class-subordination, had its own logic and, in the
US setting at least, had an ontological givenness independent of race/colour-
distinctions. Thus, the exploiters were fundamentally indifferent about the
race and colour of those they exploited.
His second comment recognised that in certain settings, again the US case,
claims about racial superiority and inferiority could facilitate the exploitation-
process. On the basis of such claims, some potentially exploited layers of
society were more vulnerable than others. In the particular historical reality of
mid-nineteenth-century America, German and Irish working-class immigrants
were only a step above blacks in the racial hierarchy. Again, given the logic of
labour-exploitation, workers with ‘white’ skin would suffice if those with
‘black’ were unavailable. Note that Marx employed ‘race’ to refer to colour as
well as to national origins. This, no doubt, reflected the two different usages in
German-speaking Europe and the US. But while race, however defined,
facilitated the process of class-subordination, it was the logic of the latter itself
that framed race and its employment. And as long as slavery was in place in
the South, all workers, regardless of colour and location, would be vulnerable
to enslavement. Whether Marx really believed that the slavocracy could
actually impose its system on the North is uncertain. His historical-materialist
perspective would suggest otherwise. But, exactly because the method did
not assume historical inevitability, a struggle had to be waged in order to
avoid such an outcome. What he wrote may, therefore, have been just for that
reason – the ‘struggle in the press’.
The second issue worth noting in Marx’s three articles has to do with
Mexico. In the Tribune, he commented on the way in which the slaveholders
were able to maintain their hegemony within the South. They did so ‘by
constantly throwing out to their white plebeians the bait of prospective
conquests within and without the frontiers of the United States.’ In the first of
the two articles in the liberal Vienna daily, Die Presse, he argued, as previously
noted, that such a strategy was designed to convince ‘poor whites’ that they
had the same interests as the slave-owners. As for the ‘conquests . . . without
the frontiers’, Marx was clearly referring to Washington’s expropriation of
Northern Mexico in 1845–6. Because the slavocracy ‘required a continual
formation of new slave states’, for reasons already discussed, ‘the conquest of
foreign lands, as in the case of Texas’, was the means for realising this goal. The
illegal annexation in 1845 of Texas as a slave-state revealed Washington’s true
intentions and precipitated war a year later with Mexico, the Mexican-
American War. Then later, as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854,
another piece of the conquest, present-day New Mexico and Arizona, ‘was
transformed into a slave territory. . . . In 1859 New Mexico [as the two states
were collectively known] received a slave code that vies with the statute-books
of Texas and Alabama in barbarity.’ But, because there were so few slaves in the
territory, it ‘had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with
a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government
in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum
together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule
of the slaveholders on the Territory.’ In essence, the conquest constituted ‘the
armed spreading of slavery in Mexico’.21
Both the tone and spirit in which Marx wrote about the conquest of
Northern Mexico is clearly at variance with what Engels said more than a
decade earlier. In the same vein in which he applauded in 1848 French
imperialism in Algeria, Engels wrote approvingly of Washington’s expropriation
of Mexico. It advanced, he argued, the interests of the bourgeoisie by making
possible the ‘creation of fresh capital, that is, for calling new bourgeois into
being, and enriching those already in existence.’22 The conquest of Northern
Mexico was, therefore, ‘waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation’,
particularly because the ‘energetic Yankees’ – unlike the ‘lazy Mexicans’ –
would bring about the ‘rapid exploitation of the California gold mines’ and,
hence, for the ‘third time in history give world trade a new direction.’23 Though
these were Engels’s opinions, there is nothing to suggest that they differed
from those which Marx would have held at that time. As late as 1853 the latter
expressed similar views about British imperialism in India.24 Such views were
informed more by their newly arrived at historical-materialist perspective, and
less by the concrete empirical terrain. A closer reading of the American reality
revealed something quite different. Rather than the bourgeoisie it was the
slavocracy that was served by the conquest, therefore preventing the full
institution of capitalist relations of production in the acquired possessions
and, thus, the growth of the working class. The benefits, in other words, that
came with the acquisition of California were compromised by the ‘barbarity’
of slavery’s extension. Marx, therefore, just as Engels had done in relation to
Algeria, changed his position on Mexico; he did the same for India.25
21. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 40, 36, 42.

23. Marx and Engels 1975–2004b, p. 365.
24. Marx and Engels 1975–2004d, p. 132.
25. Marx and Engels 1975–2004i, p. 249. Thus, I take issue with Jeffrey Vogel’s otherwise-
thoughtful article, ‘The Tragedy of History’ (Vogel 1996), in which he speaks to Marx and
Engels’s views on Mexico – India as well. Had he looked closer, he would have seen how their
views evolved as I argue here.
This argument is given added credence by subsequent comments and

pronouncements he made about Mexico. For example, he reported favourably
in December 1861 that Mexico had refused in 1845 to meet with Washington’s
emissary to even discuss the sale of its Northern territories.26 In 1848 or 1849
he, like Engels, would have viewed Mexico’s refusal unfavourably – an obstacle
to the US bourgeoisie’s civilising mission. Interestingly, in the same month,
Engels, in a passing comment, described the Mexican-American War as
one in which ‘Mexico defended herself ’.27 It is hard to imagine that he
would have employed such language in 1849. Then, in 1862, when Louis
Bonaparte with the backing of England and Spain sought to take advantage
of Washington’s preoccupation with the Confederacy by undertaking an
imperialist venture into Mexico, Marx came to the defence of the country and
its new liberal government headed by Benito Juárez. The intervention, he told
Tribune readers, was ‘one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in
the annals of international history.’28 When Bonaparte’s forces began to suffer
setbacks at the hands of the Mexicans, he exclaimed to Engels: ‘If only the
Mexicans (les derniers des hommes! [the dregs of humanity!]) were once more to
best the crapauds [Bonaparte’s generals].’29 The success of the so-called dregs
exhilarated Marx. His joy spoke volumes about the distance he and Engels had
travelled from the initial application of their theoretical perspective.
Lincoln – a ‘sui generis figure’

Although Marx’s optimism regarding the course of the War was eventually
vindicated, Lincoln’s hesitancy to do what he knew had to be done – to launch
a ‘slave-revolution’ – caused vexation along the way. Lincoln’s efforts to appease
the interests of slave-owners in states that had not joined the Confederacy led
him to avoid the question of abolition for the first sixteen months or so of the
War. Marx offered an explanation: ‘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.’30
Marx nevertheless continued to criticise Lincoln for such a stance.
Particularly repugnant was the policy that ‘no [Union] general could venture

27. Marx and Engels 1975–2004e, p. 527.
to put a company of Negroes in the field’, with the result ‘that slavery was
finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South into its invulnerable
horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-
bodied men in the South can be put into the field!’. Again, for Marx the key
to victory was a ‘slave-revolution’, the need for the North to pursue a
‘revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Aboliton of
Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner.’ The arming of blacks, free, runaway
and captured slaves, would deprive the South of its ability to carry on the War.
Lincoln ‘errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved
by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.’31
In a letter to Engels, written, apparently, on the eve of the Die Presse article, he
argued that the North would be compelled to ‘wage the war in earnest, have
recourse to revolutionary methods and overthrow the supremacy of the
border slave statesmen. One single nigger regiment would have a
remarkable effect on Southern nerves.’32 Like Marx, Frederick Douglass had
‘repeatedly called for the arming of the slaves, insisting from the outset, “The
Negro is the key of the situation – the pivotal point upon which the whole
rebellion turns”.’33
By the summer of 1862 Marx became more hopeful about Lincoln. Among
the steps he took was the recognition by Washington for the first time of the
government of Haiti, whose roots could be traced to a successful slave-revolt,
and, thus, fulfilling a long-sought hope of the abolitionists. But even more
significant, ‘[a]nother law, which is now being put into effect for the first time,

32. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 400. As for ‘nigger’, (again, small capitals here indicate
usage of English words in the original text) which Marx employed in more than one context, and
of obvious concern not only for those of us with visible roots in Africa, the editors of the Complete
Works note that, in the nineteenth century, it did not have the ‘more profane and unacceptable
status’ of later history (Marx and Engels 1975–2004k, p. xl). Whether this is an apologia is
neither here nor there. Apparently, even Harriet Tubman employed the term for self-description
(Klingaman 2001, p. 88). Marx began to use it during the Civil War as he was familiarising
himself with the US reality. In published writings, he always employed quotation-marks; in
letters, often without. Only once in the available record did, it seems, he use it in a derogatory
sense, in a diatribe against Ferdinand Lassalle (Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, pp. 389–90) in
1862, that is, in the year when he first used the word (for the context, see ‘Lassalle and Marx:
History of a Myth’, in Draper 1989, pp. 241–69). Marx and Engels, like all mortals, were
products, clearly, of the world in which they lived. Their comments in personal correspondence
that were unambiguously racist, sexist or antisemitic must be seen in context, and in relation to
their entire corpus of writings and actions. For what it is worth, Marx was fondly known by close
friends and family as ‘Moor’, owing to his dark features, and he had a son-in-law, Paul Lafargue,
a mulatto, who was also fondly called in family circles, ‘African’ and ‘Negrillo’. What the personal
details suggest is that one should be cautious and not rush to judgement.
33. Foner 1988, p. 5.
provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and

put into the field against the South.’ The North had finally begun to use
the ‘last card up its sleeve’. On the basis of these and the other legislation,
Marx concluded that ‘no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of
war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the
Civil War.’34
When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation less than two months
later – ‘from January 1, 1863, slavery in the Confederacy shall be abolished’ –
Marx no doubt felt vindicated for his optimism. Though there is no way that
Marx would have known, the rationale for it, as Lincoln explained to his
cabinet in July, was uncannily similar to what he argued in his August article
for Die Presse. ‘Emancipation’, the President said, had become
a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union . . . We

must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves [are] undeniably an
element of strength to those who [have] their service, and we must decide whether
that element should be with us or against us . . . Decisive and extensive measures
must be adopted . . . We [want] the army to strike more vigorous blows. The
Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.35
It was as if Lincoln anticipated and gave heed to Marx’s advice about the need
for ‘a revolutionary kind of warfare’ and how to deal with the slavocracy: ‘They
will yield only to force.’
The Proclamation, Marx declared, was ‘even more important than the’
recent Union victory at Antietam, Maryland – ‘the most important document
in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the
tearing up of the old American Constitution.’ His prediction that ‘Lincoln’s
place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be
next to that of Washington’ proved to be more accurate. From the perspective
of a historical materialist, Lincoln was ‘a sui generis figure’ in the annals of
history: ‘He is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian . . . 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.’
Then Marx bestowed his highest compliment ever on the US: ‘The new
world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that,
given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can
accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!’36

35. McPherson 1996, p. 77.
Superior social relations combined with particular institutional arrangements,

that is, the electoral system, brought out, in other words, the best in Lincoln.
Marx’s method also allowed him to understand the revolutionary tasks before
Lincoln certainly sooner, if not better, than the President himself.37
The Emancipation Proclamation notwithstanding, Marx’s partner remained
doubtful about the North’s prospects. Engels’s pessimism stood in sharp
contrast to Marx’s optimism. Their different assessments constitute the only
documented and sustained political disagreement between the two, lasting for
well over two years. Particularly bothersome for Engels was the apparent
irresoluteness of the North in comparison to the South in taking the necessary
measures to break the back of the slave-owners. While acknowledging
Engels’s concerns, Marx responded that ‘I’m prepared to bet my life on it that
these fellows [the Confederacy] will come off worst, “Stonewall jackson”
notwithstanding.’38 Marx answered the specifics of Engels’s complaints
including his already discussed solution to the slavery-question. He also chided
him on more than one occasion: ‘It strikes me that you allow yourself to
be influenced by the military aspect of things a little too much.’39 And
a few weeks later, ‘events over there [in America] are such as to transform
the world.’40
As the War continued without any decisive turns after Lincoln’s Proclamation,
it would be almost two years before Marx and Engels made any significant
comments on developments in the US. The presidential campaign in the fall
of 1864 got their attention. ‘I consider’, Marx told Engels,
the present moment, entre nous, to be extremely critical. If Grant suffers a major
defeat, or Sherman wins a major victory, so all right. Just now, at election time,
chronic series of small checks would be dangerous. I fully agree with you that,
to date, Lincoln’s re-election is pretty well assured, still 100 to 1. But election time
in a country which is the archetype of democratic humbug is full of hazards that
may quite unexpectedly defy the logic of events. . . . This is undoubtedly the most
critical moment since the beginning of the war. Once this has been shifted, old
Lincoln can blunder on to his heart’s content.41
37. Marx was not unique in seeing the War as a revolutionary war, or, as a social revolution.
James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (McPherson 1991),
specifically Chapter 1, quotes other leading figures of the period who shared a similar view. What
distinguished Marx, however, from his contemporaries was his global perspective, his vision of
the War as an advance for the world-revolutionary process.
39. Ibid.
Events would once again prove Marx, and this time Engels, to have been
remarkably insightful. Just as he predicted, Lincoln did indeed win the
election, overwhelmingly in the Electoral College, though closer in the popular
vote. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s victory in Georgia on the eve of
the election, as both had suspected – though Engels was ‘doubtful’ about his
chances – proved to be decisive. Finally, as Marx confidently noted, Lincoln’s
victory ensured the defeat of the Confederacy. With the results in, Frederick
Douglass called the election ‘the most momentous and solemn that ever
occurred in our country or in any other . . . to determine the question of life or
death to the nation.’42 Modern research also concurs with Marx’s opinion
about the cruciality of the election. A defeat for Lincoln would have, in all
likelihood, lead to a negotiated settlement of the War to the advantage of
the slavocracy.
By the summer of 1864 Engels began to be a bit hopeful about the North’s
situation. When he and Marx received a letter in October that year from
Weydemeyer, whom they had been out of touch with since the beginning of
war and who had risen to the rank of colonel in the Union Army, they got for
the first time an insider’s view of developments, particularly regarding the
conduct of the War. Weydemeyer’s insights, Marx’s continuing optimism, and,
most importantly, the progress registered by Sherman’s victory eventually won
Engels over. His reply to Weydemeyer’s letter, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s
re-election, makes this clear: ‘Despite the numerous blunders made by the
Northern armies . . . the tide of conquest is rolling slowly but surely onward,
and, in the course of 1865, at all events the moment will undoubtedly come
when the organised resistance of the South will fold up like a pocket-knife . . .’.
Engels then put the War in historical perspective: ‘A people’s war of this kind,
on both sides, has not taken place since great states have been in existence, and
it will, at all events, point the direction for the future of the whole of America
for hundreds of years to come. Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the
political and social development of the United States, has been broken, the
country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire quite a
different position in world history within the shortest possible time, and a use
will then soon be found for the army and navy with which the war is providing
it.’43 Six months later, Engels’s prognosis came to be at Appomattox, just as
Marx had been predicting from the outset. While he could not have foreseen
the particulars, his general forecast about America’s future was also remarkably
accurate, including the anticipation of US imperialism – ‘a use will then soon
42. Blassingame and McKivigan (eds.) 1991, p. 33.

43. Marx and Engels 1975–2004k, p. 39.
be found for the army and navy’ – at home (the subjugation of the Plains
Indians, as it turned out, was a significant chapter in this process) and abroad,
testimony to the power of the theoretical perspective that he and Marx
employed.
Marx’s claim, Engels’s as well, that a Northern victory would advance the
democratic struggle on a world-wide basis has wide support in modern
scholarship. McPherson certainly subscribes to this position, even citing Marx
as evidence, specifically, his well-known passage from Capital, published two
years after the end of the War: ‘As in the 18th century, the American war of
independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-classes, so in the
19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working-
class.’ McPherson, with the added emphasis on the significance of the
overthrow of slavery, provides evidence, not only for Marx’s claim about
Europe, but his and Engels’s allusions concerning developments elsewhere.
‘[P]erhaps it was more than coincidence that within five years of that Union
victory, the forces of liberalism had expanded the suffrage in Britain and
toppled emperors in Mexico and France. And it is also more than coincidence
that after the abolition of slavery in the United States the abolitionist forces
in the two remaining slave societies in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil and
Cuba, stepped up their campaign for emancipation, which culminated in
success two decades later.’44 Though nothing suggests that Marx and Engels
anticipated the outcomes in either Brazil or Cuba, everything indicates that
they would not have been surprised at what occurred in both countries. Other
breakthroughs in the democratic movement had their roots in the outcome of
the Civil War, not the least of which was the first wave of the struggle for
equality for women in the United States – testimony, again, to Marx and
Engels’s prescience.
Marx’s congratulatory message to Lincoln on his re-election in 1864
on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association takes on added
significance in light of the preceding discussion. And of particular importance
for this analysis and argument is a most trenchant observation Marx made in
it about class, race and US democracy that is worth repeating: ‘While the
working men, the true political power 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
labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain
the true freedom of labour or to support their European brethren in their
44. McPherson 1996, pp. 224, 227. For details on how the course of the Civil War impacted
upon developments in Brazil, see Rios 2001, Chapter 3.
struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by
the red sea of civil war.’45 Marx’s lines are pregnant with insights. First, white
workers in the US had made a Faustian bargain with the slavocracy that in
turn placed severe limits not only on ‘free labour’ – as Lincoln often referred
to it – but on bourgeois democracy itself. In exchange for the ‘wages of
whiteness’, the ‘peculiar institution’ was given a new lease on life. Second, he
anticipates the point he would concisely state three years later in Capital: ‘In
the United States of North America, every independent movement of the
workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.
Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is
branded.’ Encapsulated here is not only his broader political strategy – the full
attainment of bourgeois democracy as the precondition for the socialist
revolution – but, as well, his particular view about race and class. That is,
labour or the working class came in many faces as well as different skin-colours.
But, in the final analysis, it was first and foremost labour. Implicit here is the
assumption that race was no more than, as it would later be termed, a social
construction, while class was a social construction and more. Because class for
Marx, in other words, was first and foremost about social relations of
production, it had a reality that went beyond the particular constructions or
understandings given to it.
The third insight is the interconnectedness between on the one hand
the overthrow of slavery and racism and liberation for workers in the US and,
on the other hand, the advancement of the workers’ movement elsewhere,
specifically, at that time, in Europe. Lastly, this was not simply a congratulatory
message but, as well, an effort to impart to Lincoln, ‘the single-minded son
of the working class’, in non-sectarian language, a particular reading of what
was in progress – one to which Lincoln, as the historian James McPherson
has suggested, was not indisposed.46 With boldness and confidence Marx, in
other words, politically engaged the President of the US.
A contradictory aftermath
If the course and outcome of the War conformed in broad strokes to, certainly,
Marx’s expectations, the aftermath, ‘the reconstruction of a social world’, did
45. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, p. 20.

46. McPherson 1996; see especially, inter alia, Part IV, ‘The Enduring Lincoln’. The historian
Herbert Mitgang quotes the following from Lincoln: ‘Labor is prior to, and independent of,
capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has
its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.’ (The Nation 1996, p. 6.)
not – at least in their lifetimes. It is not possible in the confines of an article to

convey the richness of Marx and Engels’s assessment of developments in the
US following the victory of the Union – views that spanned almost two-and-
a-half decades. Suffice it to summarise their commentary as it relates to Marx’s
congratulatory message to Lincoln of 1864, more specifically, his claim at the
end that the overthrow of slavery would initiate a ‘new era of ascendancy
for . . . the working classes’.
Marx was cheered by news that within weeks of the victory over the
slavocracy, American workers had launched a nationwide campaign to win the
eight-hour work-day. The initiative had not just theoretical but also political
import for the class-struggle in Europe as well as the US. In his ‘Instructions’
to the first congress of the IWA in 1866 in Geneva, Marx pointed to the
vanguard-actions of the US workers as an example to be emulated. ‘We
propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day. This limitation
being generally claimed by the workmen of the United States of America, the
vote of the Congress will raise it to the common platform of the working
classes all over the world.’47 Thus began the first international campaign to
institute the eight-hour work-day. In the Preface to Capital Marx wrote,
again: ‘Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence
sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century
the American Civil War did the same for the European working class’ – a
variant of what Marx had said to Lincoln three years earlier. Working-class
ascendancy did not mean that socialist revolution was on the agenda. That
required the existence of a hereditary proletariat. The abolition of slavery
helped to accelerate that process by enabling the deepening and expansion of
capitalist relations of production throughout the US. Nothing Marx and
Engels ever said about the consequences of the War in this regard went further
than this affirmation of orthodoxy.
What about the outcome for ‘labour in black skin’? In this instance, the
optimism that Marx and Engels expressed in fragmented comments was not
rewarded in their lifetimes. ‘Nigger-hatred’ and the ‘mean whites’ proved to be
more resilient than they expected. The brief experiment in, if not racial
equality, then something moving in that direction, Radical Reconstruction,
came to a bloody end within a decade or so after the end of the War. What
they had urged Washington to do, employ stern duties to ‘sunder all the chains
of freedom’, fell largely on deaf ears.
47. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, p. 187. David Roediger (Roediger 1999, p. 174) argues
persuasively that ‘what made the eight-hour movement itself possible, was the spectacular
emancipation of slaves between 1863 and 1865.’
They did envision what it would take for real racial equality to be realised in
the US. The context was what labour-historian Philip Foner called the ‘first
nationwide rebellion of labor’, the massive railway-strike of 1877.48 ‘What do
you think of the workers of the [US]?’, Marx asked Engels.
This, the first outbreak against the associated capital oligarchy that has arisen
since the civil war, will, of course, be suppressed, but may well provide a point
of departure for the constitution of a serious workers’ party in the [US]. There are
two favourable circumstances on top of that. The policy of the new President will
turn the negroes, just as the big expropriations of land . . . for the benefit of the
Railway, Mining, etc. companies will turn the peasants of the West – whose
grumbling is already plainly audible – into militant allies of the workers.49
Engels replied: ‘I was delighted by the business of the strike in America. The
way they throw themselves into the movement has no equivalent on this side
of the ocean. Only twelve years since slavery was abolished and already the
movement has got to such a pitch.’50
Marx’s comment suggests that he was aware that Washington, with its ‘new
President’, Rutherford B. Hayes, had turned its back on Black America. More
importantly, it suggests that Marx felt it would take a viable workers’ party to
bring about an alliance between black and white labour, on the one hand, and
workers and farmers on the other. This was clearly consistent with the struggle
for independent working-class political action that he had waged in the now-
defunct IWA. Engels’s response is also instructive, particularly his usage of
‘already’. It means that he and Marx were surprised by the upheaval, owing, no
doubt, to their longue durée approach to the US class-struggle. While certainly
encouraged and supportive of the strike, Marx correctly foresaw that it would,
‘of course, be suppressed’. Again, not until a hereditary proletariat was in place
would the working class be able to really put its stamp on American politics.
Only with the victory of the Second Reconstruction a century later would
Marx’s forecast look like a real possibility. The other aforementioned claim in
Capital in 1867, also a variant of the important point that Marx made to
Lincoln, ‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black
it is branded’, still has, I argue, currency.
The overthrow of Radical Reconstruction explains, in my opinion, the
understandable scepticism in progressive circles today, almost de rigueur, about
the Civil War and Lincoln. Was it really an advance for working people, as
48. Foner 1977b, p. 9.

49. Marx and Engels 1975–2004l, p. 251.
50. Marx and Engels 1975–2004l, p. 255.
Marx and Engels argued, and does Lincoln really deserve their praise? But
such leeriness confuses a real social revolution with its defeat. To diminish the
significance of what took place in that brief space in time would be equivalent
to diminishing another, and related, social revolution that also went down to
bloody defeat, the Paris Commune of 1871, the first time the modern
proletariat was able to seize power. Although Parisian workers held power for
less than three months, what they were able to do in that short space constitutes
one of the historic conquests of the working class – crucial lessons, for example,
for the young Lenin.
Interestingly – and intriguingly – the individual who helped lead the charge
that ended Radical Reconstruction, Republican Party leader Carl Schurz, was
an old opponent of Marx and Engels from the German Revolution of 1848–9.
I say, ‘intriguingly’, because there is circumstantial evidence that suggests
Schurz was motivated to act as he did because of the same fears he harboured
in 1849 that put him and Marx at odds – the latter’s effort to make the
overthrow of slavery, as the Manifesto put it in reference to the fight to
overthrow the feudal régime in Germany, ‘the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution’.51 Recent research reveals that the events in
Paris in 1871 were very much on the minds of Schurz and his sympathisers in
their desire to put the genie of Radical Reconstruction back into the bottle.52
The focus of this article is Marx’s political analysis as informed by his
method. But precisely because Marx was an historical materialist he understood
that historical developments are not inevitable, but influenced by political
contingency and human intervention. Thus, the reason that he did everything
he could – from helping to organise mass-protests against British intervention
on behalf of the Confederacy, ‘the struggle in the press’ to shape public opinion,
and, of course, leading the IWA – to influence the outcome from the other
side of the Atlantic. His political activities, which cannot be detailed here for
reasons of space, are as important as his analysis; they compliment one
another.53
To conclude, Marx’s writings on the Civil War, along with those of Engels,
offer a most valuable window onto how they employed their ‘materialist
conception of history’. I argue that, together, they are even richer than Marx’s
analysis of Bonaparte’s coup d’état in The Eighteenth Brumaire. The War and
its outcome is the only successful social revolution that Marx and Engels saw
51. See Nimtz 2003, pp. 164–8, for details.

52. Richardson 2001.
53. Nimtz 2003, pp. 118–30, provides details. Foner 1977a, pp. 39–42, charges that Marx
and Engels did not do enough to defend Radical Reconstruction. See Nimtz 2003, pp. 171–8,
for a response.
in their own lifetimes. Also, their analysis took place in real time over a longer
period. The differences the two had over the course and outcome of the War
reveal that their method was not a template, but one that required deft usage.
Being armed with it was no guarantee for clarity. Finally, and to repeat, their
method allowed Marx to grasp the revolutionary tasks before Lincoln – the
need to transform the defensive War for preservation of the Union into a
revolutionary one to overthrow slavery – at least six months earlier than the
President himself, and with the firm conviction that would be the road to
victory. Herein lay the advantage that Marx derived from his historical-
materialist perspective, the revolutionary experiences of 1848–9, and the
revolutionary optimism which issued from the combination of revolutionary
theory and practice.
References
Blassingame, John W. and John R. McKivigan (eds.) 1991, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series
One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, Volume 4, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Draper, Hal 1989, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume 4: Critique of Other Socialisms, New
and Row.
Foner, Philip S. 1977a, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World
War II, Westport: Greenwood Press.
—— 1977b, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, New York: Monad Press.
—— 1984, The Workingmen’s Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the
Americas, Minneapolis: MEP Publications.
Holzer, Harold 2008, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter,
1860–1861, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Klingaman, William K. 2001, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, 1861–1865, New
York: Viking Penguin.
McPherson, James M. 1996, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— 1991, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1975–2004a, Collected Works, Volume 6, New York:
International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004b, Collected Works, Volume 8, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004c, Collected Works, Volume 9, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004d, Collected Works, Volume 12, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004e, Collected Works, Volume 18, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004f, Collected Works, Volume 19, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004g, Collected Works, Volume 20, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004h, Collected Works, Volume 38, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004i, Collected Works, Volume 40, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004j, Collected Works, Volume 41, New York: International Publishers.

—— 1975–2004k, Collected Works, Volume 42, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004l, Collected Works, Volume 45, New York: International Publishers.
—— 1975–2004m, Collected Works, Volume 50, New York: International Publishers.
Nimtz, August H. 2003, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The ‘Absolute Democracy’ or
‘Defiled Republic’, Lanham: Lexington Books.
Richardson, Heather Cox 2001, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-
Civil War North, 1865–1901, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Rios, Ana Maria 2001, ‘ “My Mother was a Slave, Not Me!”: Black Peasantry and Regional
Politics in Southeast Brazil, c. 1870–c. 1940’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Roediger, David 1999, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class,
London: Verso.
The Nation 1996, 30 September: 6.
Vogel, Jeffrey 1996, ‘The Tragedy of History’, New Left Review, I, 220: 36–61.
The Civil War and Slavery: A Response
Eric Foner
Columbia University
ef17@columbia.edu
Abstract
The four essays by Ashworth, Blackburn, Nimtz and Post all make important contributions to
our understanding of the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, and to modern
analysis of these questions within a Marxist tradition. Although they differ among themselves on
key issues, they direct attention to problems too often neglected by other historians: the rôle of
class-conflict within North and South in the coming of the War; the part played by slave-
resistance in the sectional conflict; the nature of the economic relationship between slave and
free economies; and a shift in control of the national state as an enduring result of the conflict.
Keywords
American Civil War, slavery, Marxism, history
Not long ago, the causes of the Civil War constituted the number-one question
debated by American historians. Was the War an irrepressible conflict between
two fundamentally different social systems, or did a ‘blundering generation’ of
politicians allow public passions to be inflamed by irresponsible agitators,
producing an avoidable and unnecessary conflict? Was slavery the reason for
the War, or did other issues – the tariff, states’ rights, raw sectional power –
take precedence? Even though books on the War’s military history continue to
pour off the presses, the rise of social and cultural history during the past
thirty years has to some extent eclipsed these older debates (even though the
Civil War profoundly shaped the social and cultural lives of that generation).
With the War’s sesquicentennial (150th anniversary), we can expect renewed
attention to its causes, conduct, and legacy. These four essays make major
contributions to that discussion.
John Ashworth’s two-volume account of American history from 1820 to
1861 has been widely recognised as a powerful new interpretation strongly
influenced by Marxist analysis.1 His essay ably summarises these long,

200 E. Foner / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 199–205
somewhat dense volumes, although inevitably at the cost of oversimplifying

their complex argument. Ashworth stresses the importance of class-conflict
within both North and South in helping to create conflict between them.
Slave-resistance – real or potential – spurred slaveholders to take ever more
radical actions in defence of their ‘peculiar institution’. These policies alarmed
the North and strengthened hostility to slavery, not only among abolitionists
motivated by considerations of morality, but among the far larger number
of Northerners who cared little about blacks but came to see slavery as a
threat to their own liberties and future economic prospects. Discontent among
Northern wage-workers as the development of capitalism accelerated was
mitigated by a unifying sectional outlook that viewed the South as an alien
and dangerous ‘other’.
Ashworth’s account is notable for its sophistication and command of both
the events of the time and the relevant historiography. It runs the risk, however,
of exaggerating the significance of class-conflict as a catalyst of the Civil War.
Slave-resistance, while widespread on the day-to-day level, did not really come
into its own until after the Civil War had begun, when the actions of slaves
decisively shaped the politics of the Confederacy (leading to governmental
actions to protect slavery that alienated non-slaveholding whites) and put the
question of emancipation on the agenda of a reluctant Lincoln administration.
Class-conflict in the North was also more ‘potential’ than real before the
War. Indeed, as Michael Zakim notes in his provocative book Ready-Made
Democracy, there was an integration of workers.2
Apart from slaveholders, self-conscious classes did not exist in the antebellum
United States (as Marx himself recognised). In the South, to be sure, large
slaveholders ruled, slaves were a subordinate class with virtually no rights,
and the white majority of non-slaveholders exercised little real power. But
the situation in the North was far more murky. How large was the class of
permanent wage-earners in a society that still harboured large sectors of
artisans, shopkeepers, and landowning farmers, and still offered significant
prospects for social advancement? Who made up the ruling class in the
North? Ashworth’s vague language – he refers to ‘northern élites’, not a specific
class – illustrates the problem. During the secession-crisis, appeals for
compromise flooded into Congress from these northern élites – merchants,
industrialists, and financiers. Contrary to what one might expect, they did
not desire a confrontation with the South, and to preserve the Union were
quite willing to accede to Southern demands to allow slavery’s expansion.
Republicans, their support rooted not in the nation’s centres of finance and
2. Zakim 2003.
E. Foner / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 199–205 201
industry but in the small-town and rural North, ignored them. If this was a
ruling class, it incongruously seemed to have no influence at all over the most
fundamental decision a government can make: whether to go to war.
In fact, as Sven Beckert has shown, no coherent bourgeoisie existed in the
North before the Civil War.3 The development of this class’s unity and self-
consciousness was not complete until the 1890s. The process owed much to
the War itself and to the tremendous industrial expansion that followed, which
ushered in one of the most violent eras of class-conflict in modern history.
This class-conflict contributed to the North’s retreat from the effort to secure
the rights of the former slaves during Reconstruction and to the reconciliation
of Southern and Northern whites, which gathered force toward the end of the
century. But none of this amounts to an explanation of why the War occurred
in the first place.
Ashworth and Charles Post disagree about the economic condition and
future prospects of the slave-South. Both, I think, exaggerate the South’s
economic crisis. The South lagged in industry and urbanisation but plantation-
slavery was quite profitable, largely because the region enjoyed a virtual
monopoly of the most valuable commodity in international trade, cotton.
Cotton accounted for more than half of the value of American exports. As
Robin Blackburn points out, slaves, valued as property, were worth more than
all the banks, factories, and railroads in the United States combined. The
idea that slavery needed to expand for purely economic reasons ignores the
existence of immense uncultivated tracts of land in Texas suitable for cotton-
farming. In addition, as Post observes, slavery is a remarkably resilient and
flexible institution, and there was no reason why slaves could not be used in
industry, mining, and other activities if world-demand for cotton began to
decline. Post still believes, however, that the way slavery froze immense
amounts of capital in the labour-force inevitably weakened the slave-system
economically.
Post’s discussion of the rise of agrarian capitalism in the North and whether
the growth of capitalism preceded or followed the expansion of markets is
valuable but in the end seems to exaggerate the triumph of industrial capital
before the War. There is a danger of conflating the consequences of the Civil
War with its causes – a trap the Beards fell into when they argued that the War
was not about slavery, but about industrialists’ desire for a high tariff and other
economic policies blocked by the South.4 Even on the eve of conflict, capitalist
development in the North was highly uneven, and ‘industrial capitalism’ still
3. Beckert 2001.
4. Beard and Beard 1927.
confined to New England and parts of New York and Pennsylvania. What Post
calls the ‘dominance of industrial capital’ over merchant-capital happened
after the War, not before it. Post also attributes to prewar Republicans a more
coherent economic policy than they actually adhered to. They were certainly
committed to the expansion of ‘free society’, but outside of Pennsylvania,
home to a nascent iron-industry, the protective tariff was a minor theme in
their appeal – understandably so in a party many of whose adherents had
recently been Democrats and remained advocates of free-trade. Opposition to
slavery’s expansion, not economic policy, united the party. In the absence of
the War, it is difficult to imagine a high-tariff régime being enacted by Lincoln’s
administration.
Accounts of the Civil War resting purely on economic difference sometimes
seem to assume that a nation must be economically homogenous to avoid
internal conflict. Yet, like the farming regions of the Northwest and the
industrialising Northeast, the slave-South was part of a diversified national
economy whose different sectors were cooperative as much as competitive.
Northern merchants shipped the cotton, Northern financiers extended credit,
Northern longshoremen handled Southern commerce (which went through
New York City), Northern manufacturers turned slave-grown cotton into
cloth. ‘The Lords of the Loom’ saw no conflict of interest between themselves
as the ‘Lords of the Lash’, as their behaviour during the secession-crisis clearly
demonstrated. Lincoln famously declared that a house divided against itself
could not stand. But there was no purely economic reason why the North
could not continue to coexist for many years with a slave-economy in the
South. Moreover, while most Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery
into territories such as Kansas previously marked out as the home of free
labour, there was no economic reason why they could not support Southern
expansion where it really mattered – southward to Mexico and the Caribbean.
Ashworth is quite correct to call the Northern and Southern economies
‘interdependent’.
Thus, we are brought back to the ideological aspects of the struggle, which
Ashworth emphasises and Post seems to downplay. Ashworth briefly but
effectively charts the rise of antislavery sentiment resting on moral, political,
and free-labour grounds. (He does not, however, manage to link this
development to his other theme of class-conflict within each section, which
seems to drop out of the picture as he moves to the conflict of sectional ‘world-
views’.) He also tends to exaggerate the ideological unity of each section. Thus,
until at least 1856, the Democratic Party, closely linked to the South, remained
the dominant political force in the North. It was never reduced to ‘impotence’
there, as Ashworth claims. Post seems to err on this score as well. While
criticising Ashworth for exaggerating the impact of slave-resistance on the

course of political events, he goes much too far in the other direction by
embracing Eugene Genovese’s doctrine that paternalism constituted ‘a
common set of ideological values for both masters and slaves’, an idea long
since discredited by scholars of the Old South.5 The paternalist-thesis cannot
begin to explain the tremendous upsurge of slave-resistance unleashed during
the Civil War.
Blackburn is more concerned with the conduct and consequences of the
Civil War than its causes. He brings the discussion down to a more concrete
level, writing interestingly about Lincoln, Marx, and German-American
radicals and their rôle in the War era. He rightly emphasises the centrality of
the concept of unrequited labour to the critique of slavery by all three. He
reminds us that Marx himself saw the political and economic causes of the
War as inextricably connected, rather than elevating one over the other.
Blackburn’s comment is given more precise meaning in August Nimtz’s
contribution, which lays out very clearly Marx’s insightful commentary on the
Civil War era. Rather than indulging in a sterile economic determinism, as
critics have charged, Marx developed a sophisticated analysis of the War, based
on the conflict between ‘social systems’ resting on free and slave-labour, but
avoiding notions of inevitability. As Nimtz shows, Marx grasped at the outset
the imperative of freeing and arming slaves as a path to Union victory. He
realised the error in Lincoln’s early efforts to conciliate ‘loyal’ slaveholders, and
appreciated the revolutionary significance of the Emancipation Proclamation
(often denigrated nowadays for not freeing every slave with a stroke of Lincoln’s
pen). As Marx wrote of emancipation in one of his occasional dispatches from
London for the New York Tribune, ‘Up to now, we have witnessed only the first
act of the Civil War – the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the
revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.’6 And Nimtz is quite right to emphasise
that the eventual triumph of counter-revolution, at least in the South as far as
the freed slaves were concerned, does not diminish the revolutionary quality
of the Civil War.
Blackburn underlines why the War is sometimes called the ‘Second
American Revolution’ by introducing an essential element neglected by the
others – control of the national state. From the Revolution to the Civil War,
slaveholders dominated the federal government. They created a state weak
enough to pose no threat to slavery, but strong enough to assist the institution
when necessary, such as in the expulsion of the British, Spanish, and Native
5. Genovese 1976.
6. Cited in Enmale (ed.) 1961, p. 200.
Americans from the Southeast, making possible the creation of the ‘Cotton
Kingdom’. (This story has been ably told in Adam Rothman’s Slave Country.)7
It was a state that interfered little in Americans’ day-to-day lives, yet, in the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, empowered federal officials to override state-laws
and local opposition to the recapture of runaways from bondage.
Blackburn notes that Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were
nation-builders. Lincoln had a strong sense of national unity; tellingly, during
the War he increasingly abandoned references to the Union, a collection of
discrete bodies, in favour of ‘nation’, a unitary entity. Seward envisioned an
American empire that would eventually encompass much of the Western
hemisphere and trade freely with the entire world. Both saw slavery as
impediments to their respective visions – Lincoln’s of the United States as an
example to the world of the superiority of free institutions, and Seward’s of
imperial grandeur. As Secretary of State under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew
Johnson, Seward engineered the purchase of Alaska, whose Aleutian Islands he
saw as a commercial gateway to China.
Of course, the abolition of slavery provided the nascent American empire
with a large stash of what Christopher Brown, in a somewhat different context,
has called ‘moral capital’ – an irrefutable claim to embody justice and freedom.8
As the War neared its end, Francis E. Spinner, the Treasurer of the United
States, whose signature adorned every ‘greenback’ (the new national currency
issued during the War), summed up this result and the ensuing danger:
What a school we have kept, and what a lesson we have taught the Secech
[Southerners] in particular and mankind in general. The thing to be feared now
is, that we will be running around the world with a chip on our shoulder. If we
can avoid this, a glorious future is ours.9
Unfortunately, the United States has not been able, to this day, to avoid the
imperial temptation.
Was the Civil War a bourgeois revolution? Ashworth thinks it was, because
through the Union’s triumph bourgeois free-labour values became the national
norm. To Post, the War confirmed the ascendancy of a pre-existing industrial-
capitalist economy, removing a major obstacle to its future expansion. It
thus constituted a bourgeois revolution of sorts. Blackburn reminds us that,
bourgeois or not, the War brought about a revolution in the most fundamental
7. Rothman 2005.
8. Brown 2001.
9. Day 1931, p. 299.
sense – the ouster of a class (the slaveholders) from control of the national
state. As such, it forever changed the course of American and world-history.
References
Beckert, Sven 2001, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American
Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Christopher L. 2001, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, Cambridge:
Day, Sarah J. 1931, The Man on a Hill Top, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.
Enmale, Richard (ed.) 1961, The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Third Edition, New York: International Publishers.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1976, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Vintage
Books.
Rothman, Adam 2005, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South,
Zakim, Michael 2003, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the Early Republic,
1760–1860, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Review Articles
Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Abstract
This essay is a review of Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy. While the text will provide even
knowledgeable Marxist readers with new insights on key texts and concepts in Marx, it
nevertheless fails to intervene in crucial contemporary philosophical debates. The book is
concerned less with the contemporary significance of Marxist philosophy as philosophy and more
with re-reading classical Marxist texts in a contemporary context. This job it does well, but leaves
the more important question of what Marxists have to say about fundamental philosophical
problems today unaddressed for the most part.
Keywords
Marx, philosophy, method, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, globalisation
Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy is composed of a selection of papers originally

presented to conferences of the Marx and Philosophy Society between 2003 and 2008. The
papers retain the pithy and tightly focused character of the best conference-papers, while
the book as a whole is a diverse exploration of a shared idea, as the best conferences are. As
the title implies, the focus throughout is on Marx, rather than Marxist philosophy, and
most papers are written as careful and close readings of Marx’s texts. The sixteen papers are
arranged in five sections: ‘Marx and his Predecessors’, ‘Marx and Political Philosophy’,
‘Marx on Labour, Money, and Capital’, ‘Twentieth Century Marxism’, and ‘Marx and
Feminism’. While I found each of the papers well-crafted, rigorously argued, and able to
find new steps on well-trod paths, the book as a whole is somewhat less than the sum of
its parts.
That is not to say that even knowledgeable Marxist readers cannot glean new insights on
key texts and concepts in Marx. The great strength of the book considered as a whole is the
exegetical acumen of each of the papers. Nevertheless, I felt that an important opportunity
for Marxists to intervene in crucial contemporary philosophical debates was missed. The
book is really concerned less with the contemporary significance of Marxist philosophy as
philosophy and more with re-reading classical Marxist texts in a contemporary context. If
Marx’s thought is to remain a living philosophical tradition, it must prove that its historical-
materialist philosophy of the socially concrete is capable of solving philosophical problems
that other, more abstract and idealist approaches cannot. In some cases that I will discuss,
the papers do just that. Overall, however, the book suffers from treating Marx as the subject
of analysis rather than as a point of departure for novel interventions in contemporary
philosophical disputes.
208 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 207–218
Since the papers do not reference each other and the editors aimed to respect the diversity
of content and approach, any adequate exploration of the text must discuss each of the
papers separately. Thus I will work through each section, commenting on the particular
papers, and then conclude by explicating in more detail the general conclusion noted above.
I: Marx and his predecessors

The first section opens with Joseph McCarney’s exploration of the problems and limitations
in Marx’s critique of Hegel as developed in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right. The careful exegesis of Marx combined with McCarney’s deep knowledge
of Hegel reveals a certain uncharitability in Marx’s misunderstanding of what Hegel means
by his oft-quoted aphorism: ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’.1
Whereas Marx treats ‘actual’ as synonymous with ‘given’, making Hegel’s principle imply a
conservative politics, McCarney demonstrates convincingly that Hegel identifies the actual
with a future in which the idea of freedom is fully realised (pp. 19–20). Hegel’s philosophy
is thus, as Marx himself argued elsewhere, critical and implicitly revolutionary.2 The
conservatism of Hegel’s philosophy, and the real insight of Marx’s critique, thus lies
elsewhere according to McCarney, in Marx’s disclosing that nature, which is supposed to be
mere raw material for the development of subjective spirit, in fact determines the entire
political system (in so far as the monarch is determined by accident of birth). McCarney
notes that mainstream Hegelian interpreters have consistently ignored Marx’s real insight
in this regard.
Martin McIvor takes a more general tack through the sea of relations between Marx and
his idealist predecessors. He reads Marx’s philosophy as the culminating expression of the
post-Kantian ideas of autonomy and self-determination. McIvor draws on more recent,
pragmatically inclined scholarship (Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin) to draw attention
away from the metaphysical extravagance of German idealism to emphasise the rôle of
social relations in the constitution of human subjecthood and self-determination, and
demonstrate how Marx’s social philosophy is continuous with this tradition. McIvor makes
his case convincingly, but I worried that he made it too well, highlighting the continuities
at the expense of the fundamental differences that distinguish Marx, not only from the
German-idealist tradition, but the general mode of philosophical reasoning in abstraction
from historically and socially concrete particularity. This danger is evident, for example, in
McIvor’s claim that Marx’s conception of labour is essentially the same as that developed by
Kant in The Critique of Judgement (p. 43). If one abstracts the ideational content from the
concept and compares them apart from their practical implications, such a comparison
may in fact be sound. However, in Marx, as opposed to Kant, the function of the concept
of labour is not simply to distinguish human from non-human forms of life-activity, but
equally to expose the ways in which this activity is systematically degraded by the concrete
social processes of capitalism. The effect of comparing only the ideational content and not
the practical function is to make Marx sound too much like a moralising critic of capitalism
to the detriment of his actual, historically grounded social critique. McIvor’s paper thus
1. Hegel 1967, p. 10.

2. Marx 1975b, pp. 332–3.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 207–218 209
contains the same problem as other recent efforts to draw Kant and Marx closer together at
the expense of the philosophical specificity of Marx.3
A similar criticism could be made of Scott Meikle’s ‘Marx, the European Tradition, and
the Philosophical Radicals’. In this essay, Meikle continues the project first pursued in his
path-breaking Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx.4 His contribution is an engaging
historical examination of the opposed philosophical contexts in which Marx and the
classical English and Scottish political economists grew up. As an essay in comparative
philosophical history it is a model of scholarship and eloquence. Meikle attributes the
ability of Marx to get beyond the fallacious abstractions of political economy to his classical
education, and in particular the rôle that natural kinds played in Aristotle and scholastic
philosophy, a rôle that was destroyed by English and Scottish empiricism (p. 73). While
there are remarkable insights in the paper, one is left wondering whether something essential
is left out of account: the philosophical specificity that distinguishes Marx from Aristotle.
Indeed, this question could be posed with respect to each of the papers in this section.
It is true that Marx, like every other thinker, has influences, and it is also true that
historical time helps later scholars to see these influences more clearly than the author
himself. But Marx is not just the sum of influences turned to different political ends. Marx,
I would argue, is a different kind of philosopher. What distinguishes Marx as a philosopher
is his resolute focus on the socially and historically concrete, not, as in empiricism, as
isolated sense-data, but, as in all dialectical thought, as an interconnected dynamic process.
But this interconnected dynamic process is not reified as the metaphysical claim ‘reality is
an interconnected dialectical process’ but is treated in its messy and complex social reality.
The best place to look to understand this philosophically sui generis method at work is not
necessarily his early philosophical fragments, important as they remain, but in his political
essays, where Marx’s key philosophical concepts come to life to unify his accounts of
political struggles such as the 1848 revolutions or the Paris Commune.
The principle of Marx’s historical-materialist philosophy of the concrete is perhaps best
expressed in a late letter he wrote to the editor of the St Petersburg journal Homeland Notes,
in which he rejected the interpretation of his work as ‘a historical-philosophical theory of
universal development predetermined by fate for all nations, whatever the historic
circumstances they may find themselves in’. In contrast, Marx continues, his actual method
is to ‘study each of these developments by itself ’ and then to ‘compare them with each
other’ in order to ‘find the key to each phenomenon’, but never to arrive at ‘a general
historical-philosophical theory, whose greatest advantage lies in being beyond history.’5
Unlike Kant, for whom the forms of human knowledge were determined by transcendental
and invariant structures, and Hegel, who edited out most empirical history to present it as
a series of stylised transitions in order to prove his a priori principles, Marx, at his best at
least, really did do what he said he was going to do in an early letter to Arnold Ruge: to
develop his principles from the principles of the world.6
3. See, for example, Karatani 2003 and Van der Linden 1988.
4. Meikle 1985.
5. Padover 1979, pp. 321–2.
6. Padover 1979, p. 32.
II: Marx and political philosophy

The second section, like the first, is dominated by concern with Marx’s critical engagement
with Hegel’s theory of the state. It opens with Georgios Daremas’s unpacking of Marx’s
understanding of democracy as far as this can be gleaned from an exegesis of the Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Daremas’s conclusion – that ‘Marx . . . castigates
the disembodied character of existing democracy as pure formalism’ (p. 91) – is sound, but
tells us little about the more interesting question from a contemporary standpoint witnessing
the erosion of even these ‘formalistic’ elements of democracy: What does Marx have to say
about what would count as robust and substantive democratic practice? Marx has a great
deal more to say on this question than is sometimes supposed, as detailed scholarship such
as that by August Nimtz has recently explored.7 Once again, the answers to the philosophical
questions are found not only in Marx’s explicitly philosophical works, but must be teased
out of his practical-political writing.
This point is understood in what could be the most impressive paper in the collection,
Andrew Collier’s ‘Marx and Conservatism’. Collier eschews line-by-line analysis for a
comparative approach that looks at Marx’s work as a whole. His heterodox and sure-to-be-
controversial thesis is that Marx, usually thought of as asking the same questions as liberals
and providing different answers, actually asks the same questions as conservatives, and
provides different answers. By ‘conservative’, Collier does not refer to any existing political
party but a mode of political practice that he describes as ‘problem-solving’. Like
conservatives such as Burke, Marx starts from an organic conception of the state:
A state, like an animal, has needs, and can have problems. It survives and develops
by solving its problems as they arise. These are not problems only relative to some
ideal like freedom or equality. They are problems relative to the organism’s need
to flourish. (p. 98.)
Marxist politics properly understood, Collier contends, is not driven by the ‘Noah complex’
(total destruction of the existing society followed by total reconstruction of a new one) but
concrete solutions to concrete problems as they arise in definite historical contexts. In this
way, Marx is distinct both from revolutionary madmen such as Pol Pot and liberals, who,
while eschewing revolutionary means, nevertheless practise an abstract politics of trying to
subordinate reality to a priori principles. Collier concludes that what Marx shares with
conservatism is ‘the belief that start[s] from where we are rather than from an idea of where
we want to go, and ask[s] what can be done, not for the good of people in general, but for
the good of these people, with these traditions, these needs, these skills, these resources.’
(pp. 99–100.)
Collier’s argument is likely to irritate liberals, conservatives, and Marxists alike – an ideal
philosophical outcome. Liberals will react to their being criticised for practising a prioristic
politics detached from context, given that they pride themselves on not being utopian.
Conservatives will no doubt dispute the possibility of Marxists respecting any sort of
tradition, given their revolutionary goals. And Marxists will be concerned by the conservative
implications of being compared to conservatives even though a comparison between Marx
7. Nimtz Jr. 2000.

and Engels’s actual practice as explored in Nimtz (see note 7 above) provides abundant
empirical evidence to support Collier’s claim that Marx and Engels always tried to do the
most in the given context, but never more than their best judgement determined could be
done. Whether one agrees with Collier or not, the paper should become a focal-point for
practical debates about what can be done by Marxists now, in the midst of the most serious
capitalist crisis in 70 years.
Robert Fine’s paper returns to the method of close reading and the theme of the
relationship between Marx’s politics and Hegel’s philosophy of the state. Fine’s essay, like
the two preceding that also focused on the Contribution, is erudite and rigorously argued,
but reaches a unique conclusion. Fine believes that one finds in Hegel a critique of the
modern state-form which Marx never fully supersedes. Rather, Fine suggests that we should
read Hegel and Marx as complements: Hegel supplying the critique of the modern state-
form and Marx supplying the critique of capitalist value absent in Hegel. On their own,
each critique is one-sided, together, they function as a comprehensive critique of modernity
(p. 118). The conclusion is bold and original, but perhaps overestimates the degree to
which Hegel’s actual Philosophy of Right constitutes a proper critique (an explication of the
contradictions of the object and the path by which those contradictions may be resolved at
a higher level of synthesis). Perhaps because the paper was short, I was not fully convinced
that Hegel’s political philosophy contains the principle needed for a progressive solution to
the problems of the liberal state-form. In any case, such a conclusion, in order to be
convincing, would have to leave the textual world of the nineteenth century and engage
more concretely with contemporary political reality (in which, as I noted above, even liberal
constitutional ideals are being rapidly eroded).
The papers that comprise Part Two all make a real contribution to understanding the
political side of Marx’s corpus, but for the most part do not engage directly either with
Marx’s explicitly political work, or with other important interventions in the long-standing
debate about the significance of Marx’s work for the critique and development of democracy.
Of especial note here is the unfortunate fact that Marx’s critique of liberal rights, as
developed in On The Jewish Question, his analyses of the 1848 revolutions, and the Critique
of the Gotha Programme are by and large ignored. So too is the excellent work undertaken
by scholars such as Ellen Meiksins Wood who, in the 1990s examined carefully, in rich
historical detail, the problems of liberalism and democracy from a Marxist perspective.8
There is great exegetical value and importance in these papers, but, with the exception of
Collier, the textual focus is rather narrow, the significance for non-Marxist contemporary
political philosophy rather thin, and the implications of Marxist political philosophy for
contemporary political practice mostly absent.
III: Marx on labour, money, and capital

The five papers of Part Three are the most technically demanding in the collection. Andrew
Chitty’s paper opens with the argument that the basis of Marx’s critique of capital is that it
represents an abstract expression of human species-being. Capital is free, self-moving, self-
developing, and world-transforming, i.e., exactly as Marx describes human species-being.
8. Meiksins Wood 1995.

Capital, however, has become detached from its human moorings and rules over and
constricts the possibilities for collective self-determination and individual self-realisation
(pp. 136–7). I think this line of argument is potentially fruitful, not only because it ties
together the early philosophical arguments with the mature political economy, but also
because it establishes a deep normative foundation for the critique of capitalist globalisation
(a period in which capital really is world-transforming, in the worst sort of ways). These
lines of contemporary critique are not developed here, but nevertheless supply future efforts
with a productive conceptual resource.
Sean Sayers’s paper does deal with contemporary problems, in particular the question of
whether Marx’s concept of labour, developed in the early stages of capitalist industrialisation,
remains relevant in an age which is purportedly dominated by ‘symbolic labour’. Sayers
rightfully argues that it is, and develops his position through a much-needed critique of
Hardt and Negri’s contention that symbolic labour has superseded materially productive
labour as the socially dominant form. Sayers demonstrates that Hardt and Negri’s argument
depends upon a superficial understanding of Marx’s concept of labour. Marx, far from
opposing material and symbolic labour, argues that all acts of material production contain
a symbolic and communicative element (p. 151). It is this symbolic content in material
activity that distinguishes human labour from analogous forms of animal activity. Although
he does not extend his argument to include it, his critique of Hardt and Negri could also
be used to undermine the voguish idea of the ‘creative class’ propounded by Richard Florida
as the solution to the socio-economic ills caused by de-industrialisation.9
Christopher J. Arthur’s paper on the nature of money returns to the Hegelian themes
that predominated in Parts One and Two. His contribution focuses on the Grundrisse, and
it explores the importance of Hegel’s dialectical thought for the expression of Marx’s analysis
of money in these preparatory notebooks. While it is clear to any reader of the Grundrisse
that Marx adopts a Heglian mode of expression here, it remains questionable, to my mind
at least, whether this mode of presentation is essential to the conclusions that Marx draws
about the unique function of money in a capitalist society. Is it really the case, as Arthur
asserts, that ‘the concept of money requires elucidation through drawing on the resources
of Hegel’s Logic’? (p. 159). Taken at face-value, this claim would seem to imply that
capitalism – a social form that developed through a series of contingent socio-economic
changes and political revolutions – cannot be understood save through the categories of a
philosophical text whose form and content claim to be eternally true and valid for all
phenomena. How can historical materialism require such concepts? Money does not appear
as a universal medium of exchange (its basic function in a capitalist economy) for
philosophically necessary conceptual reasons (philosophical necessity being the motor of
Hegelian logic) but for contingent historical reasons, which Marx elsewhere traces in
their historical specificity with no significant reliance upon Hegelian categories.10 I thus felt
that Arthur lost sight of the dialectic of the historically concrete which distinguishes Marx
from Hegel.
A related problem besets Patrick Murray’s essay on the meaning of value in Marx. Murray
continues the project first developed in his important work Marx’s Theory of Scientific
Knowledge, arguing here that Marx’s analysis and critique of the capitalist value-form in
9. Florida 2003.
10. Marx 1986, pp. 97–144.
Capital completes his critical response to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (p. 176).11 This claim
seems to me to overestimate the hold of Hegel over Marx’s systematic political economy. It
is of course true that Marx, in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital,
Volume One, pays homage to the importance of Hegel, but it hardly follows from this
comment made in passing, or from the content of Capital itself, that Marx thought of
himself as supplying a critique of capitalist value absent in Hegel, as Murray claims
(p. 177). While I believe that it is wrong to argue that Marx ceased to do philosophy after
the German Ideology, I believe, as I have already noted, that he does philosophy differently,
and part of this difference is to cease to act as contemporary philosophers all too often do,
that is, only in relation to other people’s ideas, and not to concrete material-historical
developments.
Marx was not supplementing or answering or completing or criticising Hegel in Capital,
he was trying to understand a still-emerging social form. What he had to say there was not
motivated by a conceptual absence in Hegel, but the real problems that capitalism generated
for workers and humanity as a whole. It is true that one needs to understand Hegel in order
to understand Marx’s philosophical development. However, one seriously misunderstands
Marx’s philosophy if one tries to articulate it through Hegelian categories. Unlike Hegel,
whose Logic rests on the standard categories of classical metaphysics, Marx’s categories are
whatever categories are required to understand the actual world. Since that world changes,
the categories of historical materialism must change as well. The unifying thread of Marxist
philosophy is not a transhistorical rationality, but the ongoing human struggle to solve
essential social contradictions.
William Clare Roberts, in the final paper in this part, looks at the structures of human
action under capitalism in a vein that reminded me of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and
Social Domination.12 Roberts’s intelligent essay exposes the structures of abstraction that
come to dominate people’s individual intentions under capitalism. He concludes that the
real problem of capitalism is the way in which it imposes a form of compulsively mechanical
activity on human agents, making democratic deliberation and genuine individuality
impossible. This conclusion is not only sound, it is also a most important basis from which
to develop a contemporary critique of the liberal-democratic justification of capitalism.
Liberal ideology, notwithstanding its complexification over two centuries of development,
still identifies without argument free markets and free individual expression and democratic
coordination of activity. Roberts supplies contemporary critics with the conceptual
foundations they need to attack and dislodge this most dangerous conflation.
Thus, there is much of contemporary philosophical value generated in this section, even
though the content of the essays is for the most part determined by exegetical and historical
considerations. Even though cosmopolitan liberalism, to cite perhaps the most relevant
alternative to a Marxist understanding of capitalist globalisation, has been forced by reality
to recognise the destructive effects of capitalism (on global life-support systems, on social
security and social solidarity, on the efficacy of liberal-democratic forms), one will search in
vain in David Held, Thomas Pogge, James Bohman, or Martha Nussbaum for any sort of
systematic causal explanation for the ‘moral gap in life-chances’ (Held) they decry.13 Read
11. Murray 1988.

12. Postone 2003.
13. Held 2004, p. 91. See also Bohman 2007; Nussbaum 2006; Pogge (ed.) 2003.
in this light, the best arguments of this section contribute mightily to contemporary
Marxist explanations of observable global dynamics, arming Marxists with the systematic
understanding of global capitalism necessary as the social-material grounds of normative
critique and political practice absent in philosophical competitors.
IV: Twentieth-century Marxism

Part Four focuses on three key figures and movements within twentieth-century Marxist
philosophy: the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács, and the distinct expressions of anti-Hegelian
Marxism in Althusser and analytical Marxism. Postone’s essay on Lukács opens Part Four.
It elaborates upon the critique of Lukács that he developed in Time, Labor, and Social
Domination. While recognising the importance of Lukács as a critic of the scientism that
dominated Second-International Marxism, Postone argues convincingly that Lukács’s
conception of the proletariat resembles the individual bourgeois subject, but writ large.
Postone, in contrast, argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism is in effect a critique of
proletarianised labour: its aim is not the rule of the proletariat, but its self-overcoming
(p. 211). In more concrete terms, the essence of socialism is the abolition of capitalist
abstract labour and abstract time, and thereby the creation of the conditions for a new form
of human subjectivity, as opposed to the bourgeois form of subjectivity released from the
contradictions of capitalism. In this essay, Postone again proves himself to be one of the
most original Marxist thinkers of the last 20 years.
There is, perhaps, no sharper philosophical opposition in the history of Marxism than
that between Lukács and Althusser. The editors were wise to juxtapose Postone’s essay on
Lukács with John Grant’s essay on Althusser. Grant reconsiders the relationship between
Althusser and Hegel, drawing on early and late works by Althusser to contest the standard
interpretation. Grant’s aim is two-fold: to reveal that Althusser had a more complex
relationship with Hegel’s thought than is usually supposed by critics, and that this more
complex relationship changes the meaning and implications of Althusser’s understanding
of human subjecthood. Grant reveals that Althusser’s structuralist understanding of subjects
as subject-positions was never intended as a denial of individual human agency. On the
contrary, Althusser not only affirms the reality of agency, he attributes essential political
efficacy to militancy (p. 232). While successfully setting Althusser’s philosophy in a new
light, Grant, by highlighting the rôle of militancy in Althusser’s thought, also uncovers the
lasting significance of Althusser for Badiou. The connection is not explored, nor ought it to
have been, but I note it simply to indicate that the importance of the essay is not simply as
an exercise in redemption, but has potentially significant contemporary implications, both
political and philosophical.
Part Four concludes with Roberto Veneziani’s rigorous and charitable examination and
critique of analytical Marxism. He begins by carefully distinguishing analytical from
rational-choice Marxism, and cautions critics against rejecting the demand for conceptual
clarity definitive of the former on the basis of a legitimate rejection of the methodological
individualism and game-theory worship incompatible with Marxism of the latter. I agree
with Veneziani that Marxists should not react defensively to the analytic attempt to
reconstruct fundamental Marxist concepts (but nor ought these reconstructions be accepted
uncritically). Underlying the argument is a point that could be raised against a number of
the more Hegelian-inspired papers in this collection: if the content of concrete philosophy
is determined by the structures and dynamics of the contemporary social world, ought not
its form be so determined as well? In other words, the question is whether a philosophical
understanding of the contemporary world can best be accomplished using modes of
argument developed in a quite different historical and philosophical context. This question
is important, and Veneziani’s paper is a well-argued riposte to defensive criticisms of
analytical Marxism. At the same time, I wondered whether he missed a perhaps deeper
problem in analytical Marxism, its almost complete divorce of theory from practice, and,
as a consequence, the near-complete assimilation of its normative horizons to those of
egalitarian liberalism.14
While each of the essays in this section is illuminating and well-argued, I was somewhat
disappointed with its scope, especially because the book claims to focus on the relationship
between Marx and contemporary philosophy. The history of Marxist philosophy in the
twentieth century is rich in insight, new directions, and controversy, and key names from
this history – Gramsci, Colletti, Timpanaro, Marcuse, Adorno, Benjamin, Callinicos,
Geras, Meszaros, Badiou, and Žižek, to name only those that come immediately to my
mind – are absent. Undoubtedly, these absences are due to the process by which the text
was constructed (selecting the best papers from a series of conferences), but they remain
significant philosophical absences nonetheless.
V: Marxism and feminism

The final part consists of two essays, Terrell Carver’s witty exploration of the historical
relationship between Marxism and feminism, and Gillian Howie’s more contemporary-
focused examination of the demobilisation of feminist practice following its cultural turn
in the 1980s and ’90s. Carver’s paper is most notable for the claim (which is worthy of
much further development) that Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State represents a far more significant revision to historical materialism than subsequent
Marxists have been willing to admit. Carver argues, convincingly, if briefly, that Origin
supplemented the idea of mode of production with the mode of reproduction, and in so
doing created the possibility, unrealised within Marxism but taken up by socialist feminism,
of a version of historical materialism in which the oppression of women was as central as
class-exploitation in the understanding and critique of capitalism (pp. 258–9). The future
of the complex and often troubled relationship between Marxism and feminism is
undecided and opens a series of very difficult questions for each, questions which, Carver
implies, can only be answered in political practice.
Howie’s essay adopts a practical focus from the outset and examines the political
trajectory of ‘third-wave’ feminism. She situates the theoretical and practical emergence of
this term in relation to problems in developing a socialist feminism satisfactory to liberal
and radical feminists. The outcome was an embrace of postmodern anti-foundationalism,
an embrace which ultimately depoliticised much feminist work: ‘off the streets, out of the
Peace Camps, and into the classroom.’ (p. 278.) At the same time, in its turn towards the
14. On the former point, see Aronson 1993, pp. 140–61. For evidence of the latter, see
Cohen 2008.
deconstruction of patriarchal culture, third-wave feminism opened up new understandings

of the symbolic structures by which the male oppression of women reproduces itself, new
understandings which could become practically important in a revitalised movement.
Of all the developments of twentieth-century Marxism, arguably none was of more
lasting importance than its fraught relationship with feminism. The growth of a powerful
international women’s movement throughout the twentieth century made the orthodox
exclusive focus on class politically and theoretically untenable. As these essays make clear,
attempts at coherent synthesis, while productive in many respects, have proven thus far
elusive. They have remained elusive because Marxists have been unwilling to cede the
ultimately fundamental nature of class-exploitation to any version of a dual-systems
approach with the result that, from a feminist perspective, Marxism has been less than fully
committed to the sort of self-criticism which deeper historical knowledge of the pervasiveness
of patriarchy demands. Both essays are correct to conclude that there is no obvious solution
at present to these theoretical and political problems. The inescapability and importance of
these problems ensures, on the other hand, ongoing interaction between Marxism and
feminism, given the impossibility of a return to orthodoxy (i.e., pre-feminist critique) on
the Marxist side.
VI: Conclusion
The common strength of the individual papers in this collection is found in the quality of
their exegetical work. All contain at least one novel insight or direction of interpretation of
Marx’s work. As such, the collection is an important contribution to Marx scholarship. At
the same time, I would argue that the collection does not contribute in such a significant
way to contemporary philosophy, mostly because it does not engage with its dominant
themes. Let me offer two examples to support my conclusion.
If there is any area of philosophy where Marxists still have something vital to contribute,
surely it is to the diagnosis of the moral, political, and social destruction that globalised
capitalism has caused. Yet there are no papers here which take on the challenge of the
hegemony of cosmopolitan liberalism in the philosophical critique of globalisation. The
same silence obtains in relation to other essential arguments in contemporary political
philosophy: the meaning and implications of human rights, the normative foundations of
democracy, the desirability and feasibility of global democracy.
Also overlooked for the most part is the novel rôle that life-support and life-development
play as the normative foundations of Marx’s critique of capitalism. The function of human
needs and human capacities as the unifying normative ground of Marx’s work is not
discussed directly, and thus an opportunity to engage with contemporary critics of social
and environmental crisis was missed. Marx was the first to systematically examine how
capitalist social dynamics become unhinged from service to life-development and
cannibalise the ‘life-ground of value’ for the sake of the production of money, the ruling
non-living system-value of capitalism.15 The papers in Part Three imply such avenues of
development, but none actually develop them in explicit engagement with contemporary
philosophical work, either within or outside of the Marxist tradition.
15. On the life-ground of value see McMurtry 1999, pp. 90–100.

Marxism is an historical philosophy and it cannot live and grow by retreating to the
comfortable intellectual enclosure familiar to official philosophy where like only talks to
like, disagreeing over matters of interpretation but leaving deep-seated problems and
conflicts unaddressed. With the exceptions noted, the papers here are too enclosed in the
universe of Marx interpretation and thus not open to sharp but non-dogmatic engagement
with the rest of the philosophical universe. Thus, I conclude that an opportunity to show
the philosophical world what a Marxist approach to philosophy has that non-Marxist
approaches lack was missed. Even though social and political philosophy remains the most
obvious point of insertion of Marxist arguments into contemporary philosophy, I would
argue that every sphere of philosophical inquiry today, from philosophy of mind and
epistemology, to the social position of natural science, to the ‘New Atheism’-debate would
benefit from Marxist intervention. In each case, the basis of intervention is the same: the
principle articulated in the second thesis on Feuerbach that truth is neither an abstract
relationship of correspondence between mind and world, nor an internal relationship of
coherence between concepts with no relationship to the world, but a changing historical
achievement of social practice which can only ever be understood in the context of conflict-
riven societies.16 What Marxism can contribute to philosophy in each of its specialised
domains is a focus on the concrete social processes which make problems appear in the
form that they appear, and thus the general conclusion that only changed practice can solve
the given problem.
Perhaps we can look forward to a second volume in which these absences will be filled.
Jeff Noonan
University of Windsor
jnoonan@uwindsor.ca
References
Aronson, Ronald 1993, After Marxism, New York: Guilford Press.
Bohman, James 2007, Democracy Across Borders, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Chitty, Andrew and Martin McIvor (eds.) 2009, Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cohen, Gerald Allan 2008, Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Florida, Richard 2003, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1967 [1820], Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by Thomas
Malcolm Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Held, David 2004, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington
Consensus, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Karatani, Kojin 2003, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, translated by Sabu Kohso, Cambridge,
MA.: MIT Press.
Marx, Karl 1975a [1888], ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels 1975a.
—— 1975b [1932], ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Marx and Engels
1975b.
16. Marx 1975a, p. 615.

—— 1986 [1867], Capital, Volume 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1975a [1932], The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
—— 1975b, Collected Works, Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.
McMurtry, John 1999, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, London: Pluto Press.
Meikle, Scott 1985, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, Lasalle: Open Court Publishing.
Meiksins Wood, Ellen 1995, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murray, Patrick 1988, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities
Press.
Nimtz Jr., August H. 2000, Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough,
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2006, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,
Padover, Saul K. 1979, The Letters of Karl Marx, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Pogge, Thomas Winfried Menko (ed.) 2003, Global Justice, Oxford: Blackwell.
Postone, Moishe 2003 [1993], Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s
Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van der Linden, Harry 1988, Kantian Ethics and Socialism, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.
Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright, London: Verso, 2010
Abstract
In this review, I argue that Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is necessary reading
for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist ways of
organising economic and social life in the world today. However, I also raise questions about
Wright’s deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, his relative neglect
of class-analysis, and his non-Gramscian conception of the relationship between the state,
economy, and civil society.
Keywords
Marx, capitalism, utopia, socialism, Gramsci
Marxism and the Envisioning of Real Utopias1

Capitalist disasters are avoidable. That is the conclusion of the official commissions set up
to investigate three recent disasters in the United States: the Autumn 2008 US financial
crisis, the 5 April 2010 fire in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal-mine in West
Virginia, and the 20 April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig in the Gulf of
Mexico.2 Since all three disasters were not caused by a freakish accident or an immutable
nature – but were instead the products of existing institutions, capitalist institutions – it is
possible to imagine and devise alternative economic and political arrangements that can
avoid similar disasters in the future.
That, it seems to me, is the task of the Left: to show that the human and social disasters
associated with capitalism are in fact preventable, and that noncapitalist ways of organising
the world can serve to prevent such disasters. There is simply no need for the world-
economy to be taken to the brink of collapse, and for hundreds of millions of people to pay
the costs; or for 29 miners to die because it boosted profits to keep machinery in a state of
disrepair; or for 11 oil-workers to be killed and an entire ecosystem to be damaged by the
cost-cutting strategies of three gigantic capitalist corporations. There is no need because
capitalism is not inevitable, and noncapitalist alternatives do in fact exist.
1. I prepared the first version of this review for the 2010 Left Forum, for a session on Wright’s
book that was organised by the publisher. I want to thank the conference-organisers, especially
Seth Adler, for inviting me to participate in that session – and, especially, for giving me
the opportunity to read the book. (It is one of the ironies of being an academic that, while our
jobs are predicated on scholarly work, between teaching, administrative work, and our own
research, we do not find enough time to read the work of other contemporary scholars.) I also
want to thank Peter Thomas for his encouragement and helpful comments on earlier versions of
this essay.
2. As of this writing (in July 2011), both the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the
National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the National Commission
on Offshore Drilling have issued their final reports. The fire in the Upper Big Branch mine
continues to be investigated by various federal, state, and trade-union commissions, although
the Mine Safety and Health Administration recently informed the families of the 29 dead miners
that the disaster was ‘preventable’.
The task may be straightforward, but I certainly do not want to minimise the work
involved. People need to be able to imagine alternative ways of organising the economy and
society in order to criticise the existing institutions – and, of course, they need to be critical
of the way things are so that they can demand, and become involved in creating,
alternatives.
That is where Erik Olin Wright’s new book, Envisioning Real Utopias, comes in. We are in
the midst of a key moment, when we have rediscovered the idea of critique – critique of the
existing order and critique of the ruling ideas, both a critique of capitalism and a critique
of the ideas that celebrate capitalism. To use Wright’s language, we have recovered – or, in
more sanguine terms, are beginning to recover – the capacity to criticise capitalism and its
consequences (on our lives, on the society in which we live, on the environment, and so on)
and to criticise the ideas of mainstream thinkers (in economics, political philosophy, and so
on) who have attempted to create a worldview according to which we simply need to adjust
our sights and make do with less. Less equality, less justice, less democracy. An age of
diminished expectations, if you will, brought on by a steady immiseration of the living
conditions of the vast majority of the population.3
So, what do we need to do to overcome, to move beyond, the mindset of diminished
expectations? What are the conditions under which we can recover our ability to produce
and sustain the forms of critique that are a sine quibus non of radical social change?
One of them clearly is the possibility of envisioning real utopias, in the context of an
emancipatory social science. Wright is absolutely right. And what makes this book so
compelling – even if not completely convincing – is his careful thinking-through of what
some of those real utopias are, and how we might begin to imagine moving from here to
there.
It is what many of our colleagues in the academy have forgotten about or chosen to
ignore. Their eyes are set on garnering professional accolades by publishing tiny studies of
theoretical and empirical analysis – with lots of seemingly sophisticated bells and whistles –
that leave the present order intact. They have given up on the responsibility of being
intellectuals. What Wright is doing is quite different, taking seriously the idea that
something is fundamentally wrong with things as they are, and that the task of sociologists
and other scholars (in the social sciences and, I would add, the humanities and natural
sciences) is to think through what the alternatives might be.
In Wright’s view, there are three moments of revitalising the project of emancipatory
social science: a diagnosis or critique of what is fundamentally wrong with capitalism; the
imagining of real, viable alternatives to capitalist ways of organising the economy and
society; and a theory of social transformation, in and through which we can think about
the possibilities of and analyse the obstacles to moving toward noncapitalist practices and
institutions. (He presents them in linear fashion – first diagnosis, then alternatives, finally
the logics of social transformation – although I tend to think of them as conditioning one
another, rather than in a unilinear fashion).
3. I understand full well that various governments and political movements are, right now,
using the ongoing crises to make a similar argument about diminished expectations in calling for
fiscal austerity. In this sense, the task of the Left, in identifying and spelling-out alternatives to
capitalist disasters, has become even more urgent.
In this, Wright’s book is comparable to two other important books: Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,4 and A Postcapitalist Politics by
J.K. Gibson-Graham.5 They are comparable but, of course, not the same. Envisioning Real
Utopias shares with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy the idea of deepening democracy, both
as a conception of noncapitalist alternatives and as a strategy for getting there. But Wright’s
book is much more explicit about what those alternatives might be, from the participatory
city-budgeting practised in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the cooperative unpaid labour that
sustains Wikipedia to the worker-control of the Mondragón cooperatives and unconditional
basic-income schemes. That is something it shares with the Gibson-Graham volume, the
idea that forms of noncapitalism can be found today and created tomorrow within a world
that many others see as purely capitalist, and that we do not need to wait around for the
big-bang revolution to take place (which most of us find hard to imagine anyway). But,
again, there are differences: for example, while Gibson-Graham pay attention to and
attempt to make sense of the affective obstacles to ‘traversing the fantasy’ of creating and
participating in noncapitalism (the desire for noncapitalism, as distinguished from the
resentment against capitalism), Wright’s work is much more a rational reconstruction of
why noncapitalism is necessary and possible. But, in my view, all three books are necessary
reading for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist
ways of organising economic and social life in the world today.
Here, in brief, is how Wright goes about his task of envisioning real utopias. In the first
part of the book (Chapters 1 through 4) – the diagnosis-step – he analyses capitalism
(which he defines in a pretty traditional fashion, in terms of private ownership of the means
of production and markets), discusses the major problems with or consequences of
capitalism (11 in all, from perpetuating human suffering and violating egalitarian principles
of social justice to fuelling militarism and destroying the natural environment and limiting
democracy), and raises questions about what he considers to be Marx’s theory of
revolutionary transformation. In the middle-part of the book (Chapters 5 through 7) –
imagining the alternatives – he presents different pathways of what he calls social
empowerment, to create a social economy (defined as ‘economic activity that is directly
organised and controlled through the exercise of some form of social power’) by deepening
various forms of participatory, representative, and associational democracy. In the third and
final part (Chapters 8 through 11) – the theory of social transformation – he distinguishes
three basic logics of social transformation: ruptural (the classic working-class revolution,
which involves taking over the state), interstitial (which bypasses the state, and involves
such forms as cooperatives, factory-councils, and fair-trade movements), and symbiotic
transformation (which uses the state, and involves forging positive class-compromises
within the spheres of exchange, production, and politics). Basically, to use the terms of our
usual left-wing debates, the alternative strategies are revolutionary socialism, council-
communism/social movements, and social democracy.
While Wright never states it in so many words, my sense is that his sympathies lie with
the third option (promoting different forms of working-class associational power) but he
does recognise the value of experiments that do not entail working within or confronting
state-power (since, at least in the United States, they are currently on the upsurge) and he
4. Laclau and Mouffe 2001.

5. Gibson-Graham 2006.
is doubtful about any kind of revolutionary rupture (at least for the foreseeable future).
Still, he is careful in his conclusion to note that, at least on the abstract level, none of the
three guarantees a social transformation beyond capitalism. ‘What we are left with, then, is
a menu of strategic logics and an indeterminate prognosis for the future’ (p. 254).
There is much to admire in Wright’s book. Allow me to discuss six of them here:
1. Wright presents a clear and relatively thorough conception of the way in which
capitalism undermines and obstructs the realisation of social justice (including economic
and political justice). While he insists that ‘capitalism is not the root of all evils in the world
today’ (p. 38), his list of the ‘harms generated by capitalism’ (p. 38) is fairly comprehensive:
it ranges from the perpetuation of eliminable forms of human suffering (relative not to
prior states of the world but, instead, with respect to possible states of the world) through
militarism and imperialism (which, while not unique to capitalism, have been the conditions
and consequences of capitalism from the very beginning) to limiting democracy (which
narrows the prospect of collective decision-making, as a result of private ownership of the
means of production, and undermines democratic forms of decision-making, given the
concentrations of wealth and power). Wright’s catalogue of capitalist ills therefore represents
a challenge to anyone who wants to attempt to defend the present capitalist order.
2. Wright should also be credited for keeping alive the idea that socialism represents an
alternative to capitalism. While so many, including longstanding thinkers of the Left (for
example, Antonio Negri),6 have chosen to abandon the idea of socialism, Wright quite
consistently argues that socialism, however defined, is the way we need to think about the
‘other world’ beyond capitalism.7 The importance of holding aloft the socialist banner
cannot be exaggerated. The Left now finds itself in the position, in the United States and in
many other countries, of opposing austerity-policies and defending existing social-welfare
programmes. But, as important as those positions are in terms of participating in
contemporary debates, they are not enough. Socialism continues to represent the political
idea that there is a wide range of alternatives to capitalist ways of organising the economy
and society.
3. Wright’s approach can be distinguished from much of what passes for the Left in
intellectual and political circles by maintaining a relationship both to Marx and to the
working class. Both play key rôles in his critique of capitalism and in imagining socialist
alternatives. I cannot say that my Marx is recognisable in Wright’s Marx (on which more
below), but the fact remains that Wright does not run away from Marx and the Marxist
tradition either in analysing the problems associated with capitalism or in terms of thinking
about the forms of noncapitalism that can be imagined and created. The same is true
of the working class, which Wright places at the centre of his analysis of capitalism and
his outline of possible alternatives. As Owen Jones (in an interview with Samuel Grove)
recently observed,
if there’s no working-class, there’s no left. It is class politics that makes the left
‘the left’, rather than radical liberals. The left has to make the case that the
working-class (those who cannot live a decent life without selling their labour,
6. Negri 2008.
7. I present my own views on how socialism can be retained and, at the same time, needs to
be rethought, in a recent article with Antonio Callari (Callari and Ruccio 2010).
and who lack control over – or are alienated from – that labour) is the majority of
society. The working-class isn’t at the centre of left politics out of simply abstract
dogma: it’s the position of working-class people – as those directly exploited by
capitalism, and whose interests are in direct conflict with those of wealthy
businesspeople – that makes them the ‘gravediggers’ of modern capitalism.8
4. Wright incorporates a wide variety of real alternatives in the world today – real practices
and institutions (such as cooperatives and intentional communities) and real ideas (such as
basic-income schemes) – into the project of envisioning utopias. His utopias are thus
tangible, in the sense that the Left can point to actual experiments that work instead of
relying on the hypothetical possibility of someday, somehow putting an alternative to
capitalism in place. That does not mean the Left should not push the envelope, and
challenge existing utopian ideas and schemes for being too focused on class-changes within
individual enterprises and forgetting about the flows of surplus within the larger society.9
But Wright does identify a wide range of alternatives to capitalist control over the surplus
that the Left can point to in demonstrating the proposition that ‘another world is possible’ –
because, at least in some senses, it already exists.
5. At a more theoretical level, Wright successfully presents the idea that society is a
‘loosely coupled system’ instead of a strictly determined structural whole. This is important
because, all too often, when socialist thinkers present their analyses of capitalism, the entire
system holds so well together that it becomes impossible to imagine the kinds of gaps,
fissures, contradictions, and elements of unpredictability that make the transition to
another kind of society possible. It is as if the lines of causality were such that capitalist
domination is universal and complete. Instead, within a loosely coupled system, it is
incumbent upon us to identify and seize on the instances in which resentments against the
existing order and desires for another order create the bases for a socialist movement.
6. And, at the political level, Wright avoids dogmatism in acknowledging both that there
are no guarantees in the struggle to realise socialist ideals and that socialism is better thought
of as a terrain for working toward economic and political justice than a given, fixed ideal to
be created all at once. I cannot overemphasise the importance of such a political stance.
What it signifies, on the one hand, is that our own ideas and movement can be derailed
and, in some circumstances, generate the most horrendous consequences. It also means
that, as the struggles to create real utopias take place (within enterprises and communities,
within the national state and the international arena), new political subjectivities and
imaginaries are created. What cannot be seen or can be glimpsed only dimly from here, in
this moment, with the existing ideas and forms of social being, can come into sharp focus
as people establish new common senses and ways of being in the world as a result of their
participation in economic and social struggles.
I cannot imagine our moving forward with the idea of criticising capitalism and creating
noncapitalism – here, in Historical Materialism, and in our intellectual and political
activities more broadly – without these ideas. And, it seems to me, anyone who wants to
engage in this debate would do well to pass through Wright’s formulations. But I also have
8. Jones and Grove 2011.

9. That is what I try to do in a recent article on worker-cooperatives (Ruccio 2011).
some problems with the book – differences that I think need to be aired in order to carry
the conversation forward.
Let me begin with a few minor quibbles. In Chapter 3, in which Wright poses the
question ‘What’s so bad with capitalism?’, he defines class-relations as ‘the social relations
through which the means of production are owned and power is exercised over their use’
(p. 34). Here, Wright is conflating class-relations – the way surplus-labour is performed by
the direct producers and then appropriated and distributed by themselves or others, such
as capitalists – with one of the many conditions of existence of class-relations – which
include, but are certainly not limited to, patterns of property-ownership. The distinction
matters a great deal in that, on Wright’s definition, a fundamental change in property-
ownership necessarily entails a revolution in class-relations, whereas on the Marxian
definition, in terms of surplus-labour, exploitation is not eliminated unless and until the
collectivity of direct producers also appropriates and distributes the surplus-labour they
perform. It also matters for class-analysis more generally since following the flows of
surplus-labour – as it is performed, appropriated, distributed, and received – permits an
analysis of capitalist and noncapitalist class-structures that is not confined to two groups
(for example, capitalists and workers).10
Another relatively minor point: Wright asserts in Chapter 7 that the ‘limited presence of
cooperative firms in capitalist economies’, while not a result of their inherent inefficiency,
is evidence of their ‘lower profitability’ (p. 240). Such an argument overlooks the inherent
difficulties in the notion of profitability, whether in defining or measuring it. There is no
agreed-upon concept for capitalist firms (is it gross profit, operating profit, net profit, or,
more exotically, NPAT [net operating profit after tax] or EBITDA [earnings before interest,
taxes, depreciation and amortisation]?) and there certainly is no shared concept of
profitability between capitalist corporations and cooperative enterprises. One of the aims of
cooperatives is precisely to challenge the accounting-framework – and thus the notions
of revenues, costs, profits, and so on – utilised by capitalist corporations. In my view, we
have to look elsewhere, including the ideological prejudices against worker-initiative and
ownership (especially within the trade-union movement), as well as legal and institutional
constraints on the part of the state and financial enterprises, to account for the small
number of cooperative firms in existing capitalist economies.
I could mention a few other such problems but, in the space remaining, I want to raise
some larger issues.
First, there is no need for him to include that awful Chapter 4, on what Wright takes to
be Marx’s theory of revolutionary transformation. It is not accurate, and there are plenty of
other interpretations of Marx that would be more interesting to engage in order to envision
real utopias. Basically, Wright reduces Marx to a set of predictions (a) about the
unsustainability of capitalism, that capitalist crises would become increasingly worse (based
on some set of laws of motion, including the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) and
(b) that the class-structure of capitalism would become increasingly simple (involving a
small group of capitalists and increasing proletarianisation) and that anticapitalist struggles
10. The Marxian definition of class in terms of surplus-labour was first elaborated by Stephen
Resnick and Richard Wolff (Resnick and Wolff 1987). It is the notion of class I utilise in my
most recent book (Ruccio 2010).
would become increasingly intense. Put the two together and you get a theory of
revolutionary rupture, with the working class battling the capitalist class over the state.
There are so many things that are questionable about that interpretation it is hard to
know where to begin. The first thing Wright forgets is the subtitle of Capital, ‘A Critique of
Political Economy’. Capital represents Marx’s intervention into an existing set of debates, a
critique of the positions in those debates (especially of the classical political economists),
not a sui generis theory of capitalism. Thus, for example, Marx’s chapter on the falling rate
of profit is not his prediction about the ultimate demise of capitalism but a critique of the
classical political economists’ theory of the falling rate of profit (based on an external factor,
the declining fertility of land) and, as with most of Marx’s approach, an argument that, if
there is a falling rate of profit, it is based on the endogenous tendencies of capitalism itself
(and, then, in the next chapter, a series of counter-tendencies).
But, more broadly, as Wright certainly knows, there are many different readings of
Capital (and Marx’s work more generally) that fall outside the modernist, scientistic
rendition offered in his book. A quite different tradition, one associated with the journal
Rethinking Marxism, which is often called nondeterministic or postmodern Marxism,
produces a quite different interpretation of Marxist theory – without laws of motion and
predictions of an increasingly unsustainable capitalism and with a much more complex
class-analysis, as mentioned above, than readers will find in Wright’s book. Perhaps the
so-called analytical Marxists are content to render and then dismiss Marx in those terms –
perhaps it is the only Marx they can recognise in their conception of modernist social
science – but it is certainly not the only one being elaborated today.
Which brings me to my second major point: what happened to the class-analysis, after
introducing it in Chapter 3? It seems to drop out of the book, until his return to the issue
of working-class politics toward the end. Wright expresses his interest in keeping the idea
of the social alive, but he forgets about one of the key Marxian insights concerning the
social: the fact that it is made possible (and, of course, impossible) by capitalist class-
exploitation. What is missing, in other words, is, first, the way that the existing society is
structured around the existence of the extraction of surplus-value by a small minority of the
population from the majority who create the surplus but do not participate in its
appropriation (the Marxian definition of exploitation) and, second, how the subsequent
distributions of surplus-value both define class-positions other than those of workers and
capitalists and serve as the basis of institutions and practices throughout the wider society.
In other words, how capitalists appropriate and then distribute the surplus they extract
from the direct producers shapes the society in which we live – how many and what kind
of jobs there will be, where they will be located, what kinds of government-programmes
will exist, what our communities look like, and so on.
That kind of class-analysis serves both as a diagnosis or critique of the existing social
arrangements and as a way of making sense of alternative – real, noncapitalist, utopian –
arrangements. One of the things we might look for in noncapitalist practices and institutions
is the way they reshape how the surplus is performed and appropriated and how it is
subsequently distributed and received. That is another way – a class-way – of thinking
about the social in socialism and the community in communism. Capitalist appropriation
and distribution of the surplus represent the ways in which the social and community are
currently constituted, and creating noncapitalist ways of appropriating and distributing the
surplus is a way of constituting a different society and community. And then the argument
could be extended to think about how collective or communal subjectivities are created
that would make such arrangements possible. That is a class-way of thinking about the
‘socialist compass’ we want to use in our intellectual and political struggles.
Permit me, then, one final point: throughout the book, Wright invokes a radical
distinction among the state, economy, and civil society, in the sense that they constitute
separate spheres, and he refers to Gramsci a few times (including the idea of a ‘counter-
hegemony’, a term that Gramsci never uses). Gramsci, in fact, rejected the liberal attempt
to divorce the state and civil society (and, thus, to define civil society in such a way that it
stands in opposition to the state) in favour of the idea that the state equals political society
plus civil society. As my colleague Joseph Buttigieg has argued:
[T]he conflating of civil society . . . with popular oppositional movements results

in an oversimplification of the immensely intricate, interdependent relations
between society (or ‘the people’) and government (or the State), and in a reductive
understanding of the myriad connections and divergences among the various
elements that constitute civil society. . . . What distinguishes hegemony from
domination is precisely the symbiotic relationship between the government
(which is frequently identified with the State in mainstream political theory) and
civil society, a relationship, then, that cannot be analyzed in any meaningful way
if one starts with a conception of civil society as something separate from and
opposed to the State.11
Likewise, Gramsci refuses to make a clear-cut distinction between civil society and the
economic sphere. Thus, we get Gramsci’s enlarged conception of the modern state,
containing three elements: political society, civil society, and the economic sphere. The
implication is that social groups and classes can and often do operate in all three spheres at
the same time.
The idea that the three spheres can be separated ultimately hobbles Wright’s conception
of extending democracy and creating more ‘social empowerment’. His view is that political
and economic power should be democratically subordinated to social power, that is, ruled
by voluntary associations constituted within civil society. What Wright forgets is that
capitalism, as it is currently constituted (at least within advanced nations), is already
predicated on the participation of such voluntary associations – of businesses, institutions
of higher education, trade-unions, civic organisations, religious groups, and so on. While
I do not think the Left is or should be opposed to creating more democratic institutions,
it also needs to put something else on the political table: capitalist control over the
social surplus.
A Marxian conception of the state, following Gramsci, is key to understanding how the
current order works within the United States and elsewhere – through hegemony, within a
civil society that is not sealed off from political society and the economic sphere. It also
gives us a way of thinking about how that hegemony can be effectively challenged by
creating an alternative hegemony. For example, it focuses our attention on the rôle that
attempts to reproduce and strengthen capitalist exploitation have played in creating the
economic and social disasters we have witnessed in recent years, and the way that exploitation
11. Buttigieg 2005, pp. 36–7.

is naturalised in and through existing political formations, economic institutions, and

social movements. And it allows us to make the argument that changing one aspect of
society – away from capitalist exploitation and towards communal or collective control
over the surplus – is the only way of effectively preventing such disasters in the future.
It is precisely the need to challenge the prevailing ‘common sense’ – to see capitalist
disasters as preventable – that forces us to envision real utopias and to do the work of
transforming them into a different, noncapitalist common sense.
Reviewed by David F. Ruccio

University of Notre Dame
David.F.Ruccio.1@nd.edu
References
Buttigieg, Joseph A. 2005, ‘The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian
Critique’, Boundary 2, 32: 33–52.
Callari, Antonio and David F. Ruccio 2010, ‘Rethinking Socialism: Community, Democracy,
and Social Agency’, Rethinking Marxism, 22, 3: 403–19.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006, A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Jones, Owen and Samuel Grove 2011, ‘From Salt of the Earth to Scum on the Streets (Part 2)’,
available at: <http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/from_salt_of_
the_earth_to_scum_on_the_streets_part_2>.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 2001, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics, Second Edition, London: Verso.
Negri, Antonio 2008, Goodbye Mr Socialism, translated by Peter Thomas, New York: Seven
Stories.
Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff 1987, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of
Political Economy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ruccio, David F. 2010, Development and Globalization: A Marxian Class Analysis, London:
Routledge.
—— 2011, ‘Cooperatives, Surplus, and the Social’, Rethinking Marxism, 23, 3: 334–40.
Wright, Erik Olin 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias, London: Verso.
Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
Social Formation From a genetic [ genetisch] perspective, the

development of ‘social formations’ refers, in
A: at-taṡakkul al-iǧtimāʿī. – F: formation sociale. the first place, to progressive formation through
G: Gesellschaftsformation. – R: obshestvennaya continuing attempts to secure basic needs
formatsia. S: formación social. – C: shehui of existence (MECW 29, 264). Second, in
xingtai 社会形态. association with the theory of succession of
formations – wherein capitalism is eventually
In historical materialism, ‘social formation’ is overthrown as the highest antagonistic form –
a central category of the structure and devel- it refers to the societal emancipation of the
opment of human societies. It serves to proletariat under communism (MECW 5, 81
‘explain [. . .] why and how societies change et sqq.). At the same time, social formation
and transform themselves’ by bringing is the object of study of an historical science,
together the ‘existence of social structure and as opposed to speculative historical philoso-
its historicity, or in other words its internal phy. In historical studies, the term has, in
dynamic of change’ (Hobsbawm 1998, 149). the sense of formative process, a subject and
Yet Marx and Engels did not systematically operation-oriented relation ( Jaeck 1988, 27
develop the concept of social formation, either et sqq.).
as a fundamental historical concept, or as a
societal model. The various definitions found 1. The emergence of the Marxian concept
throughout their works have evoked contra- of social formation was shaped by the conse-
dictory interpretations in the Western-Marxist quences of the French Revolution and the
and Marxist-Leninist traditions. emergence of industrial capitalism – in other
The concept is used by Marx in order to words, the bourgeois-industrial ‘double revo-
indicate the articulation [Gliederung] of the lution’ (Kossok 1989, 14). The development
process of material reproduction of human of bourgeois society and the emergence of
society (MECW 29, 264). In doing so, an new social demands of capital and labour
analogy in terms of content and – in the total changed social and historical perspectives
social and historical concretisation – also a (Bock/Plöse 1994, 13ff.). Society, culture and
tension is established with regards to the con- history, in their complex interrelations, were
cept of mode of production. It covers that problematised from contradictory perspectives.
which is occasionally referred to as ‘historical Attempts to explain the structure and devel-
formations’ (MECW 24, 351). Without fur- opment of society were articulated within
ther specification, ‘social formation’ is used classical German philosophy (most notably in
synonymously with ‘social form’ (MECW 28, Hegel), English political economy and French
42, 196), on the one hand, and ‘totality’ revolutionary history (Förster 1982; Förster
(MECW 28, 37) on the other. Additionally, it 1983), and in those notions of progress of the
refers to concrete social systems of distinct early socialists and communists that surpassed
spatio-temporal extension. Finally, particu- the framework of bourgeois society (Grand-
larly in the work of Engels, the term stands in jonc 1989). The origins of positivism in
close relation to the base-superstructure dia- Auguste Comte testify of attempts towards an
lectic (MEW 37, 489 et sqq.). intra-bourgeois [innerbürgerlich] justification

230 W. Küttler / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 229–237
of ideas of development [Entwicklungsvorstel- In Wage Labour, he goes one step further: The
lungen] with a scientistic social analysis. ‘social relations of production [. . .] are trans-
Marx opposed previous models of social formed with the change and development of the
structure and development by taking as his material means of production, the productive
point of departure, with reference to the forces. The relations of production in their total-
former, the practice of material production, ity constitute what are called the social relations,
human labour, and with reference to the latter, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite
the goal of overcoming bourgeois society. Not stage of historical development [. . .] with a pecu-
bourgeois society, but ‘human society, or social liar, distinctive character’ (MECW 9, 213).
humanity’, ought to be the vantage-point of a In the preparatory works for Capital and in
science aimed at practical intervention (Theses Capital Volume I, ‘social formation’ maintains
on Feuerbach, MECW 5, 6). From the mid- its methodological position in the economic
1840s onwards, Marx, together with Engels, theory of capitalism as well as in the analysis
posits the question of social perspectives as a of its genesis and preceding social forms. This
problem of the contradictions of the capitalist helps to clarify the heuristic function of the
economy and its revolutionary overthrowing term: Marx’s primary concern was with the
by the proletariat. spatio-temporal preconditions from which
The general hypothesis supporting this aim capitalism emerged as a modern bourgeois
was formed by the concept – coherently devel- mode of production; his second concern was
oped for the first time in The German Ideology critically establishing its character as the last
– that the foundations of human history were antagonistic formation which was bound to
to be found in the individual activity [Tätig- be followed by total social emancipation
keit] of production and reproduction of the (MECW 13, 264).
material conditions of existence and society Through the examination of capitalist
(MECW 5, 32). This point of departure relates development in Russia, the USA and the
both to the active process of formation of soci- European continent (in particular, Germany),
ety by humans, as well as to the pre-existing as well as of the global colonial expansion
social forms that constituted its preconditions. from the 1860s onwards, Marx and Engels
Both of these senses are implicit in the con- expanded the empirical foundation for their
cept of ‘formation’ that was common in theories of social formation. One of the rea-
French. Thus, the sketch can be regarded as a sons for this was that a one-sided, economi-
‘theory of the historical process of formation cally oriented theory of social formation could
[Formierung] of society’ ( Jaeck 1978, 72). not meet the demand of the growing workers’
movement for practical-theoretical orienta-
2. Particularly in The German Ideology, tion. These two ‘moments’ provoked research
efforts to conceptualise ‘social formation’ into the reciprocal efficacy [Wechselwirkung]
repeatedly employ the term ‘forms of inter- of base and superstructure (MEW 37, 463,
course’ (MECW 5, 51, 81 et sqq.; cf. MECW 489 et sqq.; MEW 39, 96 et sqq.).
31, 66). Shortly after, Marx wrote that man From the mid-1870s onwards, the ethno-
does not freely ‘choose his productive forces – logical and pre-historical studies of Johann J.
upon which his whole history is based’, but is Bachofen, Georg L. von Maurer, Maxim M.
rather ‘circumscribed by the conditions [. . .] Kowalewski and especially Lewis H. Morgan,
already acquired by the form of society which as well as Marx’s and Engels’s own studies of
exists before him’ (letter to Annenkov, the British and Dutch colonies, provided a
28.12.1846; MECW 38, 97). In order ‘not to new foundation for their views on ancient
be deprived of the results obtained or to forfeit communal life [ursprüngliches Gemeinwesen].
the fruits of civilization, man is compelled to Ancient society [Urgesellschaft] is taken to be
change all his traditional social forms as soon an autonomous stage of formation; the ancient
as the mode of intercourse ceases to corre- social forms of communal life [Gemeinwesen]
spond to the productive forces acquired’ (98). were now considered to be the strata of a later
W. Küttler / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 229–237 231
process of social formation. Similar to feudal- and private forms of appropriation that takes
ism in Europe, these social forms constitute these elements into account, the Mediterra-
the point of departure and the accompanying nean-European formation-stage now appears
circumstances [Ausgangs- und Begleitumstände] to be a particular case in a more general proc-
from which capitalism proceeds to expand in ess of formation, which is characteristic for the
non-European societies. With India as his primary development of capitalism and, con-
empirical referent, Marx had begun to study sequently, for the preconditions of modern
this process already in the late 1850s (MECW communism. Though Marx never synthesised
12, 126 et sqq.). He also analysed late forms of these studies and conceptual designs, Engels
ancient societies that had partly transitioned pursued them further in Origin of the Family,
to private-property arrangements as a possible Private Property and the State. His limited
foundation of relations of domination in focus on the Mediterranean-occidental history
antagonistic high cultures, up until modern of formation (MECW 26, 132–4) resulted
Russia. In this perspective, the ‘Asiatic mode later in many one-sided interpretations (cf.
of production’ became a concept for the Herrmann/Köhn 1988).
formation and structure of society in its total- The treatment of capitalism as a transition
ity (Küttler 1976; Tökei 1977; Herrmann to the ‘real’ history of human society was sup-
1999). This expanded approach to formation- ported by the new dimension of the history of
history is expressed most clearly in Marx’s formation that included the ancient societies
drafts of a letter replying to the Russian revo- as well as their later developments. Marx
lutionary Vera Zasulich. Here he comments believed that thereby his critique of private
on the future perspectives of Russian rural property of the means of production was
communities (MECW 24, 347–72). confirmed at the same time as was his assump-
These studies and deliberations resulted in a tion that class-antagonistic civilisation was
diachronic and synchronic universalisation of only a necessary transitional stage between
the concept of social formation. The study of original primitive communism and modern
ancient societies revealed the contemporaneity communism.
of the non-contemporaneous [Gleichzeitigkeit
des Ungleichzeitigen] in all eras of formation, 3. The development and usage of the con-
which had already become clear in the context cept of social formation in Marx’s work reveals
of the various forms of capitalist genesis in that its various respective dimensions draw
Europe, America, Russia and Japan. This con- upon distinct theoretical and heuristic-
cerns not only formative development leading methodical functions. Decisive was the recog-
from hominisation to civilisation, which is nition in the 1859 ‘Preface’ that ‘neither legal
characterised as ancient society, or primary relations nor forms of state could be grasped
formation, based on tribal order and common whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-
ownership of the means of production. Rather, called general development of the human
it also regards the study of prehistoric social mind, but on the contrary, they have their ori-
forms of communal life as strata of later gin in the material conditions of existence, the
processes of formation, whose existence, sta- totality of which Hegel, following the example
bility, and decline influenced the structure of of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the
precapitalist antagonistic class-societies (Her- eighteenth century, embraces within the term
rmann 1999), or, with regards to the ‘periph- “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil
ery’ – such as colonial India or the Russian society, however, has to be sought in political
Obstschinas [village-communities] – also as the economy’ (MECW 29, 263).
initial conditions [Ausgangsbedingungen] for Accordingly, in Capital, Marx set himself
the global expansion of capitalism (Eichhorn/ the task of studying, with the hand of Eng-
Küttler 1999). lish industrial capitalism and its immediate
In a synchronic and diachronic examina- socio-economic conditions, the ‘natural laws of
tion of the relationship between communal capitalist production’ as ‘tendencies working
with iron necessity towards inevitable results’ of development and the start of the dissolu-
(MECW 35, 7). The prognosis of revolution tion of ‘social formations’ based on private
in the Manifesto reappears in the conclusion of property. In the formation-process of capital,
the analysis of the contradictions in fully small private property is destroyed first. Later,
developed capitalism as an economic-nomo- through increasing concentration, large pri-
logical hypothesis [Gesetzesaussage]: ‘capitalist vate property is in turn disrupted. Its limit of
production begets, with the inexorability of a development is inversely correlated to the pri-
law of Nature, its own negation’ (MECW 35, vate appropriation of socially produced wealth
750). in the presence of progressive socialisation of
In Marx’s analysis of the ‘Method of Politi- the productive forces (MECW 35, 748 et sqq.).
cal Economy’ (‘1857 Introduction’, MECW The concept of social formation serves both
28, 50 et sqq.), a dimension emerges of a com- as a concept to bring economic analysis
plex social economy of bourgeois society, which together with its implications for all other
encompasses not only genuinely economic areas of life in bourgeois society, and as a con-
but also sociological and historical aspects. ceptual framework for the methodological
The economic laws of capitalism should be grounding of this procedure in a more general
analysed not only in the constitutive sphere of conception of history and society. To this end,
production-processes, but in all their functional in clarifying his methodology (MECW 28,
manifestations, i.e., of circulation (Capital 18–46; MECW 28, 262–6), Marx referred
Volume II) and distribution and class-structure back to the historical-materialist concept of
(Capital Volume III). Furthermore, there were development and structure outlined in The
plans to incorporate ‘Forms of the state and German Ideology. At the same time, with refer-
forms of consciousness in relation to relations ence to the Communist Manifesto, the connec-
of production and circulation. Legal relations. tion with the revolutionary and transformative
Family relations.’ (MECW 28, 45). In this perspective of communism is explained
context, the concept of formation refers tran- (MECW 35, 750). In this dimension of total
shistorically to the becoming [Werden], devel- history, the historical process of the formation
opment and progressive overcoming of a mode of human society can be structurally explained
of production no longer founded upon land as by beginning from the respective material
the predominant means of production, but conditions of production and reproduction –
rather in freely traded labour and capital-for- that is, the mode of production that ‘condi-
mation, and thus market-relations. tions the general process of social, political,
From a historical perspective, the emer- and intellectual life’ (MECW 29, 263) – and
gence and development of bourgeois society is their corresponding relations of production
analysed as a progressive development of the and class. Social revolutions are the result of
commodity-economy, starting from the emerging contradictions between the develop-
numerous forms of small-scale production in ment of productive forces, on the one hand,
the city and rural areas, through manufactur- and the corresponding prevalent relations of
ing, and up until large-scale industry in West- production, on the other. They are ‘eras of
ern and Central Europe (MECW 35, 704–51; social revolution’ (MECW 29, 264), in which
Küttler 1983). This overall process is taken to class-struggle constitutes the decisive mediation
result in the dissolution of the immediate between the processes of base and superstruc-
nexus between producers and means of pro- ture. An explicit correlation of the class-con-
duction, of stable communities and of personal cept to that of social formation remains merely
relations of interdependency. Historically- implied (MECW 37, 870 et sqq.).
retrospectively, this implies the contradistinc- Finally, historical progress is linked to the
tion between the capitalist mode of production coming of age of the economic possibilities and
and the ‘forms which precede capitalist pro- contradictions of a particular ‘social forma-
duction’ (MECW 28, 400–40). tion’. Mankind ‘thus inevitably sets itself only
With regards to future outlooks, Marx con- such tasks as it is able to solve’, since a prob-
siders capitalism to be both the highest stage lem arises only ‘when the material conditions
for its solution are already present or at least in activity of the individuals of each epoch’
the course of formation’ (MECW 29, 264). (ibid.). The practical-theoretical application of
The often-cited and widely contested line: ‘In the concept of social formation that was pre-
broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and liminarily established in The German Ideology
modern bourgeois modes of production may was realised in contemporary works such as
be designated as epochs marking progress in Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Bru-
the economic development of the social for- maire and The Civil War in France (cf. Engel-
mation’ (MECW 29, 264; translation modi- berg 1980; Jaeck 1985; Jaeck 1988).
fied), provides a rough historical sketch of the Concerning the concrete applicability of
course of this development in the light of the the concept of social formation, a distinction
well-known eras of Mediterranean-occidental arises between its theoretical-systematic (eco-
history. ‘Epochs marking progress in the economic) and historic (total-social) dimension
nomic development of social formation’, or (Bollhagen 1966). In Marx, the former
‘epochs of social revolution’ should capture corresponds to the level of statements of
the critical innovative shifts, not the entire economic law. As was proposed in the ‘Intro-
history of formation. The ‘modern’ bourgeois duction’ of 1857, the ‘anatomy’ of bourgeois
mode of production constitutes, on the one society is the key to gaining ‘insight into the
hand, the last ‘antagonistic form’ in the sense structure and the relations of production of all
that it contains contradictions in economic previous forms of society, the ruins and com-
and social classes, and yet, on the other hand, ponents of which were used in the creation of
these very ‘productive forces developing within bourgeois society’ (MECW 28, 42). This,
bourgeois society create also the material con- however, is not related to historical concretisa-
ditions for a solution of this antagonism’ tion, because otherwise all ‘historical differ-
whereby ‘the prehistory of human society’ ences’ would be erased and one would see ‘the
comes to an end (MECW 29, 264). bourgeois’ in all ‘forms of society’ (ibid.). In
Overall, Marx kept his approach princi- this sense, the critique of political economy
pally open for the critical inclusion of addi- does not represent a real type [Realtyp], but
tional developments of capitalist relations, rather a theoretical model, the validity of which
new insights regarding non-European socie- with regards to developments in particular
ties and earlier epochs, as well as for the incor- countries is tied to the presence of necessary
poration of anthropological and scientific initial conditions.
elements. His intention was not to develop a With regards to the capitalisation of Rus-
universal scheme of a particular sequence of sian agriculture – which was marked by the
formations [Formationsfolge], or a generally conditions of rural communities – Marx
applicable structural model of the concrete makes clear that, instead of the Western-Euro-
developments of capitalism. He warns against pean ‘transformation of one form of private
the desire to use his theory as a ‘universal key’ property into another form of private property’,
(MECW 24, 202), instead of as a guiding this is a case of a transformation of ‘communal
principle for the discovery of individual con- property [into] private property’ (MECW 24,
crete-historical developments. With regards to 346). In further developing his treatises on
the concept of social formation, Marx never precapitalist forms in the Grundrisse, Marx
retracted the careful heuristic formulation in generalises these insights into the concept of
The German Ideology, which claimed that large developmental sequences [Entwicklung-
guiding theoretical concepts [Leitbegriffe] can sreihen] of social forms based on communal
never be more than a ‘summing up of the property (primary) or private property (sec-
most general results [. . .] abstractions which ondary) (Engelberg/Küttler 1978, 254–92).
arise from the observation of the historical Making a deliberate analogy to the geological
development of men’ (MECW 5, 38). At most, concept of formation (MECW 24, 361), Marx
they can serve, by means of facilitating ‘the remarks: ‘The archaic or primary formation’
arrangement of historical material’, to prepare contains ‘a series of layers of differing ages, one
the ‘study of the actual life-process and the superimposed on the other’ (364). It reveals to
us ‘a series of different types, marking progres- capitalism (with a contested analogy for the
sive epochs’ (ibid.). In the West, on the other preceding social formations); third, as a series
hand, ‘the death of communal property and of diachronic and synchronic developments of
the birth of capitalist production are separated the distinct layers and formation of commu-
from one another by an immense interval nal-property and private-property based socie-
embracing a whole series of successive eco- ties (Engelberg/Küttler 1978, 719 et sqq.). In
nomic revolutions and evolutions, of which addition, there is the inclusion of ‘determi-
capitalist production is merely the most recent’ nateness of nature; subjectively and objectively.
(362). This ‘secondary formation, of course, Tribes, races, etc.’ (MECW 28, 47), and, thus,
includes the series of societies resting on slav- also family and gender-relations (Origin). This
ery and serfdom’ (368). The capitalist forma- moment appears in the context of formation-
tion which, being based on exploitation and analysis predominantly as a description of the
private property, belongs to these secondary destructive implications and developmental
formations is, through its dualism of private limits [Entwicklungsschranke] of capitalism
appropriation and socialisation of productive (Tjaden 1990b).
forces, just as transitory in its character at the
end of this series of formations as the Russian 4. The Marxian concept of understanding
rural community, which still has communal history as a progressive development of eco-
ownership of land, and already private owner- nomic ‘social formations’, and the practice of
ship of home, cattle and machinery (403 et analysing concrete societies in their develop-
sqq.; additionally, Küttler 1976; Eichhorn/ ment and structure accordingly, has evoked
Küttler 1999). divergent interpretations. A more indirect
Overall, by means of interrelation and con- strand of interpretation began from the par-
tradiction, two notions of ‘progress’ rooted in tial, and largely critical relation to Marx’s
Marx’s theories of formation are revealed here: ideas in the development of the historical and
on the one hand, this is rooted in a theory of social sciences since the 1870s (Hobsbawm
class and revolution in light of an unambigu- 1998, 100 et sqq., 204 et sqq.). However
ous power-struggle [Machtentscheidung] by novel, particularly the linkage of history and
means of revolution and the dictatorship of materialism in this approach may have been,
the proletariat. ‘Progress’, on the other hand, the trends of scientific development contained
is largely synonymous with the by no means considerable heuristic elements ( Jaeck 1988,
linearly progressing historical process of the 11 et sqq.) that provided Marx’s approach
progressive securing of civilisational-societal with innovative impulses of lasting effect,
existence of humanity on the basis of the most prominently with regards to methods for
achieved conditions of production and repro- the analysis of the socio-economic structure
duction and its higher development. This does and historical formation of concrete societies
not exclude the possibility of reversals through (Iggers 1994, 63 et sqq.).
stagnation or even in revolutions, but points Within the workers’ movement, the con-
toward the general developmental tendency of cept of ‘social formation’ served both as theory
the process of formation. and world-view (Florath 1999). In the Marx-
In an overview of the various developmen- ism of the Second International, the systema-
tal stages from The German Ideology to the tisation of the formation-view in the direction
draft-letters to Zasulich (1881), three dimen- of modern processes of transformation and
sions of the history of formation and of for- revolution was dominant. Lenin took the
mation-structures can be recognised: First, as a 1859 ‘Preface’ as the basis for an attempt at
complete process of production and reproduc- systemisation that emphasised the integral/
tion, as formation of society; second, as an holistic restructuring of society by the domi-
‘anatomy of [. . .] civil society’ (MECW 29, nant relations of production (LCW 1, 138–42;
263), for example, an integral economic and Karl Marx, LCW 21, 55–7). In this, he saw
total social system of developed industrial the systematic and historical function of the
concept as the ‘basic idea that the develop- debates regarding the Marxist theory of class
ment of the social-economic formations is a and revolution, as well as the relation between
process of natural history’ (LCW 1, 137–8). modes of production and total social struc-
Further, he claimed that ‘it goes without say- tures [gesamtgesellschaftlichen Strukturen] – in
ing that without such a view there can be no this context, above all regarding base and
social science’ (LCW 1, 141). The one-sided- superstructure. There were conceptions of a
ness of this and other interpretations was coordination of modes of production and
partly due to ignorance with regards to key social formations in a multi-structural com-
texts, such as The German Ideology, some late plex notion of society such as, for example, in
excerpts and the letters to Zasulich. That Althusser (FM; cf. Wolpe 1980); or concep-
being said, Lenin’s accentuation of the domi- tions of the subordination of social formations
nant relations of production as the basic struc- under the determination and differentiation
ture of society, and the emphasis he placed on of modes of production, as well as its inverse,
the coerciveness of systemic relations, was the constricted designation of modes of pro-
directed at showing the capitalist character of duction in direct relation to social formations
Russia, in spite of the presence of some under- and their unequal development, for example,
developed elements, and thus at demonstrat- in the process of bourgeois revolution (Pou-
ing its readiness for proletarian revolution lantzas 1973).
(Küttler 1978). In the 1980s, the discussion concerning
Stalin’s canonisation of Leninism restricted formation in the Western Left stepped further
the projected course of world-history to the to the background. However, the socio-eco-
development and implementation of social- nomic and cultural revolutions [Umwälzun-
ism in one country. The interpretation of the gen] following the collapse of state-socialism
concept of social formation after the Twenti- called forth holistic [ganzheitlichen] socio- and
eth Congress of the CPSU (1956) was also historico-theoretical concepts (Hobsbawm et
closely related to the development of a theory al. 1999). The challenges of high-tech capital-
of formation founded upon the Leninist ism and globalisation make it necessary to
system-conception of social formation. The comprehend changes in the mode of produc-
historical-materialist perspective on history tion (Haug 2001). Given the social, eco-
and society focused on one aspect only – nomic, ecological and total-cultural complexity
the transition to socialism in the era of coexist- and advancing differentiation of processes of
ence with the capitalist world-system (Kelle/ rupture [Umbruchsprozesse] since the last third
Kowalson 1975; 1981). At the same time, the of the twentieth century, an examination of
concept of social formation increasingly served Marx’s approach to understanding history as
as the heuristic foundation for the science of the development of social formations appears
history and sociology (Bollhagen 1966). particularly important for developing a theory
In Western Marxism, social formation was of formation that will be able to comprehend
predominantly discussed in relation to other these events and transformations (Eichhorn/
basic principles. Parallels and commonalities Küttler 1999).
with the debate in the East were demonstrated
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Communisme – Kommunismus – Communism. Assen; W. Küttler 1976, ‘Inhaltsbestim-
Origine et développement international de la ter- mung und Periodisierung von Gesellschafts-
minologie communautaire prémarxiste des uto- formationen in Marx’ Briefentwürfen an Vera
pistes aux néo-babouvistes 1785–1842, 2 Bde., Zasulic’, in H. Bartel et al. (eds.) 1976, Evolu-
Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus, 39/1–2, tion und Revolution in der Weltgeschichte, Bd.
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Afrikanische Produktionsweise, Anatomie, Arti-

Wolfgang Küttler kulation/Gliederung, asiatische Produktions-
Translated by Andreas Bolz weise, Basis, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, bürgerliche
Revolution, Ende der Geschichte, Epoche, Feu-
African mode of production, anatomy, articulation/ dalismus, Formationenfolge (vorkapitalistische
structuration, Asiatic mode of production, base, Gesellschaftsformationen), Formationstheorie,
bourgeois-civil society, bourgeois revolution, capi- Fortschritt, Ganzes, Geschichte, Geschichtsgesetze,
talism, communism, domestic mode of production, Geschichtsphilosophie, Geschlechterverhältnisse,
end of history, epoch, feudalism, formation-series geschlechtsegalitäre Gesellschaften, Gesellschaft,
(precapitalist social formations), formation- Gesellschaftstheorien, griechische Antike, häusli-
theory, gender-relations, gender-egalitarian soci- che Produktionsweise, historischer Materialis-
eties, Greek antiquity, guiding theme, historical mus, Imperialismus, industrielle Revolution,
materialism, history, imperialism, industrial rev- Kapitalismus, Kommunismus, Leitfaden, orien-
olution, laws of history, mode of production, talische Despotie, Periodisierung der Geschichte,
non-contemporaneity, oriental despotism, perio- Peripherie/Zentrum, Produktionsweise, Produk-
disation of history, periphery/centre, philosophy tivkräfte/Produktionsverhältnisse, Revolution,
of history, precapitalist modes of production, Sklaverei/Sklavenhaltergesellschaft, soziales System,
prehistory, productive forces/relations of produc- Struktur, Superstruktur, Systemkonkurrenz, Theo-
tion, progress, relations of intercourse, revolution, rie der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung, Ungleich-
slavery/slave-owning society, social system, soci- zeitigkeit, Verkehrsverhältnisse, Vorgeschichte,
ety, structure, superstructure, system-competition, vorkapitalistische Produktionsweisen, Weltsystem.
Notes on Contributors
John Ashworth is Professor of American History at the University of Nottingham, having

previously taught at East Anglia and Hull. He is the author of, among other works, a two-
volume study entitled Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Cambridge
University Press, 1995 and 2007), which seeks to advance a Marxist interpretation of the
coming of the American Civil War.
john.ashworth@nottingham.ac.uk
Robin Blackburn teaches at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University, New
York, and in the Sociology Department of the University of Essex. The former editor of
New Left Review, he is the author of Banking on Death – Or, Investing in Life: The History
and Future of Pensions (Verso, 2002), The Making of New World Slavery (Verso, 1997), The
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (Verso, 1988) and Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us
(Verso, 2006).
robinblackburn68@hotmail.com
Neil Davidson is a Senior Research-Fellow in the School of Applied Social Science at the
University of Strathclyde and a co-founder of the university’s Centre for the Study of
Working-Class Life. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (Pluto Press,
2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (Pluto Press, 2003), for which he was awarded the
Deutscher Memorial Prize and the Fletcher of Saltoun Award, and How Revolutionary Were
the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket Books, forthcoming 2011). He is also the co-editor
of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (Brill, 2008) and Neoliberal Scotland
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).
neil.davidson@strath.ac.uk
Peter Drucker is a Fellow of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE)
in Amsterdam, an advisory editor of Against the Current, author of Max Shachtman and His
Left (Humanity Books, 1994), and editor of the anthology Different Rainbows (Gay Men’s
Press, 2000) on same-sex sexualities in the dependent world.
polias@antenna.nl
Steve Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University. He is the author
of The Making of English Photography: Allegories (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006)
and Photography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006), editor of Art
and its Histories: A Reader (Yale University Press, 1996), and co-editor, with Paul Wood, of
Art of the Avant-Gardes (Yale University Press, 2004). He is also a member of the Historical
Materialism editorial board.
s.j.edwards@open.ac.uk

240 Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 239–240
Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the

author of more than a dozen books on the American Civil War, including Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford University
Press, 1970), Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper and
Row, 1988), and, most recently, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
(W.W. Norton and Co., 2010).
ef17@columbia.edu
Wolfgang Küttler was a member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
from 1996 until his retirement in 2001. He is the author of Lenins Formationsanalyse der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in Russland vor 1905 (Akademie-Verlag, 1978), Max Weber und die
Geschichtswissenschaft (Akademie-Verlag, 1989), and co-author of Volumes 4–7 of the
Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Argument Verlag, 1999–2010). In addition,
he has edited and co-authored the works Formationstheorie und Geschichte (co-edited with
Ernst Engelberg; Akademie-Verlag, 1978), Was ist Geschichte? (co-edited with Wolfgang
Eichhorn; Trafo, 2008), Gesellschaftstheorie und geschichtswissenschaftliche Erklärung
(Akademie-Verlag, 1985), Geschichtsdiskurs (co-edited with Ernst Schulin and Jörn Rüsen;
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994–9) and Nation und Revolution (co-edited with Matthias
Middell; Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2011).
w.kuettler@arcor.de
August H. Nimtz is Professor of Political Science and African-American and African
Studies, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. He is the
author of Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (SUNY Press,
2000), and Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The ‘Absolute Democracy’ or ‘Defiled
Republic’ (Lexington Books, 2003). Among his most recent publications is ‘A Return to
Lenin – But Without Marx and Engels?’ (Science & Society, 2009).
animtz@tc.umn.edu
Jeff Noonan is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2003), Democratic Society and Human Needs (McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2006), and Materialist Ethics and Life-Value (forthcoming 2012). He has
also published widely in journals such as Res Publica, Philosophy and Social Criticism,
Philosophy Today, Socialist Studies, Rethinking Marxism and Dialogue.
jnoonan@uwindsor.ca
Charles Post teaches sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College-City
University, is active in the American Federation of Teachers, and is a member of Solidarity,
a US-based socialist organisation. A collection of his essays on the origins of capitalism in
the US will appear in the Historical Materialism book-series as Studies in the Development of
Capitalism in the United States: From Colonial Settlement Through the Civil War and
Reconstruction (Brill, forthcoming 2011).
cpost@bmcc.cuny.edu
David F. Ruccio is Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and former
editor of the journal Rethinking Marxism. His latest book is Development and Globalization:
A Marxian Class Analysis (Routledge, 2010). His Occasional Links & Commentary blog can
be found at <http://anticap.wordpress.com>.
David.F.Ruccio.1@nd.edu

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Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 3–32 brill.

The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under

Sexuality, once a largely unexplored continent for historical materialism, has

emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities.2 Although historical-

7. For example, Seidman 1997, p. 195.

12. See, for example, Chauncey 1994, pp. 334–46.

relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.15 To analyse

15. Althusser 1971, p. 162.

examines the ways in which economic changes have been ideologically

I. Classic gay identity

21. D’Emilio 1983a.

were fewer barriers to a common sense of identity; and a relatively favourable

II. Gays in the post-Fordist economy

31. See Floyd 2009, pp. 177–8.

37. Drucker 2009, pp. 826–8.

40. For example, Seidman 2011.

43. Floyd 2009, p. 64.

locations within a global-capitalist totality that is neither static nor uniform,

44. Rubin 1982, p. 214.

capitalist societies, without necessarily renouncing or hiding their sexuality

45. Brenner 2003, pp. 78–9.

families (through sperm-donorship, adoption, the break-up of straight families

III. Social and sexual roots of alternative identities

47. Puar 2007, pp. xxiv, 38–9.

Whatever the causes (less ability or willingness to meet gendered job-

51. Badgett and King 1997, pp. 68–9.

policing.56 Social polarisation within LGBT communities has coincided with

56. Sears 2005, p. 103.

62. Nestle 1989; Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, pp. 397–404.

with ethnic-style minority-group politics. Self-identiﬁed queers refused ‘to be

67. Seidman 1997, p. 193; Drucker 1993, p. 29.

71. Oetomo 1996, pp. 265–8.

aspects of their identities, particularly eﬀeminacy in men or butchness in

73. Robson 1992, p. 87, cited in Robson 1997, p. 175, n. 13.

tended more to play with issues of inequality and power-diﬀerence in other

77. Altman 1982, p. 154.

IV. Implications for liberation

82. Herndon 2006, p. 1, cited in Wolf 2009, p. 230.

racial/ethnic and other diﬀerences within LGBT communities. These

85. Rubin 1989, p. 279.

87. See Fernbach 1998, p. 51; Drucker 1997, p. 37.

radical challenge to mainstream lesbian/gay organisations, although they have

personality is eroticised, and the ‘instinctual substance’ of ‘the perversions . . .

95. Marcuse 1966, pp. 191, 195, 203.

—— 2000b, ‘Reinventing Liberation: Strategic Challenges for Lesbian/Gay Movements’, in

A Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592382

Slavery: 1776–1848; as well as studies of the political aftermath of the conﬂict

abolitionists; we have to take seriously this kind of ideological projection. It is

4. See also Post 1982.

5. See, for example, Wood 2003.

development was not feudalism, or feudal impediments to capital-

9. Finley 1983; Blackburn 1998; Blackburn 1999.

11. Levine 1992.

South in incompatible ways. At times, he describes this production as ‘a mode

Direct slavery is as much a pivot of our industrialism today as machinery, credit,

15. Marx 1973a, p. 98.

to actual social formations; of taking the British road to capitalism as the

22. Williams 2005.

this symposium as a contribution to ongoing historical scholarship across

27. Historical Materialism 2011.

Towards a Bourgeois Revolution?

1. Ashworth 1995; Ashworth 2007.

was indispensable in securing the necessary conditions, for the growth of