Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
–– Karl Marx, 1847
Based, right? Not quite.
Here's the surrounding sentences. Emphasis ours.
Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
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 civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.–– Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
Remember that for Marx, progress is good and anarchy is bad. Here we have the frank acknowledgement that early industrialism turns primarily on slave-grown cotton (conspicuously missing in Engels' famous anti-anarchist screed, On Authority). But Marx is no Luddite. Marx calls the proletarians "the gravediggers" of capitalism, but recall that he spends much of the early sections of that manifesto singing the praises of the bourgeoisie. In England and most dramatically in France, the bourgeosie spectacularly pushed aside the reactionary feudal order and opened the path towards material abundance. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are progressive but the proletariat are more progressive.
Interpreting this passage in light of what Marxists call "historical materialism", that is, the idea that societies move through progressive stages where the productive capacities increase–– primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialist transition, and full communism–– it is clear that Marx is not in favor of causing slavery to disappear. He is not in favor of wiping America off the map of nations. Because otherwise, capitalism would never have existed. And for Marx, capitalism is a necessary phase in human development. Capitalism is better than feudalism, but socialism would be even better.
It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
–– Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845
Here we see historical materialism at its finest. Instead of placing slavery as the source, the genesis, of the industrial process, now the industrial process is presented as the salvation of the chattel slave.
Marx does redeem himself a bit twenty years later. Here's Chapter 31 of Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867):
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
But basically every Marxist reads the 1848 Communist Manifesto before Das Kapital. And Marx sticks his seemingly newfound critical perspective towards the historical development of capitalism at the very end of the book. Thus, Marxism as a movement remains Eurocentric. Which was fine in the 19th century, when Britain was the major colonial power; to push the contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeois to the maximum within the empire was good. But in today's world, with the contradictions between the underdeveloped and oppressed periphery and the rich, carbon-emitting imperial core at the top of everyone's minds–– are we still going to give Marx a pass on this "capitalism is historically progressive" bullshit?
In reality, Marx redeemed himself further by his actions and analysis during the Amerikan Civil War. His unconditional support for the North, against the interest of the British cotton-industrial bourgeois and affiliated newspapers advocating British intervention in favor of the Confederacy, quite likely played some role in swaying working class opinion against the Confederacy. At least at one mill in Lancashire, workers voted to support the Union despite the fact that the North's naval blockade pushed them to unemployment.
Marx's analysis of the contradictions leading to the American Civil War are, as usual, quite incisive. For the South, the war was triggered by the 1860 election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln, and most of the secession statements explicitly mention the preservation of slavery as their primary motive. But why did the North care enough to go to war? Most Marxists reject the simplistic idea, which Amerikan public schools allow to linger, that abolitionist sentiment and moral outrage drove the North to war. Nor do Marxists settle for the legalistic argument put forwards by Lincoln to assuage the border states, that the war was about eliminating state's rights to secession and not about ending slavery. But I have heard Marxists say that the Northern industrial bourgeois favored freeing the slaves so as to more efficiently exploit them as proletarians. A theory which privileges "historical materialism" over the obvious observation that the Northern industrialists depended on slave-grown cotton.
But thankfully, Marx himself gets it right. For the North, the war was about "free soil". He draws our attention to the Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 which banned slavery northwest of Ohio, the "so-called Missouri Compromise" of 1820 which banned slavery north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed slavery to extend past the boundaries of the 1820 through the doctrine of "popular sovereignty", precipitating the events of Bleeding Kansas which made our good friend John Brown a national figure. Marx blames the South for stacking the Supreme Court which produced the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that enslaved people bought in slave states would remain property even if their owners moved to "free states"-- in effect legalizing slavery nationwide.
This observation is key:
It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states.
The old compromises between plantation owners and textile capitalists broke down as the "free peasants" (settler colonists) of the Midwest asserted their class interests. A split in the Democratic Party ensued, with the Northern Democrats rallying behind Stephen Douglas, leaving the Southern Democrats as purely a slaveholder's party. Lincoln takes the electoral college with only 40% of the popular vote in a four-man race.
In another work Marx analyzes the strength of the Confederacy state by state, paying particular attention to the ratios of enslaved people to free people in each state. About Delware, he concludes "The slave element of this state has long been in process of dying out." Regarding Maryland, he says "we observe a phenomenon similar to
what we see in other border states where the great mass of the people stands for the North and a numerically insignificant slaveholders' party for the South." With respect to Virginia, Marx points out that the mountainous Western portion of the state is dominated by small white landowners (settler colonists), not by slave bourgeois and enslaved peoples like the rest of Virginia. The class interests of settler colonists, not morality, is the reason that West Virgina seceded from Virginia and fought on the side of the Union. Marx goes on to flex his command of geography by saying "similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east Tennessee are found in the north of Alabama, in north-west Georgia and in the north of North Carolina".
More of Marx's comments on the American Civil War can be found at marxists.org.
In short: the contradiction between free soilers–– raw, direct settler colonialists–– and slaveowners proved more decisive than the contradiction between the cotton-industrial bourgeois and the slave-agricultural bourgeois. Here's J Sakai:
We can only understand the deep passions of the slavery dispute, the gunfights in Missouri and “Bloody Kansas” between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers, and lastly the grinding, monumental Civil War of 1861-65 as the final play of this greatest contradiction in the settler ranks. It was not freedom for Afrikans that motivated them. No, the reverse. Gov Morton of Ohio called on his fellows to realize their true interests “We are all personally interested in this question, not indirectly and remotely as in a mere political abstraction— but directly, pecuniarily, and selfishly. If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us.
To millions of Euro-Amerikans in the North, the slave system had to be halted because it filled the land with masses of Afrikans instead of masses of settlers. To be precise: in the 19th century a consensus emerged among the majority of Euro-Amerikans that just as the Indian nations before them, the dangerous Afrikan colony had to be first contained and then totally eliminated, so that the land could be filled with loyal settler citizens of the Empire.
This was a strategic view endorsed by the majority of Euro-Amerikans. It was an explicit vision that required genocide. How natural for a new Empire of conquerors believing that they had, like gods, totally removed from the earth one family of oppressed nations, to think nothing of wiping out another. the start was to confine Afrikans to the South, to drive them out of the "Free" states in the North. Indeed, in the political language of 19th Century settler politics, the word "Free" also served as a codephrase that meant "non-Afrikan."
The movement to confine Afrikans to the Slave South took both governmental and popular forms. Four frontier states - Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Oregon - passed "immigration" clauses in their constitutions which barred Afrikans as "aliens" from entering the state. It's interesting that the concept of Afrikans as foreign "immigrants" - a concept which tacitly admits separate Afrikan nationality - keeps coming to the surface over and over. Legal measures to force Afrikans out by denying them the vote, the right to own land, use public facilities, practice many professions and crafts, etc. were passed in many areas of the North at the urging of the white mobs. White labor not only refused to defend the democratic rights of Afrikans, but played a major role in these new assaults.
Settlers, Chapter 4.2, "The Popular Appeal of Genocide". By applying Lenin's concept of labor aristocracy to the white working class, Sakai frees us from uncritical support for the North, from Engels and Marx's alignment with early iterations of the free soil movement in the 1847 Principles of Communism and 1848 Communist Manifesto, from hopium-addled settler communists like Howard Zinn, who see glimmers of class struggle in quite obviously fascist episodes like Bacon's Rebellion and Jacksonian Democracy.
Now that we have established that the key class contradictions which describe the contours of the Amerikan Civil War were geographic and settler colonial, not resulting from the historical progression of society from the slave mode of production to the capitalist mode of production, we can finally ask the question "why the 1860s?". And very quickly we would realize that the United States, with its 1848 victory in the Mexican-American War, had simply run out of land to expand into. To annex land to the south, in the Caribbean, in Central America, or Mexico proper, could undermine white supremacy by granting millions of new black and brown and red folks birthright citizenship. The Comanche, Apache, and Lakota still retained a fierce independence, true, but aggressive settler expansion into their territory was complicated by the question of slavery vs free soil. They were running out of land to steal. The Continent was no longer big enough for both the slave mode of production and the capitalist mode of production to coexist.
The interimperialist war of 1914-1918 was also born from land constraints. After Africa was finally directly colonized, there was no more land to conquer. Finance capital could no longer flow into a "Virginia company" or an "East India company". Lenin had it absolutely correct:
The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.
As the world gears up for a Third World War between capitalist-imperialist powers (yes, China is capitalist-imperialist), we should ensure that as many people as possible are familiar with Lenin's diagnosis and with his prescription–– revolutionary defeatism. Turn interimperialist war into a class war by overthrowing your government. All power to the people shit.
–– 2023-10-21
We edit this post on March 8th, 2024, after a couple heated exchanges with Marxists about this article. Many argued that Marx held a more sophisticated, "dialectical" view on slavery in that exchange with Proudhon than we attributed to him. Amd we don't feel like doing a deep comparative reading of two flawed 19th century arguments to prove them wrong in the narrow sense.
The broader problem is that the entire theory of "historical materialism", which remains a central tenet for Marxists even of disparate tendencies, is built on the "progressive" nature of the bourgeois revolutions. And the bourgeois revolutions were all built on the thefts of land and labor.
This is well-known in communist circles for the case of the "American Revolution", largely driven by the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act, but also featuring mass resistance by enslaved Africans:
To use an Old European power against the Euro-Amerikan settlers — who were the nearest and most immediate enemy — was just common sense to many. 65,000 Afrikans joined the British forces — over ten for every one enlisted in the Continental U.S. ranks. As Lenin said in discussing the national question: "The masses vote with their feet." And in this case they voted against Amerika.
Settlers, Chapter 2: Struggles and Alliances. Less well known is the makeup of the French bourgeois at the time of that revolution:
The slave trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. “Sad irony of human history’’, comments Jaurés. “The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation”
Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles were the chief centres of the maritime bourgeoisie, but Orleans, Dieppe, Bercy-Paris, a dozen great towns refined raw sugar and shared in the subsidiary industries.
CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938). So even the Great French Revolution, which we must admit was socially progressive, was built on the theft of resources from the Western Hemisphere and the theft of human beings from Africa.
If capitalism is historically progressive, then so was chattel slavery. And so is the burning of fossil fuels, of buried sunshine. This is a monstrous position.
Marxists can escape from this moral dilemma by rejecting historical materialism while keeping dialectical materialism. They can sharpen their critique of the capitalist mde of production and resolve to attack not only the immanent pole of commodification but also the time-ly pole of accumulation. Destroying either one collapses the structure.
In Das Kapital Vol 1, Marx distinguishes between accumulation within the sphere of commodity production (Part 7) and accumulation "outside" the capitalist mode of production (Part 8). The stolen sunshine project claims to have uncovered the general form of accumulation–– stolen land, stolen labor, stolen sunshine–– which unites this conceptual division. The theft of land may be labelled as "primitive accumulation", as can the theft of enslaved laborers, but even the labor-power of proletarians is stolen to produce surplus-value (The demand for a "fair share" of the products of labor rather than a reduction and rationalization of labor-time is revisionist and even leaves the door open for fascism. Even Hitler thought capitalists were too hard on trade unions). We can now see clearly what Marx did not, that the theft of sunshine is decisive in the infinite growth characteristic of industrial capitalism.
If we do not attack the pole of accumulation (including the CPC's revisionist line that the productive forces must be built up through capitalism until 2050)...