Guest Post by Tim Russo: If A Second Civil War Comes, Marxists Know Who Wins-- The Yankees Will Defeat Capital. Again.

An old friend of mine, Tim Russo, reviewed Andrew Zimmerman's book The American Civil War by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels and agreed to let me share it here at DWT.



Americans know La Marseillaise largely from the above scene in Casablanca (1942). Bogart gives a knowing nod to his house band to play the French national anthem to drown out Nazis singing a German battle song. Truth being more incredible than fiction, turns out La Marseillaise is even more Yankee Doodle Dandy than Hollywood’s Golden Era imagined.

August Willich emigrated to Ohio as a German exile, following a well worn path of radicals from Europe’s crushed revolutions of 1848, wandering the globe. As a communist of 1848, waving Marx’s Communist Manifesto in the air on the battle field, Willich was too radical even for Marx or Engels, regularly clashing to the point of a bungled duel in London. Thus, Marx and Engels kept an eye on Willich, as well as their many other comrades who made it into the Union Army as German born immigrants. By the Civil War, Willich was publishing a socialist newspaper in German in Cincinnati, soon to join himself.

In Zimmerman’s 2016 volume of Marx’s Civil War correspondence, Engels regularly mentions Willich having found his way into the Union Army as colonel commanding the 9th Ohio & 32nd Indiana. Willich brought 1848’s revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, with him to General Grant’s first major victory at Shiloh. At Shiloh’s second day, April 7, 1862, Willich rallied his troops, unsteady under withering Confederate fire, his back to the enemy, by ordering the regimental band to strike up La Marseillaise, as revolutionaries did in 1848, and as Bogart would 80 years later on celluloid. 

How is this not a movie? Oh wait.

Combining Marx with America’s finest hour (let alone Humphrey Bogart) was, and remains, so dangerous, Zimmerman pays tribute to the 1937 edition’s editor who lost his job over it. Herbert H. Morais was hounded out of Brooklyn College for publishing Marx and Engles’ Civil War works, even though Morais hid behind a pseudonym.  In his introduction, Zimmerman salutes the brave American leftists before him…

“They have made it relatively safe, at least for the time being, for me to publish the present edition of Marx and Engels’s writings on the Civil War under my own name even when a pseudonym could not protect my predecessor from government persecution in the United States of America.”

August Willich

Zimmerman thus does the American left of the 21st century a great service. Marx clearly saw the Civil War as a revolution against capital’s exploitation of unpaid labor-- slavery. Anticipating by seven decades Gramsci’s theory that capital controls its exploited through the voluntary acquiescence of their own minds, Marx boils the Civil War down to a battle of ideas. Two value systems clashed, slavery versus free labor, and only one would survive. Marx was under no illusion which system, facing life or death, went on the attack.

“The South” … is not a country at all, but a battle slogan…not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.”

Throughout Zimmerman’s volume, Marx & Engels yearn for Lincoln to cast aside the “constitutional” waging of war (merely to preserve the Union as is) and launch the “revolutionary” stage to abolish slavery. Marx blames the North’s slowness toward the “thunder cry” of abolition on America’s system of government allowing America’s racial original sin access to power, thus preventing full revolution against capital. Obstacles include the “border states” requiring constant baby sitting of their racial prejudices, the Union’s “loyal slaveholders” deploying racial resentment in an all too familiar way, even the North’s broader disinterest in the war other than as a way to make some money. 

Half Efforts

“One hand behind its back getting rich,” was how the Union won the war according to Shelby Foote, the Southern writer whose 3 volume history of the war has become the standard. Both Marx and Engels noticed the Union’s half efforts in real time, citing as Foote does a century later the Homestead Act sending tens of thousands to the West. Marx and Engels bristle with frustration that America shrank from the enormous power of revolutionary ideas, only to bog down in “constitutional” status quo maintenance. Engels in particular ties McClellan’s military failures to the broader reluctance of the country.

Marx easily dismisses the notion that racism created slavery, noting that capital cares little what labor looks like versus how much it costs, preferably zero. Marx writes Nov. 7, 1861, in Die Presse that should the South prevail, the whole United States would succumb to slavery, color of skin being no matter.

“…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 labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German or Irishman, or their direct descendants.”

Cincinatti recruitment add

Once Lincoln overcame the “constitutional” war and emancipated the slaves after the Battle of Antietam, Marx knows the affair is settled and the Confederacy doomed. But the revolution against capital? Had it been won? Reconstruction disappoints both Marx and Engels immediately. Jim Crow’s embryonic ugliness did not escape note, causing Marx to issue a warning to the US in October, 1865, which today is haunting.

“As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease…If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood…We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.”

Victory was not complete. Thus, predictably, the Trump era of capital’s crowning control shrieks of a coming second “civil war”, sounding just like Jeff Davis before Ft. Sumter. A way of life is threatened! We are such victims! Our sacred honor! Mob rule! None of it is new. Protecting a Confederate statue today, according to Marx, is as “defensive” as lobbing shells into Fort Sumter, a counter revolutionary attack against free labor, against freedom itself.

Echoes 

The most important portions of Zimmerman’s volume are Marx’s analyses of the decades preceding the war. Closely, eerily, mirroring our generations’ 40 years of Reagan Thatcher neoliberal global domination by capital of the state, Marx dissects slavery’s decades long expansion via control of US government by a tiny faction of aristocratic slaveholders.  The “slaveholder party” Marx calls them. From the 3/5 compromise, through the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Mexican War, the 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act, to the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court in 1857, Marx gives chapter and verse how a tiny landed gentry can capture every organ of power in pursuit of legal protection of its holy right to the highest possible profit. Not a thing has changed.

Having failed to heed Marx’s warning to ensure complete freedom for the enslaved, America yet reaps what we’ve sown. Despite the New Deal’s offensive against capital, itself revolutionary socialism in the same sense the Civil War was, the price of labor after the New Deal’s destruction heads ever toward zero. Racial tension has remained, as useful to capital as it was in 1860. A Marx letter of 1870 to friends in New York sounds as if Marx travelled forward in time to watch Fox News;

“This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organization. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.”

Ever more eery, Marx’s warning that the “white working class” would eventually be in the cross hairs of capital is today Trump’s resentment jet fuel keeping capital soaring over the state. Today’s “identity politics” con game would be unsurprising to Marx in 1861. Purposefully divisive use of race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, etc., masking capital’s control over life itself is Marx’s “constitutional” war yet again eclipsing the inevitable “revolutionary” war to come.

Play it again, Uncle Sam

To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!

For the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart will not have known any of this. There is, though, a certain twinkle in his eye that lets the Rick’s Cafe band know to play on. Let us hope that an actor in the next scene where La Marseillaise appears on film has read Andrew Zimmerman’s volume. If a second Civil War is coming, Zimmerman allows Marx to describe its onset with precision. To get that Bogie twinkle in his eye, the actor will need to know we Americans are far more revolutionary than we are permitted to know.