Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my early 1960s youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 933
27 March 2009
Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War
Finish the Civil War!
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Part One)
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by Jacob Zorn of the Spartacist League at a February 28 New York City forum.
This forum is being held in celebration of Black History Month. This is the first time that there is a black president of the United States, which in its own way is historic, especially given the history of black oppression in this country. American imperialism is bogged down in two increasingly unpopular wars and occupations abroad and an economic crisis that deepens each day. Thus, for the bourgeoisie, the fact that there is now a black president, not to mention a president who can put together an English sentence, is used to try to give a facelift to this brutal system, in order to refurbish its very threadbare “democratic” credentials—even as the capitalists plan to jack up brutal exploitation and oppression here and abroad.
Voting for the Democratic Party is counterposed to the interests of the working class and oppressed. During the elections, the Spartacist League called to break with the Democrats and for a class-struggle workers party. We did not vote for the Democrats. Nor do we think that a black president will serve to eliminate racial oppression here in the United States. Black oppression is deeply rooted in the history of the development of capitalism here, and only socialist revolution, which places the wealth of society in the hands of the multiracial working class, can liberate black people and all of the oppressed. This is why we call to finish the Civil War and for black liberation through socialist revolution.
In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico. When the United States finally left, it was only after forcing Mexico to give up about half of its national territory, including all or most of modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada, as well as Texas. In this forum, I want to look at how the oppression of black people here in the United States is rooted in the history of the United States, how the U.S. invasion of Mexico was a key part of this history, and how workers struggles in the United States and Mexico are inextricably linked.
The war was fought by the Southern slavocracy in order to further the expansion of the slave system into new land, as a way of solidifying the slave system’s domination of this country. The United States in the early 19th century was integrated into the developing world capitalist system, and the North had begun to develop into a very dynamic capitalist power. But this growth was hampered by the slave system in the South, which dominated the U.S. politically and economically. This coexistence of slavery and capitalism could not continue indefinitely. By the middle of the 19th century, what was called the “irrepressible conflict” came ever closer to breaking out into the open. The U.S. invasion of Mexico was an important signpost in the lead-up to the Civil War. As Marx put it in an article he wrote in 1861, during the Civil War:
“The present struggle between the South and the 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.”
—“The Civil War in the United States” (1861)
Here in the United States, the invasion of Mexico is often either ignored or justified as inevitable; this was certainly my experience growing up in Arizona, which is part of the land taken from Mexico. In Mexico the war is much better known. No town or village is complete without its memorial or street dedicated to the “Boy Heroes” who fought against the U.S. There, the invasion is used to bolster Mexican nationalism, with its premise that the country needs to stand as one, regardless of class differences, to maintain eternal vigilance against the monolithic aggressor across the Río Bravo. As Marxists here in the “belly of the beast,” it is necessary to oppose any instance of U.S. aggression toward Latin America and to stand for the class solidarity of the working class throughout the Americas—to fight for workers revolutions throughout the continent, from Alaska to Argentina. Part of this is understanding the 1846 invasion of Mexico and why it happened.
At the same time, it is important to understand the class forces that contributed to the invasion. Yes, on the part of the United States the war was based on a desire to take over Mexican land, with a good deal of anti-Mexican, anti-indigenous and anti-Catholic bigotry thrown in. But more fundamentally, the invasion of Mexico was developed out of the historic division of the United States between capitalist and slave systems. This very division led, less than 20 years later, to America’s second revolution, the Civil War, which smashed the Southern slave system and paved the way for the unfettered development of capitalism in the United States.
For us, as for Marx and Engels, not to mention Frederick Douglass and the millions of slaves in the South, the Civil War was a just war on the side of the North. This is ABC. It’s embarrassing that one has to assert this, but it still seems to be far beyond the grasp of many even so-called Marxists, like for example the Progressive Labor Party. They recently debated for several months about the Civil War in the pages of Challenge—and seemed never to have really reached a conclusion (see “PL vs. Karl Marx (and Abraham Lincoln),” WV No. 919, 29 August 2008). For us, the problem is that the task of black liberation was not completed, and black oppression remains integral to American capitalism.
In order to understand this, it’s necessary to understand the role of slavery in the early United States. The basic task of a bourgeois revolution is to create a unified bourgeois nation: in this sense, the first American Revolution was incomplete. During the War of Independence against Britain, the “founding fathers,” both in the North and in the South, agreed that the 13 colonies would be better off outside the control of the British Empire. But they represented different propertied classes: the budding Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern slaveholding landowners. In 1776, both the Northern merchant capitalists and the Southern planter aristocracy supported independence from the British imperial system, and for several decades it was beneficial for both to coexist in the same economy and the same country.
The new republic was not an equal partnership—the Southern slavocracy was in control. Without understanding this, the entire first half of American history doesn’t make a lot of sense. Increasing cotton production in the 19th century clinched a common economic interest between the plantation owners of the South and the Northern bankers and merchants who profited from the export of cotton to Britain and its manufacture into goods. The “slave power” of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was codified a decade later in the U.S. Constitution, which was written in 1787.
When he was running for president, Barack Obama claimed “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution.” This is a lie: while the Constitution never actually uses the word “slave,” it gave the slave South extra power, despite the fact that its population grew at a much slower rate than the free North. The “three-fifths clause” not only declared a slave three-fifths of a person, but also gave slaveowners extra power within the electoral system. And then there is the Senate, which gives each state the same representation regardless of its population. And when the Constitution was written, the Senate was not elected. Southerners held the presidency more often than not for most of the history of the early United States. This made it all but impossible to legally abolish slavery. Thus both in economic terms and in political terms, human slavery was the cornerstone of the early American republic.
Slavery eventually died out in the North, where the last state to abolish slavery was New Jersey in 1846. By the mid 19th century, Northern capitalism had developed to such a point that it was increasingly fettered by the Southern slavocracy. The envelope for this tension was often expansionism. From the original 13 colonies, the United States had already grown extensively, especially with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Both the slave South and the capitalist North shared expansionist aims. This was later called “Manifest Destiny.” But this expansion meant different things for each section. Northern capitalists and farmers wanted to expand to the west. This included much of what was then called Oregon—which is not only the current state of Oregon but also much of western Canada, which was claimed by Britain. They wanted to expand a market for manufactured goods, obtain raw materials, develop a hinterland for the North, and expand toward Asian markets through the Pacific Rim.
The Southern slaveowners wanted to expand the slave system and deepen its power over the country in order to guarantee that slavery would continue to exist. Immigration and population growth in the North threatened to offset the three-fifths clause, and new free states would mean less power for the slave South in Congress. So politicians from both sides concocted a series of so-called “compromises” to maintain the North/South balance. One example is the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which divided the Louisiana Territory into slave and free zones.
No sooner had one “compromise” been effected than the next crisis would arise. In 1861, after the Civil War broke out, Marx explained this:
“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North.”
—“The American Question in England” (1861)
The Democratic Party at the time was, in the South, the main party of the slaveholders. In the North, it comprised both merchant capitalists who traded with the South and the urban poor. In both regions, it was thoroughly racist.
Plantation-based cotton agriculture is very hard on the soil, especially as it was practiced in the South. Therefore the slavocracy had a constant demand for new land. Many Southerners wanted to create what they called an “empire for slavery,” which would include much of Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to make sure that there would always be plantation slavery in the United States. British military power was an obstacle to the North’s wish to expand to the northwest in Oregon, but Mexico appeared to be a scintillating morsel to the slave South.
Mexico After Independence
Both the U.S. and Mexico bore the marks of their colonizing powers. British North America, including later the United States, was largely based on the mercantile model of Britain, which was by the mid 18th century one of the most dynamic European economies and the first industrial capitalist country. Spain by this time was one of the most backward and bankrupt European powers; it had already squandered the wealth that it had taken from its American colonies. Rather than develop the productive forces of New Spain, the Spanish crown focused on getting as much gold and silver from its colony as it could and sending this wealth back to the Iberian Peninsula. Between 1808 and 1821, Spain was beset by various problems in Europe, and it lost control of its empire. Almost all of its American colonies became independent in this period, the exceptions being Cuba and Puerto Rico, which remained Spanish colonies until the United States took them in the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s.
I want to touch on African slavery in Mexico for a moment. The Spanish were in fact the first European power in the Americas to use African slaves. And the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, such as Santo Domingo, were based on slavery. The first black slaves arrived in Mexico with Hernán Cortés, and slaves were important in early colonial Mexico—something that is often ignored by contemporary Mexican nationalists. But the main source of labor in Mexico was indigenous peasants, not African slaves, and by the 19th century slavery had died out in Mexico. So at its independence, Mexico abolished slavery, but this was more a symbolic than a real act—except, as we’ll see, in Texas.
Shortly after its independence in 1821, Mexico was crippled by the legacy of Spanish colonialism, which had left the country underdeveloped and economically weak and heavily indebted. Mexico was very unstable; it had no real central government. Its extreme southern territories, including modern-day Guatemala, and its far northern territories were not under control of Mexico City. Between independence in 1821 and 1861, Mexico had 56 presidents, suffered several coups, and faced invasions by Spain in 1829 and France in 1838 in addition to the U.S. invasion in 1846. Mexico, in short, was not a modern nation-state. Local caciques opposed central control and political power alternated between Federalists who favored a decentralized government and conservative Centralists who wanted to place power in the hands of the government in Mexico City. One of the central figures in this period was the adventurer General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who himself ruled Mexico eleven times.
The U.S. had long had its eyes on Latin America. One example of this was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which told European countries to keep their hands off the Western Hemisphere. Mexico—or as the Spanish colonialists called it, New Spain—was particularly enticing for the United States. At the same time, the United States was pulling northern Mexico into its economy, and central Mexico was very distant. Just to give an example, one of the largest settlements in far northern Mexico was Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it took 60 days to get to Santa Fe from Missouri. But to get to Santa Fe from Mexico City it took some six months! As the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz allegedly put it almost a century later, Mexico was so far from God and so close to the United States.
Texas
I want to talk a bit about Texas, because it’s quite important. By the 19th century, Spain had already lost its territories in Florida and Louisiana. In 1819, the U.S. had signed a treaty with Spain, the Adams-Onís Treaty that established the boundary between the U.S. and Spanish territory at the Sabine River, and the U.S. renounced “forever” any claim to Texas—but Spain was still worried that its sparsely populated northern territory was vulnerable. So to populate the northern part of its territory, the Spanish government encouraged English-speaking North Americans, so-called Anglos, who were mainly citizens of the United States, to settle in Texas. The newly independent Mexican government continued the same policy. These immigrants were required to formally convert to Catholicism, which was the only legal religion in Mexico at the time, and the idea was that they would become Mexicans. But many of the immigrants had very little intention of actually doing so. Instead, they were mainly Southerners who wanted to extend slavery as far as possible into Mexican territory.
The first large-scale Anglo settlement in Texas was founded by Moses Austin and his son Stephen. By 1825, it had 1,800 inhabitants; 443 of them were slaves. Soon, Anglo immigrants and slaves outnumbered Mexicans in Texas ten-to-one, although it’s important to keep in mind that Native Americans outnumbered both. The links between far northern and central Mexico diminished even more as trade with the increasingly dynamic United States grew, and the Mexican government was too weak to force the Americans in Texas to do much of anything.
Slavery was a very special issue in this relationship. It was illegal in Mexico but was central to the economy in Texas, just as it was in the economy in the Southern United States. The Mexican government saw limiting slavery as a way to rein in these settlers, and it repeatedly reasserted its opposition to slavery, while not doing much to actually limit its practice in Texas. In 1829, the Mexican president Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery but allowed Texas to maintain slavery as long as no more slaves were admitted. The Texans got around even this by forcing their slaves to sign so-called “contracts” with their masters that virtually guaranteed their perpetual servitude.
The Texas “Revolution”: Pro-Slavery Coup d’Etat
There’s a lot of mythology about what’s called the “Texas Revolution” of 1835-36, in which Texas broke away from Mexico. But at bottom this was a slaveholders’ rebellion, fought to guarantee the existence of human slavery. Sometimes it is depicted as a reaction to a growing Mexican central government—this is what I was told when I visited the Alamo several years ago. I haven’t forgotten. But as veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser put it in an unpublished study of the development of black oppression in the United States, “The colonists didn’t care what government sat in Mexico City as long as slavery was tolerated. What they feared was that a stronger central government would most assuredly move against their practice of slavery.” Stephen Austin, a founder of Texas, himself argued: “Texas must be a slave country.” And in fact, as a state, Texas would become fervently pro-slavery and joined the Confederacy in the Civil War. The University of Texas has something called the “Handbook of Texas Online” and it describes:
“The Texas Revolution assured slaveholders of the future of their institution. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836) provided that slaves would remain the property of their owners, that the Texas Congress could not prohibit the immigration of slaveholders bringing their property, and that slaves could be imported from the United States (although not from Africa). Given those protections, slavery expanded rapidly during the period of the republic.”
Many slaves in Texas saw the Mexican army during the so-called “revolution” as an army of liberation. Since Mexico had abolished slavery, slaves in independent Texas escaped to the south. As one former slave put it: “All we had to do was walk, but walk south and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free.” At least 4,000 slaves escaped to Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s.
The Texans of course defeated General Santa Anna in 1836 and won de facto independence, although it’s a funny type of independence, because as soon as they became independent many Texans wanted to join the United States. The slavocracy wanted to annex Texas, but to do so threatened to undo the balance between the North and South and also to provoke war with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas’s independence.
“Manifest Destiny”
Now as I mentioned earlier, there was a shared expansionism in both the North and the South. This was called Manifest Destiny, the idea that God had a unique plan for white, English-speaking, Protestant North Americans to conquer and “civilize” all of America. By the 1840s, the slavocracy and the Northern capitalists were increasingly at odds over the nature of this destiny, of this expansionism. To the North, it was tied to the growth of capitalism, the expansion of free labor and markets and more influence in Congress. Oregon, as I said, was very important. To the South, expansionism meant increasing the reach of slavery and bolstering its power in government. The more the country expanded, the greater the tensions between slavery and capitalism became.
At the time, Texas remained a lightning rod. Many Southerners were anxious that Britain would try to make Texas a client state and abolish slavery there. James Polk, a Southern Democrat, was elected president in 1844 as a militant advocate of Manifest Destiny. Polk, like many American presidents, was a representative of the slavocracy: he owned a 920-acre plantation and 34 slaves—he bought 19 of them while he was president of the United States. According to historian Joseph Wheelan, he was “an unrepentant slaveholder” who “as a congressman had consistently sided with Southern interests in blocking attempts to interfere with slavery” (Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 [2007]). In his presidential campaign, Polk promised to expand into Oregon and to annex Texas. In 1845, under this pressure, lame-duck president John Tyler—himself a slaveholder from Virginia—announced the annexation of Texas.
This was a provocation against both Mexico and the Northern free states and would lead to a war with each. The pretext for invading Mexico was the border between Mexico and Texas. The border between Texas and the rest of Mexico had always been the Río Nueces, but after annexing Texas, the United States claimed that the border was actually the Río Bravo del Norte (called the Rio Grande in the United States), which is some 160 miles to the south. This not only meant making Texas bigger, but also it expanded the U.S. claim to much of New Mexico as well, which concretely meant the possibility of creating several more slave states. In his Personal Memoirs, former president Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in Mexico, argued: “The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition.”
The Invasion
The U.S. provoked a war with Mexico by stationing troops in this disputed area and then, when an American soldier was killed, claiming that, in Polk’s words, “American blood has been shed on American soil.” This was the first in a list of lies that have been used by the U.S. to justify invasions of different countries—the USS Maine (Cuba), the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam) and most recently supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (Iraq).
In the war, the U.S. had a three-pronged strategy. Stephen Watts Kearny invaded westward, into New Mexico and California (the latter with John C. Frémont). Zachary Taylor invaded northern Mexico, occupying Monterrey, and Winfield Scott invaded Mexico City from the Caribbean port city of Veracruz. Polk wanted a short war; he feared that if the war lasted too long, Taylor and Scott, who were Whigs, would become too popular. However, the war lasted longer than he expected, since Mexico did not surrender until forced to. The Marine Corps’ hymn still celebrates this invasion, asserting the U.S power in the “Halls of Montezuma,” that is to say, in Mexico City.
The war served as a testing ground for future military leaders in the Civil War and was the first war in which West Point graduates played a key role. From Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the Confederate side to George McClellan and U.S. Grant on the Union side, most of the commanding officers in the Civil War had fought in the invasion of Mexico.
Many of these officers had very different takes on the war. In the case of Grant, he later called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” To use one example, there’s the northern city of Monterrey, which was occupied for almost two years. Historian Miguel Ángel González Quiroga describes how “the city was subjected to a furious onslaught unlike any it has witnessed before or since. The fighting left devastation and ruin that converted the town, in the words of one eyewitness, into a vast cemetery.”
Even though Mexico had a larger army, the U.S. won the war. This was a reflection not of Manifest Destiny but of the superior organization and wealth of the United States. Incidentally, Karl Marx thought that the United States won despite its leadership. He called General Scott “a common, petty, untalented, carping, envious cur and humbug.” The Mexican army was officer heavy; at one point, Santa Anna commanded an army of 24,000 officers and only 20,000 enlisted men. According to historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, the “conditions of the [Mexican] army were disastrous, it was tired, poorly fed and unarmed, it was large but untrained and confronted an army that was small, but disciplined, equipped, fed and regularly paid” (De la Rebelión de Texas a la Guerra del 47 [1994]). One thing I’ll mention about the U.S. side, it should be noted that many Catholic Irish and German immigrants in the U.S. Army resented the Protestant leadership, and there were even Irish-American soldiers who defected to Mexico, forming the San Patricio Battalion. Remember that during the 19th century, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry was rife in the U.S.
Furthermore, the Mexican government was divided; it was unstable and unable to mobilize the resources necessary to fend off the United States. Mexican soldiers—largely indigenous and mestizo peasants—had little incentive to fight for a largely white landlord class of hacendados. During the war, there were numerous changes of government in Mexico itself and there were rebellions, for example, in southern Mexico. As many as 200,000 people died or were dislocated in the so-called Caste War of Yucatán by 1848. The Mexican army was used to attacking other Mexicans, not fighting foreign armies. The U.S. also had better artillery. And to top it all off, Mexico was led by General Santa Anna—who was more concerned with holding on to his own power than winning the war. And as we will see, the war itself was not popular in the Northern part of the United States.
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Workers Vanguard No. 934
10 April 2009
Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War
Finish the Civil War!
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Part Two)
We print below, in edited form, the conclusion of a presentation by Jacob Zorn of the Spartacist League at a February 28 New York City forum. Part One was published in WV No. 933 (27 March).
Why did the United States invade Mexico? As Marxists, we understand that there were class interests at play; the main class pushing for the war was the slavocracy. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser put it, “The war was fought not just for conquest in general but more particularly to extend slavery and the political power of the slave system.” The slave power’s goal of expanding slavery through invading Mexico was not a secret. One Georgia newspaper stated that taking territory from Mexico would “secure to the South the balance of power in the Confederacy [i.e., the United States], and, for all coming time…give to her the control in the operations of the Government” (quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era [1988]). In his Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant recognized that the annexation of Texas was “from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”
The invasion was very unpopular among Northerners, and they derided it as “Mr. Polk’s War,” referring to then-president James Polk, a Southern Democrat. William Lloyd Garrison, one of the leading abolitionists of the day, argued in the Liberator: “We only hope that, if blood has had to flow, that it has been that of the American, and that the next news we shall hear will be that General Scott and his army are in the hands of the Mexicans.” In 1846, Frederick Douglass denounced the annexation of Texas as “a conspiracy from beginning to end—a most deep and skillfully devised conspiracy—for the purpose of upholding and sustaining one of the darkest and foulest crimes ever committed by man” (Belfast News Letter, 6 January 1846).
The war was a catalyst. It caused the Southern slave masters and the Northern capitalists to become less and less compatible. It made clear, as Abraham Lincoln put it in a famous speech in 1858, that “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Many Northerners felt betrayed by Polk’s 1846 compromise with Britain over Oregon—which relinquished American claims to large parts of Canada and set the current U.S.-Canadian border—and opposed the invasion of Mexico. Lincoln, at the time a newly elected Whig Congressman from Illinois, denounced President Polk as a liar for declaring that Americans had been killed on American soil. Lincoln was representative of an increasing section of the Northern bourgeoisie, which, while willing to tolerate the continued existence of slavery in the South, opposed its extension and wanted to limit the extension of the slave power. Before the invasion, Northerners in both parties had been willing to accept the domination of the slavocracy; in the aftermath of the invasion, both parties were increasingly torn apart between their Northern and Southern wings. Former Democratic president Martin Van Buren of New York opposed the annexation of Texas and the extension of slavery; he broke from the Democrats, eventually running for president on the Free Soil party ticket in 1848.
David Wilmot, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, expressed this hostility when he attached a proviso to the appropriations bill for the invasion in 1846 that banned slavery from any territory taken from Mexico. The House of Representatives passed this proviso in both 1846 and 1847, but the Senate voted against it in both years because the South dominated the Senate. The Wilmot Proviso shows that the contradictions between the slave system in the South and the capitalist system in the North could no longer coexist in the same country. This did not mean that various representatives of both sides did not try other compromises, but these attempts were increasingly fruitless.
The End of the War
In 1848, with U.S. troops occupying much of the country, including Mexico City, Mexico signed a peace treaty with the United States—the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty set the border at the Río Bravo [Rio Grande], giving the United States almost half of Mexico; in exchange, the U.S. agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and promised to keep Indians living in the United States from attacking Mexico. Even so, many Southern expansionists complained that the United States didn’t get enough: many slaveholders wanted their “empire for slavery” to extend through all of Mexico into Central America, into the Caribbean and maybe even down to Brazil.
Shortly after the war, with the discovery of gold, thousands of migrants moved into California. There is a very interesting book that recently came out called The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (2007) by Leonard Richards, which shows how many Southerners wanted to expand slavery to California. In 1854, the United States purchased la Mesilla—currently southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico—in order to build a railroad through to California. In the United States this is usually called the Gadsden Purchase, after James Gadsden, who was the U.S. envoy who dealt with Santa Anna over this question. It is usually remembered because Gadsden was a railroad executive who stood to benefit personally from the Gadsden Purchase. It could also be called the Gadsden-Davis purchase, since Secretary of War Jefferson Davis supported the railroad as a way of connecting California to the South and expanding the power of the slavocracy over the Southwest. Davis, who also had fought in the U.S. Army in the invasion of Mexico, of course would become the leader of the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Southerners did not give up their desire to expand southward. A decade after the Mexican-American War, one Southern leader argued: “I want Cuba. I want Tamaulipas, [San Luis] Potosí, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.” Then there were the so-called Filibusters, Southern-backed Americans who tried to set up pro-slavery governments, who invaded various places in northern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Among the most famous of these was one Dr. William Walker, who even briefly made himself president of Nicaragua in 1856. One of the things he did in his time there was to try to return slavery to Nicaragua. The U.S. also unsuccessfully tried to purchase Cuba from Spain. There was still plantation slavery practiced in Cuba. In 1898, of course, the United States fought a war against Spain to take Cuba along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines; by this time, although slavery had already been abolished, the U.S. did manage to export Jim Crow-style discrimination to these countries.
Even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave U.S. citizenship after one year to those Mexicans in the new U.S. territory, these Mexicans faced racist discrimination. Many Mexican landholders had their land north of the Río Bravo stolen from them. And Mexicans were also subjected to racist attacks by sheriffs, Texas Rangers and armed vigilantes. Between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans in the U.S. The Native Americans who lived in the territory were also subjected to genocidal attacks, just as they were on the Mexican side.
For Mexico, the loss of so much of its national territory increased its instability. It would be too simple to say that the invasion of Mexico by the U.S. in 1846 led to the later U.S. imperialist domination of the country, but it did play an important role in stunting the development of Mexico. By the last quarter of the 19th century, when Mexico was under the bloody dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, American capitalists owned much of the wealth of Mexico and kept the country subjugated to enrich American imperialism.
Marxists and the Invasion of Mexico
When we were working on the flyer announcing this forum, I suggested the headline, “The Mexican-American War: A Marxist Analysis.” Luckily, we didn’t go with this, but it’s actually a lot trickier issue than it sounds. As Marxists in the United States, we oppose the predatory expansion of the U.S. Nonetheless, in 1846 the United States was not, in a Marxist sense, imperialist. Imperialism doesn’t just mean a big country taking over a little country’s land, but is, as Lenin explained, the last stage of capitalism, an epoch of wars and revolutions in which the world economy comes into violent collision with the barriers imposed by the capitalist nation-state. In 1846, the United States was still a developing capitalist economy and the American bourgeoisie was still, objectively speaking, a progressive class: its task of destroying chattel slavery was still outstanding.
Today, of course, the United States is the most powerful imperialist country and there is nothing progressive about the American bourgeoisie. It keeps Mexico and Latin America subjugated through trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] and, if necessary, through military force. We wrote in the Programmatic Statement of the SL/U.S., “For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!”:
“A workers government in the U.S. would also return to Mexico certain contiguous regions, predominantly Spanish speaking, of the Southwest which were seized from Mexico. This internationalist gesture would powerfully undercut the anti-Yankee nationalism that the Latin American ruling classes use to tie the workers to them and would be of significant value in extending support to proletarian revolution throughout Latin America.”
Although they chafe at the domination of the U.S., Mexican and other Latin American capitalists fear their own working class even more. They use the Mexican-American War, La Invasión Norteamericana, the North American Invasion as it’s called, along with the ongoing U.S. oppression of Mexico, to tout the lie that Mexican workers and capitalists share a common interest. The Mexican bourgeoisie also seeks to obscure the fact that the United States itself is a class-divided society and that American workers are the class brothers—and increasingly the real brothers—of Mexican workers. Ending the imperialist subjugation of Latin America—and the rest of the semicolonial world—requires the working class in the U.S. taking power as part of socialist revolutions in all of the Americas. And American workers must also fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and against U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the rest of the world. It’s for this reason that we oppose NAFTA, the “free trade” rape of Mexico—not for protectionist reasons, but because it has meant misery for the workers and peasants of Mexico. And opposition to anti-immigrant racism in the U.S. is also intertwined with the struggle against black oppression, as the history of the Mexican-American War shows.
In Mexico, nationalists trying to discredit socialism sometimes denounce Marx and Engels for having supported the United States invasion. And throughout the Third World, they are also sometimes labeled “racists.” In 1848, Engels wrote about the war:
“In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is also an advance when a country which has hitherto been exclusively wrapped up in its own affairs, perpetually rent with civil wars, and completely hindered in its development, a country whose best prospect had been to become industrially subject to Britain—when such a country is forcibly drawn into the historical process. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will in future be placed under the tutelage of the United States. The evolution of the whole of America will profit by the fact that the United States, by the possession of California, obtains command of the Pacific. But again we ask: ‘Who is going to profit immediately by the war?’ The bourgeoisie alone.”
Several years later, in 1854, Marx wrote to Engels about the war, calling it “a worthy prelude to the military history of the great land of the Yankees.” And several days later, in another letter, he praised the “Yankee sense of independence and individual proficiency” and criticized the Mexicans: “The Spanish are already degenerate. But a degenerate Spaniard, a Mexican, is an ideal.”
Well, this is what is used against Marx and Engels. And Marx and Engels were wrong—but not because they were in favor of U.S. imperialism or because they were racists. The time of the Mexican-American War was very early in the development of Marxism, before the Communist Manifesto was published. Industrial capitalism was still in the process of development and Marx believed that it needed to fully develop in order to make proletarian revolution possible. Capitalism was then a progressive force, and Marx and Engels believed that one of its most progressive features was creating a nation with a unified working class. As a result, Marx and Engels opposed self-determination for small nations; they thought that such peoples should be assimilated into bigger nations. They mainly wrote about the Slavic peoples of Central and East Europe, but they also extended this to Mexico. In this view, the expansion of capitalism on a world scale would benefit not only the developed capitalist countries but the backward countries as well. As they wrote in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.”
Marx and Engels’ empirical judgment on the Mexican-American War was wrong, but their theoretical premises were not incorrect. They were derived from a key experience in modern European history, which, in fact, directly affected Marx’s family: the Napoleonic occupation of Germany in 1806-1813. Where he went, Napoleon, bringing with him gains of the French Revolution, overturned the remaining feudal property relations and established formal equality before the law for all social classes. In Germany, these liberal reforms, including the emancipation of Jews, gave a major impetus to the beginnings of industrial capitalism. That is, the gains of the bourgeois-democratic revolution came to western and southern Germany, large parts of Italy and even the northern Balkans, not through an indigenous revolution, but through conquest from without. In many cases it encountered reactionary resistance under the name of national independence; so for the German intellectuals of Marx’s generation, a major division between the left and the right was one’s retrospective attitude toward these so-called “wars of liberation,” which in the German states were led by the Prussian monarchy against the Napoleonic occupation. Marx and Engels’ theoretical principle that social and economic progress stands higher than national independence, when the two conflict, was correct. I would argue that Marx and Engels’ attitude toward the Napoleonic occupation was a theoretical precursor to our position supporting the 1979 military intervention by the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, in Afghanistan (which is, in fact, not a nation).
Marx and Engels were not blind or indifferent to the monumental crimes committed by Western powers against the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. But they viewed such crimes as the overhead historical cost for the modernization of these backward regions. And as I already mentioned, in the 19th century Mexico was a mess without much hope of a proletarian revolution, and American “tutelage,” as Engels put it, seemed the only possible way forward. In 1853, in an article called “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Marx and Engels wrote:
“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”
But this projection was not borne out by the actual course of development. In fact, even though the capitalists did introduce certain elements of modern industrial technology into their colonies and semicolonies, for example transportation, the overall effect was to arrest the social and economic development of backward countries. By the mid 19th century, the European bourgeoisies ceased to be a historically progressive class against the old feudal-derived aristocracies—with the key turning point being the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions.
Marx and Engels generalized the experiences that Europe went through during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. In the 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” This statement aptly described European capitalist development in the early years of the 19th century. At the same time, this observation, which Trotsky later described as “conditional and limited” (Lessons of October, 1924), was at odds with the fact that European colonialism reinforced the social and economic backwardness of the countries and peoples it dominated.
Marxism is a science. It is based not on received wisdom but on observation and analysis of social reality. Marxists are not infallible, and, indeed, Marx and Engels learned from their observations and analyses of capitalist development and expansion. It wasn’t long after 1848 that Marx and Engels would develop a very different attitude toward colonialism, expressed, for example, in their defense of the Sepoy rebellion in British-occupied India in 1857-58. Ireland is probably the country to which they paid the most attention because of their knowledge of the British working class. By the 1860s Marx and Engels called for Irish independence from Britain, not only out of justice for Ireland, but also as the precondition for the organization of English workers. By the late 19th century, Marx and Engels had become champions of colonial independence and recognized that the modernization of Asia, Africa and Latin America could take place only within the context of a world socialist order. Marx’s Capital (written in 1867) contains biting analysis of what he called the “primitive accumulation of capital” by the blood and the death of peasants and workers and others. There is a good article in the current issue of Workers Vanguard that goes over the development of the Marxist position on the national question (see “The National Question in the Marxist Movement, 1848-1914,” WV No. 931, 27 February).
More generally, imperialism had not fully developed in Marx and Engels’ time. It was left to the Bolsheviks to fully grapple with the importance of the national question in the epoch of imperialism. And the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky fought against all forms of national oppression and for the right of self-determination of nations. And just as Marx recognized that the modernization of Asia, Africa and Latin America could take place only within the context of a world socialist order, Trotsky underlined in his theory of permanent revolution that in countries of belated capitalist development national liberation and social and economic modernization can take place only under the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the working class fighting to extend its revolution to the advanced capitalist countries.
In terms of the Mexican-American War, Marx and Engels, in a more specific historical sense, failed at the time to fully appreciate the fact that the invasion of Mexico strengthened the power of the slavocracy—the very power standing in the way of further bourgeois development. In the 1840s, they did not know very much about the U.S. But by the time of the U.S. Civil War, Marx and Engels had carefully studied the country. Marx’s writings are among the most perceptive on the U.S. Civil War of any contemporary observers because he understood that the war was a class war between two opposed social systems.
In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Marx wrote: “In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star.” He mentioned in this context the U.S. attempt to purchase Cuba and pro-slavery Filibusters in northern Mexico and Central America, concluding that U.S. foreign policy “was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders’ rule” (“The North American Civil War,” 1861). Marx wrote that slavery was the key issue in the Civil War, which he tied to the war with Mexico:
“Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not...but whether the 20 million freemen of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.”
The Mexican Invasion and the Coming of the Civil War
So by the time of the American Civil War, Marx recognized that the invasion of Mexico was integrally connected to the development of the slavocracy and that this was one of the key questions for American capitalism.
I want to talk a bit about the invasion of Mexico and the coming of the Civil War. The invasion of Mexico called the question: would the slavocracy or the bourgeoisie control the United States? The answer was not obvious. One of the best historians of the period, James McPherson, has said: “On the eve of the Civil War, plantation agriculture was more profitable, slavery more entrenched, slave owners more prosperous, and the ‘slave power’ more dominant within the South if not in the nation at large than it had ever been.” And the South was increasingly belligerent. Although many Northerners wanted to compromise more with the South, especially those merchants here in New York who benefited from selling Southern cotton, it became clearer as the bourgeoisie grew that establishing a unified capitalist society would require smashing slavery—that is, another bourgeois revolution. The conquest of so much territory from Mexico directly led to the Civil War. In his Memoirs, Grant wrote:
“The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
The immediate question posed by the Mexican invasion was: would this new land taken from Mexico be slave or free? In the San Francisco Gold Rush, tens of thousands of people rushed to California, and in 1850 the territory petitioned Congress to be admitted as a free state. This led to another crisis, and in 1850 there was another “compromise.” Like its predecessors, the Compromise of 1850 merely delayed the inevitable conflict between the North and South. This compromise allowed California to enter as a free state but kept the rest of the territories conquered from Mexico in limbo, with their status to be decided when they applied for statehood sometime in the future.
This would be the last major compromise. And in fact certain parts of it—like the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that Northern states return escaped slaves to their masters in the South—inflamed divisions between the North and the South even more. The 1850s were marked by the North becoming aware that its continued development as a capitalist society meant breaking free from the slave power, and the slavocracy increasingly realizing that its domination of the country was threatened. In other words, the unity between the capitalist North and the slave South was breaking down. National politics reflected this. Even though General Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party was elected president in 1848, after the war, he would be the last elected Whig president, as his party split apart between North and South over the Fugitive Slave Act.
Even many Northern Democrats could not stomach the slave power domination of the country and their party. There was a series of parties that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1856, John C. Frémont was the first candidate to run for president for the Republican Party. He ran on the slogan of “Free soil, free speech and Frémont,” which was in explicit opposition to the slavocracy. Although it was by no means an abolitionist party, the Republican Party understood that in order to safeguard the growth of capitalism, the slave power would have to be checked and the growth of slave territory stopped. The 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that Congress could not restrict slavery—and also declared that black people had no rights in the United States—made the Civil War almost inevitable. In 1860, when the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected on the platform of stopping the expansion of slavery, the South declared that it was seceding from the Union in order to guarantee slavery, which they wrote into the Confederacy’s constitution. Or as Marx put it, “the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery” (“The Civil War in the United States,” 1861).
Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say also that the Southern slavocracy maintained its designs on Mexico. During the Civil War, northern Mexico became an important geographical point for the Confederacy to try to break the Union blockade and sell cotton to Europe. According to Eugene Genovese, the Confederacy had plans to march “into New Mexico with the intention of proceeding to Tucson and then swinging south to take Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, and Tamaulipas,” and “the Confederate government tried to deal with Santiago Vidaurri, the strong man of Coahuila and Nuevo León, to bring northern Mexico into the Confederacy.” At about the same time, Mexico itself was in the middle of its own war, in which Benito Juárez fought against French monarchists and Mexican conservatives like Vidaurri as he attempted to modernize Mexico.
Finish the Civil War!
The Civil War was the Second American Revolution, the last of the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions. It took four years and the deaths of some 600,000 Americans—almost as many as those who died in all other U.S. wars—to at last break the slave power. Included in this struggle were the almost 200,000 black troops who fought on the side of the Union. The North’s victory in 1865 ushered in the most democratic period in U.S. history, Reconstruction. The war, by ensuring the development of American capitalism, also laid the basis for the development of the American working class—the power that can get rid of capitalism. Black workers today make up a very important component of this working class.
The Northern capitalists betrayed Reconstruction and the promise of black freedom, as they pursued the economic advantages of their victory over the Confederacy, rather than advancing black rights. Toward the end of the century, the vicious segregation of Jim Crow was imposed. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie moved from the consolidation of power nationally to the pursuit of imperialist power abroad—not least against Mexico and other Latin American countries.
Bloody American imperialism is the enemy of workers and the oppressed here in the United States and around the world. And this remains the case with President Obama, who is now planning to increase by 50 percent the imperialist troops occupying Afghanistan. The liberation of workers and peasants in Mexico and Latin America today requires socialist revolutions throughout the Americas, from the Yukon to the Yucatán, from Alaska to Argentina. We in the Spartacist League/U.S. are dedicated to forging a revolutionary class-struggle workers party that will be able to lead the working class to power in the U.S., which is what is necessary to smash U.S. imperialism. The fight for black liberation is central to this task. And that’s why we raise the slogan to “Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!”
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