The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   

 

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/

Peter Paul Markin comment:

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics. 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the American bourgeois political upheavals that led to Chicago hell in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits that a student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought.

That last, the student-based vision of the world got us into more trouble than expected when we confronted the bourgeois order straight-up and they came back on us with a vengeance. There must have been about eighty million ideas around like "students" were the new working class, the "red university that would be the central organizing axis of the new dispensation, and in the hubristic nature of youth we just fell in on ourselves as the obvious vanguard since that is what youth, youth in America had always done (that frame of reference, short-sighted as usual was based on the many youth, heroic youth who stood down the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) in San Francisco, and shouldered the weight in the anti-nuclear, civil rights and early anti-Vietnam War movements. But, and here is where the May Days in Paris is instructive, never really threatened to shut down the government or any of its policies by its actions despite nation-wide strikes on most campuses toward the end. A few, a relatively few, did learn other forces were necessary to mobilize if we were to beat down the old order but that was too late, the ebb had carried the day and most of the forces that were animated by the upheavals of the 1960s walked away learning no real lessons about what was necessary to really "turn the world upside down."                 

Those scorned old leftists, mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on who survived the 1950s red scare or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare and the Stalinists had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us. Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face- rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress.

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.
Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

***************
A Frank Jackman comment (2014):

Recently I wrote a short piece in a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back, the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still holds true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days, now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s,  made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against it should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   
A Markin disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner- George Grosz

 

 

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams, like Joan Miro and his infernal eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots, and like poor maddened George Groz.        

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….            

I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

 

SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)
(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me

when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"

You don't go looking back,

you don't hold the cards to stack,

you mean what you say.

Sweet forgiveness, you help me see

I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be

When you hold me close and say

"That's all over, and I still love you"

There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said

Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head

Sweet forgiveness, dear God above

I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love

Someone who'll hold our hand,

and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"

 
AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me

I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you

I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears

but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last

is the love that you've given to me

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me

Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Now while I don’t want to get into a dissertation about the thing, you know, that old medieval Thomist argument about how many angels can fit on the end of a needle or get into playing sided in the struggle between pliant god-like angels and defiant devil-like angels in the battles in the heavens over who would rule the universe that the great revolutionary English poet from the time of the English revolution of blessed memory, John Milton, when he got seriously exercised over that notion in Paradise Lost I do believe we our faced, vocally faced with someone who could go mano y mano with whoever wants to enter into the lists against her.

Yes, and I know too that that “angel” thing has been played out much too much in the world music scene, the popular music scene, you know rock and roll in the old days and now mainly hip-hop what with in my day every kind of angel from some over the top earth angel that had some guy all swooning, Johnny Angel who just couldn’t keep one girl happy but had to play the field, going to the distaff side (nice old-fashioned word, right) some honkey-tonk angel who was lured into the night life by her own hubris, Hank’s morbid angel of death that seemed to hover over his every move until the big crash out, and my favorite, no question, teen angel, some, I don’t know how else to say it, some bimbo whose boyfriend’s car got stuck on a railroad track, the boyfriend got her out and yet she went running back, running back to get his two-bit class ring, a ring that he had probably given to half the girls in school before her, and did not come out alive, RIP, sister, RIP. No, I will take my Arky angel, take her with a little sinning on the side if you can believe there is any autobiographical edge to some of the songs, take her with a little forlorn lilt in her voice, take her since she has seen the seedy side of life. Yeah, that is how I like my angels.                  

Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue, the blues down in the depths when you have to just hear her, flower in hair, maybe junked up, maybe clean, hell, it did not matter, when she hit her stride, and she “spoke” you out of your miseries, but maybe just a passing blue I need to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice she would be the one I would want to hear.    

I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a folksinger-songwriter Greg Brown tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeler discovered around same time as the original Carter Family in the late 1920s, on his tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it maybe that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.

Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? sings-song type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war. The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world” and wound up in flop houses, half-way houses, and along railroad “jungle” camps and guys who could not get over not going into the service to experience the decisive event of our generation.

Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)  

Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely here to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?

Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.

Iris, here is my proposal, once again. If you get tired of fishing the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless CD.

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues 

 

 

Listen up. No, I am not black but here is what I know. Know because my grandfather, son of old Irish immigrants before the turn of the 20^th century, the ethnic immigrant group which provided a hard core of police officers in the City of Boston and surrounding towns back then, and now too for that matter, told me some stuff (and you can get a good sense of although fictionalized in Dennis Lehane’s novel, The Given Day. The “surrounding towns” part as they left the Irish ghettoes in South Boston and Dorchester, the latter now very heavily filled with all kinds of people of color, and moved first to Quincy and Weymouth then for some to the Irish Rivera further south in Marshfield and places like that). Those Irish also provided their fair share of “militants” in the “so-called” Boston Police Strike of 1919.

Here is what he said when I was a kid and has been etched in my brain since my youth. Cops are not workers, cops are around to protect property, not yours but that of the rich, cops are not your friends because when the deal goes down they will pull the hammer down on you no matter how “nice” they are, no matter how many old ladies and old gentlemen they have escorted across the street (and no matter how friendly they seem when they are cadging donuts and… at so coffee shop on their beat).  And every time I forget that wisdom they, the police remind me, for example, when they raided the Occupy Boston encampment late one night in October 2011 arresting many, including a phalanx of Veterans   for Peace defenders, for no other reason that the “authorities” did not want the campsite extended beyond the original grounds and then unceremoniously razed the place in December 2011 when the restraining order was lifted without batting an eye.

Now this is pretty damn familiar to the audience I am trying to address, those who are raising holy hell in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York (and as I write about North Charleston down in South Carolina) about police brutality, let’s get this right,  about police murder under the color of law. And those who support the, well, let’s call a thing by its right name, rebellion.

Here is what my grandfather, or my father for that matter, did not have to tell me. They, and I ask that you refer to the graphic above, DID NOT need when I came of age for such discussions that I had to be careful of the cops as I walked down the street minding my own business(unless of course I was in a demonstration rasing holy hell about some war or other social injustice but I had that figured already). Did not need to tell me that I was very likely to be pulled over while “walking while Irish.” Did not suggest, as the graphic wisely points out, that I would need to have more identification than an NSA agent to walk down my neighborhood streets. Did not need to tell me that I would suffer all kinds of indignities for breathing.                        

He, they, did not have to tell me a lot of things that every black adult has to tell every black child about the ways on the world in the United States. But remember what that old man, my grandfather, did tell me, cops are not workers, cops are not friends, cops are working the  other side of the street. That old man would also get a chuckle out of the slogan-“Fuck The Cops.” If more people, if more white people especially, would think that way maybe we could curb the bastards in a little.  

 

  

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War- In Honor Of The Heroic Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment….  To Defend One’s Own    

 

 

In the wake of the travesties of justice in the Michael Brown murder case where a grand jury refused to indict a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and the Eric Garner stranglehold murder case in New York City where the same thing happened (and which has happened repeatedly over the years these two cases being egregious and the cause of blacks and their supporters saying enough) during Black History Month (hell, all year) it is appropriate to talk about the right of black self-defense (and of necessity at times, it is no accident that there is now renewed interest in groups like the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams author of  Negroes With Guns, and his left-wing NAACP chapter in North Carolina and a recent book describing heroic, and mostly unheralded due to the non-violence hype associated with the Martin Luther King-led segment of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s, armed self-defense actions in aid of Mississippi freedom fighters by local black militants). And when we talk about that issue the heroic struggles of the Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment easily come to mind.     

While there is no obvious link between the cases today and the heroic actions of black volunteers to defend their own by enlisting in the battle to eradicate slavery during the Civil War that is a matter of failure of imagination. From the very beginning of slavery in America, which means from the very beginning of the settlements, whites have feared, feared beyond reason at times, blacks, black men armed, or posing any kind of physical threat. In the case of the 54^th the Southerners during the Civil War went crazy when confronted with the idea of armed black men fighting for their freedom and treated any black captives brutally as no more than chattel to be executed upon capture and not as prisoners of war from an organized opposing army. No better example of that blind hatred by South Carolina whites thinking there was no greater dishonor came after the battle before Fort Wagner when the rebels buried the white commander of the regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had fallen there with the dead black soldiers he commanded in a mass grave. (His high abolitionist parents, and many Northerners thought there was no greater honor when asked later whether they wanted to remove his body from that site.)        

And so it has gone throughout the last one hundred plus years from black sharecroppers defending themselves during Jim Crow times, Robert F. Williams down in North Carolina calling for armed self-defense against the marauding white racists during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the Deacons for Justice down in Louisiana, and later the Black Panthers from Oakland to Boston. All standing for their right to defend their own by any means necessary. And all getting the eternal hatred of those whites who fear militantly political blacks who wish to defend the community. And that is where the current uprising being formed mostly by the young, young blacks and their allies, under the general name Black Lives Matter should think about history and about all the options.

[One hundred and fifty years later there is no more fitting memorial to those heroic defenders of the 54^th than the frieze on Beacon Street in Boston across from the State House commemorating their valor. Every time I go by the frieze, usually when we are demonstrating for or against some social policy of the day at the State House or at Park Street I stop and look at the determined faces of the soldiers as they march toward their destiny. Look particularly at the righteous grizzled old soldier by the head of Shaw’s horse marching with the “kids” to bring freedom and justice. Yeah, that was the place for old men to be during those hard tack Civil War time times. Today too, women too.]     

The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side At The End-The First International's Salute To Abraham Lincoln On His Re-Election In 1864 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

 

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

 

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

 

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the third year of which we are commemorating this month.

 

Below is the First International's Address to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election in 1864

 

The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams January 28, 1865 ^[A]

---

Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

---

 

Sir:

 

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 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. ^[B]

 

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

---

^[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

^[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."

---

Ambassador Adams Replies

Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

 

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 been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

 

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

 

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

 

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

 

Charles Francis Adams