Thursday, December 05, 2019

*From The Archives-On Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln And The American Civil War-A Guest Discussion

Click on title to link to a discussion about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and the early Marxist movement that hailed Lincoln's leadership of the 'Second American Revolution'.

Markin comment:

I wish to highlight the following paragraph from the "Workers Vanguard" reply to Joel in the linked article above:

"Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role."

Every radical, every revolutionary, hell, every serious liberal should think long and hard about this paragraph. The progressive days of the capitalist system are over, long over. Every attempt, including many in the old days by this writer, to deny that reality and try to forge a strategic alliance (as opposed to an occasional episodic united front on a specific issue) with even ONE representative of that class today, in 2009, is political folly, or worst. And that is true even if that ONE representative is the high-flying Barack Obama whom many are still giving a political 'free ride' despite his much demonstrated undying devotion to the preservation of the American empire and the international capitalist system.

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