invalidusernamelol [he/him]

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2020

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  • Im just saying that you can see the influence there Civil War had on Marx’s later works. He realized that American slaves had much more in common with the proletariat than he previously saw (tacit abandonment of the concept of lumpenproletariat).

    He also saw that the working classes of both America and England were capable of understanding longer term goals that may be immediately harmful to them (striking to prevent the supply of raw material from a slave source).

    It has been a while since I’ve read the book though, so I’m a bit rusty. I just know that you get to see a lot of his internal thought processes hitting points that were later adopted by ML leaders.



  • Only recommending M&E because they had a large influence on all Communist movements (obviously), and this was after the Manifesto, so you get to see a lot of the “newer” ideas taking hold (the ones that evolved into ML/“tankie” theory).

    For understanding the Civil War from the perspective of the slaves, anything else is probably much better since Marx was interfacing mostly with American and English workers at the time. I will say that all of this ended up combining into ML over time though. The US Civil War had a massive influence on all theory that came after.


  • I feel comfortable being blatantly sarcastic here lol. I’ve been telling people to read The Civil War in the United States by Marx for years on this site.

    Obviously the US Civil War had an effect on the revolutionary consciousness of the world. English workers were actively organizing against the textine owners and holding rallies/striking. Marx was running around documenting the working class movements in the North and in England.

    The positions of the Abolitionists were later absorbed by many Communists, and expanded on with the concepts of Wage Slavery. The black revolutionaries in America all built their consciousness in the context of the Civil War.

    Reconstruction is used frequently as an example of liberal failure and the need for an organized vanguard (“tankies”) to solidify the gains of revolution.

    Lenin’s dual revolution idea was derived from the failure of the American workers and liberated slaves to sieze power.