Seth: The effects of the American Civil War spurred a major "moral impetus" for the U.S. working class, you write, citing Marx. Which writings of his have been most useful in your research and teaching, and why?
David: My use of particular parts of Marx's work very much depends on what I am working on. For example, my first book was (with the late Philip Foner) a history of movements for a shorter working day in the United States and it sent me continually back to Capital and especially to Marx's incomparable sections on the hours of labor. In my undergraduate classes I am most apt to assign Marx's very early manuscripts on alienation, often alongside Herman Melville's short stories on labor, and for graduate students I frequently suggest Marx's later writings on ethnology, so brilliantly evoked in Franklin Rosemont's "Karl Marx & the Iroquois." Both of these choices show how passionately Marx hoped for alternatives to the misery of the capitalist order, for new worlds. I'm also very much a partisan of Marx's writings on slavery and the Civil War, especially those on U.S. slavery in relation to both capitalism and misery. Unfortunately, the work of Eugene Genovese, who for a time advertised himself as a Marxist, spread the notion among many U.S. historians that Marxism places slavery outside of the capitalist world and even as an honorable alternative to it. Reading Marx on the U.S. quickly dispels such a view. full: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/sandronsky231105.html
