Re: [Marxism] Engels and Mexican War
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == [This is another delayed post started some days ago but only completed now.] I must confess that I did not understand Louis's blog post on this issue. I can't tell what is his, what he is quoting from someone else, or what he is summarizing from someone else. I say this in the hopes that he will either revise and clarify what's there or provide a reader's guide. + + + Having gotten that off my chest, let me state what I think needs to be the starting point for discussing this. And that is, a clear, unambiguous recognition that Marx and Engels were wrong. And not wrong in some detail or aspect. Quite thoroughly, sincerely, and completely wrong. On the national question as a whole. Their basic postulates were a) That capitalism was minimizing and eliminating national differences by homgenizing the condition of what was becoming the most important and rapidly growing segment of the population, the proletarians; b) That the less advanced countries would follow the path of development of the more advanced ones. c) That national exploitation, the transfer of value from one (subjugated) nation to another (dominant) nation had been a major factor in the emergence of capitalism but the mechanisms of the capitalist economy tended to eliminate these sorts of issues, and economic exploitation was reduced to being class exploitation. There were good reasons beyond the limited view from a European perch for Marx and Engels to draw these conclusions, above all the French and American revolutions. In Europe, they believed/hoped that Germany would soon follow the French road and then Italy and eventually --why not?-- Russia. As for the colonies, what was notable was not just U.S. independence, but that pretty much all of Spain's colonies in the Americas had also won their independence, and though they were pretty stagnant at the moment they'd soon be dragged along in the current of capitalist development. But with hindsight we can say, we MUST say, that Marx and Engels were wrong at a very fundamental level. The development of capitalism between and among national socio-economic formations is not LINEAR but, on the contrary, dialectical, impregnated with contradictions. Developed countries do not show their future to the developing countries. On the contrary, the developed countries MAKE the colonial and semicolonial countries underdeveloped and BLOCK them becoming more like the advanced nations. (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa isn't just a clever book title.) But if this is true, then it also inevitably follows that Capital is wrong, or at the very best, one sided and incomplete. Because there is no way for Europe to underdevelop Africa or the Americas or India or China WITHOUT the massive transfer of value FROM the colonial and semicolonial countries TO the developing countries. Yet this is treated in Capital in a peripheral way. True, you WILL find basic mechanisms in Marx's economic works, from simple looting (primitive accumulation) to unequal exchange (in volume three, if I remember right, as a corollary to what happens when you have enterprises with different organic compositions of capital) but it is never worked through in the systematic and careful way that other economic relations are worked through. It is common to find among Marxists rationalizations to the effect of that Marx and Engels were right for their time, but later things changed, especially with the rise of imperialism at the dawn of the 20th Century. But the big change then wasn't that Western Europe STARTED raping the rest of the world, that had been going on for 400 years. The CHANGE was that if you were an imperialist power or wannabe, and you wanted to do the raping and looting thing, there no longer were any unclaimed territories in the Third World, you had to steal your victims from some (usually) European power. Like the US campaign against Spain to take over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, facilitated by the blows dealt to the Spanish by Cuban and Puerto Rican patriots who were fighting for independence. What emerged at the end of the 1800's wasn't foreign exploitation of the Third World, that was already there, but wars BETWEEN the imperialists over who would get what territory. The modalities of European exploitation of the Third World changed and evolved over the decades and centuries, but there was no huge shift in them from the 1870's and 1880's to the last few years of the 1890's. The big change was in a sense DOMESTIC: US capitalism had become pervasive and consolidated enough in what are now the 48 contiguous states that it began a decisive push to expand overseas, beginning with Hawaii and then the Spanish colonies. But at the same
Re: [Marxism] Engels and Mexican War
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Surely they were wrong on their own terms as evidenced by the fact that the main promoters of this war were the slave owning interests and their allies who did nothing to promote industrialization, bourgois democracy or anything else vaguely progressive, but came up with this land grab to expand slavery. Then again, they were young radicals living on another continent with no personal knowledge of American society, writing about American society the way American might lecture about the Austrian Empire and Kossuth. Although not a slave owner himself, Stephen Douglas (for the life of me I can't understand the begrudgingly charitable view towards this racist clown by mainstream historians as a Great American) was outspoken in promoting this war and opposing the N---gism (a term he would use in speeches in the Senate in conjunction with transcendentalism and abolitionism in rattling off the ostensibly weirdo theories of his oppponents like Sumner and Lincoln) on the basis that Mexicans were in no way white people, but were rather a mongrel race who had no rights whites needed to respect, being an apt and worthy object of civilizing conquest by Yankee big brother. Moreover, Douglas and other allies of the Slave Power saw Cuba, Central America and the Caribbean as similar objects, even more ripe for the taking, since King Cotton would grow there more easily. By the time of the Secession crisis of 1861, however, Marc and Engels had figured this out and gotten themselves set right however. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Engels and Mexican War
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == [1847 speech by Charles Sumner opposing the Mexican War courtesy of the Spartacist League] A war of conquest is bad; but the present war has darker shadows. It is a war for the extension of slavery over a territory which has already been purged by Mexican authority from this stain and curse. Fresh markets of human beings are to be established; further opportunities for this hateful traffic are to be opened; the lash of the overseer is to be quickened in new regions; and the wretched slave is to be hurried to unaccustomed fields of toil. It can hardly be believed that now, more than eighteen hundred years since the dawn of the Christian era, a government, professing the law of charity and justice, should be employed in war to extend an institution which exists in defiance of these sacred principles. It has already been shown that the annexation of Texas was consummated for this purpose. The Mexican War is a continuance, a prolongation, of the same efforts; and the success which crowned the first emboldens the partisans of the latter, who now, as before, profess to extend the area of freedom, while they are establishing a new sphere for slavery. The authorities already adduced in regard to the objects of annexation illustrate the real objects of the Mexican War. Declarations have also been made, upon the floor of Congress, which throw light upon it. Mr. Sims, of South Carolina, has said that he had no doubt that every foot of territory we shall permanently occupy, south of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, will be slave territory; and, in reply to his colleague, Mr. Burt, who inquired whether this opinion was in consequence of the known determination of the Southern people that their institutions shall be carried into that country, if acquired, said, in words that furnish a key to the whole project, It is founded on the known determination of the Southern people that their institutions shall be carried there; it is founded in the laws of God, written on the climate and soil of the country: nothing but slave labor can cultivate, profitably, that region of country. But it is not merely proposed to open new markets for slavery: it is also designed to confirm and fortify the Slave Power. Here is a distinction which should not fail to be borne in mind. Slavery is odious as an institution, if viewed in the light of morals and Christianity. On this account alone we should refrain from rendering it any voluntary support. But it has been made the basis of a political combination, to which has not inaptly been applied the designation of the Slave Power. The slaveholders of the country - who are not supposed to exceed 200,000 or at most 300,000 in numbers - by the spirit of union which animates them, by the strong sense of a common interest, and by the audacity of their leaders, have erected themselves into a new estate, as it were, under the Constitution. Disregarding the sentiments of many of the great framers of that instrument, who notoriously considered slavery as temporary, they proclaim it a permanent institution; and, with a strange inconsistency, at once press its title to a paramount influence in the general government, while they deny the right of that government to interfere, in any way, with its existence. According to them, it may never be restrained or abolished by the general government, though it may be indefinitely extended. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
