Marx on the Westward expansion in the US It would be a mistake to impose upon the real history of the United States a model of development derived from Capital's account of primitive accumulation in Western Europe, as Marx himself says: 'The chapter on primitive accumulation [in Capital] claims no more to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order. ... He [a Russian, not Louis P] absolutely insists on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed'. Karl Marx: a letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski. This appears in "Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and 'The Peripheries of Capitalism" by Teodor Shanin, Monthly Review 1983 In fact Marx wrote extensively on the Westward expansion in the US, which, he argued operated under different principles in North and South, neither of which could be argued to be simply capitalistic. In the South he considered the expansion wholly regressive, and indicative of the perverse system of the plantation, that was incapable of intensive growth, and only increased production extensively through the conquest of more territory. Fortunately, he argued, the perverse development of the South was offset by the wholly progressive and free development of the North-West. These immigrant communities were close to Marx's heart. Many thousands of his comrades in the German democratic revolution had fled to America, such as his friend and correspondent Joseph Weydemer, who served as an officer in the Union forces. These immigrant communities were not yet reduced to the level of wage slavery, as the Western frontier provided an escape route from that fate. The following is taken from the Collected Works vol 19 'the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveowners' pressure, had undergone, for half a century, and make it return to the true principles of its development. ... there was one broad statistical and economic fact indicating that the abuse of the Federal Union by the slave interest had approached the point from which it would have to recede forcibly... That fact was the growth of the North-West, the immense strides its population had made from 1850 to 1860, and the new and reinvigourating influence it could not but bear on the destinies of the United States.' P10 'He [Louis Bonaparte, not Proyect] knows that the true people of England, of France, of Germany, of Europe, consider the cause of the United States as their own cause, as the cause of liberty, and that, despite all paid sophistry, they consider the soil of the United States as the free soil of the landless millions of Europe, as their land of promise, now to be defended sword in hand, from the sordid grasp of the slaveholder.' P29 'As the population of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly.' P40 'It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the Northwest, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states - a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old Northeastern states.' P42 'The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders.' P42 On the Allegheny Mountains: 'every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already, for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can be cultivated with success only by small farmers.' P44 'Virginia now forms a great cantonment where the main army of secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. In the North West highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15 000, whilst the twenty times as large free population consists of free farmers.' P45 Fraternally -- James Heartfield
