The American Civil War and Working Class Unity

“In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” (Marx)[1]

Introduction

The American Civil War (1861-65) was one of the most significant events for the working class, both in the US and internationally, in the period of capitalism’s progressive growth.

This was in many ways the first industrialised war and the carnage was certainly on an industrial scale: over one million casualties or 3 percent of the US population. Not until the Vietnam War did the total number of American deaths in foreign wars finally eclipse the number who died in the Civil War.

It is well known that Marx and Engels strongly backed a military victory for the Northern bourgeoisie in this bloody conflict, with Marx even penning an address from the First International personally congratulating Lincoln, “the single-minded son of the working class”, on his re-election.[2]

Given that the Communist Left has always stood for the most intransigent defence of internationalism, do we still believe this support for one side in a war between two capitalist factions was correct and if so for what reasons?

The aim of this article is not to try to deal with the whole subject of the Civil War but to contribute to a discussion on this question by setting out some key points for a Marxist understanding.

1. Why was the Civil War fought?

Slavery was integral to the genesis of capitalism but became an obstacle to its further progress

In a previous article[3] we saw how the English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America were founded by the merchants of the City of London on a commercial basis, primarily for the production of crops (tobacco and later, on a much larger scale, cotton) to be sold as commodities on the world market, and how the huge regimented labour force required for this early capitalist enterprise was ensured by using tens of thousands of men, women and children as slave labour.[4]Until the end of the 18th century the majority of these slaves were white Europeans.

Far from being a vestige of feudalism or a historical anomaly, forms of slavery were integral to the genesis of capitalism, especially in areas of the world like South America and the Caribbean as well as North America. What was specific to slavery in North America was, first, the change that took place in the main form, from a dependence on convict, forced and indentured labour by black and white slaves to racially-based chattel slavery. This change was motivated by the growing shortage of these forms of labour and the availability of cheap black slave labour from the Atlantic slave trade, but above all by the need of the colonial ruling class to find a more effective means of controlling black and white labour and preventing a dangerous class struggle against private property.

Second, and in global historical terms more significant, was the pivotal role that plantation slavery in the US came to play in the development of industrial capitalism, which for Marx depended as much on the existence of plantation slavery in the United States as it did on the development of machinery; in fact slavery was just as much the ‘pivot’ of bourgeois industry as machinery and credit because, very succinctly, “Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry.”[5]

But if slavery was integral to the genesis of capitalism, over time it became an obstacle to its further progress. . .

https://en.internationalism.org/content/16709/american-civil-war-and-struggle-working-class-unity