Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

the length of the working day in Das Kapital, published in 1867.
89
 
Th
  e early US labor movement, like Britain’s, sought, and some-
times won, laws limiting the length of the working day. In the years 
1864–8 this campaign achieved a new scale and intensity in the 
United States. Some employers argued that this would be ruinous, 
since they made all their profi ts in the last two hours of the day—an 
argument Marx refuted. He showed that the more effi
  cient employ-
ers would be able to thrive under such regulation. As we will see 
below, struggles over this issue were to play a major role in US labor 
organizing in the postbellum world. Th
  e eight-hour day movement 
was important to Marx because it expanded the free time available 
to the laborer. 
Marx was well aware that the forced labor of the slave meant 
very long hours for all, whether old or young, male or female. And 
in the scarce hours left to them the slaves were as far as possible 
denied uses of their time that would pose any risk to the system. 
Th
  us rigorous laws sought to prevent slaves from learning to read 
or write, or to venture outside the plantation without a pass. Th
 e 
wageworker, even though intensely exploited, had greater opportu-
nities for education and communication. When Joseph Wedemeyer 
organized the Arbeitsbund that organization sought to develop the 
workers’ access to culture, to press for universal public education, 
and to oppose ”all laws that violate anyone’s natural rights, like 
temperance, Sabbath, or other prohibitionist laws.” 
90
 
Th
  e discretion available to the wageworker in the sphere of con-
sumption, culture, and reproduction was registered as a vital point 
in Marx’s work for Das Kapital. Slaves were superexploited because 
they did not receive any monetary reward for toil that yielded a huge 
fl ow of premium commodities. With little or no cash, they had no 
claim on social wealth. Although the wageworkers received much 
less than the value of their work, they were able to shape their own 
“extended reproduction,” that is, not only to reproduce themselves 
and their families in ways of their own choosing but also to achieve 
a level of social communication beyond that—for example, by buy-
ing newspapers and even helping to produce them.
 
91
 Plantation 
89 Raya 
Dunayevskaya, 
Marxism and Freedom, London 1971, pp. 81–91.
90 Levine, 
Th
  e Spirit of 1848, p. 145.
91  See, for example, Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of 
58  an unfinished revolution

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slaves were, by contrast, permitted only “simple reproduction” within 
a narrow locality—a subsistence defi ned by allowances from the 
planter and by what they could themselves produce in garden plots. 
Marx and the abolitionists sometimes went too far in attributing 
an abject state to the slaves. Th
  ey were not suffi
  ciently aware of the 
reality of a slave community that produced its own culture of sur-
vival and resistance. But they were nevertheless quite right to indict 
the tight invigilation of the slaves, the narrow space allowed them, 
the daily violence of the slave system, and the constant disruption 
of the slave community as the plantation economy advanced. Th
 e 
controversies over North American slavery brought home to Marx 
the relatively broader possibilities of class struggle open to the 
wageworker even in normal times. 
Th
  e political antecedents and consequences of slavery and eman-
cipation in the US republic also had a deep impact on Marx and 
other nineteenth-century socialists. Marx was far from admiring 
the US political system, which he regarded as continuing to exhibit 
extreme degrees of corruption, demagoguery, and humbug. But he 
was impressed by the vast scale and almost elemental character 
of the social struggles that had been unleashed there. Curiously, 
Marx and Engels devoted little attention to the aspects of the 
Constitution and its functioning that rendered it so vulnerable to 
abuses. For example, they did not note the vagaries of the electoral 
college or the indirect election of senators. Nevertheless Lincoln’s 
conduct during the Civil War crisis illustrated important points, in 
Marx’s view. Th
  e challenge of a “slaveholders’ revolt” justifi ed resort 
to military means. Karl Kautsky and other Marxists were later to 
argue that any workers’ government elected within a bourgeois dem-
ocratic regime should expect there to be the capitalist equivalent 
of a “slaveholders’ revolt” and should prepare to suppress it by any 
means necessary. Lincoln’s preparedness to suspend habeas corpus 
and to impose presidential Reconstruction showed that democracy 
might need to be defended by emergency measures. Th
 e example 
of the Paris Commune reminded Marx of the term “dictatorship 
of the proletariat,” a term that he had not used between 1852 and 
Production,” published as an appendix to Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, [Penguin 
Marx Library], London 1976, p. 1033.
introduction  59

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1871. Like the Romans, Marx saw dictatorship as diff erent from 
tyranny in that the dictator wielded extraconstitutional powers for a 
brief emergency period. Lincoln’s actions were justifi ed by socialists 
using such arguments as Hal Draper points out in his discussion of 
the evolution of Marx’s ideas.
92
At the close of the Civil War, Engels wrote to Wedemeyer with 
the following prophecy: 
Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political and social devel-
opment of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound 
to receive an impetus from which it will acquire quite a diff erent 
position in world history within the shortest possible time, and a 
use will then soon be found for the army and navy with which the 
war is providing it.
93
 
Northern capitalism did indeed receive great impetus from the war, 
after which it embarked on headlong continental expansion. For 
three decades this proved to be such an absorbing task that little 
was done to project US power outside the country’s own borders. 
William Seward wanted Caribbean acquisitions, but the Radical 
Republicans were not interested.
94
 Troops were sent to repress the 
resistance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Apache, and steps were 
taken to modernize the navy, but the terrible losses of the Civil War 
bequeathed a great distrust of military adventures that lasted for a 
generation. 
Instead, the main focus was on three intimately interlinked proc-
esses that were of supreme interest to Marx and Engels: the advance 
of capitalism in North America, the unfolding of an epic class 
struggle, and the progress made toward building a genuine work-
ers’ party. Th
  e outcome of this mighty contest was to determine the 
possibility, timing and character of any US bid for empire.
92 Hal 
Draper, 
Th
  e Dictatorship of the Proletariat, New York 1987, p. 15.
93  Engels to Joseph Wedemeyer, November 24, 1864, Marx and Engels, Th e 
Civil War in the United States.
94 Walter 
LaFeber, 
Th
  e New Empire: an Interpretation of American Expansion, 
Ithaca 1963, pp. 24–32.
60  an unfinished revolution

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