Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution



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Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution



Marx and Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution
Robin Blackburn
London
 

 
New York


First published by Verso 2011
© the collection Verso 2011
Introduction © Robin Blackburn 2011
All rights reserved
Th
  e moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY  11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-722-1
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by MJ Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Vail


 
Contents
Introduction 
1
Abraham Lincoln 
First Inaugural Address 
105
Emancipation Proclamation 
115
Gettysburg Address 
119
Second Inaugural Address 
121
Karl Marx
Th
  e North American Civil War 
127
Th
  e American Question in England 
139
Th
  e Civil War in the United States 
151
Th
  e American Civil War 
161
A Criticism of American Aff airs 
173
Abolitionist Demonstrations in America 
177
Letters
Letter from Marx to Annenkov 
185
Letters between Marx and Engels 
189
Letters between Marx and Lincoln  
211
Articles
Woodhull & Clafl in 219
  Independence vs. Dependence! Which? 
219
  Th
  e Rights of Children 
222
  Interview with Karl Marx 
225


Conclusion to Black and White 233
Th
 omas Fortune
Preface to the American Edition of Th e Condition  
239
of the Working-Class in England
Frederick Engels
Speeches at the Founding of the Industrial 
251
Workers of the World
Lucy Parsons
Acknowledgments  259




 
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln:
An Unfi nished Revolution
In photographs Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln both look the 
part of the respectable Victorian gentleman. But they were almost 
diametrically opposed in their attitude toward what was called at 
the time the social question. Lincoln happily represented railroad 
corporations as a lawyer. As a politician he was a champion of free 
wage labor. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was a declared foe of 
capitalism who insisted that wage labor was in fact wage slavery
since the worker was compelled by economic necessity to sell his 
defi ning human attribute—his labor power—because if he did not, 
his family would soon face hunger and homelessness. 
Of course Marx’s critique of capitalism did not deny that it had 
progressive features, and Lincoln’s championing of the world of 
business did not extend to those whose profi ts stemmed directly 
from slaveholding. Each man placed a concept of unrewarded 
labor at the center of his political philosophy, and both opposed 
slavery on the grounds that it was intensively exploitative. Lincoln 
believed it to be his duty to defend the Union, which he saw as the 
momentous American experiment in representative democracy, by 
whatever means should prove necessary. Marx saw the democratic 
republic as the political form that would allow the working class 
to develop its capacity to lead society as a whole. He regarded US 
political institutions as a fl awed early version of the republican ideal. 
With their “corruption” and “humbug,” US political institutions did 
not off er a faithful representation of US society. Indeed, too often 
they supplied a popular veneer to the rule of the wealthy—with a 


bonus for slaveholders. But Marx’s conclusion was that they should 
become more democratic, broadening the scope of freedom of asso-
ciation, removing all forms of privilege, and extending free public 
education.
1
 
As a young man Marx had seriously considered moving to the 
United States, perhaps to Texas. He went so far as to write to the 
mayor of Trier, the town where he had been born, to request an 
Auswanderungschein, or emigration certifi cate. In the following year 
he wrote an article considering the ideas of the “American National 
Reformers,” whose comparatively modest original aims—the dis-
tribution of 160 acres of public land to anyone willing to cultivate 
it—he recognized as justifi ed and promising: “We know that this 
movement strives for a result that, to be sure, would further the 
industrialism of modern bourgeois society, but that … as an attack 
on land ownership … especially under the existing conditions 
… must drive it towards communism.”
2
 (Th
  e idea of distributing 
public land in this way did indeed have explosive implications, as 
we will see, and the new smallholders did often lack the resources 
needed to fl ourish, as Marx predicted, but his idea that they would 
therefore embrace “communism” was more than a stretch.) In 1849, 
writing as editor of Germany’s leading revolutionary democratic 
journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx praised the frugal budget 
and republican institutions of the United States in comparison 
with the bloated bureaucracy and unaccountability of the Prussian 
monarchy. 
3
Subsequently Marx remained fascinated by events in the US, and 
for ten years—1852 to 1861—he became the London correspond-
ent of one of its leading newspapers, the New York Daily Tribune
Th
  e invitation to write for the Tribune came from Charles Dana, 
its editor, who had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 when Marx was 
in charge of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx accepted Dana’s 
1 August Nimtz, Marx and Engels: Th eir Contribution to the Democratic 
Breakthrough, Albany 2000. 
2  Karl Marx, “American Soil and Communism,” in Karl Marx on America 
and the Civil War, Saul Padover, ed., New York 1971, pp. 3–6.
3 Karl 
Marx, 
“Th
  e American Budget and the Christian-German One,” in 
Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, pp. 9–12. For Marx’s emigration 
plans, see Padover’s Introduction.
2  an unfinished revolution


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