Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

more radical measures just as the ending of the war was marked by 
a multiplication of movements and demands.
CONSEQUENCES OF VICTORY
Marx and Engels expected more from the victory of the Union 
than an end to slavery, momentous as that was. Th
  ey also expected 
the producers to assert new political and social rights. If the freed-
men moved simply from chattel slavery to wage slavery, if they were 
denied the right to vote, or to organize, or to receive an education, 
then the term emancipation would be a mockery. Some Union com-
manders were already settling freedmen on public or confi scated 
land. Th
  e decision to set up a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and 
Abandoned Lands in March 1865 seemed to mark a recognition 
that the occupying power was to take responsibility for an extraor-
dinary situation. 
As it turned out, the era of Reconstruction did indeed bring a 
radical surge in both South and North, with the Republican party 
seeking to keep abreast of events by adopting the ideas of radical 
abolitionists, black as well as white, and with pressure being exerted 
by a shifting coalition of labor unions, social reformers, African 
American conventions, feminists, and last but not least, the mul-
tiplying American sections of the IWA. Th
  e martyred president’s 
acknowledgment of its earlier address, and the warm, not to say 
fulsome, nature of Marx’s tribute to the “son of the working class” 
helped to make the International a quite respectable and visible 
body. Th
  e post–Civil War radicalization in North America in some 
ways may be compared with the British experience of slave emanci-
pation and home political reform in the 1830s.
83
 In both countries, 
abolitionism and the “free labor” doctrine seemed at a certain junc-
ture to consecrate wage labor and its central role in the capitalist 
order, only to give rise to popular movements—Chartism in Britain, 
83  I sketch British slave emancipation in Th e Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 
London 1988, pp. 294–330. For a brilliant reading of the social meanings of 
British abolitionism, see David Brion Davis’s Th e Problem of Slavery in the Age 
of Revolution, New York 1975, and Slavery and Human Progress, New York 
1984.
introduction  55

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a wave of class struggles and popular radicalism in the US—that 
challenged the given form of the bourgeois order. Although the 
banner of free labor expressed bourgeois hegemony at one moment, 
it furnished a means of mobilizing against it at another. In one 
register, the ideal of free labor encouraged the aspiration of workers 
to become independent small producers, with their own workshops 
and farms. Hence the Republican slogan “Free soil, free labor, free 
men” and its embodiment in the Homestead Act of 1862.
84
 But 
in the United States of the 1860s and 1870s, as in the Britain of 
the 1840s, there were increasing numbers of wageworkers who 
did not want to become farmers and who looked to a collective 
improvement in the rights of working people. David Montgomery, 
taking a sample of over seventy labor organizers of the later 1860s 
about whom information is available, found that most of them were 
second-generation wageworkers, about half of them British immi-
grants. Th
 eir eff orts focused not on acquiring land but on regulating 
the conditions of labor and securing political and industrial repre-
sentation of the workingman.
85
 Of course some workers did take 
up the off er of land, but many realized that this could prove a trap. 
Already by the middle and late 1860s the farmers’ Grange move-
ment was complaining about exorbitant railroad freight rates and 
cutthroat competition from large producers.
David Fernbach points out that the “Address to President 
Lincoln” was one of the fi rst public acts of the International.
86
 
Lincoln’s reply was a publicity coup. Moreover, the campaign to 
radicalize the resistance to Southern secession—to turn the Civil 
War into a social revolution—seems to have had a major impact 
on Marx’s thinking and vocabulary. Th
  e addresses written by Marx 
for the International, including the association’s own inaugural 
address, make repeated use of the term “emancipation,” a word that 
84 Th
  e classic study of the free labor doctrine is Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free 
Labor, Free Men: Th
  e Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, New 
York 1970.
85 David 
Montgomery, 
Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 
1862–1872, New York 1967.
86 Karl 
Marx, 
“Introduction,” 
Th
 e First International and After, Political 
Writings Vol. 3, edited and introduced by David Fernbach, London 1974, 
p. 14.
56  an unfinished revolution

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Marx used in his early writings but which did not fi gure  in  the 
Communist Manifesto or in his writings in the 1850s. Marx’s return 
to the concept also involved a modifi cation of the way it was used 
by abolitionists. For most abolitionists the word emancipation con-
jured up the idea of an Emancipator, an external agent carrying out 
the process of liberation. Marx believed that the new working class 
would be the agent of its own liberation. He did sometimes take 
note of slave resistance and slave revolt, but he did not study the 
Haitian example and tended to believe that slaves needed external 
deliverance. Given that people of color were a minority—albeit a 
large one—in the Southern US, this was very likely to be the case 
in North America. But the notion of emancipation also contains 
within it the idea that the person or social group to be emanci-
pated is self-standing, capable of exercising freedom, and has no 
need of an exploiter. Marx had always seen the modern industrial 
working class as the fi rst exploited class that—because of the social 
and political rights it had, or would, conquer, and because it was 
schooled and organized by capitalism itself—could take its destiny 
into its own hands. Th
  e agent here was the “collective worker,” all 
those who contributed to social labor. Marx argues in the IWA’s 
inaugural address that “the emancipation of the working class 
will be the task of the working class itself.” In a word, it will be 
self-emancipation. Marx saw the fostering of working-class organi-
zation as the International’s most crucial task, and he believed that 
class struggle would set up a learning process that would lead them 
sooner or later to see the need for working-class political power.
87
 
Even this modifi cation of the emancipation concept may have con-
tained some small, unconscious echo of Lincoln at Gettysburg, as 
when Marx commends the Paris Commune for embodying “the 
people acting for itself, by itself.”
88
 
Raya Dunayevskaya argues in Marxism and Freedom that the US 
agitation for an eight-hour day during and immediately after the 
Civil War prompted Marx to deepen and elaborate his analysis of 
87  As Carol Johnson points out, this leaves little room for long-term reform-
ism. See Carol Johnson, “Commodity Fetishism and Working Class Politics,” 
New Left Review, 1:119 (1980). 
88 Hal 
Draper, Karl Marx’s Th eory of Revolution, Vol. III, Th e Dictatorship of 
the Proletariat, New York 1986, p. 273.
introduction  57

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