Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Dr. M.: Precisely. It is hardly likely, for instance, that we could 
hope to prosper in our war against capital if we derived our tactics, 
say, from the political economy of Mill. He has traced one kind of 
relationship between labor and capital. We hope to show that it is 
possible to establish another. 
R. L.: And the United States?
Dr. M.: Th
  e chief centers of our activity are for the present among 
the old societies of Europe. Many circumstances have hitherto 
tended to prevent the labor problem from assuming an all-absorbing 
importance in the United States. But they are rapidly disappearing, 
and it is rapidly coming to the front there with the growth, as in 
Europe, of a laboring class distinct from the rest of the community 
and divorced from capital.
R. L.: It would seem that in this country the hoped-for solution, 
whatever it may be, will be attained without the violent means of 
revolution. Th
  e English system of agitating by platform and press 
until minorities become converted into majorities is a hopeful 
sign.
Dr. M.: I am not so sanguine on that point as you. Th
 e English 
middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the 
verdict of the majority, so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the 
voting power. But mark me: as soon as it fi nds itself outvoted on 
what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slave-
owner’s war.
I have here given you as well as I can remember them the heads of 
my conversation with this remarkable man. I shall leave you to form 
your own conclusions. Whatever may be said for or against the 
probability of its complicity with the movement of the Commune, 
we may be assured that in the International Association the civi-
lized world has a new power in its midst with which it must soon 
come to a reckoning for good or ill.
August 12, 1871
interview with karl marx  231

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Conclusion to Black and White
Th
 omas Fortune
I know it is not fashionable for writers on economic questions to 
tell the truth, but the truth should be told, though it kill. When the 
wail of distress encircles the world, the man who is linked by “the 
touch of nature” which “makes the whole world kin” to the common 
destiny of the race universal, who hates injustice wherever it lifts up 
its head, who sympathizes with the distressed, the weak, and the 
friendless in every corner of the globe, such a man is morally bound 
to tell the truth as he conceives it to be the truth.
In these times, when the lawmaking and enforcing authority 
is leagued against the people, when great periodicals—monthly, 
weekly, and daily—echo the mandates or anticipate the wishes 
of the powerful men who produce our social demoralization, it 
becomes necessary for the few men who do not agree to the argu-
ments advanced or the interests sought to be bolstered up to “cry 
aloud and spare not.” Th
  e man who with the truth in his posses-
sion fl atters with lies, that “thrift may follow fawning,” is too vile to 
merit the contempt of honest men.
Th
  e government of the United States confi scated as “contraband 
of war” the slave population of the South, but it left to the portion 
of the unrepentant rebel a far more valuable species of property. Th
 e 
slave, the perishable wealth, was confi scated to the government and 
then manumitted, but property in land, the wealth which perishes 
not nor can fl y away, and which had made the institution of slavery 
possible, was left as the heritage of the robber who had not hesi-
tated to lift his iconoclastic hand against the liberties of his country. 

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Th
  e baron of feudal Europe would have been paralyzed with aston-
ishment at the leniency of the conquering invader who should take 
from him his slave, subject to mutation, and leave him his landed 
possessions, which are as fi xed as the Universe of Nature. He would 
ask no more advantageous concession. But the United States took 
the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and 
which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery, a slavery more 
excruciating in its exactions, more irresponsible in its machina-
tions than that other slavery, which I once endured. Th
 e chattel 
slave–holder must, to preserve the value of his property, feed, clothe, 
and house his property and give it proper medical attention when 
disease or accident threaten its life. But industrial slavery requires 
no such care. Th
  e new slaveholder is only solicitous of obtaining the 
maximum of labor for the minimum of cost. He does not regard the 
man as of any consequence when he can no longer produce. Having 
worked him to death, or ruined his constitution and robbed him of 
his labor, he turns him out upon the world to live upon the charity 
Th
 omas Fortune, 1887
234 thomas 
fortune

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of mankind or to die of inattention and starvation. He knows that 
it profi ts him nothing to waste time and money upon a disabled 
industrial slave. Th
  e multitude of laborers from which he can recruit 
his necessary laboring force is so enormous that solicitude on his 
part for one that falls by the wayside would be a gratuitous expen-
diture of humanity and charity which the world is too intensely 
selfi sh and materialistic to expect of him. Here he forges wealth and 
death at one and the same time. He could not do this if our social 
system did not confer upon him a monopoly of the soil from which 
subsistence must be derived, because the industrial slave, given an 
equal opportunity to produce for himself, would not produce for 
another. On the other hand, the large industrial operations, with the 
multitude of laborers from which Adam Smith declares employers 
grow rich, as far as this applies to the soil would not be possible, 
since the vast volume of increased production brought about by 
the industry of the multitude of coequal small farmers would so 
reduce the cost price of food products as to destroy the incentive to 
speculation in them, and at the same time utterly destroy the neces-
sity or the possibility of famines, such as those which have from 
time to time come upon the Irish people. Th
  ere could be no famine, 
in the natural course of things, where all had an opportunity to 
cultivate as much land as they could wherever they found any not 
already under cultivation by someone else. It needs no stretch of the 
imagination to see what a startling tendency the announcement 
that all vacant land was free to settlement upon condition of cul-
tivation would have to the depopulation of overcrowded cities like 
New York, Baltimore, and Savannah, where the so-called pressure 
of population upon subsistence has produced a hand-to-hand fi ght 
for existence by the wage workers in every avenue of industry.
Th
  is is no fancy picture. It is a plain, logical deduction of what 
would result from the restoration to the people of that equal 
chance in the race of life which every man has a right to expect, 
to demand, and to exact as a condition of his membership of orga-
nized society.
Th
  e wag who started the “forty acres and a mule” idea among the 
black people of the South was a wise fool; wise in that he enun-
ciated a principle which every argument of sound policy should 
have dictated, upon the condition that the forty acres could in no wise 
black and white  235

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