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
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
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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