Lincoln was a pen pal with Karl Marx, and Marx frequently contributed editorials to the most prominent Republican magazine at the time (New-York Tribune).
Lincoln read theory.
edit: of course, Lincoln wasn’t a socialist, but he did readily acknowledge that the Civil War was a class struggle against oppressive Southern elites.
This was the response:
Sir: I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him. So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world. The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world. Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies. I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
~ Charles Francis Adams, US Ambassador
Why does this guy look like one of the default fallout 4 characters with a beard ?
Also that’s an odd video, but a based one tbh.
He kinda looks like the Electric Six lead singer.
I sometimes wonder if had the American civil war been delayed for 30 or so years (to around the time Brazil abolished slavery), and had also had some more of the rounds of European proletarian immigration happen before the war if we’d have seen the first socialist revolution having been within the US instead of Europe.
There was a lot of socialist energy in the US by 1880, but there wasn’t a flashpoint comparable to the civil war to trigger such a revolution like there was with WW1 in Russia.
Interesting hypothetical, but the socialist energy you refer to is an outcome of the US’s massive industrialization as a result of the war, and the growing numbers of proletariat due to the winding down of Western settler expansion. I think it would be unlikely that the US could hold together as one nation for another few decades given the contradictions around free and slave labor in the Western territories.
I like to speculate what would have happened if the UK/France tried to intervene–might have been a US/Russia alliance ~80 years ahead of schedule :o
So I’m still thinking of a world where Lincoln became president but just never challenged slavery. Lincoln did a ton of stuff around railroads and deeply pro industrialisation stuff outside of the broader civil war effort.
Like if land reform had still happened out into the western states which represented a big part of why capitalism was so successful in the US when compared to other countries over the long term, but I don’t think it was nearly as meaningful in a short term sense against socialism.
The end of slavery should absolutely be labeled as the second bourgeois revolution in the US. The south was hardly different than other feudal systems before the agricultural revolution, it just was more of an olegarchy than one with a more concrete line of power like there is with a monarchy.
The civil war happened during an era before there was a meaningfully sized proletarian industrial base in the country. This isn’t to say there wasn’t any sort of working class base behind this, but it isn’t what drove the country into war. But I have read that there was some sense of shared struggle seen among confederate soldiers with the northern working class as they had relatively high defection rates as the children of aristocrats weren’t sent to war.
The civil war definitely had a basis in bourgeoise economic interests, but also white working class interests-in the grossest way-slaves drive down wages, opening up stolen land west to yeoman farmers instead of plantations…
The fact that Reconstruction exists kinda nullifies the point of the video. Yeah, we had this epic leftist revolution… replacing slavery with sharecropping and letting the traitors go completely unpunished.
Lincoln’s plans were better than Johnsons afaik but still not ‘radical republican’ and therefore still woefully inadequate. I mean the only thing that would’ve ‘worked’ fully was full communism which was an untenable political platform.
Considering how stupidly bad Johnson’s plans were, any attempt to do a kind of ok job is still miles better
