Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The revolutionary German Americans did not invent this stance all by themselves, but they did readily adopt a critique of racial and gender exclusion pioneered by radical abolitionists.”

“When Joseph Wedemeyer, Marx's longtime friend and comrade, helped to found the American Workers League (Amerikanische Arbeitersbund) in Chicago in 1853, its founding statement of principles declared that "all workers who live in the United States without distinction of occupation, language, color, or sex can become members."”

“In… 1853, over a quarter of a million German immigrants arrived. The German Americans soon became naturalized and formed an important pool of votes for those who knew how to woo them.… Democratic rhetoric had some impact on them, but by the mid-1850s many German Americans were attracted to the Republicans, and they in turn helped to make Republicanism and the antislavery position more broadly attractive.”

“This brings us to the too often neglected contribution of the German Americans. Bruce Levine's study The Spirit of 1848 shows the transformative impact of the huge German immigration around the midcentury. At this time the level of immigration was rising to new heights, and Germans comprised between a third and a half of all newcomers.”

“Southern nationalism itself responded to, and stimulated, Unionist or Yankee nationalism. Whereas patriotism was about the past, the new nationalist idea, a reflection of modernity, was about the future. Even at a time when truly industrial methods only affected a few branches of society, "print capitalism" and the "market revolution" were already transforming public space and time.”

“Hundreds of thousands of white Southerners who owned no slaves nevertheless fought and died for the rebellion, seeing the Confederacy as the embodiment of their racial privileges and rural civilization. The rebels were fighting for a cause that embodied a way of life, one that embraced minimal taxation and extensive "states' rights."”

“Lincoln had worked hard, educated himself, and become a prominent attorney and political figure. This background reinforced his belief that the free labor system allowed a man to make his way in the world. The Republicans also supported a system of public education for all and the foundation of a chain of "land grant" colleges, namely colleges endowed with revenue from the sale of public land.”

“Marx did not directly compare the claims of North and South as competing nationalisms. Instead he questioned whether the South was a nation, writing, "The South, however, is neither a territory strictly detached from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan." Many who were much closer to the situation than Marx entered the same judgment in the years before 1861...”

“Lincoln believed that the broad prosperity of the North and the Northwest was rooted in its free labor system, a view shared by Marx. Republican pride in the progress of the free states repelled the Southern mainstream. Lincoln won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, but all of these votes came from the free states.”

“These slaveholders were able to corrupt or intimidate many of the poor Southern whites, and they had rich and influential supporters among the merchants, bankers and textile manufacturers of New York, London and Paris. Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”

“Marx...saw in South and North two species of capitalism—one allowing slavery, the other not. The then existing regime of American society and economy embraced the enslavement of four million people whose enforced toil produced the republic's most valuable export, cotton, as well as much tobacco, sugar, rice, and turpentine. Defeating the slave power was going to be difficult.”

“In the Southern view, slaveholders should be free to bring slaves to Federal territories, an importation seen as an unwelcome and unfair intrusion by migrants from the Northern states, whether they were antislavery or simply anti black. Southerners had favored censorship of the Federal mail, to prevent its use for abolitionist literature.”

“They [Southerners] did not favor either high tariffs or expensive internal improvements. But this restricted view of the state was accompanied by provisions that affected the lives of Northerners in quite intimate ways. The fugitive slave law of 1850 required all citizens to cooperate with the Federal marshals in apprehending runaways.”

“Southern slaveholders wished to see a Federal state that would uphold slave property; that would return and deter slave runaways, as laid down in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and that would allow slaveholding Southerners access to Federal territories. The planters were happy that the antebellum state was modest in size and competence, since this meant low taxes and little or no interference...”

“The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves in the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders,”

“In order to maintain its influence in the Senate, and through the Senate its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore requires a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, and through the transformation of the territories belonging to the United States first into slave territories and then into slave states.”

“The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.”

“A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics... reformers of every imaginable kind.”

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?”

“In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

“The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.”

“But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all…”

“From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths.”

“And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.”

“In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

“The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.”

“To be a capitalist is to not only have a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members…can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, but a social power.”

“But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor.”

“An angel was walking down the streets of the world carrying a torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other. A woman asked the angel, "What are you doing with that torch and pail?" The angel said, "With the torch I am burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail I am putting out the fires of hell." ”