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Elena Yaremenko
I have chosen the peer-reviewed journal article titled “A Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery” written in 2011 by Steve Edwards, a historiographer who reviews the perspectives of a number of historians from 1920 to the 1960s that referenced Marx’s writings on the subject of the Civil War, along with the works of present-day writers from 1980 to the 2011, who in the 1990s appear to have rediscovered the connection between Marx’s theory regarding the evolution of class struggle. Edwards covers the range of these writings as they explore and discuss the connection they have made between the Marxist theory of “bottom up revolution” and which he believes “offer[s] a platform for further debate in particular fields of study to help clarify and define the conceptual armory of historical materialism” (p. 43), in this case, as it relates to the Civil War.
“Marx and Engels did not apply ready-made concepts of revolution to the U.S. Civil War. Rather, the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem, as components of a dynamic transnational set of revolutionary movements.”(p.304) Edwards, in his paper, looks at Marxist historians as they focus their attention “on economic and social transitions or transformations; to think about class agency; and compare modes of production and forms of exploitation” (p.33), which the American Civil War represented. They saw this war as a global referendum on free, as opposed to, unfree labor and its compatibility with capitalism. This in turn led to a worldwide discussion on the subject of personhood and property, an idea that is echoed in the book, The World the Civil War Made, in Ch.12 by Zimmerman, who discusses the Civil War as a redefinition of the revolutionary war.
Edwards revisits the connection of lost Marxist historical scholarship on the subject of the Civil War. He notes that most of the history regarding the causes of the Civil War was predominantly written from the point of view of the elites and empiricists. Edwards personally looks at this new Marxists view of history as a rebellion that favors a change of emphasis from the empiricist view to one of “the class-character of society” (p.34). Thus, he believes that a narrative of the Civil War as a bottom up class struggle, fits well into the of Marxist Theory of causes for revolutions. Edwards notes that in the 1960 that there was “a strong Marxist presence in debates concerned with slavery and the Civil War” (p.33), and he lists a number of authors whose work follows the Marxist tradition of writing about “history from bellow” (p.33). He then compares and contrasts their writings in the Marxist style, to those of the “ethno-religious” and “political elite,” and “born-again empiricists” (p.34).
Comparing the views of Marx, Edwards states, is “no substitutes for historical research, but it is worth turning to his work for some questions, if not answers” (p.39). A fascinating fact that emerges from this article is that Marx wrote is series of commentaries published in the New York Tribune and the Viennese liberal paper Die Presse, on the subject of abolishing slavery (p.39). However, Marx did not study the Civil War or slavery specifically, but he did use the observations about slavery and how it relates to capitalist production in his writings. In Marx’s writings, he discusses slavery in the American South as both “a mode of production corresponding to the slave and a slave or plantation economy. In essence comparing this struggle between the North and South during the Civil War as two social systems that “can no longer peacefully coexist” and which, “can only be ended by the victory of one system over another” (p.40). In his studies of governance structures, economics, and revolutions Marx does not discuss the morality or ethics of slavery directly.
Edwards does not just compare the writings of these authors, but he also argues with them about their views of the Civil War, and about how their theories relate to Marxist theory. Edward’s comparisons examine where these writers’ ideas originated and explains how their perspectives either mesh or do not mesh with Marx’s work. Edwards acknowledges that these historians have done a great deal of research connecting the social class structure to the economy of the capitalist world market and its connection to the North and South pre-war America, but he believes that they attribute thoughts to Marx that Marx never expressed about the Civil War. Probably closest to Marx in this regard was Davidson who explains that “The real blockage on capitalist development was not feudalism or feudal impediments to capital-accumulation, …but slavery” (p.38), as it affected the Southern economy, then the Northern as well, followed by a spread into the British trade: it had a cascade effect. The implosion of the slave-based capitalist system threatened to take down the capitalists economy in the U.S. with global ripples.
The recognition of the connection to Marx’s idea of the underlying that the power of a society came from the “bottom up” can be found in this new wave of writers. These authors generally agree that one of the greatest cause leading to the Civil War was the economics of capitalism and slave labor and that trying to link this to Marx’s theories on social order. They took it a step too far by implying that Marx, in his study of the Civil War and other similar revolutions, advocated that slavery was a negative element. Marx, in his writings on bottom up revolutions merely documented as objectively as it was possible to do, the events that took place with an analysis of why he believed they occurred the way they did. While he did write about the need to abolish slavery, this is not what his theory was about, it was rather based on identifiable facts, not a referendum against slavery. Edwards looks at Marx’s writings and how the elements he writes about can be identified as underlying causes that existed at the core of the Civil War, and that also existed on a global scale in bottom up revolutions as he noted occurred during the French Revolution. These historians under review by Edwards use elements of Marx’s theory even though it is not directly pointed out as Marxist theory. What I discovered within the article was that Edwards recognizes and acknowledges Marx’s theory at work in these historians’ writings that had been lost until the advent of these modern historians including Zimmerman in The World the Civil War Made as a legitimate starting point for the study of the American Civil War.