Elena Yaremenko<\/p>\n

I have chosen the peer-reviewed journal article titled \u201cA Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery\u201d<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cbottom up revolution\u201d and which he believes \u201coffer[s] a platform for further debate in particular fields of study to help clarify and define the conceptual armory of historical materialism\u201d (p. 43), in this case, as it relates to the Civil War.<\/p>\n

“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 \u201con economic and social transitions or transformations; to think about class agency; and compare modes of production and forms of exploitation\u201d (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<\/em> Zimmerman, who discusses the Civil War as a redefinition of the revolutionary war.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0a change of emphasis\u00a0from the empiricist view to\u00a0one of\u00a0\u201cthe class-character of society\u201d (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 \u201ca strong Marxist presence\u00a0in debates concerned with slavery and the Civil War\u201d (p.33), and he lists a number of authors whose work follows the Marxist tradition of writing about \u201chistory from bellow\u201d (p.33). He then compares and contrasts their writings\u00a0in the Marxist style, to those of the \u201cethno-religious\u201d and \u201cpolitical elite,\u201d and \u201cborn-again empiricists\u201d (p.34).<\/p>\n

Comparing the views of Marx, Edwards states, is \u201cno substitutes for historical research, but it is worth turning to his work for some questions, if not answers\u201d (p.39). A fascinating fact that emerges from this article is that Marx wrote is series of commentaries published in the New York Tribune<\/em> and the Viennese liberal paper Die Presse, <\/em>on the subject of abolishing slavery (p.39).<\/em> 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\u2019s writings, he discusses slavery in the American South as both \u201ca 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 \u201ccan no longer peacefully coexist\u201d and which, \u201ccan only be ended by the victory of one system over another\u201d (p.40). In his studies of governance structures, economics,\u00a0and\u00a0revolutions Marx does not discuss the morality or ethics of slavery directly.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s comparisons examine where these writers\u2019 ideas originated and explains how their perspectives either mesh or do not mesh with Marx\u2019s 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\u00a0in 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\u00a0British\u00a0trade: it had a cascade effect. The implosion of the slave-based capitalist system threatened to take down the capitalists economy in the U.S.\u00a0with global ripples.<\/p>\n

The recognition of the connection to Marx\u2019s idea of the underlying that the power of a society came from the \u201cbottom up\u201d can be found in this new\u00a0wave of writers. These authors generally agree that one of the greatest\u00a0cause leading\u00a0to 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\u00a0did. While he did write about the need to abolish slavery, this is not what his\u00a0theory was about, it was rather\u00a0based on identifiable facts, not a referendum against slavery. Edwards looks at Marx\u2019s 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\u00a0existed on a global scale in bottom up revolutions as he noted\u00a0occurred during\u00a0the French Revolution. These historians under review by Edwards use elements of Marx\u2019s 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\u2019s theory at work in these historians\u2019 writings that\u00a0had been\u00a0lost until the advent of these modern historians including Zimmerman in The World the Civil War Made<\/em> as a legitimate starting point for the study of the American Civil War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elena Yaremenko I have chosen the peer-reviewed journal article titled \u201cA Symposium on the American Civil War and Slavery\u201d 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\u2019s writings on the subject of the Civil War, along with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":719,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions\/719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}