Re: Debating slavery: Marx's discussion

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000 13:40:46 -0500 "Austin, Andrew" <austina@xxxxxxxx>
writes:
>
> James writes: "This fails to engage with Charles's point that before
> the
> Civil War the Southern planter class constructed not only a regional
> ruling
> class but was THE ruling class for the US as a whole." This fact
> only
> supports my claim that the emergence of industrialism and the US
> civil war
> constituted a shift in ruling class fractions, not a fundamental
> transformation in the mode of production or property relations.

Except that in this situation a significant change in property relations
did occur with the abolition of slavery.

>The
> reshuffling of power among capitalist class fractions does not
> constitute a
> social revolution. James seems to note this when he writes:
> "However, that
> ignores the fact that there was a very significant shift if power
> between
> two different and antagonistic fractions of the capitalit class in
> the US."
> What I have argued not only does not ignore this important fact but
> makes it
> central to my argument. Since when do intraclass antagonisms
> constitute
> social revolutions? What definition of social revolution is being
> used here?
> James sums up my argument well when he writes, "The Civil War did,
> however,
> establish the hegemony of one fraction of the capitalist class over
> another." however, I cannot agree with his conclusion that the civil
> war
> represented a social revolution, even a partial one.

I would submit that it does insomuch as it did lead to a significant
change in the social relations of production in the South with the
abolition of private property in slave labor.  Also, to return to the
question
of bourgeois revolutions, it ought to be clear that all the historic
bourgeois
revolutions were more or less partial in nature.  None of these
revolutions
from the English Civil Wars in the 17th century, to the French
Revolution,
to the uprisings of 1848, and the American Civil War resulted in complete
transformations of the existing relations of production.  Rather all of
these revolutions consituted moments in a larger process of social
transformation in which capitalism gradually but surely displaced all
previously existing modes of production and began to remake the
world in its own image.

Jim F.

>
> Andrew Austin,
> Green Bay, WI
>

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