Re: (rise of US capitalism--part 6) - 1

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

> . . . the big issue in the earlier discussion is the nature 
of the 'Second American Revolution' . . .some Marxists like to 
call the US Civil War. I think the idea that the civil war was a revolution 
is part of a bigger methodological problem. . . . A better way to understand 
the development of capitalist  society, is to try to analyze the process on a 
global - not country by country - basis.  

 . . . the most difficult limit on Marxist historians in the past was 
the view that revolutions - and social, economic and political development in 
general - occur in walled off 'national' histories. <

Comment

Every generation in America since the Emancipation Proclamation has referred 
to the "bloody conflict" as the Civil War - at least in the North and a 
section of "Southern" intellectuals refer to the "bloody conflict" as "The War 
Between the States." 

The bourgeois revolution is not so much a revolution of the capitalists but a 
social revolution in property relations and the laboring process. This social 
revolution takes place on the basis of changes in the material power of the 
productive forces. 

Trading companies operating on the basis of the logic of bourgeois property - 
at a certain stage in the development of commodity production, colonized the 
United States.  

The Civil War is referred to as the "Second American Revolution" or the 
second edition of the "American Revolution," because of its material results. 
The 
Emancipation Proclamation declared that all persons held as slaves in states or 
parts of states in rebellion against the American Union would be forever 
free. This affected over 3 million people at the time when the selling price of 
a 
slave averaged $1000. Thus the proclamation removed over $3 billion of legally 
obtained property from the slave owners without compensation. Since slavery 
in the American Union was an exceptionally brutal form of bourgeois production 
- or rather, production operating on the basis of the bourgeois property 
relation, the Emancipation Proclamation decreed the greatest single 
expropriation 
of capitalist private property in human history. This act retained that 
distinction until the Soviet Revolution. 

The revolution was in the form of social relations and the form of bourgeois 
property.

Not only was a distinct section and sector of capital expropriated, the slave 
oligarchy as a slave holding class was shattered and reconfigured as the 
landlord planter class. The Civil War was a revolution in this sense. 

This matter has plagued American history since the Civil War. Real 
contradictions appear that express the real contradictions in social life. 
_______________

>When you get to the issue of the United States of America - one of the most 
important issues for 21st century Marxists to understand - the question of  a 
'national' vs. a 'world' approach becomes even more critical than when dealing 
with European history. - meaning that the history of the USA was following 
the same pattern of classical capitalist development established in mother 
England. 
What claptrap.) < 

Comment

"Classical capitalist development . . . in mother England," means the 
evolution of the bourgeois property relation, the growth of manufacture and the 
rise 
of the industrial system, or it means nothing.  

Without question a historical view of the entire curve of development of 
bourgeois commodity production and the industrial system is needed. American 
history is different from England's because it did not know concrete feudal 
economic relations or landed property relations as the primary form of wealth 
before 
the emergence of gold as universal wealth and the expansion of commodity 
exchange. 

Specifically, the Northern States grew as an appendage to the plantation 
system and entered into economic revolution, from manufacturing to industry. 
Unlike England - Europe, the shift to industry - internal to the American 
Union, 
did not cause massive dislocation of the countryside - feudalist. A large part 
of this dislocation in Europe was caused by the outflow of serfs into the 
towns. In America this entire historical process was avoided with the importing 
of 
industrial workers from Europe. What existed as the Native born Americans were 
family farmers and stayed as such for another century. The economic and 
social revolution in the North proceeded quite smoothly without any major 
social 
upheavals as compared with Europe. This more than less peaceful transition from 
manufacture (pre-industrial) to industry (industrial formations) - given the 
absence of feudal economic, social and political superstructure relations, has 
no parallel. 

As a historical curve, the industrial system evolved on the basis of the 
slave trade, and/with the colonization of the Americas. 
_________________

>If by a revolution you mean a social revolution in which the oppressed 
classes of a nation overthrow the state and destroy the social system of the 
oppressing classes (what I would call a social revolution.)....

Or if you mean that some opposition force in a country deposes the 
government by force and imposes a new form of government or simply puts 
some new faces in the offices of the old apparatus (what I would call a 
political revolution.) ...

Than the US Civil War was not a revolution. <

Comment

A mode of production is fundamentally a category of history and cannot be 
overthrown by human will as such. An oppressed class cannot overthrow a mode of 
production, nor can the two basic classes that make up the productive relations 
of the mode of production overthrow it - they simple are not free to do such. 
Marx explains clearly in his "Preface to A Contribution of A Critique of 
Political Economy" the logic process that unravels a mode of production and set 
the stage for social revolution. 

The Civil War is called a revolutionary war because its end results was the 
emancipation of a class of slaves and the destruction of the slave holding 
class on the basis of its military defeat and expropriation of capital. 
_______________________________

>If you look at US history as a 'national' process of development, you come 
up with an even worse problem ..............

There never was a 'bourgeois revolution' in the United States!

Not in the sense of a great social revolution in which the oppressed 
classes of a society overthrow their oppressors and the state apparatus of  
their oppressors. Not in the sense of the Dutch, English, French, Russian,  
Mexican Revolutions and Chinese revolutions.<

Comment

The bourgeois revolution is a social revolution in the form of wealth and 
property relations, which takes place on the basis of changes in the mode - 
material power of the productive forces. Marx explains this clearly in the 
Communist Manifesto and Capital. Engels traces the general form of the process 
in 
Anti-Dühring and Socialism Utopian and Scientific. Neither author pose the 
question from the standpoint of "national" versus "international" but the form 
of 
wealth, the form of property relations of a society and the form of energy and 
the laboring process as it arose historically and within the feudal economic 
and 
social relations.

There was no bourgeois revolution in the sense of property relations in 
America because there were no feudal economic, social and political 
superstructures. America was founded - colonized, as a bourgeois country. The 
revolution in 
China was not against the bourgeois property relations but against imperial 
intrusion and against feudal economic and social relations. Then the attempt to 
build an industrial society without the bourgeois property relations was 
started. 
_____________________________________________

Melvin P. 


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