RE: Forwarded from Anthony (rise of US capitalism--part 6)

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What Anthony and I disagree on seems to keep shifting.  He seems to be
building an understanding of a specific situation from generalizations.
When challenged over the specifics, he seems to retreat again to those
generalizations.

He asserted that the Civil War wasn't a revolution because the slaves
didn't overthrow the slaveholders and North (including the masses) and
South agreed on western expansion.  When I ask for the evidence for this
opinion, he falls back several centuries to discuss the broader fate of
Native Americans without making the least effort to back up what he said
about Americans in the antebellum North.  He also implies that the
disagreement is "part of a bigger methodological problem," specifically
the idea that "every capitalist country must have had a bourgeois
revolution of its very own."

None of this provides the least evidence for what he asserted earlier.

As to the obscured and occulted "methodological" questions, I always
hesitate to go there, for fear that I'll be jumped by a
"theoretician"--that wonderfully Teutonic Marxist mind-melding of
theorist-technician.

However, there does seem to be an underlying disagreement over WHAT IS A
REVOLUTION.  Three short points:

1. Revolutions have to do with the overthrow of one group that rules by
another.  The nature of power means that revolutions took place within
the national jurisdictions imposed by the class interests of the
masters.  This institutional reality--not whim of method--is what
"walled off 'national' histories."  This means you can have a French
Revolution in 1789 without having an appreciable direct effect on the
nature of class rule in Belgium.  It does not mean that each country
goes through the same process on a different timetable.

2. Marxists have long distinguished between a political revolution and a
social revolution, and this seems to be the essence of a distinction
Anthony's making.
a. "Political revolution"--Anthony's writes of a situation in which
"some new faces in the offices of the old apparatus (what I would call a
political revolution."
b. "Social revolution"--Anthony says the Civil War wasn't one because
the slaves didn't overthrow the slaveholders.
Both definitions are inadequate, the former because it understates the
nature of a political revolution (and could, as easily, describe an
election) and the latter because it's utterly wooden and mechanistic
(and broadly speaking misunderstands what happened in the Civil War).

3. Applying generalizations as a kind of universal solvent (with a few
grains of factoids) is not historical materialism.  Simply put,
Anthony's denial of the status of "revolution" to the Civil War required
minimizing differences between the rulers of 1859 and those of 1864.
This requires his invention of that mythical consensus of North and
South around western "expansion"--in the face of the facts that
"expansion" (as usually defined) was VERY CONTROVERSIAL--to the point
that it destroyed the party system that prevailed in the US from the
1820s into the 1850s.

Understanding revolutions--or any processes--requires caring enough
about them to look at the concrete and specific realities.  Was a ruling
class--its institutions, policies, etc.--overthrown in 1861-65?  Was it
merely putting "new faces" in "the offices of the old apparatus"--the
political parties, the governments, the military, the institutions of
power?

Solidarity!
Mark L.





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