Re: Forwarded from Anthony (reply to Mark L.)

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anthony has done a really remarkable thing in his history of the United
States-- he has totally missed the history of the United States.

He has also done something not so remarkable in his "reworking" of
Marxism,--he has totally removed the struggle over the organization of
labor, for the control of the product of that labor from the reworked
Marxism.  In this Anthony is following a long line of "improvers" on Marx's
analysis, the names of which escape me at the moment, just as they escape
any real impact on history.

Thus, we learn from Anthony: "The dominance of the Democratic party after
the War of 1812 only proves one point - that Western conquest was so popular
in both the North and the South, that sectional interests were put aside to
promote western expansion."

Huh?  Where did that happen?  The Maine-Missouri Compromise was signed in
bad blood. Sectional interests were not put aside at all but contested in
every word of the compromise. The poison tariff to embarass Adams became
Jackson's burden to impose against the secessionist actions of South
Carolina and its anti-Toussaint, John C. Calhoun. Where were sectional
interests put aside in 1832?  The War of 1848 as Mark Lause points out was
regarded as a war to further the sectional interests of the slave section.
In the 1850s the battle between North and South on the floor of the Congress
took a physical manifestation in what would be preview of Bloody Kansas.
The Kansas Nebraska Act made the battle of Maine-Missouri look like a
newlwed's honeymoon.

Then we learn from Anthony's new Marxism that the US Civil War was not about
slavery, about breaking the slaveholders' stranglehold on the machinery of
the national government, including its military officer corps, its appointed
positions, its manipulations of the legislature through the seniority of its
representatives-- it was not about clearing the way for free soil and free
labor; it wasn't even about controlling the product of the African American
labor on the planatations-- no it was about a primitive accumulation of
indigenous persons' territory , which both North and South agreed upon
earlier, but now wound up killing each other in great numbers.

There is no primitive accumulation without the imposition of capitalist
relations of production; the expansion westward by the North, after the
Civil War, after because the South was determined to block any and all
expansion that didn't include slavery, was not primitive accumulation at
all. There was no original creation of capitalism here out of the labor and
the land of the indigenous people.  Capital's social relations existed in
all their bitter perfection.

Except for those two things, I think Anthony is on to something.

dms



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.