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Karl Marx on the American Civil War (Quote of the Week) From the outset of the U.S. Civil War, much of the British capitalist class, whose textile industry depended on cotton imported from the Southern slave states, clamored for the North to allow the South to secede. Countering those forces, Karl Marx, who fought to rally the English working class to support the Union’s blockade of Confederate ports, emphasized that the war posed a struggle to the death between two social systems that could no longer coexist: industrial capitalism in the North and chattel slavery in the South. It took the Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to crush the system of black enslavement. And it will take a third, socialist, American revolution to achieve genuine social equality for the oppressed black masses and the emancipation of all labor through the overthrow of the decrepit capitalist order. “Let him go, he is not worth your anger!” Again and again English statesmanship cries—recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell—to the North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan’s deserted love. [In literature and the theater, Leporello is the servant and loyal friend of the libertine Don Juan.] If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any association with slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development…. “The South,” however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan. The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders’ party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an independent group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false…. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery…. The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other. —Karl Marx, “The Civil War in the United States,” 7 November 1861
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