Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1892
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Excerpt from Friedrich Engels's 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge:

There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.

The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.

  • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It’s essentially Matt Christman’s free real estate premise he keeps going on about. The USA was able to vent all of its negative consequences out westward, the endless “free” land expropriated from natives allowed the US to suppress its contradictions as long as it kept expanding. Once it hit the coast, it continued to expand into the Pacific, the Caribbean and Latin America.

    Then the Great Depression, all of the building contradictions burst at once and America had nowhere else to expand. It began to implode. The capitalist powers of Europe imploded a bit earlier during WW1 because their empires had reached their expansionary limits as well, they responded by having a bit of cannibalism and interimperialist war which destroyed enough fixed capital to reset the rate of profit a bit and create new opportunities for investment.

    WW2 destroyed even more fixed capital, and the US manufacturing was unharmed due to geographic isolation. It was able to leverage its relative manufacturing power to create a new neo-colonial global system where American capital and markets extended to almost everywhere on Earth.

    It spend the next few decades trying to expand to the last few holdouts (Vietnam, Korea, China, USSR, the Arab world, Iran) with mixed success. These small victories kept America and its globalized capital system going a bit longer.

    Now we have reached a point again where there’s nowhere left to expand that isn’t a heavily entrenched fortress nation. The crisis are mounting again. We will have another Great Depression and there will be attempts at starting another world war to destroy fixed capital again.