Lincoln was always a :both-sides: douche. He didn't believe in slavery, but also didn't believe in full cultural equity for black people.
Yeah, my favorite response to idiots who say "Well, Republicans freed the slaves" is "Yeah but Lincoln was still a racist."
Usually leads to angry googling while I slink away.
It's even worse actually. He was a free soiler rather than a conservative abolitionist (by conservative abolitionist I mean pro-emancipation but anti-equality). Free soilers wanted to make it so that newly admitted (annexed from indigenous people) states were free, while allowing for the slave states to keep their slaves. This was supposed to be a magical centrist compromise that would prevent the Southerners from starting a civil war. It didn't work. Because the southern plantation aristocracy knew that if all the newly admitted states were free states, they would be outnumbered in the senate, and eventually abolition would come through legislation. So they raided federal armories, seceded from the union and attacked Fort Sumter. Then, when they lost the war, many of them fled to Brazil where slavery was still legal until the 1880s, which is why you have the bizarre "Confederado" subculture in Brazil.
Lincoln was also much too fond of the idea of using newly emancipated slaves as settler-colonists in Africa. This was carried out to a significant extent in Liberia.
Even when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it didn't apply to loyal slave states. So certain border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia) which remained loyal to the union despite being slave states, were exempt from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Then you have the matter of picking Andrew Johnson, a racist southerner, as his VP for re-election. He still managed to have centrist brain even when he won the war. He did not hang the leaders of the confederacy. He instead picked a southern democrat and former slave owner as his VP for relection under a "National Unity" ticket, then promptly was assassinated. This left an anti-reconstruction bigot in the white house who pardoned the president of the confederacy in Christmas 1868.
Idk what the point is because that statement is also literally correct even from a marxist perspective except for the "capital has rights" bit, capital exists and there is a beneficial relationship between labor and capital, the problem with capitalism is the ownership and direction of said capital being the privilege of individuals at the expense of greater society. There is no such thing as a socialist society in which capital doesn't exist unless you want to go full 100% an-prim with it.
The latter part going full 1800s American mutualist "muh sole proprietors!" is more cringe but still a much better take than most people have
I think the bit about capital having rights is the whole issue here
So in a society where the means of production have been completely collectivized there will still be a capitalist class? I don't think this is correct.
Sure, but unless Lincoln is seeking to endow rights upon resources, "capital" in this instance is referring to a group of people.
I don't want to die on a hill defending Lincoln but you could argue that capital does/should have "rights" i.e. the right to not be vandalized because, as it is the collective endowment of society, its senseless destruction should be prevented. You can make that statement without any argument for or consideration of a "capitalist class."
The main "point" to this paragraph doesn't seem to me to be "but also capitalists have rights too! both sides!" but rather to be like "well actually sweaty if you own the capital and do all the work yourself then there's no problem," which has Lincoln sounding at-worst like some Josiah Warren type mutualist/libertarian socialist guy, and which isn't technically incorrect as long as you ignore how unfeasible it is for everyone to be some sole proprietor with capital magicked out of their asshole.
either way I don't think this really detracts from the first statement, at least in its use for propaganda in arguing with shit libs, and I'm not going to fault Lincoln for not having the Marxist view on things since even if he were amenable to those ideas this speech was like almost a decade before Das Kapital was even published. I'm aware that communism preceded Marx but my understanding is that a lot of what was popular in America in the preceding decades was this exact sort of opinion.
the highlighted bit is not the key part, but rather where he starts delusionally thinking that yeoman farmers "ask no favors of capital". the mistaken belief that everyone can be a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer is the "free real estate" :free-real-estate: at the heart of the settler-colonial project
William Henry Harrison got a cold and died like one month in, that was sorta based
Yeah the good presidents are all the ones that died from living next to a pond of poo water
Harrison massacred Native Americans and his popularity for doing so was a major reason he won in the first place
A large majority belong to neither class - neither work for others nor have others working for them.
:brainworms:
how can you think that
settler colonial brain. he was born back when everyone in America (except women, people of color) could just move west and buy a (newly annexed from natives) homestead for a nickel and live out their lives as a self-sufficient yeoman farmer.
but it's not even self sufficient unless they're forging the iron to make the nails and hammers, growing the trees for the timber, breeding the horses and chickens, and so on. If these "neither class" members are purchasing anything at all - which I don't see how they could get away without - then the people they are purchasing from are doing work for them.
