...the southern slave plantation bourgeoisie kicking and screaming into industrial capitalism.
The slave economy was a drag on the more developed form of capitalism that was about to revolutionise the world. Everything else is just window dressing and fancy speeches.
You aren't wrong, but that doesn't mean that the abolitionists weren't absolute Chads, or that the Socialists had no involvement. The reconciliation between the North/South capitalist contradiction could have gone several ways, including the maintenance of slavery in a more industrialized context. Left voices had an important role in making sure that the compass tilted towards the abolitionist outcomes.
Remember, Marx supported the Union and many European Communists like Willich played critical roles it it's success.
I mean, he didn't shoot that fucking snitch, take Harpers Ferry, and ride across the South on a tide of blood and terror, at the head of a Liberation army.
I mean yeah, the civil war was an intrabourgeois conflict but I wouldn't call the abolition of slavery "window dressing"
abolition of slavery
USA is gonna get around to that any day now
(I know, I know, chattel slavery. just being a pill :amerikkka:)
Obviously abolition is a beautiful achievement, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m saying it isn’t. I just mean in terms of the reasons the war happened. The northern industrialists (most of them at least) didn’t want to end slavery out of the goodness of their hearts, anymore than the confederacy was fighting for “states rights”. It was simply in their material interests to end it at that point in time.
Lincoln only abolished slavery because they were getting their asses kicked by a bunch of farmers and wanted to cripple their economy and "work" force
Idk, I have one question about this Theory.
Why would the northern bourgeois give a fuck if some Cornel Sanders looking mother fuckers want to drink mint juleps and own slaves? Was the northern bourgeois in need of the south? Couldn’t they just let them have their little shitty pseudo feudal society and buy cheap cotton from them? Seems weird to start such a nasty war just to drag them into industrialization when you could just focus on industrializing your own turf.
this paints it like the north was the aggressor.
they categorically were not. even in terms of bourgois competition, all the north wanted was to preserve (some) western territories for future free expansion (on native land) and existing non-slavery territory.
The two economic systems were on a collision course, who was the aggressor is kind of irrelevant (to this discussion anyway). Freeing the slaves for humanitarian reasons was an afterthought.
Nobody at the time knew that though, Lincoln thought he could make a yeoman republic
