The 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party took place in Beijing with 2,200 delegates in attendance, 100 more than the one before. The new slogan, ‘Development in Social Harmony’, has been imparted, setting aside, therefore, all reference to the Maoist ‘class struggle’ of that great country’s period of national-bourgeois revolution. From the ideological and the external apparatus of Chinese society, the very last trappings of the ‘communism’ that it never hosted in the first place are being removed.

The Congress intends, “to scientifically integrate market economy with state control”, which is actually the function of every bourgeois State once the image in the mirror is readjusted: capital controls; the State carries obeys.

According to the model of the mass party invented by Stalinism, fascism and nazism, the party-State apparatus is limitless, as opposed to the communist party of Marx, Lenin and the Left which it never remotely resembled. The party has 73 million members, with more joining all the time, and they are drawn mostly from the universities and the governing class. Pierre Haski writes: the party is “the point of departure for every young careerist (...) for everyone from the company managing director to the secretary of the local party section”.

“The party is the custodian of stability for all those with something to lose in a changeover of power, of which there are quite a few”.  Clear admission of the class matrix of the CCP, which, as well as being the party of Chinese national capital, although originally a peasant party, is now the party of the bourgeoisie; who fear “a change of power”, that is, communism, real communism.

The condition of the working class, at the other social extreme, is amongst the worst in the World: only the privileged few have access to pensions and healthcare and the entire peasantry is entirely excluded. Only 12% of GNP goes on education, health and pensions as opposed to 50% in the West: the majority of workers have to pay for healthcare and education.

The trade unions are State controlled, and yet the number of public protests, according to the Minister of Security, has gone up from 10,000 in 1994 to 87,000 in 2005, and in 2006, although the number of protests diminished, they were more violent.

In the countryside, as happened centuries ago in the old world, violent and pitiless capitalist expropriation, of the common land and the land attached to the villages, is gathering apace.

Banks, the insurance and energy sectors, transport and telecommunications all remain State property but are managed, it goes without saying, in an entirely capitalist way.

Thus we have the highly absurd situation where a country that is clearly one of the biggest of the industrial nations founded on capitalist economic relations, in fact a ‘turbo-capitalism’ as they like to call it, a country ruled by a party-State which not only doesn’t set itself the future objective of attaining communism but totally excludes it, and therefore doesn’t recognize the existence of the elementary class struggle, is universally and indisputably categorized as communist.

The magic of words. The counter-revolutionary pressure which has born down on the international workers’ movement unopposed for 80 years, and so completely distorted its indispensable references and keys to reading history and the world, has, de facto, erased from the vocabulary, and from people’s thoughts, the very notion of communism as the negation of capitalism. In exact proportion to the historical maturation of genuine communism, which corresponds to the crises and extreme fragility of every aspect of the capitalist mode of production; the more that genuine communism objectively imposes itself as an absolute and inevitable necessity, the less it becomes possible to even mention it.

Just as Christianity at a certain point started to hide anxiety about death behind the illusion of eternal life, so the general need of the bourgeoisie, with counter-revolutionary intent obviously, was to portray as imperishable and unchanging, as laws of nature, the prevailing economic relations based on accumulation of profit and the sale of labour power, and to reduce communism to being simply a variant of the unavoidable and eternal capitalism.

Ever since Marxism suddenly appeared in the middle of the 19th century, it has always predicted that the economic sub-structure of capitalism would be channeled, always and everywhere, within the bounds of univocal and necessary economic laws. History has provided the fullest confirmation of this dialectical determinism of ours which transcends race and language, and even millenary histories and cultures. Within the skyscrapers which now surround the Forbidden City the same lifeblood now courses through them, and the same words are spoken – those of capital and finance – as in London’s ‘City’. On the workers’ estates, meanwhile, there is the same subjugation of the working class, and the conditions under which capitalist surplus value is extracted also become ever more identical.

If the Capital that today vertiginously eddies and swirls above the continents retains an essential underlying unity, the ways that the various bourgeois classes have attained power in their respective nations has nevertheless proved to be many and various. This has meant that the relationships, and the clashes, between the dominant classes, and their succession to, and division of, State power have followed different evolutionary paths, which explains the various different forms of government obtained when the bourgeoisie and big landowners have shared power. The western bourgeoisies boast about their long tradition of multi-party parliamentary democracy and, in an arrogantly euro-centric spirit and with a view to sowing confusion in the workers’ ranks, they trumpet it as the perfect ideal; as the one which most responds to the requirements of modern society, in other words of capitalism, based on individualism and the market.

However, while the economic sub-structure continues to evolve, although remaining entirely capitalist, in the sense of ever increasing concentration of production, capital and banking and loss of social power on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, at the same time the government centered on parliament becomes redundant and emptied of any real power. Its continued survival in a few Western countries today is merely for decorative purposes. It is kept alive within a kind of ‘virtual’ reality, in a self-referential media orientated world, its sole aim being to get the proletariat to vote, to spread the illusion that through elections the latter can obtain their quota of power when in fact, whoever gets in, it is the big bourgeoisie which continues to exert control.

The “communist” variant of capitalism, which may be characterized by the presence of a state apparatus openly governed by a one party State, and by a tighter regulation of the rights of oppositional elements than in the West, meets the requirements of modern capitalism just as well, if not better, that the liberal regimes. What is more, just because a single party heads the State doesn’t mean it will also necessarily be monolithic, or that, especially in Russia and China, there won’t be continual violence and bloody in-fighting between the party factions. The story of Maoism and its inglorious end demonstrate this well enough.

In Moscow and Beijing, over a modern capitalist economy and its corresponding class structure, and dominating over older class relationships in the countryside as well, we therefore find bourgeois regimes and forms of government which are adapted to their class function, and which are less hypocritical and insincere that those in Washington, in Europe and in New Delhi. If the “harmonious society” of the national communists in Beijing is perceived by western ideologists of the Haski stamp as a “hybrid model”, that is, as an incomplete or failed liberal democracy, a type of enlightened despotism, as a celestial mandate derived from Confucianism, we Marxists consider that it should be numbered instead amongst the forms of fascist organicism, indeed as its most classic, modern, and... western, exponent.

In conclusion, we will say that all of this clearly has nothing to do with Communism; the communism that will eventually, in both East and West, rout both liberals and ‘illiberals’.
 
 

2008 Introduction

The following two Reports on Fascism were presented by the Italian Communist Left’s representative, in Moscow on 16 November 1922 and 2 July 1924, to the 4th and 5th Congresses of the Communist International.

Today, eighty years later, the formidable dialectic is still as valid now as it was then, if not more so.

The international bourgeoisie had managed to isolate the Russian Revolution within the narrow confines of ex-tsarist and semi-feudal Russia; it had also recovered from a period of initial disorientation, in which it had almost become resigned to the fact that the proletariat would overthrow it and take power by force of arms; in those years it had moved on to the counter-attack, and on an international scale. In Italy, casting aside its uncomfortable democratic mask, it had installed a regime which was plainly a class dictatorship. Despite all this the proletariat hadn’t accepted defeat, but had soldiered on, in preparation for the counter-attack.

Within the communist parties and the International, however, the first signs of weakness, and first signs of opportunist penetration within the revolutionary body, were starting to appear. But even if the framework of the global revolutionary organ was being put seriously at risk, it was not yet inevitable that all was lost: a flaring up of the class struggle might still have carried the parties and the International back onto the right, and necessary, road to revolution.

But unfortunately it didn’t happen, and today communism, revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat appear to brainwashed public opinion as utopias of a past world, proved by history to be the unrealisable and foolish dreams of those incapable of facing up to the overwhelming power of the bourgeoisie,

We, on the other hand, assert that the main defeat suffered by the proletariat, then as well, wasn’t so much in the armed conflict with the bourgeoisie, with one class openly struggling to maintain power and the other determined to take it away: rather it was due to a betrayal of its general staff; because of the counter-revolutionary degeneration which had corrupted the parties and the International, first of all distorting its theoretical and programmatic foundations and then turning it on its head.

And still today, a return to the original doctrine and the uncorrupted communist program of Marx, Lenin and the Left is the indispensable basis for tomorrow’s reorganisation of the revolutionary proletariat on an international scale; a reorganisation which is the necessary condition for the next bold attack on the strongholds of capitalism in order to achieve the revolutionary conquest of power.

This necessary affirmation of the need for the party is what prompts us to republish these reports on fascism. Although written a long time ago, just after the First World War, they are nevertheless still imbued with the ardour of revolutionary class struggle: not just historical research but critical arm indispensable to our movement, to our comrades and to proletarians in search of their authentic party.

Since these initial two reports, our party, continuing on the left Marxist road, has dedicated numerous studies to the theme of fascism. When asked, what is Fascism, we do not answer with the platitude that describes it as “a dictatorship which denies liberty” and the antithesis of democracy, with the latter supposedly representing the safeguard of all liberties. Although useful insofar as it disguises the character of class power, Fascism is nevertheless just one of the many aspects that bourgeois domination has historically assumed. But it is the most modern, the most effective, the most perfected, the most responsive to the necessities of capitalism in its final phase: imperialism.

Our investigation into fascism, and in fact into all of the super-structural and political forms that society assumes, is based essentially on an analysis of the economic and productive forces and class relationships over successive historical periods.

About the bourgeoisie we can say, schematising to the maximum, that after its revolutionary conquest of power, it installs a liberalistic phase of capitalism, marked by an economy in which free competition between producers and traders predominates. Corresponding to the free trade which exists in the realm of economy, freedom in politics is preached: every citizen, they tell us, stands in the same relation to the State as everyone else; Parliament holds sway over the Executive and every law and decision derives from its preliminary approval.

Of course, if during this phase democracy represents a form of government that suits the bourgeoisie, insofar as it helps to achieve a compromise between all its components, it is still a permanent swindle and a mystification as far as the proletariat is concerned; if we evaluate social relations in real economic terms, all that being free under the law really means for the proletariat is being free to sell your own labour power, or else starve.

The best demonstration that the State, even in this liberal period, was nothing more than the guarantor of the interests of the bourgeois class is given by the extension and sharpening of the class struggle, which unmasked the real dictatorial nature of the State even when in a democratic and parliamentary guise.

With the extension of commodity production and the consequent concentration of capital into a few hands, capitalism moved, bit by bit, into its final phase: imperialism. Lenin would define the characteristics of imperialism as follows:
– Concentration of production and capital has reached a sufficiently high level of development to enable the creation of monopolies, which become the key players in economic life;
– Fusion of financial and industrial capital and the formation of a financial oligarchy on the basis of this capital;
– Greater importance attributed to the export of capital as against the export of commodities;
– The rise of international monopolistic associations of capitalists who divide up the world amongst themselves;
– The completion of the dividing up of the Earth amongst the great imperialist powers.

In the modern imperialist phase, the capitalist system subjects all the canons that inspired it in its liberal phase to a radical revision. In this new epoch the bourgeoisie plays down its original myths of unlimited freedom for the citizen and free economic competition between businesses: it resorts to structures that aim to curb political opposition, and turns to state intervention in the markets and in finance.

This different economic situation is necessarily also reflected in governmental forms; State policy evolves towards ever stricter forms of control and unitary direction within a highly centralised hierarchical framework. Big capital, the financial capital that dominates the economic scene, assumes direct control of the levers of State and proves to be intolerant of any indiscipline. In this phase, even the dominant class has to do without democracy, which is substituted by forms of government that are openly despotic not only towards the proletariat but also towards the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry and small shop-keepers, etc. Still schematising, we can say that fascism is simply one – or if you prefer, the most – characteristic expression of the modern stage of development of bourgeois society, constrained as it is to adopt forms of political totalitarianism capable of tackling, in a united and disciplined way, the revolutionary pressure of a proletariat which acts out of urgent historical necessity.

Such a concept has always been a distinguishing feature of our revolutionary left current’s historical and political evaluations. Even on the occasion of the coming to power of Hitler in Germany, our fraction expressed the view (whilst engaged in polemics with Trotski) that the new political/social form of organisation, Nazism, had been imposed on capitalism by economic conditions, and, above all, by the class struggle.

In the age of imperialism, starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then irreversibly so, all capitalist States, even when they haven’t adopted the structure of an openly fascist regime, have assumed its characteristic features as a matter of necessity, even if still maintaining a formal democracy with a simulacrum of a parliament and an apparent multiplicity of parties. The transformation of State institutions and of civil life within every country throughout the world has clearly proved this: the multi-party system is now reduced to a trivial soap opera, with State maintained psychophants as the main actors, and State financial support given to the parties, newspapers and even the workers’ trade unions.

From the strictly historical point of view, analysis of the fascist phenomenon must necessarily start from that extraordinary historical event, the First World War.

Fascism’s first historical theorisation, and apparition, was in Italy. When the war first broke out in Europe, in Italy people of every social stratum, with the exception of nationalists, were virtually united in their neutrality. But the interests of big capital were not neutral, and therefore Italian diplomacy was quick to engage in talks with the governments of the opposing sides, with the aim of drawing the major possible advantage from the war. Unhappy with the offers made by the Austro-Hungarian government, it would end up agreeing to enter the war on the side of the opposing coalition, and sign the famous Treaty of London.

These events were preceded by a major interventionist campaign in which the role assumed by Benito Mussolini was of no small importance. Whilst the Socialist party maintained the same oppositional stance to the war it had taken up during the military campaign in Libya, Mussolini, who for two years had been the editor of Avanti!, the party newspaper, started making tentative moves in favour of participation against Austro-Hungary. But the socialists didn’t retreat from their theses of neutrality, and any concealed interventionism within the party was denounced by its left wing. Mussolini would then openly line up in favour of the war and establish formal links with an interventionist movement within whose ranks men of the most diverse tendencies had come together; a movement which would be utilised by the centres of national capital in order to make entering the war appear to Italy as the logical and natural solution.

The First World War – condemned as imperialist by Lenin, by the Left of the Italian Socialist Party and by a few others, and seen as something which must be sabotaged by the proletariat of every county – was presented by Mussolini as a revolutionary event which would open the way to the emancipation of the proletarian masses. Even after the armistice had been signed, Mussolini would exploit the suffering and disappointment of the combatants. He would write: “The war has brought the proletarian masses to the fore. It has broken their chains. It has considerably enhanced their value. A war of the masses concludes with the triumph of the masses (...) If the revolution of 1789, which was both a revolution and a war, opened the gateways and the roads of the world to the bourgeoisie which had completed its century long apprenticeship, the present revolution, which is also a war, must open the doors of the future to the masses who have completed their hard apprenticeship of blood and death in the trenches (...) The revolution has continued under the name of war for 40 months. It isn’t finished (...) As to the means, we aren’t prejudiced, we accept what will be necessary: legal means and so-called illegal means”.

Faced with the powerful class movements of the proletarian masses, Mussolini would soon show what the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ means he intended to put at the service of the ‘revolution’ actually were.

From 1919 onwards, with his organisation at the disposal – and on the payroll – of capitalist interests, there would be a daily almost pedestrian increase in the levels of violence and brutality deployed against workers and proletarian organisations. These criminal undertakings, blessed by the church, tolerated by the State, supported by the police and the army, and unpunished by the legal system, were carried out on a territory by territory basis, leading to the gradual strategic conquest of the entire Italian peninsular. With its highly militarised organisation, fascism moved to assume control of essential services in Italy’s economic centres. From Bologna, the fascist advance advanced in two directions, on the one hand towards the industrial triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa, and on the other towards Tuscany and central Italy in order to encircle Rome.

The revolutionary attack by the Italian proletariat in 1922 had already been defeated by the underhand dealings of social democracy, so it wasn’t in fact fascism which saved the bourgeoisie from communism. The exponents of Italian big capital were nevertheless now convinced that the one remedy which would both prevent a return of the revolutionary peril, and discipline the middle classes, was the coming to power of Mussolini and fascism: all the elderly statesmen and the political parties on the democratic side were ready to accept him into the government. The only thing that needed to be settled, through gritted teeth, was how many portfolios the fascists would be awarded; once that had been agreed, Mussolini’s triumphal entrance to Rome, who would arrive there from Milan in a sleeping-car, was just the logical conclusion.

Neither the State not the democratic parties would intervene to stop the so-called fascist ‘revolution’. At the time of the ‘March on Rome’, the king would refuse to sign the declaration of martial law, thus allowing the fascists to converge on the capital undisturbed.

The only resistance the fascists encountered was in Rome itself where the workers, led by communists, fought hard against Mussolini’s squads. On that occasion too, as was by now the custom, the Police occupied the workers’ quarter, and by depriving them of any means of defence allowed the incoming hordes of fascists to shoot the workers in cold blood. When the party now called for a general strike as a class response to the fascist takeover, the socialist leaders of the General Confederation of Labour kept their members in check and instructed them not to obey the ‘dangerous’ exhortations of revolutionary groups, whereas the leaders of the other unions didn’t respond at all.

At the end of October 1922, Mussolini submitted his first government for parliamentary approval. The Mussolini government was given a vote of confidence of 306 votes to 116. The fascists had a mere 35 parliamentary deputies, that is, less than ten per cent.

Speaking for the Communist Party of Italy, Rabezzana read a party declaration that stated: “The consolidation of all the bourgeois parties around fascism confirms the exactness of our critique. More than any number of conferences, fascism in government shows that a revolutionary period has begun. The death of democracy coincides with the death throes of the dominant class (...) You fascists are the continuers and legitimate inheritors of the entire tradition of the Italian bourgeoisie”.

The Italian communist left has always rejected the idea of fascism as a ‘historical digression’, abruptly begun and abruptly finished. It has always maintained, on the contrary, that there is a continuous historical, social, political and economic thread uniting pre-fascist democracy, fascism and post-fascist democracy. In 1945, in our review Prometeo, we wrote: “The current war has been lost by the fascists, but won by fascism (...) The capitalist world, having preserved the integrity and historical continuity of its powerful State units, will continue to try to dominate the forces which menace it, to implement a system of ever tighter control over economic processes, and to undermine the autonomy of any social or political movement which threatens the established order (...) This fundamental truth becomes every day more evident in its organisational workings, which tend towards economic, social and political control of the world”.

Consistent with our unequivocal evaluation of fascism is derived our evaluation of what would later be called ‘anti-fascist resistance’: a movement which is so entirely lacking in class connotations that it even expects the proletariat to subject itself to a section of the bourgeois parties, in order to pursue the anti-historical and reactionary aim of ‘restoring democracy’. And that is why we have always considered anti-fascism as the most pernicious of all the products of fascism. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the armed partisan bands – and this is the case in Italy as much as in Spain – even when it was composed of confused proletarian groups, couldn’t free itself of its patriotic and democratic premises; which were, and are, completely antithetical, both historically and politically, to the class movement for socialism, in spite of the thousand and one lies of democrats and Stalinists alike.
 
 
 
 
 

Communist International
4th Congress - November 16th, 1922
Report on Fascism by the delegate of the Communist Party of Italy
[link to the text]
 
 
 
 

Communist International
5th Congress - 23rd session, July 2nd, 1924
Report on Fascism by the delegate of the Communist Party of Italy
[link to the text]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Our view that “the most damaging thing produced by fascism was having provided the justification for antifascism” is well-known.

Marxism interprets the word ‘Fascism’ as denoting a form of government which capitalism adopts when it finds itself in particular difficulties. It is adopted when the proletariat becomes a real threat to the very existence of capital; when the bourgeoisie has to set aside and bury its differences, temporarily abandoning the mask of democracy; and indeed, the function of parliament has only ever been to represent the various factions of the dominant classes. When needs must, in order to protect their class as a whole, the cruel and ruthless executioners of the working class are unleashed to have their day.

The tendency of Capital is to become ever more concentrated, and a new form of government is adopted in conformity with the gigantic and destructive capitalist machine which results. The two things are connected: concentration is a response to the falling rate of profit, and is implemented through successive mergers although profits continue to decline. The inevitable result is an ever increasing pressure on the whole of society, and this is exerted both directly by organising an increased exploitation of the workers, and through the fact of the existence of the millions of unemployed expelled from the productive apparatus.

It is under these circumstances that the latest forms of nationalism and racism have developed. The emergency bourgeois government – the fascist government – demands unquestioning faith in the nation (with the latter having become a paltry substitute for the true global community) and at a terrible cost to those who don’t come up to the required standards of national and racial “purity”. As far back as the 18th century Dr Johnson would write that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Today that is still undeniable, although we’d prefer to say it is the last refuge of the defenders of capitalism... and of its wars. More and more the nation is becoming an institution whose one aim is to imprison and oppress the proletariat within its borders. Meanwhile, the business dealings of capitalism know no frontiers. It is known, for instance, that many influential English capitalists had shares in Krupps during the 2nd World War, a fact which some say caused even more damage to the country than the actual German bombs themselves. Where-ever there is money to be had, and surplus value to extract, there will we find capitalism.

Indeed, what better way to make proletarians forget they belong to an international class than to disguise bourgeois States as ‘nations’? The workers are lined up on the war fronts, and then they slaughter each other in their millions. War is capitalism’s drastic solution to the problem of over-population, capitalism’s way of regulating population.

The workers in the trenches have often recognised the soldiers in the enemy trenches as being exploited just like themselves, and to such an extent that episodes of fraternisation have occurred despite rigidly enforced war censorship. But bourgeois propaganda continues to terrify us with the German, Arab, Jewish, and fascist menace, or indeed the “communist” or “bourgeois” menace, describing the violent atrocities of which the enemy is capable.

In opposition to this annihilation of international class power the Bolsheviks responded by offering immediate peace terms and withdrawing workers from the front during the 1st World War, even at the expense of territorial loss.

The anti-fascist movements played their part in this anti-revolutionary operation by providing the banner under which the 2nd World War would be fought, in the name of which millions of proletarians were massacred. Even the so-called left parties and trade-unions, which claimed to be representing the working class, declared themselves to be democratic and anti-fascist. But despite what they said, these movements were entirely directed towards dispersing the potential inherent in the class and getting it to directly support capitalism by supporting the principle and practice of democracy, since the latter is inseparable from capitalism.

It is an ignorance of dialectics which prevents them from understanding that both fascism and democracy are forms of bourgeois government, proper to different periods and places, and responding to diverse contingent necessities of capitalism. This is shown by historical evolution which sees the spread of the fascist model, even if it is dissimulated under a democratic veneer. Meanwhile democracy itself actually becomes the dictatorship of one party, or several parties with the same identical anti-proletarian, conservative programme. All that remains of democracy is just financial investments in the electoral circus

If we are asking the workers to desert the anti-fascist movements it isn’t because we deny the necessity of responding to the cowardly violence of fascism, but because we believe that the latter’s real power resides not in its thuggish ‘squads’ but in the real and continuous protection which democracy and the alliance of all the bourgeois fractions are prepared to give it. The proletariat doesn’t have the option of “choosing” between democracy and fascism because they are the same thing: fascism is the unscrupulous and extra-legal armed wing of democracy, and democracy is the “velvet glove” of fascism.

In any case, the living conditions workers have to endure are no better under the democratic regimes: they are no more secure on a day to day basis and their tomorrow is just as uncertain, they are just as worried about being evicted from their homes, just as liable to fall prey to spiralling debts and having to work longer and longer hours to pay them off. The proletariat in this society has one choice before it: either submission, or engaging in the struggle for its own class objectives, separate from and opposed to each and every bourgeois and petty-bourgeois faction.
 
 

Chapters expounded at the September 2003 party meeting.

(Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4nbsp;)
 
 

A War of Long Duration

After the bombardment of Fort Sumter – which can be considered as having given the North an initial advantage, since the South appeared as aggressors, therefore silencing those in the North who were opposed to the war – the rush to arms was enthusiastic, with both sides convinced, for different reasons, that the war would not last long.

Recruitment was initially dependent on volunteers, who would flock to both camps in considerable numbers, but by the second year of the war conscription had already been introduced, particularly in the South. In the North the system didn’t take definite shape until 1863.

Since there could only be a quick resolution to the war in the East, with the fall of one of the two capitals, it was here that attention would therefore be focused in the summer of 1861. In the North public opinion was clamouring for a decisive victory, not least because most of the troops were only enrolled on three-month terms, giving an idea of how long Washington thought the war would last. “Forward to Richmond!” was the battle-cry of politicians and hack journalists alike; the battle-cry, that is, of those who thought they would be travelling there in carriages or trains, not marching, or languishing in trenches. But they would have to wait a few years: the battle which took place on July 12th 1861 at Bull Run in Virginia saw the North soundly defeated, even if it was little more than skirmish compared to the ones which followed.

The Northerners dug themselves in around fortified Washington to take stock of the situation. For Lincoln, at least, defeat be transformed into victory insofar as it confirmed Congress’s determination to press forward to victory. Lincoln was allowed to float a huge 400 million dollar loan, and enrol 500,000 volunteers for either a 3 year term or for the duration of the war. Apart from parties, frondes and interest groups, this was the way the bourgeoisie would express its unitary determination to achieve its economic and political objectives.

Even if there was contact between the rival armies in Missouri, in West Virginia and in the peninsular to the South-east of Richmond, as well in Virginia itself, the rest of the year would roll by without further major engagements. The North would also deploy its overwhelming naval superiority to impose a blockade and would conquer a certain number of coastal forts and islands.

What should be done? For the Southerners the decision was relatively simple: whilst defending themselves from attack, they needed to bide their time and allow defeats, attrition and pressure from the foreign powers to convince public opinion in the North that the war wasn’t worth continuing. But for the North, which had set itself the task of defeating an enemy occupying a limitless territory which could count on a massive population, there was nothing for it but to attack. But where?

Winfield Scott, the General-in-chief of the Northern forces, predicted it would take a war of three years at least, with heavy losses, to subdue the South. Along with the naval blockade, he considered driving down the Mississippi as a primary objective. In Northern hands it would effectively separate the South from the West, and the South would be slowly strangled due to its isolation, lack of supplies and the military pressure exerted on it from all sides. Due to these characteristics, Scott’s plan would become known as the ‘anaconda plan’, and although it had its weak points, it was better than many later ones. Lincoln, after Bull Run, didn’t want to modify it that much, but when McClellan was entrusted with the command later on this would force a change of direction. McClellan saw the East as the one spot where pressure needed to be applied to crush the rebellion, whereas the West he saw as a very secondary theatre of war. And on this basis he directed his next campaign. In fact Richmond had a psychological rather than a strategic value: if the city fell, the Southerners could retreat into their limitless hinterland and choose the time and the place from which to launch their counter-attack.

In any case, war was continuing. In the West the Southerners occupied Columbus, a city in Kentucky, leading the State to abandon its neutrality and definitely side with the North. The North would then counterattack in the same zone with a series of attacks on cities and fortified positions, with the consequence that the Southerners abandoned the State in February 1862. The commander in the west was actually Halleck, but later history would consider Grant as the military star of the age.

A good description of this campaign can be found in an article by Marx from March 27, 1862, which also gives his opinion on the general strategy of the war. A communist, sat in a library in London, would see more clearly than the generals strutting around the battlefields equipped with all the available information: “In densely populated and more or less centralised states there is always a centre, with the occupation of which by the enemy the national resistance would be broken. Paris is a brilliant example. The slave states, however, possess no such centre. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and all these on the seacoast. The question therefore arises: Does a military centre of gravity nevertheless exist, with the capture of which the backbone of their resistance will be broken, or are they, just as Russia still was in 1812, not to be conquered without occupying every village and every plot of land, in short, the entire periphery?
    “Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.
    “Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.
    “The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.
    “From the foregoing considerations it follows:
    “The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south – difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march – could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.
    “The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations (...) On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope”.

We will see that the road to victory for the North was precisely that, even if it was a strategy applied only partially and two years late. But that is to run ahead of ourselves.

In the spring of 1862 the Confederates were in a tragic position. After winning a few battles they had spent the winter basking in past victories. The Northerners, on the other hand, had passed the winter of undeclared truce (the last of them) forming regiments, founding cannons, and organising the logistics required for armies of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men.

The Offensive that had got underway in January in Kentucky had “liberated” the State. The northern march had continued southwards, and on February 25, Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, had fallen. Other victories were attained in trans-Mississippi, in Arkansas and in New Mexico: a minor theatre, inhospitable and sparsely populated, where armies of reduced dimensions operated, but important nonetheless as a supply centre for the South.

After other important coastal conquests by the North, their luck seemed to have run out when suddenly a new and deadly weapon appeared in the bay of Norfolk (in southern hands but blockaded by the North): a battleship. This was the Merrimac (re-christened the Virginia) a wholly new concept in ships, impenetrable to the cannon shot then available and therefore able to get alongside war ships and sink them at its leisure. It should have given them an advantage capable of breaking the Northern blockade, but the northerners were working on a similar, possibly better, ship, the Monitor; which just a day after the attack by the Virginia would reach the bay of Norfolk where a fierce, but indecisive, duel ensued.

But in the West success continued to elude the South. An attempted counter-attack in Tennessee would lead to a bloody battle at Pittsburgh Landing. Grant was attacked whilst awaiting the rest of his army, but partial defeat would be transformed into a clear victory, and the Southerners were forced to retreat to the south of the Mississippi State border.

Meanwhile, another offensive would aim to gain control over the great river, mostly by deploying the river fleet, supported on land by the infantry. Bit by bit the forts and cities on the river would succumb; and when to avoid being outflanked the Southerners were forced to abandon Memphis, the Northern navies would descend hundreds of miles South. Memphis fell on June 6th. But already on April 25th, thanks to an extremely audacious action by Admiral Farragut’s naval squad, an even more important city on the river delta had fallen: New Orleans. The Northerners had then headed upstream, taking up a position next to the apparently insuperable fortifications at Port Hudson. Meanwhile, the river fleet which in June would follow the course of the Mississippi downstream would be brought to a halt about two hundred miles due North at Vicksburg, where formidable defences had been set in place by the Southerners. They couldn’t do otherwise; the loss of the father of rivers would mean the detachment of the States on the other side of the river, with consequences we have already described. Thus, for the time being, a communicating door with the West remained open for the Southerners, a link they couldn’t afford to lose.

In the East, leadership of the northern troops, firstly of the Army of the Potomac then of the whole of the Northern army, had been entrusted to McClellan, a grizzled and conceited organiser who dedicated himself to constructing an army whose enormity, it was thought, would make it invincible. But the general seemed reluctant to use it, and only deployed it when given explicit orders to do so by Lincoln. Faithful to his vision of a concentrated attack on Richmond, McClellan conceived a plan of attack that foresaw disembarking troops to the southeast of Richmond, on a peninsular defined by the estuaries of the York and James Rivers. From there his intention was to move his huge army towards Richmond, which would be conquered by means of a textbook siege. Luckily for the Southerners, McClellan was in no hurry to fight and his army moved off very slowly. In fact, having once disembarked, the Northerners, instead of throwing themselves in forced stages on Richmond, chose instead to lay siege to Yorktown. Getting the batteries ready to invest the city took a month, and not surprisingly, the day before the bombardment started, the Southern garrison craftily slipped away, and abandoned the city.

The delay allows Lee, the new commander in chief of the Southern army, to gather an army that isn’t the equal of the Federal one but can nevertheless forcefully oppose it. Thus the fall of Yorktown and the port of Norfolk, in itself positive, is counterbalanced by the territory left to the Confederates, who led by Jackson attack in West Virginia and threaten Washington. Federal troops are sent north, weakening a still powerful army, which nevertheless still has 125,000 troops after the division. But they aren’t enough for McClellan, who has a curious propensity of always vastly overestimating the enemy’s strength. Therefore, when attacked by Lee in the Seven Days’ battles (25 May to 1 June) he retreats to the bridgehead; here McClellan decides to re-embark his army, which emerges relatively unscathed, in marked contrast to the Confederates whose victory costs them enormous losses.  But if Lee saved Richmond, McClellan expended enormous resources and achieved nothing. In fact the Southerners are given the opportunity to counter-attack, which passes into the second battle of Bull Run and carries Lee’s army up into Maryland. Here on September 17 the Battle of Antietam takes place, without winners or losers, but Lee is forced to fall back to the south.

For Marx this Federal success is extremely important and decides the outcome of the war, not least because of its effects on the battle of Perryville (Kentucky) in the following month. If the Southerners had won at Antietam, their push into Kentucky would have had far greater impact. From there, just by crossing the River Ohio and pushing forward into the eponymous State, they could have split the North in two. In a nutshell, it is almost the reverse of the tactics that Marx hoped the North would follow in his article of March 27. He is well aware of the limitless technical and economic power of the North, but knows too there is no certainty, at that point, about the attitude of the border States, nor of the European powers: the military collapse of the Union could have forced it into making a peace settlement favourable to the South.

McClellan is now replaced by Burnside, who attempts to launch an attack on Richmond from Fredericksburg, a city on the river Rappahannock. There Lee draws up his army, and from an impregnable position, on December 13, the Southerners massacre the soldiers of the Union, wave upon wave of whom are sent to die without prospect of success (12,000 dead). The Northerners fall back, Burnside is sacked (although his style of butchery would be imitated, on both sides, by every general after him), and in Virginia there is a transition to trench warfare. The Southerners, meanwhile, have started too think maybe they can win.

In the West, unlike in the East, the advance of the federal troops is constant, despite the occasional setback. Halleck is recalled to Washington and appointed general-in-chief, and the army of the West is divided in three; a factor which would weaken it, temporarily, until its command was entrusted to Grant.

The Northern advance is held up in Tennessee by a Southern counter-attack (Battle of Chattanooga) that is soon halted however and forced back to Perryville on October 8, after Grant in his turn had won at Corinth. There is a final bloody battle at Stone’s River, in Tennessee, and between 31 December and 3 January the Southerners once again have to abandon the State.
 

The Crucial Year

Vicksburg, the river fortress, necessarily becomes a primary target, but it requires repeated campaigns, three of which fail due to the stronghold’s particularly advantageous position, high above the water and in a predominantly marshy area. Finally, in a rapid outflanking manoeuvring, which daringly take the risk of getting trapped behind enemy lines, Grant manages to lay siege to the city, which capitulates on July 4 1863. Port Hudson suffers the same fate soon afterwards, and as well as bringing the entire course of the Mississippi under their control, the victory would yield the northerners an additional 36,000 prisoners.

In the East, command of the Northern army passes to Hooker, and he too ends up being defeated by Lee on the outskirts of Fredericksburg (Chancellorsville, 2-4 May). We need however to remember that the balance of dead and wounded in these battles wasn’t always in favour of the victor; on the contrary, sometimes the price of victory was an ample blood tribute. Therefore in every battle, barring few exceptions, the North was at a considerable advantage compared to the South due to its numerical superiority and populous hinterlands. Hence, when Lee decided to make another attempt to invade the North, he couldn’t have expected to face a weakened army. And at Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania between the 1st and 3rd of July, there was the umpteenth massacre of infantry by the artillery, after which Lee’s army, repelled with heavy losses, was forced to abandon the field and return to Virginia, from whence it would never emerge again.

After the resounding victory at Vicksburg, the year 1863 ended favourably for the North in the West as well. An impressive Northern offensive succeeded in occupying Chattanooga, an important city on the border with Georgia. But about twelve miles south of the city, on the banks of the Chickamauga Creek, the Southerners waited for Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. There the latter was defeated, but, as so often was the case, not annihilated or dispersed. The battle was an extremely bloodthirsty one, one of the bloodiest of the war with the North’s casualty list running to 12,000 and the South’s to 19,000, amounting to 25% of the troops deployed. Rosecrans fell back to Chattanooga to hold out there.

Before achieving another Vicksburg, however, the federals were rescued by two armies under the direct leadership of General Grant, now commander in chief of the troops in the West, and after a battle before the gates of the city, on 23rd to 25th of November, the Southerners were forced to fall back to the South.

The war was now turning in the North’s favour, but that didn’t mean it would soon be over. In the expectation that war weariness would finally overcome the North, the Southerners can still expect to hold out in their unlimited fastness for some time to come. A strategy of conquest is therefore required and, above all, destruction of the enemy army – the one true condition of victory considering the vast dimensions of the confederate hinterland.

Lincoln now has Grant take command of all of the federal armies; the lieutenancy-general, a post that previously only Washington had ever assumed. Grant’s plan is simple, in fact the very one Marx had suggested a couple of years earlier: to attack with a strong army from Tennessee in the direction of Georgia, head for the sea and split the Confederation into two parts, head back north to rejoin the Army of the Potomac and force the Southerners to fight with the possibility of being destroyed in the process. But Grant hasn’t read Marx properly, and continues to favour the Virginian front, with the result that enormous forces, better employed elsewhere, are tied up there. The North however is so rich in all respects that it can allow waste. Especially of human life.

In the east, the attack is developed in three arenas: Shenandoah Valley; Central (River Rapidan); South (peninsular). Clearly the principal arena is the central one, and the first encounter is fought in a stretch of land known as the Wilderness on the 5-6 May 1864. It is an extremely bloody affair, as is by now the norm, and the Northerners are stopped. Grant prefers not to persevere and moves south. This forces Lee to move off quickly in order to head him off and to take up advantageous positions, which he does at Spotsylvania, where there is another huge massacre between the 9th and 19th of May. Another stalemate, another sideslip to the south by Grant; Lee once again forms up on unassailable positions and meets him in battle at North Anna on the 23rd; yet again Grant disengages himself to the south, this time moving menacingly close to Richmond. Lee lines up at Cold Harbour and Grant concentrates all his forces there. However Lee too has to deploy all of his forces and, unlike 1862, instead of sending detachments to menace the northern rear he has to recall all forces available to him, even from other theatres. It is at this point that Sherman in the west sets out on his march on Atlanta.

On June 3 Grant attacks, and his forces are beaten back (7,000 dead and wounded in one day) in a battle that would earn him the highly appropriate nickname of “butcher”. Meanwhile further north, in the Shenandoah Valley, the northerners led by Sheridan destroy the southern army facing them and threaten to encircle Richmond, forcing Lee to dispatch troops against them. Grant makes another skilful sidestep to the south and invests Petersburg, a city to the south of Richmond that forms part of its defensive system (13-8 June). Lee, taken by surprise, gets pinned down manning the city’s defences, and there he would stay for almost a year, defending the southern capital from the northern army that slowly but inexorably tightens its grip on the city. But worst of all, the possibility of carrying out those manoeuvres that had been his strength in the preceding years is precluded.

The only place with any room for manoeuvre is the Shenandoah Valley, despoiled by the northerners. In the month of July, General Early heads up the valley into Maryland and threatens Washington, but it is a threat that no longer inspires fear. He doesn’t achieve what Jackson achieved in ’62, which was forcing the North to send significant troop numbers back to defend the capital and thereby weakening the main front facing Richmond. Early thus re-enters Virginia having achieved virtually nothing; he however continues his harrying actions until Grant gives Sheridan the task of hunting him down.
 

The “March to the Sea”

On 4 May 1864 Sherman’s operations in Georgia begin, setting out from his base in Chattanooga. Facing him is the Army of Tennessee under the command of Joseph Johnston. The superiority of Sherman’s forces allow him to carry out continuous outflanking actions on the confederate positions, and in order to avoid being surrounded, the confederates have to continuously retreat, or accept battle under conditions which put them at a clear disadvantage. Once Sherman attacks one of these entrenched positions, he gets pushed back with losses; but then Johnston has to retreat, and then again and again, all the way to Atlanta. It is basically a repetition of Grant’s advance in the east: at last the federals have learned to exploit their superiority in men and equipment.

On 17 July, Hood replaces Johnston because of unhappiness in the South about the old general’s temporising tactics, but it is a serious mistake. Johnston, who had had no option but to retreat, had in fact significantly slowed up the progress of the Union’s army, which had only advanced 140km in two and half months: and he had achieved all that with little over half the number of combatants as the northerners, and with his forces incurring no major damage; a minor masterpiece. Hood on the other hand has no qualms about giving battle before Atlanta, and he suffers heavy losses. In the end Sherman tries another outflanking movement and Hood has to abandon Atlanta, which is occupied by the Federals on 2 September.

In 1864 victory smiles on the North at sea as well: in August, Farragut’s boats take Mobile, Alabama, last of the major ports left to the South. And as regards another thorn in the side of the Federals – the confederate commerce raiders – things also start to improve: on 19 June the famous Alabama is sunk in the English Channel; in October, in defiance of international conventions, the Florida is boarded when riding at anchor in the port of Bahia. Brazil wasn’t Great Britain, and conventions only get respected when there is someone around capable of punishing transgressors (and, those presently in charge in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are providing us with plenty of fresh examples of the validity of this axiom).

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the struggle between the armies of Grant and Lee continued. Holed up in Richmond and Petersburg, which he cannot afford to abandon, even if tactically it might have been the best option, Lee still has some room for manoeuvre, with Early’s troops, in the Shenandoah valley. But Sheridan gets put in charge of closing down this front as well, and in August he organises the Army of the Shenandoah. Grant’s orders are not just to destroy the enemy’s army, but also to devastate the valley and render it unserviceable to the Confederates. And not only to the regular army, but also to the bands of partisans, which although present in several States are particularly active in the valley, commanded by a southern officer by the name of Colonel Mosby. And partisan bands operating behind enemy lines, with the aim of keeping a substantial part of the enemy forces occupied, would prove to be another original feature of the Civil War seen in later wars. Thus Sheridan advances south, harrying the Confederates, who he regularly defeats along the course of the river thanks to his overwhelming numerical superiority.

Following his route isn’t difficult because everywhere it is marked with dense columns of smoke that fill the entire valley. That is how General Sherman puts into practice Grant’s order to ‘devastate the whole area so thoroughly that a crow flying across over the valley would have to carry its own rations’. With ruthless efficiency the unionists torch the farmhouses, the cattle sheds and mills; destroy the harvests, hay lofts and even stocks of wood laboriously accumulated for the winter; sequester and carry away livestock and slaves, and arrest and imprison all men below fifty years of age. Dwellings are supposed to be excluded from this fate but in fact, whether in reprisal against actions taken by the partisans or due to individual soldiers under the influence of drink or after war booty, they get burned down as well and the unfortunate occupants are left roofless, only to swell the lines of fugitive poor which the federal vanguards propel before them along the roads of the once fertile valley, now reduced to a desert.

With the approach of autumn, Sheridan retreats about half way up the valley. On 19 October the Southerners mount a surprise attack on the federal encampments at Cedar Creek, but eventually, thanks partly to the timely return of Sheridan from Washington, they are defeated and fall back. At this point, in the valley that in previous years the confederates had witnessed so many brilliant victories, it is all over for them as well.

Sheridan and Sherman’s successes allow Lincoln to be triumphantly re-elected in the second presidential ballot (8 November), defeating a recycled McClellan. But Lincoln’s main victory is over the radicals in his own party who, as we will see later on, are getting increasingly active.

If we now retrace out steps a bit, and return to the western front, we see Sherman ordering the evacuation of Atlanta on 7 September. Hood has decided to abandon a frontal assault on Sherman’s troops and decides to head north and invade Tennessee and Kentucky, hoping to be followed by Sherman. But times have changed; the numerical superiority of the northerners allows them to split their forces, and two armies of the West are formed: a smaller one, under Thomas’s orders, is sent to stop Hood in Tennessee, the other one, under the command of Sherman himself, is assigned to attack Georgia and the Atlantic States, with the aim of then heading back north towards Virginia.

Sherman’s main problem is his supply lines, which are far too long. The solution is to accumulate as much equipment and supplies as possible, and supplement that by living off the resources of the territories they cross. It is a bold decision having the army burn its bridges, forcing it to press on to victory or destruction; a repetition, on a grander scale, of Grant’s victorious manoeuvre at Vicksburg. And it is also a ruthless decision to have the full weight of the war descend on the civilian population, as Sheridan had already done in the North. The first of these measures is actually taken in Atlanta, which following the evacuation is razed to the ground to prevent it serving as a base for an improbable confederate counter-attack.

On 16 November the army sets out on the famous “March to the Sea”. But this isn’t so much an offensive, considering it wasn’t facing an actual army, but rather a triumphal descent towards the underbelly of the Confederation. For the advance the army was divided into four columns, which would devastate and destroy all before them over a broad 100-kilometre front. Once again, the troops’ good behaviour was not a high priority. On 21 December the port of Savannah is occupied. For the confederates, the loss of Georgia isn’t compensated by successes on other fronts: in Tennessee, at Franklin on 30 November and at Nashville on 15-16 December, the Southern army is defeated in battles which, after desertions had reached epidemic proportions, verge on the suicidal, and it is forced into retreat. But by now one can scarcely talk of an army: Hood resigns.

On 10 January in the New Year, Sherman marches out of Savannah and heads north. Columbia in South Carolina is taken on 17 February, and Charleston on the 18th. Meanwhile the one remaining important seaport, Wilmington in North Carolina, is taken by sea on 15 February, and reached by land on the 22 February. Whilst Sherman puts the hated South Carolina to fire and sword (in the northern collective imagination the State was considered the biggest warmonger of them all, and the one from which the secession had originated) the scattered southern forces are reunited in North Carolina, and their command restored to Johnston. Here Johnston makes a vain attempt to stop the Federals, but his temporising abilities are of little avail against such overwhelming forces. Meanwhile, in the valley of the Shenandoah, Sheridan disperses the remnants of the southern forces under Early’s command, and takes his cavalry before Petersburgh: Grant launches an enveloping attack (Battle of Five Forks, 29-30 March) and on April 2nd, an attack on the entire front. Lee, not wishing to be encircled, is forced on April 3rd to abandon the city, and Richmond along with it. Grant’s army pursues him and bars his line of march: at Appomattox Court House Lee renounces any last moment resistance, and on the 9th April, he signs the surrender. It is the end, for even if it is just one army surrendering, the South is nevertheless defeated. Soon the other generals surrender to the Federals as well.
 

The Emancipation of the Slaves

The question of the emancipation of the enslaved African masses, present in large numbers in the southern States, is one that affects events throughout the civil war. It constitutes a causative factor, a phenomenon relevant to the war itself, and a burning issue in the period afterwards.

For Marx and Engels the question of slavery is the central question and root cause of the disagreement between the capitalist and financial North and the agrarian and latifundist South. To their contemporaries, however, who appeared to give little thought to the matter of emancipation, that was not how it appeared. Apart from pro-abolitionist groups operating in the north very few northerners seemed to care much about the lot of the Negroes. Indeed, at the popular level, it seems there was actually more sympathy for Negroes and their emancipation in the South than in the North, at least before the war.

The fact is that the various actors who took part in the events which were unfolding didn’t have a clear understanding of what was happening, and, as is always the case, they acted like puppets, suspended as they were by historical and economic threads woven by the society in which they lived out their lives. About Lincoln we could quote Cromwell’s far-sighted quip: “No-one goes so far as he who doesn’t know where he is going”. In fact the good Abraham spent the last five years of his life contradicting in practice his earlier positions.

Marx, on the other hand, from the first year of the war could see that the question of emancipation was crucial to the outcome of what may be considered the completion of the bourgeois revolution in North America; a revolution which had started in the 17th century, and crossed the Atlantic on the ships of the colonizers; a capitalist development which, dispersed as it was throughout the boundless New World, would take a while to assume its characteristic forms. The so-called American Revolution, i.e. the War of Independence, marked the national emancipation of the American bourgeoisie from the colonial subjection of Great Britain: it is to this that we reduce its social and economic import, both as regards its aims and the way the struggle was conducted, which in fact involved only a very small minority of the American colonists. The Civil War, on the other hand, created the opportunity of completely liberating those productive forces that, according to our doctrine, pave the way to the proletarian revolution. The economic system in the South, and therefore slavery, stood in the way of this liberation. And this explains why Marx and Engels always gave their passionate support to the North.

As early as the beginning of November 1861, Marx wrote: “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.

“If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the war up to now, they have constituted the chief weakness of the North (...) Anxiety to keep the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe’s most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil – slavery itself.
When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont’s Missouri proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was done solely out of regard for the loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached (...) Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan – emancipation of the slaves”.

The liberation of the slaves had therefore appeared as a military necessity as well. When later General Hunter made himself promoter of a similar initiative to Frémont’s, the president’s reply was the same. In 1862, however, the inadequacy of the military forces on the one hand, and the threat of a part of the Republican Party to form a third, more radical, party, forced Lincoln to act more decisively. The most determined section of the bourgeoisie had made its voice heard.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union – announced Lincoln in 1862 – and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that” (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862). But by the Autumn of 1862, the situation had ripened: the South was showing no signs of giving in, and only at Antietam had Lee’s counter-offensive been stopped by the Unionist army. On the wave of that victory (which some consider a turning point in the war, the beginning of the end for the South) Lincoln issued a first proclamation in which he announced his intention, from January 1st 1863, to liberate all slaves living in areas dominated by the rebels.

According to Lincoln it was a purely tactical measure: “Without the problem of slavery, the rebellion would never have happened – he said – and, deprived of slavery, it can’t continue”. We cannot but agree with this self-evident comment, but it should be remembered that the South wasn’t simply the North, plus slaves. In fact we have seen that slavery was an integral part of the economic social structure in the South, and it was illusory to think that if ‘the problem’ was removed, everything else could go back to the way it was; how true this was would soon become only too evident.

The Proclamation invited the Southern States to re-enter the Union, subject to the emancipation of all slaves, in exchange for an end to the conflict. In some cases there was even compensation offered to cover any economic losses arising from emancipation. And yet the definitive Proclamation, which was issued on 1st January 1863, only included the territories in the hands of the Confederation and not the border States, nor the ‘liberated areas’. It was nevertheless an extraordinary turn of affairs (Marx considered it ‘clause-ridden’, but still ‘historic’).

If we consider Lincoln’s thinking at the time of his inauguration, when, among other things, he had declared his preparedness to accept a 13th amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the permanency of slavery in the southern States, we can see how individuals count for very little: for the very same person was now calling for a 13th amendment to provide for the abolition of slavery in the Confederate States. But Congress, which was a lot more radical than the president, would go much further than this,  and push through a measure prohibiting slavery over the entire territory of the United States. This amendment, ratified eight months after Lincoln’s death in December 1865, represented a significant change to the Constitution.

The Emancipation Proclamation could not be postponed; chiefly because all it did was ratify something that was already happening on the farms and plantations throughout the South. The lack of control over the slaves due to the war emergency, with many whites in uniform, meant there was a general relaxation of discipline, with numerous cases of absenteeism, insubordination and successful escape attempts. And whenever the Federals arrived, the situation would become particularly explosive. Even back in 1862 a law had been passed prohibiting the army from returning runaway slaves to their owners (although the army would end up exploiting the former slaves as auxiliary workers; casually referring to them as ‘contrabands’). Later on slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia (The city of Washington) and in the Territories, although it was largely a symbolic measure.

The consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation was that Negroes could be enrolled in the Unionist army. But if, on the one hand, this allowed large numbers of highly motivated troops to be admitted, on the other hand it inspired fear. What would the armed Negro do after he had learned to kill whites with impunity? But right from the start all the calls to abstain from violence in areas where the slaves had been liberated would prove unnecessary; and the reality was that episodes of violence were comparatively rare as the process of introducing emancipation gathered pace. The idea of the Negro with a gun therefore slowly started to gain acceptance in the North. Besides, after much hesitation, and far too late, they had decided to arm the blacks in the South as well. Necessity had won out over fear: the Negroes, who in power represented a socially frightening prospect, had in fact rarely lived up to the fears of the whites; class of slaves though they were, they nevertheless found themselves in a myriad of different situations, lacking in mutual contact and leaderless; rarely did they rebel and in general their objective was to eke out a living on their own parcel of land. But it would take the whites many years to understand that fact.

In the South they understood it too late: in the end they realised that the enormous numerical inferiority of their armies was an insurmountable problem; whereas the enemy was using ‘their’ Negroes against the South itself. For some time President Davis, and some of the most eminent military leaders on the southern side, including Lee, had been considering whether to emancipate at least some slaves in order to save the independence of the Confederates. Finally, despite opposition from the confederate Congress, Davis managed to pass a law stating that slaves who enrolled voluntarily in the Confederate army would not only be freed at the end of the war, but also (truly remarkable for the time) receive citizenship and a patch of land. All that whilst the North – Lincoln included – was still thinking of resolving the problem of the freed slaves by deporting them back to Africa.

History would however follow a different path and yet this enrolment of the blacks, apart from being a powerful confirmation of determinism in human history, shows that a revolutionary juncture had been reached: the supreme good for the South was independence, but to maintain it the South would have to gradually dismantle its economic system; gradually substitute it for a system which was remarkably similar to the one it was fighting against. History would thus have taken its course anyway, transcending lines on the map, different coloured uniforms, races, Generals; and also, transcending any ideas and consciousness that the participants may have had of the situation in which they were operating. In the end North America had to be transformed in order to allow the capitalist system to develop in line with the rhythms which world trade and the available resources allowed. And thus it was.
By the end of the war, in 1865, almost a million ex-slaves – a quarter of the Southern Negroes – had left the plantations and sought protection from the unionist troops, working afterwards for the army under often extremely harsh conditions, and without pay. Around two hundred thousand Afro-Americans, 80% of them from the confederate states, fought in the ranks of the unionist navy and army, in ‘black regiments’ commanded by white officers. Evidently there were those who were sceptical of the fighting capacity of the ex-slaves, but not for long. Initially they would receive lower pay than the whites, but eventually salaries would be levelled out; the first real and significant equalisation in the history of American blacks. In the army Negroes became literate and subject to the same rules as the whites. They fought with great courage, even if regularly destined for the worst missions; thirty per cent of them never came back, a much higher percentage than the whites.
 

The White Proletariat

In reality Negroes inspired more fear in the North than in the South. The Democratic Party in particular, in opposition in the North, would exploit the difficulties arising as result of the war to counter-pose the Negroes’ interest in having slavery abolished to that of the white workers, impoverished due to the length of the conflict and by inflation and menaced by the prospect of the appearance of millions of Afro-Americans on the labour market. Although an unlikely prospect, this was nevertheless believed.

As a class, white proletarians had more than enough reason to be fed up with the Republican Party and the government. Class-consciousness, which was starting to develop in the East, was repressed both in the North and the South by constant appeals to patriotic unity, which was preached by the politicians and put into effect with arms. In the course of this ‘war for liberty’, proletarians who dared to strike, especially in the factories which provided important materials for the war effort, would be faced with well-equipped army divisions; and those who criticised Lincoln would end up in jail without even a hint of a trial. Eventually the number of political prisoners incarcerated would reach 30,000, an eloquent testimony to how democratic the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie really are. Meanwhile the flower of the proletariat went off to die on the battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee.

In the North, the war caused the prices of essential goods to rise sharply, sometimes by as much as 100%. But there was no corresponding rise in wages, and for families in particular, who had found it difficult enough to buy enough food at the old prices, it was very hard indeed. It was one of the many ways in which the bourgeoisie took advantage of the war to enrich itself in a thoroughly shameless manner. Throughout the course of the war, strikes in all trades were relatively frequent everywhere, and this was a factor in the trade-union revival. In fact the shortage of labour gave proletarians a certain amount of leverage. Many women entered factories for the first time; a change frowned upon by their male workmates because they mainly perceived it, because women were paid less, as an attack on the average level of wages. By 1864, despite the war, the presence of the proletariat was making itself felt: there were 200,000 trade-union members, some in national rather than local trade unions which were equipped with their own press organs.

The extension of the strikes prompted the bosses to turn to Congress for help, and they were only too happy to oblige. The Contract Labour Law of 1864 made it possible to employ foreign workers who had undertaken to provide a year’s free labour in exchange for the cost of their emigration. This allowed the capitalists to access workers who were not only low cost but who couldn’t afford to strike. To break strikes the army was used, sometimes to drive workers back into their workplace at the point of bayonets.

Everything was conspiring to make proletarians see the war as one being fought on behalf of the Negro slave, or for the capitalist in his fancy spats; or at least being fought for everyone apart from themselves. In March 1863 a new law on conscription was passed. This allowed drafted men (the system functioned like a lottery, there was no general conscription) to obtain exemption by paying a commutation fee of 300 dollars to the government. For the overwhelming majority who couldn’t obtain exemption – 300 dollars was more than a year’s wages for many workers – it was case of a “war of the rich, fought by the poor”. Nothing new under the sun!

In July of the same year, immediately after the law had come into force, popular rage exploded into open revolt in the cities of the North. In New York an angry mob destroyed the recruitment office; then, for three days, groups of rowdy elements roamed the city destroying public buildings, factories, omnibuses and private houses. The so-called Draft Riots concentrated the blind and disorderly discontent of desperate elements, who unleashed their anger against the rich, and against Republicans, but above all, against Negroes. After sacking the houses of the rich, the mob moved on to torment the latter. An arson attack was launched on an orphanage for Negro children; many Negroes were hung, thrown into the flames, and generally hounded by the mob; many took refuge in Central Park. On the fourth day, troops who had just returned from Gettysburg suppressed the riots. It is thought that the number of deaths resulting from this event, which in the country’s interior history in terms of casualties comes next after the Civil War itself and the attack on the Twin Towers, is thought to be around four hundred. Other revolts, which were less bloodthirsty, took place in several other cities.

Writing about these events soon afterwards in Capital, Marx would declare that emancipation was also therefore a progressive factor as far as the advancement of the class struggle was concerned: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”.
 
 

A Productive Party Meeting at Viareggio - June 3-4, 2006 [RG95]
 
 

              STATE EXPENDITURE   %
    1  USA              455,3    41,4
    2  China            161,1    14,6
    3  India            81,8     7,4
    4  Russia            66,1     6,0
    5  France            51,2     4,7
    6  United Kingdom    46,2     4,2
    7  Germany           36,9     3,4
    8  Japan             35,2     3,2
    9  Italy             34,5     3,1
   10  Saudi Arabia      29,1     2,6
   11  Turkey            24,3     2,2
   12  South Corea       23,1     2,1
   13  Brazil            20,7     1,9
   14  Iran              18,5     1,7
   15  Pakistan          16,1     1,5
             WORLD     1100,1   100,0