Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 02:56:22 -0500
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: on nation building--civil war


dear friends,

Lincoln was forced by the victories of the
South  in 1861-2 to issue the emancipation 
proclamation , especially after defeats of 
2nd Manassas and in the Shenandoah  Valley.

The North hoped  previously to gain re-union by the battle
cry of "Union"  alone but it did not work. Finally,
through the tides of  battle and tactical-strategic 
necessity forced Lincoln's hand . Lincoln hoped
for a near-victory would strenghten his hand in timing,
this he got at Antietam in 9/62 and issued the 
Emancipation proclamation a few weeks after.
It was to be effective in 1/1863 but was only effective
in re-occupied secession territory and not SLAVE 
lands of states that did not formally  seceed--Missouri,
Kentucky, Maryland, etc.
 but It gave the north a great boost!
1) 200,000 blacks were to enlist in the Union forces
and present themselves well in most of their combat.
2) the political-moral uplift was to re-charge the 
North ideologically -politically.
3) emancipation was the near death to the plans of 
pro-confederate European powers to hoped to more
actively intervene on the part of the south
4) The home-front of production  was strenghtened
by the social cause  of the defeat of the chattel slave
system which  got waged  workers mass support..

The desperate South in late 1864-5 had received
the (secret) plans of Gens. Cleburne  and Lee himself to offer 
Blacks freedom from chattel slavery if they would fight for
 the south. A plan that was villified by the majority of the
Bourbon ruling class and quickly buried.  This would
have undermined much of the purpose that the 
Southern states had seceeded over in the first place.

In the 19th cent  Certain national struggles could still be 
supported by marxists,communists , but  by the end the century 
the world system had changed  and most feudal/backward orders
having been swept aside-- world capital became pre-dominant
As Engels said 'that which in one historical period  can
be progressive in the next can become reactionary.
This is what happened to all  nationalist programmes..

On  Jim Blauts  distortion of Rosa L's critique of national
libbing-post  1914;
 It is clear he does not understand or present
 the issue dialectically. The world capitalist system had by the early
 20th century become a worldwide  --hegemonic and the modern
imperialist -monopolist  capital  expanded to every corner of the
globe. Capitals world market had been created.
 This made the national-libbing issue  qualitatively
different as a class stand . Imperialist economics meant 
now that peripheral nations would  circa WW1 be part of
one section of the imperialist camps or another to compete
and share the worlds stolen loot/commodities form the 
workers. (absent  socialist revolutions that is)
Socialist revolutions /movements were on the agenda for
marxists, no longer nationalist -bourgeois ones.
The workers movements were to now be part of an 
Internationalist  organization to make headway  to combat world
 capitalism.

Jim B.  puts forward political/moralist arguments to support
nat-libbing in this age but he has no economic /material 
arguments to back up his case therefore his views become
idealist if not utopian . And in practice in this century cross-class
united blocs of nat-libbing got the 'liberated" bourgeois a rented out 
new nation state but left the workers movements drowned in
blood in  many lands courtesy not only of imperialists but their
national bourgeois partners in the peripheral countries..

Nat-libbers live in a big time warp now . National patriotism
only divides the international working class, we should build
class unity in theory and practice to unite the class. A much better
tactic in the overall marxist strategy for ending waged slavery 
and getting to a  non-exploiting society world wide.

Neil .



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