Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 09:38:34 +0000
From: Lew <Lew-AT-dialogues.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: on nation building


In article <8IOfmUAm5e$0IwPp-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>, James Heartfield
<James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk> writes

>I think all of this is fair enough, but so what if Lincoln was not
>motivated by a moral wish to free the slaves? The North's struggle
>against the South was without a shadow of a doubt the progressive
>alternative. For sure Lincoln was motivated by a desire to keep the
>Union together (he was the president after all). But the Union was in
>real danger not only of losing out to the South, but in being dictated a
>pro-slavery policy in the new territories. You can attribute an economic
>motive to the North in that free labour was more efficient than slave,
>but that obscures the real character of the struggle as one between
>freedom and slavery. Lincoln might have been slow on the uptake, but he
>did win the war. 

This is a classic liberal interpretation of the events and it well
illustrates the liberal ideological origins of nation building. The
cause of the war lay in the conflict of material interests between the
industrial North and the Southern plantation owners. Whatever Lincoln's
personal preferences were, the fact is that he was elected to office and
originally prosecuted the war with the publicly stated aim of saving the
Union, even if that meant the retention of slavery. Had circumstances
been slightly different and had the North more quickly brought in its
manufacturing superiority (the crucial factor in the North eventually
winning the war), then Lincoln may well have saved the Union - for
slavery. As it was, he only made his change when circumstances dictated.
More than the promise of abolition, this brought in many thousands of
black soldiers for the Union army. For them the fight was between
freedom or slavery. But to say that this is the "real charecter" of the
struggle is superficial in the extreme. 

There is a parallel with workers and the vote at about the same time in
Britain. The vote was granted to workers largely as a result of
conflicts between the Tories (representing land) and the Liberals
(representing industry), each seeking to promote their class interests
over the other by an  extension of the franchise. Of course the
extension of the franchise was a goog thing, but to present its "real
charecter" as an ideological struggle of which workers were the
unintended benificiaries is to turn marxism on its head.

I think it is time to put to rest the notion that wage slavery was (is)
necessarily more efficient than chattel slavery. It depends. Robert
Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their book _Time on the Cross_(1974),
demonstrate statistically that US slavery conformed to the basic laws of
free market economics and was economically efficient. For example,
agriculture in the South was 35% more profitable than in the North. This
is not to say that chattel slavery can be imposed anywhere, but its
resurgence in some parts of the world this century show that it is not
incompatible with capitalism.
-- 
Lew


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