Marx’s intertwining of race and class during the Civil War in the United States

Abstract

Marx wrote extensively on race and class in the American Civil War. These writings, developed during the time he founded the First International and was completing Capital, argue that capitalism was grounded in slavery and that racism attenuated class-consciousness among workers from dominant racial groups. At the same time, the Civil War unleashed new forms of democratic and revolutionary consciousness and action, in which Black slaves seeking freedom, Black and White northern soldiers, British workers, and abolitionist and socialist intellectuals expressed solidarity with each other across racial and national lines. The Civil War had revolutionary implications, not only in terms of bodily and political freedom for four million human beings but also in terms of large-scale economic changes that uprooted a centuries-old agrarian system and that posed – in the end unsuccessfully – the question of radical land reform on behalf of the former slaves. These Marx writings, which have been discussed only sporadically over the past century, are especially timely today.