Just one of the week's important read:
Marx & Engels writings on Civil War still provocative 155 years later
With a presidential candidate on the Republican side who is the darling of neo-Confederates, old style KKK-types, and alt-right white nationalists, there's no time like the present to review the United States' troubled history with racism. International Publishers' new and completely updated edition of The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is an opportunity to do just that.
What makes this collection of writings by these two giants particularly interesting, however, is not just the commentary they offer on the Civil War. As Professor Andrew Zimmerman, who edited this edition, says in his introduction, "Readers will not find a Marxist interpretation" of the war in this book. Instead, what it showcases is Marx and Engels in the process of applying their methodology of historical materialism to an event of world-historic importance as it unfolded.
The book thus carries a relevance beyond the interest it might arouse among Civil War buffs or historians; it represents a milestone in the development of Marxism as a method of social and political analysis.
International first offered this title nearly 80 years ago, edited and introduced at the time by Herbert Morais (under the pseudonym Richard Enmale). In this edition, Zimmerman has expanded the selection of texts to include new writings by the primary authors, but also added relevant material from figures such as Union Army officer Joseph Weydemeyer, a comrade of Marx and Engels, as well as African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois.
Zimmerman's introduction to the book and his commentary for each individual chapter provide a background that is rich in detail and tailored to a contemporary audience. Marx and Engels' newspaper articles and private correspondence are situated within the historical and political debates of their day, but their place in the ongoing development of Marxist political economy is also chronicled. As Zimmerman points out, Capital Volume 1 would appear just a couple of years after the Civil War, so the selections in this book are examples of Marxism in its own process of development.
A fundamental conclusion that Marx and Engels return to throughout is the undeniable reality that the Civil War was, fundamentally, a social revolution against the institution of slavery. Efforts by some at the time (and subsequently by revisionist historians) to paint the conflict as being fought solely over tariffs or "states' rights" trade disputes are exposed as one-sided and usually self-serving interpretations. The economic nature of the conflict was certainly key, but it was economics in the form of slavery which informed every aspect of not only the Civil War, but of U.S. and global industrial development.
As Marx observes in one excerpt, "Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery... Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry." Slavery, then, was "an economic category of the greatest importance."
The American Civil War, for Marx and Engels, was a class conflict - not just a military one. Following on the insights of DuBois and others, Zimmerman rescues Marx and Engels' arguments from the mechanistic "Marxist" interpretations of the war which have characterized it as simply the victory of a bourgeois revolution and the freeing of capitalism from its slave fetters. In Zimmerman's words, the war was, according to Marx and Engels, "a workers' revolution carried out within a bourgeois republic that was finally undermined by that bourgeois republic." That undermining of course, was the counterrevolution against Reconstruction.
Zimmerman does not shy away from the shortcomings of Marx and Engels in his introductions or his selection of texts, however. He is blunt in his critique of their propensity to underestimate and not properly recognize the central role played by slaves and former slaves in fighting for their own emancipation. Though Marx and Engels are consistently anti-slavery and unreservedly on side with the fight for freedom, black workers and slaves play only secondary roles in most of their discussions of labor's struggle against slavery. The addition of DuBois's 1933 essay, "Karl Marx and the Negro," as an appendix serves as an important remedy.
Marx and Engels' analysis of Abraham Lincoln's halting but steady evolution from reluctant anti-slavery warrior to a new kind of democratic leader destined to "lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world," makes up another important component of the book. It holds lessons for how activists today must strategically evaluate political figures and leaders.
Finally, the lessons Marx and Engels drew from the Civil War are reflected in their writings on the role of racism in England's colonial domination of Ireland and on the class struggle nature of revolution which was displayed in the Paris Commune. The latter "Civil War in France" was described by Marx with the same language that had colored his earlier descriptions of the fight against the Confederacy. The Commune, he said, was yet another example of "the war of the enslaved against their enslavers."
This book stands as an example of how the two masters of critical political economy grappled with the rapid development of capitalism and the upheaval of social revolution in the mid-19th century. The insights of the selected writings on offer are matched by the succinct but illuminating introductory texts by Zimmerman. The volume holds importance for not just students of Marxism or the Civil War, but for political activists and academics broadly.
The Civil War in the United States
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Introduction by Andrew Zimmerman.
219 pp. $14.00, ISBN: 978-07178-0753-6.
Available in paperback from International Publishers.
Editor's Note: International Publishers is hosting a book talk with Andrew Zimmerman to discuss this new edition on Thursday September 22 at 7pm at Brooklyn Commons, 388 Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, NY.
--
As I've written here before, years ago, I've work with Raoul Pack to help him on the research he needed to write his film's synopsis about Karl Marx.
The film became years later a fictional project and will be out next year.
It's called The Young Karl Marx, has been shot in between France, Belgium and Germany in French, English and German, and will be out in 2017.
Here are more details:
26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist's son, who investigated the sordid birth of the British working-class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl Marx's new vision of the world. Together, between censorship and the police's repression, riots and political upheavals, they will lead the labor movement during its development into a modern era.
Read here too:
http://variety.com/2015/film/global/berlin-raoul-peck-set-to-direct-august-diehl-in-young-karl-marx-exclusive-1201427240/
Berlin: Raoul Peck Set to Direct August Diehl in ‘Young Karl Marx’
Haitian vet helmer Raoul Peck is on board to direct “The Young Karl Marx,” a period drama chronicling the turbulent youth and friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The ambitious project has lured two German stars: August Diehl (“Night Train to Lisbon,” pictured above) for the role of Marx, and Alexander Fehling (“Inglorious Basterds”) for the role of Engels.
Pic is being produced by Agat Films and Velvet Film in France, Rohfilm in Germany and Artemis Prods. in Belgium.
Films Distribution, Nicolas Brigaud-Robert and Francois Yon’s Paris-based arthouse company, has acquired international sales to the film.
Written by Peck and Pascal Bonitzer, “The Young Karl Marx” opens with 26-year old Marx who goes with his wife, Jenny, into exile, and depicts Marx’ encounter with Engels, the son of a textile factory owner, in 1844 Paris.
Set against the backdrop of the 1848 rebellions, which culmintaed in police raids and riots, the movie charts Marx and Engels’ journey to complete Communist Manifesto, which gave birth of the labor rights movement.
“Avoiding the habitual caricature of the old bearded revolutionary icon, this film is the coming of age of two young and daring intellectuals who will have an extraordinary impact on the world of the 20th century and beyond,” said Peck, whose latest “Murder in Pacot” will be playing in the Berlinale Panorama Special on Feb. 10.
“The Young Karl Marx” is backed by pay TV Canal Plus, pubcaster France Televisions (France 3 Cinema), as well as Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (MBB) and Mitteldeutsche Medienforderung (MDM). Diaphana and Neue Visionen will release the movie is France and Germany, respectively.
Lensing is scheduled to begin in July.
No comments:
Post a Comment