An Unfinished Revolution
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln
Blackburn, Robin
Publisher: Verso
Year Published: 2011
Pages: 272pp ISBN: 978-1-84467-722-1
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX14065
A study of Marx's analysis of the American Civil War as a conflict about slavery, not tarrfifs. Marx saw the north as a bourgeois republic, and the south as expansionist.
Abstract:
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Table of Contents:
Introduction
Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address
Emancipation Proclamation
Gettysburg Address
Karl Marx
The North American Civil War
The American Question in England
The Civil War in the United States
The American Civil War
A Criticism of American Affairs
Abolitionist Demonstrations in America
Letters
Letters from Marx to Annenkov
Letters between Marx and Engels
Letters between Marx and Lincoln
Articles
Woodbull & Clafin
Independence vs Dependence! Which?
The Rights of Children
Interview with Karl Marx
Conclusion to Black and White - Thomas Fortune
Preface to the American Edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England - Frederick Engels
Speeches at the Founding of the Industrial Workers of the World - Lucy Parsons
Acknowledgments
From publisher:
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of “free labor” and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln’s response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy.
The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men’s Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped spread the demand for an eight-hour day. Blackburn shows how the IWA in America—born out of the Civil War—sought to radicalize Lincoln’s unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war, and it inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades.
In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes articles from the radical New York-based journal Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, an extract from Thomas Fortune’s classic work on racism Black and White, Frederick Engels on the progress of US labor in the 1880s, and Lucy Parson’s speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.
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