[Peace-discuss] Obama's Right-wing advance

[C. G. Estabrook]

Joe--

I think the piece you quote is good on Obama but not so good on Lincoln.  It 
overstates "the historically progressive character of Lincoln and his 
government": it's not clear that they "embodied a profoundly democratic and 
ultimately revolutionary agenda, centered on the struggle against slavery and 
the preservation of the union."

Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho' he may have become so). 
His position before secession was that the federal government did not possess 
the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already existed; he 
supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly prohibited Congress 
from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.

In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley), "My paramount object 
in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy 
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and 
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save 
it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do 
about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the 
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to 
save the Union."

And what was "saving the Union" about?  All would admit today that the *effect* 
of Lincoln's policy was to establish a much more powerful central government in 
the United States.  (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about a verb: 
"the United States is" vs. "the United States are.")  But the *cause* of the war 
was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor differently -- by 
slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came into conflict 
after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that followed it.

"Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the 
Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect 
of competing against a forced-labor system.  But favoring free soil did not mean 
agitating to free the black man.  The majority of Western farmers were not 
abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the 
black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace.  That goal, and the 
attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the 
abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party" (W. A. Williams).

I'm suggesting, I'm afraid, that the WSWS article is insufficiently Marxist, in 
that it ignores the class interests that led to the rise of the radical 
Republicans (and Lincoln), who were not necessarily abolitionist and only 
adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi empire farmed 
with wage-labor, not slave-labor.  (Hence the central Republican party plank was 
"no extension of slavery.")

Remember that Marx himself, when he wrote on behalf of the International Working 
Men's Association to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), gave as his 
principal reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle 
between capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern 
workers "were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their 
European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to 
progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war."

I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would have opposed 
the war in 1860 -- but obviously not because s/he would have supported slavery. 
  But I do wonder what a thorough-going anti-war movement that was in fact 
egalitarian (therefore necessarily democratic and abolitionist) would have 
looked like then.  (There were vestiges, of course.)

Regards, Carl


On Dec 8, 2008, at 7:00 PM, Joseph Parnarauskis wrote:

> It is hard to ignore Obama's rapidly evolving recant of his pre-nomination
> promises to the American people.  As a Socialist Equality Party member and
> former local candidate for State Senate, I feel obliged to send you this
> article from the World Socialist Website, our Party's daily web-paper, giving
> a clear and concise analysis of his incoming administration.  From a
> international and Marxist perspective, it will clarify his lies of "Hope and
> Change".  I enjoy reading your banter daily regarding your views of his 
> turn-around.   I look forward to your comments. Best regards, Joe
> Parnarauskis
> 
> 
> 
> Obama’s Team of Reactionaries
> 
> 
> 8 December 2008
> 
> In recent weeks, numerous media accounts have referred to President-elect
> Barack Obama's cabinet selections as a "team of rivals." The reference is to
> a book of the same name by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham
> Lincoln's choices for key cabinet posts after his victory in the 1860
> election, when he confronted the secession crisis and then the Civil War.
> 
> The media comparisons between Lincoln's and Obama's cabinets are specious,
> betraying a combination of historical ignorance and political shallowness.
> The false analogy serves two political functions. First, it implicitly
> imparts to Obama a progressive and democratic aura which is, in fact, belied
> by his cabinet selections, all of whom are advocates of militarism abroad and
> austerity at home. Second, the analogy distorts and demeans the historically
> progressive character of Lincoln and his government, which embodied a
> profoundly democratic and ultimately revolutionary agenda, centered on the 
> struggle against slavery and the preservation of the union.
> 
> The use of the term "team of rivals" in relation to the Obama cabinet rests
> on the president-elect's selection for secretary of state of his chief
> opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, and his
> retention from the Bush administration of Robert Gates for defense secretary.
> Obama won the nomination over Clinton, who was the early favorite, by
> appealing to broad opposition to the war in Iraq among Democratic voters and
> the population at large, incessantly reminding voters that "she got it wrong"
> in her support for the invasion and presenting himself as the candidate who
> would bring a rapid end to the war. He then won the general election based on
> a powerful voter repudiation of the Bush administration's militaristic
> foreign policy and its pro-corporate and anti-democratic domestic agenda.
> 
> Gates oversaw the conduct of the "surge" in Iraq that drowned the Sunni
> resistance in blood and ethnically cleansed vast areas of the country. He has
> publicly opposed any timetable for the withdrawal of US forces.
> 
> Obama's top cabinet appointments thus represent a brazen repudiation of his
> campaign rhetoric, a slap in the face to the millions of workers and youth
> who voted for him because they believed or hoped that the victory of the
> candidate of "change" would really signal a change for the better, and a
> clear signal to the ruling elite that his administration will, in all
> essentials, continue the imperialist and militarist policies of the Bush
> administration.
> 
> This is not only not analogous to Lincoln's approach, it is the opposite.
> Lincoln's key cabinet picks, while they had been rivals for the Republican
> Party nomination of 1860, in no way represented a retreat from the central
> principals of his campaign and the aspirations of his voters: preserving the
> union and preventing the expansion of slavery. These appointments included
> William Seward as secretary of state, Salmon Chase as treasury secretary, and
> Edward Bates as attorney general.
> 
> Lincoln rose to prominence in the young Republican Party by giving political
> voice to mass popular sentiment against the expansion of slavery to the new
> states and territories of the West. Largely because of his genius for clearly
> presenting the critical political issues related to slavery, he bested more
> prominent politicians such as Seward (senator from New York) and Chase
> (governor of Ohio) in the contest for the 1860 Republican presidential
> nomination. But despite numerous political and personal differences, Seward,
> Chase and all of Lincoln's other cabinet selections shared the central aim of
> the Republican Party—preserving the union and defeating the rebellion of the
> Southern slave owners.
> 
> Lincoln did not invite rivals into his cabinet who disagreed with him on
> basic questions of principle, such as Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who
> represented the northern wing of the Democratic Party in the 1860 election
> and who advocated further concessions to the southern elite on the slavery
> issue, or John C. Breckinridge, the candidate of the Democratic Party's
> southern wing, who favored the expansion of slavery. To have matched Obama's
> cynicism, Lincoln would have needed to appoint Douglas as secretary of state
> and Breckinridge as secretary of war.
> 
> The "rivals" he did appoint to his cabinet all shared his hatred of slavery
> and his determination to defeat the pro-slavery forces, by force of arms if
> necessary. As a senator in the 1850s, Seward earned a reputation as one of
> the most articulate opponents of slavery. He denounced the Compromise of
> 1850, which allowed for the expansion of slavery and sanctioned the passage
> of the reactionary Fugitive Slave law. In so doing, Seward memorably appealed
> to a "higher law" than the Constitution. In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska
> Act, which permitted slavery in the new states under the guise of popular
> sovereignty, he called the question of slavery the "irrepressible conflict"
> that could not be avoided by the sorts of compromises favored by Douglas and
>  other northern Democrats.
> 
> Edward Bates, from Missouri, was a former Whig who, after a long period of
> semi-retirement, regained political prominence based on his opposition to the
> expansion of slavery to neighboring Kansas. His selection as attorney general
> was designed to win support among the border states for the Lincoln
> administration and its struggle against the Southern slaveocracy.
> 
> Kearns Goodwin makes much of Chase's jealousy toward Lincoln. But Chase's
> opposition to slavery was never in doubt. He made his political name as a
> young Ohio attorney defending fugitive slaves against their masters, and was
> a founder of the Free-Soil Party, a precursor to the Republican Party. After
> Lincoln accepted his resignation as treasury secretary in 1864, he quickly
> appointed Chase as chief justice of the Supreme Court, where his decisions
> upheld Reconstruction in the South.
> 
> In securing the 1860 Republican nomination, Lincoln beat out his main rivals,
> Seward, Chase and Bates. Then, after winning the general election, he invited
> them to assume key cabinet posts. He did so not simply because he was a
> shrewd politician, but because he wished to unite the various sections of the
> Republican Party behind the aspirations of genuinely democratic forces in the
> country and create the best possible conditions for crushing the Southern
> planters' rebellion.
> 
> In contrast to Lincoln's Team of Rivals, Obama has chosen a Team of 
> Reactionaries, which embodies the president-elect's cynical and contemptuous
> repudiation of his campaign rhetoric and the aspirations of the vast majority
> of those who voted for him.
> 
> Tom Eley
> 
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