[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen)

[Stuart Levy]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:24:59PM -0500, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Evidently, Slavery is equivalent (in moral and economic terms)  working for a wage. An amazing revisionist view of the Civil War. 
> 
> --mkb

An interesting comment during the "Solidarity with Democratic Movements"
talks last Thursday was on the question, Why has there not already been
a new mass uprising among Palestinians, along the lines of those
in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, etc.?  I think Prof. Farhad Malekafzali said:
the Israeli fragmentation of the West Bank population by checkpoints,
Jewish-only roads, etc. has been effective in impeding people
from organizing area-wide.   (How to hold mass rallies if you
can't travel?)

I think his point applies to the difference between owned- vs. wage-slavery too.

Besides other barriers to organizing (such as forbidden education),
owned slaves generally couldn't travel.  (In the recently-noted 1811
Louisiana slave uprising, the instigator was a trusted slave overseer,
himself a slave, who could and did travel between plantations,
secretly organizing as he went.)

Wage slaves might have no good choices among employers,
but lots of industrial workers could move, read and even write
newspapers, etc.  That must have given them a leg up over their
owned southern peers in organizing as workers.



> On Apr 10, 2011, at 9:18 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
> > Societies are defined by how the ruling class gets enough to eat.  The American civil war was a conflict between two ways of doing that.
> > 
> > Two dominant political groups, one primarily resident North of the Mason-Dixon Line and the other south of it, competed because they profited from two different and incompatible ways of exploiting labor - by renting it or owning it (i.e., by chattel-slavery or wage-contract).  Extracting surplus value from the direct producer could be done ether way, but probably not by a mixture of both.  
> > 
> > That's what Lincoln meant when he said in 1858, "I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free ... it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other ... Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South." 
> > 
> > ("Free" labor has a technical meaning - it refers to the labor of those who have no right to live without working for their masters, i.e., those to whom the society had no responsibility.)
> > 
> > The Southern ruling class understood that the new Republican party, with its central plank of "no extension of slavery" was the vehicle of the northern ruling class and wage-slavery, as opposed to their form of slavery. When its candidate was elected president, the the rulers of the Southern states knew an attack was imminent and declared their independence - as these governments had done three generations earlier, in 1776.
> > 
> > Gen. Winfield Scott, the leading US military figure - his generation's George Washington - wrote on the day before Lincoln's inauguration (March 3, 1861) and suggested the new president could conquer the Southern states at the end of a long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; or he could say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!" 
> > 
> > Lincoln chose the former, and Scott was retired. 
> > 
> > That Lincoln understood what was at stake in his state-building is clear from his first State of the Union address: <http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/lincoln/stateoftheunion1861.html>.
> > 
> > 
> > On 4/10/11 6:02 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> >> 
> >> The best explanation of the "War of Northern Aggression" that I ever heard came from Fred Madsen,
> >> who took a bullet in South Vietnam during reconnaissance in the early 60's.
> >> 
> >> Fred said that the war was fought over who would control the Land occupied by the southern states.
> >> 
> >> I find Fred's explanation to be unassailable.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On 4/10/2011 10:49 AM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> I  ran into this today on Google or Yahoo news and made it into a word doc b/c I tho't it was interesting and enlightening enuff on its own, plus it had parallels with today's issues, i e poor white farmers [who were not slave-owners] supporting the Confederacy because that was the class they aspired to and identified with... (Sociologist James Loewen wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns).
> >>>  --Jenifer
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>> 
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