Reddit reviews An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

Karl Marx's "Lincoln Letter"

> Sir:
>
> We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
>
> From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
>
> When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
>
> While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they 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.
>
> The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
>
> Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council


More reading in the book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln.

you might be interested in the book an unfinished revolution which is made up of letters written between abraham lincoln and karl marx. lincoln was a great admirer or marx and the first international, and apparently saw parallels between the war to end slavery in the united states and the struggle for worker's emancipation more generally. i am in no way an expert on any of this, so perhaps someone else can add more helpful information, if they have it.

I am what you would call a Marxist.

>Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
>
>— Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858

The perspective of the collective ways that humans make their living stem from economic activity. How we define work is how we define ourselves. Excuse my french but F that. Work is no longer our salvation or the meaning of our lives it is just a paycheck. 27 states have right-to-work laws which means you can get fired and hired in seconds and there is no reason needed. Your economic input is worthless unless it is given value by an employer. I say F that.

but Marx is the enemy of democracy. I mean is it?

>Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.
>
>— Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism

If you are not familiar Engles is Marx's partner and considered to have given huge contributions to the Marxist thought process. The goal of Marxism is to promote egalitarianism and an educated working class that will create self determination. Did that happen anywhere in the communist camp? No. However, has that happened in places where the govt has steadily supported unions and income equality more than the US. YES. HELL Yes.

Marx believed that capitalism was fundamentally flawed. The problems of exploitation and alienation were baked into the basic workings of capitalism, and as long workers didn't own the means of production, there was no escaping these problems. No set of adjustments to capitalism would solve them, the only solution was to overthrow the whole system.

Andrew Yang is looking to give the the means of production back to the people. How?

The freedom dividend is making us essentially "shareholders" in the greatest economy so lets keep it real Yang is serving Marxism's best parts while completely avoiding the disasters of authoritarianism. He wont be the first one Karl Marx had a long standing correspondence with Abraham Lincoln the only "real" republican ever before the first emergence of the military industrial machine after the civil war. https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Revolution-Karl-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/1844677222 you can check this book out.

I know that Karl Marx had written to President Lincoln on occasion of Lincoln's re-election, you can find a copy of this letter in German at: http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me16/me16_018.htm

and in English at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

Engels also commented about the assassination in a letter to Marx, which you can find in English here: http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1865/letters/65_05_03.html

Coincidentally, this magazine published an article about the connections between Marx and Lincoln https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx

Google search also recommends this book https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Revolution-Karl-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/1844677222

And found this scholarly article https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/159534/mod_resource/content/1/Marx_Lincoln_Blackburn.pdf

I haven't read this book (though I did read the book alanpugh mentioned, second his recommendation), but I hear it's very good.

I never denied war crimes. You just made the false, and ignorant assumption that those crimes are directly because communism and Marx and stuff, and I just pointed out you have no idea WTF you're talking about.

Reading Zinn makes you aware. Just like reading Marx, Engels, Proudhon, Chomsky, Abraham Lincoln, Weber, Dr. King, Malcom X, Che Guevara, Trotsky, etc etc.

People illegally flee from America to Mexico just to get dental care, so if "people fleeing" is your best argument for capitalism and against communism...... good luck! XD

>Look, just because Marx said Communism is democratic doesn’t mean it’s not authoritarian and capable of violating human rights.

The father of communism, and one of the most respected genius intellectuals to this day, and defender of human rights, idealizing and describing it as democratic... means communism originally is democratic.

You can choose to pick any random sociopaths and claim they were "communists", and therefore somehow (no explanation provided) that invalidates communism as a whole... but that doesn't make it remotely true. It's just you starting from "communism is bad" and walking back to try to justify your bullshit.

>It would be perfectly “democratic” for all right handed people to vote that all left handed people be killed and their possessions stolen.

No, that would be discriminatory and totalitarian. What a horrible, stupid example.

The bourgeois exploiters weren't just "born left handed". They made the conscious choice, just like today's CEOs and landlords, to exploit other people's labor, instead of getting a real job and career of their own.

>To look at actual history as well, the French reign of terror was extremely democratic.

That reign of terror inspired the founding fathers, and American democratic principles, still in use today.

Soon enough you'll realize the most revered American heroes were "commies" - like Abraham Lincoln, whose goal for the civil war was to free slaves as part of his plan to strengthen worker rights in the USA, as he exchanged letters about ideology and strategy with his friend and supporter overseas, Prof. Karl Marx.

If you're against Marxism, you're on the wrong side of history - you're pro-slavery, pro-Nazi, pro-war, pro-human rights abuses.

>So what specifically about Communism’s economic system makes it immune from these atrocities?

The simple fact that these atrocities had nothing to do with communism, and everything to do with psycho, evil idiots who carried them out, and really didn't have one communist bone in their body. The people they oppressed were communists - but like you said, they were dictators, and didn't give a shit what their people wanted.

https://www.amazon.ca/Unfinished-Revolution-Karl-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/1844677222

It’s in this book, Marx deplored slavery and being a historical materialist believed the expansion of capitalism to the southern US would only be possible through the abolition of slavery and then the slave feudalism of the South could finally be conquered by capitalism, which could then be eventually replaced by socialism.