Americans love to imagine the civil war was as important as WW2, and in both cases they ensured that the bad guys would thrive in the peace that followed

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 28 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean, yes after reconstruction was defeated, that's true.

But I think Marxists and Socialists in the US should be out there claiming it's legacy (and reading W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America while they're at it), as the American Civil War was an actual Social Revolution.

A social revolution that was defeated by a mix of feckless liberalism and literal terrorism.

So much of the labor movement that followed, which US leftists love to champion, framed itself in the language and spirit of abolitionism and the civil war, (e.g. "we abolished chattel slavery, and now we need to abolish wage slavery")

[–] miz@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago

quote from Douglass in support of your comment

Frederick Douglass, arguing for unity among black and white laborers in 1883, said that “experience teaches us that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”

The critique of wage slavery was then taken up by anarchists, socialists, and labor radicals of various stripes, who railed against the capitalist labor market and organized for a multiracial struggle against the owners of capital. Lucy Parsons, born a slave and later a widely known anarchist, declared in one of her most famous speeches:

How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.

from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage-slavery-bernie-sanders-labor

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 23 points 3 weeks ago

The Nuremberg Laws were inspired by the Jim Crow Laws that developed after the end of the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction. The amount of influence the apartheid state of America had on future apartheid states is actually fairly substantial. From the Nuremberg laws in Germany, to the laws that created the apartheid system in South Africa, and the ones that govern the apartheid system in Israel. What might the world have looked like if Reconstruction had actually happened? We could probably debate all day whether the Germans would have independently arrived at the Nuremberg laws without Jim Crow, but it wouldn't matter. The reality is that they did look to America for inspiration, and that inspiration was born out of the Civil War and its consequences.

[–] Lussy@hexbear.net 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It was really important. This is a really reactionary take.

[–] CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Not that crushing slavery wasn't important, but the history of the civil war specifically is relevant to Americans mostly and far less so to the rest of the world (especially because WW2 is much more recent).

To be fair, out of all the American shit the the rest of the world has to absorb into their brains on the daily, the civil war was a Real Important Event compared to most of it.

[–] la_tasalana_intissari_mata@hexbear.net 14 points 3 weeks ago

"crushing slavery" -> limiting it to prisons

[–] somename@hexbear.net 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It was actually kind of a big testing ground and innovation space for a lot of military technologies of the time. So it was important to the wider world, if only for that.

Kinda like how Ukraine and Russia’s war is being watched now.

[–] Lussy@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I think the abolition of slavery in probably the biggest slave holding country in the world at the time was pretty significant to the world, yeah, I think this is a reactionairy take

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

To be fair, the statement was "as important as WW2", which is a bar that almost any event would fail to clear, though I don't think there's much use in ranking events like this.

[–] booty@hexbear.net 12 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

a bar that almost any event would fail to clear

smuglord Ever heard of the big bang?

[–] Castor_Troy@hexbear.net 12 points 3 weeks ago

The Big Bang and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago

lmao

[–] Lussy@hexbear.net 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I didn’t mean to be snappy about this, I really meant to say something like this

though I don't think there's much use in ranking events like this

I believe the Yank civil war is a pretty important moment in history and shouldn’t be diminished because it doesn’t compare in magnitude to WWII. I don’t think it is one of those ‘oh Americans think everything is about them’ moments

This is what Lenin said about the Civil War

"In some respects, if we only take into consideration the 'destruction' of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!"

The American Civil War was revolutionary because it put an end to slavery: "for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war."

Marx letter to Lincoln

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.... 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.

Later

"The bourgeois papers are still holding it against us that of A. Lincoln’s replies to the various messages of congratulations on his re-election, only the reply to ours was more than a formal acknowledgment of receipt".

Definitely look at the civil war and its aftermath through a materialist lens but it just feels kind of edgy to say it wasn’t a massive moment in world history.