Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln

Via Billy


These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.
—Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837

Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.
—Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848

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.
—Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association to Lincoln, 1864

ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United State. 

3 comments:

  1. I always love to point this out when the conservatards start ranting about "Muh Lincoln" and attacking great men like Andrew Jackson. They just can't grasp that the Republican party stated as a progressive party (hasn't changed much) with the support of Marx and German communist immigrants.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, only changed after the War until the 50/60's I would say.

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  2. The history we are never taught and always denied by the public school system. indyjonesouthere

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