IN NOVEMBER 1864, Karl Marx wrote a letter congratulating President Abraham Lincoln on his reelection to the White House. “From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of England felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class,” Marx declared. He was therefore thrilled by the news that Lincoln would continue “to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
That reconstructed social world did not just involve a Union victory in the Civil War. What Marx had in mind was the triumph of the North’s free labor system and the accompanying spread of Northern capitalism throughout the would-be Confederate States of America.
If the idea of Marx welcoming the spread of capitalism comes as a surprise, that’s because you don’t know Marx. The free market economist Joseph Schumpeter famously likened capitalism to a “gale of creative destruction.” But Marx, co-written with Friedrich Engels in 1848.
