An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

By Robin Blackburn, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln and Raya Dunaevskaya

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War, with Marx writing on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the urgency of suppressing slavery and the cause of “free labor.” In his introduction Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln’s response to the IWA was a sign of the importance of the German American community as well as of the role of the International in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy.

The International went on to attract many thousands of supporters in over fifty regions of the US, and helped to spread the demand for an eight-hour day—enacted by Congress in 1868 for Federal employees. Blackburn shows how the International in America—born out of the Civil War—sought to radicalize Lincoln’s unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign–born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war. It inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades.

In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes Raya Dunaevskaya’s assessment of the impact of the Civil War on Marx’s theory and a survey by Frederick Engels of the progress of US labor in the 1880s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781844677979

Robin Blackburn

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School in New York and the University of Essex in the UK. He is the author of many books, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock, Banking on Death, and The American Crucible.

Reviews for An Unfinished Revolution

[tlcrawford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Robin Blackburn’s documentary history, “An Unfinished Revolution” is an interesting look at the convergence of Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx’s views on the United States’ Civil War and its aftermath. Lincoln, the first president elected from the new Republican Party, a party formed with input from Charles Fourier, a French Socialist who worked as Marx’s editor and with many immigrant German members who had been students of Marx, was dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery into any more Federal territories. Marx saw the end of chattel slavery as the first step in freeing all workingmen from capitalist wage slavery. As an economist Marx knew that confining slavery would kill it. Virginia had already made it illegal to import slaves from other states. Like any other commodity if supply exceeded demand the price would drop and the slavocracy’s human capital would be like gold transformed into tin. Marx’s predictions of the possible consequences of “Sessica”, as Marx called the Confederacy, winning and of strategy needed for the Union to win are impressive. Popular opinion was that the Union needed to surround and crush the Confederacy. Marx argued that capturing its center, George, would lead to victory.Unlike most documentary histories I am familiar with where each document is preceded by a short explanation Blackburn has put all the documents together in the second half of the book and uses a 100 page introduction to present his thesis. Lincoln’s war was only the first half of a struggle that continued in the form of labor unrest in the north after the Confederacy’s defeat on the battlefield. Documents by Thomas Fortune who explains just how wage slavery is worse than when he was property of a slave master and Lucy Parson’s speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, (IWW), explains that the struggle will not be easy but it must go on, offer much support to Blackburn’s argument and the quote from historian Eric Forner that provides the book with its title, the Civil War and Reconstruction are America’s unfinished revolution. Overall the book is very readable and thought provoking. It is a scholarly work but the lack of any statistical evidence, I admit statistics are needed but they frequently cause my eyes to glaze over and my mind to wonder, makes it is as accessible as many popular histories. I only have two issues with the book. First, the lack of an index is inexcusable in the computer age. Second, rather than separating the documents according to author and type it seems to me that a chronological arrangement would make it easier for the reader to follow the arguments.