Perry Anderson has a good take on the recent elections and developments in Taiwan here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/ande01_.html

Posted by: Conrad Barwa at August 4, 2004 04:17 AM

Thanks very much for that link. The article was fascinating, but his stance on the American Civil War is predictably British. (All Britons root for the Confederates in retrospect. They can never agree why, but they always do.) If you want to understand the ACW, you need to read W.E.B .Dubois.

Posted by: James R MacLean at August 4, 2004 08:28 AM

The article was fascinating, but his stance on the American Civil War is predictably British. (All Britons root for the Confederates in retrospect. They can never agree why, but they always do.)

I missed his reference here to the ACW, perhaps you can point it out to me; he did make a reference to the American anti-colonial Revolution but that is obviously a different matter. I would be surprised if Anderson would root for the Confederacy in anycase, except perhaps at some cultural-emotional level, if that since he is bascially a Marxist theoretician but I could be wrong on this point.

Posted by: Conrad Barwa at August 4, 2004 08:04 PM

Where a nation-state was already constituted, rather than still to be created, self-determination has been systematically rejected. In such cases, the right typically reverses into a taboo. For ideologically speaking, what is then at stake is not 'self-determination', but 'secession'. This is the Lincolnian moment. Its historical record is virtually as uniform as its Wilsonian or Leninist opposites. The American Civil War with its 600,000 dead - the largest military-industrial massacre of the 19th century - was fought to suppress the separation, approved by unimpeachable democratic majorities, of the Confederacy from the Union.

When I noticed this, I realized Anderson was not a Californian (though that's where he works), but a Briton. The British believe the American Revolution was merely another secession—identical in character to, say, a zillion other separatist movements, except more morally squalid than any of them (Hence, the innocuously neutral-sounding "American War of Independence.") But it was a revolution, and it had a parallel movement within England. IOW, it wasn't anti-English; it was directed against royal prerogative.

Modern neo-confederates usually feel the need to scorn the wrongheadedness of the Union-as-emancipator narrative. The Union's official institutions did not consider emancipation until long after the war began; the emancipation was not accompanied by adequate land reform or some other provision to take care of the former slaves, so most fell back into labor-alienating sharecropper relationships.

The problem with this reasoning is that revolutions don't have their outcomes determined by "vanguards"; the first movers in a revolution don't start by announcing their final aims. The intransigence of the CSA drove the revolution of 1861-65 to it final conclusion, but Anderson's analysis is the old Times one of Lincoln as a moral monster, prepared to kill en masse in order to preserve a tawdry political fiat. The historic implications of the war are tossed out—the entire rationale for the American Revolution itself is disregarded, since that is thought of as nothing more than an opportunistic secession.

If you scratch a British Marxist, you usually find yourself with a hardline monarchist.

Posted by: James R MacLean at August 5, 2004 09:54 AM

The British believe the American Revolution was merely another secession—identical in character to, say, a zillion other separatist movements, except more morally squalid than any of them (Hence, the innocuously neutral-sounding "American War of Independence.") But it was a revolution, and it had a parallel movement within England. IOW, it wasn't anti-English; it was directed against royal prerogative.

I agree with you about this, particularly since it had the characteristics of a Civil war almost as much as one against the British. It is taught very much as just an anti-colonial revolt in British history - I speak as someone who has gone through and observed this schooling process. However, I think you mistake Anderson’s theoretical point about secession always being characterised as such after the constitution of a nation-state as opposed to self-determination of a constituent part for support for the Confederacy; I highly doubt that any Marxist whatever their hue would support a slave-owning plantocracy - as Marx’s own writings make clear, this is not a tenable position.

The problem with this reasoning is that revolutions don't have their outcomes determined by "vanguards"; the first movers in a revolution don't start by announcing their final aims. The intransigence of the CSA drove the revolution of 1861-65 to it final conclusion, but Anderson's analysis is the old Times one of Lincoln as a moral monster, prepared to kill en masse in order to preserve a tawdry political fiat. The historic implications of the war are tossed out—the entire rationale for the American Revolution itself is disregarded, since that is thought of as nothing more than an opportunistic secession.

Umm, I think his reasoning is correct; most historians would agree that emancipation was an outcome of the war not its direct cause. Lincoln isn’t a monster but like many his ideas about how to deal with the slaves revolved very much around repatriation to Africa or settlement outside the Union; given the state of race relations most anti-slavery people at the time wouldn’t have understood why many African ex-slaves would have wanted to remain in a country where so many of the White population hated or regarded them as inferior. Things did change but as a consequence of the nature of the war; reconstruction could have suceeded more if the North had shown the will to remain in the South and carried out the reforms by force but it was unwilling to maintain a military occupation and indulge in this kind of coercion so it ended. For a Marxist like Anderson, in a way though the Civil War was about ending slavery as he would have seen it as a competition between two forms of socio-economic organisation - a modern industrial one based on wage labour and a plantation-commercial one based on slavery. The two were incompatible and for capitalist growth to occur in the rest of the new and potential states within the Union the latter had to be displaced as a model of labour relations. Similar reasoning can be brought to bear about the American Revolution whose radicalism was quickly circumscribed by established property relations - as the work of Charles Beard and other historians of the period demonstrate.

If you scratch a British Marxist, you usually find yourself with a hardline monarchist.

I don’t think so; at the most perhaps an English Marxist, as most Celtic Marxists tend to have a dim view of the Monarchy - see Tom Nairn’s excellent work The Enchanted Glass on the subject but Nairn is a Scottish Marxist. Still most ‘English Marxists’ despised the monarchy you only have to look at the work of historians such as Christopher Hill on the radicalism of the English Revolution and Rodney Hilton of feudal class relations to see this. For them the monarchy stood for all the irrationality and injustices of the English class system; modern day English Marxists like Terry Eagleton and Hobsbawm are hardcore anti-monarchists.

Posted by: Conrad Barwa at August 5, 2004 05:15 PM

I think his reasoning is correct; most historians would agree that emancipation was an outcome of the war not its direct cause.

No one is challenging this. The ACW was launched by the slavocracy, not the federal government. Moreover, the federal government could not POSSIBLY have announced something as drastic as that, because it had—up to 1860—included southern members in Congress. So suddenly declaring, "I, Abraham Lincoln, am going to abolish slavery and enfranchise the African American population" was not merely imprudent—it was impossible for anyone elected to the POTUS.

ME: The problem with this reasoning is that revolutions don't have their outcomes determined by "vanguards"; the first movers in a revolution don't start by announcing their final aims.

Let me try to put this another way: if national self-determination were regarded as an absolute right in 1861, then republics would all disintegrate and the only countries that could survive would thereafter have been autocratic. The reason all republics would cease to exist, as opposed to that particular one, is that any system designed to arbitrate among rival interests would be unable to maintain survive dissent.

So while the Britons just see the two wars—the AWoI (1775-83) and the ACW (1861-65)—as two secessionary phases, one of which was suppressed by the victors in the first, this view is simply wrong. The first one was not at all anti-English, complicated as it was; it was a revolution. The people who carried it out were English, very often English workers. Our declaration of independence spells this out. The British reaction is, "Oh, well, of course they would say that, wouldn't they?"

The revolution of 1861 was a falangist one, and the first movers were the one-party states (what Anderson calls "impeccable democratic majorities"); in fact, for years a festering problem has been the fact that the slavocracy had power but no representation amongst the better part of its population: of 5 million whites and four million slaves on the eve of the ACW, only 2 million were in the class that could vote (so—about half a million voters for the entire 12-state population of 9 million). This is not an impeccable democratic majority.

Everytime a country or organization changes its policy on an important issue, however, it's not the vanguards with the maximalist position who are in charge. What you have is tug of war, with the midpoint of the rope inching along. The POTUS is never supposed to be an ideologue; he's supposed to be a facilitator and referee. Lincoln was the best one of these we've ever had.

I'm really sorry I can't address this suject properly right now, Conrad. I've already spent far too much time and it is OT. It merits another post. It must be admitted, though, that Lincoln is part of my personal pantheon—someone I revere beyond expression. WEB Dubois's book, while moderately critical of Lincoln (Lincoln struck him as too cautious; much as I admire Dubois, I have to differ. Dubois, as a historical icon, stands for extreme virtue; Lincoln, extreme wisdom), points out the real conditions of the war and its onset.

Yes, I have read Marx on the ACW and he's great.

The remark about "British Marxist = monarchist": I don't meant they all admire the Hanoverians!

Posted by: James R MacLean at August 5, 2004 07:07 PM

Let me try to put this another way: if national self-determination were regarded as an absolute right in 1861, then republics would all disintegrate and the only countries that could survive would thereafter have been autocratic. The reason all republics would cease to exist, as opposed to that particular one, is that any system designed to arbitrate among rival interests would be unable to maintain survive dissent.

I think this is a false argument, in that it assumes all political conflicts are essentially nationalist or identity based - they are not. It is correct in so far as each nation contains smaller constituent parts but the way the whole is imagined imparts a level of unity that won’t always fly apart at the first internal disagreement - see Bendedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ if you haven’t already for a good illustration of this point.

So while the Britons just see the two wars—the AWoI (1775-83) and the ACW (1861-65)—as two secessionary phases, one of which was suppressed by the victors in the first, this view is simply wrong. The first one was not at all anti-English, complicated as it was; it was a revolution. The people who carried it out were English, very often English workers. Our declaration of independence spells this out. The British reaction is, "Oh, well, of course they would say that, wouldn't they?"

Well, two things here. Firstly neither at a popular level nor at a professional historical one; have I even come across anybody regard the ACW in the was you have described above; I also don’t think this is what Anderson believes, as he was just using a metaphor to prove a point. My knowledge of early US history is shaky but my understanding is that it was only in the first few decades that each state of the former 13 colonies came close to leaving the Union; by the mid-19th century the Federal mode of governance had grown to an extent that this was not possible. I recall vaguely about Rhode Island or Mass. Wanting to leave the Union for some reason or another in the initial years after independence but this was early on. Secondly, I don’t think that many Brits would have regarded Americans at the time as ‘English’ in the same way that they were; again similarities with the native-born colonists in Spanish America is instructive, while they came from the same culture and national stock; I think most English particularly the middle classes and the aristocratic elites would have regarded the colonialists as a related but distinct part of the English social system of gradation. One can see this in that the reactions towards the original English Revolution and indigenous radicalism was rather different than American radicalism’s more supportive reactions from within its own ranks.

The revolution of 1861 was a falangist one, and the first movers were the one-party states (what Anderson calls "impeccable democratic majorities"); in fact, for years a festering problem has been the fact that the slavocracy had power but no representation amongst the better part of its population: of 5 million whites and four million slaves on the eve of the ACW, only 2 million were in the class that could vote (so—about half a million voters for the entire 12-state population of 9 million). This is not an impeccable democratic majority.

Perhaps he means by the standards of the time; after all it was constitutionally sanctioned provisions that restricted the ability of Blacks to count as voters and citizens and I think only two northern states granted Free Blacks these rights and these were states which had an inconsequential free Black population - this was simply the attitude of the time. Democratic majority here would mean that of the sanctioned electorate - one that in another exclusion would exclude women for a while as yet (nobody impugns the democratic nature of democracies that had not yet granted women the vote compared to non-democracies at the time).

Everytime a country or organization changes its policy on an important issue, however, it's not the vanguards with the maximalist position who are in charge. What you have is tug of war, with the midpoint of the rope inching along. The POTUS is never supposed to be an ideologue; he's supposed to be a facilitator and referee. Lincoln was the best one of these we've ever had.

I agree that in theory this is how he was meant to be seen; I suppose the Presidency became more internvetionist after FDR and the interwar period.

I'm really sorry I can't address this suject properly right now, Conrad. I've already spent far too much time and it is OT. It merits another post. It must be admitted, though, that Lincoln is part of my personal pantheon—someone I revere beyond expression.

I look forward to this, I haven’t anything against Lincoln and I admire him as well; though for different reasons than you and most Americans I think. I just feel that one shouldn’t read things into Lincoln’c character or role that were simply not there. This would do a disservice to the man, indubitably one of the greatest American Presidents.

The remark about "British Marxist = monarchist": I don't meant they all admire the Hanoverians!

I think my point was that most of the British Marxists I know and have read detested the monarchy in its Stuart, Victorian, Edwardian and modern guises. I don’t understand where you got the idea that they had any love for the British monarchy in any of its historical manifestations; they are for the most part hardcore republicans and anti-monarchists.

Posted by: Conrad Barwa at August 6, 2004 01:44 AM