mladikov
10-03-2009, 09:49 PM
Joshua Trevino:
http://joshuatrevino.com/2009/05/19/a-southern-socialism/
Among the works of pre-Civil War Southern apologists, John C. Calhoun’s infamous “positive good” speech before the U.S. Senate and his Disquisition on Government stand as the signal texts. The culmination of Calhounian thought, such as it was, found its expression in Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone” speech, given in Savannah mere weeks before the fight at Fort Sumter. “Our new government,” said Stephens, “is founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
There is of course a social critique underlying the racism — or perhaps it is racism underlying the social critique, though both are simultaneously possible — inasmuch as both Calhoun and Stephens expressed displeasure with the emergence of modern capitalism and its individualist, competitive demands. Calhoun in particular devoted substantive portions of his Disquisition to the proposition that man and his rights (contra the Declaration of Independence) exist solely within a social context. “[Man's] natural state is,” he wrote, “the social and political — the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race.”
This is as far as most popular histories go on the Southern, and eventually Confederate, view of capitalism and its structures. Yet the extent to which this theme was developed by Southern ideologists is best illustrated by one George Fitzhugh, a Virginian who published two works on the topic in the 1850s. His 1854 Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society and his 1857 Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters are classics of the genre, and if they did not exert the influence the author wished, they did nicely encapsulate the Southern slaveholding riposte to Northern industrial and agricultural society’s agitation for free labor.
I reprint here, below the fold, several passages of the first work, which is the more intelligent of the two. (This is, admittedly, not saying a great deal.) I find Fitzhugh remarkable in his argument throughout both works that socialism is merely an imperfect reaction to capitalism, inasmuch as it is an attempt to replicate the benefits of outright enslavement. Note that Fitzhugh, alongside better-known eminences like Calhoun and Stephens, were ardent proponents of slavery; and note that they saw socialism as the appropriation and modification of slavery for capitalist society. The significance of this is not easily overstated. Coupled with the technocratic features of the Confederate Constitution (also elaborated upon by Stephens in the “Cornerstone” speech), the heritage of American Progressivism in this light assumes an altogether more sinister — and today, highly relevant — cast.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society, 1854:
Pages 27-28: The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment, and attending to all domestic wants and concerns. Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism. In fact, the ordinary wages of common labor are insufficient to keep up separate domestic establishments for each of the poor, and association or starvation is in many cases inevitable. In free society, as well in Europe as in America, this is the accepted theory, and various schemes have been resorted to, all without success, to cure the evil. The association of labor properly carried out under a common head or ruler, would render labor more efficient, relieve the laborer of many of the cares of household affairs, and protect and support him in sickness and old age, besides preventing the too great reduction of wages by redundancy of labor and free competition. Slavery attains all these results. What else will?
Page 42: … Louis Napoleon is made Emperor. He is a socialist, and socialism is the new fashionable name of slavery. He understands the disease of society, and has nerve enough for any surgical operation that may be required to cure it. His first step in socialism was to take the money of the rich to buy wheat for all. The measure was well-timed, necessary and just. He is now building houses on the social plan for working men, and his Queen is providing nurseries and nurses for the children of the working women, just as we Southerners do for our negro women and children. It is a great economy. Fourier suggested it long after Southerners had practiced it.
Pages 45-46: But it is probable the constant arrival of emigrants makes the situation of the laborer at the North as precarious as in Europe, and produces a desire for some change that shall secure him employment and support at all times.Slavery alone can effect that change; and towards slavery the North and all Western Europe are unconsciously marching. The master evil they all complain of is free competition – which is another name for liberty. Let them remove that evil, and they will find themselves slaves, with all the advantages and disadvantages of slavery. They will have attained association of labor, for slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire. A well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy. One old woman nurses all the children whilst the mothers are at work; another waits on the sick, in a house set aside for them. Another washes and cooks, and a fourth makes and mends the clothing. It is a great economy of labor, and is a good idea of the Socialists. Slavery protects the infants, the aged and the sick; nay, takes far better care of them than of the healthy, the middle-aged and the strong. They are part of the family, and self-interest and domestic affection combine to shelter, shield and foster them. A man loves not only his horses and his cattle, which are useful to him, but he loves his dog, which is of no use. He loves them because they are his. What a wise and beneficent provision of Heaven, that makes the selfishness of man’s nature a protecting aegis to shield and defend wife and children, slaves and even dumb animals. The Socialists propose to reach this result too, but they never can if they refuse to march in the only road Providence has pointed out.
Page 48: Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.
Page 61: The miseries of the great mass of the people, the inability to find work, or to obtain in return for such work as can be performed in reasonable time and by ordinary strength a sufficiency of the comforts and necessaries of life, may all be traced to one source – competition instead of combination. The antagonistic and regenerative principle which must be introduced, is association.” No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving. The above quotation and the succeeding one go to prove the positions with which we set out: that free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism the science of slavery.
Pages 69-70: Socialism, in some form or other, is universal in free society, and its single aim is to attain the protective influence of slavery. St. Simon would govern his social establishments by savants, more despotic than masters. He would have no law but the will of the savant. He would have a despot without the feelings and the interests of a master to temper his authority. Fourier proposes some wild plan of passional attraction as a substitute for government, and Louis Blanc is eloquent about “attractive labor.” All human experience proves that society must be ruled not by mere abstractions, but by men of flesh and blood. To attain large industrial results, it must be vigorously and severely ruled. Socialism is already slavery in all save the master. It had as well adopt that feature at once, as come to that it must to make its schemes at once humane and efficient. … Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.
Recall that Francis Parker Yockey, in Imperium, also reached the conclusion that the plantation system was quasi-socialist (despite the South's anti-tarriff stance). Sorokin as well recognized that antebellum Southern society was highly familistic and collective, an indication of a society ripe for socialist development.
The complaints of the blacks were a product of misunderstanding and ignorance. What did it matter whether they worked in the fields for the master, or slaved away in Northern factories for a pitiful wage? Most of them lacked the education to climb up from horrible poverty or manage the complications of the freeman's life; with the plantations, a slave had all that he needed - food, shelter, and clothing.
http://joshuatrevino.com/2009/05/19/a-southern-socialism/
Among the works of pre-Civil War Southern apologists, John C. Calhoun’s infamous “positive good” speech before the U.S. Senate and his Disquisition on Government stand as the signal texts. The culmination of Calhounian thought, such as it was, found its expression in Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone” speech, given in Savannah mere weeks before the fight at Fort Sumter. “Our new government,” said Stephens, “is founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
There is of course a social critique underlying the racism — or perhaps it is racism underlying the social critique, though both are simultaneously possible — inasmuch as both Calhoun and Stephens expressed displeasure with the emergence of modern capitalism and its individualist, competitive demands. Calhoun in particular devoted substantive portions of his Disquisition to the proposition that man and his rights (contra the Declaration of Independence) exist solely within a social context. “[Man's] natural state is,” he wrote, “the social and political — the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race.”
This is as far as most popular histories go on the Southern, and eventually Confederate, view of capitalism and its structures. Yet the extent to which this theme was developed by Southern ideologists is best illustrated by one George Fitzhugh, a Virginian who published two works on the topic in the 1850s. His 1854 Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society and his 1857 Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters are classics of the genre, and if they did not exert the influence the author wished, they did nicely encapsulate the Southern slaveholding riposte to Northern industrial and agricultural society’s agitation for free labor.
I reprint here, below the fold, several passages of the first work, which is the more intelligent of the two. (This is, admittedly, not saying a great deal.) I find Fitzhugh remarkable in his argument throughout both works that socialism is merely an imperfect reaction to capitalism, inasmuch as it is an attempt to replicate the benefits of outright enslavement. Note that Fitzhugh, alongside better-known eminences like Calhoun and Stephens, were ardent proponents of slavery; and note that they saw socialism as the appropriation and modification of slavery for capitalist society. The significance of this is not easily overstated. Coupled with the technocratic features of the Confederate Constitution (also elaborated upon by Stephens in the “Cornerstone” speech), the heritage of American Progressivism in this light assumes an altogether more sinister — and today, highly relevant — cast.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society, 1854:
Pages 27-28: The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment, and attending to all domestic wants and concerns. Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism. In fact, the ordinary wages of common labor are insufficient to keep up separate domestic establishments for each of the poor, and association or starvation is in many cases inevitable. In free society, as well in Europe as in America, this is the accepted theory, and various schemes have been resorted to, all without success, to cure the evil. The association of labor properly carried out under a common head or ruler, would render labor more efficient, relieve the laborer of many of the cares of household affairs, and protect and support him in sickness and old age, besides preventing the too great reduction of wages by redundancy of labor and free competition. Slavery attains all these results. What else will?
Page 42: … Louis Napoleon is made Emperor. He is a socialist, and socialism is the new fashionable name of slavery. He understands the disease of society, and has nerve enough for any surgical operation that may be required to cure it. His first step in socialism was to take the money of the rich to buy wheat for all. The measure was well-timed, necessary and just. He is now building houses on the social plan for working men, and his Queen is providing nurseries and nurses for the children of the working women, just as we Southerners do for our negro women and children. It is a great economy. Fourier suggested it long after Southerners had practiced it.
Pages 45-46: But it is probable the constant arrival of emigrants makes the situation of the laborer at the North as precarious as in Europe, and produces a desire for some change that shall secure him employment and support at all times.Slavery alone can effect that change; and towards slavery the North and all Western Europe are unconsciously marching. The master evil they all complain of is free competition – which is another name for liberty. Let them remove that evil, and they will find themselves slaves, with all the advantages and disadvantages of slavery. They will have attained association of labor, for slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire. A well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy. One old woman nurses all the children whilst the mothers are at work; another waits on the sick, in a house set aside for them. Another washes and cooks, and a fourth makes and mends the clothing. It is a great economy of labor, and is a good idea of the Socialists. Slavery protects the infants, the aged and the sick; nay, takes far better care of them than of the healthy, the middle-aged and the strong. They are part of the family, and self-interest and domestic affection combine to shelter, shield and foster them. A man loves not only his horses and his cattle, which are useful to him, but he loves his dog, which is of no use. He loves them because they are his. What a wise and beneficent provision of Heaven, that makes the selfishness of man’s nature a protecting aegis to shield and defend wife and children, slaves and even dumb animals. The Socialists propose to reach this result too, but they never can if they refuse to march in the only road Providence has pointed out.
Page 48: Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.
Page 61: The miseries of the great mass of the people, the inability to find work, or to obtain in return for such work as can be performed in reasonable time and by ordinary strength a sufficiency of the comforts and necessaries of life, may all be traced to one source – competition instead of combination. The antagonistic and regenerative principle which must be introduced, is association.” No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving. The above quotation and the succeeding one go to prove the positions with which we set out: that free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism the science of slavery.
Pages 69-70: Socialism, in some form or other, is universal in free society, and its single aim is to attain the protective influence of slavery. St. Simon would govern his social establishments by savants, more despotic than masters. He would have no law but the will of the savant. He would have a despot without the feelings and the interests of a master to temper his authority. Fourier proposes some wild plan of passional attraction as a substitute for government, and Louis Blanc is eloquent about “attractive labor.” All human experience proves that society must be ruled not by mere abstractions, but by men of flesh and blood. To attain large industrial results, it must be vigorously and severely ruled. Socialism is already slavery in all save the master. It had as well adopt that feature at once, as come to that it must to make its schemes at once humane and efficient. … Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.
Recall that Francis Parker Yockey, in Imperium, also reached the conclusion that the plantation system was quasi-socialist (despite the South's anti-tarriff stance). Sorokin as well recognized that antebellum Southern society was highly familistic and collective, an indication of a society ripe for socialist development.
The complaints of the blacks were a product of misunderstanding and ignorance. What did it matter whether they worked in the fields for the master, or slaved away in Northern factories for a pitiful wage? Most of them lacked the education to climb up from horrible poverty or manage the complications of the freeman's life; with the plantations, a slave had all that he needed - food, shelter, and clothing.