An Unusual Question

We know that Stalin, in the pre-war period, gutted the one sector of his economy that worked...the farm sector. And he did this because he needed the wealth there to modernize his industrial sector. My question is where he got the idea. My hunch is that this may have been an idea expressed in the writings.of Marx. (Not Groucho, the other one.)

I ask this question because I once read that Marx and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries. When Lincoln was in the Washington Congress Marx would visit the capital to give talks. I see two possibilities.

1) Lincoln may have heard the idea from Marx or his writings and pressed to employ this industrial development idea in the US. In particular, to extract wealth from the rich cotton planters to assist with the expansion of the us economy by infrastructure improvements. And to also finance the expansion of the US navy. Of course the extraction of cotton profits by the design of the taxation system, led to a revolt by Southerners. The Civil War, contrary to what you have been taught growing up, was not over slavery, but rather taxes. Our historians in the US have denied the truth just as historians in the Soviet Union hid the truth about Stalin for so many years. Lincoln was America's Stalin.

2) Or perhaps Marx in his travels here observed Lincoln and his party executing this tactic in the run-up to the civil war. Perhaps he wrote about it.

Anyone familiar enough with Marx to know the answer here?

 

I'm not familiar with Lincoln's policies but as far as know Stalin's policies were rooted in ideology, not economics. The party's power base was in the factories, not in the farms, and especially not in the small privately managed ones that grew out of the agricultural reforms, and centralized planning is a terrible fit for agriculture than needs a lot of local initiative and motivation to succeed. So it was not a "taxing the landowners to create resources for industrial development" but rather the social equivalent of "attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole", hugely disruptive but no direct transfer of resources from agriculture to industry.

 

Best joke post I have seen in for some time.

I know enough about Marx to know that he never visited the United States...

The rest of the post is even more rubbish.

My advice...Stick with Groucho.

 

I'm not going to engage with you and your insults. People know how to size up those who engage in your brand of rudeness.

That aside:
1) I looked for the book on the Civil War and did not find it. Its by a guy with a Spanish last name.
2) I did find an internet statement that Marx never visited the US. But that is irrelevant.. He was alive at the time of the Civil War and could have written something about theories of how nations could finance industrialization. In reading around the internet I see the idea would have been more reminiscent of Marx's associate Frederick Engels. So I'm hard pressed to say for certain who was mentioned as visiting our capitol.
3) If your problem is with my assertion that the cause of the civil war was taxes and not slavery, I suggest you do an Amazon search of "Civil War causes". Since I first read the book I mentioned, I see a number of newer books have been published on this same idea. Do your own search.

 

Do you subscribe to the Lost Cause Theory?

 

Tired Old Soldier:

Wikipedia has a good section on the collectivism that was done. As they explain it, collectivism was done because the government insisted on stealing the crops and livestock of the farmers. When naturally production fell, the government collectivized the farms. I don't know if Wiki gets into it but Stalin at one point was seizing 100% of the crop and working the peasants as slaves. The peasants died off in droves and fled the land. And this was in the Ukraine, the childhood home of Stalin himself.


Collectivization in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

 

Not really. The South were not noble in their resistance. They were damn fools. Nearly as irrational as the Japanese in WWII. Most of the taxes were being imposed on goods imported from abroad. The South could have made it's point simply by boycotting goods made in the North. That would have formed the basis for an industrialization of the South. And the North could have hardly protested. The South would be doing to the North something very similar to what the North was doing to the South.

The punishing taxation of European goods made it so that cotton ships would have to return empty from abroad. A measure that destroyed the economics of the cotton trade.

 

People also know how to size up a slap-dash post such as yours.

Engles did visit the United States...in 1888.

You would probably have better luck trying to tie one of several of the German Marxist/Socialist immigrants that came to the US in the late 1840's-early 1850's to this idea, rather than attempt directly linking Marx/Engles. Still, the early Marx/Engles followers fell to abject failure, as their ideas failed to take root at the time. It would not be until about the 1870's that their ideas began to gain traction.

FYI: The Marx/Engles article for the New York Tribune can be found here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tribune.htm

Why read "revisionist" literature when original documents are a much better source...
"The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States"
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html
How many times are taxes mentioned? And how many times is slavery mentioned?

You can also try
Alexander H. Stephens's "Corner Stone speech" - He was the Confederacy's VP.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/

The Confederate Constitution
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp

Jeff Davis's "The Gathering Storm" speech
http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117:speech-of-jefferson-davis-before-the-mississippi-legislature-nov-16-1858q-where-he-advocates-secession-if-an-abolitionist-is-elected-president-&catid=41:the-gathering-storm

Secession Commissioner S.F. Hale of Alabama urges Kentucky to secede to avoid racial equality and the “lust of half-civilized Africans.”
http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121:secession-commissioner-sf-hale-of-alabama-urges-kentucky-to-seceded-to-avoid-racial-equality-and-the-qlust-of-half-civilized-africansq&catid=40:secession

These are only a few scraps...There are lots more should you chose to look.

 

Any clues in 'The Communist Manifesto' by Marx and Engels? Published 1848.

 

Wasn't published in the US until 1872.

Still, the first English publication was in 1850, but was not widely circulated and was mostly forgotten about.

 

22-24 year gap between U.K. and USA publishing dates ....gosh! Must/could have been some cross-fertilisation between those dates, especially in the academic context?

 

Not really. The failed European revolutions of the late 1840's mostly discredited Marx, so if Marx was being discussed at all, it likely would be as a failure. It would not be until Das Kapital was published that Marx began to regain his lost prominence.

 

I disagree with this statement. Primary original documents are the sole basis for historical interpretation. It's up to the researcher to come to their own conclusions. Now, in many of those instances historians reach similar overall conclusions. As is such in this case. However, I am not saying to accept everything regurgitated but there is truth behind it. I enjoy a good opinion based on facts and evidence. In this case, the stack is firmly set against the alternative.

 

Except when these declarations were made, the South was already roused for war.

"Make the world safe for Democracy" was Woodrow Wilson and America's entry into World War I...Perhaps you have confused this with FDR's Arsenal of Democracy."

Please get your propaganda straight.

Except the slave-holders constituted a small minority of the South's population, nor were it's troops composed of mostly slave-holders. So, couching their declarations in terms of slaves would rouse very few to the flag.

Further, the Morrill Tariff that you purport to be the cause of the Civil War is absolutely laughable. It was not the cause of the Civil War, but a result of it. The Tariff would have been defeated in Congress had not all those Southern Senators and Representatives resigned their posts.

Apparently you do not realize how heavily Parshall & Tully relied on primary(original) Japanese sources. For, if you did, you would not have made such a silly statement.

 

But only if you are willing to accept their declaration as gospel. There is a saying that the first casualty of war is the truth. It seems likely to me that you have never read any contrary opinion about the causes of the Civil War. Unless you approach all history with a certain scepticism, you are going to buy into propaganda whenever the truth does not show our side in a flattering light. Our history is no less manipulated that that of the Soviet Union's, judging by what I have read. I can't say how this manipulation is accomplished. But part of the problem is the unwillingness of historians to deviate from "official histories" and the statements of the belligerents.

 

Quite a few inferences you have made about me in about 3 posts on a single thread, lol. I take any document at face value and draw my own conclusions, regardless of leaning. I just happen to not, as you have done, focus entirely on that revisionist historical propaganda. It's one thing to denounce other historians works if you have a grain of proof. It's another to tout your own agenda and declare a mountain of historical evidence is tainted.

In addition, in the future could you kindly refrain from adding text within my quotes.

 

Well, let's see...

From the Present, we have

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/06/war-over-slavery_rhetoric_is_i.html

From the Past, we have Lincoln's actual address to Congress on July 4, 1861, Paragraph 5

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=69802

Now, why is the Present writer being so dishonest about quoting and presenting Lincoln's address?

And you wonder why some of us are unwilling to buy into Present authors trying to rewrite history to further the promotion of their own brand of propaganda.

 

It was really Lenin who inspired the event. Lenin wanted to destroy all vestiges of Tsarist Russia, He started a fight with the peasants by sending men to collect grain, but it failed to solve the problem. The Soviets were not strong enough at the time to continue the fight so he started the NEP or new economic policy. It was doomed because he meant the peasants would always have power over the party by controlling grain production.

 

I believe the writer is simply mistaken. He is referencing another speech by Lincoln that I have read excerpts from. Lincoln says roughly that the South can refuse the mails (Federal services) if they like. But that taxes will be paid.