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HOME PAGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC POWER FACTION
From @RandomPoster33, an independent and censored contributor to WSWS.ORG comments section and advocating for a Fourth International Government
Public Monuments and Ulysses S. Grant’s Contested Legacy “President John Quincy Adams once stated that ‘Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals; it bears the head of no man upon its coin; its very essence is iconoclastic.’ Monuments, in Adams’ view, were undemocratic, coercive tools of monarchy. These troublesome…
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Public Monuments and Ulysses S. Grant’s Contested Legacy
“President John Quincy Adams once stated that ‘Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals; it bears the head of no man upon its coin; its very essence is iconoclastic.’ Monuments, in Adams’ view, were undemocratic, coercive tools of monarchy. These troublesome icons demanded unquestioned fealty and promoted a version of history as simple hero-worship.”
How does this article refute the bourgeois revolutionary spirit of the civil war as presented by the WSWS? Also, there are political implications of vandalizing monuments that go beyond simply advocating for no monuments (they already exist!). Toppling a Lincoln or a Grant statue indicates extreme ignorance and backwardness. Such an act shines a light on the reactionary nostrums of neoliberal identity politics. Failure to see the revolutionary, progressive character of the Civil War is a failure of logical thinking, particularly of dialectical historical thinking. That its leaders were not perfect by the narrow ahistorical eternal standards of moralizing petty bourgeois today is no mark of dishonor in the wider view of history.
The civil war ended slavery but began Westward Expansion and at the same time an expansion of European powers into Africa, called the Scramble for Africa, expanding European colonization from 10% of Africa in 1870 to 90% by 1914. This expansion created a relative peace between European powers and the United States while they divided up the world. This process reached an end once most of the world had been divided among them, leading to WWI.
The end of slavery arose as a solution to the conflict between slave and non-slave states over expansion into the Western Frontier. The North, as the more capitalist of the two, needed to expand to the West and this meant they needed to confront and crush the South. The real abolitionist movement could not control the northern manufacturers’ and financiers’ Republican Party as it would have opposed Westward expansion, cutting across the interests of the industrialist ruling class in the North.
WWI had similar “revolutionary” ideas, such as Wilson’s 14 points, the rise of the 2nd International, especially in Germany, and the Third Republic in France. These “revolutions” only served as a cover for the expansionist agenda demanded by capitalist interests.
Lincoln may have appreciated the work of the previous generation of revolutionaries and may have attempted to expand its reach. He did not want a new revolution, however, or he would have removed the ruling class from power in Washington DC. Lincoln proved himself as state legislator in Illinois, where he supported Henry Clay’s American Colonization Society. This meant he supported the colonization of Africa as early as the 1830s using slaves freed in the US for that purpose. This would give them a fate worse than the tenant farmer.
Would a revolution controlled by a president in Washington DC that, through dictatorial measures, changed the governor of California and made public utilities of the Tech Giants, while leaving the rest of the economy corporate and capitalist as ever, prove that a revolution had conquered Washington DC and given the power to the working class? Such a situation, if accepted by the revolutionary party, would lead to an expansion of American power by militaristic means. The nationalization of the tech giants under capitalism will not suffice, as economic planning under the democratic control of the workers will require a state that controls every industry with the class interests of the international working class at the center of its strategy.
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