Maybe you can help me Charles Brown. I am working on one line of the Communist Manifesto. "Section II has made clear the relationship of the Communists to the existing working class parties...the Agrarian Reformers in America". In all his subsequent writings, Marx takes no interest in farmers' movements in the U.S., but he does concentrate on the Abolitionists. I believe (a) Marx may be referring to the Free Soil party, formed in 1848; or (b) for Marx the abolition of slavery must result in the break up of the plantations and the allocation of the lands to former slaves and poor whites. In support of (b), I note the Haitian Revolution resulted in the break up of sugar plantations and the substitution of coffee cultivation by individual farm families. White American labor is relatively better off than European labor, although he supports the efforts of white laborers to form unions. Black American labor is the most highly exploited form of labor, and there are many references to it in Marx's writings.

CB: See the last chapter of Capital I on the "colonial" question , Kurt Thornbladh. The US has so much free land for white working masses that the process of expropriation of serfs is reversed to a certain extent in the US North American population . Farmers own their own means of production ! As their "natural laboratories "; small as it is; and they are not serfs. Trouble is they are all petit bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie in embryo . US is crawling with potential "millionaires" in their own dreams that is .

Marx knows all this. So, he puts special emphasis on American proletarians ? Maybe ?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded. Karl Marx, Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest

Tags: america, civil-war, communism, freedom, freedom-of-choice, liberty, marx, revolution, slavery, socialism, usa like Actually _Capital_

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/808816-labor-in-the-white-skin-can-never-free-itself-as

"A human in white skin can never be free while his black sister is in slavery, "And we here highly resolve that these dead shall not haave died in vain. And this government of the people, by the people and for the people Shall not perish from the Earth." Abraham Lincoln said that on November 19, 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And he was right. I believe that too."

http://www.cpsr.cs.uchicago.edu/robeson/links/NYlabor.ballad.lyrics.html

Here is the abstract scheme of expropriation of serfs which is reversed in a significant fraction of the white working people's population in America, especially North America, creating a vast population of petit bourgeois "farmers". Doubly free labor has to be "freed" of ownership of means of production for there to be capitalist relations of production . Wage-slavery.

"I The process which precedes the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation

One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization — from the means and material of labor. This means above all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental commune. In both these forms, the relationship of the worker to the objective conditions of his labor is one of ownership: this is the natural unity of labor with its material prerequisites. Hence, the worker has an objective existence independent of his labor. The individual is related to himself as a proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality. The same relation holds between one individual and the rest. Where this prerequisite derives from the community, the others are his co-owners, who are so many incarnations of the common property. Where it derives from the individual families which jointly constitute the community, they are independent owners co-existing with him, independent private proprietors. The common property which formerly absorbed everything and embraced them all, then subsists as a special ager publicus [common land] separate from the numerous private owners."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/precapitalist/ch01.htm. Kurt Thornbladh

Here Lenin outlines abstractly how bourgeoisie develop out of farmer populations :

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1893/market/05.htm#v01zz99h-093-GUESS Kurt Thornbladh

The US had a mass Hutterite or Amish level of mode of production population . You know, Dorothy , Kansas of your dreams . Fields of Dreams galore . Oooohklahoma where grass grows taller than the corn. Kurt Thornbladh

Kurt :That' s interesting. The small white American farmers are like the Cossacks in the Russian Empire. They are allowed to be free because they are agents for the expansion of empire, and an economical source of soldiers. The population of Anatolia in the Byzantine Empire was like that as well. From about 800 AD until 1000 AD they were free people who supplied soldiers to the Emperor. Around the time of the latter date they were converted to serfs.

Yes, though I think they are a larger fraction of the total population, and more importantly, this was capitalism , not feudalism , capitalism still with it's capitalist slavery and colonialism surplus-value" turbo-chargers ", the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism . Eventually , slavery was discarded after it gave the capitalist accumulation of money rocket an initial main boost, because slavery is not doubly free labor limiting its productivity as permanently separated from hi-tec machinery . Sent from my iPhone