The Existential Ideology of American Reactionary Socialists

The ideological concern that centers my work relates to diverse figures such as Orestes Brownson and George Fitzhugh constructing critiques of capitalism before the advent of America’s post-Civil War rise in industrial capitalism. They looked to burgeoning American industrial capital as a fully realized terror and fantasized about older modes of ideology--for Orestes Brownson it was a Christian Hierarchy; for George Fitzhugh, slavery modeled after the Greco-Roman tradition. Karl Marx defined the reactionary socialist belief as “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of history.”[1] What then becomes clear is how their ideologies of the past allow them to be critical of capitalism in a socialist vein, while remain nostalgic and unable to offer real alternatives to the liberal Western marketplace.

Created by John Haven in 1850, Slavery as it Exists in the South/Slavery as it Exists in England reconstructs Southern slavery positively against English--and Northern American--labor.[2] The etching depicts two settings; the first shows the Southern plantation with dancing slaves while the second image depicts the utter destitute state of the working class in an industrial city. The sketch projects the debilitating existence away from the South and shows the real site of violence in the heart of an English factory town. Yet the depiction of England cannot help but reflect Southern culture as well. Why is it that the “runaway” is an industrial creation—or for that matter, the old derelict who is unable to work by the age of forty. A close inspection of the image also shows that a sign in the background reads “a wife to be sold.” The parallels between the images reveal what historians know about 19^th century industrialism and American slave history. . Clearly there are markers that reveal the image to be centrally concerned with the effects of capitalism but also reveals a truth of slavery in the United States. That is, the references away from American slavery, reveal the tropes and types that exist in the southern states of America.

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[1] Marx, Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 491.

[2] Haven, John. Slavery as it Exists in America. Slavery as it Exists in England. Boston, 1850.

This work is based on my work on pre-Civil War socialist and authoritarian trends. I look forward to the discussions at the conference this fall.

Paul J. Edwards

Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow

American and New England Studies

Boston University