"Out of Death of Slavery":

A Return to Marx's Civil War Writings

Abstract

The goal of this essay is to offer a return to Marx, specifically to Marx's writings on the US Civil War, in order to consider their role in the development of Merxian materialist conception of history. To that end, this reading of Marx's writings on the civil war elicits a definition of class as 1) An objective, dynamic systematic process of expolitation in global capitalism 2) defined concretely in a given space and time by the content, shape and limits, and necessities of political-economic struggle and 3) a contested, fluide ideological and cultural structure rooted in social institutions contrive to reproduce existing social relations of production. In order to, establish this multidimensional definition, I contextualize this reading of Marx's Civil War writings within his extensive investigations of events in Asia and Africa.