Adrian Riskin :anarchoheart2: on Nostr: For whatever reason I'm seeing a lot of posts about the Confederacy recently. You ...

For whatever reason I'm seeing a lot of posts about the Confederacy recently. You know the drill: "They lost every battle but won the war." "If only we had punished them after the war we wouldn't be in this situation." Et fricking cetera... This idea is not only wrong, it's dangerous too.

The US civil war was fought between capitalist factions. On the one hand Northern capitalists who had realized that chattel slavery was politically unsustainable and that it had to be replaced by wage slavery throughout the US in order to preserve the means of exploitation and on the other Southern capitalists who couldn't see that slavery couldn't actually continue because they were blinded like Scrooge McDuck by the unimaginably vast profits they were making from slave labor.

Northern capitalists never cared about the well-being of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. Those with the power to decide were never going to protect them. The Northern economy relied as much on slave labor as the Southern and they weren't about to let that slip away by failing to manage the end of slavery in a profit-preserving manner. Their goal was to integrate Southern capital into the modern system rather than to help any oppressed people whatsoever. The Southern ruling class finally figured this out and stopped trying to drown the lifeguard and we've had the boots of this unified ruling class on our necks ever since.

Governments aren't going to save us now and governments were never going to save us or anyone else who's not a capitalist. Ultimately these ahistorical fantasies support capital because they support the fantasy that governments protect ordinary people. Clearly enslaved and formerly enslaved people weren't going to free themselves by voting in the right government and just as clearly we're not going to either.