Settler Colonial Studies

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Henry Carey's ‘Entire Bad Joke’ and Henry George's

‘Idle Taunt’: displacement, settler colonialism and
revolution in nineteenth-century America

Lorenzo Veracini

To cite this article: Lorenzo Veracini (2020): Henry Carey's ‘Entire Bad Joke’ and Henry George's
‘Idle Taunt’: displacement, settler colonialism and revolution in nineteenth-century America, Settler
Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2020.1789029

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2020.1789029

Published online: 07 Jul 2020.

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SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2020.1789029

Henry Carey’s ‘Entire Bad Joke’ and Henry George’s ‘Idle

Taunt’: displacement, settler colonialism and revolution in
nineteenth-century America
Lorenzo Veracini
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article follows nineteenth century debates pitting US Primitive accumulation;
economists Henry Carey and Henry George on the one hand, and revolution; displacement;
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other hand. Carey and socialism; settler colonialism
George maintained that displacement and settler colonialism
could be a response to contradictions and an alternative to
revolution. Marx and, later, Engels restated a revolutionary
perspective.

Karl Marx referred to prominent economist Henry Carey’s ‘entire bad joke’: the prospect
that individual workers may earn enough and become independent proprietors.1 Carey
believed they could, and constructed an influential theory about the ‘harmony of inter-
ests’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield had feared that in the settler colonies workers wouldn’t
need to labour for a wage and endeavoured to ensure that they did – hence his argument
advocating a ‘sufficient price’ for land. Marx read both Wakefield and Carey but concluded
that workers couldn’t become independent proprietors and that their social mobility
would not last (hence, the joke). This article pursues the line of inquiry that Gabriel Piter-
berg and I have followed in a 2015 Journal of Global History article dedicated to the
relationship linking Wakefield and Marx.2 In that article we followed Marx’s rejoinder to
Wakefield’s interpretation of an episode in the early colonisation of Western Australia,
when servants had deserted wealthy colonists. Wakefield’s reaction to that episode was
to develop the theory of ‘systematic colonization’; in turn Marx’s reading of Wakefield’s
project was instrumental in his development of the notion of primitive accumulation,
the separation of workers from their means of subsistence, a process that forces them
onto the wage relations and underpins the operation of capitalism.
Carey did not like anything British, and Wakefield did not approve of anything Ameri-
can. Marx brought them into conversation because these economists were talking about
primitive accumulation (even if neither Carey now Wakefield use the term). Wakefield
endorsed primitive accumulation; he knew it was necessary for the operation of what
he called ‘capitalist civilisation’, and wanted to reintroduce it where available ‘free land’
in settler frontiers was undoing it. Carey considered it necessary, as this article’s third
section outlines, but believed that its adverse consequences may be mitigated. Marx,

CONTACT Lorenzo Veracini lveracini@swin.edu.au

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 L. VERACINI

on the contrary, as this essay’s first section sketches, believed that it was irreversible and
that only a revolutionary passage would transform the world it had created and its mode
of production.
Two decades later, and in the context of an ongoing conversation between two political
traditions, one advocating displacement, the other revolution, as this paper’s fourth
section outlines, Henry George would powerfully rehearse Carey’s argument in a
different key. If for Carey workers could become independent proprietors, for George it
was a matter of ensuring that they should again be able to do so. He had realised that
they could not and argued that suggesting that they could amounted to an ‘idle taunt’.
Georgism would become influential, especially in the United States and in the other
settler-colonial societies, and Friedrich Engels addressed it in his ‘Preface’ to the US
Edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels argued that returning to
a previous dispensation, like George was advocating for, was impossible. For Engels, the
only way was forward and towards a revolutionary passage. Engels’s appraisal of Georgist
politics is outlined in this article’s fifth section.
These debates took place within larger nineteenth century contestations about
growing contradictions, revolutionary possibilities or dangers (depending on how one
looked at the prospect of revolution), and the advisability of displacement as an alternative
to revolution. Wakefield thought that contradictions could be effectively displaced else-
where; Carey thought that labourers retained the option of displacing, and that through
displacement they could arise above their condition; Marx knew that contradictions
would follow all escapes; and Engels knew they had. What I have defined as the political
traditions of ‘the world turned inside out’, the prospect of changing the world by changing
worlds, and what Christopher Hill called in 1972 ‘the world turned upside down’, revolu-
tion, were thus engaging in a crucial formative debate.3 Emplaced transformation and dis-
placed transformation were strategic alternatives.
These traditions were alternative to each other but had interacted intensely. The ‘frag-
ment hypothesis’ proposed by Louis Hartz in a seminal 1964 book assumed that it was in
the 1950s, after the global war, that the neo-European ‘fragments’ – the settler societies –
were finally reconnecting with the European metropole after prolonged isolation.4 Hartz
was focusing on the nonrevolutionary traditions that follow ‘fragmentation’, the process
whereby new societies are established outside of Europe. But isolation had been
undone before, as this essay’s second section summarises. The exiled revolutionaries of
the European revolutions of 1848 had already brought revolution and American ‘fragment’
together.5 It was a fateful encounter. Marxism developed in connection with and through a
sustained reflection on settler colonialism as a mode of domination, and the American pol-
itical traditions were profoundly transformed by the revolutionary ‘spirit of 1848’.6 Frag-
ment and revolution had interacted in profoundly transformative ways.7
And yet, this interaction is largely neglected by Marxist traditions, which have focused
on Europe, only sometimes on the colonies of exploitation, and have understood Marxism
as a tradition largely autochthonous to the European metropole (with the exception of his
reflection on the Civil War, which is well known).8 This article argues that displacement and
revolution were fundamentally connected to one another in the development of Western
political thought, and that Marx saw emigration as dissipating revolution in Europe while
others supported emigration for this very reason. Recovering this formative interaction
may contribute to the larger project of ‘provincialising’ Marxism.9
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 3

More generally, this analysis is especially needed because settlers living on Indigenous
lands in North America and elsewhere need to keep the question of ongoing Indigenous
dispossession firmly as the focus of the analytical frame.10 It cannot be sidelined because it
is the foundation of a settler-colonial regime and its supersession requires a decolonising
passage. Besides, sometimes what is implied and omitted is as important as what is expli-
citly stated. Reflecting now on Carey, Marx, George, and Engels is especially productive
because despite all their differences, as we will see, these authors agreed in completely
foreclosing the dispossession of Native Americans. These authors all assumed the dispos-
session of Native Americans as a given and overlooked entirely its morality as they dis-
agreed on what should be done with Indigenous lands and offered diverging theories
of social transformation and society building.
Both the world turned inside out and its revolutionary counterpoint were premised on
appropriating lands that belonged to someone else. But this neglect is a current affair, and
reassessing these political traditions and their reciprocal relations can help developing
solidarities with Indigenous peoples and nations dispossessed by settler colonialism.
Too often contemporary demands for change neglect the sovereignty of Indigenous poli-
ties currently struggling against settler-colonial imposition. Demands for environmental
protection, for example, routinely disregard Indigenous claims, while the Occupy Move-
ment, for example, dwelled on Indigenous lands but typically failed to acknowledge this
fact and its implications.11 Settler colonialism is not incidental to the operation of a
settler society, it is one of its foundational structures. Studying the ways in which this
mode of domination was foreclosed in the nineteenth century can help avoiding this
neglect today.

The discovery of the world turned inside out

For Marx primitive accumulation applies in the ‘Old World’, but not in the settler-colo-
nial new worlds. ‘In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of
primitive accumulation is more or less accomplished’, he remarks, but it is ‘otherwise
in the colonies’. Marx means the settler colonies: where the ‘capitalist regime’ collides
‘with the resistance of the producer’ (Marx means the settler), who, ‘as owner of his
own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the
capitalist’.12
Marx recognises Wakefield’s insight: ‘It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have dis-
covered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the
truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country’.13 Wakefield’s
finding in the colonies had implications for colonialism and for an understanding of
capital everywhere:
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsis-
tence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist
if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell
himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation
between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.14

As a consequence (and as a result of Indigenous dispossession, even though Marx does

not remark on it), the settler colony is at the moment of its inception noncapitalist:
4 L. VERACINI

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of
the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this
– that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part
of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later
settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of
their inveterate vice – opposition to the establishment of capital.15

Subsistence settlers, Marx recognises, escape capitalism, the wage relation and other
market compulsions:
Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the
furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build
their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own indus-
try. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases,
shoes and clothes for their own use.16

For Marx, the settler colony upsets the operation of capitalism:

The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly repro-
duces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumu-
lation of capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and
demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits sat-
isfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the
capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence,
which the smug political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into
one of free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of com-
modities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in
the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. […] What becomes of the production of wage-
labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? The wage-worker of
to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes
from the labour-market, but not into the workhouse (emphasis added).17

Wakefield had similarly identified this disappearance and offered a corrective:

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? […] The trick is how to kill two
birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, indepen-
dent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time
for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an indepen-
dent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the
wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by violation of the sacred
law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as
it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage
labour market full for the capitalists.18

This in theory; in practice, as Marx remarks, even if ‘the English Government for years prac-
tised this method of “primitive accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for
the use of the colonies’, things had gone differently.19 Moreover, Wakefield’s solution is
entirely unnecessary; Marx saw capitalist contradictions rapidly catching up, and the non-
capitalist settler colony eventually turning into a capitalist heartland, not through ‘sys-
tematic colonisation’, but through relentless capitalist expansion and rapid immigration:
the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America, leaves
behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration
from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 5

emigration westwards can wash them away [while] the American Civil War brought in its train
a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristoc-
racy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the
exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralisation of capital.20

Escaping contradictions, Marx concluded, could only be a temporary fix.

The world turned inside out meets the world turned upside down
Europe rediscovered the revolutionary world turned upside down in 1848 (even though
Britain did so only indirectly).21 Outlining how Marxism developed in connection with
an ongoing reflection on American developments (and settler colonialism as a specific
mode of domination), in a recent essay Andrew Zimmerman aimed to return ‘the
history of revolution to the center of the American Civil War and the American Civil War
to the center of the history of revolution’.22 This is a valuable insight, because Zimemrman
convincingly argues that the Civil War was a revolution – it was seen as such by many con-
temporary observers – and because, as he demonstrates, it was crucial to the development
of Marxian theories of revolution.
The Civil War’s ‘prehistory’ should then be sought in the failed European revolutions of
1848–1849 as well as in the growing sectional differences tearing the US republic apart.
This requires, Zimmerman argues, seeing the European revolutionary outbursts not as
nationalist-liberal uprisings, but as genuine socialist revolutionary uprisings.23 They were
socialist revolutionary attempts, he argues, especially in Germany, and the revolutionaries
that fought for them, and the repressive agencies that were tasked with their repression,
believed they were. The ‘veterans who fled to the United States tended to be socialist
internationalists’.24 The liberals who had contributed to these insurrections were generally
left alone; it was the radicals that were typically chased out. Baden, Germany had been a
crucial battlefield; many of the socialists who fought there also fought in the Civil War,
including August Willich, the future brigadier general of the Thirty-Second Indiana Infantry
Regiment. Engels fought in 1848 as an adjutant to Willich.25
The transfer of socialist traditions to the US follows the defeat of revolution. Similarly, it
was the coup d’état carried out by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, another defeat, that had
finally convinced many exiles in London or Switzerland to cross the Atlantic. Marx wrote
skeptically about attempts to displace contradictions to America in a passage about Par-
isian lotteries and California gold.26 Still centred on Germany, Marx’s revolutionary strategy
after 1848 had two closely connected problems: emigration and defeat. The movement of
revolutionary personnel and the transportation of contradictions away from what he saw
as the centre of world revolution was for him a strategic challenge. ‘The Eighteenth Bru-
maire of Louis Bonaparte’ was a piece he had written with the revolutionary diaspora in
mind; it was first published in a New York-based German language publication.27
The revolutionaries who crossed the Atlantic brought with them the lessons of their
defeat, and revolutionary theory was transformed through this displacement and reflec-
tion. The reverse is also true: while these revolutionaries often and for quite some time
saw their presence in the US as temporary, they themselves were transformed. Two dis-
tinct traditions interacted intensely through this encounter: the world turned inside out,
which existed already in the US and was transformed by the revolutionary traditions
6 L. VERACINI

coming from Europe, and the imported revolutionary traditions, which ended up trans-
formed by their engagement with the world turned inside out.
For various reasons, but primarily because New York was offering little opportunities for
advancement, the defeated revolutionaries moved west. In St. Louis, Missouri, they formed
a veritable colony of German expatriates. It was in these settings that a group of exiles
began embracing their displacements for their regenerative political possibilities. It may
have been gradual and only implicit, but it was a crucial transformation: an exile’s gaze
is fixed on the original country, but the world turned inside out focuses on the new
locales. Zimmerman remarks that:
[t]hough in the 1850s Marx and [Joseph] Weydemeyer [Marx’s most active collaborator and
correspondent amongst the exiled revolutionaries] thought the US was simply a place to
wait for the next European revolution, […] they were already, even if they did not know it,
participating in American politics.28

They were participating because of where they were, and Marx was participating
(admittedly from a distance, as correspondent for the New York Tribune) because he
needed his comrades and because he felt they were abandoning the prospect of European
revolution in exchange for the promise on transformation elsewhere (he also needed the
money that secure employment would bring).
Marx and Engels were generally very well informed about circumstances in the US. They
knew that many of the defeated revolutionaries had successfully integrated (especially in
the North and the West), had become influential, and had introduced to the US a secular
radical tradition, but as far as Marx and Engels were concerned they were needed back in
Germany.29 Marx realised that the ideas of the German national revolution were shaping
the political culture of the Union but did not consider this a priority.30 Some of these emi-
grants were only interested in organising workers’ unions; most sided with the Republi-
cans and were crucial to the Civil War effort. They were defeated revolutionaries in
Europe, but had become organic to the settler-colonial order and its extension in North
America. Displacement was undoing revolution.
Marx took the world turned inside out seriously; given the circumstances, a bad joke
was not funny at all. Could the promise of free land and ‘manly independence’ really
undo worker subjection under capitalist conditions? Could displacement be the answer?
His comeback was to turn the argument upside down: homesteadism would not undo
the prospect of revolution; on the contrary, it would in due course even if not immediately
further it because it would lead to an inevitable expansion of capitalist relations.31 The sup-
porters of systematic displacement thought that homesteadism was a way to permanently
pre-empt revolution and class conflict, but he thought that it would ultimately accelerate
the maturation of contradictions.32
Marx thought similarly on the issue of slavery. He and US President Lincoln were equally
opposed to slavery, but they did so for different reasons: Marx opposed it because slavery
sustained a global capitalist regime in its struggle against revolution, Lincoln because its
westward extension would impede further displacing contradictions to yet more unsettled
territories (and therefore increase revolutionary tensions in the industrialised northeast).
Marx supported the war against the South because it would result in a revolutionary
moment (‘things are taking a revolutionary turn’, he noted), Lincoln because it would ulti-
mately prevent it.33 They were surprisingly respectful of each other. Marx addressed
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 7

Lincoln appreciatively on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association (a sitting

US President at the time did not mind that a socialist international organisation should
express its support):
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a
new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the
working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of
Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through
the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a
social world.34

Robin Blackburn refers to how much Marx and Lincoln shared. What they did not agree on
was the need for and advisability of revolution.
Marx appreciated the revolutionary possibilities that the war would bring but also
realised that the war was also and crucially a war for continued displacement. Referring
to ‘white plebeians’, he noted that a different spatial outlet than that of homesteaders
settling on ‘free soil’ was essential to the stability of the South and its mode of production.
The numerous class of restive young white mainly propertyless men, he reasoned, had to
be allowed an external outlet if internal disruption was to be avoided. Many in the South
were aggressively looking at Latin America and especially Cuba, as well as towards the
West.35 Marx realised that the fundamental problem in this conflict was not slavery per
se, but its need for expansion. Displacement was not dissipating contradictions; it was
bringing them to a head. Lincoln, on the contrary, had condoned slavery in the Union
until circumstances forced him to emancipate the slaves. But he continued to believe
that freed Blacks would remain aliens and consistently hoped that they may be ‘colonized’
elsewhere. Only in the last year of the war he finally abandoned this prospect.

World turned inside out against world turned upside down

And yet, even if ‘fragment’ and revolution were transformed through their encounter, and
even if the American socialists considered organising in a new fashion, especially in areas
of relative industrial concentration, and the European revolutionaries came to believe in
the political promise of displacement, discontinuities should not be overemphasised.
Adam Dean has suggested in his analysis of the ideology of the Republican Party
before and during the Civil War that a renewed focus on ‘agrarianism’ could be seen as
a last effort to displace contradictions rather than accepting the inevitability of a
coming sectional or class war (America would get both).36 The American ‘socialist’ tra-
ditions had been previously dominated by Fourierist tendencies and related ‘association-
ist’ ideas – class struggle, emplaced struggle where the contest is over the right to shape a
specific geography, was not a priority. They would rather build utopian colonies in remote
locations and away from rising contradictions. Even those who had no intention of actually
moving traditionally supported the westward expansion; if many left, they thought, the
position of the urban workers who remained would be strengthened. An interest in estab-
lishing regenerated communities elsewhere remained ascendant.37
The American Fourierists typically advocated gradual measures towards abolishing
slavery as an institution – a stance that Carey also advocated. Carey was especially influ-
ential with the Tribune and had privileged access to its editor, Horace Greeley, and to
8 L. VERACINI

many of the Whigs that would join the Republican Party.38 Greeley would famously pro-
claim the ‘go west, young man’ doctrine, advocating displacement rather than organising.
Marx’s work for the Tribune enabled him to follow closely Carey’s advocacy and the
debates that would lead to the consolidation of the Republican Party.
Carey is crucial in the developing contest between emplaced and displaced transform-
ation. He argued that economic development and the productivity upturns that followed
the mechanisation of industry would lead to an ever-increasing ‘harmony of interests’
between workers and owners.39 In a way, Carey was a Wakefieldian (he had read his
England and America), an influential and consistent advocate of ‘internal improvement’,
the ‘American System’, and tariffs. These measures would ensure, he averred, that the
industrialisation of the east would be compatible with the ‘orderly’ colonisation of the
west. Both Wakefield’s ‘sufficient price’ for land and Carey’s tariffs fundamentally disrupted
the free trade orthodoxies of the political economists.
Carey’s tireless support for protection was part of his embrace of the politics of displa-
cement: protection in his view was needed to displace manufacture itself from one
location to another.40 The harmony of interests would then be sustained by a displace-
ment of people and manufactures and by increased productivity, doing away with long-
distance trade and associated transportation costs. ‘Two systems are before the world’,
he concluded,
the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and
transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commod-
ities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labour of all; while the other
looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that
engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the labourer good
wages, and to the owner of capital good profits. […] One looks to giving the products of
millions of acres of land and of the labour of millions of men for the services of hundreds
of thousands of distant men; the other to bringing the distant men to consume on the
land the products of the land, exchanging day’s labour for day’s labour.41

Carey’s opposition to free trade, the unequal colonial relations that underpinned it, and the
British hegemony that sustained it was premised on the realisation that if goods moved,
people would not – not to the new lands as settler cultivators, and not to the new lands as
manufacturers. Carey supported displacement: ‘We need population’, he concluded,
arguing that protection, ‘raising the value of labour’ promotes the ‘annexation of individ-
uals’ to the US, and that the movement of free settlers would mark
the establishment of perfect free trade between ourselves and the people of Europe by indu-
cing them to transfer themselves to our shores. It is a bounty on the importation of the
machine we need – man – to give value to the machine we have in such abundance – land.42

‘Perfect free trade’ was counterposed to the false ‘free trade’ supported by the British pol-
itical economists. Most importantly, Carey argued, why ‘annex’ land when you can annex
people instead, promote their displacement, and welcome them to land the US already
owned?
Crucially, the ‘harmony of interests’, the cornerstone of Carey’s argument, was only
possible if workers could become owners of farms in the first place. The harmony was pre-
mised on the ongoing availability of ‘free’ or relatively cheap lands, and on many labourers’
willingness to displace there (and on the ‘sale of public lands’ in the US, ‘alone sufficing to
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 9

pay the expenses of government’).43 Marx had looked at the map and saw that it identified
a finite landmass, even when one was to include regions not yet under the control of the
US Republic (which Carey did, supporting the annexation of Canada and Cuba), and even
when one took into consideration, as Carey did, underused land in the settled parts of the
Union. The public lands were finite.44 The ‘harmony of interests’, if it ever applied, was only
a temporary circumstance and was certainly not universal.45
Marx’s strategy had remained confrontational. He restated a revolutionary position and
the necessity of class-consciousness and struggle, a stance that could not be more
different from Carey’s ‘harmony’ premised on displacement. And yet Carey’s opinion mat-
tered. He could shape editorial policy at the Tribune, possibly the most important period-
ical in the US at the time, would be influential with the Lincoln administration, and was
successful in ensuring that tariffs were included in the Republican Party platform in
1860. Carey could also influence Charles Dana, who edited the Tribune after Greeley and
employed Marx. Even though the Tribune was generally supportive of displacement, it
became a battleground between two strategies.
One result of this confrontation was that Marx’s theory of revolution developed in close
relation with displacement as method. On this point, Zimmerman offers a crucial insight:
‘Marx’s engagement with the American socialism of Horace Greeley and the “harmony of
interest” doctrine of Henry Carey’ pushed him to ‘develop his own ideas about the class
conflict’; in particular, he found ‘anathema to the revolutionary strategy that he and
others in his radical milieu continued to develop’ the free soil doctrine that was ‘central
to Carey’s concept of harmony of interests, as it was to much American Republicanism’.46
Carey’s ‘entire bad joke’ was premised on the belief that individual workers could ‘accumu-
late enough’ to own their farms. Marx’s theory of class struggle, however, what was
keeping the prospect of future revolution alive, was premised on a determination to
demonstrate that this was ultimately unsustainable.
Carey understood that primitive accumulation was fully established in the northeast,
but he assumed that there would always be an outside. He thus ‘universalised’ settler colo-
nialism (the occupation of ‘new’ lands was possible everywhere one could dispossess
Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples – dispossession was the hidden engine
of the ‘harmony of interests’). Marx’s critique of this logic was sharp even if did not
focus on dispossession. For Marx, ‘Carey’s generality is Yankee universality’; capitalism
was not surrounded by a settler-colonial world, it was the other way round.47
Carey had also concluded that the exploitation of industrial workers was acceptable
because it did not prevent workers from eventually becoming settlers somewhere else.
He was therefore a protectionist: only protection against a British-dominated world
would enable a reconciliation of industrial exploitation and ongoing settlement, and
only protection would raise the value of labour until the most damaging aspects of exploi-
tation were undone. Carey believed that settler colonialism could undo capitalism’s con-
tradictions by providing an escape from its relations of production. Similarly with regards
of the slaves: the availability of a spatial escape for freedmen allowed to think about
gradual emancipation. But for Carey the slaves must remain where they were; displace-
ment was not for them, unless it was to be displacement to another continent, or ‘coloni-
sation’, which Carey supported. Carey universalised settler colonialism but did not include
slaves or slavery in its expansion.
10 L. VERACINI

In response, Marx restated class conflict and a similarly uncompromising stance against
slavery. No gradualism was possible. And indeed, even if the revolution did not take hold
in the US (his comrades were largely lost to his cause, not many returned), a revolution of
sort did come. Zimmerman interprets the Civil War as a revolution and appraises the
German emigrés’s extraordinary collaboration with Black insurgents. This alliance was
real, ‘one of the earliest collaborations of socialists with a proletariat’; the ‘The Mississippi
Valley, where many German socialists fought, first in Missouri, then in Arkansas, then,
under Grant, in Mississippi, was home to arguably the most proletarianized workforce in
the world.’48
It was another fateful encounter, a revolution, even though an ‘unfinished’ one, and
even if it was followed, as W. E. B. Du Bois noted, by a ‘counterrevolution of property’.49
It would generate a theory of revolution as well, and it is significant that Marx developed
his theory of surplus value as a response to ‘the American struggle over slavery’ (and as a
critique of Carey’s notion of ‘harmony of interests’). Not only primitive accumulation is dis-
covered in the settler colony by Wakefield; the theory of surplus value itself is a response to
the world turned inside out and of a revolutionary struggle to protect its ongoing
possibility.
In general, responding to the notion of ‘harmony of interests’ required that Marx reflect
on America as a specific social formation. It was a country
where bourgeois society did not develop on the foundation of the feudal system, but devel-
oped rather from itself; where this society appears not as the surviving result of a centuries old
movement, but rather as the starting point of a new movement; where the state, in contrast to
all earlier national formations, was from the beginning subordinate to bourgeois society, to its
production, and never could make the pretense to being an end-in-itself […] and where,
finally, even the antitheses of bourgeois society itself appear as vanishing moments.50

The ‘antitheses’ were frontier circumstances characterised by a subsistence economy. It

was not a ‘normal’ situation, Marx pointed out, whereas, on the contrary, for Carey, the pol-
itical economy of settlement (what Wakefield had called ‘the art of colonisation’, where
everything except land is ‘created out of nothing’) ‘was the natural economy’, or ‘the
eternal, normal, relations of social production’. Carey thought that settler colonialism is
humanity in its natural state; Marx highlighted how profoundly ideological this perspective
was.51

The world turned inside out restated

Henry George published Our Land and Land Policy in 1871.52 It was an immediate success
because ‘homesteadism’ had not been – George made a lot of sense to his readers. Cir-
cumstances had changed. The ‘limitless’ domain of the US, George argued, was running
out; population was increasing and would soon approach European densities; eventually,
the new world will resemble the old one. Carey had believed in the ‘harmony of interests’;
George was no longer optimistic. He felt that the world turned inside out was disappearing
fast (he did not use the term, of course). His essay opened with the perception of crisis: ‘no
child born this year or last year, or even three years before that, can possibly get him-self a
homestead out of Uncle Sam’s farm, unless he is willing to take a mountain-top or alkali
patch, or to emigrate to Alaska’.53 The problem was not absolute scarcity, or the prospect
of scarcity: the problem was monopolies. Monopolisation made land and settling it
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 11

expensive. If a frontier is by definition a locale where land is bloody cheap (this is no

unnecessary swearing, but a literal description), George was announcing the passing of
the frontier two decades before Frederick Jackson Turner would (Turner would also
rehearse Carey’s notion that available land on the frontier had dissipated social tension
in settled areas).
Moreover, George continued, land was being allocated to speculators who did not
intend to use it themselves (to profit, they must tax those who will cultivate it). Speculation
was a tax. How had this happened? George rehearsed the story of settler independence
and democracy. It ‘was not until 1820 that the minimum price’ for an acre of land ‘was
reduced to $1.25 cash, and the Government condescended to retail in tracts of 160
acres’, he noted, and ‘it was not until 1841, sixty-five years after the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, that the right of pre-emption was given to settlers upon surveyed land’, but it was
only in 1862 that the ‘right of every citizen to land, upon the sole condition of cultivating it,
was first recognized by the passage of the Homestead law’. This ‘growing liberality to the
settler’, however, ‘has been accompanied by a still more rapidly growing liberality to
speculators and corporations’.54 Relatively speaking, the settlers had been unfairly
treated; speculators and corporations had outpaced the settlers. By definition, displace-
ment, the world turned inside out, is no solution if your relative speed does not exceed
that of what you are escaping from. Land grants – all land grants, to States, to educational
institutions, to railroad corporations – were ultimately a tax on bona fide settlers. George
concluded that the prospect of displacement was disappearing fast if it had not disap-
peared altogether. A major war to keep it possible had just been waged, but if one
enemy of the world turned inside out had been disabled (slavery and its extension), the
other, monopolisation, had been given free rein.
Besides, land grants for railways, George noted, despite what it was said to defend
them, actually retard settlement. These grants (like the ‘sufficient price’ Wakefield had
advocated for the British colonies of settlement), ensure that primitive accumulation
was immediately transferred to the ‘new’ lands, but whereas Wakefield had intended to
extend primitive accumulation as a way to reconnect metropole and peripheries,
George was countering it. He was interested in the possibility of an escape because escap-
ing was no longer possible. We ‘are giving away the land’ to hasten settlement, he
remarked, but ‘when the time comes that these lands are really needed for cultivation,
they will all be monopolized’. On the contrary, he added, we ‘need not trouble ourselves
about railroads; settlement will go on without them-as it went on in Ohio and Indiana, as it
has gone on since our Aryan forefathers left the Asiatic cradle of the race on their long
westward journey’.55 George was proposing to return to a happier situation – he
wanted to make America great again.
His focus was California. California was where it had all ended, geographically as well as
sociopolitically:
Across many of these vast estates a strong horse cannot gallop in a day, and one may travel for
miles and miles over fertile ground, where no plough has ever struck, but which is all owned,
and on which no settler can come to make himself a home, unless he pay such tribute as the
lord of the domain chooses to exact.56

Settler property could not be established there because of land monopolisation. There was
no ‘State in the Union in which settlers in good faith have been so persecuted, so robbed,
12 L. VERACINI

as in California’, where rich men ‘make a regular business of blackmailing settlers upon
public land’, and ‘of appropriating their homes’.57
And yet California could have been the most suited of all the states for denser settle-
ment (denser settlement was one way the world turned inside out could still prosper
even after the store of public lands had been depleted: if less land was needed for subsis-
tence, displacement was still possible – Carey had also made this point). Instead, California
had been a mecca of grants: bogus grants, Mexican grants, railroad grants, scrip originat-
ing from other states and issued for a variety of purposes (half-breed scrip, educational
scrip, etc.). Land monopolisation had proceeded unchecked. And it was not only about
taxing settlers through land grants and associated speculations – an invisible tax – the set-
tlers were routinely robbed of their property: the ‘railroad companies can only take half the
lands’, but the speculators take ‘the settler’s home from under his feet’.58
It was a world turned ‘backwards’ (which is, literally, the opposite of a world turned
inside out). It was a world that:
has already impressed its mark upon the character of our agriculture-more shiftless,
perhaps, than that of any State in the Union where slavery has not reigned. For California
is not a country of farms, but a country of plantations and estates. Agriculture is a specu-
lation. The farmhouses, as a class, are unpainted frame shanties, without garden or flower
or tree. The farmer raises wheat; he buys his meat, his flour, his butter, his vegetables, and,
frequently, even his eggs. He has too much land to spare time for such little things, or for
beautifying his home, or he is merely a renter, or an occupant of land menaced by some
adverse title, and his interest is but to get for this season the greatest crop that can be
made to grow with the least labour. He hires labour for his planting and his reaping,
and his hands shift for themselves at other seasons of the year. […] He buys on credit
at the nearest store, and when his crop is gathered must sell it to the Grain King’s
agent, at the Grain King’s prices.59

The farmer relies on the market for his provisions, on the market for his labour, on the
market for his produce, and on credit to run his farm. But this was not all; George
noted the anthropological consequences of such a state of affairs. There ‘is another type
of California farmer’:
He boards at the San Francisco hotels, and drives a spanking team over the Cliff House road;
or, perhaps, he spends his time in the gayer capitals of the East or Europe. His land is rented for
one third or one fourth of the crop, or is covered by scraggy cattle, which need to look after
them only a few half-civilised vaqueros; or his great wheat fields, of from ten to twenty thou-
sand acres, are ploughed and sown and reaped by contract. And over our ill-kept, shadeless,
dusty roads, where a house is an unwonted landmark, and which run frequently for miles
through the same man’s land, plod the tramps, with blankets on back – the labourers of
the California farmer – looking for work, in its seasons, or toiling back to the city when the
ploughing is ended or the wheat crop is gathered.60

The ‘tramps’ are the real end of the world turned inside out – the ultimate antisettler: a
labourer who continuously displace and will never become independent.61
George depicted a classed society (and, he noted worryingly in relation to Chinese
immigrations, soon to be a raced society too) and a classed society must witness social
disruption. Carey’s stabilising device, displacement, was no longer available because all
the land had been ‘locked’ away. There was even a landed aristocracy in California, the
crucial social marker of the ‘Old World’ had preceded the settler there. But at least
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 13

speculators want to sell the land dearly, aristocrats are even worse: they are intent on
holding on to it.
Revolutionary measures were needed to pre-empt a coming revolution: ‘break’ mon-
opolies, open the land, and enable bona fide settlers to get secure title. George proceeded
dialectically. If a tax, albeit an invisible one, had been detrimental, a countertax would be
beneficial: tax property in land, he concluded – tax the tax. The tax would reconstitute the
‘harmony of interests’ by rearticulating the land/labour nexus. George’s tax was premised
on a specifically land-centred theory of labour:
The value of land and of labour must bear to each other an inverse ratio. These two are the
‘terms’ of production, and while production remains the same, to give more to the one is
to give less to the other. The value of land is the power, which its ownership gives to appro-
priate the product of labour, and, as a [con]sequence, where rents (the share of the landowner)
are high, wages (the share of the labourer) are low.62

In a ‘new’ country, ‘the value of labour is at first at its maximum, the value of land at its
minimum’, but as ‘population grows and land becomes monopolised and increases in
value, the value of labour steadily decreases’. Then, a ‘man who starts with nothing but
his labour’ would find it impossible to ‘become his own employer’ and be ‘at the mercy
of the landowner and the capitalist’.63
Land must be cheap; indeed it must be free (but only to bona fide settlers and in limited
quantities, that is, in parcels large enough to ensure a comfortable subsistence for a man
and his family, his reproduction, but also small enough to ensure that no unearned profit,
no tax on future settlers, ensues). Land that is acquired for speculation must be taxed.
George concurred with Carey that settlement is ‘normal’ and that monopolisation of
land is slavery.
But George concurred with Carey on another account too: the land tax would gradually
discontinue monopolisation. Like for slavery, there was no need for revolutionary
measures; the land tax would make displacement possible and therefore offer an alterna-
tive to revolution. Thus, George offered a revolutionary solution to dispense with revolu-
tion altogether (and like the state in Marx’s theory, the tax on the tax would eventually and
automatically disappear as it transformed society and undid property concentration). For
George, like for Carey, a capitalist system of relations and its contradictions must be
escaped, not overcome.
Revolution was indeed on George’s mind. The United States was turning into Europe,
and Europe is revolution. This was 1871, after all, an eminently revolutionary year.
George prophetised: ‘we shall find ourselves embarrassed by all the difficulties which
beset the statesmen of Europe – the social disease of England; the seething discontent
of France’.64 But it was not too late; reconstituting the world turned inside out was still
possible. If land was allocated only to actual settlers, and if ownership of land was
limited to the capacity to labour it, orderly settlement, like Carey had argued, would ensue:
There would be no necessity for building costly railroads to connect settlers with a market. The
market would accompany settlement. No one would go out into the wilderness, to brave all
the hardships and discomforts of the solitary frontier life; but with the foremost line of settle-
ment would go church and schoolhouse and lecture-room. The ill-paid, overworked mechanic
of the city could find a home on the soil, where he would not have to abandon all the comforts
of civilisation, but where there would be society enough to make life attractive, and where the
wants of his neighbours would give a market for his surplus labour until his land began to
14 L. VERACINI

produce; and to tell those who complain of want of employment and low wages to make for
themselves homes on the public domain would then be no idle taunt.65

If Carey’s bad ‘joke’ had turned into a ‘taunt’, the land tax could reconstitute the world
turned inside out. Bona fide settlers and residents of city lots would be tax-exempt, land
prices would fall, taxes on productive activities and exchanges could be abolished, and
the ‘harmony of interests’ between town and country, so important for Carey, would be
re-established.
In a final note George added that his proposed reform was absolutely necessary
because the alternative was revolution, as the example of Paris demonstrated:
This great problem of the more equal distribution of wealth must in some way be solved, if our
civilisation, like those that went before it is not to breed seeds of its own destruction. In one
way or another the attempt must be made – if not in one way, then in another. The spread of
education, the growth of democratic sentiment, the weakening of the influences which lead
men to accept the existing condition of things as divinely appointed, insure that, and the
general uneasiness of labour, the growth of trade-unionism, the spread of such societies as
the International prove it! The terrible struggle of the Paris commune was but such an
attempt. And in the light of burning Paris we may see how it may be that this very civilisation
of ours, this second Tower of Babel, which some deem reaches so far towards heaven that we
can plainly see there is no God may yet crumble and perish.66

In a footnote likely added to update the text as news from the ‘Old World’ were coming in,
George argued that only widely distributing the property of land would make revolution
impossible:
And this French struggle also shows the conservative influence of the diffusion of landed
property. The Radicals of Paris were beaten by the small proprietors of the provinces. Had
the lands of France been in the hands of a few, as the first revolution found it, the raising
of the red flag on the Hôtel de Ville would have been the signal for a Jacquerie in every
part of the country. So conscious are the extreme reds of the conservative influence of prop-
erty in land that they have for a long time condemned as a fatal mistake the law of the first
Republic which provided for the equal distribution of land among heirs, not because it has not
improved the condition of the peasantry, but because the improvement in their condition and
the interest which their possession of land gives them in the maintenance of order dispose
them to oppose the violent remedies which the workmen of the cities think necessary.67

The restored world turned inside would be a viable alternative to both monopolistic reac-
tion and revolutionary adventurism.

The world turned upside down restated

Engels’s ‘Preface’ to the US Edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1887)
can be seen as a response to the continued resilience of world turned inside out traditions
in America – the socialists had not returned to Europe and European socialism had not
developed in America.68 Engels began by noticing the ‘almost unanimous’ perception
that there are no classes in the US and therefore no class struggle (a question that
Werner Sombart would ask again at the beginning of the twentieth century).69 Socialism
was widely deemed to be a ‘foreign importation’ to America, Engels continued, an exogen-
ous element, a movement centred elsewhere. Engels countered all these assertions
through prophecy: socialism will emerge in the US and then it will not be a foreign
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 15

import; it will arise out of the material conditions of production. True, he averred, the
growth of a genuinely socialist movement in the US had been delayed, access to owner-
ship of cheap land and immigration had enabled many to escape proletarianisation, but
America was now outgrowning this stage.70 The emergence of revolutionary contradic-
tions could only be delayed, not permanently escaped, Engels stated.
And yet, he continued, the politics of displacement were entrenched. There were sig-
nificant contemporary epitomes of this tradition, including Georgism and demands for
a land tax. But the land tax was not revolutionary, Engels argued, and it was not a solution:
If Henry George declares land-monopolization to be the sole cause of poverty and misery, he
naturally finds the remedy in the resumption of the land by society at large. Now, the Socialists
of the school of Marx, too, demand the resumption, by society, of the land, and not only of the
land but of all other means of production likewise. But even if we leave these out of the ques-
tion, there is another difference. What is to be done with the land? Modern Socialists, as rep-
resented by Marx, demand that it should be held and worked in common and for common
account, and the same with all other means of social production, mines, railways, factories,
etc.; Henry George would confine himself to letting it out to individuals as at present,
merely regulating its distribution and applying the rents for public, instead of, as at present,
for private purposes. What the Socialists demand, implies a total revolution of the whole
system of social production; what Henry George demands, leaves the present mode of
social production untouched, and has, in fact, been anticipated by the extreme section of
Ricardian bourgeois economists who, too, demanded the confiscation of the rent of land
by the State.71

But of course the land tax was not a revolutionary move; it was never meant to be. It was
designed to make the world turned inside out great again, not to supersede a capitalist
mode of production. Settler nationalised land was only meant to enable ‘men’ to establish
viable subsistence farms and undo concentration of property and dispersal of population.
Similar proposals would in later decades be proposed by the People’s Party and the Popu-
lists and their organisations: nationalisation of railroads, public or co-operative warehous-
ing of crops, and guaranteed prices and loans. They were means to make displacement
possible again.
Engels then proceeded with his survey of the other segments of American ‘socialism’.
The Knights of Labour were also aiming to return to a previous dispensation rather than
looking forward. It was, Engels remarked, ‘a truly American paradox clothing the most
modern tendencies in the most mediaeval mummeries, and hiding the most democratic
and even rebellious spirit behind an apparent, but really powerless despotism’.72 However,
they were not static: the ‘Knights of Labor are the first national organization created by the
American working class as a whole’; they are
constantly in full process of development and revolution; a heaving, fermenting mass of
plastic material seeking the shape and form appropriate to its inherent nature. That form
will be attained as surely as historical evolution has, like natural evolution, its own immanent
laws. Whether the Knights of Labor will then retain their present name or not, makes no differ-
ence, but to an outsider it appears evident that here is the raw material out of which the future
of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at
large, has to be shaped.73

This ‘outsider’ imagined that as contradictions would catch up, the world turned inside out
would turn into the world turned upside down.
16 L. VERACINI

However and paradoxically, for the world turned inside out to turn into the world
turned upside down, the world turned upside down – the German immigrants who
formed the primarily German American Socialist Labor Party – had to dissolve into the
world turned inside out of American political traditions. Engels had reversed Marx’s argu-
ment: the emigrés must embrace their new world. If Marx wanted the socialists to return,
Engels encouraged them onward. True, the Socialist Labor Party was to a certain extent
foreign to America, having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immi-
grants, but they came with the experience of European class struggle. While this is ‘a for-
tunate circumstance for the American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate,
and to take advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years’ struggle of
their European classmates, and thus to hasten on the time of their own victory’, the
‘party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement’. ‘But’, Engles
added, ‘in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb’ and
‘become out and out American’. The socialists ‘cannot expect the Americans to come to
them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the
vast majority and the natives’ (of course they were not ‘natives’, but Engels, like the
other authors considered here did not consider actual Indigenous peoples).74
The Germans socialists would need to embrace displacement and join the American
world turned inside out. It was a dialectical move; their assimilation would transform
the political tradition of their new country from within. Relatedly, the opposite should
not happen in Germany, and German workers should always oppose the local followers
of Henry Carey. This is why Engels had written Anti-Duehring (1877).75

Coda: Is there socialism in the US?

The question of the putative ‘absence’ of socialism in the US is a vexed one. It was debated
for decades.76 This article has argued that the significance of America’s tradition of social-
ism should be reassessed because it is in many ways a badly posed question: asking why
there is no socialism assumes that there actually is none, and many have contested this
assumption (John Nichols and James Green for example, have convincingly argued that,
actually, on the contrary, there is an American socialist tradition, albeit a unique one).77
Outlining the links between socialist and settler-colonial thought is especially important
because the recent emergence of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (among
many others), and the public visibility and viability of their ‘socialist’ politics makes this
contextualisation especially urgent.
As it depends on one’s definition, it is a question that cannot be ultimately answered.
But if the dialectical relationship between world turned inside out and world turned upside
down is taken into account, one could definitely agree that there is socialism in America
and that it is indeed a quintessentially American tradition. But, and this is crucial, this
socialism is not for all – displacement is premised on dispossession, and keeping the ques-
tion of Indigenous dispossession in mind, together with the Marxist critique of the world
turned inside out and its political traditions, is absolutely crucial for settlers who are
seeking new ways of inhabiting Indigenous lands and to develop solidarities with the
struggles of Indigenous nations and collectives.
‘Making space’ for alternatives is often proposed as a way forward. But ‘making
space’ begs the question: whose space? Even the prospect of ‘moving forward’ suggests
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 17

that there may be a place somewhere else where a new beginning may be sought.
These places would be Indigenous land before they can be made into something
else. We should be attentive to the metaphors that shape our politics, especially if
they carry a settler-colonial imprinting. The alternative to displaced change may be
emplaced change.

Notes
1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 580.
2. Gabriel Piterberg and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Wakefield, Marx and the World Turned Inside Out’,
Journal of Global History 10, no. 3 (2015): 457–78.
3. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution
(London: Temple Smith, 1972); Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out: Global History
of a Political Tradition (London: Verso, forthcoming).
4. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (San Diego, Harvest/HBJ, 1964). See also Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America (San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991); Kevin Bruyneel,
‘The American Liberal Colonial Tradition, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 311–21.
5. Hartz focused on the ‘Puritan fragment’; he did not see the early US Republic as a fragment.
‘Fragment’ is used here to refer to it in the spirit of Hartz’s theory even if not its letter.
6. Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil
War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). On this group of socialist exiles, see also Robin
Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011);
Alison Clark Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking
Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
7. Andrew Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International and
Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War’, in The World the Civil
War Made, ed. Gregory Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2015), 304–26.
8. See, for example, Andrew Hartman, ‘Marx’s America’, Jacobin Magazine, 05/05/18, https://
www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/marx-america-lincoln-slavery-civil-war For a less recent reflec-
tion, see Gerald Runkle, ‘Karl Marx and the American Civil War’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 6, no. 2 (1964) 117–41.
9. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
10. On the centrality of indigenous dispossession, see Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks:
Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014).
11. Adam J. Barker, ‘Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy
Movements in North America’, Social Movements Studies, 11, no. 3–4 (2012): 327–34.
12. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (first English Edition, 1887), https://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present 166, no. 1 (2000):
146–80.
18 L. VERACINI

22. Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 305.
23. See Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
24. Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 306.
25. Ibid., 307.
26. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
27. Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 309.
28. Ibid., 310.
29. Cited in Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, 240.
30. This is also Levine’s argument. See Levine, The Spirit of 1848.
31. Marx recognised that the ‘colonies proper, such as in the United States, Australia, etc)’, that is,
the settler colonies, were not capitalist because the settlers originally are ‘more or less pea-
sants who work themselves and whose main object, in the first place, is to produce their own live-
lihood, their means of subsistence’. Capitalist production, however, ‘gradually comes into
being’, he added. See Karl Marx, ‘Colonial Land, Farming, and Capitalism’, in Karl Marx on
America and the Civil War, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), 28.
32. See Marx, ‘American Soil and Communism’, in Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, ed. Saul
K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), 3–6. Padover presents here an article Marx
had written in 1846 as a response to Hermann Kriege, a German immigrant to New York who
had written in favour of National Reformers campaign for distributing 160 acres of free land to
all bona fide settlers. Kriege presented this possibility as a ‘true’ socialist demand, but Marx
defines it ‘extravagant nonsense’ (p. 5).
33. Cited in Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, 174.
34. Cited in ibid., 212.
35. See ibid., 146.
36. Adam Wesley Dean, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the
Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). See also Reeve Huston, Land
and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in
New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
37. See Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880 (New York,
Dover Publications, 1965); Michael Fellman, The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in
Nineteenth Century American Utopianism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973); Robert
S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the
American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000 (Westport: Praeger, 2003); Robert
P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000
(Westport: Praeger, 2004).
38. See Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 310–11.
39. See Arnold Wilfred Green, Henry Charles Carey: Nineteenth-century Sociologist (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951).
40. See Henry C. Carey, The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (Phi-
ladelphia, PA: J. S. Skinner, 1851). The book is entirely dedicated to demonstrating the need for
a protectionist policy.
41. Ibid., 228.
42. Ibid., 130.
43. Ibid., 229.
44. Referring to Hermann Kriege’s support for the proposals of the American National Reformers
(i.e. homesteads for all who wanted them and were white), Marx noted: ‘Let us take seriously
examine Kriege’s gift to humanity. Fourteen hundred million are to be preserved for all
humanity as inalienable common property. And specifically each farmer is to get 160 acres.
From this one calculate the size of ‘all humanity’ – precisely eight and three quarter million
‘farmers’, each the head of a family of five, hence representing a total of forty-three and
 SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 19

three quarter million people. We can likewise calculate how long ‘all eternity’ lasts […] not
quite forty years’. Marx, ‘American Soil and Communism’, 4.
45. Marx and Carey respected each other. Marx called Carey ‘the only original economist among
the North Americans’, and Carey, who advised the US government for decades, sent Marx a
copy of Harmony of Interests. He later also sent Slavery at Home and Abroad. Cited in Adalbert
G. Lallier, The Economics of Marx’s Grundrisse: An Annotated Summary (Houndmills: Palgrave,
1989), 55. Marx engaged seriously with Carey’s work, even though he concluded that his pro-
tectionism was ultimately a petty bourgeois stance. For Marx, Carey’s anti-free trade, anti-
England rhetorics, and opposition to the orthodox political economists were ultimately pre-
mised on his fear that free trade and centralised industrialisation would result in class struggle
and revolution. See Michael Perelman, ‘Political Economy and the Press: Karl Marx and Henry
Carey at the New York Tribune’, 19/05/08, https://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2008/05/
19/political-economy-and-the-press-karl-marx-and-henry-carey-at-the-new-york-tribune
46. Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 310–12.
47. Marx, Grundrisse, 883–4.
48. Zimmerman, ‘From the Second American Revolution to the First International’, 315.
49. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935).
50. Marx, Grundrisse, 884. Hartz’s theory of ‘fragmentation’ also noted America’s lack of a feudal
encumbrance.
51. Marx, Grundrisse, 884, 888.
52. Henry George, Our Land & Land Policy: Speeches Lectures, and Miscellaneous Writings (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999). See also Charles A. Barker, Henry George
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Edward Nell, Henry George and How Growth in
Real Estate Contributes to Inequality and Financial Instability (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2019).
53. George, Our Land & Land Policy, 5.
54. Ibid., 8.
55. Ibid., 23.
56. Ibid., 25.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 42.
59. Ibid., 47.
60. Ibid.
61. On the panic that follows tramps, see Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebel-
lion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2017), 51.
62. George, Our Land & Land Policy, 55.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 62.
65. Ibid., 71.
66. Ibid., 86–7.
67. Ibid., 87.
68. Friedrich Engels, ‘Preface to the American Edition’, in The Condition of the Working Class in
England (London, ElecBook, 2000), 19–32.
69. Ibid., 19.
70. See Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, 240.
71. Engels, ‘Preface to the American Edition’, 26–7.
72. Ibid., 27–8.
73. Ibid., 28.
74. Ibid., 28–9.
75. German social-democratic leader Eugen Dühring was importing and adapting Carey’s
approach and ‘harmony of interests’ and had won some followers. See Friedrich Engels,
Anti-Dühring (1877), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/
20 L. VERACINI

76. See, for example, Werner Sombart, Socialism and the Social Movement (London: Dent, 1909);
Robin Archer, Why is There No Labor Party in the United States? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Eric Foner, ‘Why is there no Socialism in the United States?’ History Work-
shop Journal 17, no. 1 (1984), 57–80.
77. John Nichols, The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism (London: Verso,
2011); James R. Green, The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle
for Freedom (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2015).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Lorenzo Veracini is Associate Professor of History at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne.
His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism as a mode
of domination. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Over-
view (2010), and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). Lorenzo co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the
History of Settler Colonialism (2016), and manages the settler colonial studies blog. His next book, The
World Turned Inside Out: Global History of a Political Idea, is forthcoming with Verso in 2021.

ORCID
Lorenzo Veracini http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3481-8535