https://archive.is/LF8u4https://aronzonijr.medium.com/the-republican-partys-red-roots-c0ff3155c08bWhenever I observe the never-ending barrage of social media posts by Republicans decrying the evils of “socialism,” I can’t help being struck by the irony that the Republican Party was in part founded by genuine socialists and foreign socialists to boot. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, one of the party’s most important founding members, though not a socialist himself, undoubtedly read a great deal of Karl Marx’s work via American socialist Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where Marx served as foreign correspondent for a decade. In addition, several of Lincoln’s socialist Republican Party colleagues (comrades?), went on to become key supporters of his 1860 presidential campaign, members of his administration or high-ranking officers in the Union Army.
As John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation, points out in, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism, in the midst of the Civil War, during his first State of the Union address, Lincoln felt compelled to mention the growing conflict between “labor” and “capital” and to make clear which side he favored. After touching on a litany of topics including, the war, trade treaties, fiscal matters, agriculture, Native American relations and the need to fill three Supreme Court vacancies, Lincoln requested “brief attention” to “the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above labor in the structure of government.” He continued:
“It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in
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