Honestly. This scenario liberals imagine, where there is some kind of red line that would cause a sitting governor to actively utilize the national guard against federal forces is pure idealism.
The last civil war was a social revolution born out of the contradictions between the slavery mode of production of the south and the rapidly growing capitalist mode of production of the north. The abolition of slavery meant more wage laborers for the north and the complete liquidation of debt leveraged “assets” for slavers in the south. This was the contradiction that drove the development of the Civil War.
The wealth of the South was tied up in debt and assets. Land and Slaves, two things not easily made liquid. Increasing slave productivity would require massive investment in industrial machines from the North. While these machines would increase productivity they would be over saturated with labor as they wouldn’t have enough to reached equilibrium and couldn’t as easily offload the unproductive slaves that didn’t have machines to work. Their reserve army of labor would become depreciating assets who still require food, shelter, and medical care regardless of how shitty it was. The end of slavery would literally be the end of the slavers “way of life” their entire economic way of life would be obliterated unless the state compensated them fair market value for their slaves. Which, would be ridiculous right?
The North, however, was rapidly industrializing and making effective use of the wage system. It didn’t matter to the capitalist if machines displaced workers. It was on the workers to feed, cloth, and house themselves. Petite Bourgeois business owners could exploit their workers by playing them tip only wages, since there was no minimum wage (the first state to have one wasn’t until 1912), leaving the burden of paying a workers wage to the patrons. This system was naturally far more effective at dealing with dead labor then slavery, since you didn’t own the worker, just the workers labor. This meant that the reserve army of labor of the north was effectively “free” to the capitalist and ultimately drove wages down as people competed for work. The capitalist never needed to consider if investing in machines would leave them with a population of unproductive workers, because they would just let them go, something the slaver couldn’t do because the slave was often collateral on loans.
While there is always an inciting incident to point to at the onset of a conflict, these inciting incidents are formed by political and economic conditions that had been building to that moment. You can’t run a simulation where a governor chooses to use the guard against ICE and then say it’s similar to current events in a vacuum. You have to ask the question first, what are the economic conditions driving these actions? The country isn’t divided economically like during the Civil War. There isn’t dueling economic models that Walz could find himself aligning with one over the other.
There are only two forces at play internally here in the US. Workers, and Capital. The people on the streets being killed by ICE are workers. The man killed today was a Union member. When Waltz deploys the National Guard, he doesn’t do it to push ICE out. He does it to put bodies between ICE and the workers doing their duty as legal observers, documenters, and citizen journalist. It obstructs them in those duties. He does it to support the police who actively work with ICE in their duties and have never been on the side of the workers. Tim Waltz is the same guy who sicked the cops and the guard on BLM protesters in 2020 in collaboration with the Trump administration. He’s a team player, and he’s not on our team.
The reason he makes these messages on twitter, is not to stop the killings exactly. It’s because he knows that at some point the only next step is deploying the military. If that happens it will only escalate the resistance of the workers of Minneapolis. Instead of individuals carrying weapons for self defense you will have groups carrying weapons for group defense. When the monopoly of violence becomes challenged, all bets are off, and Tim Waltz knows it’s safer for him if ICE just leaves. The likelihood of that happening however seems low.
Honestly. This scenario liberals imagine, where there is some kind of red line that would cause a sitting governor to actively utilize the national guard against federal forces is pure idealism.
The last civil war was a social revolution born out of the contradictions between the slavery mode of production of the south and the rapidly growing capitalist mode of production of the north. The abolition of slavery meant more wage laborers for the north and the complete liquidation of debt leveraged “assets” for slavers in the south. This was the contradiction that drove the development of the Civil War.
The wealth of the South was tied up in debt and assets. Land and Slaves, two things not easily made liquid. Increasing slave productivity would require massive investment in industrial machines from the North. While these machines would increase productivity they would be over saturated with labor as they wouldn’t have enough to reached equilibrium and couldn’t as easily offload the unproductive slaves that didn’t have machines to work. Their reserve army of labor would become depreciating assets who still require food, shelter, and medical care regardless of how shitty it was. The end of slavery would literally be the end of the slavers “way of life” their entire economic way of life would be obliterated unless the state compensated them fair market value for their slaves. Which, would be ridiculous right?
The North, however, was rapidly industrializing and making effective use of the wage system. It didn’t matter to the capitalist if machines displaced workers. It was on the workers to feed, cloth, and house themselves. Petite Bourgeois business owners could exploit their workers by playing them tip only wages, since there was no minimum wage (the first state to have one wasn’t until 1912), leaving the burden of paying a workers wage to the patrons. This system was naturally far more effective at dealing with dead labor then slavery, since you didn’t own the worker, just the workers labor. This meant that the reserve army of labor of the north was effectively “free” to the capitalist and ultimately drove wages down as people competed for work. The capitalist never needed to consider if investing in machines would leave them with a population of unproductive workers, because they would just let them go, something the slaver couldn’t do because the slave was often collateral on loans.
While there is always an inciting incident to point to at the onset of a conflict, these inciting incidents are formed by political and economic conditions that had been building to that moment. You can’t run a simulation where a governor chooses to use the guard against ICE and then say it’s similar to current events in a vacuum. You have to ask the question first, what are the economic conditions driving these actions? The country isn’t divided economically like during the Civil War. There isn’t dueling economic models that Walz could find himself aligning with one over the other.
There are only two forces at play internally here in the US. Workers, and Capital. The people on the streets being killed by ICE are workers. The man killed today was a Union member. When Waltz deploys the National Guard, he doesn’t do it to push ICE out. He does it to put bodies between ICE and the workers doing their duty as legal observers, documenters, and citizen journalist. It obstructs them in those duties. He does it to support the police who actively work with ICE in their duties and have never been on the side of the workers. Tim Waltz is the same guy who sicked the cops and the guard on BLM protesters in 2020 in collaboration with the Trump administration. He’s a team player, and he’s not on our team.
The reason he makes these messages on twitter, is not to stop the killings exactly. It’s because he knows that at some point the only next step is deploying the military. If that happens it will only escalate the resistance of the workers of Minneapolis. Instead of individuals carrying weapons for self defense you will have groups carrying weapons for group defense. When the monopoly of violence becomes challenged, all bets are off, and Tim Waltz knows it’s safer for him if ICE just leaves. The likelihood of that happening however seems low.