To: combjelly who wrote (278329 ) 1/5/2024 5:34:54 PM From: Brumar89 Respond to Lincoln didn't correspond with Marx. Marx corresponded with him. Just as hundreds of thousands of others did. Lincoln had a war to run and couldn't waste time writing nobodies like Marx................The claim that Lincoln regularly read Marx, or picked up economic doctrines from Marxist writings, is entirely anachronistic. Marx did not publish the first volume of his treatise Capital until 1867, some two years after Lincoln was assassinated. His earlier writings on the relationship between capital and labor primarily appeared in obscure European outlets with little circulation in North America, and even the Communist Manifesto of 1848 went almost completely unnoticed in the English-speaking world until sometime after 1870. Marx’s articles for the newspaper consisted of brief news summaries about the Crimean War, continental European politics, and piles of dry filler material about annual crop yields and industry reports. Only a small minority of these works ventured into something resembling a cohesive Marxian economic theory, and the chances that Lincoln would have encountered them let alone recognized them as such is low. In the 1850s and 60s, Marx’s name remained sufficiently unknown in America that only a tiny number of contemporary newspapers even noticed or reprinted his contributions to the Tribune. Several of those that did openly mused about the possibility that the “Karl Marx” byline served as a pseudonym, presumably intended to expand the output of other writers under Horace Greeley’s employment.............. https://www.aier.org/article/was-lincoln-really-into-marx/
