Marx goes to the States

I was just reading this interview with Thomas Barnett, who makes an interesting point:

Marx was right. Back in the 1840s, he said that capitalism is going to sweep the planet, just crush everything in its way. It’s just that it took a certain type of capitalism to do it—not the European version, not colonialism. It took an American-style, truly liberal, free-trade version. It took political adaptations that Marx considered impossible to achieve. Marx was diagnosing capitalism on the basis of Europe in the nineteenth century. He saw castes, he saw elites, he saw viscounts and dukes and duchesses. He said this is never going to work. But if he’d come to America, he would have seen that this is the place where anybody comes, anybody joins. The synthetic identity is crucial to us. We are a version of globalization before globalization.

Say Marx and possibly also Engels tour the U.S. before writing some of their most well-known works. How does this change their writings, and how socialism develops in the decades and centuries ahead?
 
If he'd been exposed to slavery, I expect he'd have written a fair bit about it. A Marxist flavor of Abolitionist could be interesting to see. Otherwise, though, I don't think it would have made much difference - the person you quote has a rather skewed version of Marx. The Marxist explanation for American exceptionalism would probably just be formulated a little earlier and by Marx himself - that there are real limits to how much you can oppress a proletariat that has the ability to go west and start a farm for itself whenever it becomes sufficiently annoyed with local authorities. The threat of losing their workforce keeps American capitalists more moderate and solicitous of their workers until the frontier closes around 1900 - after that, it behaves much like the other industrialised nations.
 
Marx predicted that capitalism would destroy all vestiges of traditional hierarchy and conquer the world in an unstoppable march of progress. In many ways, he was its greatest fan. It's just that he said *afterwards*, the system would come apart through its inability to manage its internal contradictions (the thing 19th-century German intellectuals valued above all was consistency).

So, a visit to the USA in the 1840s would probably show him a protocapitalist society very strongly tinged by aspects of the ancient world such as slavery and warrior democracy (Engels would have anthropological points to make, I'm sure) and he'd very likely predict that it would see both slavery and its high degree of militarisation supplanted by the structure of capitalist society already emerging in Britain.
 
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