Marxism was quite a clever philosophy for its time but it remains rooted in the 19th century because its adherents are so doctrinaire that they're unwilling to revise its tenets in the face of new information.

Given that Marxism _has_ changed over time, I'm not sure you can make this assertion.

Of course, ANY group has people that hold onto an 'original' form of an idea, but they don't represent the majority.

Marxists seem excessively concerned with orthodoxy to me, as a whole. Mind you this is sort of unavoidable when a philosophy is named after a person. I have some sympathy with analytical and structural Marxism, but almost all the Marxists I encounter in person are of the more orthodox class warfare variety.

Marxists who aren't concerned with orthodoxy generally self-identify as "Socialists" rather than Marxists, even -- perhaps especially, given the degree to which Marxism as a label has become associated with Leninism and its descendants -- their approach to socialism generally follows Marx as opposed to other socialist thinkers.

There are also Utopian Socialism, so socialists in general is a larger group than Scientific Socialists.

But more seriously, I think you're conflating revisionism and orthodoxy; just because Marxism is changed over time doesn't mean that it accepts all changes.

(And by Marxism, I mean Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and M-L-M. There are a few smaller tendencies as well within all these broader traditions.)

To be clear, when I said that Marxists who aren't especially concerned with orthodoxy tend to identify as "Socialists", I did not mean the very different claim that persons who identify as "Socialists" tend to be Marxists who aren't concerned with orthodoxy.

Yes, socialism includes a lot more than Marxism (and did before Marxism even existed.)

And, no, I'm not conflating revisionism with orthodoxy. My experience has been that people who generally adhere to Marx's views but are not concerned with a narrow orthodoxy of a specific approach tend not to identify as "Marxists", and those that identify as "Marxists" tend to be very keen on the orthodoxy of a very specific interpretation or evolution of Marxism (predominantly, an orthodoxy oriented around Leninism or Maoism as the One True Marxism, though sometimes not.)

True, my top comment certainly conflated them - it was a throwaway but a rather lazy one, plus I have a rather jaundiced view of Marxists, critical theorists, and similar groups.

And libertarians seem very concerned with adhering to the letter of a 226-year-old piece of paper. Being concerned with orthodoxy isn't just a Marxist thing.

As a vague summary, it's actually not wrong. One of the main reasons that Northerners opposed the Civil War was because they had business interests in the South. And one of the main reasons that Southerners opposed the Civil War was because emancipation would wreck their economy.

But there are dozens of other ways to understand that cross-section of history.

Exactly, I dont believe that it was THE foundation for our economy. The Industrial Revolution may be THE foundation for our MODERN economy, I dont find agriculture as our foundation anymore. We can literally watch China go through it now.

>But there are dozens of other ways to understand that cross-section of history.

This.

The pre-war southern economy was an agricultural economy made possible by slave labor.

From Wikipedia, but any research will back this up:

While about a third of Southern families were slave owners, most were independent yeoman farmers. Nevertheless, the slave system represented the basis of the Southern social and economic system, and thus even non-slaveowners opposed any suggestions for terminating that system, whether through outright abolition or case-by case emancipation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Southern_United_...

"a struggle between the bourgeoisie of the north and the landowners of the south."

Your only talking about the South. I was talking about both sides. The quote had both in it too.

If slavery was the foundation of the economy, then wouldn't the economy have collapsed when slavery was abolished?

Yes. And it did, well locally anyway. My great grandfather (maternal), fought in the civil war for the South to preserve his "right" to govern his affairs the way he saw fit. Reading some of his letters would ring chords in the Libertarian movement today. His thesis was that a government "of the people" should be "of the people" all the way down, and by that he meant that he believed that states were better able to make laws about how their citizens were treated and lived than Washington was (which he felt was 'controlled' by rich industrialists in the North). His children suffered tremendously post-war when all of the processes and mechanisms by which their economy operated were uprooted all at once.

Now sometimes that is the only way that you can change things enough. Just rip the bandage off and damn all the hairs its going to pull out. I don't have a good analogy for the impact it had on them, perhaps if the government suddenly outlawed the use of cars or any form of non-public transportation it would throw a similarly sized wrench into the mix.

The southern economy did practically collapse after the Civil War.

Slaves were freed. Infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the white male population was dead. These factors together led to a large drop in per capita income, but it's impossible to try and assign levels of responsibility to each one. [1]

It's also worth noting that the formalized system of slavery was replaced with a de-facto slavery system called sharecropping [2]. Sharecropping involved forced borrowing of work necessities at a high interest rates. It led many farmers, both black and white, into the grip of wage slavery [3].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era#Material_dev... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

It came close. Shortly thereafter, slavery was replaced with Sharecropping. I don't remember much about that from my US History classes, but I'm under the vague impression that it wasn't much of an improvement.

Cherry-picked, out-of-context quote from wikipedia: "Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both black and white) were economically confined to serf-like conditions of poverty."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States

You never heard of the Reconstruction? The South went into severe poverty for decades after the Civil War.

Sometimes when reality distortion bubbles collide they pop.