Marx’s writings on the American Civil War have long languished in obscurity. Despite the fact that they address race, class, and revolution — and that major figures including W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Raya Dunayevskaya have viewed them as central to Marxist theory — most of them had been out of print for decades until Andrew Zimmerman’s new edition appeared last year.

They contain some real treasures. To wit: “In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” These sentences come, of course, from the first volume of Capital, completed in 1867 after the Civil War had ended and Radical Reconstruction had begun.

In his 1860 tribute to John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, Marx presents the event as a harbinger of a wider slave insurrection and as consonant with the struggle for the emancipation of the serfs in Russia: