Talk of a new “civil war” in the 21st century is no idle boast. The dynamic of capital capturing the state for decades, as existed in antebellum America on the eve of Ft. Sumter, is today nearly exact, the only exception being the severity meted out to its victims. Indeed, it is as if American actually lost the Civil War, or rather, never fought it; capital succeeded in “secession” from American government, and the consequences as predicted by Karl Marx should the Confederacy be allowed to secede have come to pass.
For example, what’s “helotry”?
hel·ot·ry
(hĕl′ə-trē)
n.
1. The condition of serfdom.
2. Helots considered as a group.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
helotry
noun
A state of subjugation to an owner or master:
bondage,
enslavement,
serfdom,
servileness,
servility,
servitude,
slavery,
thrall,
thralldom,
villeinage,
yoke.
The American Heritage® Roget's Thesaurus. Copyright © 2013, 2014
Who were “helots”?
The helots (/ˈhɛləts, ˈhiːləts/; Greek: εἵλωτες, heílotes) were a subjugated population group that formed the main population of Laconia and Messenia, the territory controlled by Sparta. Their exact status was already disputed in antiquity: according to Critias, they were "slaves to the utmost",[1] whereas according to Pollux, they occupied a status "between free men and slaves".[2] Tied to the land, they primarily worked in agriculture as a majority and economically supported the Spartan citizens….The number of helots in relation to Spartan citizens varied throughout the history of the Spartan state; according to Herodotus, there were seven helots for each Spartan at the time of the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC.[3] Thus the need to keep helot population in check and prevent rebellion was one of the main concerns of the Spartans. Helots were ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered: every autumn the Spartans would declare war on the helots so they could be killed by a member of the Crypteia without fear of repercussion.[4][5][6] Uprisings and attempts to improve the lot of the helots did occur, such as the Conspiracy of Cinadon.
In his Nov. 7, 1861 column in the Vienna newspaper Die Presse, Karl Marx uses the word “helotry” to describe what would happen, over time, to the white working class in America should the United States allow the Confederacy to secede peacefully. (emphasis added)
One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the "South" and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern Confederacy would relinquish its capacity to live and the purpose of secession. Secession, indeed, only took place because within the Union the transformation of the border states and Territories into slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the other hand, were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States. The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw California after them. Incapable of wresting the mouth of the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the exception of the states of New England.
What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal speakers of the South at the Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which leaves it open to every state of the old Union to join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.
It’s hard to describe today’s white working class in America more accurately than in helotry. Marx always had quite a way with words.