Slavery's Legacy (1969)

Book Review from the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Black Rage by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (Jonathan Cape 35s.)

Hatred of blacks and belief in white supremacy are, say the authors, built into American culture. They are well aware that this racism is the legacy of slavery:

  It was the economic usefulness of slavery in the period when cotton was king which in turn gave rise to the moral, religious, and psychological justification of the enslavement of blacks. Moral justification followed economic necessity and black Americans were viewed as sub-humans designed for labouring in the fields.

The American Negroes are of course not inferior to ‘whites’. Nor are they a ‘race’ (even in that term’s vague meaning). Some are not even black. They are a cultural group sharing a common tradition—of suffering and oppression. Brought to America as slaves to labour on the tobacco and then on the cotton plantations, when they were 'freed’ in 1865 they became unskilled agricultural labourers. Now they form a section of the working class still mainly confined, because of discrimination, to unskilled jobs.

The authors' theme is that this legacy of slavery has imposed on the Negroes a particular kind of indignity and mental cruelty. It has forced them to develop, or rather preserve, a slave mentality accepting the racist lie that they are inferior. Black rage, they suggest, is the reaction of Negroes who are beginning to realise the degrading confidence trick that has been pulled on them. Even so. what they are demanding is very modest—not that they be treated as human beings but only that they be treated as ordinary wage slaves rather than as freed chattel slaves.

The basic oppression and exploitation in America is that of the workers by the capitalists. However, as Marx pointed out, in a non-revolutionary time the ruling ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class, shared by rulers and ruled alike. Racism was the ideology of the Southern slavocracy which has been inherited by the ruled of capitalist society long after the rulers whose idea it was have gone. Thus, the 'whites' too are the victims of racism, conned into accepting an outdated ruling-class idea.

Socialists urge Negro workers to reject the chattel-slave mentality that is imposed on them. Just as we urge white workers to cast off the outworn ideas of a former ruling class which only cause extra suffering for some of their fellow workers.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Black and White Slavery in America (1969)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The enclosure of the common lands in France, Germany, and England gave rise to a multitude of starving outcasts, some of whom turned their eyes towards the New World in the hope of finding an amelioration of their lot. These provided ready material for the kidnapper and emigration agent, who enticed them across the Atlantic and then sold them into a species of slavery (indentured service) even worse than the slavery of the blacks.

The records of the American white slave trade exhibit an almost unbelievable barbarity. This traffic is fully discussed by James O’Neal in The Workers in American History, where the worst evils of Negro slavery are shown to be paralleled if not surpassed by the system of indentured service.

Of course the followers of the ‘meek and lowly one’ had to have a finger in the pie, and we read that:

  The famous Whitfield, and the two Wesleys, visited America at this period (1743) and urged the expedience of allowing slavery. (War of American Independence, Ludlow, p38).

In his Story of the Negro Booker T. Washington points out that the white man sold his own people in America years before the first black slaves sailed into Jamestown, Virginia (1619).

(From an article on ‘The American Revolution’ by G. McClatchie, Socialist Standard, July 1919).

"The Anatomy of Peace" (1947)

Book Review from the July 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

A very major war is followed by a spate of declarations and statements relating to its cause and purporting to provide for its future prevention. Such a book is the "Anatomy of Peace” by Emery Reves. It has been a great success in America and will probably be so in this country, particularly as it has been published in a cheap form. (Penguin books, 1s.)

The book is a restatement of World Federalism, an idea popular to-day with various political groups, notably those who are not faced with the actual task of administering the affairs of Capitalism.

After discussing at some length Capitalism, Socialism and Religion in the light of their relation to the problem of war and peace, Reves concludes that they have failed, and then proceeds to give a fairly adequate statement of the nature of war and peace from the Federalist standpoint.

The essence of the doctrine is stated in two propositions : (i) “War between groups of men forming social units always, takes place when those units—-tribes, dynasties, church, cities, nations—exercise unrestricted sovereign power; (ii)"War between these social units ceases the moment sovereign power is transferred from them to a larger or higher unit" (page 110). This is followed by the axiom "War takes place whenever and wherever non-integrated social units of equal sovereignty come into contact" (page 111).

To some extent the idea is a measure of the failure of previous attempts to solve the problem of world war, for as each succeeding war increases in intensity and in the area affected so the plans and schemes for its future prevention become more and more drastic.

After the first World War a League of Nations is thought to be the panacea, but it fails. The second World War sees the rise of the Federalist idea, revolutionary to the extent that it requires the surrender of National Sovereignty. A proposition certainly unacceptable to the world of 1919-1939.

Experience shows that political ideas often precede the necessary economic preconditions of their realisation, and this is an observation which is particularly apposite to such a book as the "Anatomy of Peace." For whilst, superficially and as stated syllogistically by Reves, the fundamental propositions of World Federalism seem to be logical and require only the acceptance of humanity for their realisation, there is one all important factor which reduces the ideal to impotency. It is the factor of Capitalism, and for an illustration of the basic fallacy of Federalism Reves need not have gone further than the history of his own country America.

In 1861 America was engulfed in a civil war over, in its immediate aspects, the rights of the southern states to secede from the higher federal unit, the United States. Now that in itself knocks the ground from beneath Reves' feet, for here is a case of a war between two groups existing within the orbit of a higher or larger unit. But why did this war take place? What force was at work which made nonsense of this principal of the "higher unit"? It was the force of economic conflict between two rival Capitalist groups, one exploiting slave labour, the other exploiting the seemingly expensive free wage labour.

If Reves says he is concerned only with wars between sovereign states, then he must explain the phenomena of sovereign states changing their line-up in different wars. 1914-1918 found America and Japan allies. 1939-1945 finds them enemies. Why? The factor of contact obviously has no bearing on this question of alignment.

Reves attaches great importance to the factor of "contact" between sovereign states, and yet he again appears to be unable to learn from the history of his own country. For since the time of Napoleon America has never been at war with Canada, yet they enjoy geographical, political and economic contact. Common economic interests have made the pursuit of war unnecessary and pointless, and this condition precludes many other contacting sovereign states from engaging in war.

Were it not for the chapters on Capitalism and Socialism the book would not deserve the attention of the Socialist movement, for there is nothing new in it, but there is much in these chapters which requires consideration and discussion.

He states that Capitalism has failed to produce freedom, and whilst it would be possible to quarrel with Reves' idea of freedom it is not really necessary to the argument. What is important, however, is the idea that the purpose and function of Capitalism is to provide freedom. He sees Capitalism not as a system which has developed along inevitable lines, but as a system resulting from some preconceived set of principles which have been set into motion, one of them being universal freedom. He says for instance, "The purpose of mechanical industrial economy is maximum production of consumer goods" (page 45). This statement implies a motive for production guided by no other consideration than the satisfaction of human needs. If this were so, then the deliberate destruction of foods, the shelving of labour-saving devices, lockouts, cartels and any other of the restrictive practices of Capitalism would not occur. It is a half-truth. Maximum production is the motive of Capitalist production only provided it is compatible with maximum profit This is partially recognised when he says, "High tariff walls, export subsidies, exchange manipulations, dumping, cartels, the artificial creation of industries through government financing, etc., have completely distorted the free play of economic forces as understood by the classical theorists of the early 19th century"' (page 51).

Further he states the dominating motive of all economic activity outside existing national boundaries to be the determination to strengthen by all means the economic power of the nation states. Reves does not explain how or why the nation states are strengthened by external economic activity.

In the chapter "The failure of Socialism ’ Reves displays even less understanding. His confusion is shown most clearly when he is discussing the problem of Russia (it is notable that he does not distinguish between Socialism and the Bolshevist system). The following quotations will suffice to demonstrate his confusion :

  "Twenty years after the creation of the first Communist state based upon the principles of Marx, Engels and Lenin . . ." (page 66).
   "To state that Russia's development in the first 25 years of the Soviet regime has virtually nothing to do with Socialism and Communism is not to be interpreted as disparaging the positive achievements of the Soviet government . . . " (page 67).
   "Only in Russia has the Communist system been established . . . " (page 88).

It is not surprising that he finds little difference between freedom, foreign policy and methods in Russia and elsewhere. Had he read Engel’s "Anti-Duhring” with greater care (he quotes from this book when dealing with the question of the State) he would never have fallen into the common error of supposing that state ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution is Socialism. State Capitalism, for that is the most suitable term for such a system, means wage-slavery; production for sale and profit; coercion by poverty; money; investments, in fact all the paraphernalia of Capitalism, often with the absence of political freedom.

In this chapter Reves is mainly concerned with the question of Socialism and the State, and, not unsuccessfully, he shows the divergence between the theoretical principles of Marxism on this issue and the actual course of events in Russia.

Strangely enough the development of the Russian social system displays once again the accuracy of Marx’s observation on the time lag between the idea and the conditions of its realisation.

Since Feudal Russia of pre 1917 had no virile bourgeois groups capable of assuming the role of harbingers of the Industrial Revolution, the revolutionary movement took on a predominantly proletarian form. Strengthened theoretically by Marxism this group, the Bolshevists were successful in overthrowing the existing ruling class. However, as anticipated by the S.P.G.B., the Bolshevists having achieved power were forced by the prevailing economic conditions to throw overboard most of the ideas of the nature of the Socialist revolution and its eventual development, and resort to the usual practices and methods required to administer the affairs of a class society. Since then their international propaganda machine has devoted most of its energies and resources to explaining away, by doubtful "dialectics,” this apparently contradictory development

We repeat, the preconditions of Socialism were not present in Russia in 1917 and the economic and political trends since that time have justified our original analysis, based upon the understanding of Marxist principles.

Reves' criticism of Socialism from the theoretical standpoint can be reduced to two main arguments: (i) That the state is not the instrument of class oppression, 14 freedom,” he says, 44 is exclusively the product of the state ” (page 65), and (ii) that the common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth is a fallacy insofar as it is claimed to promote the wellbeing of society.

He sees the state behaving as a policeman in civil society, settling the internal disputes of the nation, affording protection to the weak against the advances of the powerful and ruthless. Yet he also sees the nation states promoting terrible conflicts between themselves, oppressing and ravaging. The dual character of the state mystifies him. He does not see that the external affairs of the state are but the extension of those very internal practices which he admires so much. The state does perform certain humane functions within its domestic province, but in the main the motive is the maintenance of the fundamental status-quo. It reforms, it adjusts certain anomalies of the social order, but only to placate the increasing temper of the offended. To summarise our position, "The state is the public power of coercion. It makes and administers the laws, and it does so in the interests of the class which is economically supreme at the different epochs.”

The recent development of state power has mesmerised some into imagining that it is a self-motivated organism, beyond the control of any human group, a passionless machine. It is not. As any other social instrument it. is subject to human control, its forms of behaviour are determined by the group controlling it, and in modern society it acts in the interests of the Capitalist class whether controlled by avowedly Capitalist or alleged Labour parties.

On the question of ownership Reves uses the usual arguments that the diffusion of ownership in modern Capitalist society is so great that "it is managed more or less as a Socialist or state owned enterprise” (page 55). We do not quarrel with the idea that the relationships between owners and employees under state owned and privately owned industries are the same. But we do reject the notion that Socialist production can ever produce the same social relationships as Capitalist production. The reasons are obvious. Capitalist production is production for profit, and whether ownership of a particular concern is widely diffused or is in the hands of a small group, the motive is the same.

In any case, recent surveys of the distribution of Capitalist holdings, in America for instance, have shown that this wide diffusion of capital is a myth, and that the great bulk of capital is still in the hands of a numerically insignificant minority.

Reves' proposition that if the total annual world production was divided equally among the members of the entire human race the result would be poverty is probably true. He also says: "In spite of our pride in the miraculous industrial achievements of the U.S., England, France and Russia, our production lags miserably behind existing scientific and technical potentialities" (page 57).

Reves, probably unknowingly, has hit upon one profound objection that the Socialist movement has against the Capitalist system. Capitalism we say has served its historical purpose, it has shown the way by mass production and the division of labour to potential plenty. To-day huge areas such as China and India stagnate and corrode. Great masses of society fritter away their energies pursuing tasks which in a rational society such as Socialism would be regarded as socially unnecessary and accordingly eradicated. The "not enough to go round anyway" idea is a malthusian throwback and would not concern a society properly organised for maximum production for maximum satisfaction of human needs.

In conclusion we say again if the working class dissipate their political energies by pursuing plans and schemes calculated to solve the problem of war by adjusting the political relationships of nation states, then they will be faced in the future with more war and all the horror and tragedy it brings. War is a product of Capitalist society and its conflicts, and the solution lies in the abolition of this system and its replacement by Socialism; there is no other way.

J. L.

Arguing with President Trump (2019)

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

On February 5 our great flag-hugging president Donald Trump stood before Congress and delivered his State of the Union Address. Among other things he said:

  Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

Standing behind him, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives and a Democrat, nodded vigorously in approval as he said this. President Trump was expressing a bipartisan consensus shared by most Democrats as well as Republicans. 

How would a socialist respond to this, if given the chance?

Was America founded on liberty and independence?

Very well, America was founded on liberty and independence. But whose liberty to do what? And whose independence from who?

The United States was founded by free English colonists who sought independence from the British crown and certain liberties or rights (such as the right not to be taxed without representation and the right to trial by jury). In other respects, however, full liberty and independence were enjoyed only by the wealthiest of the colonists. Then as now, many Americans were dependent for their livelihood on employers. Debtors were dependent on their creditors. 

What liberty or independence did the black slaves have? Or the white indentured servants, who paid for their passage across the Atlantic with seven years’ labor under conditions so harsh that they might or might not survive? Or the native people in the areas occupied or coveted by the colonists? After all, George Washington’s Revolutionary Army fought not only to free the colonists from British rule but also to conquer the tribal lands of the Iroquois League and Ohio Union. [See Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).]

So it is true that America was founded on liberty and independence – for some. It is equally true that America was founded on slavery, dependence, and genocide – for others.  

Are we free today?

How free are Americans today? Perhaps, as President Trump claims, we are all ‘born free.’ But as Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ 

Slavery has been officially abolished, but many people still live in conditions not far removed from slavery: 2,300,000 in jails and prisons, others forcibly confined and drugged in mental hospitals, victims of human trafficking, illegal immigrants held at the mercy of their employers and working for very little or even nothing. 

The majority of the population – those of us who have to sell our ability to work in order to earn a living – can count ourselves at best partially free. How free are you if for at least 40 hours a week, or double that if you work two jobs, you are controlled by a manager or supervisor and ultimately by a boss? How free do you feel? 

Only those whose wealth and property income enable them to live in comfort without working for a boss can be considered truly free. President Trump, whose net worth is estimated at $3.1 billion, certainly falls into this category, as do Ms. Pelosi and the other 50 or so members of the congress addressed by President Trump who own assets of $10 million or more. President Trump’s meaning becomes much clearer when we realize that by ‘we’ he has in mind, mainly if not exclusively, he and his fellow capitalists. 

When is ‘government coercion, domination, and control’ bad?

President Trump’s denunciation of ‘government coercion, domination, and control’ seems to be at odds with the real policy of his government. Are we really expected to believe that the current US government never coerces, dominates, or controls, either at home or abroad? For example, when it imposes sanctions on Venezuela and freezes its assets in order to create a crisis that can serve as a pretext to bomb and invade that country and seize its oil and other resources, surely that has something to do with ‘government coercion, domination, and control’? 

No. Because it is mainly capitalists who need to be protected from government coercion, domination, and control. The Maduro government in Venezuela stands accused of trying to coerce, dominate, and control domestic and foreign capitalists. Economic and even military action to oust that government is not therefore itself ‘government coercion, domination, and control’ but action against ‘government coercion, domination, and control.’

By contrast, should a government agency try to stop a corporation dumping poisonous or flammable waste into the public water supply, thereby encroaching upon its ‘liberty and independence,’ that is a flagrant exercise of ‘government coercion, domination, and control’ – of capitalists. We may rest assured, of course, that no abuse of this sort will occur while the agency is headed by a Trump appointee.

Calls to adopt socialism?

What ‘calls to adopt socialism’ is President Trump talking about? Is it the World Socialist Movement that ‘alarms’ him? I suspect not. Our movement is not yet large enough to give him cause for alarm. He and his colleagues are probably discomforted by the fact that they now have ‘socialists’ sitting among them in Congress. Exactly how many ‘socialists’ is unclear. Only a handful of congresspeople openly call themselves ‘socialists.’ However, according to McCarthyite sources many more are closet socialists. One especially vigilant commentator claims that all 81 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are ‘socialists,’ ‘progressive’ supposedly being a codeword for ‘socialist.’ The uncertainty must be nerve-wracking for right-thinking congresspeople, who must worry about inadvertently smiling at a ‘socialist’ or even, God forbid, shaking hands with one. 

True, there is nothing new about having even an avowed ‘socialist’ in Congress: Bernie Sanders has been there since 2007. But they may have found it easier to tolerate a lone socialist. And an avuncular and urbane figure like Bernie presumably disturbs them less than the new crop of impertinent and combative young women, some of them with almost unpronounceable foreign names like Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.  

I am inclined to reassure President Trump that his alarm is premature. The ‘socialism’ of these ‘progressive Democrats’ is not of the full-bloodied kind, entailing the dispossession of the capitalists and the transfer of their productive assets to common ownership and democratic control. Their ‘socialism’ is of the milk-and-water variety – the ‘socialism’ advocated by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, with which quite a few of the ‘progressive Democrats’ appear to be affiliated. 

It would be more accurate to call such ‘socialists’ social reformers. They accept world capitalism, with its world market and great power competition, as givens. They never even talk (at least in public) about replacing it with a new system. Their ideal is capitalism on the West European and especially Scandinavian model. They seek merely to regulate the worst abuses – destabilizing financial speculation, for example — and implement programs like ‘Medicare for All’ and a ‘Green New Deal.’ The most far-sighted capitalists recognize that such reforms would make the capitalist system more stable and sustainable.  

The trouble is that American capitalists, unlike their West European counterparts, have never had to accustom themselves to the presence of moderate ‘socialists’ in government (arguably with the exception of a few years in the 1930s under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt). They have not learned how to tame, manipulate, and work with such people. Especially in recent decades, with neo-liberalism in the ascendant, they have grown used to having everything their own way. The prospect that soon they may have to make a few compromises comes as a shock to them.

Nevertheless, the capitalist system has repeatedly shown itself quite capable of co-opting and absorbing ‘progressive’ social reformers. Will today’s social reformers prove an exception? We shall see. 

Stefan

Trump and anti-socialism (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Here, in the United States,’ President Trump declared in his State of the Union message to Congress on 5 February, ‘we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence – and not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.’

The United States was founded on capitalism and so involved government coercion, domination and control from the start. The American ‘war of independence’ was a classic bourgeois revolution in which a class of rich merchants, landowners and slaveholders mobilised enough popular support to set up an independent capitalist state on the east coast of North America. A state is a coercive institution and, when controlled by a capitalist class, is used to dominate and control the subordinate working class, as it has been throughout American history.

When it came to imposing controls on individual capitalist activity in the overall or long-term interest of the capitalist class as a whole, however, it has been a different story. Individual capitalists, defended by their ideologues, resented this and were able to minimise it due to the relative weakness of the US central state compared with its European counterparts.

Without ideological leftovers from feudalism such as honour and duty, American capitalists could devote themselves exclusively to profit-seeking and money-making, idealised as ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘free enterprise’. As far as they have been concerned, the ‘liberty’ and ‘independence’ that Trump spoke about has been their liberty to pursue profits and capital accumulation unhindered by state interference, with attempts by the government to restrict their activities in the general capitalist interest being denounced as ‘socialism’ and later ‘communism’ and, more ridiculously, ‘Marxism’. Hence Trump’s rhetoric.

Even so, the US state has intervened to curb individual capitalist excesses – to save them from themselves – as with trust-busting before WW1 and, then, in the 1930s with Roosevelt’s New Deal. In fact, before WW1, genuine socialist and Marxist ideas did circulate amongst a section of the American working class, as a rich body of literature bears witness to. After WW1, however, these were swamped by Bolshevik ideas from backward Russia and working class understanding regressed. After WW2 ‘anti-communism’ ruled supreme.

Now, especially since the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, more and more people, in particular young people, are no longer afraid of the word ‘socialism’. There is even one Senator and one member of the House of Representatives who openly call themselves ‘socialists’. It is this that has alarmed Trump (or that he feigned to be so as to take a dig at the Democrats). But he has no need to worry as they are merely reformist Social Democrats who are no threat to US capitalism. They may want to rein in the activities of individual capitalists that are harming the long-term interests of the US capitalist class, as for instance over carbon dioxide emissions, but they don’t want to get rid of capitalism as a system.

We don’t want to be too churlish about the revival of interest in the word ‘socialist’ not being an interest in genuine socialism in the sense of a society based on common ownership and democratic control with production directly to satisfy people’s needs. The very fact ‘socialism’ is no longer a dirty word means that real socialism can be discussed too, bringing closer the day when what used to be the United States of America becomes a part of the world socialist commonwealth.

The American Civil War (1959)

From the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conflict Defined

The American Civil War was a savage affair. It lasted for four years and it caused the deaths of 600,000 of the young men of America. It wrote such names as Gettysburg, Bull Run and Shiloh into the history of human conflict.

It was a war, we were told, over slavery. If you were humane, liberal and democratic you fought for the North, against slavery. If you were brutal, despotic and contemptuously aristocratic you fought for the South, for slavery. If there are any legends of history which for their own sakes are worth preserving, this is not one of them.

In truth, the Northern States had little use for slavery. Their agriculture produced anything from lumber to livestock, for which they needed workers who were knowledgeable, adaptable and freely moving. Such workers were also needed by the modern industry, which was developing in the North. In contrast, the South, with its warmer climate, raised settled crops like indigo, sugar, tobacco—and cotton. It was profitable to work these crops by ignorant slaves, under a few overseers. This difference in economic needs was at the root of the clash over slavery.

The first negro slaves came to America at the beginning of the 17th century. Before this, workers were employed under indentures—and they moved on to settle new lands when their term expired. This was not a convenient system for the Southern planters, who needed a settled labour force. Even so, they did not immediately use the Negroes as slaves; at first they were treated as indentured servants (although they had no indentures) and when their term ran out they often themselves bought another Negro. (It is interesting that the recognition of this right was the first legal sanction of slavery in America). When the planters realised that the Negroes had no legal rights they dropped the indenture formalities and openly bought and worked them as slaves. This was the stimulus to the West Indian slave mart, with its history of cold-blooded cruelly.

Slavery takes root

When slavery was not economical the white colonists tried to abolish it, but were often prevented by the English slave-running interests. Any anti-slavery movement based on moral grounds, without good commercial reasons, was doomed, as in the State of Georgia, which banned slavery when it was founded only to see the law ignored and evaded. The reason was that the Southern economy was being boosted by the demand from Europe for fresh foods and new materials; cotton was of increasing importance and the planters would not allow it to be disturbed. The invention in 1793 of the Whitney Cotton Gin (which automatically combed and separated the cotton), stimulated production and increased the demand for slaves. The cotton plantations spread from the Old South (Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky) into the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi), whose red clay was ideal for this crop. The Old South traded slaves into the new plantations—in 1836 Virginia alone sent 40,000. The Negroes did not like their new conditions—the song Carry Me Back to Old Virginia is the lament of the slave who had been moved from the comparatively genteel Old South to the harshness of the Deep South. This area became heavily dependent on its cotton, and its pro-slavery sentiment became that much more fanatical and its planters that much more brutal. This attitude, although outdated, lingers on in the Southern States. It causes the riots in places like Clinton and Little Rock.

As we can see from a few dry figures, the 17th and 18th centuries saw a remarkable growth in the American Negro slave population. Over the 20 years up to 1671 the white population of Georgia increased from 15,000 to 40,000 and its Negros from 300 to 2,000. In 1760 the North American population was about 1½ million, 300,000 of them slaves; at this time the average slave holding in Virginia was 10 (largest 250). When the war started in 1861 there were about four million slaves in the Confederacy and some 230,000 free Negroes.

It was during the first half of the 19th century that the Southerners’ aristocratic pretensions became so objectionable, with the notion that they represented the gracious, hospitable elements of American society, whilst the Northerners stood for all that was brash and cheap. The uniformity of productive (that is, agricultural) , methods and organisation of property ownership tended to unite the South politically and gave it an important—possibly over-important—influence in American politics. On the other hand the North was comparatively disunited, with many economic factions each having its own functional and property rights. In the 1850’s the Capitalists of the North were stricken by a financial crisis and this, with the usual depression of the workers’ conditions and the greed of the industrialists, strengthened the Southerner’s conviction in his superiority. (The romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott went down well with this conviction!) Inevitably, the white men in the South looked on the Negro as a docile, dim-witted, sub-human; even the poor whites tried to get on the band wagon. Although they lived in appalling poverty on their tiny plots, trying to compete with the big plantations, they had their pride. Their skin—when they washed it—was white; so they could join the pro-slavery chorus.

Slave Empire

If the poor whites had little reason to get on their high horse, the wealthy Southern planters could offer strong justification for their attitude. They had invested good money in their Negroes, which they would lose if the slaves were freed. They wanted to expand the slave-lands into a great empire to take in the new lands in the West, Cuba, Central America and even Brazil. This empire, they thought, would supply the food and raw materials which the developing industries of Europe needed. But the Northern industries also had designs on the West and it was here that the conflict was defined. To win their point, the South rigged their elections, sending numbers of representatives to Congress based on population returns which included slaves who were not allowed to vote. They became more and more aggressive and impatient of the interference from the government. As the quarrel grew fiercer, one compromise after another was tried, but all failed. The Southern States wanted the right to run their affairs as they liked. And they were getting ready to fight for it. 

Jack Law

(To be continued.)

Link to Part II

The American Civil War — II (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part I

No Compromise

Neither side rushed blindly into the American Civil War. North and South made many efforts to compromise on their disputes, but each settlement only flung up more problems, making the war seem more certain.

Louisiana Purchase

In 1803 it was proposed that the Louisiana lands, recently purchased from France, should be recognised as a State of the Union. This proposal roused the jealousy of the New Englanders, not because Louisiana was a slave State but because they feared the addition of a Southern State on the other side of the political balance. This dispute promoted the agreement that free and slave States should be admitted to the Union alternately. This compromise worked well until 1820, when Missouri, a slave State, applied to join the Union. (Indiana. Illinois, and Maine had joined as free States and Mississippi and Alabama as slave States.) Although it meant breaking their agreement, the North bitterly opposed the entry of Missouri, for they were coming to the opinion that no more slave States should be admitted to the Union. This dispute was shelved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which recognised Missouri as a slave State, but ruled that no slave State should exist north of a parallel 36' 30' N., and that any State south of this line should be allowed to decide its own status.

The Missouri Compromise was broken by the refusal to extend the line across the Continent when California joined the Union, and further trouble developed over the admission of Kansas and Nebraska. These two States were brought into the Union to carry the railways which were pushing into the West. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise both should have been free States, but in the event only Nebraska was recognised as such. Kansas, whose wild and lawless settlers were violently pro-slavery, was allowed to choose its own status and the whole procedure was legalised by the Kansas/Nebraska Bill of 1854, which finally wiped out the Missouri Compromise.

The first elections in Kansas were chaotic. First, heavily armed Border ruffians from Missouri came into the State and drowned the election in illegal votes. When the pro-slavery candidate was declared elected, John Brown led a counter invasion of Abolitionists. Civil war broke out between the two sides, with each setting up its own government and holding its own elections. In the end, the slavers won, and they passed the most stringent measures to protect their system. Another compromise had failed. 

The Republican Party

Tempers on both sides were now rising fast, aggravated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Act allowed Marshalls from the Southern States to arrest runaway slaves, who had previously been granted refuge in the North, and return them to their masters. The dispute over this Act was highlighted by the case of Dred Scott, a runaway slave, who legally contested his return. His case dragged on for years, until in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that he was a piece of property without the right to sue in Federal Courts and that anyway he had lost his case in the Missouri courts, which had sole authority to deal with it. This decision stung opinion in the North, and the extreme anti-slavery attitude of the Abolitionists became more acceptable. In Boston, Lloyd Garrison had earned from the State of Georgia a $5,000 price on his head for publishing the Abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Respectable Northerners, after the Dred Scott case, looked upon Garrison’s paper with a less hostile eye.

Still, the Abolitionists could not win a Presidential election; in 1856 John C. Fremont lost to the Democrat, Buchanan. In truth, the Abolitionists could never fulfil the needs of the North’s rising capitalists. As the railways grew out and the link-up of the Middle West destroyed local prejudices, as the struggle between industry and the Southern landowners became more acute, so opinion in the North became more solid. In 1856 the Republican Party was formed and the Northern capitalists had a political organisation strong enough to counter the aristocratic planters. The Republicans did not at first intend to abolish slavery, or to sharpen the conflict with the South. They wanted to expand American industry, develop the West and control the country’s political affairs. But each successive dispute, and the planters’ notion of their inborn superiority, made civil war seem unavoidable.

Abraham Lincoln

The Bourbon planters were blind to the fact that the South was falling behind economically. Two-thirds of the country’s banking and financial investments were in the North, with Massachusetts alone said to hold more money in her banks than the whole of the Confederacy in 1861. Other estimates put the North's manufactures as worth nearly ten times all the crops of the South, and reckoned the Northern hay crop more valuable than all the Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar. (The planters over-estimated the importance of the world’s demand for cotton right through the war, many Southerners expected Lancashire opinion to force England to declare war on the North). They were convinced of their strength, and America slithered towards civil war, with the feeble President, Buchanan, incapable of doing anything about it.

In 1860 another Presidential election fell due, with Abraham Lincoln representing the Republican Party. There were only 30,000 slave-owning families in the South, with about 10,000 of them large owners. But these were the influences in Southern public opinion and, although Lincoln was plainly moderate in his opinion on the slavery dispute, they had no desire to put political power into his hands. He did not receive one vote south of Virginia (where he polled 2,000). In the border State of Missouri he got just 17,000. In 1856 the cotton States had plainly said that, if the Abolitionist Fremont were elected, they would leave the Union. (There had been several such threats during the past 60 years’ political struggles, not all of them from the South.) The planters recognised that Lincoln’s victory broke their last link with the Union, which they regarded as a collection of sovereign States which they could leave at will. They would suffer no coercion from a central government.

Secession

In December, 1860, South Carolina led the way out of the Union, and by February of the following year Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Texas had joined her in a Confederacy formed at Montgomery, Alabama. Jefferson Davis was the President and Alexander Stephens the Vice-President. Civil War seemed a hardening certainty.

              Jack Law

(To be continued.)

Link to Part III

The American Civil War — III (1959)

From the March 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part II

Preparation and Prospects

As the year 1861 opened the future opponents of the American Civil War stood glowering at each other.

The war was only a few months away, but it was still difficult to descry any clear-cut differences between North and South. The Confederacy’s President—Jefferson Davis—had been strongly Unionist, until he saw control of the Union slipping from the South’s hands. His Vice-President —Alexander Stephens—had opposed secession right until the moment when his own State of Georgia contracted out. There was also confusion on the issue of slavery, many prominent Southerners opposing it, whilst the Lincoln Government had often slated that it had no intention of abolishing it. Perhaps the most famous Southerner to oppose slavery was General Robert E. Lee—the North actually invited him at the start of the war to take command of its forces., but he refused. Especially confused was the Northern State of Maryland, where there was much sympathy for the Confederates. Plenty of Americans thought that the seceded States had taken a perfectly legal and constitutional action and that, whatever military precautions the two sides may take, the quarrel would blow over.

Fort Sumpter Falls

The first important dispute after secession came as each side began to draw up its strength, and was about the possession of military forts and recruitment of manpower. First, the Union Government ordered all the border States to place their troops under Washington’s control. Promptly, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the rebels, as a protest against this attempt at federal coercion. More ominous were the rumblings around the army forts in the Southland.

The Confederates argued that, although the forts were occupied by United States troops, the land on which they stood had only been leased to the Government. Now that the Southern States had left the Union, their occupation by Federal forces was illegal and intolerable. Interest became centred on Fort Sumpter at Charleston, which the Governor of South Carolina had been planning to take over since December, I860. Southern Congressmen warned Lincoln that any attempt to relieve Sumpter would lead to war and sure enough on January 9th, 1861, the steamer, Star of the West, sent to the fort, was fired on and forced to withdraw. An uneasy peace brooded over Fort Sumpter until April, when Confederate General Beauregard, learning of a Union convoy on the way to raise the siege, bombarded it into surrender. Although many other forts had been taken in the South, Sumpter had become an important symbol, and its fall touched off a unifying passion in the Union. It may also be said to have marked the start of the war.

Since February, the South had been seriously preparing its war effort. After Sumpter, Lincoln replied by calling for 75,000 militia, to serve for three months (later altered to three years) and announcing a blockade of every Southern port from South Carolina to Texas. On May 6th the Confederate Congress passed an Act which recognised the existence of a state of war with the Union and shots were exchanged in Virginia and at Camp Jackson, St. Louis. There had been almost a year of increasing tension and bitterness. That was at an end. Hope was finished, too. The world’s first modern war had started, with its savagery and terror.

Prospects

What were the strength, the weaknesses and prospects of either side ? The Northern population was about 22 million; the Southern between 5 and 6 million, plus about 4 million negroes. In 1860 the United States Army had numbered about 16,000; of these, the Southern States had the nucleus of an army in the forces controlled by each State. About 3 million men served in the war in the Union forces, 2 million of them 23 years old or younger—an ideal age for soldiers. On the other hand, the Confederates' smaller population forced them to conscript all men between 17 and 55. When the war opened the volunteers on both sides were numerous, but as the thing dragged on the spirit declined. In the South, poor dirt farmers joined open combat with Confederate patrols and draft officials, whilst in the North, Chicago suffered anti-conscription riots.

The South was full of hope. Although the Act of Secession had cut them off from the new lands in the West, they thought that their raw materials could be traded for manufactures from the growing capitalist powers of Europe. These manufactures, ran the optimistic argument, would compensate for the rebels’ lack of industrial power. Here lay the South’s weakness, for as the agricultural area of the United States, they had left manufacturing to the North. They had next to no factories and what they had were mainly worked by Northerners, who returned to their home States when the war started: this was disastrous to the railway repair shops. The rebels had only one works—at Tredegar, in Richmond—where they could cast a gun or make a marine engine: the States Armouries were deficient, and at the start of the war there were no powder mills. There was hardly any iron and unseasoned wood had to be used in shipbuilding. All of this meant that, among other things, the rebels would not be able to break the blockade which the Union Navy kept on its ports. It also meant that recognition of the Confederacy by the European Powers was a wild dream. But the South was blind to all this; their population may have been only a quarter that of the North, but they had plenty of men who got their living planting and hunting, who were used to horseback and hardened to a spartan outdoor life They could handle guns and, apart from a dislike of organised discipline, were ideal material for soldiers. When the time came, they were to fight hard and tenaciously. The aristocratic pretensions of the South had bred a group of accustomed leaders: men like Lee and Johnston, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, all brilliant commanders. Yes, the South was full of hope: one rebel, they said, was worth any ten Yankees.

The Yankees

And the North? Industrially, they had it all. But they needed a machine—the sort to which the 20th century has become accustomed—to change their population of factory and merchanting workers into soldiers. It took them a few years; but in the end they did it, reaching their peak of organisation when Sherman’s troopers blasted their way across the heart of the Confederacy, like any crack Commando brigade. “The Yankees dare not fight,” said many a cocky Southerner at the war’s beginning. The next few years showed that the Yankees could not only fight—they could also march and plunder, and hound an entire army to destruction.

Jack Law.

(To be concluded.)

Link to Part IV

The Blurring Boundaries of Political Spending (2017)

From the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the increase in inequality, the influence of corporate political spending is stronger than ever.

In the current free market framework of global politics, regulation is perceived by capitalists as a barrier between big business and an increased accumulation of assets. These free market principles have been applied to many aspects of life, from the deregulation of the financial industry towards the end of the 20th Century, to the increasingly neoliberal state of political finance regulation. In the United States particularly, a common trend has been occurring with regards to political spending. In 2010, the United States saw a Supreme Court decision that would change the role of money in politics by deeming caps on political spending to be ‘unconstitutional’. This was a decision born out of the misuse of the 14th Amendment of the American Constitution and, having had a significant impact on political spending, corporations are now playing an increased role in influencing governments to be capitalist- friendly.

The 14th Amendment and Corporate Personhood

In 1868, the 14th Amendment was added to the American Constitution, with its purpose being to bring equality to all citizens of the United States. Putting this into context, the amendment was made in the wake of the American civil war, and its intention was to protect newly freed slaves from further persecution. Whilst this amendment was added to protect the people, the rise of capitalism as the dominant ideology in the United States has led to this legal construct being twisted to suit the needs of corporations. Capitalists argue that, as corporations are formed and exist within the confines of the United States, they should be entitled to the same constitutional rights as people. This idea has remained in the psyche of the United States since the addition of the 14th Amendment and still holds influence today, with the Supreme Court case of Citizens United vs The Federal Election Commission being based around this theme.

Citizens United vs The Federal Election Commission

This was a Supreme Court case held in response to legislation restricting corporate funding for political advocacy adverts during electoral periods. After deeming Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ documentary to be a smear campaign against President Bush in 2004, conservative non-profit group Citizens United produced a documentary named ‘Hillary: The Movie’ in the run up to the 2008 primaries. This film contained clips from interviews with major political figures, in which they were highly critical of the career of Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission took Citizens United to the Supreme Court as a result, stating that the documentary’s sole purpose was to influence the opinion of the public. However, Citizens United won the case, with the Supreme Court ruling that caps on political spending violated First Amendment rights to free speech, essentially rendering defunct the legislation for this.

Quid Pro Quo Politics

Whilst the Supreme Court verdict suggested that spending money comes under the remit of the First Amendment rights to free speech, this should not be the case. In capitalist societies, where the sole purpose of production is to accumulate as many assets as possible, big business will only spend money if there is a guarantee of returns on their investment. This causes an issue to the wider public as, with the mammoth increase in political spending since this decision, governments are pushed into the arms of corporations. Noam Chomsky is clear about this sentiment when he says “Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power”, as the continued influence of money has blurred the boundaries between politics and business.

Brexit Campaign

This theme of spending money to influence political issues has not just been a phenomenon in the United States. In this year’s EU Referendum, just over half of the donations given to groups from both sides of the debate were given by 10 individuals. Breaking down the totals of the top 10 donors, £6.9 million was donated to the Remain campaign, with £9.5 million to the Brexit camp. Thus, the ball has been removed from the court of the wider public when important political decisions are being made, with the tide now very much with the wealthiest individuals in the world. This is a damning statement, particularly when considering that the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals in the world now own at least as much as the rest of the 99 percent combined. It’s a worrying thought that, with enough money, anyone can get what they want. Just ask Mr. Trump.

William Horncastle

What Price Racialism? (1947)

From the August 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following instructive news item appeared in the Evening News (July 5th, 1947).

  "Mr. Winston Churchill has joined the 'rebels.' He is the first Englishman to be elected a member of the Society of the Cincinnati organisation of descendants of American Revolutionary Army Officers. He qualifies through his maternal great-great-grandfather."

Thus a direct descendant of the aristocratic and unimpeachable House of Marlborough has descended, on his mother’s side, from a family that fought strenuously against Britain, finally helping to cut the connection and establish a new and opposing “nation” which may one day be engaged in a life and death struggle with Britain. What other nation, totalitarian or democratic, has also absorbed blood into it from the same source we do not know, nor do we know the blood mixture that has joined the original stream from outside sources in the course of time. Further than that we do not know the derivation of the great-great-grandfather on the maternal side; the same, of course, applies to the great-grandfather and the grandfather; all is swathed in mystery.

Even in this one instance how complicated the question has become? Now apply the same reasoning to the whole of the English aristocracy who boast of their lineage, and who are noted for their generosity in bestowing titles upon wealthy wives of lowly origin, and it will be appreciated what nonsense racialism really is.

To cap this modern mixture of blood kindred let us reflect upon the effect of the idea contained in the well-known proverb, “It is a wise child that knows its own father,” as well as the influence of the progeny of the past favours of royalty, and we add complication to complication. The blood of what murky ancestry may roll full billowed through the veins of aristocracy? What applies to them applies to all of us; which shows how farcical is the basis of all claims to racial purity.

Gilmac

All Migrants are Workers (2017)

The Material World Column from the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-migrant feeling is running high in many countries. The anti-foreigner nationalists are having a feeding frenzy of xenophobia. The right-wing media publish headlines provoking panic. It is all too easy to blame immigrants for causing problems such as unemployment, bad housing or crime. An accusing finger can always be pointed at ‘them’ for making things worse for ‘us’. It is often alleged that ‘newcomers’ live off the backs of ‘locals’. If migration has led to the rise of the far-right ― it is only through the racist tactic of blaming economic woes on the new arrivals. Many ‘natives’ cannot contain their indignation that their ‘indigenous’ culture is being undermined. But what happens when those migrants are your ‘own folk’ from another part of the nation? Californians in the ’30s would have been amenable to a wall along the state’s eastern border, not its southern one.

During the 1930s the mid-west of the United States suffered a series of droughts that drove hundreds of thousands off their land. Many from Arkansas and Oklahoma headed westwards to California. They were the Dust Bowl refugees and 86,000 arrived in California from the drought states between June 1935 and September 1936 alone.

When they reached the Californian state line, they did not receive a warm reception. The Los Angeles police chief, James ‘Two-Gun’ Davis, deployed police at entry points into California with orders to turn back any with ‘no visible means of support’ (or, as Woody Guthrie, sang it, ‘if you ain’t got the Do Re Mi’. They were called ‘The Bum Brigade’ and were given specific orders to search all incoming cars, wagons, and trains.

When migrants reached California they found that most of the farmland was owned by large corporations run by managers so many gave up farming. 40 percent of the Dust Bowl refugees who became migrant workers ended up picking grapes and cotton in the San Joaquin Valley where they replaced the Mexicans who were deported. Even though tons of surplus food were produced, the Okies who worked on those farms suffered the very real threat of starvation. Author John Steinbeck witnessed the burning of extra produce by a California company – a result of the New Deal concept of limiting production of goods so that the demand, and thereby the price, would increase. Companies wanted to keep prices high, and so they destroyed excess food, crops, and livestock.

Other migrants settled near larger cities in shantytowns called Okievilles, on open lots local landowners divided into tiny subplots and sold cheaply in monthly instalments. They built their houses from scavenged scraps, and they lived without plumbing and electricity. Polluted water and a lack of trash and waste facilities led to outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, smallpox and tuberculosis.

The California Citizens Association formed in 1938 and its secretary, Thomas W McManus made clear its attitude towards the newcomers:

  ‘No greater invasion by the destitute has ever been recorded in the history of mankind… Californian jobs go to Californians and not to the horde of empty bellies from the Southwest’.

It succeeded in extending the waiting period for California relief from one to three years, vigorously supported by the agricultural corporations who were resorting to their usual knavish tricks in order to guarantee a cheap, surplus supply of labour. The purpose of the California Citizens’ Association was to offer wages below the minimum decency standard of relief, and to enforce this wage rate by giving workers no alternative – the usual ‘work or starve’. At this point, the California Citizens’ Association dropped its disguise and became the Associated Farmers, Inc. The powerful Associated Farmers (the growers) feared the ‘Okies’ might unionise and demand better wages. They feared that white migrants would not prove to be as docile as the Mexican workers.

A Californian called Fred Edwards drove his destitute brother-in-law from Texas into California in 1939, and was found guilty of violating a California statute criminalizing transportation of indigents into California. In 1941, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the California statute as unconstitutional and no longer did individual states possess the authority to interfere in the free movement of peoples. Once war approached and the West Coast industries boomed, many migrants abandoned the fields and orchards for the shipyards and armament factories. In fact, during the 1940s the number of people coming to California from the Prairies actually increased.

Donald Trump’s incitement of the anti-immigration sentiment is not new. Immigrants to America have always been feared and hated.

What people were saying about the Irish or the Chinese or the Okies in the past, they now say about Hispanics. There is always another group to look upon as a threat, and demagogues like Trump use that to gather support and garner power.

ALJO

Past Class Struggles: The American Revolution. (1919)

From the July 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 15th century the minds of the merchants in the rising European commercial States were agitated by the attempts to discover another way to the East Indies, for the customary caravan routes across the Continent of Asia were threatened, and in some cases completely blocked, by the growth of Arabian and Moorish power. Portugal, through Diaz and da Gama, tried round the Southern part of Africa, while Spain sent Columbus across the Western waters.

Columbus eventually reached America, and the land he discovered is thus described by Prescott (Prescott’s Works, edited by John Foster Kirk) in his “Biographical and Critical Miscellanies":

  All around was free,—free as Nature herself: the mighty streams rolling on in their majesty, as they had continued to roll from the creation; the forests which no hand had violated, flourishing in primeval grandeur and beauty: their only tenants the wild animals, or the Indians nearly as wild, scarcely held together by any tie of social polity. Nowhere was the trace of civilized man or his curious contrivances. . . The only eye upon them was the eye of heaven. (Page 127)

The dealings of Columbus, the slave trader, with the natives of this virgin land is a record of fraud, cruelty, and force perpetrated on innocent, generous, and credulous savages. As the immediate pecuniary gains from his discoveries did not satisfy those who financed his expedition, Columbus frequently offered to send to Spain cargoes of the natives to be sold into slavery.

The colonists who followed in the track of Columbus were Court adventurers and companies of merchants, who were granted tracts of land with almost unlimited rights of settlement, being empowered to make their own laws, etc. The settlements were originally on the Eastern coast, but could be extended, if desired in strips right across the continent to the Pacific coast.

From the beginning the attitude of the colonists toward the innocent savages was one of cruelty and rapine, as the following quotation will bear out (in Reference to Rayleigh's settlement on Roanoke Island, N. Carolina, 1585) :

   Treachery and cruelty, however, marked the brief existence of even this first English colony; a leading Indian chief and his principle followers were massacred by pre-concert at an audience at which no sign of hostility was shown by the Indians.—“War of American Independence,” Ludlow, p. 27.

As the new land was opened up the settler commenced to do a roaring trade with the mother country, and the need for workers arose “Voluntary emigration ceased in 1685, and the only additions from England to the white population were by means of transportation and kidnapping, the latter practised chiefly from Bristol.” (Ludlow, p. 31.) “Kidnappers as well as slave buyers, the colonists broke the treaties with the Indians, harried them with commandoes, and sold them as slaves to the West Indies.” (Ludlow, p. 36.)

The history of America up to the period of the Revolution is the record of the rise to enormous wealth of a land-owning, slave-holding, and trading autocracy. The property qualificacation excluded the workers from the vote [and the same was true long after the Revolution), all wealth and power being in the hands of the wealthy class.

During this time there were frequent revolts of the oppressed, all of which were ruthlessly suppressed by the future advocates of eternal liberty.

The enclosure of the common lands in France, Germany, and England gave rise to a multitude of starving outcasts, some of whom turned their eyes toward the New World in the hope of finding an amelioration of their lot. These provided ready material for the kidnapper and emigration agent, who enticed them across the Atlantic and then sold them into a species of slavery (indentured service) even worse than the slavery of the blacks.

The records of the American white slave traffic exhibit an almost unbelievable barbarity. This traffic is fully discussed by James O’Neal in “The Workers in American History,” where the worst evils of Negro slavery are shown to be paralleled if not surpassed by the system of indentured service.

Of course, the followers of the “meek and lowly one” had to have a finger in the pie, and we read that—

   The famous Whitfield, and the two Wesleys, visited America at this period (1743) and urged the expediency of allowing slavery. (Ludlow, p. 38.)

In his “Story of the Negro” Booker T. Washington points out that the white man sold his own people in America years before the first black slaver sailed into Jamestown, Virginia (1619).

These, then, were the conditions from which the wealth of America had arisen.

When the English capitalists realised what a prize was within their grasp they tried to keep their hands upon it, and in doing so, overreached themselves. Navigation laws were passed confining to English vessels, navigated by Englishmen, all importation into and exportation from the colonies, and even forbidding any importation of European commodities except those commodities coming from England.

Subsequently a further Act was passed forbidding all colonial staples to be imported otherwise than to England, so that a duty equivalent to the English customs duty was laid on the importation of such articles from one colony to another. Says Gibbins:

   It is quite obvious, apart from any consideration of national policy, these regulations were dictated by the class interests of British manufacturers and merchants. (“Industry in England," p. 366.)

All these restrictions, however, failed in their object An extensive contraband trade developed and American smugglers waxed wealthy.

It was the time when the great inventions were revolutionising industry in England. The production of wealth in prodigious quantities was commencing, and the world lay waiting to absorb all the English manufacturers could produce. So we can guess with what consternation they viewed the attempt of the Americans to produce and export on their own account, instead of remaining producers of raw material for English manufacturers and a dumping-ground for British manufactures:

The revolution commenced with some skirmishes in Boston and the upsetting of the East India Company's tea in Boston harbour. For some time this vast company was on the verge of ruin owing to the large stocks of tea and other Indian goods on their hands. The English Government magnanimously (!) agreed to accommodate the Company by taking off as much duty in England as would make the Company’s tea cheaper in America than any foreigners could import. This struck a mortal blow at the smugglers. The latter were consequently roused to righteous and indignant action, and stood right sturdily for the “Rights of Man” by throwing the pernicious tea into the Atlantic.

Washington, one of the principle figures in the Revolution, prior thereto was engaged in surveying land, and O'Neal states that on the eve of the war a case was pending against him for illegal surveying. He was also deeply involved in the white slave traffic. His “poverty” may be estimated from the fact that he offered to raise and equip at his own expense a force of 1,000 men to relieve Boston.

Benjamin Franklin also was not above turning a honest penny in the slave traffic.

The delegates who had been chosen for the Philadelphia Congress of 1774 “Had known what it was to breakfast in a villa on the Hudson River with a very large silver coffee pot, a very large silver tea pot, napkins of the finest materials, plates full of choice fruit, and toast and bread and butter in great perfection. But in Philadelphia . . there was magnificence, and, above all, abundance, under many roofs. 'A most sinful feast again,' John Adams wrote, 'everything which could delight the eye or allure the taste. Cards and creams, jellies, sweetmeats of various sorts, twenty sorts of tarts, fools, trifles, floating islands, and whipped sillabubs. These dainties were washed down with floods of Madeira.' ” (Trevelyan, vol I., p. 225.)

Such were the poor down-trodden whose souls the times were trying (according to Thomas Paine), and who proposed vindicating the Rights of Man! Another comic tragedy was in process of production upon the stage of history. In relation to the above it is well to remember that the vast majority of the population at that time (excluding Indians) was composed of poor whites and slaves both black and white.

To prosecute the war the English proceeded to engage German mercenaries and disaffected Americans. By the offer of freedom to indentured servants they attracted many to their ranks' so that the rebels were compelled to offer the same inducement.

The stock jobbery and wrangles of the English capitalists, in the attempt of each to make the war as lucrative as possible to himself, put England out of the running from the start. On the American side similar jobbery prevailed. I will quote Washington’s own words:

   Such a dearth of public spirit, and such want of virtue; such stock-jobbing, and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another in this great change of military arrangement, I never saw before, and I pray God's mercy that I may never see again. (Trevelyan, Vol. I., p. 403.)

His letters during the war are full of similar complaints. All along he complains of the enormous desertions, sometimes of whole regiments. and of the difficulty of getting recruits. High bounties had to be offered by the different States before the various armies could be raised, and immediately their term of service was up they departed.

On both sides the aid of the Indians was extensively employed, and they were urged on by bribes to acts of the greatest barbarity. 

The gentle refinement of Washington, the glorious example of American schoolboys of today, may be judged by the following:

   During the summer (August and September, 1779) a terrible revenge was taken on the Iroquois for the Wyoming massacres by General Sullivan, who with 5,000 men devastated their whole country between the Susquehannah and Genesee rivers,—covered, we are told, with “pleasant villages and luxurient cornfields"—burning every village, giving no quarter. At one village, which is termed the “metropolis of the Genesee Valley," no less than 160,000 bushels of corn were destroyed. The Indians were pursued as far as the British fort of Niagara, and Indian agriculture was destroyed throughout the district. The total American loss did not exceed 40 men. The responsibility for these cruel measures lies at Washington's own door. His instructions to General Sullivan (May 31st) were “that the country may not be merely over-run, but destroyed." (Ludlow, p. 164.)

At length England agreed to evacuate America. It is noteworthy to mention (bearing in mind the much-vaunted Rights of Man) that one of the articles in the final capitulation stipulated the restoration of slaves and “prohibited the British from carrying away any Negroes or other property of the inhabitants."

Such was the great American Revolution. At bottom it was a fight between the privileged class of America and England to decide who should enjoy the wealth wrung from the slaves of both colours.

In early times to have imported free workers into America would not have sufficed for the needs of the privileged class, as the workers would have spread far and wide and gained their subsistence without working for a master. Hence workers had to be introduced in two particular forms of servitude (chattel slavery and indentured service) which tied them to their particular masters for a definite period or for life.

Long after the Revolution these forms of servitude continued. When economic development had rendered wage labour possible and more profitable, then the old forms of slavery disappeared.

Gilmac.

US Capitalism: Born on the Fourth of July (2018)

The Material World column from the July 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxists see history is a series of disguised class struggles. Evidence of this is can be found in the story of America’s independence where its landed elite saw in the new government and constitution a protection against democracy and a means of safeguarding their privilege despite pretensions of being 'enlightened' by sweeping aside the king and his aristocrats.

The American colonists fought to separate from Britain yet the War of Independence was not merely about 'home rule' but also about who should rule at home. The new republic was never designed to be anything other than an oligarchic state which we see today. The War of Independence did not establish a truly democratic government, nor significantly change the structure of American society. It reinforced class division.

Alexander Hamilton, presently subject to a hit musical, at the Constitutional Convention said:

'All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. … The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.'

The War of Independence may have advocated the abstract principles that 'all men are created equal' and that power is derived from 'the will of the people' but the definition of 'the people' excluded women, non-landowners, and slaves. The signatories of the Declaration of Independence were the land and property owners intent on building a system of government based on the division of power that would guard against what they saw as the excesses of democracy – 'mobocracy'. The colonial 'country gentlemen' were afraid that, as they were not themselves in the majority, the less well-off would vote to take away their property and arrangements.

Having two different houses of Congress, a Senate and a House of Representatives, places an obvious obstacle in the way of simple majority rule. There are 435 Representatives and 100 Senators. 51 Senators can block the majority rule. Moreover, Senators are elected for six years while Representatives are elected for two. The electoral college to elect the president operates intentionally in opposition to majority rule in this same way. In a system of electing the President by mere simple majority, a candidate or party could win by appealing to 51 percent of the voters. The electoral college, however, serves as a partial safeguard against those who might be able to find and win over a majority. The national popular vote is not the basis for electing a President, it is delegates elected locally (Clinton received almost 3 million votes more than Trump yet he won by achieving 306 delegates out of the 538 available in the electoral college that chooses the President.)

Those so-called American supporters of 'liberty' did not abolish slavery and continued to permit slavery to flourish. At the time of America’s founding, a full 20 percent of the US population was enslaved. By 1776, the number of slaves in the colonies had reached 500,000. Slavery in 18th century America was not confined to the South and could be found in each of the 13 colonies, and was especially numerous in New Jersey and in New York's Hudson River Valley. The slave-owning class from the South insisted as a condition of their participation in the Union that their interests be protected in the very fabric of the Constitution itself.

Consequently, the slaveholders would control the presidency of the new republic for 41 of its first 50 years, and 18 of 31 Supreme Court justices would be slaveholders. Slaves gained their freedom by entering the British army. This was especially true in Georgia, where over 10,000 slaves flocked to freedom behind British lines, one of the largest mass escapes in the history of American slavery. Eventually, more than 65,000 from across the South joined them. Wherever the British marched, slaves followed. Non-slave states now stood obligated to defend slave states against slave rebellion.

Nevertheless, there was also the revolutionary side of the American War of Independence as in all class struggles. There were a number of radicals seeking what the now household names of 'revolutionary' leaders feared and who are now relegated to footnotes in scholarly textbooks. Soon after the War of Independence there grew among the common people the feeling that the revolution against the British had been fought for nothing and there were popular uprisings such as Shays’ Rebellion (1787), put down by a mercenary army paid for by the well-to-do who feared a threat to their property rights, and the Whisky Rebellion (1791) was similarly suppressed by the wealthy.

ALJO

Radicals in North America (1968)

Book Review from the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critics of Society: Radical Thought in North America, by T. B. Bottomore. Allen and Unwin 25s.

Bottomore first broadcast this as a series of talks on Canadian radio. He points out that “the course taken by social criticism in North America was quite different from that in Europe, because the society itself was very different”. The original colonies were formed by European religious and political dissenters. Statements on the rights of man, incorporated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, contained some of the most radical 18th century ideas. Political democracy became established. Thus in American society at that time there were no great issues (slavery being the one exception), only individual grievances. As would be expected this situation did not give rise to any lasting school of criticism or reform movement.

After the Civil War there followed a period of immense industrial expansion. The mass immigration of the 1880’s began to supply the additional workers needed by industry. During the period from 1860 to 1910 the rural population of America doubled, but the town population increased almost sevenfold. These decades saw the inevitable rise of poverty, unemployment and other social problems. It was these social changes that led to a revival of social criticism, initially taking the form of Populism and similar movements. Symptomatic of this revival was the appearance of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888).

Bottomore examines the subsequent development of North American social criticism down to the mid-twentieth century. In a separate chapter on Canada he deals with the formation of the New Democratic Party in 1961. According to him:

  "The New Democratic Party was founded with the support of socialist groups and trade unions. In the same year a new exposition of socialist ideas was published under the title Social Purpose for Canada.”

The NDP is not in fact a Socialist party. It was set up in opposition to the Socialist Party of Canada. No socialist groups took part in the formation of the NDP. Socialists would not, and did not, wish to be associated with the plans to patch up Canadian capitalism put forward in Social Purpose for Canada.

Of modern social criticism, Bottomore has this to say:

    “Another way of describing the present nature of social criticism would be to say that the critics of whatever social order they are confronting no longer see one big social problem, for which there is one big solution. Instead, they see a succession of more or less unique situations, each of which requires the critic to take a moral stand, to commit himself, but only with respect to that particular situation. There is no rule for dealing with all situations. Our age, therefore, is certainly an age of criticism, but also of exceptional confusion and disarray.”

Socialists take the view that it is impossible to solve the major problems of modern society in isolation. The social problems from which the working class suffer all have their roots in the very basis of the capitalist system. They can only be solved when the workers rid themselves of the confusion they share with modern “social critics”, equip themselves with socialist knowledge and establish Socialism.

DS