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

The Stars and Stripes . . . Forever? (1969)

From the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The American flag, in the general form it takes today, was born during the American Revolution and represents a clean break in design from the English-type standards that were in use in the colonies until 1777. Even General Washington, in his earlier battles, used a flag with English and Scottish crosses rather than the stars. Paintings such as the one showing him crossing the Delaware with the Stars and Stripes were inaccurate. So is the story that the first flag was made in 1776 by Betsy Ross of Philadelphia from a design furnished her by General Washington. The Continental Congress accepted the original stars and stripes (thirteen of each) design on June 14 1777.

The school texts, encyclopedias, and information almanacs supply the type of data concerning the flag, its growth to the present 50 stars, its dimensions, and its rules of display. Such information is of concern to patriots but more to the point is a discussion of the purposes which the Stars and Stripes serves, the interests which it supports, the very reasons for its existence.

All previous revolution, as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, were revolutions by a minority in the interests of a minority. Even though it did not exemplify the classic pattern of bourgeois revolution, in that it was directed against a colonial power rather than a landed aristocracy and church within the nation, the American Revolution was no exception. There were no serfs in the American Colonies, not even peasants in the ‘free' sense of some European peasants who worked the lands of (frequently absentee) landlords. But there was a great majority of impoverished small farmers, business people, artisans, and fishermen, not to mention chattel slaves and a tiny minority of privileged landowners, commercial-type capitalists, and financiers. The privileged minority was, nevertheless, dominated by the mother country and had something definitely to gain by a break in relations. It raised the cry of ‘freedom' (meaning freedom of commerce) and went about the task of convincing the majority of underprivileged that revolution against England would also be in their interests. Such a task was not easy, especially in a land like America which was largely populated by expatriate British, and desertions from the army and outright refusals to fight were rampant.

The new American ruling class, then, like all ruling classes, had urgent need for initiating ideas and attitudes and gadgets that would aid in preventing a new revolution from developing. Historians record that such a fear was uppermost in the founding fathers and a number of steps were taken to circumvent the possibility. The Stars and Stripes has served admirably, since 1777, as a symbol of a common interest among all Americans. As with the bourgeoisie of all nations, the American capitalist class has never hesitated to use the flag to stir base emotions in workers in order to fight workers of other countries and one another as well. This is the primary purpose of the Stars and Stripes, as it is of the Union Jack, the Hammer and Sickle, the Tricolor, and every other national emblem on earth.

Indoctrination

But no flag, in itself, can be expected to raise emotions in the desired manner. Americans, generally, are not stirred by the Union Jack, nor does the Stars and Stripes bring a tingle to the spine of the average Briton. A system of indoctrination is needed. In America we have the Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy of Boston and recited by schoolchildren all over the country to this date. [1] And there is The Star Spangled Banner, a national anthem (fortunately unsingable by most voice ranges) about the flag, written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key during the war with Britain. Although it is virtually impossible to enforce laws and codes of custom concerning these patriotic exercises on a universal basis, there are laws, penalties, and prescribed codes of custom in many areas of endeavour in the various states and on a national level.

For example, Section 69 of the General Laws Relating to Education in The Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1966) goes into the subject of proper display of the flag in the schools and continues:

Failure to display flag as above required for a period of five consecutive days by principal or teacher in charge of a school, or failure of teacher to salute the flag and recite pledge of allegiance or to cause pupils under his charge to do so . . . (provides for a penalty of a $5 fine for every such period).

And failure by a school committee subjects each member to the same penalty.

In its zeal to enforce respect for the national anthem, Chapter 264, Section 9 of these Massachusetts laws reads:

National Anthem: Whoever plays, sings or renders the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ in any public place, theatre, motion picture hall, restaurant or cafe, or at any public entertainment other than as a whole and separate composition or number without embellishment or addition in the way of national or other melodies, or whoever plays, sings or renders the 'Star Spangled Banner', or any part thereof, as dance music, as an exit march or as a part of a medley of any kind, shall be punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars.

And Section 9 of the same chapter provides a penalty for misuse of the flag of a fine ranging from $10 to $100, one year in jail, or both.

Outraged

On the federal level, a joint resolution by both Houses resulted in Public Law 829: a codification of existing rules and customs on flag etiquette. The Law was approved on December 22, 1942. But there was, apparently, no desecration problem since there were no provisions for penalties.

The most agonised reaction to desecration and defilement of the Stars and Stripes was that of the Congress of 1967-8. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the burning of the American flag by an opponent of the Vietnam war in Central Park, New York, in May 1967. By a vote of 385 to 16 the House of Representatives passed a Bill that provided penalties of one year imprisonment, $1,000 fine, or both. The Congressmen were outraged and vied one with another in the vitriol of their language. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina demanded: “Let’s deal with these buzbards," and James Haley of Florida emoted:

Load a boat full of them and take them 500 miles out in the ocean and handcuff them, chain the anchor around their necks and throw them overboard. (Time Magazine, June 30, 1967)

So enraged were the Representatives, in fact, that they completely forgot to refer in their Bill to burning. The language deals with “publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling or trampling upon," omitting reference to the act that motivated the Bill.

But the Senators, in their version, saved the day and inserted the flammatory word. So Public Law 90-381, which became law on July 5 1968, provides for the following penalties:

(a) Whoever knowingly casts contempt upon any flag of the United States by publicly mutilating, defiling, burning, or trampling upon it shall be fined not more than $1000.00 or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.

And section (b) carefully defines what is meant by ‘flag’ in order to avoid the possibility of a legal technicality that the object mutilated, defiled, burned, or trampled upon was but a replica or picture of the flag or some other official emblem other than the Stars and Stripes. The term is all-encompassing. It took 191 years. But there is now a Federal law to avenge maltreatment of “Old Glory’ and it specifically applies to desecration by Americans abroad of America’s flag as well.

Socialists do not include flag desecration in any list of revolutionary activity —not because we respect a nation’s flag but because revolutionary socialist activity must be dominated by consciousness and understanding, not upon unreasoning passion. Nor are we flag wavers.

Harry Morrison 

(World Socialist Party of the United States)

Footnote:

[1] The Republicans, in 1954, had the words "under God" inserted after “one nation indivisible." But the Supreme Court decisions on religion in the schools (1962 and 1963) now makes the use of this phrase questionable in the classrooms.

The Class Issue in the American Revolution (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

What, if anything, does the Declaration of Independence mean? The approach of its 200th anniversary has produced a small deluge of reviews of the saga of American history and the "truths” adopted on 4th July 1776. There must be many who, having read and listened, still wonder why a nation claiming to be founded on “inalienable rights” of equality, freedom of speech and thought and "the pursuit of happiness” manifestly does not have them. The answer is that the Declaration of Independence was framed as the expression of one class’s economic interests.

The colonization of America resulted from European countries’ quest for trade. Its labour-force came in part from the same source as theirs, the dispossession of peasants to make them “free labourers”; also from refugees from the religious wars and persecutions which were part of the break-up of feudalism, victims of rack-renting and famine in Ireland, unemployed artisans, etc. About half the white colonists before 1730 sold themselves as slaves or "indentured servants” in exchange for a passage to the New World, and about 200,000 black slaves were taken from Africa.

The various American colonies were practically all self-supporting from agriculture and the forests and their products (the highly lucrative fur trade created policies towards Indians, and also the first millionaires). In the non-slave states the labouring class was a mixture of indentured servants and wageworkers. The colonies were driven closer together by conflicts with Indians and by the English wars with France and Spain which both had colonies in America and fought for trade there.

The rôle of the British government in controlling America was to preserve Britain’s position as the manufacturing centre, to which other countries sent raw materials and from which they had to buy manufactured goods. Under the Navigation Laws, the colonies had to use English ships for trade and all goods had to be "laid on the shores of England”, where duty was collected. The French war had left the British government with a heavy debt, and it sought to raise revenue in America; whereas the New England merchants were chiefly smugglers evading payment of duties.

The political conflicts leading up to the War of Independence — the Boston Tea Party, the Currency Act, legislation restricting the manufacture of finished goods and restraining movement westward — were all manifestations of this situation. But the term "American Revolution” is a misnomer insofar as it conveys a separate, unique upheaval or “a noble experiment”, as The Times called it in a recent article. It was part of the eruption as the capitalist class took political power, the American phase of the English revolution.

The greater part of the Declaration of Independence consists of political attacks on George III. In Britain the Georges were supported by the Tory representatives of the landowning aristocracy while the Whigs, standing for the interests of developing capitalism and freedom of trade, were still struggling. In America, still in its early stages, the class issues were confused but the dominant interests were those from which the capitalist class originated: the smuggling merchants, land speculators, and would-be manufacturers. The Tories comprised large landholders, "respectable” merchants, officials and dependants of the British regime, and the Church of England faction.

These ties were exchanged across the Atlantic. The revolutionists were in fact a minority, but they were more active, perceptive and coherent — in a word, conscious — than any other section. They drew the support of the small business men and the labouring class through local legislative assemblies and over such issues as the Currency Act.

The War of Independence ended in 1782, one month before the Tory government fell and the Americans’ Whig allies came to power in Britain. This was the beginning of capitalism’s rise to maturity. How much the Declaration of Independence meant, and whom it stood for, can be seen in the fact that in the mid-1780s out of an American population of 3½ million (excluding Indians) only 400,000 were “free” men. Its principles, and the ideas of democracy it embodied, were cast aside almost immediately.

That, again, was not special to America. In France the cry was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, and in England freedom was demanded everywhere. Freedom for whom and what? Freedom for the inrushing capitalist class to exploit without restraint, without the shackles of monarchy and divine right: equality at the start of a race in which the self-elected winner had the hides and carcasses of the rest. In America, the ownership and control of the means of living were vested in the class whose lineal descendants still hold it.

The history books show Independence to have been essential to the emergence of a great modern nation: the creation of a strong central government controlled by the manufacturing and commercial class. The capitalists were a revolutionary class, advancing the capacities of mankind immeasurably. What the Declaration of Independence shows is their inability to fulfil those capacities after two hundred years. Like the aristocracy from whose grip they broke, from a dynamic social force they have long since become an obstruction to mankind. It is time for the next move, to Socialism.

Robert Barltrop

For Your Leisure Time (1950)

From the May 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Howard Fast is an American novelist whose works are now published in London by the Bodley Head. He takes as his themes events in history, mainly American history, and introduces a few fictional characters amongst the real characters who were involved in the events. He sees the class struggle in the periods about which he writes.

The novels by this author already published in this country are as follows: "The Unvanquished," "The Last Frontier," "The American," "Citizen Tom Paine" and "Freedom Road." There is also available a book of selected works of Tom Paine.

"Freedom Road" is the most significant of these books. It deals with the period immediately following the American civil war when thousands of Negro slaves found themselves freed from their slavery on the cotton plantations in the southern states. It tells, through the story of a fictional negro character, Gideon Jackson, how these freed slaves, illiterate, cowed, ill-clothed and bewildered, clung desperately to their new found freedom against the brutality and terrorist measures of their class enemies, the ex-plantation owners. It shows how they strove to learn to read and write and understand the bewildering world into which they had been turned loose; how, in the brief period when they were allowed to do so, they carved out a democratic constitution for such states as South Carolina and Georgia. It proves that the interests of the negroes and the poor whites were identical,  a class interest against a system of slavery, both chattel and wage. The author tells how the slave owners and the northern industrialists soon realised that they had a common interest in keeping in subjugation all workers, black and white, even though they set about the task under the cry of anti-negroism. The book deals with the origin of the Ku Klux Klan and its bestial, foul and brutal terror carried out whilst a so-called anti-slave government shut a blind eye. The latter chapters of the book are not to be read by those who are at all squeamish. They show the mutilations and death agonies of black and white men, women and children in this class war.

"Citizen Tom Paine" is the story of the life of that revolutionary pamphleteer. Tom Paine wrote in popular form and expressed the aspirations of the rising industrialist class in America and France in its struggle against the dominant land owning class of its day. Paine, according to Howard Fast's portrayal of him, was a most unlovely character, he was ugly, deformed, drunken and dirty to the point of filthiness, but he had terrific courage. Starting life as a stay maker he went to America under the patronage of Benjamin Franklin, and obtained employment as editor of a newly founded magazine. His rebellious writings soon got him into trouble and he was swept up in the American War of Independence. This war was a struggle between the forerunners of the modern American capitalists against the British land owners supported by the British Government. The American land owning element lined up with their British colleagues, whilst the revolutionary tenant farmers and industrialists relied, as always, on the support of poor farmers and the workers. Tom Paine's role in this struggle was that of a "rabble rouser." When the struggle of the American revolutionaries was at a low ebb and fresh enthusiasm had to be whipped up, it was Paine to whom men like Washington turned for a pamphlet or a speech to re-arouse the enthusiasm of the workers and small farmers. After the American war, Paine left for England where he was immediately marked as a prospective menace to the Government and he had to flee the country to France. He arrived there when the French revolution was in process and was at once elected to the Convention. Lining up with the Girondins, Paine was finally marked for the guillotine and imprisoned. He appealed to his erstwhile compatriots  in America to save him, but they had achieved victory in their struggle and did not need the services of their "rabble rouser" any more.  They wanted their workers to be passive, docile and obedient now that they held the helm and a man like Paine was likely to be a menace. So they left him to his fate. He escaped the guillotine and returned to America where he spent his old age being sneered and jeered at by everyone as an atheist. Paine wrote fluently about democracy and the 'rights of man' but he had a horror of 'mob rule' as he considered the aspirations of the workers to be. He was the spokesman of the early capitalists, not of the workers whom he appealed to and exhorted to fight.

"The Last Frontier" is a splendid story of the struggle of a small tribe of Red Indians to return to the green pastures of their old hunting grounds from the Indian reservations on an arid, dusty desert in Oklahoma. Hunted and hounded by American troops they were nearly all exterminated, only a few eventually winning through. The one fictional character in this story is an American army officer who is troubled that the newly adopted constitution of his country lays down that all men are born free and equal whilst he sees suppression, exploitation inequality all around and must himself play a part in enforcing such conditions. Can a thing that is right in principle be wrong in practice, is the theme of this splendid story. 

"The Unvanquished" is a tale of the first few days of the American War of Independence telling of the sufferings of the farmers and workers who fought on the American side, their determination and endurance, but the story has less significance for Socialists than the others mentioned. "The American" is the life story of Judge Pete Altgeld, the Chicago judge who gravitated from a tame radical position to one of extreme working class sympathy. It deals mainly with the American political racket and the anti-working class attitude of the American governments of the latter end of the last century and beginning of this one.

Howard Fast may not be a Socialist but he sees history through the eyes of the oppressed classes. His writing is good and his stories are exciting whilst being at the same time instructive. We commend him to readers of the Socialist Standard for their leisure time reading.

W. Waters

Liberty, Levelling and Lies (2015)

From the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much of the story of the United States of America’s founding is a total lie. The War of Independence can be described as a civil war between the various forces within American society. The United States remained a society of disparities in wealth.

Income and wealth were as inequitably distributed in the United States in 1800 as in British America in 1776—this despite the confiscation of 2,200 loyalist estates and the opening up of the West to settlement. Europeans visiting the United States in the years following the War of Independence wrote of hovels from which emerged the impoverished and undernourished of the new republic. ‘Instead of the lands being equally divided, immense estates are held by a few individuals,’ observed a traveller in rural Virginia in the 1790s, ‘whilst the generality of the people are but in a state of mediocrity.’ The historian Robert Wiebe argues, ‘the Revolution actually strengthened gentry rule by channelling popular ferment toward the British and the American Tories’.

Marxists call the American Revolution a ‘capitalist’ revolution. This means that the revolution put the American capitalist class in power and accomplished many things that the capitalist class needed to have done. It unified the colonies, ended all of the restrictions on the growth of capitalism, set up a government that would protect capitalist property and so forth. But when we call this revolution a ‘capitalist revolution’ that does not mean that the capitalists themselves led this revolution, or even that a majority of the capitalist class supported it. As a matter of fact, the revolution was mainly made by other classes. It was even made against the will of the majority of the capitalist class of that day, the merchants.

In the 1770s and 80s, something revolutionary was stirring in the colonies. It was a people's movement for political democracy. In public meetings and town halls, ordinary citizens were gathering to discuss how to govern themselves. Town meetings, long an institution in New England, were taken out of the hands of the propertied voters by the general city population. Although there were only 1,500 people in Boston entitled by property qualifications to attend town meetings and vote, attendance reached two and three thousand, and in days of crisis, six or seven thousand.

In 1776 a conference in Pennsylvania proposed a new constitution with annual parliaments in which voting wasn’t qualified by property, nor was holding office, and a judiciary appointed by the legislature for seven-year terms, and removable at any time. Some radicals, such as Thomas Young, even pushed for a provision in the state constitution limiting how much property any one person could own. That, however, was narrowly defeated and removed by more conservative influences. It called to form a ‘new government … on the authority of the people alone’. Out of it emerged the most democratic constitution of the time, guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the vote for all male taxpayers resident for a year or more. There was no Governor, but there were annual elections for the House of Representatives and all bills were printed so people outside the immediate political process could consider them. It was viciously denounced by the wealthy as ‘a mobocracy of the most illiterate’.

It was this threat that lead James Madison, the fourth US president, to warn of the perils of democracy, saying too much of it would jeopardise the property of the landed aristocracy. ‘In England,’ he observed, ‘if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure.’  Land would be redistributed to the landless, he cautioned. Without the rich exercising monopoly privileges over the commons, the masses would be less dependent on elites like them.

The first constitution of the United States (the Articles of Confederation) endured for 10 years, starting in 1778, before being circumvented.  In February 1787, the richest man in the United States, George Washington, proposed a convention in May in Philadelphia for the alleged purposes of revising the Articles of Confederation. In their place was proposed a new, second Constitution of the United States, which included a powerful federal government to rule over the state governments, a president for life (a king!), a senate appointed for life (peers!), an electoral college that elects the president and an appointed for life Supreme Court (Law Lords) with authority over the state courts. Because of opposition the terms of office were subsequently limited.

The Philadelphia Convention, widely heralded today as the birth of democracy, was essentially a coup against it. America was divided between the moneyed interests which supported the new federal government and popular dissent which objected to the loss of local power and the rising supremacy of the rich. The Anti-Federalists were overpowered by the media apparatus and political influence of the oligarchs, who convinced commercial interests, small landowners, farmers, merchants and artisans to side with them. What happened at Liberty Hall in 1787 was that the wealthy elites empowered themselves to regulate commerce to their own advantage, enshrining their rule under the empty rhetoric of liberty.

To praise the oppressors of the time as spokesmen for liberty is to forget actual real history and fall victim to propaganda of the ruling class ideology which camouflages plutocracy by creating the form and appearance of popular government yet under private control. Those who argue that the Founding Fathers were motivated by high-minded ideals ignore the fact that it was they themselves who repeatedly stated their intention to create a government strong enough to protect the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. They gave voice to the crassest class prejudices and at no time denied the fact that their concern was to thwart popular control and resist all tendencies toward class ‘levelling’.

ALJO

Tom Paine and Today (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Paine is still invoked today from Obama to some in the Occupy Movement.

In his inauguration speech in 2009, President Obama quoted from Paine's patriotic rallying call The  Crisis, and during his election campaign he quoted from Paine's Common Sense which advocated American independence. In 2012, Obama presented Bob Dylan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1963 Dylan received the Tom Paine Award for his work in the Civil Rights movement. Later, Dylan wrote As I Went Out One Morning referencing Paine. Paine proposed the abolition of slavery in his African Slavery in America, authored the proposal's preamble for the Pennsylvania Assembly which abolished slavery in 1780 and later supported the Haitian Black Jacobins.

Paine's book Rights of Man laid the foundations for bourgeois liberalism: freedom of property, commercial enterprise (a kindred spirit was Adam Smith), limited government, reduced taxation, advancement based on merit, productivity and industriousness. The bourgeoisie were a revolutionary class; the severed heads of Charles I and Louis XVI are testament.  Paine attacked the “chivalric nonsense” of monarchy and aristocracy for: its privilege and hierarchy, based on heredity; its corrupt government; taxation; wars; and its stifling of economic innovation.

EP Thompson called Rights of Man “the foundation text of the English Working Class movement” although it was in Agrarian Justice that Paine pushed bourgeois radicalism to its limits. He believed that poverty was caused by 'bad' government, and proposed welfare provision to be paid for by progressive taxation on landed property.  He also believed that the dismantling of the war machine would bring savings which could go to the “hordes of miserable poor” and thereby reduce taxation on the bourgeois class. Paine did see that the accumulation of property in the hands of a few would cause poverty, but he was a bourgeois liberal and believed: “That property will ever be unequal is certain”.

Marx saw the “rights of men to property” espoused by Paine and adopted in the USA as “not based on the union of man with man but on the separation of man from man”, and that the Rights of Man did not go beyond egoistic man: “it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individual”.

Today, Paine's bourgeois liberalism would be offended by the existence of monarchy, and the aristocracy still in government. The Prime Minister is related to the Queen and is a descendent of William IV, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is an ‘Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’ aristocrat.

Steve Clayton

Hypocrisy Exposed (2005)

Book Review from the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon Schama: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. BBC Books

Forget Schama the TV historian - this is a solid piece of research into a sordid piece of British and American history from the late 18th and early 19th century. The European colonists in America rebelled against their British rulers, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

This was the period of slavery and the slave trade, and many black slaves (and 'free' blacks) saw through American protestations about liberty and supported the loyalist (i.e. British) side. Some black people fought on the patriot (American) side, though slaves were excluded from the American army and giving arms to any black people was anathema to many, especially in the south.

But once Britain had been defeated, the question arose of what would happen to these black 'loyalists'. Some escaped slaves were recaptured by their owners, but most managed to avoid this dire fate and were given certificates by the British commandant of New York, stating that they were free to go where they wished (i.e. they were no longer slaves and subject to the orders of their owner).

In 1783 many loyalists, both white and black, were shipped off to Nova Scotia to start a new life. But the 3,500 black settlers there were subject to appalling discrimination, being always last in line for such things as food supplies and allotment of land. Consequently, many of the former slaves travelled (in some cases, returned) to Africa, specifically to what later became Freetown in Sierra Leone.

Under the initially somewhat paternalistic regime of the Sierra Leone Company, they attempted to establish a settlement of their own where they could produce their own crops and trade with local chiefs. In principle, everything was run democratically, with each head of household having a vote, including women. Says Schama, 'the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom'.

But this freedom was illusory: in 1800 the black residents of Freetown rebelled against mistreatment but were savagely put down, by a Company army partly consisting of Maroons (former Jamaican slaves who now fought on the British side). Two of the leaders were hanged.

Schama effectively exposes the hypocrisy of the rulers on both sides. The British government scoffed at the Americans' pretensions to freedom while owning other human beings, and Americans condemned a system where the poorest inhabitants of British cities were little better than slaves. He also brings out the courage and tenacity of slaves and ex- slaves who fought for some dignity in their lives.

Paul Bennett