1776: Whose republic? (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Republic of Washington will grow and grow, until it makes the whole world tremble’ – Marquis de Sade.

In American schools children are taught to call it the American Revolution. Was it? In Britain we were brought up to refer to it as the American War of Independence. But whose independence?

The man mostly urging the colonial owning classes to declare independence from the British crown was an Englishman: the political reformer Thomas Paine. Largely alone in his zeal for the independence of the American commercial class, he would be resisted by the much more timid George Washington and the latter’s clique of slave-owning mouthpieces for ‘liberty’, who were reluctant to go so far, until forced to by circumstances and the sheer ferocity of the British army.

The colonial gentry had launched the cry against imperial taxation and oppression in 1775 and Paine, for whom dissent, anywhere, was an irresistible magnet, became its most zealous spokesman. In his pamphlet aptly named Common Sense he showed the absurdity of the American colonies being ruled by a tiny island kingdom a gigantic ocean away. When the people of his own roots, the pacifist Quakers, warned the rebels of inviting carnage, Paine told them to mind their own business and not interfere in a ‘just’ war (where have we heard that before?).

Oppression is oppression, regardless of who the oppressor is, and Paine was soon to learn this, with the ingratitude and disdain of his supposed colonial ‘comrades’ after they had at last yielded to his urgings that they replace the British rag on a pole with a republican one.

American farmers and ordinary people bore the brunt of British ferocity as the Quakers’ warning came true.

British ferocity, directly caused by the Washington revolt, did indeed provoke a hatred that benefited those riding it and carried them to victory and the overthrow of British rule. War continued, however, beyond 1782 (its official end), with the British navy attacking towns and shipping and in turn put to flight by an American known (ironically) as Captain Nelson, called a pirate by the British. As late as 1812 Britain launched an invasion of the new United States of thirteen colonies, and hostilities would carry on until into the American Civil War of the 1860s.

During the war the British state used the native American Great Lakes tribes against the colonists in the same way that earlier in the century the Jacobites (the political faction supporting the Stuart monarchy of James II) had done in Scotland. Robert Burns did not like the Jacobites, but he admired the tribal Highland people. As his song Ye Jacobites By Name suggests, they stirred up rebellion, seducing the Highlanders to their cause, then, when it failed, scarpered off to France, leaving the Highland people to suffer the vengeance of the British state.

The Jacobites did this twice in the 18th century, and the last time they scarpered, in 1746, it would result in the destruction of the Highlanders who had followed them. The clearances would have been on the cards anyway at some point, because, like the native Americans and other native peoples around the world, the clans were an obstruction to the development of capitalism.

So who benefited? For all the talk of ‘liberty’, certainly not the United States’ four million African-American slaves, no matter how hoarsely and painfully Tom Paine and others implored. The poor farmers’ subsequent revolt, demanding relief from poverty, and stressing their having fought for the Congress, was ferociously crushed. The British during the war had helped secure the later fate of the native people too, using them against the colonists, teaching the natives about scalping, and ensuring the colonists’ eternal hatred for ‘Indians’.

As for Paine, his dedication to George Washington of The Rights of Man did not help him when arrested for ‘moderantism’ by the French Jacobins. Washington ignored his appeals to save him from the guillotine (for that he had to rely on others) while The Age of Reason – a rational dissection of the Bible –finally sealed his fate where the United States of America were concerned.

In short, 1776 marks yet another murderous squabble between capitalist factions. Revolution – the world revolution of those who actually do all the work in society – is yet to come, and when it does it will be truly democratic and thus will not require violence.

A.W.

American independence and its mythology (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 is upon us, it seems like a good time for socialists to assess this momentous event. Marx, in contrast to his writing on the American Civil War, has little to say about the conflict other than that he saw it as progressive but unresolved until the North’s victory over the South in 1865.

Although we have little interest in the international and internecine struggles between members of the bourgeoisie, what of the claim that these events on the east coast of North America constituted a revolution? If so what kind of revolution and was Marx correct as seeing the transition of 13 colonies into a nation-state as a progressive event in respect of the long-term aim of socialism? A cynic might suggest it was the capitalists of both states and their hatred of paying tax that generated the conflict between them. That the early USA was almost entirely dependent on slave labour for its wealth does make the shouts for liberty and justice rather hollow and hypocritical but then the international bourgeoisie have always been masters of myth creation and, as ever, it falls to Marxist socialists to try and separate myth from reality by stripping away the ideological overgrowth.

By 1763 the British had succeeded in expelling their French colonial rivals from North America but in doing so they had all but bankrupted their treasury. To maintain a series of forts to protect the victory was expensive and Parliament resolved to raise the revenue to pay for this by a series of taxes that regulated overseas trade on the 13 colonies. The colonists, on the other hand, thought that they had done their fair share of fighting to help the British defeat the French and saw no reason to pay for the honour. The climax to this came with the implementation of the hated ‘stamp act’ which was the first direct tax imposed by the British.

In 1763 the British had also forbidden any further expansion west because, for one thing, they feared the cost of going to war with the native Americans. However, the colonists saw the west as ripe for land speculation and they proceeded to create a ‘general assembly’ in the same year to oppose these British measures under the slogan: ‘No taxation without representation’. In response London passed a series of ‘quartering acts’ that imposed British troop garrisons in many of the leading towns with the added insult that the locals should provide them with food and shelter. Boston erupted and British ships were confiscated, whilst embargoes were placed on imports and exports to the ‘old country’. This was an act of rebellion against the crown which resulted in an invasion of Boston in 1768. Boston became a hotbed of rebellion with constant tension and violent skirmishes which in 1770 climaxed with the infamous ‘Boston Massacre’ in which many colonists were killed. Riots followed including the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ where British ships were looted and their cargoes destroyed. By now the Americans had begun to create armouries for what they regarded as an inevitable war. On discovering the location of one of these a British army marched on Concord to seize the armaments but were confronted along the way at Lexington by a colonial militia and the first battle of the war took place.

The war was to last until 1781 when the British surrendered at Yorktown to the Americans and their French and Spanish allies. The colonists had won their independence but what kind of state would they create and was it in any way ‘revolutionary’? The propaganda against Britain had portrayed it as a feudal autocracy when, in fact, the King and his aristocrats (both old and newly created) had been capitalists for a good 100 years before the rise of merchant capitalism in the new world, and parliament was the final arbiter of policy.

The American economy was mainly based on the labour of chattel slavery and people like George Washington lived like ancient Roman patricians on massive slave estates. So in its formative years the republic saw very little change from the perspective of the black slaves and the poor white farmers. Britain was well into its ‘industrial revolution’ and was a much more progressive state than its new competitor. Most of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ were slave owners who, apparently, saw no hypocrisy between the claims of liberty and justice for the white elite and the reality of life within for hundreds of thousands of enslaved inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson began his political career opposing slavery but ended it as a racist bigot of the worst kind. In North America the conjunction of slavery and skin colour became enshrined in the American psyche and even after the ‘emancipation’ at the conclusion of the civil war many of the formerly enslaved became ‘share-croppers’ – in effect, little better than medieval serfs. America had progressed from chattel slavery to feudal serfdom. This kind of racism was to fuel the genocide of the Native Americans and so preserve the racial and political violence embedded deep within the culture which survives to this day. Of course, socialists are not surprised at the depths of bourgeois hypocrisy but the American oligarchs seem to have taken it to another level claiming that they have no empire and that their state violence was always in ‘defence of democracy’. Perhaps the origin of their state is one of the reasons for the US’s continual political backwardness? If 1781 was revolutionary it was an extremely reactionary revolution more akin to the Third Reich and its genocidal and slave-economy policies than to the English and French revolutions.

Many historians regard the relationship between the founders’ support of slavery and their call for liberty and justice as some kind of paradox; they shy away from the truth of the origin of their country being founded on a lie. It can be said that the absence of any mitigating counterforce to the free market capitalism embraced by the oligarchs made it possible for the northern states to invest millions of dollars into industrial technology and so become one of the most powerful economic powerhouses by the end of the nineteenth century – in that Marx was correct; but what he didn’t foresee was that this extremely technologically advanced country would not also enjoy a commensurable rise in working-class political consciousness. Consumerism, religion and nationalism would prevent any important political evolution and has led to the kind of authoritarian ‘king’ figure that America now endures. The world longs for the end of the murderous American imperialism which seems, at last, to be within sight. Its birth in violence, racism and genocide and the malign shadow that has forever haunted America as a result might finally destroy it. No doubt it will be replaced, in the absence of socialist consciousness, by an equally rapacious capitalist global empire of some kind. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ will have to wait until people realise just how to make what was and is now just a platitude into something meaningful and real.

Wez.

50 Years Ago: The class issue in the American Revolution (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2026 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 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…

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…

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.

[From the article, The Class Issue in the American Revolution' by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, July 1976.]

Liberal media: the barking dog of institutional power (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a recent Reuters investigation revealing that one fifth of sitting US Congress members, living presidents, and Supreme Court justices are direct descendants of slaveholders. Liberal circles celebrated this as exemplary accountability journalism. But this celebration reveals the sophisticated mechanism by which modern media manufactures consent. Not through falsehood, but through strategic structural omission.

The investigation was conducted by journalist Blake Morrison. He meticulously mapped genealogical connections between today’s political elite and their slaveholding ancestors. He traced lineages through census records, slave schedules, estate documents, and family bibles. He identified at least 100 members of the 117th Congress with ancestral ties. The investigation even named the enslaved individuals where records permitted, giving human names to those previously reduced to property listings alongside sorrel horses and folding tables.

The dog is on the chain

Morrison’s reporting frame focuses on the personal impact of discovering these genealogical connections. It frames the story through individual family history and curiosity. It systematically avoids examining the legal and financial mechanisms through which slaveholder wealth was preserved, compounded, and transferred into the present day.

The Reuters investigation, like much accountability journalism, perpetuates the fiction that wealth passes simply from father to son. This is not how dynastic wealth operates. The actual mechanisms, trust law, estate law, corporate inheritance, land title chains, and complex financial instruments, remain entirely unexamined. By failing to map and explain the legal instruments that protected and grew slaveholder wealth across generations, the investigation performs a crucial ideological function. It transforms a systemic analysis of racial capitalism into a personalised narrative of ancestral discovery. The story becomes about individual bad apples and their personal reckonings with family history, rather than about the structural continuity of wealth extraction from enslaved labour into contemporary financial and property systems.

The everyday reproduction of consent

This is not accidental. It represents the operational logic of what Walter Lippmann termed ‘the manufacture of consent’ in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann argued that the professional class should manage democracy because they know about power and because raw political reality is too complex for most people. Columbia University’s journalism school is the training arm of the institution most closely associated with Lippmann’s legacy. And it’s where Blake Morrison teaches interviewing and investigation.

Now consider a story that Reuters is not currently investigating. In March 2026, the Poynter Institute reported that Thomson Reuters (Reuters’ owner) has multiple contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one of which gives DHS access to number plate reader data. Reuters journalists themselves signed a letter demanding the company explain what human rights and civil liberties due diligence it has undertaken in relation to this contract.

This story is not historical. It’s happening now. And it is about US government surveillance. Thomson Reuters has a $22.8 million open contract with DHS that runs until 2026. Another company, LexisNexis has a separate $22.1 million contract. These contracts support ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations, including immigration enforcement and deportations.

A YouTuber, Ali McForever, traces the connections between state power, media systems, and global economic structures. Her analysis reveals how the manufacture of consent operates not through crude propaganda but through the careful cultivation of partial visibility.

She argues that Reuters will trace a family tree across centuries but will not trace a contract across subsidiaries. They will name an enslaved ancestor but will not name the shell company receiving ICE funding. They will expose a genealogical connection but not a procurement chain.

She also argues that Morrison’s investigations are formulaic. Although the story is always factual, the conclusion is invariably some bad apples and a regulatory gap. That is deliberate, not incidental omission. Legal wealth transfer mechanisms or surveillance infrastructure never appear anywhere in the investigation. A story containing falsehoods can easily be debunked yet stories that are structurally true but conclude just before the system is made visible produce something more durable. The wagging tail of accountability without any bite.

She argues further that Morrison’s work occupies a space where a systemic critique would otherwise exist. It occupies this space deliberately while Thomson Reuters takes millions from the same agencies that Morrison claims to expose. The public receives confirmation that journalism performs its watchdog function while never barking against the actual levers of power.

Trust structures

Let’s consider what a genuinely systemic investigation would require. Mapping trust structures established in the 19th century that remain active today or tracing land titles through Jim Crow-era legal mechanisms designed to protect white property ownership. Examining how corporate charters and financial instruments allowed slaveholder capital to transform into industrial and banking capital without passing through the father to son inheritance model that Reuters implicitly assumes.

Tracing the Thomson Reuters contracts through their actual ownership layers. Revealing which data brokers operate the number plate reader databases for ICE. Exposing the procurement chains that connect historical slaveholder wealth to contemporary border militarisation. This is work that Ali McForever has done. This is the work that Reuters deliberately avoids because it would expose their own complicity.

Journalism that maintains intimate proximity to power while performing the ritual of critique is in thrall to King Capital. It names the brokers but not the banks. It traces the genealogy but not the wealth. It exposes the contract but not the procurement chain.

This is workers’ consent being manufactured in its most abstracted form. Not through raw propaganda, but the careful cultivation of partial visibility, we are shown enough to believe ourselves informed, while the actual mechanisms of power, legal, financial, structural, remain unexamined behind a veil of individual narrative and personal moral narrations.

For socialists, we know when the bourgeois press celebrates its own accountability, we must ask what remains unseen. What legal instruments go unexamined? What ownership layers remain obscured? What surveillance contracts go unexamined? The answer reveals not mere journalistic failure, but journalistic function. To manufacture the consent necessary for the continued operation of capital and its dog, the military industrial complex, one carefully framed investigation at a time.

A.T.

An American Analysis of The Bi-Centennial Bust! (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

American capitalism in this year of Bi-Centennial celebration might well be summed up in a word: turmoil. Certainly, to base one’s estimates entirely upon reports by the media and to accept the superficial analysis of capitalist-dominated thinking, is to provoke the question : is American society disintegrating before our very eyes ?

For here is a nation based upon Law—we are assured —that is seemingly a Mecca for outlaws. Here exist a system of government and a political philosophy that shine as a beacon to the rest of benighted mankind, the most brilliant and the fairest system in the world of these or any previous times. Every American school-child has been made aware of this by the authors of the approved texts. And every last one of the horde of immigrant workers from Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean (not to mention the steady stream of those from so many other lands) have heard of it, if not from their children, then certainly from other sources of “information” that abound in this “land of abundance.” Even the “wet-backs” who cross and re-cross the borders of this Promised Land, aided and abetted by employers of cheap, unskilled labour, always on the lookout for still cheaper human energy, have heard the glad tidings of America, the Land of the Free (and those who work for them).

And despite the gilt-edged assurances of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the entire American system of doing things, the turmoil exists and seems to accelerate with the passage of time.

But do not be deceived. There is nothing unusual about the troubles and woes of capitalism in America, today. Concerned supporters and radical opponents to the contrary notwithstanding, the system functions normally and there are at least two obvious tests one can make to verify this assertion : (1) Compare it with its own past by checking newspapers of the past in the microfilm department of your Public Library; (2) Compare it with what goes on, today, in the rest of the world wherever capitalism—in whatever form—is the order of the day.

And yet, one cannot be too careful when undertaking such comparisons. For it is the superficial that is readily seen, especially when observing the situation, via the media, on a world basis. It would seem that there is much more “law and order” in other nations than is the case in America, especially in the dictatorship countries, much less turmoil than in these United States. But it is not safe to make such an assumption for at least one good reason, viz., there is no country where the press (and other media of propaganda) is as highly developed, as a “Fourth Estate,” as in America. The Lords of the Press in this country have been able to maintain a large degree of independence from national government and what it assumes to be national (capitalist) interests.

More so than in other nations, even in the nations of the “Free West,” is this the case. Just one example is needed: publication of “classified” government material in any other country would earn for its publishers a cell in the slammer, if not the execution block. Yet, the US Constitution guarantees that there shall be no prior restraint on the freedom of the press and this right of individual capitalists over the rights of other individuals, or even at times the interests of the total national capital, as interpreted by the government, has been upheld in the high courts. Even ordinary cases before the courts—right up to murder—can be and are “tried in the newspapers” and defendants either convicted or acquitted on the basis of stories in and attitudes created by the newspapers.

The fact is, then, that all of the sores of capitalism (and they are many) are reported and sensationalized by the media in America to perhaps a greater extent than any place else in the world. And there is another aspect about reporting that should not be overlooked. That aspect is the penchant for distortion. Newspapers and TV Newscasts are, besides a major part of the head-fixing industry, commodities themselves produced for sale on the market (to readers and viewers) with view to profit (from advertisers). Especially is this true in a country such as the United States of America where outright Government ownership is not present either in the press or the Airwaves. The message, as taken by some, of turmoil-to-the-point-of-disintegration, then, should be inclusive of a large grain of salt.

★

With the foregoing in mind, let us now look at America in this Bi-Centennial Year as it really is. It is certainly not a land in which some 220 millions enjoy a common heritage or—at least—a common interest. (Nor is this so any place else in the world). Neither is it in deeper-than-usual difficulty and ready to come apart at the seams. The first part of this estimate should be obvious to all but those unfortunates who are born blind, deaf, and speechless, and needs no elaboration. The second part can be made apparent through a brief look at class warfare and mass poverty in America over the entire period of its history; and the public libraries are well-stocked with all the documentation one would need, from old newspapers, to journals, to history books. From the rebellions immediately following the framing of the Constitution in 1787 until the continuing upheavals of these 1970s, class warfare has run rampant in this land, even when it is cloaked by racial overtones.

As for the fanciful estimates of uninformed radical activists and the fears of far-right patriots that capitalism in America is being destroyed from within, the facts indicate otherwise. This does not mean that America might not, in time, be toppled from her position of world dominance by another power or combination of powers. This is possible even if it may not seem probable in the immediate future. But the working class of America can hardly suffer economic loss from such an eventuality. For working class standards are really not tied to a nation’s position of power vis-a-vis other nations. Latest figures show per capita income (by means of which living standards are generally estimated) in America are not first, but fifth, despite her occupying the No. 1 spot in world power. Nor can the British workers, for example, look back with nostalgia to those times when Britain dominated the world and wish to return to their living standards of those “good old days”.

So let us take a hard look at the actual standards of the American working class in this year of America’s colossal 200th birthday party. And let us go to the capitalist Press for some statistical facts, rather than the fiction it so dearly loves to spew on the subject of American working-class affluence. As reported in The Western Socialist (Boston, USA) in its No. 5, 1975 issue:

In a full page spread in an issue of The New York Times, USN & WR (US News and World Report) goes after advertising. And in blowing its own horn it inadvertently blows the whistle on the Great American Myth. We are presented with the picture of a smiling family of four on a sight-seeing trip, enjoying the ‘American heritage’ by actual contact. The caption accompanying the photograph reads: “If Peter Lloyd wasn't above the Buying Point, his kids would be reading about our American heritage. Instead of seeing it.’ And the ad goes on to spell out this American message. A chart depicting the details of ‘The Buying Point’ spills the beans and it seems that one exercises his patriotic urges in proportion to one’s income — which is something we knew all along, anyway, but which is something that makes news when revealed by the capitalist press.

The Report goes on to show, citing USN & WR, that one half the households are below the buying point. Further, that the lower half gets by on but 23 per cent of the national total income. Nor should we forget that a significant percentage of that upper half enjoys its buying power through the power of instalment buying (“hire purchase,” in Britain) and are forever precariously perched on a parlous precipice, warding off a plunge.

As the WS piece concludes:

For never forget, if we are all equal under the law, in America, it is a fact that some of us are more equal than others. Those whose income is above the buying point, and especially those who actually own America, the 5 or 10% at the top.

★

The American Bi-Centennial hoop-la is accentuated, of course, by the quadrennial race for the Presidency. Adding somewhat to the confusion is the fact that the incumbent, Gerald Ford, is the first us President in history who was not elected to the office. He was selected for the Vice-Presidency, by the then President Nixon, to replace Spiro Agnew who resigned rather than face trial on graft charges. When Richard Nixon followed Agnew into disgrace and retirement from office, Gerald Ford succeeded to the accoutrements of the Presidency. Because of this new element, the Republican Convention will be “open” with the incumbent enjoying no scissors-hold on the nomination. So the bad actor from California, Ronald Reagan, is making an all-out effort to save his country from disaster!

On the Democratic Party side, the race has narrowed somewhat as far as the various state-wide Presidential Primary elections are concerned. The main ingredient for capturing the White House, in these times, is money —piles of it—and those with money to invest usually place it on a more apparent winner. But a popular syndicated humourist, Art Buchwald, has observed that one needs a beautiful mouthful of teeth to be elected President of the United States and in that respect, at least, most of the candidates qualify—right down to Hubert Humphrey and Edward Kennedy whose shadowy figures bulk in the wings, awaiting a possible bolt from the blue.

But the most important fact of life for the working class in this proud year of capitalism in America is a sad one. There is no sign on the horizon of a meaningful opposition to the system that holds them in wage servitude. Any alternative being offered to the major parties, regardless of the designation, is but a variation of the theme: Capital versus Wage Labour with a government functioning as a capitalist class. There remains the need, in America, to build a genuine Socialist organization capable of presenting the case for a wage-less, price less, moneyless, world society, Let this not take another century !

Harry Morrison

Boston Local, WSP of US

America . . . Land of the Free (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

America is the land of the free. Or is it? They certainly taught you at school that you were a free citizen living in a free country. The media screams out the glorious message to you every day: “You are free — now go to work.” Read the American Declaration of Independence; you can’t be freer than that . . . can you?

The definition of freedom adopted by a society determines the degree to which it imagine itself to be free. The Greeks called their society a free one, but it was based upon slavery. Since the Sixteenth Century in Europe individualism has reigned supreme. Liberty, in accordance with this definition, means the liberty of the individual: if you’re a worker you demand the liberty to work; if you’re a landlord you demand the liberty to take rent; if you’re a manufacturer you demand the liberty to make profits. Such is the freedom of individualism.

But what if your freedom is my slavery, if your profit is my unpaid labour, if your luxury is my poverty? Is that freedom Yes, it is the freedom of the individual.

The individualist conception of freedom is a class based one. It works well as long as there are workers willing to pay the price for the liberty of the minority. The working class need a new conception of freedom, a social expression of freedom. This will be in the interest of not just the lucky few, but the entire population of society. The social expression of freedom is socialism. Socialists argue that freedom is not just an abstract notion providing a defence for oppression, but a political necessity arising out of class antagonisms which are caused by property society. The socialist view of freedom is not moral — for morality tends to be simply the defence of established social relations — but practical. We do not say that freedom is desirable, but that it will be inevitable if workers are to bring to an end the oppression which is the product of class society.

Capitalist ideology faces a profound dilemma. Its liberal philosophical origins incline it towards conceptions of liberty and democracy, but its structure causes the system to act against the freedom of the vast majority, the working class. The liberal capitalist’s utopia is the liberal State described by Mill and proposed by the Declaration of Independence, but in practice the State serves as the oppressor of the working class. This must be so for property to be defended and profits to be made. In America and Western Europe the workers have won the right to participate in their own oppression by their possession of the vote. This is a valuable weapon which could be used to win control of the State machine and abolish capitalism. But workers Should be under no liberal illusions: this limited freedom is ever-precarious while the owning class have the upper hand. Legal expressions of freedom are useful, as those who lack them know, but they are no substitute for social freedom itself.

Socialists do not stand for individual freedom. The “right” of the capitalist to exploit the workers is not in our interest and so we oppose it. We will not support campaigns for the “right” of parasites to send their children to better schools than the rest or the “right” of the indolent class to kill animals for entertainment. We want social freedom where there will be no classes, no government, no laws, no social discrimination on grounds of age, race or sex, and free access to all wealth.

Such social freedom implies democratic decision-making. That will not mean simply the act of mindlessly voting for a leader once every few years. It will mean the informed, intelligent, uncoerced organisation of social affairs in which the minority viewpoint will be given the same freedom of expression as that of the majority.

Under capitalism they tell people that they are free and it is because the majority are unfree that they believe it. Let there be no confusion in the minds of the working class about the extent of their freedom.

Ask yourself this simple question: if you refused to sell your mental or physical energies on the labour market for one month how much food would your free society give you to eat? The answer is that under capitalism you can starve to death for all your mythical freedom.

Steve Coleman

Cooking the Books: The King of Tariffs (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Trump often cites the “gilded age” of William McKinley, the late 19th-century president, who imposed tariffs at an average rate of 50 percent to protect the domestic farming sector from foreign competition’ (Times, 4 April).

Actually, it was the manufacturing sector that McKinley wanted to protect. When he was a congressman for Ohio he drew up the Tariff Act of 1890 that came to be known as the McKinley Tariff. Trump calls him the ‘Tariff King’, a crown he himself clearly wants to wear.

In 1888, with the campaign for tariffs in America in full swing, Engels published an English translation, with his introduction, of a talk on free trade that Marx had given in French in Brussels in 1848. Engels quoted Marx as saying (in chapter 31 of Capital) that historically protectionism had been ‘an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers’. In his talk Marx criticised free trade too but came out in favour of it because it would hasten the development of capitalism and so bring on the final confrontation between the working class and the capitalist class. As he put it:

‘The free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade’.

Engels’s introduction provided a useful historical survey of protectionism — including which sections of the propertied classes in different countries had benefited from it and which had not at various times — and some background on what led to the McKinley Tariff, but also made some points about the effect of tariffs on different sectors of capitalist business which are still relevant today.

One difference he mentioned was between those sectors which relied on imported materials and those which didn’t. Manufacturers who obtained within the country the materials to transform into what they sold welcomed a tariff on imports of their product as protecting them from outside competition. On the other hand, those manufacturers who relied on imported materials did not want a tariff on them as this would increase the cost of producing their product. Nor did importers want tariffs generally.

This was seen today in the immediate reaction to Trump’s 2 April ‘Liberation Day’ on Wall Street, where share prices reflect traders’ views on the future profit prospects of the quoted firms. Shares in Apple whose smartphones are manufactured in Asia fell by 9 percent and ‘Big multinational consumer groups were heavily in the red, reeling from tariffs on Asian production hubs. Nike slumped 14 per cent’.

Exporters are not keen on tariffs either as their products are likely to be targets of any retaliatory action taken by other countries. America doesn’t export much manufactured stuff (except weapons of war and pharmaceuticals). Apart from oil and gas, its main exports are agricultural products. Sure enough, this is what China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced two days later, were aimed at. ‘The latest measures are likely to have the most impact on US agricultural exports, including soya beans, wheat and corn’ (Financial Times, 4 April).

In short, not all its business sectors benefit when a country imposes tariffs. America today is no exception. Some capitalist businesses are in favour of Trump’s policy but some will be lobbying for exemptions, even campaigning against him. Not that there is any guarantee that his protectionism will succeed in ‘manufacturing manufacturers’ in America, or, rather, in raising them from the dead.

In any event, as Engels noted:

‘The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.’

McKinley was elected president in 1896 but was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901.

Studs Terkel (2008)

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Studs Terkel, a prolific American writer and broadcaster over several decades,  died at the end October at the age of 96. His style and approach is well illustrated by the sub-title of his 1975 book Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. Besides the subject of work, he dealt with leisure, family and education, culture and sub-culture. An article partly based on his writings appeared in the Socialist Standard for August 2003.

Some of Terkel’s nine thousand interviews — especially the broadcast ones — were with celebrities of various kinds. But his books were mainly about the life experiences of everyday men and women. He quoted these graphic words of an assembly-line worker: “I stand in one spot, about two or three feet area all night . . . it don’t stop. It just goes and goes. I bet there’s men who lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line.” Or again: “They give better care to that machine than they will to you . . . If that machine breaks down, there’s somebody out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I’m just pushed over to the other side till another man takes my place. The only thing they have on their mind is to keep that line running.”

Terkel also captured people’s memories of the Depression years and the Second World War. Again and again the themes of solidarity and sharing shine through amidst the destitution and suffering. A woman born in 1911 recalls the ’20s in a mining town in Illinois: “we’d go out picnics, we’d go out fishing, all families. Everything for the picnic. And then when you went to the picnic, there was no money exchanged, no commercial, everything like one big family. They’d cook a pot of mulligan stew and everybody’d share out of that. That was a picnic. Today you go on a picnic, what is it? It’s commercial. You buy your ticket, you buy your popcorn, you buy your beer. If you haven’t got a fistful of money, you haven’t got no picnic.”

As Oliver Sacks once said, “There is no one in the world who can listen like Studs Terkel.” Reading his books provides an unforgettable picture of working-class American life and shows that, contrary to what may sometimes appear, American workers are dissatisfied with their lot and more than prepared to fight for better times.

Blogger's Note:

A version of this article first appeared on the Socialism or Your Money blog in November 2008.

Black History (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Red and Black, Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, by Eugene D. Genovese, Allen Lane. The Penguin Press 5.00

This book is a compilation of some eighteen previously published essays by Professor Genovese and, like books of this nature, suffers a bit from disjointedness, even from an occasional contradiction. But it is not this in the book that really bothers us. It is, rather, the Genovese approach to the Marxian method of interpreting history. His opening chapter: On Being a Socialist and a Historian and his concluding essay: On Antonio Gramsci (head of the Communist Party in Italy in the early 1920s; arrested and imprisoned for the last eleven years of his life by Mussolini) should be read carefully as one sees, in starkness, the utter contempt or, at best, condescension of the self-appointed intellectual “Marxist” for the mental potentialities of ordinary working people. To Genovese, leadership—presumably of intellectuals — is certainly the most important factor in educating the working class to the urgencies of Socialism. He approves of Gramsci’s vision of the ideal party:

“A party justifies its historical existence when it develops three strata: (1) a rank-and-file of ordinary men whose participation is characterised by discipline and faith; (2) a leadership, which provides cohesion; and (3) cadres, which mediate morally, physically, and intellectually between the other two.”

Of these strata he stressed leadership:

“We speak of captains without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to find captains. It is surely true that an already existing army will be destroyed if it lacks captains, whereas a group of captains, co-operative and in agreement on common ends, will not be slow in forming an army where none exists.”

But this is not Marxism nor was it really new with either Gramsci or Lenin. It is the sort of theory which Marx and Engels consistently fought against throughout their careers. As far back as 1848, in their Communist Manifesto, they made clear that: “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” (Our emphasis). The Marxian case rests, indeed, on the theory that the ideas of man (not merely of leaders) are basically determined by the mode of production and that it is the business of working for wages for an owning class (not the preachments or captaincies of great men) that will cause workers to organise for Socialism.

The foregoing should not discourage the student of Socialism from obtaining the book (if he can afford it). There is much of interest to be gotten from the essays on the blacks in America notwithstanding the incredible misunderstanding of the Marxian method. Genovese, for example, sees American blacks as embracing “genuine ingredients of a separate nationality, even as they form part of a general American nationality … (and that) it is no longer possible to believe that a class can be understood apart from its culture, or that most modern classes can be understood apart from their nationality.” But what, after all, is a nationality? In the final analysis it is a group split into people with rival and conflicting interests. Even in the case of American blacks, where the percentage of capitalists is undoubtedly smaller than usual, the struggle between and within the classes is apparent. Black bourgeois pit themselves against one another as well as against the white bourgeoisie, and against the black (or white) workers they hire. Black workers, on the other hand, must also compete among themselves—as well as with white workers—for jobs.

It should also be pointed out that Genovese does a creditable job in showing the limitations of the economic determinists both of the non-Marxist and professed Marxist varieties. Creditable, that is, to the extent that he does not go overboard himself in an opposite direction. Certainly historians such as Charles and Mary Beard (who were not professedly Marxist) could be categorised as economic determinists and yet their analysis of the factors motivating the South to secede in 1860 was not as “narrowly defined” as he would have it. For the tariff did play a major role in antagonising the cotton planters who had an enormous stake in trade with England, Genovese and even Marx to the contrary notwithstanding. And the Homestead Law was certainly not in the interests of a ruling class that was based largely on latifundia-type labour, a wasteful sort of labour which, together with a one-crop economy, burned up land quickly and helped generate competition between North and South for frontier areas. The spread of homesteading certainly did offer a threat to the South.

Part of the problem of Professor Genovese seems to be his obvious lack of understanding of the basics of a capitalist system. Even his attempt to label the southern slave economy bears this out although he does correctly show that it was certainly not feudal, as so many professed Marxists maintain. Unfortunately, despite his grasp of the form feudalism, he declares that economy to be as different from capitalism as it was from feudalism. In fact the ante-bellum South had a system of plantation capitalism. True, the relationships were not [wage-labour and capital] but, rather, chattel-slave labour and capital (although there were many wage-slaves too). Nevertheless, unlike the classical systems of slavery and of serfdom, production was organised for sale on the market with view to profit. The production of cotton, tobacco, and (following the government’s ban on slave-importation) slaves themselves, was not carried on primarily for the use of the ruling class. A backward and inefficient type of capitalism, yes. But nevertheless capitalism.

Harry Morrison

(World Socialist Party of the United States)

Blogger's Note:

Not sure what happened but this review was a bit garbled in places and there were no corrections in a later issue of the Socialist Standard. It happens.

Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! (1932)

From the November 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Observer for June 26th gives an extract from their paper of a hundred years ago, which contains the following: —

“The expedition sent out by the American Government in 1820-21 to explore the Rocky Mountains has at length been heard of after an absence of eleven years.

While west of the mountains they fell in with a tribe called the Copper Indians, who receive their name from owning extensive copper mines ; 300 of them, armed with bows and copper darts, attacked the company in day time; a severe action ensued, and only about 30 of the Indians escaped ; the rest were killed or wounded, with a loss of two killed of the company.” (Italics ours.)

The Racial Problem: Conflict in the U.S.A. (1963)

From the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our comrades in North America are making most effective use of the radio in putting over the case for Socialism. They recently broadcast a talk over WBCN in Boston on the current racial disturbances in the United States. We believe that this on-the-spot Socialist analysis will be of interest to our readers and have pleasure in reproducing it below.

It took place in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands filled the streets, hundreds of Negroes were jailed. The police and firemen used water and vicious dogs on the marching men, women, and children who practiced, as they marched, the doctrine of non-violence. Then an agreement was reached by the Negro spokesmen and the committee of the “white power structure ” made up of a group of “white” civic and business leaders.

A week before, swarms of Negroes overwhelmed the police lines and swept through the downtown area, so state troopers were called in to reinforce the local police.

After Birmingham was quiet for a few days the “white” activists struck, They bombed houses in the dead of the night of May 10, also a motel where many of the Negro leaders were staying. The reaction was a renewed frenzied wave of emotion. Mobs roamed the streets smashing windows, overturning cabs and seeking revenge. The situation finally was subdued but not until President Kennedy sent some 3,000 Federal troops to the area and alerted the national guard.

Whether the situation in Birmingham, Alabama, breaks out anew or remains quiet, there still will be the large question that the events in that city are bringing into focus. Where is the racial problem in the United States heading?

Throughout these remarks, when we refer to Negroes, we have in mind the overwhelming majority—the exploited Negro workers. Their interests are basically as one with the workers everywhere. There is a small section of the negroes who are capitalists (some millionaires, but mostly petty capitalists) and these have a common interest with their fellow capitalists, regardless of colour, country or creed.

This is the fourth of a series and we welcome this opportunity to make our case known to you, our listeners. We have limited funds as we are supported only by our membership and sympathizers. However, we are expending our funds and our energies in this manner because we seek your attention and your support.

Capitalism is beset with all kinds of problems. Last week we focused our attention on war, and we would be pleased if those who listened would communicate with us so that we might know how you feel. Tonight we will deal with the Racial Problem.

We maintain that it is not enough to be informed. It is important to have a point of view. We cannot be indifferent to our fellows having segregation forced on them, treated like inferiors, denied equal opportunities, and worse. We maintain that prejudice is basically economic. There are more than twice as many Negro workers unemployed as there are so-called White workers out of work. The question of racial discrimination is rooted m economic prejudice.

Why are more Negroes unemployed? Why is there an unemployment problem? It is our thesis that unemployment is inexcusable. That the profitability of the capitalist arrangement is dependent on having unemployment, as well as on other factors. The employers need a reserve army of men and women out of work for two good reasons:

1. In order that those who are working will properly respect their jobs and fear the loss thereof, and
2. To keep wages in check.

Supply and demand would send the price of labour-power (wages) soaring if there were not millions of workers looking desperately for job openings. For the capitalists it is a good thing to have their workers hungry and apprehensive and not too independent. This, incidentally, is another illustration of the conflict of interests that separates society into classes.

What does the worker want? He wants employment . . . steady . . . at top pay.

What does the boss want? He wants a labour pool available in order to select his workers and at wages that are as low as possible. The more workers competing for each job, the lower will be the rate that the employer will have to pay.

And the thing that marks off our contemporary times is the wholesale introduction of automation. What does this do? It throws out of work and into the street those workers whose skills are displaced by these new monster machines. The expression in economic statistics is no longer unemployment, but—disemployment. In the steel industry alone hundreds of thousands are out of jobs and due to these new methods and machines they will never be recalled. These new processes in the mass production industries that displaced labour (which, of course, is the primary reason for their introduction) have now created a level of unemployment that has remained constant for many years. It will go higher, it cannot go lower.

Now it seems that we have strayed from our subject. Not so. As a matter of practice the first group to be affected by disemployment is the unskilled worker. As a matter of reality, the Negroes make up a large percentage of the unskilled population. And the viciousness of the circle becomes even more acute because the Negroes are the first and the worst affected. They are the first to be fired and the last to be hired.

Our contention is that capitalism breeds unemployment. Just as my colleague demonstrated last week that war is inevitable, given the relationship of rival, competitive nations, we maintain that racial discrimination can only be eliminated when we get rid of capitalism with its prejudice-breeding competition for jobs.

Let us spend a moment on the subject of racial prejudice. We might start by asking ourselves: What is “race "? Because of the factor of time we will content ourselves with making a few general observations on the question and immediately refer anyone who wants to explore thus subject further to our literature list in The Western Socialist. It might be of interest to those of our listeners who have never heard of the World Socialist Party that we are part of an international group of organizations that have in common a Declaration of Socialist Principles. There is besides our own party, the Socialist Parties of Canada. Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. One of the Principles which unite us is particular apropos at this time: . .  "The emancipation of the working-class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.”

So once again, what is “race”? Biologically, there is no such thing as race. If ever there was such a concept, modern investigation discloses that the mixing and mingling of the human animal homo sapiens, through the centuries and over the continents has completely sullied the purity of any grouping. The colour of a man's skin, the shape of his head, the thickness of his lips, the kinkiness of his hair, his height, his weight only proves how varied is Man. In Hawaii the mixing process of different groupings is in its infancy and already it is nigh impossible to identify any individual. In Brazil the Indians and the Europeans and the Negroes are so fused that there is no Indian problem. Nor is there a European problem or a Negro problem. In the United States where chattel slavery existed until 1865, the Negroes were imprisoned in one sector of the country. Upon their legal release at the end of the Civil War and all the way up until the events in Birmingham, they have still remained imprisoned by economic shackles. This may be a good time to define slavery.

It was Shakespeare who wrote: “He who owns the means by which I live, owns my very life.” The southern Negro escaped from chattel slavery into wage slavery. Under the former he worked for a master from sun-up until sun-down and in return he received his grub, hand-me-down rags and a roof over his head. Under the wages system, the worker toils by the clock for a boss in return for which he gets an amount of money, which barely enables him to buy food, clothing and shelter to maintain himself and his family, so that he can go back to repeat the -process. Most workers will resent the description of their lot as slavery. And we answer that none are so blind as those who will not see. This is not the time for too much elaboration but suffice it to say that the government statistics support this description. Average wages of the industrial workers faithfully match the cost of living index.

Following the Civil War some Negroes came North looking for freedom and opportunity. However, with few exceptions, most were herded into ghettos— Harlems and South Ends—and in the competition for the available jobs, they were always the scapegoats. They were forced to accept menial work as servants, as elevator operators, dishwashers and worse.

Today the situation is aggravated by events taking place elsewhere. The world is in turmoil. The drive to exploit every possibility on the part if imperialist nations finally has caused Africa to explode. What formerly was anti-colonialism now is a demand for independence. The Negroes now constituting approximately 10 per cent, of the population in the United States are showing signs of being fed up with being pushed around. They are still segregated, not only down South where the vestiges of the past persist, but in the North as well. And they resent it. The Negroes are segregated but they are not ex-communicated. They listen to TV and read newspapers. Every channel of communication flashes the injustice of their lot. Some turn to extremes such as the Black Muslim movement. Others are influenced by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and many other groups. It is the Socialist analysis that to get rid of so-called race prejudice there is only one method, to get rid of its cause, capitalism. There is no other way.

Previously we related the fact of unemployment and tied it in with competition for jobs breeding prejudice. How do the current political leaders deal with this7 Their approach is tragically ludicrous. How do they propose to reduce unemployment? By reducing taxes! With the reasoning that this will give the economy a shot in the arm, stimulate business and, lo and behold!, unemployment will be lessened This is like throwing the tide back by using a bucket.

The alternative that we propose is Socialism. Under Socialism the causes of race-prejudice will no longer exist. The entire population will co-operate in producing all the things required by society. Each person will contribute, irrespective of differences, what he is able to society—and will take from society what he needs. Under Socialism competition between human beings will cease to exist. Privilege will be abolished. People will live in harmony.

This is one of the few opportunities we have to underscore an important element in the Socialist case. Usually we get involved in answering away so many misconceptions about Socialism that we fail to bring home the fact that we stand for world co-operation—common ownership and democratic control. And in the language of every Socialist the expression Comrade is used, not in the derisive sense it has come to mean due to the distortion of our ideas when seen through the caricature in the U.S.S.R., but is a manner of addressing our brothers, joined in the greatest job in the world today, the job of educating and organizing for a Socialist world.

Brains and money (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

A most persistent myth that enjoys widespread belief in modern times is the fable about wealth being the result of brainpower—the brainpower of those who possess wealth. “It takes brains to make money,” we are told again and again. If we point to that considerable percentage of the super-capitalist class—a, majority, in fact—whose wealth is inherited, there is the immediate response: “Well, so their fathers or grandfathers had the brains. And they have to know how to handle the fortunes, too, or they can lose them."

Well, it isn't easy to argue with that because it does take a certain type of brains to found and maintain a financial empire. A reading of American history makes this apparent. The Morgans, the Mellons, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and Fricks, the Fords, the DuPonts and the rest of the super-rich Americans did have the sort of brains one finds in the Jungle among predatory animals. They were pitiless as they clawed their way to success, with little mercy for the workers and their families whom they used (“employed,” is the word in general usage) to produce their wealth and just as little compassion for one another in their mad competition to sell one another short.

But we must admit the analogy is not altogether fitting. The predatory lower animals, we understand, do not usually devour their own particular species, nor do they seek to store up endless caches of dead carcasses. On the other hand, the two-legged predator has had, and still maintains, institutions that surround his depredations with the aura of respectability, even holiness. He has his charitable foundations and his churches, upon which he bestows vast sums and which reciprocate by saving him on his taxes, keeping his name before the public, and generally singing his praises. They function as pillars of his empire.

Well, we are often told, that might be true of some of the capitalists but it doesn’t fit the majority, it doesn’t affect the proposition that it still takes talent to make money. And of course brains and abilities are invaluable assets. But the industries and institutions of capitalism today are not generally operated by members of the capitalist class. Rare, indeed, is it to find a capitalist in modern times who even knows where his industries are, leave alone have anything to do with operating them. Can one imagine a Rockefeller or a J. Paul Getty concerning himself with the actual details of running his far-flung financial and industrial institutions? They are no doubt busy most of the time with their travels, their political manipulations and their society events. They may conceivably consult, from time to time, with some of their executives. But even allowing for acumen in their own right they would have to be supermen, indeed, to have the time and talents needed to operate the industries of these times. And that is precisely why they endow the prestigious business schools throughout the nation. They pay to train, and then hire the required brains. As a class, the capitalists of our times are completely superfluous and parasitic. They could all be transported to the moon, never to return, without noticeable effect to the total economy, not even to their stock exchanges for they, too, are operated from top to bottom by hirelings.

What does it take to make money today? Brains and talent, certainly, but not one's own brains and talents. One needs capital. How does one get capital? In various ways: by inheriting it, by luck at the racetrack or lottery, by robbery (but don’t get caught!). Far better to pick the right parents. We wouldn't necessarily agree with the great French novelist Balzac who argued that behind every fortune is a crime. But we do agree with Marx who exposed primitive accumulation as forcible, brutal, even murderous expropriation of the majority and the creation of a propertyless working class. But the secret to riches in modern times is: by hook or by crook, hire the brains to make it for you.

Background to Civil Rights in America (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great many—if not most—people make a practice of judging shop merchandise by the display in the window. A policy such as this often leads to confusion, if not error. Much the same might be said for many of those who would analyze the civil rights struggle in America. They concentrate upon the propaganda and personal utterances of spokesmen involved in the struggle and gain an image of the causes, thereby, that is inaccurate to some extent and generally confusing. Slogans such as “Equality”, "Justice”, “Freedom ”, etc. are important in generating enthusiasm among the rank and file membership; they constitute the window display. But if one is to understand the problem it is necessary to get behind the slogans and examine American capitalism and its basic needs. Since the Supreme Court of the United States is a top agency of American capitalism, no better research can be recommended than an examination of their edicts over the years.

The Dred Scott Decision.

Every American school child has been made acquainted with the basic details — if not the underlying significance — of the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s court declared, 5 to 3, that Scott could not be a citizen because he was a Negro and that he was not freed from his original slave status merely because he had twice established residence on soil that was guaranteed free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Whatever the attitude today towards the “morality”, “justice”' and "mercy” of the Supreme Court of 1857, one can be certain that it reflected the prevailing opinions of their time. But more important, they reflected the needs of American capitalism. Southern plantation capitalism was still an important—even if a rapidly deteriorating—part of the United States economy and plantation capitalism operated on a foundation of chattel-slave labour. Chief Justice Taney and his Court were not about to endanger the sanctity of private property nor is it likely that many, aside from an Abolitionist minority, regarded the justices as black-hearted scoundrels.

Even in the North, feeling against the institution of chattel-slavery in the Southern states was not widespread and the Abolitionists were not by any means popular. But they carried on their activities. In Boston, for example, they soap-boxed on the Charles St. mall of Boston Common and they placed posters in Negro neighbourhoods warning the coloured people against conversing with white strangers lest they divulge information that could lead to the capture of runaway slaves. It took the secession of the Southern states from the Union to bring on the Civil War and to end the legal system of chattel-slavery.

“Separate But Equal”

By 1896 American capitalism generally, and Southern capitalism in particular, had new problems. In the North, industry had grown rapidly under the command of the “ malefactors of great wealth ’’—Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. —There was area enough, what with the developing frontier, and wage-labour enough with the deluge of poverty-stricken immigrants, to obviate the need for expansion into the deep South. So the South remained largely a region of small scale, low wage, capitalism. Southern white capitalists had found it advantageous to foster a myth of white superiority and a policy of white supremacy. By keeping Negro labour power generally well below minimum subsistence standards, white labour power was stabilized at a level high enough to satisfy a type of ego that is happy to be “better off" than others, even if considerably below national averages.

The Supreme Court, while not necessarily Southern in sympathy, could reflect the attitudes of American capitalism, generally, and still deliver a verdict on Negro rights consistent with the demands of Southern capitalism of the time. So in 1896 the Supreme Court decided that the State of Louisiana was not in violation of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution when it introduced segregation of Negroes in railway passenger cars. Again in 1908 the “nine old men" decreed that it was entirely constitutional for the State of Maryland to set up segregation in schools. So legalized segregation (“separate but equal") became perfectly natural, normal, moral, and the height of justice in the South and everybody, including such revered Negro leaders as Booker T. Washington, seemed happy at the new development in American democracy. . .

". . . With all Deliberate Speed.”

until 1954, when an entirely new set of circumstances—developed over a period of years and accelerated since the end of World War II—became reflected in a new and opposite Supreme Court decision. In fact, the decision on desegregation in 1954 placed a legal stamp upon a movement that erupted in the wake of a rapidly developing industrialization of the Southland. It is one thing to compel Negroes to take a back seat and refrain from “contaminating” the white man's schools and his pools when the region is pretty much a sleepy backwater. It is quite another problem, however, to segregate the coloured population—particularly the small section with higher educational qualifications and incomes on a par or higher than the vaunted “American standard ”. As big Northern industry moved into the South and as the South became a part of the 20th. century the pressure for “equal rights” under the Constitution reached boiling point and in many instances the lid was blown off in demonstrations, sit-ins, and riots in major cities both South and North.

Not only had it become evident that the “separate’’ Negro facilities, schools, etc. were far from equal, indeed decidedly inferior; it had also become evident to the Supreme Court that the very concept of separateness denotes inferiority and constitutes a violation of the 14th. Amendment, Melville W. Fuller and his Supreme Court of 1896 and 1908 notwithstanding.

But why had the Negro movement reached its present dimensions as late as the mid years of the 20th. century ? Why not in 1900, or in 1920, or 1940? There are those who might infer that Chief Justice Earl Warren's Supreme Court is composed of men of higher moral calibre that the courts of Roger Taney and Melville Fuller. Or perhaps, even, that the moral qualities of the nation are higher today than in 1857 or 1908. Even if we accept that this is true, the question remains; why this should be so at this particular time; All evidence points in one direction. Segregation, except in special instances, is not in the interests of American capitalism today on either the domestic scene or, especially, the international arena. The rapid appearance since World War II of a number of new nations populated and ruled by coloured people has doubtless influenced the conversion of an ardent segregationist such as Lyndon B. Johnson into an outspoken champion of Negro civil rights. And only the more backward states of the Old Confederacy refused to go along with him in November, 1964. For Mr Johnson today represents the interests of the total national capitalist class of America and segregation has now become a positive menace to those interests.

Civil Rights and Emancipation.

Despite the continuing opposition to the Civil Rights Law enacted by Congress in 1964, in parts of the South there seems to be a general compliance. It is but a matter of time until only the most dominant of all discriminations—between workers and capitalists—will remain.

There is no denying the heroism displayed by rank and file Negro and white workers — even children — against fearsome odds. From the “sympathetic” liberals who would have them not ask too much too quickly, from the bigoted and dangerous Birch Society members, Ku Klux Klansmen, and even from Southern “law and order", those who struggle for civil rights find a great many cards stacked against them. But the civil rights groups, themselves, are in a sense reactionary. They organize—for the most part—on the basis of loyalty to America and they demand for Negro workers nothing more than the opportunity to compete equally in the sale of labour-power. They cater to the myth of racialism even to the extent of building an image of a glorious history in Africa. They encourage and foster religious practice among their following. In short, they balance their militancy with the sheeplike propaganda so important to capitalism, and they hide the greater struggle, in which workers of all colours are brothers.

Harry Morrison

(Boston, Mass.).

‘‘America’s 15,000,000 negroes are its single most under developed human resource, and they cannot reach their full potential usefulness until they are thoroughly integrated with the white population. . . . Only when negro and white families can live together as neighbours, when negro children and white children can play together, study together, go to the same church —only then will the negro grow up properly prepared for his place in the world of work."

The Manchester Guardian, (15.5.56).

Machines and Hell in the US (2022)

Book Review from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

E. Sylvia Pankhurst: A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change. (Edited by Katherine Connelly) Pluto Press £16.99.

Sylvia Pankhurst visited the US in 1911 and 1912, each trip lasting about three months; the first included a few days in Canada. She wrote an account of her visits, but it was not finished or published. Here Katherine Connelly provides a timeline, an extensive general introduction and short introductions to each chapter of the original text; she also supplied the title.

The visits were undertaken partly for financial reasons, but also to spread suffrage ideas in the US, where in only five states did any women have the right to vote by 1912. Pankhurst spoke to many suffrage organisations, but her write-up is more concerned with the social situation: the lives of working women, prison conditions, racism, and so on. In New York she observed that bad pay and conditions, such as a seventy-hour week, were not just applicable to immigrants but to all women workers. In a laundry the workers ‘moved as though they were part of the machinery’. A factory in Nashville ‘might well serve as a representation of Hell’, such was the noise and dust. Prison conditions were appalling, with a ‘dehumanising atmosphere’.

The visit to Nashville was a deliberate choice to study the situation in the American South and Pankhurst specifically chose to speak to a black audience. This was because many suffrage organisations marginalised or excluded black women activists, and some campaigners even argued that giving white women the vote would restrict the influence of black voters.

In 1912 Pankhurst also spent several days in Milwaukee, where a supposedly Socialist local council had been elected. The mayor, Emil Seidel, was the vice-presidential candidate when Eugene Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party of America ticket that year. She acknowledged that the council had achieved relatively little and that women’s needs had been overlooked. Such a ‘top-down’ approach to policy was not appropriate, and this may well have influenced her views back in the UK, when she rejected the authoritarian attitudes of her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel, and set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which linked the suffrage struggle to trade union activities.

For socialists the most interesting part of Sylvia Pankhurst’s career came a decade later, when she rejected Bolshevism and stood for ‘the total abolition of money, buying and selling, and the wages system’ (see our pamphlet Sylvia Pankhurst and Socialism). This volume, however, provides a useful and informative look at her earlier views and the political situation in the US.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Big Deal! (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Boris Johnson announced the bringing forward of a modest package of public works, he remarked that,  ‘it sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a New Deal. All I can say is that if so that is how it is meant to sound to be’ (Times, 30 June). He was referring to the policies pursued by the Roosevelt administration in America in the 1930s.

When Roosevelt assumed office as President in 1933 the US was confronted with an unprecedented economic crisis – a huge fall in output, mass unemployment, a frozen financial system. To try to deal with this, his administration adopted a programme of public works (for which he is remembered) and of restricting production until stocks cleared (which is not remembered, but which is essential before capitalism can recover from a slump).

Re-elected in 1936, he expanded the public works programme. Capitalist production recovered to some extent but in 1937-38 there was another recession. As for unemployment:

‘When Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, the unemployment rate was 16.9 per cent, almost twice what it had been in 1930. (…) When Roosevelt ran for the unprecedented third term [in 1940], unemployment was 14.6 per cent.’ (LINK).

No wonder a Times sub-editor, in a note explaining Roosevelt’s New Deal to readers who might not have been familiar with it, wrote:

 ‘The extent to which it helped the US economy to recover from a deflationary recession remains a matter of debate. Some argue that FDR, as the president was known, did not spend enough and that it was the Second World War that finally put the US economy back on track as government spending soared.’

The ‘some’ referred to who wanted FDR to spend more are left-wing reformists, and currency cranks, who do not understand how capitalism works. The Roosevelt administration could in theory have spent more on putting people to work on infrastructure projects but this would have had to have been at the expense of private capitalist investment, a fall in which would have had the opposite effect of more unemployment. But it is true that mass unemployment in the US only ended when the government mobilised resources to fight a war.

The New Deal was opposed by some sections of the capitalist class who regarded it, as Johnson’s hero Churchill put it in an appeal to Roosevelt in 1937, ‘this war on wealth and business, this war on private enterprise’ (quoted in the Guardian, 29 June). Most capitalists, however, were more level-headed. Roosevelt himself was reported as having said, in May 1935, that ‘I want to save our system, the capitalistic system.’

By capitalism he meant private capitalism as production for profit by private capitalist enterprises. This survived as the dominant form of capitalism in the US. It was never really in need of ‘saving’. Nor was capitalism in its more accurate sense of production for profit on the basis of wage-labour, since those Roosevelt wanted to save private capitalism from – the fascists who wanted America to emulate Hitler’s Germany and the ‘communists’ who wanted it to emulate Stalin’s Russia – were merely advocating alternative ways of operating this.