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.

Some publications. (1906)

From the October 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the second of the two sixpenny parts in which Messrs. Watts are issuing Professor Haeckel’s “The Evolution of Man.” This is an even more remarkably cheap production than the first, as it covers 192 pages, contains 199 illustrations, and is furnished with an index and a new portrait of the author. The two parts can now be obtained in one well-bound cloth volume at 2/- net.

Also in “Cheap Reprint” form, Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man,” edited by Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner, and “Religions Persecution : A Study in Political Psychology,” by E. S. P.

Messrs. Watts & Co.. the publishers, inform us they are issuing in the same form “The New Scientific System of Morality,” by G. Gore. F.R.S., and “The Cultivation of Man,” by C. A. Witchell.

Historic error (1998)

Book Reviews from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historical Dictionary of Socialism. By James C. Docherty, Scarecrow Press, 1997.

This book follows academic convention by saying that socialism defies precise definition and then proceeds to give emphasis to the policies and actions of Labour, Social-Democratic and “Socialist” organisations and individuals around the world. One result of this viewpoint is that Blair, Anthony Charles Lynton (1953- ) gets over twice as much space as Morris, William (1834-1896).

A common thread uniting many of the self-styled “Socialist” organisations has been a defence of the welfare state, although as Docherty points out the idea can be traced back to Thomas Paine who suggested comprehensive welfare benefits to combat poverty in Rights of Man (1791). But the welfare state has also been pursued by non-Socialists and anti-Socialists. For example, in late nineteenth century Germany, Bismarck introduced a number of welfare measures, such as unemployment insurance, in the belief that he was fighting socialism.

In Britain the Liberal Party was the first to establish the principles of the welfare state in the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 (based on the German model) and then in subsequent legislation, and it was the Liberal MP William Beveridge whose Report in 1942 coined the phrase “welfare state”. And now in Britain we have the spectacle of Tories leaping to the defence of the welfare state against Labour government cuts in spending. Confused? Well, if you take the viewpoint that socialism is what “Socialists” do, then you should be.

Docherty claims that Marx’s labour theory of value “was used to justify the argument that labour should be paid more than simply a subsistence wage.” Marx did indeed argue that workers should get more than a subsistence, but not a wage. His whole point was that the wages system (including salaries, employees and employers, workers and bosses) was the means whereby we are legally robbed of what we produce. This leaves many begging for crumbs off the rich man’s table via the welfare state.

Socialism, as originally used by the followers of Robert Owen in the 1820s and later made famous by Marx , will be a system of society where production takes place directly for human needs. This is still the only sensible way of understanding socialism, and not the Alice in Wonderland world where words mean whatever anyone says they mean.

Lew Higgins

Notes By The Way: Acton by-election (1944)

The Notes By The Way column from the January 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Acton by-election

The recent by-election at Acton, London, provided some piquant details to liven up our somewhat depressing war days.

Eight candidates started. The Government candidate was a golf champion (amateur—of course).

One "Independent” told reporters that he was “fighting for more potatoes and nurses for old-age pensioners." He walked about Acton wearing a tin-hat on which he balanced a box bearing his slogans ("Star," 24/11/43). Another Independent Liberal withdrew "so as not to split the I.L.P. vote," showing that he has no illusions about the Liberal, non-Socialist, I.L.P. The cream of the joke, as usual, was supplied by the Communist Party. According to the Press, the C.P. advised Acton electors NOT to vote at all—for any of the four candidates—on the grounds that the Government nominee supported the release of Sir Oswald Mosley. It is a bit awkward—after all—when you’ve been shouting your head off in Trafalgar Square the week before for the imprisonment of Mosley to urge workers to vote for a candidate who favours his release. But if you oppose, or abstain from voting for the Government candidate, you are NOT supporting the war —or the Government.

A classic example of the inevitable results of unprincipled compromise. The C.P., "using Churchill"-(? !), having in twenty-three years advised the workers to vote for each other party in turn. Labour, I.L.P., Liberal, then Conservative, and finally, Coalition, has "united” itself into nothing. It now advises workers not to vote for anybody, and has no intention of running its own candidate.

Its history might well be entitled "Unity Through Everybody—to Nowhere." Small wonder that the "Evening News,” quite unintentionally, probably sub-consciously, when giving the list of guests at a Labour M.P.'s wedding recently, placed, after Tommy Trinder, Bud Flanagan and Miss Evelyn Laye—Mr. William Gallacher, M.P.

The Socialist Party also advises electors NOT to vote for any of the candidates. They are ALL (including the I.L.P,) anti-socialist. But only until such time as the Socialist Party has sufficient support to run socialist candidates.

Beveridge Be-bunked

"1794 AND ALL THAT."

In October, 1943, the Glasgow Fabian Society held a Conference on Full Employment.

At: this meeting Sir P. J. Dollan stated that —

  "Full employment is not a new issue. Tom Paine suggested that there should be full employment in 1794. There is nothing in the Beveridge Report, except the amounts. which was not foreshadowed by Tom Paine in "The Rights of Man.” ("Forward," October 30, 1943.) 

Which is just what the Socialist Party proves in its new pamphlet, "Beveridge Reorganises Poverty."

The difference between the Fabian Society, Labour Party, I.L.P., Communists, Sir Patrick Dollan, etc., and the S.P.G.B., is that the Socialist Party concludes that— .

  "The Beveridge proposals will not solve the problem of the working class. They will level the workers' position as a whole, reducing the more favourably placed to a lower level and putting the worst paid on a less evil level. This is not a 'new world' of hope, but a re-distribution of misery.” (Page 20.) 

  The outstanding social problem of the age is "the poverty of the working class, and not just the additional burdens borne in times of unemployment, old age and sickness, burdens which incidentally Beveridge does little to lift. The poverty of the working class is due to the private ownership by the capitalists of the means of production and distribution. Socialism alone can end that poverty.” (Page 20.)

The social reformers urge the workers to continue chasing the will o' the wisps which have been suggested since 1794, with various amounts, without appreciable result.

This little pamphlet will go far towards de-bunking the Beveridge and other "Plans" as solutions of the poverty problem of the workers.

("Beveridge Reorganises Poverty" is obtainable from S.P.G.B., Rugby Chambers, 2, Rugby Street, W.C.1. Price 3d. Post free 4d.)

Kindersley Lawsuit

Dublin High Court has recently considered an action by Lord Kindersley to direct Lady Aronmore to deliver his grand son Gay to him, so that said offspring may attend Eton.

We wonder if the noble Lord, whose appeals to the rather more modest mass of the people of Britain to go without things they need and invest the money in War Savings ("Give till it hurts"), would be very deeply hurt if it were suggested that he might have saved all those heavy lawyers' and school fees—and put them in his own War Savings!

Or can't a Kindersley attend a Council School?

See Naples—and Die!

The "Evening Standard” for Wednesday, November 3. reports that the Allied Military Authorities evacuated the whole population of Naples, four hundred thousand of them, before they turned the electric current on, as they feared mines connected to the circuit.

"These were Naples’ poorest folk, the little shopkeepers, labourers, factory hands, fishermen and their families," and —here’s the point—"among them were old folk to whom, after years in dingy lanes, Naples’ superb harbour was almost n discovery.” (Our italics.)

In other words, thousunds of people in Naples are so poor—that is, are so pre-occupied with scraping an existence in Naples' slums—that they did not even KNOW' they lived in one of the world’s most beautiful harbours.

The beauty is reserved for those who can AFFORD it. Poverty is the mortal enemy of leisure—which is. the prerequisite for the appreciation of beauty.

A magnificent social vista extends before the eyes of those workers who raise themselves out of the mental slums and trudge the heights of socialist knowledge. By their own efforts they can apprehend, "see" Socialism—and LIVE.

The "Independent” Trader

Mr. Lynch, the President of the National Union of Small Shopkeepers, has sent Mr. Bevin a telegram “pointing out that 100,000 traders have had their businesses closed down during the war.” The telegram states “that traders over forty . . . have been told to sell their concerns and go down the pit.”—(“News Chronicle,” November 4.)

Mr. Lynch might have saved himself the telegraph charges. One of the effects of modern war is the acceleration of the process of the Concentration of Capital. Commerce as well as Industry is being trustified. It has become well-nigh impossible for any appreciable number of working men to achieve “independence” from employers by opening a small shop.

What this “independence” is worth, when obtained, the Hardships Tribunals (representatives of the capitalist class), who instructed small traders to “sell up and go down the pit” have shown.

Nothing can prevent the small traders from being always on the verge of "going down the pit” into the ranks of the wage-working class. Socialism—not small shops—is the way.


Crime After the War

The London evening press has published official reports of important conferences being held now by London police to make plans to deal with the wave of violent crime which is confidently anticipated after the war.

And surely, alongside the other post-war plans to consolidate Capitalism, with the Beveridge Report and the new Plan of London—Scotland Yard's Post-War Reconstruction deserves an important place.

What the police chiefs are mainly concerned with, quite naturally, is the advent of thousands of unemployed desperate men, some even perhaps in possession of arms, highly trained in all the most effective means of violent assault and killing, and inured to bloody violence.

A leading article in the Atlantion, the Atlanta Penitentiary convicts' paper, quotes Lord Wavell:

  "Field-Marshal Wavell is said to have described the modern soldier in these terms—a good soldier must be part burglar, part footpad, part athlete, part gunman, and all guts.”
  "If this is on the level, General Eisenhower is overlooking a lot of good material—and we don't mean at Harvard either.” (The Star, quoted in Forward, 16th October, 1943.)

His commanding officer claimed that Ruby Sparkes was the best soldier in his company.

The London police chiefs are probably right. Alongside of Unemployment, Disease, Invalids, Poverty and Prostitution there will probably appear their bed-fellow—Violent Crimes. Whatever they plan may catch criminals—but will not abolish the cause which makes them—Capitalism.


1,250 Cigars for Cairo Talks

  "Five hundred native servants were engaged to assist five officers and 17 other ranks of the British Army in catering for the delegates attending the Cairo conferences.

  “Three hundred lb. of tea, 37,500 eggs, 400 lb. of coffee, 7,500 lb. of bread, 500,000 cigarettes, 1,250 cigars and 2,000 tins of milk were ordered for the conference by the supervising officer, Major N. P. Jeffery, of the Army Catering Corps, who was in charge of catering services for the Eighth Army in the Western Desert. 

  “A.T.S. sergeants and corporals were brought from all parts of the Middle East to act as housekeepers for the delegations. One A.T.S. sergeant had a full-time job as personal attendant to Mine. Chiang Kai-shek.”—(“Evening Standard,” December 8, 1943.)

The banquet at Cairo was, however, exceeded by the colossal spread at Teheran, where Stalin, as usual, drank over twenty toasts in rare wines.

Well! It seems to be a pretty good instalment of “freedom from want,” if you happen to be one of the “chiefs.”


Austerity at Home

The ”News Chronicle” (December 11, 1943) reported a sale at Christie's on December 13 of fine wines, spirits and liqueurs from the Kentish home of the Countess of Limerick who died some months ago. “Among the top prices were £46 for a dozen bottles of champagne, £60 for a dozen bottles of brandy, and £48 for twelve bottles of German wine.”

“A box of 92 Corona cigars went for £39, or over 8s. each.”

Probably over-paid miners, of course, who don't know what to do with the high wages they're not used to!


Destruction Unlimited

Recently the Press has made much of the accounts by an R.A.F. pilot of the destruction of the Ruhr dams. He describes how a scientist instructed him for months—scientific experiments were made on a dam due for destruction in the Midlands. A picked team trained incessantly to fly at exactly the right height—to ensure complete demolition.

When the dams were burst the damage by flooding was colossal. Millions went down the drain.

Again, as the Allied forces pressed on into Italy the Germans decided to open the flood-gates and flood the Pontine marshes, the reclamation of which (by draining) was claimed as a major triumph of Fascism. In this case the military reason was the opposite one—defence, not attack.

Again the destruction of wealth was incalculable. In a further case, the mighty Dnieper dam, in the Ukraine, was blown up by the Russians themselves to prevent its use by the Germans. The Dnieper dam was the crowning achievement of the Soviet Government; its loss, immense.

In all these cases we see one thing clearly apparent— the destruction of what man has toiled to create by war is staggering. Why is this? The Socialist Party, learning, from Marx, pointed out years ago that Capitalism is in the daft and senile stage now.

Productivity of labour has now become so great that man can harness the rivers to his purpose.

But so long as these great works are privately owned (as they are under Capitalism, even if State controlled) their very ability to increase the supply of wealth becomes the cause of wars, for the shrinking market.

The war solves the crisis, for the time being only, by destruction.

After having converted swamps into fertile lands, or diverted rivers to assist navigation, man blows them all up, so as to start all over again.

In the same way as he digs gold out of the earth, under Capitalism, to put it down there again.

So long as humanity is divided into warring cliques (inevitable under Capitalism) we shall never get much further than making wonderful things, and blowing 'em up.

Socialism, by making the great achievements of modern engineering science the common property of all, will abolish war and the senseless destruction of what should be great boons to humanity, because crises will go with capitalist production.

Horatio.

Lights of Other Days. (1920)

Book Review from the April 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pioneers of Land Reform, with an introduction by M. Beer, author of "A History of British Socialism." London: Bell & Sons, Ltd. Bohn's Popular Library. Social Economic Section.

The above work comprises three essays; the first, "The Real Rights of Man," by Thomas Spence, published in 1793; the second, "An Essay on the Right of Property in Land," by William Ogilvie, 1789; the third: "Agrarian Justice," Thomas Paine, 1795-6.

Messrs Bell are to be complimented on the tasteful manner in which they have presented these three essays to the public interested in social studies. The volume is a handy size, artistically bound, with clear type on a good paper, and is sold at a reasonable price—a combination not often achieved in the publishing world to-day.

The essays themselves are well worth preserving if only because they exhibit the social problem as it appeared to men of intelligence and sincerity before modern Socialism exposed the real nature of capitalism and revealed the futility of reform.

It was natural that men should see injustice in the extensive ownership of land before they observed the same injustice in the ownership of machines, mills, and other instruments of production. On page 6 Spence says : "It is plain that the land or earth, in any country or neighbourhood, with everything in or on the same, or pertaining thereto, belongs at all times to the living inhabitants of the said country or neighbourhood in an equal manner."

In his day capitalist industry had already reached the stage where, through division of labour, there were nearly always more workers on the labour market than were required in manufacture, the result being, as now, competition for jobs, which kept wages low. In addition, however, the assizes had the power to fix wages, so that, even when there was a demand for workers, wages could not rise above subsistence level.

These early fruits of the capitalist system— unemployment, low wages, and a general wretchedness of condition of the working class —were viewed by the "pioneers" from the standpoint of the prevailing notions of private property. Private property in land, or the means of wealth production, had, up till that time, not been questioned or challenged. The scientific age had only just begun. The stage where men analyse and sift the symptoms from the essentials, and discovering the cause of abnormal conditions to be fundamental, prescribe fundamental changes, had not been reached. Science was in its teens, feeling its way toward maturity. And social science was the most backward of all, because men do not begin to investigate the basis of their relations with one another until scientific methods in other spheres have demonstrated the necessity for its application.

Spence and Ogilvie wrote when men still living could remember the later enclosures of land that followed the break-up of the Feudal system. They actually lived in the period often described as that of the industrial revolution— the second half of the eighteenth century— when machine industry had its birth. Thus their ideas naturally reverted to the conditions that had so recently been swept away. They asserted that only by laws which would give to every man the right to occupy land sufficient for his requirements could poverty be abolished. Ogilvie's essay on "The Rights of Property in Land" is an exhaustive and detailed plan for giving every man this privilege. Subsequent history has shown that such a plan would have been futile. large capital outlay is just as necessary in agriculture to-day as in manufacture. The man who can neither buy nor hire machinery is a slave to the soil. The first bad harvest flings him into the grip of the moneylenders; and if he is lucky, after long days of drudgery and nights of anxiety he may be able to -pay the interest and live as well as the artisan.

In most European countries a far greater proportion of the workers have been peasant-proprietors than in England, but it has not saved them from the poverty and wretchedness incidental to capitalism everywhere. The small holder cannot hope to compete with the big capitalists ; their position becomes more precarious and their condition more wretched with every advance in machinery and large-scale production.

Tom Paine and Thomas Spence were something more than "pioneers of land reform." Paine is much better known for his splendid efforts against dogma and superstition. Spence was a leader in all working-class movements of his day against capitalist oppression. ''He took part in all revolutionary movements, and was twice imprisoned, for altogether seventeen months," says Mr. Beer. In their day private ownership of land appeared to be the cause of poverty, because the worker had no means of living except by submitting to the manufacturers' conditions, In our day agriculture is not to be distinguished from any other subject of capitalist enterprise. Every industry has been capitalised, and is under the control of capitalists. The next step is the socialisation of industries and their control by the people.

F. Foan

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

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