*Why Communists Do Not Celebrate The Fourth Of July- A Guest Commentary
Markin comment
To answer the question posed by my headline to this entry here is the guest commentary that will more than detail the reasons that while we respect and learn from the lessons of the American revolution we do not celebrate the holiday associated with that revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 942
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11 September 2009
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Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism
Part One
We print below, in slightly edited form, a presentation by Jacob
Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008, the first
of several classes on black history and the development of the American labor
movement.
This is not going to be a history class of everything that happened
from 1492 to 1860; the material is too immense. I want to focus on the salient
political points for this period, and also to try to set up the next class, on
the Civil War. We are historical materialists, and as such we say that black
oppression—and we say this often in WV—is not just a bunch of bad ideas
but has a material, that is to say, a historical and class, basis. What I want
to do in the class is explain the origins of this material basis. In the second
class and in subsequent classes, this will be developed further. These are the
three things I specifically want to drive home:
1. How slavery in the Americas was central to the development of
capitalism, both on an international level and also here in the United
States.
2. How elements of the contemporary black question, including the
very concept of race, have their roots in the system of slavery.
3. How throughout every step of the development of the United
States up through 1860 slavery was integral, from the colonial period, through
the American war of independence, to the Constitution, and then culminating in
the struggle that led up to the Civil War.
Marx and Primitive Capitalist Accumulation
I want to begin with what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of
capital, which was discussed in one of the readings for this class, in the first
volume of Capital. Marx has a very powerful quote in there: “In actual
history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly
force, play the great part.” And that’s kind of a summary of what I’m going to
be talking about: enslavement, robbery and murder.
I’m not going to go over much of the European background, although
it’s worth reviewing our pamphlet, Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins
of Marxism (1998), and also some of the articles we’ve written on the
English Civil War, in addition to the Capital reading. Marx talks about
the bloody origins of capitalism, and one of the key events was the enclosure
acts that threw the peasantry off the land in England and Scotland in order to
kind of kick-start capitalism. As Marx describes, in Europe this resulted both
in a class that owned the means of production (because land became necessary as
a means of production, for wool and other things) and also a class that owned
nothing but its labor power. One result, necessary for the British colonization
of North America, is that it created a large surplus of people in England who
were subject to incredibly harsh punishment for very small crimes and for whom
even colonial Virginia looked like a good escape.
Marx also talks about how the conquest of America, both North and
South America and the Caribbean, was also key in the development of world
capitalism. A key element of this was the dispossession of the indigenous
population, a dispossession that was extremely violent and genocidal. If you
want a taste of what this was like, you should read the writings of a Spanish
priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, which go into a lot of the
gratuitous violence: about 95 percent of the pre-Colombian indigenous population
was killed, perhaps 90 million people. But this early Spanish colonization,
which was largely based on extracting gold and silver, fueled the development
not only of Spanish but also of Dutch and English capitalism.
In North America, primitive capitalist accumulation meant not only
dispossessing the indigenous population of the land, but also finding somebody
to do the work, since in North America the English really didn’t use the Indians
as a labor force. A comrade brought to my attention a really good article in
WV No. 581 (30 July 1993), “Genocide ‘Made in USA’,” that shows how the
destruction of millions of people was key in the building of the American nation
and the laying of the basis for the development of North American capitalism,
and how it left a birthmark of racism on American capitalism from the get-go.
But fundamentally the colonists in North America had the opposite problem from
what the ruling class in Britain had: that is, there was an abundance of land
but a shortage of people to work on it.
I want to make the point that a lot of the history of the Americas,
especially here in the United States, tends to be focused on North America. But
in the early years of colonization, the most desired area of the Americas was
really the Caribbean, and it was much later that North America was colonized—and
not only by the English: there were Spanish outposts (for example, St.
Augustine, Florida, is the longest continuously settled city founded by
Europeans in the current U.S.); there was French fur trading in Quebec and
plantation agriculture in Louisiana; and also obviously the Dutch in New Jersey
and New York, as well as the British in Virginia. There was a lot of competition
among these different European powers, and we’ll look especially at the rivalry
of the Dutch and the English in terms of mercantilism.
Capitalism and Slavery
The readings talk about “chattel slavery.” So what exactly is a
chattel slave? It’s not a concept that is used much today. “Chattel” means
personal property. It’s related to the word “cattle.” And that is what slaves
were: they were legally property that was sold and sometimes killed.
In the abstract, capitalism and slavery are fundamentally
counterposed systems. One is based on free labor, and the other,
on slave labor. Many of the advocates of capitalism opposed chattel slavery not
only because they thought it was morally wrong, but also because they thought it
was retrogressive. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote:
“From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by
freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves” and “Whatever
work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be
squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”
Likewise, Alexander Hamilton, about whom we will be talking in a
bit, said that slavery “relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of
commerce, and introduces misery and indigence in every shape” (quoted in James
Oliver Horton, “Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary
Generation,” New-York Journal of American History [Spring 2004]). The
piece that comrades read from Eugene Genovese, “The Slave South: An
Interpretation,” in The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) shows how, as
a system, slavery was not capitalist; the slavocracy in the American South had
its own productive system, its own values—or, to use Genovese’s phrase, its own
“civilization”—that derived from this non-bourgeois system. Slavery was
fundamentally different from capitalism.
However, capitalism did not evolve in the abstract, but in the
concrete, and slavery was fundamental to this development. Even though the slave
system itself was not capitalist, slavery was central to the development of
capitalism, both in the U.S. and internationally. Slavery was also a very
profitable “industry”—for lack of a better term—in its own right, and
international and American capitalists are indelibly stained with slavery.
Slavery, of course, is not only a precapitalist, but also a
prefeudal system of production. There is a brilliant book by Karl Kautsky called
the Foundations of Christianity (1908) that, among other things, analyzes
the importance of slavery in ancient Rome. Many of the elements of slavery in
America are actually discussed by Kautsky in his treatment of plantation or
mining slavery in Rome. He distinguishes, for example, between slavery for
domestic use and slavery for profit, or commodity slavery. Obviously, commodity
production in ancient Rome did not reach the level that it does under
capitalism, but he made the point that when slaves make commodities that are
then sold for the profit of their masters, the masters increase the exploitation
of the slaves, which can only be done through immense oppression and brutality.
Kautsky describes in detail a lot of the very brutal nature of Roman slavery,
and he traces the decline of Rome to the contradictions in its slave system. For
our purposes, one of the key elements, however, that is missing in Kautsky’s
piece is race. This is not an accident, because, as we’ll see, Roman slavery was
not a racial form of slavery.
With the destruction of the centralized Roman state in West Europe
and the development of feudalism, slavery largely died out in medieval Europe.
In 1086, for example, about 10 percent of the English population were slaves,
but slavery was not central to medieval society. It was still practiced in the
Mediterranean and parts of the Arab world, but in West Europe, feudalism was the
dominant system, with serfdom the main productive form of labor.
The development of the English colonies in the Americas was
concurrent with the development of capitalism in Britain—it was going on at the
same time as the English Civil War, and there were various political intrigues
over whom the colonies would support; there are cities in the United States
named after both King Charles I and Cromwell, for example. Yet, the
contradiction is that the rise of capitalism was accompanied with a new rise of
slavery. Particularly in the English case, this was accompanied by the creation
of the world sugar market. Eating sugar is not based on slavery, but the
creation of the sugar market was.
I want to make some points about the development of slavery in the
Americas. The first is that there is a prehistory: before the Spanish arrived in
America, the Portuguese had begun using slave labor on plantations in their
island colonies off Africa, such as Madeira and the Azores. By 1452, the Pope
had given the Portuguese the right to trade slaves, and in 1479 the Spanish
crown gave Portugal a monopoly over the slave trade. By 1502, there is evidence
of black slaves in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo
—that is to say 130
years before the English planters really began using slaves in the Caribbean and
almost 200 years before slavery became entrenched in what would become the
United States, in Virginia.
Slavery was crucial in almost every European colony throughout the
Americas, and from the 16th century through the mid 19th century between 10 and
12 million Africans were “traded” as slaves. And it was extremely violent:
depending on what century you’re looking at, between 10 and 40 percent of the
slaves died in transit. Ninety-five percent of these African slaves ended up in
either the Caribbean or Latin America. North America received a relatively small
fraction of all the African slaves, and this would have important ramifications
on how slavery developed here.
Although the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, for most of
the 17th century the dominant labor system in Virginia was indentured servitude,
which was a really nasty and brutal system. If it weren’t for the slave system
that came after, we would probably label indentured servitude one of the most
brutal systems known. Indentured servants agreed to work for a period of years,
usually between five and seven, in exchange for transportation to America. They
might be promised land at the end of their terms.
But to begin with, many indentured servants did not live to the end
of their terms of service. While they were servants, they were subjected to
extremely harsh discipline and punishment. They could be whipped, they could be
beaten, they could be sold for the duration of their terms of service. They
worked a lot harder than English peasants worked, and a lot of what we think of
as unique to slavery was also present in various ways in indentured servitude.
Many servants ran away.
By the mid-to-late 1600s, from the point of view of the planters,
there developed several problems with indentured servitude. Servants were living
longer. (Incidentally, one of the reasons that they began to live longer is that
they began to drink more alcohol and not drink polluted water.) This meant that
there began to develop a layer of unruly and dissatisfied ex-indentured
servants, making Virginia more and more unstable. The danger of this was
highlighted in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion, when poor whites, mostly former
indentured servants, and blacks united against the colonial government—in this
case, to demand that the colonial government, among other things, drive out the
Indians. But at the same time, fewer and fewer Europeans were willing to come to
America as servants, partly because England was developing economically and
partly because news got around England of what servitude was like, and it did
not seem so attractive as it might have before.
So the fact that servants were living longer at the end of the 17th
century made slavery (which was for life) more attractive, from the point of
view of the planters, than servitude (which was usually for less than a decade).
The planters in Virginia began to import slaves in larger and larger numbers. By
the first decade of the 18th century, Virginia had been transformed from a
society in which slaves were present into a society in which slavery was the
central productive relationship, a slave society. This was not the only slave
society in the Americas, but it was quite different from the slave societies in
the Caribbean or Brazil.
When I was preparing this class, comrade Foster raised the
interesting question: why did it take a revolution—the Civil War—to get rid of
slavery in the United States, whereas in many other countries (not all of them,
Haiti also obviously had a revolution) it did not take a revolution to get rid
of slavery. There are various reasons, but one is that in the American South
there were more slaveowners, many owning relatively few slaves, so that slavery
was much more entrenched in colonial society and in later U.S. society. But
importantly, from the point of view of the planters, slavery not only offered a
source of labor, but also it offered a source of social stability, because with
slavery came what veteran American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser calls the
concept of race.
The Race Concept
I’m not going to talk a lot about it because comrades are familiar,
but there is no scientific basis for this concept of race. At the same time,
various academics like to talk about race being “socially constructed.” But even
though race is not scientifically real, it is very, very real. It affects almost
every aspect of one’s life in this country, as we are reminded when we look at
the newspaper every day. Marx, dealing with religion, wrote in The German
Ideology (1846) that religion has no history—that is to say, no history
independent of the social conditions that created it. So as Marxists, we
understand that race is not just a bad idea, but one that developed out of a
social system of production, a system of social relations, chattel slavery. This
is explained very well in Fraser’s “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian
Revolution” [in Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990, “In
Memoriam: Richard S. Fraser”]. And for comrades who are interested in a more
in-depth look at it, there is also a very good book on the creation of the idea
of race in America by Winthrop Jordan, called White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), that goes back to the 16th
century.
Chattel slavery is an inherently inhuman system. It
involves degrading an entire group of people, putting them by definition outside
the realm of both legal and moral protection. Chattel slaves are not legally
human. As John Locke said in Two Treatises of Government, in 1690, slaves
“are by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary
Power of their masters. These Men cannot in that state be considered as any part
of Civil Society….” This would later be paraphrased in the Dred
Scott decision that the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to
respect. The concept of race served as a justification for slavery, conflating
class status—slavery—with physical features: skin color. While there were some
free blacks, even in the South, being black became equated with being a slave,
that is, outside of the norms of human society. It’s also useful to keep in mind
that, of course, Africans at the time of slavery were not all of the same
“race,” either: there were very different societies in Africa, and if we could
borrow a term, we could talk about “how Africans became black.” Frederick
Douglass has an important statement from when slavery was still in
existence:
“We are then a persecuted people, not because we are
colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years
been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and
servitude.”
—“Prejudice Against Color” (1850), in The Life and Writings of
Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2,
ed. Philip S. Foner (1950)
This is the beginning of the material basis for the
creation of a race-color caste in North America. And it’s not an accident that
laws banning interracial sex and marriage were passed in Virginia and Maryland
at the same time that slavery became consolidated in the late 1600s and early
1700s.
The idea of race was defended using the so-called “Curse of Ham”
from the Bible, which is the idea that blackness was a curse from God, going
back to Noah. And there was in fact slavery in biblical times, and you can find
lots of passages in the Bible about slavery, and these were used to justify
American slavery. I don’t want to defend the honor of the Old Testament, but
nowhere is racial slavery mentioned in the Bible because it did
not exist. Comrade Don pointed out a very interesting article by George Breitman
that was published in the Spring 1954 issue of Fourth International,
called “When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began,” that looks at the development of
racism. And he shows that in the ancient world, there was no one group of people
that was by definition enslaved, nor was slavery confined to one particular
group. This idea of race did not make sense—it didn’t exist. So, racial
slavery did not exist.
I also want to make an aside that race in the U.S. is different
than race in other places, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean,
which had different types of slavery. There’s a myth in Brazil called “racial
democracy,” which is that there’s really no such thing as race in Brazil;
everybody’s Brazilian. This is obviously untrue, but it does reflect the fact
that there was a different expression of slavery there. A lot of the difference
has to do with how slavery developed in North America and the nature of British
mercantilism. At the time the Virginian planters began to use slaves, the Dutch
had already taken over the slave trade from the Portuguese, and because of
Dutch-English rivalries, in 1651 Navigation Acts were passed, making it illegal
for British colonists to buy products from other countries. Slaves were included
as “products,” obviously. This had an important ramification on the importation
of slaves. In fact, many of the early slaves in Virginia were not actually from
Africa, but from Barbados. It’s also important to keep in mind that from the
British perspective, the center of the slave trade was not in North America but
in the Caribbean.
Therefore, the slave population in North America became a lot more
stable, tended to live a lot longer and have more children. The details, for
example, of slavery in Jamaica are horrid. The average slave tended to die
within seven years of arriving in Jamaica. Therefore, although the slave trade
provided only half a million African slaves to North America, by the time of the
Civil War, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million
people. A lot of this has to do with the demographics. In the British Caribbean,
many plantations were left in the hands of overseers, while their absentee
owners were content to stay in Britain. Eric Williams talks about this in his
book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In North America, the planters
became more Americanized, and they tended to stay in North America. For example,
the Lee family of Virginia arrived around 1639; the Washingtons arrived around
the same time.
In the Caribbean, the plantations were much larger, and slaveowners
there had more slaves than in North America. One result of this is that African
culture was destroyed through the experience of slavery to a much larger degree
in North America than in the Caribbean or Brazil. As Fraser put it in “The Negro
Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution,” in the United States “the Negro people
are among the oldest of all the immigrant groups. They are essentially
American.” And this is also shown in Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, in which Douglass pointedly calls himself An American Slave
in the title. He illustrates that slaves in the U.S. spoke English, were largely
Christian (he’s very powerful on the role of Christianity in supporting
slavery), and were an organic part of American society. This is different than
in Haiti, for example, where at the time of the Haitian Revolution, two-thirds
of the black population were born in Africa. Or in Cuba. There’s a book by
Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966), based on
interviews with a former slave who was born 50 years after Douglass, Esteban
Montejo, that talks about how even in the late 19th century there were lots of
aspects of African culture that survived in Cuba.
So that’s an important part of understanding the integral and
unique nature of slavery in the U.S., which has programmatic implications today:
there’s no separate black nation, and our program is one of revolutionary
integrationism.
Slavery and the Development of Capitalism
One of the strengths of the Williams book is that he shows how the
development of British industrial capitalism was to a large degree based upon
slavery. The bourgeoisie in Liverpool, Manchester and the City of London became
rich through the slave trade, later through sugar trading, and then with textile
production that used slave-produced cotton. Of course slavery was not what
provided the labor in England in the development of English
capitalism or the industrial revolution. But after the abolition of the slave
trade in 1807, and then slavery itself in the British Caribbean in the 1830s,
British capitalism still depended on slavery because the textile mills of
Manchester, for example, needed cotton. In 1860, about 75 percent of all British
cotton came from the American South. This is part of the reason, as Marx wrote
at the time, that a section of the British bourgeoisie supported the South
during the American Civil War.
Also, throughout the late 18th century, there was slavery in much
of the North (comrades might remember the very good “Slavery in New York”
exhibit at the New York Historical Society), even though it was not the central
method of production. By the early 19th century, slavery as a social
relationship had mostly disappeared from the North (the last Northern state to
free its slaves was New Jersey, in 1846). But the main connection between the
nascent bourgeoisie and slavery was not that they owned slaves.
There is a very interesting book called Complicity: How the
North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (2005), written by
three reporters for the Hartford Courant. It shows how the
Northern bourgeoisie was connected to the slave system by a million threads:
they bought molasses, which was made with slave labor, and sold rum as part of
the Triangle Trade; they lent money to Southern planters; and most of the cotton
that was sold to Britain was shipped through Northern ports, including here in
New York City. They financed the slave trade, and even after it became illegal,
there were still ships leaving from New York that were involved in slave
trading. And they sold manufactured goods to the South. This is the background
to the relationship between Northern capitalism and slavery. Capitalism is very
different from slavery, but at the same time they are very historically
connected.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 943
25 September 2009
Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism
Part Two
We print below, in slightly edited form, Part Two of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New York on 30 March 2008. Part One of this talk, published in WV No. 942 (11 September), focused on the centrality of black chattel slavery to the early development of capitalism.
I want to talk about the American Revolution, which we don’t write about all that much. I think there are two essential pitfalls in dealing with the American Revolution. One was shown most fully by Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party (CP) during its popular-front phase in the mid 1930s. In What Is Communism?—the same book in which he tried to show that “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century”—Browder argued that the American Revolution of 1776 was essentially the model of the popular front. (There’s a novel by Howard Fast called Citizen Tom Paine, written during World War II, where he also makes this argument, that Tom Paine came up with the idea of a popular front against British colonialism.) The second pitfall is to pretend that the American Revolution isn’t really important at all.
There’s a WV article that was part of the readings, called “Why We Don’t Celebrate July 4” [WV No. 116, 2 July 1976], which is very useful. But just because we don’t celebrate the Fourth of July doesn’t mean that we think the revolution was unimportant. The revolution was, so far as it went, both important and progressive—the main thing is that it didn’t go all that far. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in the sense that it laid the basis for the development of American capitalism, but keep in mind that Britain in 1776 was not a feudal society—the English Civil War had happened more than 100 years earlier. Socially, the revolution was an alliance between the planter elites of the Southern colonies, which obviously were based on slavery, and the merchants of the Northern colonies because both of them wanted to break away from the constraints of British mercantilism. Thus, the revolution spurred not only the development of American capitalism, but also the development of the slave system in the South. The revolution itself cemented the alliance between capitalism and slavery, an alliance that would later—to borrow a phrase from the Communist Manifesto—have to be burst asunder. But one of the interesting points about the American Revolution is that this relationship was almost not burst asunder. The revolution did not solve the question of which of these two systems would dominate; and in that sense, the Civil War really was the Second American Revolution. This is another part of the answer to comrade Foster’s question: Why did there need to be a Civil War? I think the American Revolution kind of set it up, in that sense.
I want to talk about the political significance of the revolution, however. Many of the ideals of the revolution, which drew upon the Parliamentary side of the English Civil War, are, in and of themselves, important. The right to bear arms, the separation of church and state, representative democracy, republicanism and colonial independence are good things. It’s worth reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Some of these ideas were quite radical for the time—and I would just remind comrades that in Britain there is still both a crown and an established church. Plus, the founding fathers were by and large secular. I don’t think that if George Washington had said that God had told him to fight England that people would have taken him seriously. That’s another point that our article on the Fourth of July makes—that even by bourgeois standards, the leaders of the American Revolution stand several heads and shoulders above the current leaders.
The Nature of the American Revolution
The American Revolution, however, was not a social revolution, unlike either the French or the Haitian revolutions that immediately followed it. The question of the revolution was not whether the goal of the colonies was to be capitalist, or to make money, but for whom the colonies would be making money. It is important to keep in mind that of all the British colonies in America, the West Indies—the so-called “sugar colonies”—were much more important than the mainland North American colonies. The Northern colonies, as Eric Williams describes, essentially existed to provide food and other supplies to the Caribbean colonies. They preferred importing food, even at very high prices, from North America to wasting land that could otherwise be used for sugar. And in an earlier book, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), Williams described how even then, most of the fish eaten in the Caribbean was imported from elsewhere, even though obviously the Caribbean is made up of islands. And the West Indian planters were a powerful section of the British ruling class, including many representatives in Parliament. So Parliament was not going to do anything that would harm the interests of these planters.
Under British mercantilism, there were basically two ways that the North American colonies were important to Britain. Under the Navigation Act of 1651, and later the Molasses Act of 1733, they were supposed to trade only with other British colonies. For the North, these acts were largely dead letters; they traded with whomever they wanted to trade. Northern merchants regularly bought molasses from French colonies, which tended to be more productive and sold cheaper, and they sold rum and other products—made directly or indirectly from slave labor—to non-British colonies. The planters in the South were expected to sell tobacco only to the British, but they found ways to get around this. The other important role of the North American colonies was to pay taxes. And tobacco was taxed at this time, in much of the 18th century, not by its value (i.e., by the price), but by how much was actually grown, so that as the planters’ profits declined, their taxes often still increased. So, in much of the 18th century, even though the sugar colonies were much more profitable, they paid much less in taxes than did Virginia. And Virginia, in fact, paid more taxes to the royal treasury than any other colony. Nonetheless, for most of this period, the British government had a policy that was called salutary—or benign—neglect, allowing the colonies to ignore much of the mercantile laws while the colonies ran themselves.
This all changed at the end of the Seven Years (or the French and Indian) War, in 1763, which, in America at least, was fought in part over control of the Caribbean and French Canada. It was very complicated, and in some ways perhaps the first world war, drawing in every European power. But two trends merged at the end of this war. Britain ended the war with immense holdings in North America, with a large empire, and the newly crowned George III wanted to reassert a vigorous role for the British Crown. But the British were broke after the war and looked to America as a way of paying for this. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, the British “felt that the colonies were ungrateful children, ready to profit from the security our arms had gained for them, but unwilling to pay the price.”
So Parliament and George III, in a rather ham-handed way, passed a series of laws regarding the colonies (if you remember ninth grade, you probably went through them). But the bottom line is that these laws convinced both the American planters in the South and the merchants in the North that as long as they continued to remain a part of the British system, they would not be able to develop in the way that they wanted. And slavery was central to all of this, both because the main product that was being sent from Virginia—tobacco—was made with slave labor, but also because sugar and other things that were being traded in the North were an integral part of the Triangle Trade between Europe, the American colonies and Africa.
Slavery and the American Revolution
There is a great article that deals with the American Revolution in WV No. 764, called “The Haitian Revolution and the American Slavocracy.” Many comrades don’t remember it because it was published on September 14, 2001, but it explains how the American Revolution did not involve a social revolutionary component that was equivalent, for example, to the sans-culottes in France. It did not fundamentally change the class structure of the United States. But in order to mobilize the mass of the white populace—small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers—to risk their lives and livelihoods against Britain, the wealthy colonial elites had to tell them that all men, having been created equal, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
One of the key ways they were able to do this was through the institution of slavery, and the American rulers could give political rights to whites because the central labor force in the American South was slaves, who were excluded from all this. This is one of the reasons that there was no regime of plebeian terror in the American Revolution as there was in France; there was no Robespierre or, as in the English Civil War, Cromwell. Famously, in writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder (he owned about 200 slaves), had put in some mild anti-slavery language, blaming George III for supporting the slave trade. This was taken out at the insistence of the slaveholders. That is to say, slavery couldn’t be touched.
From the revolution until the Constitution was adopted, the law of the land was what is called the Articles of Confederation. They allowed each state to regulate its own affairs, including whether to have slavery or not—this is the concept which later is called “states’ rights.” Earl Browder, in the same piece I referenced earlier, wrote that the Constitution was a “counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton.” (Given that this was about the same time that Browder was defending the Stalinist Moscow Trials in the USSR, his idea of a political counterrevolution might be somewhat suspect.) The CP fundamentally preferred the side of Jefferson—their school here in New York City, for example, was called the Jefferson School of Social Science. Jefferson liked to talk of individual liberties, and in some ways he is one of the more eloquent spokesmen for the American Revolution. But the system that was set up was really a cover, to a large degree, for slavery. Jefferson’s traditional enemy is considered to be Alexander Hamilton, and there are a lot of bad things about Alexander Hamilton, I suppose—he was willing to sacrifice political liberty upon the altar of bourgeois development, and he feared the people having too much power. But one of the key things was that he opposed slavery. If any of the founding fathers were vindicated by the Civil War, I think it was really Alexander Hamilton, who was in favor of a strong central government to develop capitalism, was opposed to slavery, and who also proposed arming blacks in the American Revolution, something that, again, the slaveholders opposed. Part of this is probably his own background, because he came from the British Caribbean and was intimately familiar with slavery.
Although the Constitution did represent a move away from the more egalitarian goals, or at least the rhetoric, of the revolution, it was carried out largely by the same men who made the revolution—as our piece in 1976 put it, they died of old age. It was not really a political counterrevolution in the same way that you can talk about Thermidor in the French Revolution, because there was not really a Robespierre in the American Revolution. The closest you would have, I guess, would be Daniel Shays, who in late 1786 in western Massachusetts rebelled against high taxes. It was fundamentally a different type of revolution.
The Constitution of 1787 was pushed by Alexander Hamilton in order to create a centralized government that would have the power to help create a unified, capitalist country. It was not very democratic, even if we exclude the question of slavery. In this context, I recommend section three in the July 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief by the Partisan Defense Committee on Jose Padilla, which is called, “It Took a Civil War to Establish the Rights and Privileges of United States Citizenship.” It makes the point that federalism—the so-called separation of powers, including between the states and the national government—really allowed slavery to exist until the Civil War. Therefore, the Constitution of 1787 codified the coexistence of two battling social systems, with the South given extra power.
I’m sure comrades have listened to, or at least read, Barack Obama’s recent “A More Perfect Union” speech, where he argues that:
“The answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”
Well, no, the Constitution actually made resolving this question short of a Civil War largely impossible. Also—it’s interesting—when he lists all the bad things about the Constitution, he leaves out the most important part, which is the three-fifths compromise, which not only said that blacks are 60 percent human beings, but essentially gave the slave South control of the federal government. As Frederick Douglass put it in an article titled “The Constitution and Slavery” (1849): “Under it, the slave system has enjoyed a large and domineering representation in Congress, which has given laws to the whole Union in regard to slavery, ever since the formation of the government.” Out of the three-fifths clause we also have the amazing contraption of the electoral college, which basically was designed to, and did, give the South the presidency, by giving more power to states that owned slaves. Some nine out of the first 15 presidents were Southerners, most from Virginia. So slavery was not, as Obama put it—and it’s not just Obama, it’s a common liberal myth—a “stain” on early American politics and society, but an essential thread woven throughout the development of American capitalism. It’s a fundamental aspect, not extraneous or peripheral.
The Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 in order to get the states to support the adoption of the Constitution, and this is what the Padilla brief calls the “Second Constitution.” And these recognized important rights, but they still did not define any sense of national citizenship, something that would not come until the Civil War. In fact, one of the reasons that the framers didn’t put these rights in the original Constitution is that they didn’t want to start off saying that “all men are equal” again. That is to say, they didn’t want to have anything that could be seen as challenging slavery. Of course, a point that is made in the Padilla brief and that we have often made since the “war on terror” began is that rights are not just granted by a piece of paper but also reflect what type of social struggle is going on in society.
Workers Vanguard No. 944 |
9 October 2009
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Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism
Part Three
We print below, in slightly edited form, the third and final
part of a presentation by Jacob Zorn to a Spartacist League educational in New
York on 30 March 2008. The first two parts were published in WV Nos. 942 and 943 (11 September and 25 September).
One way of contrasting the American Revolution to the French
Revolution is to look at the case of Tom Paine. In the American Revolution, he
was the far-left wing. But when he went to France, while he supported the French
Revolution, he ended up essentially on the right wing of the revolution. It
wasn’t his ideas that changed so much as the context. And when the Haitian
Revolution erupted in 1791, even the elements of the American Revolution that
supported the French Revolution, such as Jefferson, hated the Haitian Revolution
and wanted to drown it in blood, because they saw in it a spectre that would
threaten slavery in the South. Interestingly, Hamilton was one of the more open
to recognizing Haiti as an independent country, partly because he hated France.
Also, it’s interesting that the leaders of the American Revolution who were the
most anti-slavery—Alexander Hamilton and Tom Paine—were not really American in
the traditional sense. Tom Paine had just come over from Britain, and Hamilton
was from the West Indies.
I do not want to suggest that the American Revolution was nothing
more than a pro-slavery rebellion. As the article on Haiti points out, “To be
sure, some radical elements in the American Revolution, including Thomas Paine,
denounced slavery as a moral evil and called for its abolition. And Jefferson
himself was well aware—and was constantly reminded by his liberal and radical
English and French friends—that black chattel slavery was blatantly incompatible
with the democratic principles he so eloquently proclaimed” (WV No. 764,
14 September 2001).
The common way liberals and idealists deal with this problem,
especially with Jefferson, is to say that the ideals of Jefferson
transcended the reality of Jefferson (and other founders)—that
this was their own personal weakness. But in reality, whatever his personal
weaknesses, Jefferson’s beliefs reflected the interests of his class, which was
the slavocracy, and it was social struggle that expanded
bourgeois-democratic rights to black people, including through the Civil War,
and not a closer reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Incidentally, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison rejected
the entire Constitution—they called it a “covenant with death”—because it was
pro-slavery, but in some ways they drew the wrong conclusion. That is to say,
they avoided political struggle in favor of “moral suasion.” But their analysis
of the Constitution as pro-slavery was correct. When Frederick Douglass broke
with Garrison, he also changed his views of the Constitution.
The Early U.S. and Slavery
To many, the pro-slavery nature of the Constitution at the time may
have appeared justified because many people thought that slavery would die a
slow but natural death: the international slave trade was going to be abolished,
the fertility of the soil in tobacco country was declining, and tobacco prices
were in decline. But two things gave the Southern slavocracy a renewed lease on
life, and Jefferson was at least indirectly involved in both. One was the
invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s that made slave-produced cotton
profitable. Jefferson as secretary of state approved the patent by Eli Whitney,
and he also bought one of the earliest models. The second was the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803, in which Jefferson as president basically illegally doubled
the size of the United States. There is a whole debate in the history books over
whether Napoleon or Jefferson was the one most responsible for the Louisiana
Purchase. But in reality I think it was Toussaint L’Ouverture—by having defeated
the French in Haiti, he made it so that Napoleon wanted to wash his hands of any
colonies in America as quickly as possible.
Taken together, these developments increased the power of the
Southern slavocracy and propelled them into conflict with the North. As we all
know, this conflict between the capitalist North and the slave South eventually
led to the Civil War, the second bourgeois revolution in the United States.
However, the Northern capitalists were not engaged in one unceasing
revolutionary struggle. Key elements of the Northern bourgeoisie were all too
eager to cohabit with slavery because it was profitable. However, by the mid
19th century, the development of capitalism as a whole increasingly came into
conflict with the domination of the Southern system in national politics. Marx
in 1861 sarcastically described what he called the Northern bourgeoisie’s “long
hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European
history,” in describing their willingness to compromise with the South.
And in fact, Marx was one of the greatest observers of the class
dynamics of American politics. Here’s a rather long quote from the same article
by Marx:
“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working
through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the
general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this
century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the
encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave
of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the
South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive
victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic
force in the North, appearing under different party names with different
watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each
single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history
could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward
to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the
contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his
memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly
antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum
point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of
the United States, as Mr. [Stephen] Douglas himself confessed, every legal
barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was
broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential
nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of
dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision,
diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the
American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto
reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But,
concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the
connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of
Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn
the balance of power.”
—“The American Question in England” (1861)
So the point is that there was what New York Senator William Henry
Seward called an “irrepressible conflict” between slavery and freedom. I’m going
to give somewhat short shrift to the 1850s, not because it’s an unimportant
period, but because it’s so important that comrades are probably more familiar
with it than with the earlier stuff. I also think that the first volume of James
McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire (1982) covers this ground very well. But I
want to draw comrades’ attention to several factors. One is the role of the
political parties, and the second is the role of expansion.
As Marx illustrates, the Democratic Party—including in the
North—was a pro-slavery party. The contemporary political system that we have
today is relatively new. For much of the antebellum period, there were two
parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Democratic Party, formed by Jefferson
in 1792 and reformed by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, was a populist
party. They were in favor of what is often called “Jacksonian Democracy,” which
goes down in various history books as the expansion of democracy in the United
States. They were for the rule of the “little man”; they were against banks and
entrenched economic power. They opposed the creation of a national bank. They
were a white man’s party, viciously anti-Indian—Jackson carried out one of the
brutal series of attacks that pushed the Indians out of the Southeast and
further west—and also viciously pro-slavery and anti-black. This was also the
time of increasing Irish immigration, and the Democratic Party, especially in
big Northern cities like here in New York, based themselves on immigration.
In the South, the Democrats were an openly pro-slavery party.
Although he had his differences with Jackson, one key Democratic leader was John
C. Calhoun, who was in many ways the intellectual grandfather of the
Confederacy. He developed the idea—“nullification”—that a state could refuse to
abide by the federal government if it disagreed. He also believed, unlike
Jefferson, that slavery was not only necessary, but was positively good. And
this is really the history of the Democratic Party. There is a new book that is
very interesting, by Bruce Bartlett, who writes for the Wall Street Journal,
called Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (2008). He
is pro-Republican and so has an ax to grind, but it goes through the history of
the Democratic Party on the question of slavery and then later on
Reconstruction, up through the Dixiecrats.
The other political party was called the Whigs. They opposed what
they saw as increased presidential power. They wanted the government to
intervene into the economy to help spur capitalist development, such as through
a national bank, protective tariffs to develop industry, and government spending
on what were called “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. Both these
parties had supporters in the North and the South, but as slavery became a more
important issue, they were increasingly torn apart.
The other party that developed, as the slave question basically
corroded the Whigs in the 1850s, was the Republican Party. The Republicans were
not an abolitionist party, but they were perhaps the most radical mainstream
party that the country has ever seen. They were dedicated not to eliminating
slavery, but to rolling back the power of the slave South—the so-called Slave
Power. There is a good book by Eric Foner that sums up the goal of the early
Republicans, called Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970). The
Republican Party became the party of the American bourgeoisie in its struggle
against the slavocracy—it was a class-based party, something that we are told
doesn’t exist in the United States.
And then there were the abolitionists, who were seen as a radical
fringe, but who played a very important role in pushing the question of slavery
forward. I said that there is really no radical Cromwell or Robespierre figure
in the American Revolution, but it’s the abolitionists who are the real radical
bourgeois revolutionaries in the history of the United States. It is to them
that we look, not Thomas Jefferson.
Why did the two systems keep butting heads? It was not about the
morality of slavery or about broader philosophical issues. It was because both
slavery and capitalism had built-in tendencies to expand, and the expansion of
one came at the expense of the other. So, as Marx wrote, one had to vanquish the
other. There are three reasons why the Southern slavocracy needed to expand:
1. Exhausted soil. Just as in Roman times, the slavery system used
up the soil rapidly. The emphasis was on getting the most crops possible now,
and not on preserving the soil. In the North, they were able to invest capital
in order to fertilize farm land, but in the South they didn’t do that. So there
was an endless need for more land. According to Eugene Genovese’s The
Political Economy of Slavery (1967), by 1858 some 40 percent of the South’s
cotton land was already exhausted.
2. Political. The three-fifths compromise was designed to give the
South more power than its population warranted, but it still could not allow the
North to obtain more free states. Every free state needed to be offset by a
slave state, to prevent the North from getting the upper hand.
3. Domestic slave trade. Less important, but still real, was that
the slaveholders in the older states, like Virginia and Maryland, raised money
by selling slaves to the Lower South, so they had an interest in keeping slavery
expanding.
So the whole politics of the South was one of expanding slavery,
and they saw any interference with the growth and expansion of slavery as a
dagger aimed at the heart of the entire slave system.
But the free North also needed to expand. The key reason was, as we
all know, that capitalism has to have expanding markets as its productivity
increases. Capitalism depends on growing markets, and although a fair number of
capitalists made a profit on selling to the South, slaves were not very big
consumers, and there was a limit to the planters’ demand for goods. So from the
point of view of the North, the South was really a stagnant economy, compared to
the West, which the Northeastern and Northern capitalists saw as a vast
potential market. They were increasingly selling to the West, but this depended
on the expansion of free labor and not slavery to the West.
The second reason was political. The North did not want to be
dominated by the South more than it already was, so it needed to offset the
growth of slave states. Both the North and the South had agreed in theory that
expansion was good. This was the period of so-called “Manifest Destiny”—the idea
that God had uniquely blessed the United States with the job of civilizing the
American continent. This idea was popular in the North and in the South, but the
devil was in the details, and the question was what to do about the land that
became part of the United States.
The first real crisis came with the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Missouri was the second state admitted from the Louisiana Purchase, and
essentially what was agreed on in 1820 was the temporary measure of drawing a
line, anything north of which would become free, and anything south of which
would become slave. But the problem was broached again every several years.
A key thing, to which I’m going to give a lot less attention than
it deserves, was Texas. In the 1830s, slaveholders had moved to Texas, and they
basically engineered a split from Mexico. The South supported this because they
wanted Texas to join the country as a slave state. The so-called Texas
Revolution of 1835-36 was basically a rebellion against Mexico in order to
protect slavery. The North did not want Texas to join as a slave state or, God
forbid, several slave states.
So, a lot of the roots of the immediate struggle over slavery in
the 1840s and ’50s go back to how to deal with the question of Texas. Mexico,
for obvious reasons, did not want its former territory to be annexed by the
United States, and when in 1845 the Southern states essentially were able to
annex Texas, that act provoked a war with Mexico. And so, in 1846 the United
States invaded Mexico and ended up occupying Mexico City and important cities
like Veracruz and Monterrey. As a result of the 1846-48 war, the U.S. took over
half of Mexico’s territory, and the acquisition of these new territories gave
rise to disputes between the North and South that helped lead to the Civil War
(see “Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War,” WV Nos. 933
and 934, 27 March and 10 April).
The situation created compromise after compromise. Many Northerners
preferred to compromise with the South, and so there were a series of
compromises, but the crisis over Texas and the invasion of Mexico basically made
continued compromises impossible. Northerners, including Democrats, had been
less willing to support the invasion of Mexico because it was seen as a war to
expand slavery. Not just the abolitionists—although the abolitionists were the
most fervent—but many people in the North were against the invasion of Mexico
because they thought it was a pro-slavery conspiracy, which to a large degree it
was.
The U.S. obviously won the war against Mexico, which had important
effects on the development of both U.S. and Mexican capitalism. Yet the
immediate result of the victory was to bring the United States even closer to
civil war. The first sign of this was the Wilmot Proviso, in which Northern
states refused to finance the war against Mexico so long as it was seen as
increasing the number of slave states. The Wilmot Proviso declared that the war
would only be funded if the states that were gained from it did not become
slave. This cut across party lines—Wilmot was a Democrat from Pennsylvania—and
it heralded the realignment of American politics along sectional lines.
Soon after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which finalized
the taking over of half of Mexico, there was the Compromise of 1850, and by this
time the split of the country was already posed; it was already talked about.
And in fact Calhoun, who would die shortly afterward, all but advocated a
division of the country, that is, the secession of the South. The Compromise of
1850 allowed California to become a free state, but it put off deciding on the
rest of the former Mexican territories, and this was seen as allowing the
possibility of slavery there. More grotesquely, it also created the Fugitive
Slave Act, which made Northern states complicit in “returning” slaves who had
run away from the South to the North. When they attempted to capture Anthony
Burns, a runaway slave, in Boston and provoked angry mass protests, it really
posed the question of the relationship between the North and the South.
Frederick Douglass spelled this out when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed:
“By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old,
slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that
act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as
Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as
slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of
the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled
banner, and American Christianity.”
—“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852)
From the 1850 Compromise on—there were still more compromises—the
Southern states were increasingly pushing the envelope. There was the Dred Scott
decision, where the Supreme Court ruled, as we mention in our Mumia articles,
that slavery was not only the law of the land in the South, but was the law of
the land anyplace. It ruled that slave property must be protected, including in
free states and that, in its famous statement, blacks had “no rights which the
white man was bound to respect.” This really gave rise to what would be a final
showdown between the capitalist system in the North and the slavocracy in the
South.
I want to make the point, however, that it was not something that
even at the time was obvious, or that even many of the bourgeoisie accepted.
When John Brown carried out his raid in 1859, he was roundly denounced by many,
including by Abraham Lincoln. But it posed the question: How was the United
States going to be ruled? Was it going to develop as a capitalist country or as
a slave society? This is something that the Civil War, which is the subject of
the next class, would decide, in what we call the Second American
Revolution.
