*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
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Workers Vanguard No. 942
|
11
September 2009
|
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
|
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.
