*Why Communists Do Not Celebrate July 4th- And Celebrate July 14th- Another Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a Workers Vanguard, Number 942, September 11, 2009 article entitled Slavery and The Origins of American Capitalism, Part 1 which provided added details to the premise of this entry. For Parts Two and Three check today's other entry Why Communists Do Not Celebrate July 4- A Guest Commentary.

Guest Commentary:

"Why We Don't Celebrate July 4-Marxism and the "Spirit Of '76"- Workers Vanguard, Number 116, July 2, 1976

The burned-out tenements of America's decaying slums are plastered with red, white and blue posters celebrating a 200-year-old revolution. From factory bulletin boards and the walls of unemployment offices, patriotic displays urge American working people to join with Gerald Ford and the butchers of Vietnam in commemorating the "Spirit of '76." Class-conscious workers and militant blacks, like the colonial masses ground down under the economic and military heel of arrogant American imperialism, must recoil in revulsion from the U.S. bourgeoisie's hypocritical pieties about "liberty."

The Fourth of July is not our holiday. But the chauvinist ballyhoo of the "People's Bicentennial" does not negate the need for a serious Marxist appreciation of colonial America's war of independence against monarchical/ mercantilist England. Marxists have always stressed the powerful impact of the classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions in breaking feudal-aristocratic barriers to historical progress.

In appealing for support for the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin in his Letter to American Workers (1918) wrote:

"The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those really
great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been
so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present
imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or
capitalists over the division of usurped land or ill-gotten gains. That was the
war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed
America and held her in colonial slavery. "

It is also legitimate for revolutionaries to appeal to the most radical-democratic traditions of the great bourgeois revolutions. Yet the fact remains that the Fourth of July is a fundamentally chauvinist holiday, a celebration of national greatness. In no sense does it commemorate a popular uprising against an oppressive system, or even pay tribute to democratic principles and individual freedom. Attempts to lend the Fourth of July a populist coloration (or the Communist Party's popular-front period slogan that "Communism is 20th century Americanism") only express the capitulation of various fake-socialists to the democratic pretensions of American imperialism.

But neither can the traditions of 1776 justly be claimed by the imperialist bourgeoisie. Compared to the leadership of the colonial independence struggle, the present American capitalist class is absolutely degenerate. One has only to think of Franklin or Jefferson, among the intellectual giants of their time, and then consider Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. The twentieth-century United States is the gendarme of world reaction, the backer of every torture-chamber regime from Santiago to Tehran.

The "founding fathers" would have been revolted by the men who today represent their class. The degeneration of the American bourgeoisie is appropriate to the passing of its progressive mission. The attitude toward religion is a good indicator. Virtually none of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were orthodox Christians; they held a rationalist attitude toward the concept of god. Jefferson would have walked out in protest at today's prayer-intoning presidential inaugurations.

The America of 1976 is the contemporary analogue of the tsarist Russia which the "founding fathers" held in contempt as the bastion of world reaction—the tsarist Russia against whose tyranny Lenin and the Bolsheviks organized the proletariat. It is to the world working class that the liberating mission now falls.

Was the War of Independence a Social Revolution?

Like the Fourth of July, Bastille Day in France is an official, patriotic holiday, replete with military marches and chauvinist speeches. Yet the events Bastille Day commemorates retain a certain revolutionary significance to this day. The French people's understanding of 1789 is as a violent overthrow by the masses of an oppressive ruling class. The French imperialist bourgeoisie's efforts to purge the French revolution of present-day revolutionary significance have not succeeded. A Charles De Gaulle or a Valery Giscard d'Estaing cannot embrace Robespierre or Marat, for the latter stand too close to the primitive communist Gracchus Babeuf, who considered himself a true Jacobin.

The American war of independence was also a classic bourgeois-democratic revolution, but it was not really a social revolution which overthrew the existing ruling class. The British loyalists were largely concentrated in the propertied classes and governing elite. However pro-independence forces among the planters and merchants were strong enough to prevent any significant class polarization during the war.

The English and French bourgeois-democratic revolutions had to destroy an entrenched aristocratic order. That destruction required a radical, plebeian terrorist phase associated with the figures of Cromwell and Robespierre. For the American colonies, winning independence from England did not require a regime based on plebeian terror. The war of independence did not produce a Cromwell or a Robespierre because it did not need one. Nor did it give rise to radical egalitarian groups like the Levellers and Diggers, or the Enrages and Babouvists. It never remotely threatened the wealthiest, most conservative planters and merchants who supported secession from Britain.

The consolidation of bourgeois rule in the Puritan and French revolutions required a political counterrevolution in which the Cromwellians and Jacobins were overthrown, persecuted and vilified. The radical opposition which sprung up in resistance to this counterrevolution became part—through the Babouvists in France—of the revolutionary tradition which Marx embraced.

Because the American war of independence did not experience a plebeian terrorist phase, neither did it experience a conservative bourgeois counterrevolution. The leaders of the independence struggle went on to found and govern the republic; greatly venerated, they died of old age.

The men who met in Philadelphia's Convention Hall 200 years ago realized their aims more satisfactorily than any other similarly placed, insurrectionary group in history. This achievement does not bespeak their greatness, but the limited, essentially conservative nature of their goals. The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the Constitution, without significant opposition, demonstrates the bourgeois conservatism of the leaders of the American Revolution. The "founding fathers" had no children who could claim that the principles of 1776 had been betrayed in the interests of the rich and powerful. The era of the war of independence did not give rise to a living revolutionary tradition.

John Brown's Body

There is a social revolution in American history which troubles the imperialist bourgeoisie to this day. It did not begin in 1776, but in the anti-slavery confrontations. The issue rose by the civil war and particularly the period of Radical Reconstruction—the intimate relationship between capitalism in America and racial oppression—awaits its fundamental resolution in future revolutionary struggle. The wasn't-it-tragic attitude of the bourgeoisie to the civil war era contrasts sharply with their celebratory attitude toward the war of independence. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, unlike the Declaration of Independence, will never be a holiday in racist, imperialist America.

It is in the civil war era that there are parallels with the plebeian component of the French Revolution. The contemporary bourgeois treatment of John Brown resembles the French ruling class attitude toward Robespierre. They cannot disown the anti-slavery cause outright, but they condemn John Brown for his fanatical commitment and violent methods. The Reconstruction era of 1867-1877 is the only period in U.S. history which the present ruling class rejects an un-American extremism. Two important films, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the later Gone With the Wind, are outright apologies for white supremacist terror against the only radical-democratic governments this country has ever experienced. The Compromise of 1877, when the black freedmen were abandoned to the merciless regimes of the ex-slaveholders, was the American bourgeois-democratic revolution betrayed. And the reversal of that historic betrayal awaits the victory of American communism.

Because of the American revolution's limited social mobilization, those whose principles ultimately clashed with bourgeois rule—the likes of Tom Paine and Sam Adams—were easily disposed of. The radical abolitionists—John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass— are the only figures in American history before the emergence of the workers movement whose commitment to democratic principles actually threatened bourgeois rule. For the same reason that the present-day bourgeoisie denounces John Brown as a dangerous extremist, we communists can claim the radical abolitionists as ours. Only a victorious American socialist revolution can give to the heroes and martyrs of Harper's Ferry and the "underground railway" the honor that is their historic right.

*Why Communists Do Not Celebrate The Fourth Of July- A Guest Commentary

Click on title to link to the first part of the article, in the interest of completeness, posted below, Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism, September 11, 2009.


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. 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.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

*Why Communists Do Not Celebrate The Fourth Of July- A Guest Commentary-Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism

Why Communists Do Not Celebrate The Fourth Of July- A Guest Commentary-Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism

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


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.

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.

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN-CIRCA 1650-THE LEVELLERS

BOOK REVIEW

THE LEVELLERS AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION,edited by G.E. Aylmer, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK, 1975

The names John Lilburne, Robert Overton and William Walwyn, key radicals in the leftist phase of the English revolution do not come to mind when thinking of the leaders of the English Revolution like Robespierre and Saint Just do for the French Revolution and Lenin and Trotsky do for the Russian Revolution, but they should. They represented the heart of the London-centered programmatically-based plebian urban artisan democratic opposition to monarchy and hierarchic rule. Although Oliver Cromwell is, from a military perspective at least, more justly recognized as a destroyer of the principle of monarchy from a historical perspective the documents of the Levelers presented here in detail represent a precious accrual of propaganda for all later democratic movements.

As far as the English revolution is concerned this writer’s sympathies lie with the democratic social program put forth by John Lilburne and the Levellers and the social actions of Gerard Winstanley and the True Levellers (or Diggers) on Saint George’s Hill. The English historian Christopher Hill’s studies of those movements and others, as expressed in the religious terms of the day, initially drew me to the study of the English Revolution. However, I believe that those plebian-based democratic programs in the England of the 1600’s were more a vision (a vision in many ways still in need of realization) than a practical reality. Even Cromwell’s achievements were a near and partially reversible thing. Such are the ways of humankind’s history.

The English Revolution was by any definition a great revolution. It is therefore interesting to compare and contrast that revolution to the two other great revolutions of the modern era- the French and the Russian. The most notably thing all three have in common is once the old regime has been defeated it is necessary to reconstruct the governmental apparatus on a new basis, parliamentary rule, assembly rule or soviet role, as the case may be. The obvious contrast between revolutions is what class takes power- patricians or plebeians? That has been the underlying strain of all modern social revolutionary movements. The defeat of the Levellers and their democratic program, based as it was on the relatively small urban artisan class and their supporters in the New Model Army demonstrates that they were just a little too early in the development of the capitalist modern world to succeed.

The editor has provided a good introduction to these documents which places the struggle for adoption of such Leveller programs as the various Agreements of the People in proper perspective for those not familiar with the details of the English Revolution. I note, as the editor does, that the New Model Army played an unusually large role in the political struggles, especially among the plebian masses which formed the core of the army (through the ‘Agitators’). In an age when there were no parties, in the modern sense, the plebian base of the army is where the political fight to extend parliamentary democracy was waged. That it was defeated by military action led by Cromwell at Burford in 1649 represented a defeat for plebian democracy. Thus, the political fortunes of the Levellers rose and fell with their influence in the army. In the latter revolutions mentioned above urban-based political parties turned that around and created armies as a sword of the revolution. Think of Trotsky's role in the Russian revolution. That is quite a different proposition. Read on.

*A Chronicle of The French Revolution From The Top- Schama's "Citizens"

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For The French Revolution. As Always With This Source It Is A Good Place To Start In Order To Look Elsewhere For More Specific, And Sometimes More Reliable, Information.

BOOK REVIEW

This year marks the commemoration of the 219th Anniversary of the great French Revolution. Democrats, socialists, communists and others rightly celebrate that event as a milestone in humankind’s history. Whether there are still lessons to be learned from the experience is an open question that political activists can fight over. None, however, can deny its grandeur. Well, no one except those closet and not so closet royalists and their epigones who screech in horror and grasp for their necks every time the 14th of July comes around. They have closed the door of history behind them. Won’t they be surprised then the next time there is a surge of progressive human activity?

Citizens- A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama, Vintage Books, New York, 1989

All great revolutions, like the French revolution under review here, are capable, especially when they are long over, of being analyzed from many prospectives. Moreover, official and academic historian have no other reason to exist except to keep revising the effects that such revolutions have had on future historical developments. Left wing political activists, on the other hand, try to draw the lessons of those earlier plebeian struggles in order to better understand the tasks ahead. As part of that understanding it is necessary to look at previous revolutions not only from the position of how it effected the plebes but to look at from the position of those who do not see the action of the plebeian masses as decisive, at least for the French Revolution. If one wants to get a feel for the old way of looking at history from the top down then you can do no better than to look at the fairly recent example of Professor Simon Schama’s "Citizens".


As a student I was well versed in historical narratives that highlighted the role of great men (and it was mainly men that were highlighted in those days) and great governmental policies that formed the contours of human development (and here, again, development means Western European development). Professor Schama takes us back to those days in his narrative, although he also has some interesting things to say about cultural developments (creation of a reading public in the 18th century, increased focus on education under the influence of Rousseau and the philosophes, development of a public opinion with increased circulation of newspapers and post bills, changes in social mores such as the cult of sensibility, etc.) reflecting the hard fact that these days one cannot sell an historical argument (much less books) unless one sets the stage with such tidbits.

Louis XVI (and to a lesser extent his grandfather Louis XV) has had a very bad press over the last couple of generations, and rightly so, as historians, whether Marxist- influenced or not, have come to understand that one of the factors that speeds up the revolutionary process is the incompetence, inability or both, of the rulers and their coteries to rule in the old way. The great Russian revolutionary writer Leon Trotsky in an early chapter in his monumental three-volume History of the Russian Revolution noted the similarities in this regard between Charles I in 17th century England, Louis XVI in 18th century France and Czar Nicolas of Russian in the 20th century (and their wives) in this governmental incapacity (and colorlessness in their personal demeanor).

Professor Schama recognizes that any rehabilitation effort would take serious work so that he tends to dismiss Louis XVI as basically misunderstood and concentrates on his various, rapidly changing governments in order to argue, in the final analysis, that if this or that policy had been followed through a revolution could have been averted. This is hardly the first time such a proposition has been presented by a later, and in this case much later, historian who has the benefit of hindsight. However, unlike earlier historians Schama has the ability to observe that up until now although great revolutions have created an intense social swirl for a period they lose steam and the long term results of the upheaval appear as something that could have easily been negotiated by men of good will. Despite that piece of wisdom he nevertheless forgets that at times, particularly revolutionary times, even good will is as scarce as hen’s teeth. That mistake decisively impairs his argument.

If one, like this reviewer, spends his or her time looking at the base of society (here the urban sans culottes, the landless peasants and displaced village artisans)to see how those forces were brought to political life, organized, made politically effective (if only for a time, as noted above, before they as individuals like society in general also run out of revolutionary steam) and how they put pressure on their leaderships and how those leaderships responded to those pressures then one downplays the other social forces that are in play in a revolutionary period. Great revolutions, however, create all kinds of turmoil in layers of society that previously were dormant or were in control, although shakily. In that regard, virtually a sure sign that a pre-revolutionary situation exists is when a portion of the old ruling elite (or their agents) begins to make revolutionary noises.

Professor Schama has taken that important insight and made it one of his central arguments, that is , in the end the upwardly mobile, self-improving nobility (the meritocracy in today’s terms) in France rather than being frustrated with the old regime just wanted to tweak things here or there in order to make it more efficient. This is where his emphasis on looking at the effect of policies at the top of society leads him to a false conclusion. If revolutions merely occurred just because of the question of problems with circulation of elites then the plebeian masses of the cities (led by the sans culottes here) and those of the countryside(the peasants and village artisans) could not have been brought onto the political stage in their wake.

Nevertheless Professor Schama argues his view with skill and verve. There are also many other interesting arguments made by Professor Schama in this long book (although length here is no problem as the book is a fairly easy read due to his energetic style of writing), plenty of great photographs to give a nice visual presentation of the period and more than enough cultural tidbits to make this worthwhile to read. But, if you are a leftist political activist, the biggest reason to read this book is to know your political opponents, their arguments and those who would try to denigrate our plebeian history. Read on.

***Once Again On The Causes Of The English Revolution- Professor Lawrence Stone’s View

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for English historian, Professor Lawrence Stone.

Book Review

The Causes Of The English Revolution, 1529-164, Lawrence Stone, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1972

The last time that the name of Professor Lawrence Stone came up in this space was a review of his magisterial study of the rise and triumph of bourgeois family structure and its mores in England, The Family, Sex And Marriage In England 1500-1800(the study centered on English changes, which as the vanguard of capitalism made a study of the bourgeois family structure quite sensible) from 1500 to 1800 so the good professor is certainly familiar with the period under discussion in this book. The bourgeois family study, some 500 pages, abridged, is contrasted here by a much shorter work of less than two hundred pages. But don’t be thrown off by the shortness of this work, given the expansiveness of the subject, because this is a serious concise work that lays out for the beginner and the more knowledgeable a very nice grab bag of causes for the 17th century English revolution that gives one a jumping off point for further investigation. For the more advanced devotees of the study of the English revolution there are plenty of footnotes and a bibliography at the end that will provide helpful for that further study.

Of course any speculation on the cause or, more correctly, the causes of the English revolution (like any revolution, or other world historic event) is, for the most part, a matter of hindsight, and therefore ready material for an historian’s “cherry-picking” to suit his or her predilections. And also a cause, as in the English case described here by Professor Stone in the first section of the book, for all sorts of “flare-ups” back in the 1950s and 1960s in British academic circles. From such questions as whether the 1640-60 events were even a revolution ( a question pretty much now resolved in favor of revolution) to which class lead and benefited from it to more esoteric questions about whether the gentry (the big landowners, for the most part) benefited from the revolution or not there was something of a field day on this period and Professor Stone seems to have been right in the middle of it along with such English revolution luminaries as Professors Tawney and Trevor-Roper. And as long as it is kept to the academic milieu ( as is the usual situation) such infighting can, and in this case did, produce some useful insights.

After the academic “fireworks” settle down from the first section Professor Stone, in the second and third sections, gets to his laundry list of causes for the revolution, some worth further investigation, some that seem more speculative (like the question of the rise and fall of the gentry, or parts of it, in the rush to revolution). He breaks down the period from 1529 to 1642 into smaller segments in order to separate longer term causes from shorter and more direct causes. Obviously any study of long term trends toward revolution in England in this period has to include changes in agricultural production toward more capitalist methods of growing for the market, the role of demographic spreads and population growth (especially London’s growth) and, probably most importantly, the fall out from the Protestant Reformation as it played out in there. Shorter term reasons include the rise of Puritanism in the wake of the religious and political policies the James I and Charles I regimes, the vast increase in literacy, education, and lay authority in church matters, changes in the legal and state church structure, particularly by Charles I promoting a more authoritarian regime in the face of more democratic church movements, and, as always, the personal factor, of Charles I’s eagerness to shoot himself in the foot every time some controversy came up so that in the end he alienated, and made indifferent or hostile , the elements of society that stool closest to him, especially the merchants and nobility. This is hardly exhaustive of Professor Stone’s presentation but should be enough to whet the appetite.

Of course for revolutionaries, as well as thoughtful historians, the causes of revolution and the pre-revolutionary period are important in their own right. Just as today we can see, even if we cannot right this minute do anything about it, that conditions in America and Europe are ripe for revolution, a socialist revolution, and we can point to unemployment, the gaps between the rich and poor, extensive deindustrialization, cuts in public social welfare budgets and the like as the precursors we can look at the English, French Russian and Chinese revolutions for some insights. The English revolution, as the first great Western one, is particularly important to study because of the links to America and because something in the English-American psyche (at least in the past) has acted almost as a barrier to further revolutions among English-speaking Anglo-American people.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Down With the Monarchy and the “United Kingdom”!-For Workers Republics on Both Sides of the Irish Sea!-With James Connolly In Mind

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011



For Workers Republics on Both Sides of the Irish Sea!

Down With the Monarchy and the “United Kingdom”!

We reprint below an article from Workers Hammer No. 215 (Summer 2011), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.

When the starving poor of Paris demanded bread, the haughty French Queen Marie Antoinette famously said “let them eat cake.” For British working people facing the deepest economic crisis since World War II, the equivalent is “give them a royal wedding.” Hardly had the hoopla subsided over the nuptials of William and Kate in April when the whole royal circus was re-enacted in the meticulously choreographed visit of Elizabeth II to Ireland a few weeks later.

A popular joke doing the rounds in the run-up to the royal wedding went along the lines of: “Prince William says he doesn’t want the traditional fruit cake at the wedding, but Prince Philip says he doesn’t give a toss and is going anyway.” Forever the butt of jokes due to his unstoppable, bigoted ravings on royal engagements, Prince Philip is often portrayed as a senile old reactionary in contrast to a reserved, reverential Her Majesty. But whatever comparable tact the Queen may display, Prince Philip’s outbursts are an unashamed expression of the racist, class contempt that is the institution of the monarchy.

David Cameron [Conservative prime minister] and his cabinet celebrated the announcement of the royal wedding last autumn with a banging of fists on the table in the manner of those educated in public schools [elite private schools], inculcated as they are with the arrogance that they are born to rule. For Cameron & Co., the event would be a “wedding of mass distraction” in which the population would fawn over the marriage of two pampered parasites and would put the devastating cuts and job losses to the back of their minds. But that is not quite how it turned out, as Polly Toynbee reported on the “big day” itself:

“Yet despite months of coverage, rising to a crescendo of print and broadcasting frenzy this week, the country has remained resolutely phlegmatic. Cameras pick out the wildest enthusiasts camped out or dressed as brides, yet the Guardian/ICM poll and others put those expressing ‘strong interest’ at only 20%.

“In poll after poll, more than 70% refused to be excited. Laconic, cool, only half the population said they would watch Friday’s flummery.”

—Guardian, 29 April

If there was little enthusiasm in England, Scotland and Wales showed even less excitement over the royal spectacle.

But we had to put up with it nonetheless: the absurd yet very real gossip about the Prince marrying a “commoner,” which says a lot about this country’s “in-your-face” class prejudice. Kate Middleton’s millionaire parents belong to the top 0.5 per cent income bracket and this “commoner” went to the same public school as the wives of the prime minister and the chancellor. In the eyes of the aristocracy, she is not high-born enough for her and her sibling to avoid the tag of “the wisteria sisters” in reference to their social climbing, or to avoid the “doors to manual” dig at her mother, a former airline stewardess. There was the endless bunting, the portrait of “Wills and Kate” emblazoned on the Union Jack—that butcher’s apron, the flag of an empire where “the sun never set” and the blood never dried and of the continued imperialist slaughter of Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya.

For those wanting to protest against the royal carnival, the message from Metropolitan Police Commander Christine Jones was that this could be deemed criminal. In a statement she declared, “this is a day of celebration, joy and pageantry” adding, “Any criminals attempting to disrupt it, be that in the guise of protest or otherwise, will be met by a robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate policing response.” In a suspension of democratic rights, dozens of people were barred from central London on the day of the wedding. Using the occasion as an excuse for a political clampdown, squats and social centres were raided.

Several student protesters were arrested and charged, including Alfie Meadows, the student who required brain surgery when he was struck down by police at a tuition fees protest in December. Scores of people were pre-emptively arrested in connection with the wedding, including several who were charged with “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” for planning activities such as a Right Royal Orgy event, a proposed piece of street theatre in London. The bourgeoisie were taking no chances with their feudal freak show. Some 5,000 police officers were part of the royal wedding security operation on the day, with 550 armed police put on a shoot-to-kill footing.

Abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches is an elementary democratic demand but one that is integral to a revolutionary programme in Britain. The continued existence of such feudal relics is an assertion that class privilege and vast inequality is part of the “natural” order of things in which each—“the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”—has his place. We stand in the tradition of the English Revolutionaries of the 17th century who “turned the world upside down,” overthrowing the feudal order with the king at its head, and of the revolutionary Chartists in the 19th century who disdained to bow in awe before the monarchy and marched with pikes and muskets in their hands. Opposition to the monarchy as the pinnacle of the British class system is a precondition for building a party fit to overthrow capitalist rule in this country.

The Queen “Forgives” the Irish!

The Queen’s visit was the first time that an English monarch had set foot in southern Ireland since independence in 1921, indeed since George V’s visit in 1911. The bourgeois press in Britain and Ireland was awestruck as the Queen, accompanied by Irish president Mary McAleese, laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, dedicated to those who fought for Irish freedom against the British crown, from the 1798 United Irishmen to the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1919-21 war of Irish independence. Typical of the obsequious press coverage was the London Independent’s statement that “what made the appearance all the more memorable, was the Queen’s tilt of the head—apparently silencing centuries of conflict” (independent.co.uk, 22 May).

More grovelling followed when the Queen went to the national stadium in Croke Park, scene of the original Bloody Sunday when in November 1920 British auxiliary troops, the hated “Black and Tans,” opened fire on a crowd at a Gaelic football match, killing 14. This massacre was an act of revenge for the assassination by Irish nationalists of eleven undercover British agents earlier that day. In a speech in Dublin the Queen intoned: “With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently—or not at all.” Thus the British rulers would whitewash the history of their colonial rule in Ireland. This “reconciliation” is of a piece with Tory prime minister David Cameron’s grudging admission a year ago that the 1972 Bloody Sunday killing of 14 unarmed protesters in Derry was “unjustified,” while adding that of course Bloody Sunday is not the defining story of the British Army’s role in Northern Ireland from 1969-2007. At the time we wrote:

“This is a blatant attempt to bury the memory of British Army brutality in Northern Ireland once and for all. The theme about the need to ‘move on,’ to erase the memory of Bloody Sunday from history, is echoed ad nauseam in the British capitalist press. By portraying Bloody Sunday as an exceptional incident within an otherwise impeccable record, the Saville Report [on Bloody Sunday] is being used to refurbish the credentials of the imperialist forces who today shoot-to-kill with impunity in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

—Workers Hammer No. 211, Summer 2010

An official visit to Dublin by an English monarch would have been unthinkable if not for the imperialist “peace deal” codified in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, under which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) agreed to disarm itself and the Irish nationalists of Sinn Fein joined the Northern Ireland government in Stormont. Sinn Fein refused to condemn or protest the Queen’s visit, and were not part of the formal reception. The “peace process” gave cosmetic surgery to the Orange state [Northern Ireland] but it remains fundamentally the same repressive, anti-Catholic state that it was at the time of partition in 1921. Independence for Ireland replaced the yoke of British domination with a clericalist, Catholic state in the south. We fight against the national oppression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland; at the same time we oppose the bourgeois nationalist programme for a “united Ireland,” which would create an oppressed Protestant minority. We insist that the conflicting claims of the interpenetrated Catholic and Protestant communities can only be equitably resolved in the framework of an Irish workers republic within a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles.

The Queen’s visit and the ballyhoo about the “normalisation” of relations between Britain and Ireland is not unconnected to the fact that today Britain has more trade with Ireland than it does with Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. Amid fears that the Irish government might default on its loans from the European Central Bank, the debt-ridden British government has a vested interest in ensuring that its loans are paid back. An article in the Irish satirical magazine the Phoenix (3 June) titled “British Queen frees the Irish from themselves” wryly noted: “The British lent us their Queen for a few days so as to revive our tourist industry and to bury the hatchet, sorry, the past.” It summed up: “Britain offered a loan (that protects British investors) and makes tut-tutting noises at nasty continentals.”

A comrade reporting from Dublin during the Queen’s visit said: “The visit has been accompanied by the largest security operation in the history of the state, with Dublin in almost complete lockdown for three days.” There were small protests by groups of Irish nationalists which were encircled by riot police who continually harassed and beat the demonstrators and arrested many. The Irish Anti-War Movement, dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), also called a “black balloon” protest under the slogan: “Remember the deaths at the hands of Her Majesty’s forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Conveniently not mentioned is the Irish bourgeoisie’s role in supporting the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan, including making Shannon airport available for U.S. military operations. Also whited out of history is British imperialism’s role in Northern Ireland.

“United Kingdom” and English Domination

The Sunday Times (29 May) reported that: “The Queen has signalled in a private meeting with David Cameron her concern at the prospect of the break-up of the United Kingdom.” This was in response to the victory of the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) in the Scottish elections in May. Similarly, at the time of her 1977 Silver Jubilee the Queen declared: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” We revolutionaries oppose the reactionary entity known as the “United Kingdom,” which incorporates the Orange statelet in Northern Ireland and rests on English domination over Scotland and Wales. The Westminster parliament reflects the favoured status granted to finance capital and the City of London by the ruling class, which has contempt for the former industrial areas of northern England, as well as Scotland and Wales.

A tirade of English chauvinism followed the victory of the SNP which now enjoys an outright majority in the Scottish parliament. The English press worked up a lather over the fact that the SNP might hold a referendum on independence— heaven forbid that the Scots should be allowed to decide such a question for themselves! The Spartacist League upholds the right of self-determination for the Scottish and Welsh nations—which means the right to separate (or not to separate). In reality, SNP leader Alex Salmond is in no rush to set a date for a referendum on independence because despite the popularity of certain SNP policies, such as lower student tuition fees than in England, the electorate might well vote no to independence. The SNP’s vision is one of an independent capitalist Scotland, under the English Crown and accepting the British armed forces. If an independent capitalist Scotland came into existence it would fare little better than Ireland, whose “Celtic Tiger” economy was once the SNP’s model.

Our attitude to the national question in Britain is grounded in intransigent opposition to all forms of nationalism—first and foremost the dominant English chauvinism. Our programme is for workers revolutions to overthrow all the capitalist regimes in Britain and in Ireland, North and South. The myriad forms of national oppression will be resolved when workers revolution has swept away capitalist rule on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish Sea.

Recall the Fate of Charles I!

In opposition to the royalist blather of the ruling class about “tradition” and “heritage,” we revolutionary Marxists have our own traditions. We recall the historic fate that befell Charles I in 1649 as a result of the defeat of the Royalist forces by Oliver Cromwell’s army. The English Revolution that began in 1640 took the form of a civil war between Royalists, who had the support of the landed aristocracy and the Anglican Church, and the Parliamentarians who included the rising capitalist class, backed by the labouring masses of the day. In 1645, Cromwell founded the New Model Army, heavily drawn from the ranks of yeomen, peasants and labouring classes of the cities, who became the decisive force in the revolution.

The New Model Army inflicted crushing defeats on the Royalists and in 1645 they captured the King. The conservative bourgeois elements in Parliament sought a compromise with the Royalists, enraging the army ranks who were led by the Levellers, the left wing of the revolution. In 1647 Parliament tried to disperse the army regiments, ordering them to enlist for Ireland or face immediate dismissal. The ranks mutinied, seized the King, held him captive and demanded that Cromwell should resume leadership of the army, which he did. But political debates raged between the Levellers and the generals and a split in the army was averted when the King escaped (or was freed) and the civil war re-ignited. Throughout 1648 Cromwell’s army again inflicted defeats on the Royalists. In Cromwell’s absence the army leadership in London, in alliance with the Levellers, decided to put the King on trial, which meant he would face execution. After some initial hesitation Cromwell endorsed the regicide, declaring: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it.” The execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 marked the decisive defeat for the feudal order in England. The result was unprecedented progress, not least in the abolition of the monarchy under the appropriately irreverent and rational wording “the office of a king in this country is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people.” The House of Lords was also abolished for a time, being deemed “useless and dangerous.” The English Republic adopted Common Law over the “Royal Prerogative,” abolished the “Star Chamber” system of courts and permitted a degree of religious dissent.

Two years after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored in 1660. But there would be no going back to the situation where the feudal nobles ruled over the bourgeoisie. Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, pointed out that, in the course of defeating the Royalist side, Cromwell had created a new society and that this could not be undone by decrees of Parliament. He explained:

“In dispersing parliament after parliament Cromwell displayed as little reverence toward the fetish of ‘national’ representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nonetheless it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse up on the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the Restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?” (1925)

Cromwell’s Conquest of Ireland

After the defeat of the Royalists in England, Cromwell organised an expedition to Ireland. In the outline of a report on the Irish question to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London, Karl Marx noted that “By engaging in the conquest of Ireland, Cromwell threw the English Republic out the window” (16 December 1867).

Cromwell’s conquest of the country was a continuation of the English Crown’s hundreds of years-long subjugation of Ireland. It represented, in the words of the Marxist authority on the English Civil War, Christopher Hill: “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy.” A necessary precondition for the English bourgeoisie’s invasion of Ireland was rooting out the Levellers from the ranks of the army. The prospect of being shipped to Ireland had provoked a Leveller revolt in the army in 1649. This time, unlike in 1647, Cromwell and his generals did not side with the mutineers. The Levellers were crushed by Cromwell at Burford, their leaders were arrested, four were executed. The episode showed that while the English Revolution, as a bourgeois revolution, was progressive in its ascendancy against feudalism, once the bourgeoisie took power, the progressive content soon gave way to reaction as the capitalist class consolidated its hold on power. Once established, bourgeois rule in its Irish colony was based on the profit-accumulating, imperialistic interests of that class.

In his writings on Britain, Trotsky emphasised the revolutionary traditions that the British working class needed to reclaim and emulate. This is in counterposition to the reformist Labour Party “lefts” who insisted that British workers could learn little from the experience of the Russian Revolution, as Britain was a more civilised, Christian country with established democratic channels through which socialism could patiently and peacefully be phased into existence. Trotsky advocated that British workers should learn from the Roundhead [Cromwellian] and Chartist traditions of revolutionary struggle, as against the Labour Party’s Fabian tradition of gradualism and pacifistic class-collaboration. Trotsky observed:

“The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth-century revolution by dissolving its past in ‘gradualness.’ The advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English revolution and find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social forces. Cromwell was in no case a ‘pioneer of labour.’ But in the seventeenth-century drama, the British proletariat can find great precedents for revolutionary action.”

—“Where Is Britain Going?” (1925)

Contrasting Cromwell with the Labour Party leaders who “dare not refuse pocket money to the Prince of Wales,” he declared “the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”

On the Chartist tradition Trotsky insisted: “As the Chartists tossed the sentimental preachers of ‘moral force’ aside and gathered the masses behind the banner of revolution, so the British proletariat is faced with ejecting reformists, democrats and pacifists from its midst and rallying to the banner of a revolutionary overturn.” Chartism was the first mass independent workers movement, brought into being by the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. The powerful left wing of the Chartists was republican, internationalist and revolutionary-minded. They asserted the right to bear arms and bitterly opposed the new, semi-military professional police in working-class districts across the country. Chartism was defeated and demoralised in the aftermath of the failure of the European-wide 1848 revolutions and the ensuing reaction. This paved the way for “Christian-socialist” Fabianism and the Labour Party, which since its founding in 1900 as the political expression of the trade union bureaucracy has worked to tie the working class to the bourgeois order.

Her Majesty’s Labour Party Vassals

Loyal to the capitalist state and its institutions, the Labour Party has always been a reliable prop for the monarchy, whether through staunch support or presenting the institution as a harmless irrelevance. At the Labour Party conference of 1923, when a resolution questioning the need for the monarchy was proposed, the “left” George Lansbury argued “what is the use of bothering about that just now” and the motion was voted down by 3,694,000 to 386,000!

The Labour leaders have a history of grovelling before the Crown—from Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, donning royal plumage when invited to Buckingham Palace in 1927 and graciously allowing King George V to arrange the 1931 popular-front government between Labour and the Tories, to Tony Blair’s craven service to the royal family following the death of Lady Diana and his insistence that the Queen is the “best of British.”

There was at least one amusing spectacle at the royal wedding—much to his chagrin, Blair’s fawning over the monarchy was not even rewarded with an invite. Whether the royal snub was a result of Blair’s conversion to Catholicism, the fox-hunting ban so loathed by the aristocracy or just his connection to the Labour Party (however tenuous its links to the working class) we can only speculate. Labour’s current leader, Ed Miliband, was keen to show he was fit for prime-ministerial office with his support for the royals and contempt for working people when, in the period before the royal wedding, he railed against the possibility of strikes being called anywhere near the occasion. Not that strikes were ever likely to disrupt such a patriotic affair given the present bunch of trade union misleaders.

Whatever occasional mutterings against the monarchy may come from Labour Party “lefts,” the reality on the ground is very different. That darling of the reformist left, Tony Benn, an avowed republican, has in fact sworn an oath in defence of the Crown, as a member of the Queen’s Privy Council, a position granted to everyone who becomes a governmental cabinet minister. It should be remembered that Benn was a member of the Labour cabinet that sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969. Labour’s shameful tradition also includes Arthur Henderson who, as a cabinet member, was in the King’s “advisory” Privy Council when the British government ordered the execution of James Connolly for his heroic role as the head of the proletarian Irish Citizen Army in the Dublin 1916 Easter Rising against British rule.

British “Far Left”: Latter-Day Fabians

The British “far-left” organisations are steeped in Labourism and so they soft-pedal any opposition to the monarchy. In 1997, during the media-induced hysteria surrounding the death of Princes William and Harry’s mother Diana Spencer, the left whistled to the tune of Tony Blair’s “people’s princess” platitudes. Our article at the time reported:

“The fake-revolutionary left, ever in Labour’s tow, was swept along, nominal disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding. Diana Spencer may have been the girl from the 10,000 acres next door, but for the centrist Workers Power group, ‘Her depression, bulimia, suicide attempts and ultimately divorce provided a glitzy microcosm of the plight of millions of less wealthy women’ (Workers Power, September 1997). That (and more) said, Workers Power assured its readers that it would ‘not be joining in the wave of national mourning’ and even vowed to ‘do everything’ to get the monarchy ‘scrapped forever’—everything, that is, but oppose Blair’s Labour Party at election time.

“In the same vein, but even more nauseating, was the so-called Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)…. The CPGB’s Weekly Worker (4 September) carried a front-page eulogy by chief spokesman Jack Conrad. While allowing that ‘even a bourgeois republic is preferable to the anti-democratic monarchy,’ Conrad outdid even Blair himself in his treacly musings for the ‘troublesome princess’ who ‘represented a soul in a soulless world’: ‘Her brief 36 years epitomise the struggle and fate of the 20th century personality who by chance and/or design has been iconised and thus commodified and sold by the uncontrollable, all pervasive power of capital’.”

—Workers Hammer No. 159, November/December 1997

In contrast, our article maintained:

“From the standpoint of the working class, the death of the ‘Princess of Wales’ was not a tragedy; special interest in the affairs of royalty, which places the life of an aristocrat above that of her chauffeur, betrays something of a servile instinct. The archaic institution of monarchy should long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history.”

For its part, the British SWP has gone a step further than the other reformists. At the founding of their ill-fated Respect Coalition in 2004, SWP leaders ensured that a resolution which called for the abolition of the monarchy was voted down!

For the reformist left, any opposition to the monarchy is framed by the consideration that it is an expensive excess and an embarrassment to the façade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Obviously, the vast cost of maintaining the royal parasites is an obscenity, but while this may be the main point of emphasis for liberals and reformists, Marxists realise capitalist budgets are made in the interests of the bourgeoisie and, for the bourgeoisie, royal visits, weddings and the monarchy itself are cheap indeed for the reactionary purposes they serve. The emphasis on tradition, heritage and historical continuity which this feudal relic implies is supposed to foster illusions in a class-harmonious, evolutionary society, free of tumultuous social change. Our comrades in the U.S. captured this perfectly in a 1977 article on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee:

“The Queen thus represents the British counterpart to the American myth that U.S. society is classless. In England it is manifestly impossible to deny the existence of class-based inequality. So the ruling class maintains that while there are classes, and there may be shifts in the class structure, there must be no class struggle. The monarchy is the living and familiar sign that there is a grossly unequal social place for everyone, and that this is historical and inevitable. That is why the Queen is treated with such dignity, why this cow is sacred.”

—Workers Vanguard No. 164, 1 July 1977

The monarchy does not merely fulfil a symbolic role, to the advantage of the British bourgeoisie, but stands ready as a rallying point for reaction. The Queen is the head of state; it is to her, and not parliament, that the armed forces and its officer corps swear an oath of allegiance. In the event of social crisis, in which the bourgeoisie felt its rule to be threatened, it is quite conceivable that the monarchy would be used in a reactionary mobilisation to stabilise the capitalist order, providing constitutional cover for a right-wing bonapartist coup. During WWII, discussions between the pro-Hitler Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, and the Nazis in Germany placed the Duke as the rumoured likely prospect to head a quisling government in England after the fall of France in 1940.

In fact the royal prerogative of Queen Elizabeth II has already been used to bring down a government in Australia, where she is also head of state. As our Australian comrades explained:

“In 1975 Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, his government the object of a concerted CIA destabilisation campaign, threatened to expose the role of the top secret U.S. spy bases. The Queen’s man and more importantly the CIA’s man, Governor General John Kerr, dismissed the elected government. Utterly committed to the institutions of the capitalist state, including the constitutional powers invested in the Queen, the ALP [Australian Labor Party] tops preached loyalty to the parliamentary process rather than let an enraged working class get ‘out of hand.’ The events of 1975 illustrated how the constitutional monarchy in Britain and here could be used in some future crisis to bestow ‘legitimacy’ on the establishment of a reactionary, possibly military regime to defend the capitalist order.”

—Australasian Spartacist No. 144, Autumn 1992

Workers Revolution Will Sweep Away Medieval Rubbish

Karl Marx reported with great affection a protest by the British working class against class oppression in 1855. This was a protest against the Sunday Trading Bill and Beer Bill which ensured shops were closed and restricted the opening hours of “places of public entertainment” (most notably public houses): their “betters” had decided the workers should be on their knees in church instead. Seeing the stark hypocrisy of the upper classes, who were not affected and who spent the day on leisurely carriage rides in London’s Hyde Park, a mass demonstration of the workers was called there and concluded in the following confrontation with English high society:

“A babel of jeering, taunting, discordant ejaculations, in which no language is as rich as English, enveloped [the upper classes] from both sides. As it was an improvised concert, instruments were lacking. The chorus therefore had to use its own organs and was compelled to confine itself to vocal music. And what a diabolical concert it was: a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds! A music that could drive men mad and move a stone. To this must be added outbursts of genuine old-English humour peculiarly mixed with long-contained seething wrath. ‘Go to church!’ were the only articulate sounds that could be distinguished. One lady soothingly offered a prayer book in conventional binding from her carriage. ‘Give it to read to your horses!’ came the thunderous reply, shouted by a thousand voices.”

—Karl Marx, “Anti-Church Movement—Demonstration in Hyde Park” (28 June 1855)

So moved by this demonstration of proletarian class outrage, Marx wrote: “We saw it from beginning to end and do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the English Revolution began in Hyde Park yesterday.”

We look to the revolutionary proletariat of these islands to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords—this time for good—and the established churches, along with the bourgeois rulers and all other forms of social parasitism, through socialist revolution! To do so the working class will need its revolutionary organisation. Our aim is to build this, modelled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party which, acting as a tribune for all the oppressed, led the storming of the tsar’s “prison house of peoples” and liberated one sixth of the earth from autocratic, chauvinist oppression and capitalist exploitation. The tsar was prevented from gaining asylum in Britain with his cousin King George V, who feared the repercussions this deeply unpopular move would have had for his own dynasty. Lenin and Trotsky’s desire was to put the tsar on trial as with the fate of Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. But with the counterrevolutionary White armies closing in on where the tsar and his family were imprisoned, the local Bolsheviks were forced to wipe the Romanov dynasty from the face of the Earth. As Isaac Deutscher relayed from Trotsky’s diary:

“In the midst of civil war, [Trotsky] says, the Bolsheviks could not leave the White Armies with a ‘live banner to rally around’; and after the Tsar’s death any one of his children might have served them as the rallying symbol. The Tsar’s children ‘fell victim to that principle which constitutes the axis of Monarchy: dynastic succession’.”

—The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940 (1963)

Forward to a world where the perversions of monarchy and dynastic succession are remembered only as abolished relics of the past!