The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power
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Friday, July 03, 2020
The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power
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.
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.
Thursday, July 02, 2020
A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review
A Slice Of Life-French
Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up”
(1934)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sarah Lemoyne
Kiss and Make-Up,
starring Cary Grant, Helen Mack, Genevie Tobin, 1934
New Introductory note by
Sarah Lemoyne: I want to thank site manage Greg Green for manning up to what
had happened to me in losing the coveted Hammer Production psychological thriller
six-film series due to what he confessed was office politics and the cruel realities
of the cutthroat publishing business. I had intended on leaving but his offer
of giving me both the Star Wars and Marvel Comic studio film reviews was too
good to pass up. Read below to find out just how treacherous this journalism
business really is-stuff they don’t have a clue about in journalism schools.
**********
Admittedly, as I have
freely admitted in my bracketed introduction to my first film review, I have a
lot to learn about journalism, the ins and outs of journalism, and the internal
politics of who and why certain personalities get, or don’t get, certain
reviews. That naiveté on my part got me caught in a vise right after my second
review of the six-part Hammer Production psychological thrillers when wizened
and gnarled ancient Sam Lowell unceremoniously grabbed the series from under me
on the basis of some good old boy connection. In that sense I learned fast that
you make your own breaks in this world and that you had best defend your turf
in this cutthroat business. I get that. What I don’t get is when a turkey of a
film, well not a turkey but one that could have been left on the cutting floor
and nobody would have cried one single tear, like this Kiss and Make-Up is assigned to me and I am clueless about what to
say about the thing except I am fully confused by the point.
That is when my newfound
friend and mentor Seth Garth gave me some pearls of wisdom that he had learned
at the feet of that same gnarled Sam Lowell who I refuse to talk to these days as
one can understand. Seth told me Sam told him that when all else fails always
go to a “slice of life” hook informing a new younger audience of what these old-
time films showed about life in those periods. That will be my hook here
although in a quirky way.
(By the way I am not
talking to Sam especially since I have heard a rumor that the old cretin in
taking over my Hammer series has decided that he had to give his take on my
first two published reviews in order to make the series his own. Being from all
observations practically senile he is looking for me, for Sarah Lemoyne, to
write those reviews and basically trash my own reviews as so much insignificant
babble since as a stringer I am at the beck and call of this mountebank. He
had, has, a well-deserved reputation for either, at least in the old days, just
doing a recopy job on the press releases the studios handed out or having a
stringer like Leslie Dumont, who clued me in of on Sam’s having stringers write
the stuff under his name, write it for him
Probably for some women,
maybe more in the past than now, although maybe I have been sheltered a bit by
being around professional women, personal beauty and appearance drives their
lives. That is the premise the studio was working on in this wacky sent-up of
the very lucrative beauty business where handsome Cary Grant is in Paris as a
doctor specializing in make-overs for the rich and ugly women who need all the
help they can get in his temple of beauty. (Why the film had to be set in
Paris, per se, instead of London or New York since nobody including French
Nationals speaks French except I heard that Paris was, and still is, one of the
beauty and fashion centers of the world with people like Coco Chanel and Christian
Dior running amok). What the good doctor was trying to do is laughable by
today’s plastic surgery standards where a tuck here and a pinch there will do
wonders, thank you, exercise and diet standards but we will chalk this up to
the times and let the chips fall where they may.
Now Cary, whom along
with Clark Gable, was my grandmother’s idea of manly handsomeness and to an
extend I see her point is not only running this beauty temple but sampling the
wares of his transformations, especially one Madame Caron, who has not only
been transformed but has become the bane of her husband since she came under
Cary’s care. The solution, for the cuckolded husband anyway: sue for divorce
with Cary as the co-respondent, the alienator of affections, in those tough
divorce times especially in Catholic France in the 1930s when the Church still
had some sway. That done Madame and Cary get married and run to the French
Rivera for their honeymoon but find they are incompatible since she had become
a beauty maven. (By the way what passes for beauty, genuine or bought, in those
days would be hard-pressed to even get a date out in today’s meat markets since
today pretzel thin upper body with long thin legs and long hair un-permed, or
the appearance of un-permed hair is what is considered attractive by fashion
magazine and cinematic standards.)
Of course that was only
the “front” story. Handsome Doc, who apparently had sold out his professional
credentials for filthy lucre after medical school rather than making some
research breakthrough that could lessen the ills of humankind, in the end sees
the error of his ways. Made to see those errors by his smitten (with him)
secretary and chief fixer Anne who is dewy fresh and who could today get dates
without lifting a finger both as to looks and brains. Seth tells me this is an
old Hollywood “hook” in the storied history of cinematic boy meets girl lines
which have salvaged half the films ever made. If you don’t follow the bouncing
ball you lose the fact that everything is heading toward some final romance
between this pair, despite Cary’s ill-advised marriage, despite the playboy
affect, despite the blindness to a genuine companion against some floosy
affair.
In the end after being
kicked metaphysically in the head Cary finally gets it. If that doesn’t give
enough of a slice of life about what was fashionable in a previous age then let
me throw this out. This is film is touted as a pre-Code film meaning after the
enforcement of the Code came into play that each and every possible connotation
of sex, sexual desire, even sexual knowledge was under pressure from the
religious crazies and zanies banned from the screen. This included any nude
scenes, profanity, erotic touching and the like. Those later post-Code films, especially
with scenes of married, happily married,
couples in separate marital beds, certainly could provide a slice of life for
the times but what passes for the sexually provocative in the pre-Code period
would be laughed at today by eight- year olds with a computer and access to the
Internet. How is that for slice of life.
When Hammer Productions Pulled The Hammer Down-“The Snorkel” (1958)-A Film Review
When Hammer Productions
Pulled The Hammer Down-“The Snorkel” (1958)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sarah Lemoyne
The Snorkel, Peter van
Ecyk, Betta Saint John, Mandy Miller, Hammer Productions, 1958
[Nobody ever said the
life of a writer, make that a journalist to be closer to the nub of what is on
my mind today, was easy, or was going to be easy. Take the example of Allan
Jackson, the editor of this publication both in its original hard copy format
and up until recently the on-line version who for years went under the moniker
Peter Paul Markin but who got so wrapped up in some 1960s youth celebration
fixation kind of thing that the younger writers staged a revolt and that was
that. Gone, unceremoniously gone, and while he was permitted to return to write
new introductions to an encore edition of the famous The Roots Is The Toots history of classic rock and roll series which
he was instrumental in putting together now that that task is over he has gone
back to oblivion. Some say he is running a whorehouse down in Buenos Aires and others
have him once again begging at now enshrined Mitt Romney’s Republican bid to be
the next U.S. Senator from Utah looking to do public relations work from his former
nemesis.
Such is the life at the
top of the pyramid, the place where one mistake, which is after all the only
one that Jackson made with that 1960s nostalgia business which would probably not
have even been one at say Rolling Stone, puts
you right back on cheap street. So you can imagine what the reality is like for
a free-lancer, a stringer, taking assignments on consignment like they do with decent
used clothing and having to haggle for every dime while old-time by-line
writers have them do the heavy lifting while they go for long cocktail hours
and spent long afternoon in hidden hotels rooms with companions not their spouses.
One guy who shall remain nameless since I still like to use his services occasionally
was notorious for grabbing whatever came off the AP wire and just putting his
name on top. Worse, when he was doing film and book reviews he would do the
same with the studio publicity department hand-outs and publishing blurbs. Christ
and editors, including me, let the stuff go through were happy to have his name
on the by-line.
That brings us to the case
today of young free-lancer, stringer if you like that term better Sarah LeMoyne
who I had originally assigned the six-film Hammer Production thriller series from
the 1950s so she could get her feet wet in the reviewing business by doing a
short series connected to one studio. Then office politics, yes, I will admit
office politics on this one, got in the way. Sam Lowell decided that he wanted
to do the series since he had done the film noir end of what Hammer Productions
had put out, and had done it well. So Sarah, all happy and such to have a nice assignment,
as you can see from her short introduction to the film below, got short shrift because,
well, because she is a stringer, a by the word stringer if it comes right down to
it and Sam Lowell has a by-line respected in this cutthroat business where you
are only as good as your by-line writers whatever talents your stringers might
have. What got Sarah in a crazy mood, a kill crazy mood if you think about it
was that Sam has asked her to do two things. First write the rough drafts for him
of each of the six films and secondly to rewrite her own first two published reviews
so they reflected his take on the material. In short to trash her own reviews
to set up a fake controversy between two reviewers. Christ it was all I could
do to talk Sarah out of leaving. I had to promise this introduction AND another
series maybe Star Wars or the Marvel Comics studio productions. Yeah,
Christ. Greg Green]
********
[I am happy today since
my first film review was recently published so the world is beautiful, and I
will not bore the reader with long-winded gripes or go off on a tangent like
some writers here seem to think is mandatory or else their reviews don’t measure
up. Read on. Sarah Lemoyne]
Having recently been
given the assignment to do this six-film compilation produced by Hammer
Productions of England and distributed by Columbia Pictures in the United
States I agree with Seth Garth who has turned into something of a mentor to me
of late that the term “low budget” certainly applies to this one, The Snorkel, as it did to the last. By
that he meant, and this runs through the Hammer horror movie and film noir
compilations as well which Sam Lowell had reviewed a couple of years ago, that
they used mostly unknown British and American actors, didn’t leave much on the
cutting room floor and spent about six dollars on set design.
That is all true in this
vehicle as well except somehow they got an interesting story line that helps
the viewer forget that the actors were over-emotive and the scenery needed
serious work. I don’t know how this one fits into the psychological thriller
genre but the premise is not bad. Step-father Snorkel, let me call him that,
apparently tired of his wife, or merely looking to get his hands on her dough
unimpeded planned and executed the “perfect” murder, or at least he thought so,
by drugging her up and gassing up her room sealed while he has fresh air via an
air pump tied to his snorkel under the floorboards as she suffocated to death. His
alibi complete with passport entry that he had been over the border in France working
on a new book or some such baloney. The whole thing was written off as the
suicide of a depressed and forlorn woman. Done. End of story.
No, no, no. Enter his
step-daughter, a goof teenager which doesn’t help her credibility, accompanied
by her nanny, who without any evidence but also knowing her man, knowing this guy
was strictly a gold-digger was not buying any of the suicide story-and lets
him, and the world know it. Problem about her theory which we already know is a
serious one is that freaking sealed room and no evidence of somebody somehow doing
the deed. Every time teen angel gathers up a bit of steam either nanny or dad
squash the thing tight but teen angel knows that this guy is a bastard. Teen
angel knows that she witnessed this guy murder her father in order to marry
mother dear so this guy has a track record in her mind. Most of the rest of the
film is spent in that tug of war between these deadly adversaries with the
nanny pushing toward Snorkel’s side once he puts on the charm machine. But
despite the perfect crimes Snorkel feels the heat from teen angel and so he
makes what will be his fatal mistake and tries to kill her.
Still nobody is buying
her story. This though is where a little rough justice in this wicked old world
as Seth likes to say comes in. In one last effort to figure out how the murder
of dear mother and then herself could have happened she has a guy from the consulate
check a few spots, one of them behind the very heavy cabinet. No go. No go but
that cabinet was left in place right over a trap door which had been place
where Snorkel hid while he was doing his dastardly deeds. While he is now
hiding as they inspect the premises. He can’t move the heavy cabinet from his
tight position and he is doomed. Doomed
once teen angel comes for one last look and hears his pleas for life. She walks
away leaving him to suffocate. Maybe. Maybe if her stop at the police station
doesn’t get the coppers there in time. Beautiful rough justice. Interesting as
a perfect murder tag but don’t try this at home, okay.
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