July the Fourth

As another July the 4th comes around it reminds us of the buying of American democracy by a ruling class that many people insist does not even exist. Marxists have always called the American Revolution a “capitalist” revolution. This means that the revolution put the American capitalist class in power and accomplished many things that the capitalist class needed to have done. It unified the colonies, ended all of the restrictions on the growth of capitalism, set up a government that would protect capitalist property and so forth. But when we call this revolution a capitalist revolution, that does not mean that the capitalists themselves led this revolution, or even that a majority of the capitalist class supported it. As a matter of fact, the revolution was mainly made by other classes. It was even made against the will of the majority of the capitalist class of that day, the merchant capitalists. The American Revolution comprised not merely a revolt against Great Britain but also a struggle by farmers, artisans, planters and sections of the merchant class against the wealthy ruling classes of the colonies: the large landowners, big merchants and the top layers of the clergy and professional class.

In the 1770s to '80s, something revolutionary was stirring in the colonies. It was a people's movement called democracy. In public meetings and town halls, ordinary citizens were gathering to discuss how to govern themselves. Town meetings, long an institution in New England, were taken out of the hands of the propertied voters by the general city population. Although there were only 1,500 people in Boston entitled by property qualifications to attend town meetings and vote, attendance reached two and three thousand, and in days of crisis six or seven thousand. The propertied voters began to stay away since, as one of them complained, there were "very few gentlemen" present. This gave rise to a culture that was virtually unknown at the time: that of commoners sharing the responsibility of self-government (albeit women, native Americans and slaves were still excluded).
 In the Journal of American History, Joyce Appleby wrote:
"Foreign visitors in the 18th century invariably commented on the vitality of public discussions and on the political confidence of ordinary men."

 The American colonies of the 1760s and 1770s were not a unified state, but a loose collection of 13 provinces, with a combined population of only 3 million. They had separate histories and no tradition of acting together. After the War of Independence, citizens of the 13 sovereign states considered the United States of America to be a description of a friendly alliance of nation-states similar to the United Nations and the oligarchs of that era found it difficult to conduct business among the 13 sovereign states, each of which was developing its own laws regulating commerce, taxes and tariffs.

In Pennsylvania, in 1776 a conference was called to form a ‘new government … on the authority of the people alone’. Out of it emerged the most democratic constitution of the time, guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and increased representation so all male taxpayers resident for a year or more could vote. There was no governor, but there were annual elections for the House of Representatives and all bills were printed so people outside the immediate political process could consider them. It was viciously denounced by the wealthy as ‘a mobocracy of the most illiterate’, and there were increasing fears among the propertied that ‘artisans, small traders, farmers, and men with mud on their boots had come to power.’ In opposition to these lower orders, ‘Men with land, men with fortunes, men with visions of development and wealth, men with far flung connections, men with memories of the surety with which their fathers had ruled, all these were developing the distaste for state level democracy’.

 The first constitution of the United States (the Articles of Confederation) endured for 10 years, starting in 1778, before being circumvented.  In February 1787, George Washington (the richest man in the United States) proposed a convention in May in Philadelphia for the alleged purposes of revising the Articles of Confederation. Upon arrival, however, delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were dismayed to discover that Washington, Madison, Hamilton and others wanted to throw out the old Articles of Confederation. In their place, Hamilton proposed a new, second Constitution of the United States, which included a powerful federal government to rule over the state governments, a president for life (a king!), a senate appointed for life (peers!), an electoral college that elects the president and an appointed for life Supreme Court (Law Lords) with authority over the state courts.
"Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy," Alexander Hamilton is quoted as saying according to the Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 taken by Robert Yates.

Many of the delegates left in protest. Of the 62 delegates appointed, only 39 signed the new Constitution. Terms for elected officials were a minor concession to the proponents of democracy. The Bill of Rights was tacked on at the insistence of outraged citizens during the process of ratification, but it narrowed the list of protected rights to 10 out of the dozens that were initially proposed. The Philadelphia Convention, widely heralded today as the birthplace of democracy, was nothing short of a coup. In Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, the rules stated, "That nothing spoken in the House be printed or otherwise published or communicated." James Madison, one of the main recorders, refused to publish his notes until all of the framers were buried in the grave.

Under the new Constitution, the federal government of the United States of America became a new, powerful legal body that wielded supreme authority over the subordinate states. Resistance to the new Constitution was widespread. In 1787, Washington wrote, "Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them." William Grayson of Virginia wrote, "We are now told . . . that we shall have wars and rumors of wars, that every calamity is to attend us, and that we shall be ruined and disunited forever, unless we adopt this constitution . . .”

 The adoption of the new Constitution came down to money. America divided between the  monied interests which supported the new federal government and popular dissent which objected to the loss of local power and the rising supremacy of the rich. The Anti-Federalists were out-powered by the media apparatus and political influence of the oligarchs, who convinced commercial interests, small landowners, farmers, merchants and artisans to side with them. To better understand what transpired at Liberty Hall in 1787. These wealthy elites empower themselves to regulate commerce to their own advantage. Rule of the plutocrats under the empty rhetoric of democracy is so familiar and comfortable that to have millionaires in Congress and a ruling class of wealthy elites seems as American as apple pie. The primary driving force behind the ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and more overtly in the Bill of Rights, was the dominance of the new capitalist class, and its needs and interests. The ideas of the American Revolution are inextricably linked with the real historical process of the extension of capitalism in North America, and fed into the measures adopted by Congress in the 1780s to further that development.

 The American Revolution established the basis of an industrial capitalist class. Prior to it, merchant capitalism had held undisputed sway in the cities. The basic activity was not the production of goods, but the buying and selling of goods. It made its money by buying them cheap and selling them dearer. The place vacated by the old wealthy classes was taken by a new aristocracy of wealth, which was soon far richer than the old. The new capitalists, manufactures, and bankers secured as their spokesman and leader possible the most able statesman American capitalism has ever had at its disposal. Alexander Hamilton, in the early years of the Republic before Jefferson and the planters succeeded in wrestling away a share of the power, used the new state machinery like a pile driver to set the pillars upon which capitalism would build. These men quickly sought a way of quieting people’s desire for direct democracy.

 “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” applied originally to just a small group of wealthy, white, land-owning males. The “pursuit of happiness” meant the right to accumulate property and wealth. Under their new flag, Native American peoples were slaughtered and their lands stolen. Millions of Africans perished in transit to America, and those that survived lived as human livestock. Early American society, both North and South, was based upon the barbarous enslavement of African peoples.

Later when the U.S. seized the Southwest, Chicanos became a conquered people in their own lands. Asians were imported as coolies and contract laborers to help build the West. The U.S. colonised Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines and other lands in the Pacific. From Europe tens of millions of people seeking a new and better life made their way to these shores. But most found themselves cruelly exploited as indentured servants, craftsmen, laborers and small farmers. Inequality and organized cruelty abounded in the new society – nothing less than a second revolution, the Civil War, was needed to end slavery.

U.S. capitalism also spread its tentacles throughout the entire world. The U.S. coveted the markets, raw materials, and labor of other peoples, especially in the third world. It invaded the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, the Congo, Iran, Lebanon, China and a host of other countries. It waged wars of conquest like the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, and the war in Indochina. Through this aggression, U.S. industrialists and financiers constructed a world empire of colonialism and exploitation. After World War II the U.S. became a superpower and dominated the world. U.S. multi-nationals earned the justified hatred of people around the globe The ruling class hoped they could continue their bloody deeds forever.

The creativity and toil of the working people – workers, farmers, technicians, craftspeople, intellectuals and others built the U.S. Whenever the working peoples tried to improve their position in society, however, the ruling forces viciously attacked and opposed them.

The people’s movement in the U.S. is stained with the blood of hundreds of martyrs, including many socialists. The Haymarket demonstrators of Chicago. The Pullman strikers. The massacred men, women and children of Ludlow, Colorado. The fighters of the union organizing drives of the 1930s. These are a few of the famous heroes and heroines of the U.S. working class. The state persecuted and even killed fighters for justice, from John Brown to Nat Turner, from Eugene Debs to Mother Jones, from W.E.B. DuBois to Malcolm X, from Big Bill Haywood to Joe Hill.

But the struggles of the working people in the U.S. could never be fully extinguished because the injustices remained.  People cry out against pollution and environmental destruction. Each person in America is faced with the choice of either enduring the suffering of unemployment, brutalization and war; or taking the path of struggle – joining with others who are dissatisfied and know that a better society is possible.

 On July 4th  we remember there is another revolution to fight - the socialist revolution.

Hat-tip to here