A New Declaration of Independence

“...what, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?...There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking & bloody, than are the people of these United States...” — Frederick Douglass

July the 4th comes around to remind us of the purchase of American democracy by a ruling class and how the founding of America is based upon a lie. No reputable historian denies that the class interests of the founders in shaping the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution. Slaveholdings and financial holdings significantly influenced particular clauses or rules contained in the Constitution. The American War of Independence did not establish a truly democratic government. It did not significantly change the structure of American society; rather, it reinforced the political, economic, and social gaps between classes of Americans.

The fathers of American democracy, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, were very wealthy. With estimated net worth (in today’s dollars) ranging from $20 million to $500 million, they were likely all in the top 0.1 percent of the wealth distribution, demonstrating that the accumulation of capital is perfectly compatible with democratic values. In 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons. In the interior of Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres. By 1760, fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, shipping, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard. In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In those same years, the poor, those who owned no property, represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%.

The United States in the 1780s was controlled by economic elites that were universally white and male and owned considerable capital, much of it (as in the cases of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison) in the form of slaves. So they then created a political system in which power was concentrated among property-holding white men such as themselves, and in which slavery was allowed to flourish. The slave-holding class was able to translate its wealth into political influence, enough to maintain the institution for 77 years after the Constitution was ratified. And the economic power of white men helped keep in place a system in which a substantial majority of the US population was denied suffrage for over a century. They kept in place a system that was, by any reasonable definition, not a democracy. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason and the other Founding Fathers did act as much for economic motives as for “abstract democratic” ideals. Despite pretensions of being “enlightened” – sweeping aside monarchy, aristocracy and the established church – the new republic was never designed to be anything other than an oligarchic state.

Fourth president, James Madison, warned of the perils of democracy, saying too much of it would jeopardize the property of the landed aristocracy. “In England,” he observed, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure.” Land would be redistributed to the landless, he cautioned. Without the rich exercising monopoly privileges over the commons, the masses would be less dependent on elites like them.

Edmund Randolph, America's first attorney general, said, “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”

Alexander Hamilton derided “pure democracy.” At the Constitutional Convention he declared that “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the peopleThe people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.”

Howard Zinn wrote “The Founding Fathers did lead the war for independence from Britain. But they did not do it for the equal right of all to life, liberty, and equality. Their intention was to set up a new government that would protect the property of slave owners, land speculators, merchants, and bondholders."

Socialists are not afflicted with the disease of patriotism that will be on display across America today, which makes the wage-slaves of the nation eager to kill the wage-slaves of another country in the interest of a plutocracy that wields the same lash over them all. It seems ironic that millions are so patriotic in a country in which the only interest they will have is six feet of dirt in a cemetery. Most Americans know as much about the Revolutionary War as they know about the wars and revolutions now devastating the world today - which means not much at all.

The World Socialist Party of the United States declares that life, liberty, and happiness for every man, woman, and child are conditioned upon equal political and economic rights. That private ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth has caused society to split into two distinct classes with conflicting interests, the small possessing class of capitalists or exploiters of the labor force of others and the ever-increasing large dispossessed class of wage-workers, who are deprived of the socially-due share of their product. Our present system divides society into two classes, the “have all” and the “have nothing” class, and that it is the great mass of the people that do all the useful work who belong to the “have nothing. That capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production, is responsible for the insecurity of subsistence, the poverty, misery, and degradation of the ever-growing majority of people. That the same economic forces which have produced and now intensify the capitalist system will compel the adoption of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production for the collective good and welfare, or result in the destruction of civilization. 

The WSPUS declares its object to be the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution, through the restoration and repossession to the people of all the means of production and distribution, to be administered by organized society in the interest of the whole people, and the complete emancipation of society from the domination of capitalism. Wage-workers with their historical mission to realize a new world should sever connection with all capitalist and reform parties. The WSPUS does not hope for the establishment of social order through the increase of misery, but on the contrary expects its coming through the determined, united efforts of the workers of both city and country to gain and use the political power to that end.

American socialism is only a branch of world socialism, as American capitalism is a branch of global capitalism. A socialist does not hate every capitalist individually (although many truly deserve our contempt), that some should be picked out as scapegoats while the economic power and political encroachment of all the others should be silently submitted to. It means that while we understand that every individual capitalist is the result of the present system as much as the wage worker, we still must fight the capitalists as a class, because the producers cannot reasonably expect anything but exploitation from the exploiters as a class. To achieve socialism we want to make use of our political liberty and take possession of the public powers. The WSPUS will fight open and above-board everywhere and fight all capitalist parties alike. It cannot and will not assist capitalist politicians of one party in one state and of another party in a different state. In short, members of the WSPUS will be simply socialists, and nothing else.