p Workers as well as farmers were often held in servitude in the English-speaking world of Old England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, often of a de facto slave type. -And, this situation lasted until at least the early 1800’s. An entertaining novel set in Scotland and the US, where mine workers suffered these circumstances, is worth your attention entitled A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett.
p So the fact that the overwhelming percentage of New England’s population was or had been unfree ( 75%) by the time of the Revolutionary War (1775 — 1881) did not change the general perception both at home and abroad, that “freedom” was extant in North America as it had never been in historical Europe. —And, in fact, it was.
p Primarily this was because White’s who came in as temporary slaves (so-called indentured servants) eventually were freed or escaped servitude as part of the deteriorating ability of their feudal colonial masters in Old England to control the destiny of a land so far from home; which at any rate was being torn apart itself in a series of Civil Wars and revolutions.
p The initial wave of 1600’s immigrants was religious and of the Cromwell variety — which is to say protestant of the Independent, Congregationalist, Puritan type; (remember the English Revolution, the English Republic and the English Civil Wars of 1640 — 1660 we discussed in Chapter 12 on Capitalism.) It featured those whose objective was to work in some way for a living, as well as those who planned on living off of them, as they had, in the Old World. Such hopes were usually extinguished rather soon for the latter, but among the former some of our White ancestors survived in their North American toeholds; despite hostile environments (both natural and cultural). Unlike the warm climates and already domesticated masses of “Latin” America awaiting the Spanish ronin who colonized them, the North Americans seemed to have picked the “hardest” way to go.
507p This English Revolution period, 1640-1660, witnessed the emergence of a true “New” England; one where the Cromwellian Puritans, Congregationalists and Independents of a variety of Church affiliations finally turned their beachhead settlements into true colonial towns. Their most distinguishing characteristic, vis a vis their Spanish counterparts to the south, was their addiction to self-help “work” as the source of their wealth, as opposed to living off the work of those being held in servitude. This was a new and completely different “social value” than that characterizing the feudalist occupation of New Spain. The protestant ethic had found a safe haven, and so had these protestant colonists — soon to be joined by Christians of the old and “official” (i.e., Roman Catholic) Church variety, many temporarily out of Papal favor in Europe.
508p As importantly, as Adam Smith reported in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, the American’s had proven that free labor in the end was cheaper than labor held in servitude. Free labor could be dismissed when no longer needed, while slave labor
p (both temporary and permanent) had to be fed, clothed, and housed all year round.
p America is Labor Short
p Nothing had plagued New England more in the 1600’s and 1700’s than the shortage of “hands.” So, it was not long before “temporary” slaves were imported — usually but not always White. As we have seen they were called “indentured servants”, and were ostensibly under contract to work for a certain person for two to seven years to pay the cost of their passage, at which time they would join their “free” (if impoverished) brethren, not yet truly petty bourgeoisie, on the land or in the towns. Recruiters sold these “packages” of temporary slavery with all the skill of modern used car sales hucksters offering many enticements (e.g., learn a trade; be all you can be; see the world; find a mate; become a “free” farmer, etc.) Yet an apple that turns out to be a lemon often leads to consumer rejection. —And, the reality the temporary slaves found awaiting them was far more severe than they had imagined; so the struggle to end being “unfree” often began as soon as the immigrants arrived in the New England colonies. The newcomers determined to make lemonade, and move on.
509p Yet, there is a big difference between being conscious of the unjust nature of feudal society and being class conscious of the proletarian variety. It would take the introduction of true capitalism, with all its technological diagnostic criteria in hand, before a true “proletarian” consciousness could emerge. In other words, one must have proletarians before one can have proletarian consciousness.
p The Struggle to End being Unfree
p Fundamentally, these de facto temporary slaves (at least the Whites) when abused or otherwise having become disaffected, could always run away and hide while farming in the western forests, or work as some kind of laborer, apprentice, or specialist guildsman in the large towns of the North (Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia.) Africans could often do this as well since a great many of them had come to New England as “freemen” or as “temporary slaves” in the 1600’s and 1700’s and had settled as “citizens” in the Northern Colonies. “Running away” had, of course, happened in Europe also, but was a far more effective “open door” to freedom in New England, with its de facto unlimited western frontier.
p Once arriving in cities, those with the idea of being free laborers soon discovered workers could not legally band together and refuse to work, except at a certain wage and for a certain number of hours. All this was explicitly outlawed in New England as it had been in Old England. As, for that matter, was paying and/or receiving a wage higher than prescribed by the bourgeois bosses of the colonies This was the first challenge the immigrants confronted.
p Unity vs. Collaboration
p In the struggle for adequate wages or fees, working people learned only by combining to achieve some degree of unity could they earn a decent wage or fee for their labor Thus, the first half of the foundation for social progress was learning to achieve unity of purpose and action.
p However, their economic struggles with the bourgeoisie were compromised by the necessity of letting the bosses run the progressive movement to replace feudalism
p with democracy of the capitalist sort (where the bourgeoisie rule, in other words, and settle their business among themselves politically in a “democratic” fashion). The bourgeois elements had the meeting places, the press, the elected offices held, the Church, and who else could lead. At any rate, this was the predominate ideological framework of that time (as it had been since the days of Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution). So, workers were always deeply involved politically alongside their bourgeois brothers — as younger brothers. Not as an independent class with its own inherent interests. Furthermore, many of these working people were also petty bourgeois or wanted to be (guildsmen working for fees; small craftsmen operating shops; small farmers.) Therefore, it wasn’t hard to convince them their political objectives should be the same as those of their employers and the more prosperous farmers (often called planters.) In practice if working conditions and wages were not blatantly unfair working people were willing to set aside economic demands in favor of political unity with their more prosperous neighbors. Under these conditions workers were willing to collaborate with the well-to-do.
510p Capitalist Technological Foundations Illegal
p -And, there were good material reasons for proto-proletarian mechanics, artisans and apprentices, to think of the colonial burgeoning bourgeoisie as being like class brothers. At least on the surface. For example, the technological foundations of what was then “modern” manufacture were specifically prohibited by British colonial law from being exported to New England. Not that the North American bourgeoisie didn’t import them anyway — but, it made every aspect of their manufacturing endeavors illegal from the get go.
p For example, blast furnaces and the know how to make them, were equipment and knowledge, carefully policed in British ports. US smugglers like John Adams and John Hancock were forced to assist in the disguising of mechanics and others with technical knowledge in order to get them aboard their ships and often their equipment had to be left behind. The hope being that these men could remember how the furnaces were built and maintained, so they could reconstruct them once safely in America.
p It was illegal to produce wrought iron in the colonies. Illegal to bring in artisan mechanics. Illegal to make machinery. Illegal to export anything that didn’t first go through British ports on British ships. The entire Anglo-American enterprise was an exercise in illegal trafficking.
p North American capitalists had to start out as criminals, and continue that way as a normal part of everyday business once they might get production underway. —And, finally, their sales activities at home and abroad were a further and equally serious criminal infraction. Working people saw that feudalist oppression was as hard if not harder on the well-to-do than it was on them!
p The arrival of the Flying Shuttle (1755), the Spinning Jenny ((1760), and the Steam Engine c.1765, were great criminal, as well as technological, accomplishments and would have earned their importers the hangman’s noose had they been caught. In fact, it was the deep woods of North America which often had to be the locale for the construction of these furnaces and proto-factories, and in this the bourgeois importers naturally required the day to day assistance of the proto-proletarian and small capitalist farming, masses.
p So, the material foundations of a united front were strong, constant, and overpowering.
p In Conflict
p However, where the antagonistic articulation between the bourgeoisie and the mechanics, artisans, apprentices and would be proletarians, in this new Less-than-Eden, were often too sharp to allow for class collaboration, Whites and Blacks could also take up arms and revolt. They did this often, and many times, together.
p True chattel slaves in the Southern colonies mostly Black, often did revolt. —And, in turn either escaped to sanctuaries such as Florida or Mexico or were slaughtered by thugs employed by their overseers. Thus, this second half of the foundation for social progress was learning to be willing to engage in armed revolt. Something White poor people were also learning.
p A united front with the bourgeoisie was de facto the way history unfolded. —And, while the struggle of Black chattel slaves and White temporary slaves were two distinctly different things, what this means for us, is that from this point forward in our studies we want to study two distinct trends in US working class consciousness formation. American White and free workers would have to contend with two tendencies. That is (1) unity with the bourgeoisie to achieve political success and (2) a willingness to fight the bourgeoisie and the slavocrats for economic success. Black slaves could not collaborate in any real way other than to submit to slavery and they had to learn to fight or flee.
p {Note: today it is labor unity, and the willingness to fight back in open revolt, that constitutes the foundation for progress of all wage earning people in North America. It is for that reason the US Rulers spend so much effort and resources controlling all the media of communications (newspapers, books, and TV and Radio news and school textbooks.) Whatever happens the ruling oligarchy aims to (1) divide the people (destroy their unity) and (2) discourage “violence” on their part to redress their grievances.-And, with their Government apparatus in the States as well as Federally they pass endless legislation aimed at “atomizing” if you will the American people, turning one group against another, in the hope that constant and growing divisions among the masses will prevent unity from being achieved on their part. Today the fact we still need to get the right to organize a union through Congress shows us nothing has changed.)
511p With this background in mind let us turn to the situation with regard to wage earners in the period immediately preceding the Revolutionary War. When we do, we see among the Whites, these two general trends had begun to take precedence in the social and political struggles of the North Americans by 1765. (The point in time we have defined “Capitalism as a Stage” to have emerged — I suggest at this point you reread chapter 12).
p Politically, first and foremost, was the demand of the immigrants for “democracy”; the second was the demand of the immigrants for “freedom” from British aristocratic economic oppression. Let us review them in that order.
p The Struggles for Political Democracy and Economic Freedom
p The initial wave of immigrants featured egalitarian ideas so common among the religionists of the puritanical-independent-Congregationalist Cromwellian variety in the 1600’s, and all of the New England toe-hold colonists could vote. By the 1700’s
p however, the poor had often been stripped of that right, and only the “landed” (property owning) or otherwise wealthy, citizens were allowed to vote (of course neither the temporary or permanent chattel slaves could vote; nor, the poor and wage- or fee-earning working people.) There were exceptions, or soon would be, in places like Philadelphia where persons renting apartments could vote (and this included many working people.) However, none of this anti-democratic movement in the colonies occurred without generating massive dissatisfaction, and as we have seen in Pennsylvania, workers sometimes won.
p As you might imagine the tiny English-speaking world of that time was always affected in one part, when something happened in another part. We have seen that the word “all”, when talking about the English-speaking world, meant only the United Kingdom and Ireland, the New England colonies and some Caribbean colonies. Thus, as Old England went, so went New England, eventually (albeit with its new indigenous democratic inclinations.)
p Cromwell had his most serious and final pre-English civil war debate (c.1640) with himself. He was trying to decide whether to make the attempt at bringing his version of Christian political and economic life to Old England, or chucking the whole thing, to join his fellow co-religionists in their pilgrimage to the New World. —And, this tendency continued for the next two centuries. Which is to say, this Old World vs. New World choice, awaited young English men and women, for over two centuries. The time it took to traverse the distance involved continued to shrink, so it was not surprising that revolutionary developments (or counter-revolutionary ones) in Old England continued to have reflections in the New World and vice versa.
p In the midst of the Old English civil war (which led to the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords), in 1646, the American Nathaniel Bacon led a White revolt against the feudal parasitocracy headed up by the slave-owning planters (slavocrats) in the Virginia Colony. The slavocrats were able to defeat Bacon’s forces (largely White and of course poor) by drowning the revolt in blood (Bacon inconveniently died during the armed struggle.) But, before the rulers could finish their work the commoners had regained some of their rights. White men without property regained their right to vote for their political representatives, and the right to vote in the selection of officials of their church as well, at least temporarily.
p Nearly half a century later, and one year after the Anti-restoration Revolution of 1688 in London, a follower of Bacon named Jacob Leisler led another armed struggle in New York City, in 1689, against the local aristocracy. This time the reactionary forces did not succeed in reversing the gains of the uprising. As you can see, in both cases the American revolts, while indigenous responses to local conditions, took their triggering cue from Old England, which in both cases was in the throes of bourgeois revolution. Also, in both cases there were two primary classes involved in insurrection. The small holding capitalist farmers of the countryside (about 90% of the White population in the American colonies) and the artisans-mechanics of the cities. The latter being the precursors to true proletarian status.
512p British Capitalism Faces First Colonialist Financial Crisis
p Tea Party in Boston
p It’s important for you to recognize at this point one critical factor in the emerging
p post-War (1856-1863) situation in Britain. Yes they won the war against France but they did so at the cost of about 60 million pounds! Parliament took various taxing measures including requiring the North American colonies to pay part of the bill - at least the ongoing part of supporting British troops and other British Government functions in the Atlantic colonies. This was an abrogation of the long ago won, full civic rights in colonial Assemblies, due to rich White Yankee Gentry, in the North American system of rule by White Male Wealthy “common” men. The Stamp Act and other taxing pieces of legislation culminated in the Boston Tea Party and led directly to the North American Revolutionary War (1775-1781.) The ultimate cause having been the British capitalist’s greed to seize French and other possessions on a global basis, which had led directly to the loss of the North American colonies altogether.
513p Technically this is more of a colonial war than an imperialist war in that the British and French capitalists were not trying to export capital at any important rate. That is, factories and the machinery within them were not being sent here and there and sold to anyone anywhere. Just the opposite actually as you have seen in this juxtaposition of British Imperialism versus North American colonists. But it was symptomatic in every way of what capitalism portended for the 19th century.
p The Origin of American Proletarians
p It’s important here to note that Capitalism, for a century and a half after New England’s colonization, did not yet quite exist - in either Old or New England. Which is to say, that workers hired, and paid for their labor-power (wages), then placed at the factory bench, were not yet quite in existence — or, where in some large American cities, some small shops of this type did exist, they were limited by British colonial law, which allowed no would-be capitalist to hire more than ten such persons per shop. -And, of course, the New Englanders were still over half a century away from steam engines and machinery, as late as 1700. Yet, despite all these deficiencies it is clear that the American class from which true proletarians (factory workers) will emerge is the class of the guildsmen, mechanics, and artisans, of the pre-Revolutionary War period.
514p Secret Revolutionary Societies
p When not religious, it would be secular revolutionary bodies, which served as the organizational forms around which the bourgeoisie organized its resistance to feudal authority in the American colonies. The latter were necessarily “secret” societies devoted to one or another aspect of the struggle against British rule. None was more important than The Sons of Liberty. These were capitalist organizations at-bottom, but the mixing up of working class and bourgeois politics as a consequence of the primitive condition of pre-capitalist development in the English colonies led the first truly working-class “union” type of organizations to embed themselves in these bourgeois secret societies. Among the first to do so were the Seamen’s association of New York City, who created their own branch of the Sons of Liberty they called the “Sons of Neptune.” These men led the strikes in New York against British imports, against British maritime policy, and in general against everything “British.”
515p Often, the small capitalist farmers in the American countryside allied with their city brethren or at least wanted to. —And, women organized as a separate and distinct group in the “Daughters of Liberty.”
p In Ireland, and even in Old England, affiliate supporters of the Sons of Liberty were organized and active — seeing in their American brothers and sisters true allies against British ruling aristocratic oppression. After the Battle of Concord in 1775 these Irish and English supporters sent money to the widows and children of the American men who had fallen in combat. In 1778 there were riots in Dublin and London in support of the American cause which gave General Washington and his compatriot’s great solace, that the path they had chosen was indeed the right one. As Thomas Jefferson wrote about the violence of the North American revolutionary civil war, to paraphrase, “it would be better that there were no more than one man and one woman left in every country in the world than that things should go on as they have.”
516p Workers Take the Point
p The most sophisticated American workers organized independently of the bourgeoisie by 1773 (two years before the fighting began) setting up in New York the Committee of Mechanics, making it their own branch of the Sons of Liberty, while the bourgeois elements operated through their “Committee of Fifty One”. The militants took over the revolutionary movement, sending money to the poor in Boston who suffered under British oppression (the British had closed Boston’s port); enforced a non-importation rule on shop-owners (forbidden to sell British goods by the Sons of Liberty); establishing contact with like-minded organizations in the other colonies (“Committees of Correspondence”); organized and enforced the decision not to allow any American workers to build for the British Army (barracks, forts, etc,); and enforcing their own declaration that American merchants could not transport, supply or in any way support British troops.
517p Note: Sixty years ago in 1947, Philip S. Foner began the publication of his outstanding History of the Labor Movement in the United States (International Publishers [publishing house of the US Communist Party] 1947, New York) This series would run to eleven volumes by the time Foner was finished with it. I mention it at this point because I want those of you with a serious interest in the subject to turn to his books next in your studies. Remember the idea that a study or book has to be brand new to be most accurate is actually a silly idea associated with the bourgeois means of production. In science (and history is a science to us) we always build on the past.
p From this point forward it is my task to focus on key turning points in the history of the North American working class movement; not to present a complete history which is at any rate a task beyond the one I have set myself in this volume, namely, your introduction to the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. But for intermediate and advanced studies this should be your next task.
p American Revolutionaries Seize State Power: The War Begins
p At any rate, as we have seen, for the most part the proto-proletarians and the native bourgeoisie of the New England colonies and their like-minded semi-capitalist {and even some slavocrat) planters of the southern colonies had forged, out of the material conditions of their lives, a de facto united front against British feudalism cum capitalism. The fighting began in April, 1775, in Massachusetts.
p Only days after the Sons of Liberty had inflicted 300 dead upon the British at Concord their agents arrived in New York and their correspondents there seized state
p power in that great city. Revolutionaries seized power in Newark, New Jersey and Savannah, Georgia, shortly thereafter.
p Within months, leaders of the Military Association of Philadelphia (mechanics and bourgeois elements) put together a conference of working and farming people. This body was a highly democratic “constitutional convention” which seizing state power declared a new “government” to be in existence in Pennsylvania. It’s assured “freedoms” included many if not all of those later to be incorporated in the “Bill of Rights” to the victor’s Constitution in 1790. —And, new armed forces were recruited to join the fight triggered by the people of Massachusetts.
p Thomas Paine’s book Common Sense was published at this time. Paine was a commoner and proud of it. His propagandizing on the part of the emerging revolution was one of the great ideological victories of that time and recognized as such by all of the democratically inclined North American leaders. Note that in this book Paine demanded that workers should have the right to withhold their labor if they wished and not be required by law to submit to any set level of wages; nor employers penalized for going along if they wished to do so. Washington and Jefferson endorsed Paine, his book, and thus, indirectly, the call for workers to be freed to organize.
p By the Spring of 1776, nine of the thirteen colonies had revolutionary governments —either new, as a product of seizure, or older bodies converted to revolution. By the summer of 1776, all of the colonies had voted for war and revolution.
p A Continental Congress was formed in Philadelphia in 1776 and to it had streamed delegates from far and wide. Although conservative elements were present most of the delegates had been instructed to vote for war and revolution and so they did.
p The war itself lasted until Red Coat General Cornwallis was finally cornered by the Continental Army and the French Fleet at Yorktown, in 1781. Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot provides the best motion picture account, I have yet seen, of the struggle from a southern semi-capitalist planter’s standpoint; and it demonstrates in its characters the various small farmer, working class, unfree and slave components of the Continental Army. I shall not pursue the matter here except to say, to paraphrase, with the victory at Yorktown “everything had changed.”
Perhaps that is an overstatement since slavery and various other forms of oppression existed almost everywhere in the fledgling nation, but a first step had been taken forward, into the future. A step as important to the international bourgeoisie and the emerging Capitalist Stage as Lenin’s step forward with the Russian Revolution and Civil War would be for the international working class movement, and the Stalinist Socialist Stage, 136 years later.
Notes