Introductory observations.

Specific assumptions, points of view, and hopes, lie behind every political blog and this one is no exception.

To begin with two key assumptions:

* The world, with the U.S. leading the way, is rapidly becoming a fascist camp.

We’re all familiar with the evidence:

- The Patriot Act and its heavy-handed destruction of what Americans long considered sacred about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

- The U.S. war on Iraq, justified and defended by subterfuge and a vast web of lies.

- The shallow and symbolic 9/11 “investigations” and the abject failure of “investigators” to ask the most critical questions or follow the most pregnant leads. (See: The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray Griffin).

- Political correctness” which increasingly stultifies meaningful discussion and debate throughout the academy and the media.

- The Drug War, with its tactical squad property seizures and home invasions, often of people innocent of any crime; its planes and helicopters flying low over rural areas in search of marijuana plants and methamphetamine labs.

- The immense U.S. prison complex, with more people incarcerated per capita than in any other industrial and most nonindustrial countries.

- The cold indifference to/disdain for/animosity toward, other people in general, now celebrated by the arts and media in rap music, video games, movies and TV programming.

- The deep and fast-growing gap between rich and poor within and among nations.

- The use of superficial justifications to seek out, intimidate, silence and repress all who attempt to resist the swelling fascist tide, dismissing them as “evil,”"unpatriotic,” “treasonous” or “terroristic.” (See: Sean Hannity, Deliver Us From Evil, Ann Coulter, Treason, David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil).

- A U.S. military-industrial complex far more consolidated and wielding far more power than President Eisenhower ever dreamed of when he expressed deep concern about that possibility.

- An increasingly brutal and oppressive U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the growing armies of poor in underdeveloped nations; a brutal and oppressive policy controlled and directed by the Pentagon acting wholly independent of Congress and the courts. (See: Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire).

* We’re working to render our global fascist camp uninhabitable with an energy and efficiency that could hardly be exceded if it became our conscious intent.

Again, the evidence:

- Polluted seas, with dying coral, vast expanses devoid of life, salmon, swordfish and shark so mercury-laden we’re advised to strictly limit consumption, thousands of acres of plastic debris strewn upon the planet’s mighty waters.

- Streams, rivers and lakes polluted with PCBs and heavy metals from industries; nitrates and phosphates from corporate farms ; mussels, fish and ducks declared inedible as a result of their contamination.

- Poultry, beef and vegetables contaminated with e-coli and salmonella from the employment of grand scale and high-speed methods of production.

- Mad Cow Disease and other variants of Jacob Creutzfeldt Syndrome, a consequence of the insane feeding of herbivores their own body parts.

- Millions upon millions of acres of land desecrated by open pit mining and the clearcutting of forests.

- The razing of earth’s hardwood forests, resulting in floods that destroy whole villages in Central and South America and in Asia.

- The use of depleted uranium tipped shells by the U.S. in Serbia, Kuwait and Iraq, inducing cancers, rare blood and bone diseases and birth deformities in American troops, their spouses and children, as well as in Serbs, Kuwaitis and Iraqis.

To briefly state my point of view:

* I believe the problems identified can not be solved so long as we continue utilizing the established order of production and distribution; that nothing less than a complete socio-economic-political restructuring is required.

Readers are urged to be very sceptical about this proposition. I began arguing the U.S. would move far to the right, probably into fascism, to be followed by a revolution, in the late 1960s. I’m therefore well aware my view of events may be colored by that long-standing conviction.

* Revolutions are always preceded by either-or/for or against divisions of the communities which undergo such upheavals.

- My inquiry into past revolutions shows this has invariably been the case, and my understanding of why and how revolutions occur tells me the one I believe confronts us will not be an exception.

- The indicated division of societies into “for or against” subcommunities is always instigated by those on the Right, with revolutionary contingents developing in reaction to the growing oppression. E.g.: Britain attempted to pay for its European wars with monies drawn from the colonies through Townshend Act levies or a tax on stamps or tea, thereby prompting the American Revolution; the efforts of wealthy Chinese landholders to stabilize their declining fortunes in the 1930s and 40s resulted in the Chinese Revolution; the 1964 formation of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) was in reaction to peasants being pushed from the land by government troops which acted at the behest of wealthy landowners.

- Neoconservatives and the Bush government have already begun a “for or against” division of Americans. From the late 1960s to the mid-80s the U.S. political continuum ran from reactionary–to conservative–to liberal–to radical–to revolutionary. Today’s truncated continuum, drawn by the government, neocons and writers like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, extends only from conservative (those “for” U.S. fascism at home and aggressive imperialism abroad) to liberal (those who are “against”, however weak their resistance).

- At best, the “against” contingent is in its infancy. It has not yet begun to develop a revolutionary consciousness of its situation or the practices required to effect the needed structural change.

- Publications like “The Nation,” “The Progressive,” “Mother Jones,” “Z,” and the internet magazine “CounterPunch,” currently represent the feeble, nonrevolutionary voice of the U.S. left. Many of them have been around a long time, “The Nation” since Civil War days. Their system-sustaining role becomes obvious when one inquires: Did they stop the genocidal slaughter of native American indians? No! Did they prevent the equally genocidal killing of three-plus million Asians during the Vietnam War? No! Did they stop the killing of more than 300,000 Central Americans, most of them poor peasants, in the 1970s and 80s? Of course not! To the contrary, they played the role–tolerable to the U.S. elites which directed such slaughters–of a liberal on a conservative university committee. They eased pressures on those who slaughtered by making it appear the elite’s brutality was actually being opposed as it dodged and deceived to counter the left-liberal theses put forth. It might even be argued that had this psuedo-left not existed the brutal suppressions described might have taken place more quickly with less loss of life. Insofar as a revolutionary community does begin to develop in the U.S., such publications will assuredly be dismissed as “Sheep in Wolves Clothing.” (Marx’s label for their counterparts in his own era).

- The tactics and the weapons employed by every revolutionary community are determined by its unique situation. Fortunately for those of us with strong pacifist inclinations, guns, bombs and other instruments of violence are not apt to be useful weapons in the predicted coming struggle. For one thing, the defenders of the established productive-distributive system are too well armed. Any attempt at a violent transformation would simply result in bloodbath decimations of the revolutionaries. Given the integration of our high-tech socio-economic-political system, disruptive tactics are almost certain to be the chosen weapons; in particular, computers wielded by sophisticated hackers.

- Right now the crucial task before those who believe in the necessity of a second American revolution is to begin formulating clear ideas about who they are, what they stand for, the nature of the problems faced, and an equally clear understanding of why those problems can not be resolved without dismantling the present order.

The Hope:

- According to an old adage: “No power in the world can stop a truth whose time has come!.”If that’s so, and I believe it is, it necessarily follows that: “No power in the world can promote a truth whose time has not yet arrived!”. It’s always possible that neocons and other reactionary representatives of the U.S. elite will win the coming struggle. Predicting that the division of the world into “haves” and “have nots” is going to accelerate, they are already aggressively establishing military bases around the globe, training thousands of “Special Force” operatives, organizing and arming paramilitary units in underdeveloped countries, and moving to weaponize space, all in order to put “have nots” down if and as they resist. They may win. But they should not be allowed to win without a struggle.

A PromiseAll thoughtful reactions to arguments presented on this blogsite–whether from the left, the right, or somewhere in between–will be posted and responded to. Threats and angry insults will simply be ignored; with the Psychology 101 reminder that we only get angry at ideas which hit home; i.e., which are the unpleasant logic of our personal experience.  

Politics and Reality

Heated political disputes aside, we Americans speak with one voice respecting the importance of truth. Rush Limbaugh, that enthusiastic promoter of George W. Bush and neocon politics, asserts truth is the fundamental reason his “Excellence In Broadcasting” network exists: “What drives my show is truth,” he affirms, “truth in both form and substance. And my audience consists of those who have the courage to believe in and live the truth.” Vehemently opposed to the war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and other Bush policies that have Limbaugh waxing ecstatic, convinced those policies are being justified with clumsy distortions and lies, Senator Robert Byrd reassures people of his persuasion: “No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeeezing out through the cracks, eventually.” Standing somewhere between Limbaugh and Byrd on most major issues, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave her own testimonial: “Do not doubt,” she urged, “truth is a durable thing, provided only that the truth-tellers are tough and persistent, undiscouraged and unbowed.” Then, there’s our pot-puffing, left-leaning, gentle and humanitarian minstrel Willie Nelson, who rhymes: “Don’t confuse caring for weakness. You can’t put that label on me. The truth is my weapon of mass protection, and I believe truth sets you free.” Surely, it’s time for a common-sense, materialist, consideration of what we mean by political truth. 

Confronting the Truth About Our Warring “Truths:”

Let me begin with a question: How often do you knowingly call true political ideas which, when you act upon them as valid, result in your expropriation? (Put bluntly: How often do you choose to cut your socio-economic throat?) Frankly, I never behave that way, however much I may fancy myself to be on the Left. Nor, with rare exception, do I witness other people doing so, whatever their stated political positions. Now, we must either declare this a miracle of walking-on-water proportions, or, consider it irrefutable evidence that, before anything else, our political truths are blueprints and justifications for defending our social existence. This is not to suggest the opportunistic truth-creating is consciously practiced. It seems reasonable to suppose that, like me, when weighing the validity of political propositions most people do not ask themselves: “To what extent will I be personally helped or hurt if I believe this to be true?” We apparently dodge menacing political ideas with the same unreflective spontaneity and grace that we dodge onrushing cars.

Once we’ve admitted WHAT we do, and WHY, how we go about it isn’t really a mystery. While we discover our truths by examining the “out there” of experienced reality, we simultaneously create them through a pragmatic selection of “in here” definitions used to give the “out there” meaning. Since no one ever is or could become an indifferent observer of his/her experience, to say our truths represent our experience is at once to argue they represent our interests.

To illustrate the political truth discovering-creating process:

In September 2000 an intensified struggle between Israel and Palestinians–the Second Intifada–began. Although the British and American socio-economic ties to be protected are almost all with Israel, many reporters sympathized with the Palestinians’ plight and that sympathy was initially reflected in their news stories. So, eleven months after the Second Intifada started, Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, UK, disclosed the BBC had ordered its’ newspeople to discontinue calling Israel’s killing of Palestinians “assassinations,” and to use the term “targeted killings” instead. CNN similarly instructed correspondents to stop describing Gilo as a “Jewish settlement.” “We refer to Gilo as ‘a Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967,’” read the CNN directive. “‘We don’t refer to it as a settlement.’”1

The exasperation in Palestinian businessman Said El-Said’s voice was palpable when he wrote:

“Creative international media in general and in the US in particular have redefined the English language when it applies to Israeli actions. Occupied territories are now ‘disputed’ territories . . . Illegal settlements are now called ‘neighborhoods’. These ‘neighborhoods’ are being built on demolished Palestinian lives, homes, confiscated lands or farms. Occupiers are now ‘settlers’ in the tradition of the European immigration to the US and Australia. Gaza is the home of 5,000 immigrant Jews that have taken over one third of the total land there, leaving one million Palestinians ‘fenced in’ refugees, in one the most densely populated areas in the world. Gaza has been turned into one of the biggest prisons in the world. The resistance to occupation is now ‘terrorism’. The 8 meter high concrete Wall, with even higher watch towers manned with machine guns aimed at the recently bulldozed wasteland called ‘safety zones’ on either side, built by Israel on Palestinian lands, is called a ‘fence’, like the ones we have separating our gardens in happy suburbia. The Wall is swiping large segments of the leftovers of Palestinian land and cutting off more farmers from their farm lands and villages. About 40% of the West Bank (40% of the 22% left of original Palestine) is being cut off. An additional 600,000 Palestinian lives are disrupted. 275,000 are now inside the ‘fence’ and are facing deliberate eviction, better known as ethnic cleansing.”2

In an April 4th, 2004 news briefing, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, identified “terrorists,” “thugs and gangs,” and “opponents of progress toward self-government,” who sought to prevent the creation of a “free,” “liberated,” and “democratic” Iraq. On the same day, Aljazeera.net spoke of “resistance fighters” engaged in “defending” Iraq “against U.S. occupation forces.” The Iraqnet Information Network describes Myers “thugs and gangs” as “Iraqi insurgents,” while the “insurgents” themselves refer to their dead fighters not as “terrorists” or “thugs,” but as “martyrs.”

Then, there are the U.S. media references to private companies operating and fighting in Iraq. The State Department has granted 22 such firms the right to be there, including Blackwater Security Consulting, DynCorp, Safenet-Iraq, and Triple Canopy Security Services. Although the firms’ 25,000 employees come from many countries, most are Americans, principally former Green Berets, Navy Seals, and other Special Forces operatives. In times past individuals paid to do this kind of work (salaries run from $350 to $1,500 a day) were known as “mercenaries.” But to the U.S. government and media these men are not mercenaries at all. They are “security contractors.”

Understanding the interest-protective nature of our truths enables us to make material sense of something every frustrated political science professor knows all too well from experience. If a first-year graduate student with no published writings describes the stages of cell division to a freshman biology class, every last student will accept his words as gospel. Yet, let the same class be addressed by a political scientist of wide repute, one who has multiple doctorates and a hundred-plus publications, and the class reactions will be profoundly different. If he takes a firm position, particularly if that position identifies him as conservative, a few students are sure to respond: “Right on!, That’s exactly how it is!” A second minority (generally much larger for conservative speakers) will just as confidently retort: “You’re crazy!,” or, “That’s only propaganda!” While, picking and choosing among the arguments presented, the class majority will mumble: “I agree with _________, __________, __________, reject __________, ___________, _________, and believe there may nor may not be something to the rest. The reason for this difference? Whereas all members of the class are served by regarding the biology graduate student’s ideas as true, it’s quite different with the political scientist’s propositions. In keeping with variations in their socio-economic experiences and interests, a minority finds his arguments very useful, therefore true, another minority finds them menacing, ergo false, while the majority experiences, hence understands them, as a little bit of both.

It was noted conservatives generally receive a cooler welcome than leftists on university campuses. This, too, makes sound material sense. Having neither dependents to support nor mortgage payments to make, not yet tightly bound to the existing productive system through remunerative employment, college students are more open than other Americans, French, Germans, British, et. al., to critical examinations of the industrial-elite/capitalist productive order which, with growing difficulty, currently sustains us all. As a result, self-described anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist social science professors usually have larger and more enthusiastic classes than their right-leaning colleagues, a distinct advantage when it comes to tenure and promotion. Similarly, the books of prominent leftist writers have a profitable appeal for a sizeable university audience; an audience which often invites their authors on campus to make well-paid presentations. Of course, upon graduating and becoming as intimately dependent upon the established order as everyone else, formerly radical students soon begin thinking like everyone else. Which explains the old adage that a young person who isn’t a communist at age 20 has no heart, while one who is still a communist at 30 has no head.

Because they, too, are dependent upon the established order, however much they may critique it, leftist professors almost always define themselves by what they think and say, rather than by what they do; i.e., give themselves an idealist, rather than a materialist definition. Not doing so would lead them to conclusions ill-suited to a preservation of their own socio-economic existences. Consider the behavior of a not-so-hypothetical American political science professor who depicts himself as an anti-imperialist (and yes, this is confessional). After giving a lecture condemning U.S. imperialism in Central and South America the professor leaves the campus to buy a shirt made of Brazilian cotton picked by peasants paid an exploitative wage. Enroute to the department store he stops for an espresso made with Colombian coffee, likewise picked by individuals he considers victims of imperialist exploitation. Finding a shirt he likes, he pays with a check drawn on a bank that commonly finances corporations whose imperialism in the underdeveloped world he so vociferously decries. Next, the professor phones his wife, utilizing the services of a communications industry he recognizes as having vast exploitative Latin American investments. At his wife’s request, he then enters a supermarket to purchase bananas, products of Conchita Brand’s exploitation in Central America. Just before heading home he mails a tax payment at the Post Office, part of which his government will use to provide Latin American military officers with interrogation techniques and weaponry to suppress those who dare to threaten our profitable imperialist connections. Obviously, if our professor gave himself the kind of materialist definition he gives his declared capitalist/imperialist enemies (they are what they do, not what they think and say), he would have to declare: “I’d like to be an anti-imperialist, but unfortunately it would cost more than I’m currently willing to pay!,” hardly a comforting proposition. In brief, looking at ourselves through an idealist, rather than a materialist, lens has made it possible for we self-styled leftists to endure, often prosper, while enjoying condescension for our conservative opponents and feeling good about ourselves. As with left publications, to date, acting like “Sheep in Wolves Clothing” has unquestionably served us well.

However–and that’s the point of this blog–I do not believe it’s going to serve a large and growing social segment well much longer.

1. Robert Fisk, “CNN Caves in to Israel Over its References to Illegal Settlements,” The Independent, UK, 3 September, 2001.

2. Said T. El-Said, “Equal Partners?,” Mid East Realities, 11/22/03. 

Battling “Communism”: Ronald Reagan’s War

Author Peter Schweizer began his laudatory biography (Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism), by relating how Reagan was viewed by people who knew him personally:

“In her recent book about Reagan, Frances Fitzgerald paints a picture of a man who spouts patriotic pieties and is ignorant of the world around him. Historian Edmund Morris, in his 874-page authorized biography, concludes that Reagan is simply incomprehensible, an airhead who has lived a charmed life. Diplomat Clark Clifford has called him an ‘amiable dunce,’ and Nicholas von Hoffman said it was ‘humiliating to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our president. “1

The “bumpkin,” Schweizer approvingly acknowledges, appeared to be driven by an obsession. “Ronald Reagan,” he writes, “is impossible to understand outside of his forty-five year battle with communism.”

Most readers will probably agree with Fitzgerald, Morris et al. regarding Reagan’s remarkable superficiality. They’re also likely to agree with Schweizer’s contention that to make sense of the man requires focusing on his anti-communist crusade. Indeed, it will be argued, Reagan’s superficiality and his war against communism were parts of a whole, as intimately connected as the head and the tail of a coin.

Demonstrating Reagan’s shallowness where an understanding of his declared enemy was concerned is easy. Consider what our reaction would be if Sean Hannity proclaimed himself a reknowned operatic tenor and Ann Coulter announced she is Queen of Scotland. Surely we would laughingly remind them that all things, including people and nations, are what they DO, not what someone SAYS. If we became convinced Hannity and Coulter sincerely believe they hold those positions, we would assuredly dismiss them as suffering from delusions.

Where, then, is the material evidence which led Reagan to believe the U.S.S.R., China, North Vietnam and Cuba were “communist” states? Granted, their leaders said they were, and, one can assume they genuinely believed it. But we’ve already noted that self-description, however sincere or ingenious, does not a reality make.

Had Reagan done a little reading on the subject of Marxism, he would have comprehended that describing the Soviet Union, China, et al., as “socialist,” let alone “communist,” directly contradicted Marx’s understanding. By “socialism,” not only Marx, but his peers–including detractors who hated the idea–meant “wage equality.” Under socialism Marx held everyone would receive the same payment for their labor. Thus his: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Following the failure of the Paris Commune, he modified that part of his thesis slightly, concluding that for a brief time there might be a 2-to-1 income difference in newborn socialist societies, the highest paid receiving double that of those who were paid the least.

Now, neither Bolsheviks, Maoists, North Vietnamese, Castroites, nor any other victorious self-described “communist” revolutionaries have seriously considered putting the indicated income structure in place. As numerous academicians have documented, right from the outset, the incomes paid in post revolutionary Russia and China were no more equalitarian than those found in Western industrial countries. Some observers have even suggested they were less.

As for “communism,” Marx proposed it was going to be the “mature,” i.e., fully developed, stage of socialism, claiming that despite the wage equality of socialism people would still not be truly equal. One man might have no children, while another had five, two of which were suffering from serious chronic illnesses. For both to receive the same income would obviously put the second at a serious disadvantage. Under communism, Marx argued, such situational differences would be taken into consideration. There, the operative principal would be: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” What, pray tell, does any of this have to do with Brezhnev’s fabulous classic car collection, or, with Deng Shao-ping’s pronouncement that “to be rich is glorious,” while tens-of-millions of people in both countries continued to lack adequate food, clothing and medical care?

According to Marx, all people seek, gain and utilize political power in order to defend their “social existences” (socio-economic status in today’s vernacular), against those who have less. Consequently, he contended, following a socialist revolution, with everyone having essentially the same social existence to protect, politics and the political state would automatically die. Thereafter, only an administrative structure would remain, concerned with distributing the community’s production in an egalitarian fashion. Furthermore, he reasoned, the people would collectively govern this distribution. Every adminstrator would be popularly chosen as well as subject to immediate recall. Clearly, this feature of Marx’s socialist society in no way describes the post-revolutionary Russian, Chinese, et al. material reality.

Like many conservatives, Reagan decried his “communist” opponents for their position respecting property. ‘People aren’t allowed to own land and homes in the Soviet Union and China’ ran the argument. ‘The state has even assumed ownership and control of production.’ Ironically, Marx argued such conditions were going to evolve from the full development of capitalism, rather than suddenly appear with the advent of socialist revolution.

During the early period of capitalism, Marx reasoned, the capitalists were able to obtain sufficient money (“surplus value”) from their workers to replace outworn plants and machinery. However, as more and more competitors came on the scene, competing successfully required industrialists to build ever-larger, more modern and expensive, productive facilities, costing far more than they could obtain from their own operations. As a result, merely to survive, capitalists found it necessary to begin selling stocks and bonds, a practice Marx regarded as “seeds of socialism,” since it entailed forfeiting some control over their factories to those who held the stocks and bonds. In time, Marx predicted, building and maintaining the grand-scale facilities which capitalist competition demanded would become so expensive that even the sale of stocks and bonds would not provide sufficient funds. It would be increasingly necessary for capitalists to obtain financing from virtually every member of society, he argued, and that meant bringing in the state. Engels stated Marx’s position on the subject of state-ownership of production succinctly, writing:

“The transformation, either into joint stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers, proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with . . . State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”2

According to the vocabulary of Marx’s time, a vocabulary whose bits and pieces we sometimes still employ, feudal communities were, by definition, communities dominated by individuals who procured and maintained their hegemonic social existences through the ownership and control of land and agricultural/raw material production. Conversely, capitalist societies were defined as societies dominated by individuals whose hegemonic statuses derived from owning and controlling industrial production and finance. As for the meaning of “ownership,” Marx said he used the Greek definition; namely, “use and control of.” Consistent with Marx’s paradigm, Soviet and Chinese, et al. political authorities must, as Milovan Djilas argued in The New Class, be seen as capitalist to the core.

Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which Marx was right when he proposed that out of necessity the capitalists of all mature industrial-elite societies will come to be funded by virtually everyone via the state. In deciding, you might consider the billions-of-dollars of public financing which corporations like General Electric and General Motors receive through tax write-offs, the hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars of the public’s money paid directly to many of our most successful corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, and arms’ producers like Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, Northrup, Boeing, etc.. The largest U.S. agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations are likewise heavily funded by the state, indeed, would go under if the funding was removed.

‘Nevertheless,’ Reagan and his adoring acolytes have been wont to argue, ‘unlike citizens of self-styled “communist” communities, a majority of Americans “own” their homes.’ In saying this, like good mythologists they ignore the material reality that the properties of most such “home owners” are to a large extent titled to (i.e., controlled by) lending companies and banks. The banks and lending agencies then sell approximately 90 percent of the loans to two government-backed corporations: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In short, it is the government which does most of the “owning.”

In the U.S., local branches of government exercise ultimate ownership of property by way of county taxes, something first pointed out to me in 1953 by a 92-year-old farmer living in upstate New York. The U.S. was rabidly anti-Soviet at the time and the farmer was responding to my observation that people couldn’t “own” their homes in the Soviet Union, while in the U.S. they could. Scratching his head, the old man replied: “Well, I’ll tell you. There wasn’t any property tax when I bought my farm. This 44 acres, the house and two barns were mine no matter what. But today, if I don’t pay my taxes the government will take my property just as surely as a Russian farmer’s government will seize his if he doesn’t pay the rent. So, in Russia they call it “rent,” and here we call it “taxes.” But where’s the difference in the relationship between a man and his home?”At the time, the only answer I could come up with was that, unlike Americans, Soviet citizens had no say over who acquired occupancy of their homes if they decided to move. In the 1960s George Ginsburg, a Soviet specialist who was anything but sympathetic to the Soviet Union, his family having been expropriated during the Russian Revolution, disabused me of even that idea. “Actually,” he said, “like almost everything else of importance, the relationships between individuals and property in the U.S.S.R. are controlled by bribery. If someone wishes to have a given individual acquire his apartment, home or farm, it is only necessary to pay a bribe to the appropriate authority.” “As a consequence,” he concluded, “Russians might well have more authority over their houses, farms and businesses than their counterparts in the United States.”

Finally, if it’s government ownership of property which makes a country “communist,” without question Israel, where the state owns more than 95 percent of the land and those who occupy it only lease, may presently be the most “communist” nation around. By the time of his overthrow in 1961, dictator Rafael Trujillo had used political power to acquire ownership of nearly all the Dominican Republic’s major industries, from radio stations to airlines. Needless to say, neither Reagan nor any other U.S. politician has been heard to label either country “communistic.”

Everything said notwithstanding, those who directed the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions did use parts of Marx’s paradigm to justify and direct what they were doing. Moreover, the hard and fast material reasons why they did so are just as easy to identify. Marx had contended agricultural-elite/feudal orders of production, like hunting and gathering and semi-nomadic slave systems which came before, were able to sustain only a finite number of people at given socio-economic levels. Hence, he proposed, when (principally because of population growth), a given system of production and distribution is no longer able to serve that vital function, those for whom it has begun to fail join forces, rise up and replace it with their own more cornucopian structure.

Feudal productive orders, Marx reasoned, having reached the indicated exhausted stage, were everywhere being razed and replaced by more productive, ergo more progressive, industrial-elite/capitalist socio-economic-political organizations. However, he continued, in the not-too-distant future the latter would themselves become drained of their capacity to socio-economically sustain their populations and would, in their turn, be dismantled and replaced by the more productive and egalitarian socialist/communist structure he envisioned.

With rare exceptions, pro as well as anti-Soviet historians have acknowledged that in 1917 feudal Russia found itself in the kind of crisis situation Marx described. Menshevik and Bolshevik revolutionaries consequently agreed that the survival of their country’s growing population made it daily more imperative that, ala Marx’s logic, their feudal system be torn down and a capitalist productive order established in its place. In the days leading up to the abortive 1905 Revolution, Russian Marxists focused on convincing the nation’s financiers and industrialists that they should undertake a capitalist revolution. When that effort failed, the Marxists then decided it would be necessary to lead the capitalist revolution themselves.

Also ala Marx’s theory, the Russian Marxists reasoned that their capitalist revolution would disrupt the country’s relationships with Western European states, thereby throwing them into a deep crisis. Since the latter were already capitalist, it was believed they would have to resolve that crisis by moving to the next historical stage, i.e., carry out socialist revolutions. In their turn, European socialist revolutions would sever the newly established Russian-European relations, pushing Russia back into crisis; one which would spark a second, this time socialist, revolution at home. In keeping with this logic, the Bolsheviks named their newspaper “Iskra,” meaning “the spark.”

The Russian Marxists never seriously considered the possibility that their impending revolution could be socialist. Industrializing the country following the razing of its feudal order was going to require the active assistance of chemists, physicists, engineers, doctors, teachers, machinists, and educated others who enjoyed much higher status than Russian peasants and workers, the latter averaging only four years of education. The Marxists recognized that if the indicated sub-elite’s favored social existence was not maintained they would leave for Western Europe and the U.S. where it could be–something many had already been doing.

Thus, the ideological dispute between Russian Marxists which led to the formation of Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1906 concerned what position they should adopt following Russia’s predicted capitalist revolution. Mensheviks, believing the process whereby Western Europe would undergo socialist revolutions which then sparked a socialist revolution in Russia would take decades, insisted they should enter the newborn capitalist political system, working within to provide workers and peasants some protection as the capitalist system flowered, then went into crisis and was razed. The Bolsheviks, conversely, held the process would occur rapidly, concluding that as Marxists they should pressure the capitalist system from without, just as they had done with the pre-capitalist feudal system.Ironically, looking at the Bolsheviks’ material practices rather than blindly accepting their words, reveals that when the Russian Revolution occurred they did not simply “enter” the government. They opportunistically “became” the government; the political overseers of their country’s nascent state-capitalist order. Conveniently telling themselves the February overthrow of the Tsar had constituted Russia’s capitalist revolution, and ignoring all but a few useful features of their idol Marx’s logic, by 1918 many Bolsheviks were already claiming their party’s October seizure of power was the socialist revolution.

By 1921, Lenin was virtually alone in continuing to describe Russia as engaged in building a state-capitalist, rather than a socialist, system of production. The U.S, England and France had no serious competitors when they constructed their industrial-elite productive orders and were therefore able to go about it gradually, Lenin reasoned. Russia, on the other hand, would face stiff competition from mature capitalist nations and must either establish large-scale industries quickly or fail to survive. Being late-comers to capitalism, Japan and Germany had confronted the same dilemma, he noted. When the Meiji Restoration destroyed Japan’s feudal system in 1867-8, Japanese industrialists recognized that building a capitalist economy would require rapid industrialization; and that, in turn, necessitated getting financial assistance from virtually everyone via the state. So, Japan established a state-capitalist order. Under the direction of Otto von Bismarck, a unified Germany had to make the same accelerated transformation from feudalism to capitalism a few years later. Comprehending it could only do so by obtaining government assistance, Germany became even more state-capitalist than Japan. The Soviet Union, Lenin emphasized, would have to adopt the same state-capitalist policies. He argued it was the country’s weakly competitive small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, not its capitalists, who threatened to impede its progress. Challenged by anarchists and other strident anti-capitalists, in June of 1921 Lenin declared:

“The alternative (and this is the last possible and only sensible policy) is not to try to prohibit or put the lock on the development of capitalism, but to try and direct it into state-capitalism. This is economically possible, for state-capitalism–in one form or another, to some degree or other–exists wherever the elements of free trade and capitalism in general exist.

“Can the Soviet state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, be combined, united with state-capitalism? Are they compatible? Of course they are. This is exactly what I argued in May 1918. I hope I proved it in May 1918. Nor is that all. I then proved that state-capitalism is a step forward compared with the small proprietor (both small-patriarchal and petty-bourgeois) element. Those who juxtapose or compare state-capitalism only with socialism commit a host of mistakes, for in the present political and economic circumstances it is essential to compare state-capitalism also with petty-bourgeois production.

“The whole problem–both theoretical and practical–is to find the correct methods of directing the inevitable (to a certain degree and for a certain time) development of capitalism into the channels of state-capitalism; to determine what conditions to hedge it round with, how to insure the transformation of state-capitalism into socialism in the near future.”3

At the time, Trotsky remarked only Lenin had the courage to make such an admission. By 1921 the other Bolshevik authorities were energetically defending their own hegemonic social existences, and that of the nascent industrial-elite, with the argument that Russia was building a classless, communist society, an idea which contradicted virtually every tenet of their demigod Marx’s theory.

That China’s political authorities are similarly directing the construction of a state-capitalist productive order in the name of socialism and communism is now so blatantly obvious that an elaborate defense of the proposition would be pointless. Respecting the conservative nature of all revolutionary transitions Marx wrote: “As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment the revolutionary class becomes conservative.”4 Ergo the course of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions.

In sum, Reagan’s unquestioning endorsement of the Soviet Union’s proposition it was “communist” made about the same sense as accepting the word of a man who staggers from a bar eating a roast beef sandwich while declaring himself a teetotaler and a vegetarian. To say it again, superficial to the core, Reagan never looked for the material realities underlying his opponents’ words. According to Schweizer, during the 1980 campaign which brought Reagan the presidency a Soviet report described him as “a firm and unbending politician for whom words and deeds are one and the same.” That he was!

Was Reagan’s war itself, then, the product of an ideological mistake? Like Russia’s “communism,” did it not have a hard-and-fast material side, a socio-economic interest foundation? Here, again, the answer is unquestionably “Yes!” But Reagan was as pragmatically blind to the material reality that his aggressive “anti-communist” mission was ideal for protecting dominant socio-economic interests at home and in the Third World as he was to the material forces which determined the policies of Soviet leaders.

By 1953 the U.S.S.R. had rebuilt its war-shattered economy and was entering an economic crisis. It would soon be impossible for the country’s party-state industrial-elite and its worker-peasant masses to both have their social existences sustained. As he had done during the Great Depression, Stalin proposed dealing with the crisis through fascism, protecting the elites’ social existences by killing, enslaving and oppressing millions of those below.

However, on this occasion a less disruptive and injurious option was available, one which would require neither a fascistic stepping on the Soviet lower classes nor a revolutionary expropriation of the state-capitalist elites. While Russia produced little in the way of consumer goods, it had become a powerhouse where the construction of a heavy industrial base was concerned. Using whatever force and persuasion was required, if it promoted industrial development in Eastern Europe it could not only reap sufficient profit to socio-economically sustain the majority of its people, it would be able to tell itself it was being progressive in working to dismantle feudal structures and relationships in that region. Former Soviet politicians have suggested the brutal Stalin, ill, and irrelevant to the indicated more peaceable (for Soviet citizens) resolution of the country’s problematic situation, was helped to join the deceased.

By the late 1960s Soviet authorities, albeit timidly, saw an opportunity to play the same essential role in Latin America, where peasant populations were rapidly increasing and agricultural-elite/feudal structures were already proving incapable of maintaining the social existences of growing numbers. Pro-industrial self-styled Marxist revolutionaries were starting to organize throughout the hemisphere. As in pre-revolutionary Russia their leaders were educated but downwardly mobile children of the landholding elites. In defense of their threatened social existences these Latin American Marxists opportunistically insisted their countries had “dependent capitalist,” rather than feudal economies (dependent upon the capitalist economy of the U.S.), leading them to conclude the industrial revolution they proposed to oversee would be “socialist,” rather than “capitalist.” The transformation they sought would admittedly have been progressive; but only in the same sense, and to the same degree, as the anti-feudal revolutions which occurred in Russia and China.

Under the existing circumstances, a naïve humanist, for whom all people’s lives are of equal value, might have dared to wish Reagan would support such Third World revolutionaries as nascent capitalists, whatever label they chose for themselves. “Naïve” because, besides expropriating Third World agricultural/raw-material elites, the changes sought by the revolutionaries would have meant an equal expropriation of U.S. multinational interests whose own social existences required that the increasingly threatened feudal productive systems be maintained. Naïve, too, because had Reagan promoted such a totally out-of-character policy he would assuredly have been blocked from bringing it to fruition, very possibly winding up dead.

Challenged Latin American feudal orders could best be protected by labeling anyone threatening our raw-material, banking and communications interests in the region “communist,” even when (as with many priests and academics) that was not how they defined themselves. At the same time, the U.S. economy could be reenergized by selling menaced Third World feudal elites billions of dollars worth of military hardware to put the “communist” revolutionaries down. The all-out battle against “communism” would also justify a massive expansion of the military-industrial complex and defense industry spending, thereby directly and indirectly putting millions of Americans to work. Keep in mind that the U.S. economy was in serious difficulty at the time.

In the 1980s, a president more perceptive, less superficial than Reagan, might have started to probe beneath the surface, to look beyond words and discover the material conditions which were producing the revolutionary threats in underdeveloped countries. That, of course, would have made him less willing to protect our own elite Third World interests; which is what made Reagan and his superficial thinking so ideally suited to the time.

Schweizer, like Reagan, ignores the terrible consequences of our country’s struggle to preserve exhausted Third World feudal systems: the 500,000 to 1,000,000 million pro-industrial Indonesian “communists” who were massacred in 1965; the 3 million Southeast Asians we bombed, gassed and napalmed to death during the “anti-communist” Vietnam War; the 200,000-plus Central Americans slaughtered during the 1970s and 80s; and the tens-of-thousands of Chileans, Argentinians, Uruguayans, Brazilians and other South Americans who suffered the same fate.

Today, with the productive orders of non-industrial nation’s around the world rapidly becoming less and less able to socio-economically sustain their growing populations, we are aggressively moving to do it all over again. Only this time the individuals who organize and attack our ever more imperialistic penetration of their economies are to be butchered and suppressed as “evil terrorists,” rather than “communists.”

That, like the Taliban and Al Qaida, many of the “evil terrorists” have reactionary visions is indisputable. By blocking all attempts of the non-industrial world’s poor to sustain themselves by entering the modern industrial age, we have left them no other option. In the 1970s Iran’s communist party proposed to take power, bring in the Soviet Union, and establish that country’s own industrial base. Aggressively selling Iran their factory-made commodities, industrialized nations, the U.S. leading the pack, were at the time destroying the lives of the Irani shoe and sandal maker, the handicraftspeople who hammered out pots and pans or fired clay dishes, the Iranian dress maker, and the bazaari merchants who sold such wares. Iran’s Western tilt was also resulting in industrial-world art, music and films replacing Iranian cultural entertainment, thereby clobbering native artists. Finally, when it came to employment for teachers, chemists, engineers and the like, individuals educated in the U.S., France and England got most of the jobs, and virtually all of those which were highly paid. Middle and lower-middle class Iranians educated at Tehran University sat home, twiddling their thumbs. Ayatollah Khomeini solved the immediate problems of them all. Iran would move back toward the 17th century, stop importing huge quantities of Western manufacture, thus putting handicraftspeople back to work; Western tastes would be made taboo, reopening the door to native artists; and the mullahs, whose land the Shah had been seizing, whose political authority he had been usurping, and whose government financing he had recently stopped, would reestablish their dominion over the country.

The same process is currently at work in Asia and Latin America, as well as throughout the Middle East, while U.S. foreign policy continues to be dictated by individuals and corporations who have the most to lose if our country becomes progressive and the most to gain if it becomes increasingly reactionary and brutal. We know well who they are: oil corporations, whose executives comprehend the world will reach “peak oil” by 2010 at the latest, with a rapid downhill slide for all of the oil giants after that; the vast and rapidly-growing military-industrial complex, whose various corporations stand to reap ever more billions of dollars by ruthlessly putting less-developed-world revolutionaries down, and whose military officers can realistically expect rapid and well-paid promotions in the doing; the well-paying mercenary firms like Blackwater Security Consulting, DynCorp, Safenet, and Triple Canopy Security Services, now sprouting like mushrooms; the manufacturing companies which utilize the cheap underdeveloped world labor that the burgeoning crisis provides; the U.S. raw-material, agricultural, communications and financial industries which would suffer serious-to-fatal injuries if the profits they presently drain from underdeveloped regions were lost.

The indicated material features of the process are becoming so apparent it’s conceivable even a Reagan would no longer be sufficiently superficial to miss them. Under the circumstances, George W. Bush may be a more appropriate leader. Whereas Reagan was widely depicted as a dunce, from the time Bush took office academicians have seriously debated whether, with reference to standard intelligence tests, he qualifies as a “moron.” Insisting experience and idea always constitute “a unity,” Marx concluded that insofar as productive orders become drained of the ability to pacifically sustain populations, materialist understandings will no longer function to represent them. At that point, leaders who use idealistic logics and brute force to prop things up automatically come to the fore. In our case, we may be approaching the penultimate stage at which idiots quite naturally become kings.

1. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, NY: Doubleday, November 2002, p1.

2. Frederick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.”

3. James E. Connor, ed.: Lenin on Politics and Revolution, Selected Writings, NY: Pegasus,Western Publishing Co., Inc. 1968, P336.

4. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, NY: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1973, p122.

 Explications

In Politics and Reality (Post #2), it was observed that whatever our personal politics–reactionary, conservative, liberal or revolutionary–the political ideas we embrace as “truths” are blueprints and justifications for defending our socio-economic existences.  We both  discover and create those political truths it was noted: discover them by examining the “out there” of reality, and create them through an automatic and pragmatic, selection of “in here” definitions used to give the “out there” meaning.  

These two propositions syllogistically lead to the following sub-conclusions:

1.) It is the assumed desire to have our social existences maintained which has always bound we humans together in our various communities: hunting and gathering, slave, feudal and capitalist, etc. 

To explain why this must be so: At any point in time the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a community (the pie to be shared), has a fixed dimension, enabling economists to assign it a monetary figure.  Consequently, if given members of the community were to suddenly acquire more, others would necessarily have to receive less; which is why politicians invariably argue for making pies bigger over time, rather than diminishing any social segments’ portion through a redivision in the here-and-now. In short, in the here-and-now, our individual efforts to obtain more necessarily put us in competition/conflict with, rather than bind us to, everyone else. Thus, it’s not the things we do to enhance our social existences that tie us all together and produce a community consciousness/truth, but rather, the things we do to protect what each of us already has. Conservatives label liberal policies which, if implemented, would diminish the social existence of the wealthy, “class warfare,” and they are right. From the experience and interest position of the elite, such expropriative programs do, indeed, constitute “warfare.” As a consequence, they have never been carried out in any community except through revolutions.

Now, if people tie themselves to given communities because their socio-economic existences are thereby sustained, it follows that insofar as they cease to be sustained those allegiances will be broken. Which, of course, they are.  In their respective revolutions, expropriated Russians left for Western Europe, expropriated Chinese fled to Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, and expropriated Cubans moved to the U.S., refusing to continue paying allegiance to their communities as newly constituted. Today, American, French, German, British, Japanese, etc., financiers and industrialists who have international material existences to defend regard themselves not as citizens of any particular country but of the world, and urge the establishment of a global political authority. 

When in 1917 Russia’s feudal productive order became drained of its ability to maintain a large and rapidly-growing segment of that country’s population, the pro-industrial Bolshevik revolutionaries defensively stripped the feudal-elites of the political power being used to protect their social existences. Whereupon the elites, aided and abetted by the U.S. and West European countries who had interests which were also being expropriated, then moved to defend themselves through war (war being “the continuation of politics by another means,” in the words of Prussian theorist Karl von Clausewitz).  The Russian feudal-elite’s civil war battles were predictably fought by peasants whose social existences the feudal productive system could still secure, against pro-industrial citizens of the state-capitalist world then aborning; those who a feudal order was no longer able to sustain.  The same process subsequently took place in China.  One need only recall Mao tse-tung’s “Long March,” observing who Mao’s forces were marching away from, and why.  

Readers who have been active in labor unions or ad hoc political bodies should have no difficulty accepting the proposition that community politics is defensive of social existence. If a sharp increase in the cost of living prompts a union’s members to defend their material existences with a strike, they will be remarkably unified.  However, when the strike is over and they return to work vowing to use the union to improve, rather than simply defend, their situations, they will find themselves running off in almost as many different directions as there are members of that  organization.  (No longer having a cohesive body of workers behind them, accomplishing much of anything then requires union heads to make “sweetheart” deals with the bosses, something the latter are well-served by encouraging.  That, in turn, may soon result in their having more in common with the bosses interest-and-outlook-wise than they do with workers.  If the workers subsequently find their social existences being trampled and begin reunifying around strike demands, they are very likely to discover their union leaders standing with the employers.  Ergo wildcat strikes).

In the 1960s, with American college and university entrance examinations standardized to reflect the life experience of upper-class whites, black and Latino Americans found they were being driven from the campus as a markedly increased number of students competed for a relatively constant number of slots.  (Black student enrollment at San Francisco State University plummeted from 11.3 to barely 3 percent of the student body in only 7 years.)  Whereupon unified and aggressive black and Latino student organizations sprung up across the country to lead strikes which closed many campuses down.  In most instances the rebels won their defensive struggles. Black and Latino studies departments and courses were established, and for a time the number of  black and Latino students being admitted to colleges and universities significantly increased.  However, while their spokespeople loudly declared they would henceforth fight for improved minority conditions from within, internacine battles over how to accomplish it quickly tore their formerly unified political organizations apart, and many of the gains they had made soon began to disappear for their successors. The history of the Black Panther Party provides an equally graphic illustration of political activity being defensive of social existence. 

2.)  Insofar as some members of a community have elite social existences they must/ will spontaneously seek/gain/exercise control over the community’s political consciousness, i.e., its truths, in order to defend them. 

Having nothing material to protect, the poorest citizens of every country, north and south, east and west, are rarely political.  Unless coerced, most do not even bother to vote. (In a July 28th, 2004 speech at Cambridge, Michael Moore related: “I went to one of these meeting of America Coming Together (ACT), . . . and they put up on the screen a map of Cleveland, Ohio /which/ showed a precinct in Cleveland that was 96% African American. Total voter turnout in 2000, 13%.”)  Just above them on the socio-economic ladder, people with low-paying jobs and a few material possessions are slightly more politically involved. Next come individuals with solid middle class existences, who not only vote with greater frequency but are more apt to make additional political gestures; in the U.S., advertising candidates with bumper stickers and window posters and driving friends and acquaintenances to the polls. At the apex of every country’s socio-economic scale are the wealthy, for whom life is politics and politics life. “The elites,” political scientist Russell Neuman observed of American politics, “are ten times as politically active. These findings, which are replicated in other cultures, emerge as a central fact of political life.”  For the same reason, young people, who have not yet acquired much to defend, are notably apolitical.  (Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, has been using a portion of the country’s growing oil income to provide land and health care to hungry and landless peasants.  Having something to defend, in the August 15th, 2004 recall election they went to the polls in great numbers, soundly defeating his opposition).

Without exception, the kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies who enjoyed elite socio-economic status in feudal communities also wielded political authority over what their communities thought and did; their nations’ foreign as well as domestic policies.  In order to justify exercising that authority feudal elites, again, without exception, devoutly believed in Religious Absolutism, a philosophy which conveniently assured them truth was absolute, came from God, and arrived on earth via the elites and high religious figures. 

In a speech to the British Parliament given on March 21st, 1609, King James VI proclaimed: 

“The state of the monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth . . . Kings are justly called Gods, for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth. . . . God has power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none: to raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure . . .And the like power have kings; they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting down: of life, and of death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only. . . . I conclude then this point touching the power of kings, with this axiom of divinity, that as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy . . . so is it sedition in subjects, to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power . . .”  

King James VI went on to argue kings should nevertheless wield their God-given power justly, and, that he was particularly careful to do so. However, as with all kings, he took it for granted that “just” exercises of his kingly powers would always protect his personal socio-economic existence.

The religious authorities who formulated and serviced the requisite philosophical justifications–the “Divine Right of Kings” in feudal Europe, the “Mandate of Heaven” in feudal China and Japan–shared in the enjoyment of the secular elite’s favored status: popes and priests in Catholic Italy; archdeacons, deans and bishops in Anglican England; Shinto priests in feudal Japan; ayatollahs and imams in feudal Middle Eastern states today.  Precisely because of the interest ties between the secular and religious elites of feudal communities, no sharp separation was/is made between church and state. Here, too, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait et. al., are graphic contemporary examples. (Recall Ayatollah Khomeini’s assertion that: “Religion and politics are one!”)       

Since preserving their social existence is every community member’s most fundamental political objective, so long as European and Asian feudal orders of production were able to sustain them, peasants, merchants, and other individuals of lesser status, reflexively internalized and acted upon the elite’s Religious Absolutist vision/its philosophical truth. Again, the pragmatism involved is clear. Were such non-elite members of a community to reject the elite’s rationale for exercising political control it would place them in perpetual conflict with the elite, making it difficult-to-impossible for any of them to have their social existences maintained.  In times of crisis the peasants and merchants of feudal communities would often question specific elite dictates. If a given crisis was profound they might even attack the king (James’ VI’s pretensions notwithstanding). But not until agricultural/raw-material-elite productive orders were becoming unable to sustain them did nascent industrial-elites begin to challenge the Religious Absolutist ideology of the feudal system which dictated what truth is, where it comes from and how it gets passed around.  At those times, via revolutions, power was transferred from feudal-elites to industrial-elites (capitalists): England 1640 and 1688; France 1789, Russia 1917, China 1949. One of the first acts of victorious industrial-elites has understandably been a severance of the church-state connection.  Moreover, as in France, Germany, the U.S. and Russia today, industrial-elite representatives still expend considerable time and energy fending off the efforts of land-holding/agricultural interests and their religious advocates, whose personal social existences could be better protected by eroding the church-state division and reestablishing many feudal relationships/restoring many feudal truths. 

That Religious Absolutism is the philosophical expression of feudal productive orders (feudalism’s manifestation in the form of ideas), becomes immediately obvious if one tries to imagine building and maintaining a feudal community without it. For a week or two everyone might “play along,” with those who elected to be peasants bowing to the dictates of priests and bishops, lords and ladies, kings and queens, just for the fun of it all. But if the system was going to have any permanence, it would be imperative that everyone internalize the feudal logic, sincerely believing God had determined their respective stations in life, who they were, what they thought and how they behaved toward one another.

Just because politics and political truths are defensive of social existence, Europe’s inadequate feudal productive orders did not go quietly into the night.  As they began to produce excess populations, serfs increasingly confronted a shortage of land on which to labor. Young aristocrats found there was not enough land for them to obtain their own estates. Struggles broke out between church authorities and aristocrats over the possession of given properties. War was initially used to ease the crisis. Serfs bound themselves to nobles and nobles swore blind allegiance to kings and princes as, through pillage, plunder and the taking of life, they drained the chronically deficient feudal system of its last bit of viability.

Conservative unto the end, feudal nations next began easing their productive order crises by engaging in colonialism, venting excess populations in conquered lands.  Those least able to sustain their burgeoning numbers moved out first: Scandinavia’s vikings–who pillaged, plundered and colonized in Scotland, England and Europe–followed by the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, England and France. In every instance, the colonizers revealed the conservatism of this political undertaking by attempting to replicate abroad the circumstances being lost at home, often even using old names for their new communities: New Amsterdam, New York, New England, New Jersey, New Rochelle, New Caledonia, Neuvo Espana, etc.

Nor did the colonists experience any difficulty formulating and believing in the requisite truths.  When Francisco Pizarro and 168 soldiers, 62 of them on horseback and armed with guns, attacked the Peruvian Inca chief Atahuallpa and 40,000-plus assembled braves in November 1532, they killed an estimated 7,000 in a single night.  (See: Jared Diamond’s brilliant Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).  According to the eyewitness reports of Hernando and Pedro Pizarro and others cited by Diamond, the invading Spaniards experienced great fear when faced with such overwhelming numerical odds. “Many of us urinated without noticing it, out of sheer terror,” wrote one.  However, the utilitarian conviction that they were doing the work of God stiffened their spines.  According to the eyewitnesses’ accounts of this bloody slaughter:

“Governor Pizarro . . . sent Friar Vicente de Valverde to go speak to Atahuallpa, and to require Atahuallpa in the name of God and of the King of Spain that Atahuallpa subject himself to the law of our Lord Jesus Christ and to the service of His Majesty the King of Spain. Advancing with a cross in one hand and the Bible in the other hand, and going among the Indian troops up to the place where Atahuallpa was, the Friar thus addressed him: ‘I am a Priest of God, and I teach Christians the things of God, and in like manner I come to teach you.”

When Atahuallpa threw the bible presented him to the ground:

“The governor then gave the signal to Candia, who began to fire off the guns. At the same time, the trumpets were sounded, and the armored Spanish troops, both cavalry and infantry, sailed forth out of their hiding places straight into the mass of unarmed Indians crowding the square . . . We had placed rattles on the horses to terrify the Indians. The booming of the guns, the blowing of the trumpets, and the rattles on the horses threw the Indians into panicked confusion. The Spaniards fell upon them and began to cut them to pieces. The Indians were so filled with fear that they climbed on top of one another, formed mounds, and suffocated each other. Since they were unarmed, they were attacked without danger to any Christian. The cavalry rode them down, killing and wounding, and following in pursuit. . . . It was an astonishing sight, for the whole valley for 15 or 20 miles was completely filled with Indians. Night had already fallen, and our cavalry were continuing to spear Indians in the fields, when we heard a trumpet calling for us to reassemble at camp.

“If night had not come on, few out of the more than 40,000 Indians troops would have been left alive. . . . (Atahuallpa was taken prisoner.)  It was extraordinary to see so powerful a ruler captured in so short a time, when he had come with such a mighty army. Truly, it was not accomplished by our own forces, for there were so few of us. It was by the grace of God, which is great.”

Because the feudal orders of England and France began suffering profound structural crisis later than those of Spain and Portugal, they were less successful than the latter at easing it through raw plunder (for over 200 years Spain’s feudal economy was enriched with gold, silver, jade and other treasures stolen from the New World).  As a result, from the 1600s until 1725 both countries–and to a lesser extent the Netherlands–also engaged in another utilitarian practice to keep their problematic economies functioning.  They turned to piracy, attacking and pillaging Spanish and Portuguese vessels returning home with stolen wealth. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the most successful English pirates were knighted and provided their own navies. During his voyages on “The Golden Hinde” Sir Francis Drake is reputed to have obtained sufficient pelf to redo the entire Royal Navy.With few exceptions, the pirates were children of the landholding and religious aristocracy whose social existences were threatened: Sir John Perrot was a major landowner’s son; Sir Francis Drake was the son of a Protestant preacher suffering persecution in the religious struggles over who would, and who would not, be maintained; Sir Walter Raleigh studied at Oriel College, Oxford and Middle Temple Law School.      

But, for England and France, piracy, like colonial conquest, proved to be only a temporary solution to the feudal order crisis.  A growing number of individuals in both countries had begun finding it easier to defend their social existences by engaging in practices that would introduce capitalism, a new and more beneficent productive system. Artists and artisans became numerous. Some turned to producing jewelry or clothing, or fabricating weapons. Others transported these items to neighboring communities for barter, or imported similar goods produced elsewhere. Finding that full-time craftsmen made finer products than did serfs turning out single items every now and then, landed aristocrats encouraged the craftsmen and merchants by purchasing their wares (Marx called this “sowing the seeds of their own destruction,”). Thus assisted, the nascent industrial-elite/- capitalist community prospered within the feudal order, its numbers multiplied through births, and through the chronic inadequacy of feudalism, which continued producing more people than it could socio-economically sustain, excess rural populations moving to the industrializing cities to survive.  

The end was reached when the chronic insufficiency of feudal productive orders turned acute;  i.e., as merchants and manufacturers, who together with industrial workers constituted the citizenry of the capitalist productive systems preparing to be born, found that defending their social existences required selling more goods than the feudal aristocracies could either use or afford. Out of their assumed desire to be maintained, a new understanding began formulating itself in the nascent industrial-elites’ heads. If they dismantled the exhausted feudal system and undertook a full development of the capitalist productive order a large middle class would come into being who could afford the cornucopia of goods being turned out. Unemployed peasants would be forced to find work in the factories. Only the feudal aristocracy would fail to be sustained, but then, its historic mission had come to an end. 

The material necessity for given orders of production to be replaced by more  cornucopian systems becomes obvious if one imagines Americans deciding to return to a feudal existence.  To do so would require exiling or killing around 60 percent of our people.  An estimated 4 to 6 percent of the U.S. population now produces more than 90 percent of our food, using sophisticated irrigation systems, tractors, plows and combines which only an advanced industrial economy can provide. The food is then distributed via trains, planes and semis, which likewise require a complex industrial order for their manufacture. Ditto with virtually everything else we enjoy, including housing, clothing, medical care, entertainment and travel. In the same way, sustaining the social existences of the French or English during the 16th century would have been impossible if they had decided to raze their feudal systems and revert to a hunting and gathering way of life.  (Hence, the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons who dream of restoring feudal governance in which religion and politics are united fight a war they can not possibly win.  They can, and do, however, enjoy small victories which strengthen the protection of their followers’ social existences; which, of course, is why their followers give them such an enthusiastic backing). 

3.) The fundamental material process which determines community political theory and practice is universal. 

Chauvinistic Americans often depict the U.S. as a superior country, its people freer and more democratic than those of any other nation. If one ignores a few large chinks in their reasoning–200 years of slavery, the grand scale killing of blacks required to obtain the slaves and their subsequent oppression, the ethnic cleansing and genocidal elimination of several million native Americans, the Civil War, the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII–the chauvinists are undeniably correct. Americans, particularly Americans of European extraction, have known  greater socio-economic-political freedom than nearly any other peoples.  

What the flag-waving chauvinists conveniently ignore, however, are the hard-and-fast material reasons for that greater freedom.  Right from its beginning as 13 colonies, the U.S. has been uniquely able to ease structural crises by passing the injury on to other peoples.  The population of the colonies was 5 million in 1800.  By 1850 it had grown to 25 million and Americans were actively securing their social existences by driving Indians from their lands. 

The South was dependent upon producing cotton and tobacco.  Cotton production, in particular, quickly exhausted the soil, making it necessary for cotton farmers to expand westward, acquiring new land. A rapid increase in  population exacerbated this need. Preserving the social existences of the growing Southern population not only required a continual increase in cotton and tobacco production, but in the number of slaves who did the planting and harvesting. The South’s slave population was 1,900,000 in 1810.  In 1860 it was over 4,000,000. The cotton harvest during the same period more than tripled.

While Southerners maintained social existence by extending slavery to new regions, the North–in control of the country’s harbors and ports–did so by imposing ever larger tariffs on French and English manufacture going to the South; by letting the sons of Eastern farmers move westward and obtain their own “homesteads” for food production; and, increasingly, by undertaking industrial development (which also necessitated mounting tariffs to protect it from European competition). As is clear in retrospect, the self-protective activities of both regions were putting them on a collision course. 

Until the late 1850s, the feudal South’s chairmanship of pivotal congressional committees, along with its expedient use of the gag rule, enabled it to prevent the industrializing North from doing unacceptable injury to its interests. The South was able to block construction of a rail line across the country, which the North sought to provide homesteads for the rapidly multiplying number of its farmers’ children, and to expand the market for its growing manufacture. It prevented the passage of laws to provide the North with a flood of cheap European factory labor, laws drastically increasing the tariffs on European products, and a law establishing a national bank, all things Northern manufacturers more and more desperately needed.   

But while preserving the social existence of their respective populations was producing increased friction between North and South in this period, it  led them to cooperate on an ethnic cleansing of Indians.  In 1830 Congress passed “The Indian Removal Act,” which was immediately signed by President Andrew Jackson. Though the act became tied up in the courts, the forcible seizure of  native American lands continued to accelerate throughout the eastern states. In 1835 bribery and pressure were used to get 100 Cherokees to sign a treaty relinquishing all claims to land east of the Mississippi. Although not one of the 100 had any right to represent the tribe and 14,000 Cherokees (virtually all of the adults) promptly signed a repudiation of the treaty, it would soon be used to justify their removal.  

Concentrated in Georgia, but inhabiting parts of Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina as well, by 1838 the Cherokees were the only large Indian community remaining in the East. Basing his decision on the fraudulent 1835 treaty, President Martin van Buren now ordered their removal to Oklahoma.  Between 16,000-20,000 Cherokees were driven into “removal forts,” as white settlers rushed in to burn their homes and win title to their lands through lotteries.  Leading a militia of 7,000 men, General Winfield Scott then oversaw their forced relocation.  “Cherokees!” Scott announced on coming before the tribal leaders: “The President of the United States has sent me, with a powerful army, to cause you, in obedience to the Treaty of 1835, to join that part of your people who are already established in prosperity, on the other side of the Mississippi.” 

While some Cherokees were able to travel part way by water, more than 8,000, many without shoes, made the painful 1,200 mile journey on foot.  Four thousand Cherokees died on the infamous “Trail of Tears.” A few were murdered by settlers; most succumbed to contagious diseases which spread quickly given the lack of adequate clothing, food, water, and rest.  “Humanity weeps over the fate of the Indians,” Andrew Jackson consoled, “but true philanthropy reconciles the mind to the extinction of one generation for another”.   

New settlers continued pouring into Texas (Tejas, for Mexico) throughout the 1830s, some of them from Europe, most from Southern and Eastern states.  With their status insecure, in 1832 the settlers petitioned Mexico to make Tejas a Mexican state. Their petition was rejected. Two years later Santa Anna proclaimed himself Dictator of Mexico, and, fearing Mexico might lose control of Tejas, began exerting greater pressure on the settlers. Whereupon, in 1835 the settlers revolted, proclaimed Texas independent and chose Sam Houston as its president. 

In 1845 the U.S. Congress declared the annexation of Texas, making it the 28th state. That act led to a war with Mexico the following year.  When the Mexican-American war ended in 1848 the United States had acquired over 1 million square miles of territory, including part or all of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oaklahoma.  This remarkable conquest, along with the ethnic cleansing of Indians, went far toward making it unnecessary for the swelling population of white Americans to maintain their social existences by attacking one another.

There was, however, the waxing North-South interest conflict still to be resolved. By 1860, due to the more rapid population growth in the North, the South had lost control of critical congressional committees. Then, in 1861 the North succeeded in electing the pro-Northern-interest Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. With the frontier now wide open and the North in full command of the federal government, Southerners understood that if they remained in the Union they were going to suffer profound injury to their social existences; i.e., expropriation. The situations and imperative needs of North and South having become mutually exclusive, both would now have to construct and act upon radically new protective Community Truths. Both immediately began to do so. 

4.) Novel socio-economic circumstances invariably produce novel political truths. 

The South’s defensive reaction was immediate.  It would secede from the Union, enlarge/build its own ports for trade with England and France, thus avoiding the North’s heavy tariffs; and, it would extend the feudal slave order westward. Leading Southern politicians had previously spoken of “eventually” ending slavery, even asking Congress–in vague and noncommital language, of course–to develop a long range plan. (Much as Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party presently talk of “eventually” establishing a Palestinian state and seek “responsible” Palestinian leaders to help them do it, while continuing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the seizure of their lands.)  Now, the South found compelling biblical justifications for slavery, telling itself the Old Testament makes clear it had God’s approval, that nowhere and never had slaves been so compassionately treated, that the use of “indentured servants” in the North was widespread, and the indentured servants were often more exploited than slaves in the South. Only 10 percent of Southerners owned slaves, ran the South’s reformulated truth, while virtually everyone backed secession, proving a perpetuation of slavery was not the reason for breaking with the North. Furthermore, it was contended, Northern politicians lied when they said they considered slavery a major concern. Lincoln himself had never expressed a burning interest in the issue. To the contrary, in his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas in September 1858 he exhorted:

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races. . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Prior to the South’s secession, Lincoln had envisioned emancipation taking decades, and proposed sending emancipated blacks back to Africa, where, ran the South’s refabricated truth, their lives would, if anything, be far less pleasureable and free. 

The position of Lincoln and the North respecting secession is hypocritical, argued the South: When Louisiana was purchased in 1803, it was New England states who, fearing the purchase might weaken their federal powers, first threatened secession. Moreover, in a speech before Congress in January 1848 Lincoln declared:  “Any people anywere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right–a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

The North’s position is hypocritical, too, reasoned the South, in that when the colonies revolted against England they did so because they were being saddled with an injurious “taxation without representation.”  The North is now doing the same thing to the us.  Not one Southern electoral vote was cast for Lincoln, and we no longer have congressional power to prevent the imposition of intolerable tariffs on our importations. (There was no income tax at the time and tarriffs provided nearly all the federal income).  We therefore have the same God-given right to secede from the Union that the colonies did to secede from Britain.

The North’s position is also illegal, because the Articles of Confederation clearly stipulate: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”  We therefore have a legal right to practice slavery, while the North has no legal right to try and stop us. 

Finally, the North’s refusal to respect our secession is a result of greed, in that it exacts the burdensome tariffs to finance its own development, just as England once attempted to pay for its European wars and its industrialization through onerous taxes levied on the colonies.   

As for the North’s reconstituted truth, immediately following North Carolina’s secession in December 1860 editorials in major Northern newspapers acknowledged the economic aspect of the fight.  “In one single blow,” said the Chicago Daily News, “our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it is now. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits.”  “With us,” echoed the New York Times, “it is no longer an abstract question–one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated power of the State or Federal Government, but of material existence. We /Northerners/ were divided and confused till our pockets were touched.”

 But, to date, no community has ever admitted it was prosecuting a war for economic self-interest (those on the battlefield might start questioning the extent to which they were personally served), and the North was not about to do so either.  Abolition of slavery and preservation of the Union would soon become the unifying calls to arms; the North’s Community Truths in its bloody battle with the South.  

Since the 1830s an “underground railroad” had existed in the North which assisted slaves in their flight to freedom.  An estimated 3,500 abolitionists–liberals, quakers and ex-slaves–were the railroads’ principal “conductors,” and by 1850 they had helped an estimated 70,000 slaves flee, the majority settling in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Canada.  However, most white Northerners, including many abolitionists and more than a few underground railroad conductors, believed blacks, by nature, were not fully equal to whites.  If defending their social existences demanded abject racism of Southerners, it required varying degrees of diluted racism from the white majority in the North.  Many Northern whites considered the conductors’ activities far too radical. Others, particularly lower-class workers fearful of competition for their jobs, were openly, sometimes violently, hostile to abolition. 

Before the war began most Northern whites viewed the brilliant orator and ex-slave Frederick Douglass with that mixture of awkward respect and deep dislike that their 1960s counterparts felt for Malcolm X.  A fierce abolitionist who sought an immediate resolution of the problem, Douglass made most Northern whites uncomfortable. As, when speaking to festive Independence Day celebrators in 1952, he exhorted: “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all the other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . To him your celebration is a sham. . . A thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of  practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States.” 

Douglas also understood, and, to the dismay of many Northern clergymen denounced, the interest-shielding function of Southern religion. “I assert most unhesitatingly,” he wrote, “that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds–and a dark shelter; under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.”    

Then there was the North’s pre-war attitude toward the violent abolitionist John Brown.  On October 16th, 1859 Brown led 21 men (16 whites, 5 blacks) in a seizure of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia where 100,000 rifles and ammunition were stored.  Believing he was on a mission from God, Brown hoped this bold action would prompt an uprising among Virginia’s slaves, who he would then be able to provide with weapons. The slave revolt did not occur. Instead, armed Harper’s Ferry residents attacked Brown and his followers and 36 hours later the seizure came to a bloody end when a militia headed by Colonel Robert E. Lee killed 7 of the raiders and took a wounded Brown prisoner.  On December 2nd Brown was hung for his daring action.  While there were Northerners who sympathized with his failed effort, some of them prominent figures (e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass), the great majority did not.  According to the North’s “prevailing wisdom” (Community Truth), Brown was criminal and probably insane.  Boston’s Daily Evening Transcript reported: “Mr. Brown with his handful of deluded followers created in Maryland and Virginia was not at all creditable to the people or authorities of the vicinity.” The Evening Journal of Albany, N.Y. referred to “the crime of seeking to plunge a peaceful community into the horrors of a servile insurrection.” The State Register of Springfield, Illinois, went further, observing: “It was scarcely credible, when the first dispatch was received yesterday, that the object of the ruffians could be other than plunder, but late dispatches, including those we publish this morning, show, conclusively, the the movement was a most extensive one, having for its object the uprising of the negroes throughout the south, a servile war, and its consequences–murder, rapine and robbery.” “This most fiendish plot of these fanatics” agreed the Indianapolis Locomotive, “if successful in Virginia and Maryland–we have no doubt was intended to be carried throughout the entire Southern States–having for its object plunder, violations of female chastity, and an indiscriminate slaughter of all who should oppose its fearful march.”  As one writer sums up, at the time Brown was “labeled a madman for his failed miltary adventure and repudiated even by prominent anti-slavery leaders.” 

However, that was 1859.  A mere one-and-a-half years later the North’s operative logic concerning Frederick Douglas and John Brown began a rapid metamorphosis.  South Carolina seceded from the Union in December of 1860, and within months Douglass began to change from a Malcolm X to a Martin Luther King  according to the prevailing wisdom. There were still people who despised him, some who, throughout the Civil War, even continued to express their oppposition to abolishing slavery. But they were a declining minority and, like we Sheep-in-Wolves-Clothing Americans who said we were opposed to invading Iraq, since it maintained their social existences, where practice was concerned they went along with the community’s understanding. 

The North’s reevaluation of John Brown was even more dramatic.  South Carolina attacked the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor on April 12th, 1861.  That very same day “/A/t Fort Warren on George’s Island, Boston Harbor, members of the Second Battalion, Boston Light Infantry, and the slowly swelling ranks of the Twelfth Massachusetts gathered on the parade ground for a flag raising ceremony.  Soldiers in the Second Battalion, also called the ‘Tiger’ Battalion, had a special surprise prepared for the occasion, a new song based on a revival hymn”. The song?  The anonymously written “John’s Brown’s Body Lies A-mouldering in the Grave.” “He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,” the melody proposes. (Robert W. Allen, “Say, Brother, Who Wrote this Melody?”)   “Although many Northerners /had/ condemned the /Harper’s Ferry/ raid, by 1863 John Brown had become a hero and a martyr in the North”, a potent unifying symbol.

But the North’s critical Civil War truth, the Community Truth about which there was virtually no disagreement, the one which superseded all others combined, was that the Union could not be permitted to break.  Lincoln stated this truth emphatically in his famous reply to an open letter by Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune on August 22, 1862: 

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

The Articles of Confederation expressly state “the Union shall be perpetual,” the North intoned. This “Save the Union” truth just happened to be the one around which Northerners would have to unite if they were going to protect their social existences with minimum disruption of their lives.   

Since it was no longer possible for the Northern and Southern populations to both be socio-economically sustained, as people have always done in their situation, they would now bleed and butcher one another to determine which of them was going to suffer crippling expropriation, which would write the script the other had to follow. The war would be savage where a loss of life and destruction of property were concerned. Over 600,000 people would die, while another couple million received serious to disabling injuries.  The value of destroyed or damaged property in the South alone was estimated to be in excess of two billion dollars, an almost unfathomable sum at the time.        

Alvin Toffler has observed (The Third Wave), that calling the North-South struggle a “Civil War” is misleading. It was, he notes, America’s industrial revolution; the final wresting of political power over the country from Southern land-holding/agricultural (i.e., feudal) elites and placing it in the hands of the financial-industrial (capitalist) elite concentrated in the North. In that regard, it was akin to other anti-feudal revolutions before and after, including the French, the Russian and the Chinese. Like them, it was a cruel and bloody undertaking.

Throughout the Civil War (as well as during and after reconstruction) Northerners and Southerners– blacks and native Americans included–all continued behaving in ways which emphasized that politics is the struggle to maintain social existence, community violence/war the continuation of politics by another means.

On April 15th, 1861, three days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln activated 75,000 men from the states’ militias.  On the 17th, learning that Virginian troops were enroute to Harpers Ferry, Union forces blew up the Armory and Arsenal to prevent its seizure. North Carolina’s legislature put out a call for 20,000 volunteers.  The Civil War had started.

Except for minor skirmishes, for the next three months both sides concentrated on war preparations. Each appeared convinced the other would quickly decide the cost of an all-out struggle was unacceptable, making the conflict of short duration.  The North, in particular, had difficulty grasping the tragedy of the situation (Lincoln activated the militiamen for only 90 days).  Aware they possessed the industrial base and rail system required for making war, while the agricultural South did not, confident that with a  population of 22 million–as opposed  to the South’s 9 million, 4 million of them slaves–they were much stronger than their opponent, to many Northerners the whole thing seemed almost playful.  The North carried this fun-making attitude into battle when, on July 21st, it sent 30,000 ill-trained men to confront 22,000 equally raw Southern forces at Manassas (the First Bull Run), Northern Virginia.  Prominent Washingtonians, including many congressmen and even a few senators, along with their wives and servants, packed lunches and travelled the 25 miles by horseback and carriage to witness the opening engagement. 

With the troops frightened and inexperienced, many wearing clothing which did not clearly identify them as Union or Confederate, this initial clash had the order of a barroom brawl with guns.  Men on both sides were hit by what we now call “friendly fire.” Within hours 4,700 were dead, wounded or missing (2,950 Union, 1,750 Confederate). Even a few Washington merrymakers got shot as they joined Union soldiers in making a quick retreat back to the Capitol. “/T/he dead and dying remained on the field of battle for four days until family and loved ones reclaimed them, or local farmers collected the bodies.”  The First Manassas was  a very sobering experience for Northern politicians. “It’s damned bad!”, Lincoln is said to have exclaimed. Events would soon show he understated the situation.  It was not simply “bad,” it was hideous.  

A few weeks after the North’s defeat at Bull Run, Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 volunteers, the number of volunteers supplied by individual states dependent upon the size of their populations. The government’s verbal appeal was directed at “all able-bodied men” between the ages of 18 and 45. Its practical appeal, however, had a very different target. It was aimed at young men who were either middle class–particularly lower middle class–or, poor.  Each volunteer would be paid $100, hardly a sum of interest to members of the elite. This practical appeal was not the handiwork of individuals from the middle class and the poor, those whose young men were being asked to respond, and, in responding, to bleed and die.  It was, quite simply, designed by politicians who represented, first and foremost, Northerners of favored status; i.e., it was politics as usual.

Volunteers enlisted through township and county offices, few of which kept comprehensive records.  But the records of those which did is revealing: Tippecanoe Township, Tippecanoe County,  Indiana, registered a total of 171 volunteers.  Of them, 163 are identified as “farmers”.  Given that mid-19th century Northern farms were typically between 40 and 100 acres in size and the mean age of the documented “farmers” was 23, these were undoubtedly middle to lower class sons of farm owners. In addition to the “farmers,” the Tippecanoe Township volunteers included: 2 mechanics, ages 19 and 20; 1 blacksmith, age 25; 1 carpenter, age 28; and a 32-year-old plasterer.  Jackson Township, also in Tippecanoe County, recorded 116 volunteers: 51 farmers; 53 laborers; 1 teacher, age 23; 1 Captain, age 24; and 1 carpenter.  Since young men hired to work on farms were usually called “laborers,” it’s likely that the great majority of Jackson’s volunteers were also relatively poor country boys.  At any rate, it’s obvious young sons of the elite did not sign up in either Tippecanoe County township.        

In an internet post (“A Small Community Goes to War”), Frank S. Coleman quotes a Middletown, New York advertisement of July 30th, 1861:

“To arms, young men. You are wanted for the duty which your country requires of you. Come join the Middletown Volunteers, a company now being organized at Middletown, and to form part of the new regiment from Orange and Sullivan Counties . . . Come one, come all. . . . Let none falter now. The Government has made ample provision for you: $50 bounty to be paid by the state of New York on enlistment; $25 bounty to be paid by Uncle Sam; one month’s pay in advance; $75 and a land warrant at the end of the war. Pay from $13 to $23 per month.  Uniforms and subsistence furnished immediately on arriving in camp at Goshen. Pay to commence at once.”  Here, too, its clear to whom the Middletown plea, like that of Lincoln, would most appeal; namely, young men of middle to lower class status, particularly farm boys who dreamed of acquiring land in the midwest.  

As students of the Civil War are aware, with very few exceptions, it was precisely those young men who responded; and, at this point, they responded in significant numbers.  Not many people who lived far from the Capitol had heard details of the ignomineous defeat suffered at Bull Run. The war was just beginning, and for all the reasons previously cited, the confidence and enthusiasm of most Northerners still ran strong. In mid February 1862, they became almost euphoric when, in a three-day battle at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, the Confederacy lost 16,623 men (231 killed, 1,000 wounded, 13,000 taken prisoner) to  the Union’s 2,832 (446 killed, 1,700 wounded, 150 captured or missing).  Since the North was not prepared to accommodate anything near 13,000 prisoners, most were released after vowing they would not again take up arms for the South. 

But the North’s euphoria would not last long.  In a bloody two-day battle, April 6-7, 1862, at Shiloh, Hardin County, Tennessee, the Union lost 13,038 men (1,745 killed, 8,408 wounded, 2,885 missing or captured).  Since the Confederate forces retreated, Shiloh was considered a Northern victory.  Numerically, however, the Union’s loss was slightly greater (the Confederacy lost 10,694 men: 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, 959 missing/captured).  More importantly, with Shiloh the terrible dimensions of the conflict began to be apparent to everyone, including to the young men needed to carry it out.

While our country’s present population is 13 times that of the North during the Civil War, Americans across the political spectrum are deeply disturbed that 975 U.S. servicemen have died and over 8,000 have been wounded after 17 months of fighting in Iraq.  Imagine our reaction, then, if we suffered losses proportionate to the North’s in a 2-day battle: i.e., 22,399 killed and 109,304 wounded. For that matter, although our population is over 9 times that of the Civil War North and South combined, consider what our response might be if we had identical 2-day losses: 3,468 killed, 16,420 wounded.

Insofar as the theory and practice necessary for protecting the social existence of a community’s elite begins to be of questionable utility for sustaining middle and lower classes, encouragement is always replaced with coercion.  In times of war, conscription is usually the initial coercive measure.  Given its much smaller pool of potential fighters, the South acted first, passing a draft measure on April 16, 1862, only 9 days after Shiloh.  Three months later (July 17th), the North passed the Militia Act of 1862.  At the time, Lincoln observed: “we had about played our last card and must change our tactics or lose the war.” (John Bernhard Thuersam, The League of the South Institute). The Militia Act was a de facto draft in that, according to its provisions, states were no longer asked to supply volunteers, they were now ordered to do so, although how they went about it was still going to be up to them.  Depending upon how much money they could come up with, states increased the bounties paid to enlistees to $200, $300, in some cases, $1,000. (James MacGregor Burns, Academy of Leadership).  In brief, poor white farm boys would be given more money to kill and, for many thousands of them, to suffer and die.

 But the Militia Act had another important proviso. Those on the very bottom of the socio-economic pile would now be encouraged to enlist; namely, free blacks.  “And be it further enacted,” read the bill, “That the President be, and he is hereby, authorized to receive into the service of the United States, for the purpose of constructing intrenchments, or performing camp service or any other labor, or any military or naval service for which they may be found competent, persons of African descent . . . “  Contending it would promote racial equality, Federick Douglass had long been arguing  blacks should be allowed to volunteer.  The main resistance came from unskilled city workers who (correctly) feared all moves in the direction of equality threatened competition for their low-paying jobs. In New York and other cities the Democratic Party, its fortunes reliant on such workers, was aggressively promoting that racist stance.

The Militia Act was a rather typical piece of legislation, in that it was aimed at assuring all concerned their social existences would be protected.  Alarmed the war might be lost, financiers and industrialists were pressuring for a major increase in the number of combatants; including, if necessary, the admission of black volunteers. By compelling states to provide volunteers, and by permitting black enlistees for the performance of menial jobs, the Milita Act gave them both.  At the same time, unskilled young white men who worked in city factories and on city docks and feared the job competition greater racial equality would bring, were being consoled that the move toward equality was going to be minimal at best.  Blacks enlistees would only be permitted to do things white enlistees found distasteful, such as digging ditches, washing clothes and cleaning latrines.  They would not be allowed to fight.  They would also be paid much less than whites. The monthly pay for white volunteers was $13.00, plus an additional $3.50 for clothing.  Black enlistees would be paid $10.00 a month, minus $3.00 for their clothing. (Connie Slaughter, “African Americans in the Civil War.”)

As is almost always the case, things did not turn out quite as planned.  The number of young white men signing up continued to be grossly inadequate, despite the increased bounties.  The North’s grand-scale military expenditures were stimulating the economy, particularly the agricultural sector, making the idea of taking a bounty and going to war even less appealing to farm boys.   For the same reasons, free blacks, whose population was relatively small, did not rush to enlist in large numbers either.

On the other hand, blacks who did enlist often found themselves engaged in battle. While it was against official policy, many commanding officers soon realized not only their social existences but their very lives, and those of their troops, would be best defended by arming black enlistees, as well as by freeing slaves in regions under their control. E.g.,”General John Fremont, commander of Union forces in Missouri, issued a directive freeing all slaves in his area of operations without first getting the President’s approval, and in nearby Kansas Brigadier General Jim Lane formed black units without the War Department’s concurrence.” (Major George E. Reynolds, “Pride Over Prejudice”).  

At this juncture the picture remained bleak for both the North and the South, and the North still faced the distinct possibility it would lose the war.  Then on August 29-30, 1862, the Second Battle of Bull Run/Second Manassas took place, each side suffering heavy losses: the Union: 1,747 killed, 8,542 wounded, 109 missing/captured; the Confederacy: 1,553 killed, 7,816 wounded, 1,814 missing/- captured. The Second Bull Run/Manassas was a significant defeat for the North, and its elites immediately began demanding more drastic steps had to be taken.  Lincoln responded by drawing up plans for a national draft of 400,000 men, and for the emancipation of all slaves in secessionist states. 

However, being defensive, the political process is always gradual and two more costly battles would occur before either measure became law: at Antietam, Maryland, on September 17th, and Fredericksburg, Virginia on December 13th.  The North was considered the victor in the first, the South in the second.  But in each instance the losses were so great for both sides that identifying either as “winner” or “loser” seems absurd.  The Union’s combined loss for the two battles was: 2,568 killed, 10,673 wounded, 2065 missing/captured. The Confederacy suffered: 1,899 killed, 9,398 wounded, 1,827 missing/captured. (It should be kept in mind that with battlefield medicine primitive and antibiotics a thing of the distant future, well over half of the wounded later died of their injuries).       

On January 1st, 1863, “Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in the rebellious Confederate states”.  The Proclamation was founded on the hope that, on hearing the Northern government had set them free, many slaves, perhaps a majority, would become indolent and resentful plantation workers; thereby undermining the Southern economy and making it difficult for the South to finance a continuation of the struggle.  It was even hoped a growing number of slaves would escape to the North and join the Union forces.  

But, to repeat a central tenet of this blog, politics is the struggle to maintain social existence, not to risk everything out of a desire to enhance it.  Hence, while the number of slaves fleeing North may have increased slightly (though no one appears to argue that was the case), most remained right where they were. With their lowly social existences dependent upon the Southern economy, they went on aiding and abetting the Confederate cause. Some did so enthusiastically:  “The record is clear,” notes Geitner Simmons, “that, whatever their motivations, Southern slaves donated money to the Confederate cause, held concerts to raise additional funds, worked in munitions factories and served as body servants to Southern officers.” (Salisbury Post.) 

Indeed, right from the beginning of the Civil War, a sizeable number of freed Southern blacks even joined in fighting against the North.  “/T/he State of Tennessee became the first southern state to legislate the use of free Blacks as soldiers in June, 1861, and authorized the same rate of pay as for Whites.” (Reginold Bundy, “The Black and the Gray”). “General Order Number 38, issued by Confederate General Braxton Bragg at Tullahoma, Tennessee, in January 1863, stated: ‘All employees of this army, black as well as white, shall receive the same rations, quarters, and medical treatment.’”  Ironically, “the Confederate Army was providing equal treatment at a time when the U.S. Army was discriminating against black men in the matter of pay.” (Vernon R. Padgett, “Did Blacks Serve in the Confederate Army as Soldiers?”)  “/O/n February 9, 1862, 3,000 well-trained Black graycoats formed the ’1st Native Guard’”, and “On December 22, 1862, 700 armed Black graycoats attacked New York soldiers near New Market Bridge, VA.”  (Bundy, op cit.). Professor Ed Smith,  American Studies Director at American University, observes: “Stonewall Jackson had 3,000 fully equipped black troops scattered throughout his corps at Antietam–the war’s bloodiest battle.” “Smith calculates that between 60,000 and 93,000 blacks served the Confederacy in some capacity.” (The Washington Times). 

Why on earth would freed blacks not simply work, but confront injury and death, to defend a socio-economic system which exploited and oppressed them?  For the simple reason that the same system was the source/provider of their social existence. A letter-to-the-editor of the New Orleans Daily Delta made the point: “The free colored population love their home, their property, their own slaves and recognize no other country than Louisiana, and are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North; but they have plenty for Louisiana. They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought in 1814-15.”

The Daily Delta writer refers to Southern black slave owners.  Like Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians, any discussion of black slave ownership has tended to be considered “politically incorrect” in the U.S..  Zuleh2, the black author of an article published in Africa Forum calls it: “a part of our history that is swept under the rug by many Black historians, glossed over or conveniently ignored”.  While black slave owners were a small minority, they not only existed, in defense of  their hegemonic social existences, they were as pro-slavery as their white counterparts. “/T/he official U.S. Census of 1830 shows that there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves”.  In 1860, Antoine Dubuclet, a black sugar plantation owner, had “over 100 slaves” and an income of $264,000. “That year, the average wealth of southern white men was $3,978.”  By 1840, the Africa Forum writer reports: “South Carolina boasted 454 Negro masters with 2,357 slaves. Although only about one in five white households in the South owned slaves, approximately 75 percent of the free black heads of household in the state owned slaves. Many former slaves did not regard slavery as a malevolent institution but as an economic opportunity, and had no qualms about buying other blacks once they were able to. . . . In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings.”

Obviously, the Emancipation Proclamation was not going to solve the North’s mounting difficulty prosecuting the war. In March 1863 the Lincoln Government then took the next conservative step: it institutionalized a national draft (the Enrollment Act), which would become operational in July. In a three-day battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia, May 1-4, the Union suffered another significant defeat, losing 17,278 men (1,606 killed, 9,762 wounded, 5,919 missing/captured) to the Confederacy’s 12,821 (1,649 killed, 9,106 wounded, 1,708 missing/captured), making the draft even more urgent.

 In a July 11th editorial, the New York Times explained the reason for the Enrollment Act: “The volunteer system long since exhausted the spontaneously patriotic and warlike spirit of the community.  When volunteering for the love of the cause came to an end, the bounty system was brought into requisition, and money considerations induced tens of thousands to enlist who otherwise would not have done so. But the charge on national and municipal credit, of keeping up a vast army by bounties, was too great to be borne. The Government  has at last resorted to the means that all great military nations employ to raise and sustain armies”.

As with earlier appeals for volunteers, there would, however, be a sharp distinction between the stated and the practical operation of the draft.  “The plan,” the New York Times hypothesized, “is that of general, impartial Conscription . . . Instead of the Conscription being a hardship, ungenerously imposed by the Government upon the people, it is really an arrangement of reverse character, by which the Government remits to a majority of its citizens a duty which it might rightfully call on all to discharge–and remits, according to a plan that the minority who have to serve cannot complain of as unfair, for all run an equal risk of Conscription.”  Such was the Draft Act in theory.

In practice, the Act was very different; which the Times editorialist was honest enough to observe, though he seems to have been conveniently unaware of the contradiction.  “Any person may,” he related, “on or before the day for his appearance, furnish an acceptable substitute to take his place, or he may pay the Collector of Internal Revenue for his district the sum of $800, and thereby be exempt from any further liability under that draft. Any person failing to report himself within the time prescribed, furnish a substitute, or pay the $800, shall be deemed a deserter, and be arrested and tried as such.”

In brief, the draft would involve “general, impartial conscription,” according to which “all run an equal risk”; except for men who happened to be lower middle class or poor.  At the time, the average yearly income for workers was $500, the majority earning less than half that sum.  Not many workers could come up with the required $800 “commutation fee” or the $400-$1,000 being charged by “substitutes.”  Even the rare worker who managed to purchase a substitute did not always find he was off the hook.  Substitutes frequently took the money and ran to another county or another state to gull another victim.  Conversely, elite youths and members of the higher-status middle class had no difficulty paying $800 for commutation or financing responsible substitutes.  Besides being able to buy their way out of combat, many were also granted “draft exemptions,” based on their favored status as politicians, judges, clergymen and teachers, or their employment in a wide variety of government offices, in munitions factories, and as railroad engineers.  (Since the function of politics is universal, precisely the same practices were being followed in the South. Draft exemptions were given to clergymen, politicians, judges, etc. and, most importantly, to planters having more than 20 slaves, a provision which furnished blanket immunity to all members of the land-holding/agricultural elite).   

Although it was considered a Union victory, the famed July 1-3, 1863, battle at Gettysburg, Southern Pennsylvania, brought the war almost to the heart of the North. Moreover, it was a bitter triumph (3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, 5,365 missing/captured; Confederate losses: 3,500 killed, 18,000 wounded, 6,500 missing/captured.)  “By the time the names of the first /1,236/ draftees were drawn in New York City on July 11, reports about the carnage of Gettysburg had been published in city papers.”  Two days later protesters, the majority of them unskilled Irish workers, burned the draft office at 46th Street and Third Avenue to the ground.  Putting the Enrollment Act into practice had begun prompting those it most injured to see the conflict for what it had been all along: “a rich man’s war fought with poor men’s blood.” 

“Before the 1840s, New York City’s blacks held most of the /low-paid/ city jobs as longshoremen, hod carriers, brick makers, barbers, waiters and domestic servants.” But, as the door was opened to European labor, “Irish immigrants, particularly those arriving after 1846, competed with blacks for these unskilled jobs and eventually gained control of the occupations, leaving many blacks to work only as strike breakers;” which, in turn, triggered growing enmity and anger among the Irish. (Encarta Africana).  “By 1860, one of every four of New York City’s 800,000 residents was an Irish-born immigrant.” The indicated “competition for jobs between Irish and black workers, already intense before the war, increased dramatically in the conflict’s early years and racial tensions mounted in work places and in workingclass neighborhoods throughout the city.” (Virtual New York City).  

While waging the Civil War was proving immensely profitable for a minority at the top, particularly makers of uniforms, swords and guns, and moderately profitable for many farmers, by 1863 it was having an increasingly hurtful impact on city workers at the very bottom.  Since the war’s beginning there had been “a 43 percent increase in inflation”, while unskilled workers’ “wages increased by only 12 percent.” “As a result, the standard of living for the cities poorest immigrant groups, the largest being the Irish, was drastically reduced.” (The New York City Draft Riots of 1863).   Adding fuel to the fire preparing to ignite, “Negroes had been brought in by the shipping companies of New York to break the strikes of longshoremen for higher wages in the spring of 1863.”  (Albon P. Man, Jr., “The Church and the New York Draft Riots of 1863″). 

Unfortunately from the perspective of one who dreams of a just, humane and egalitarian world, people invariably join together in community around those logics which justify and direct a defense of their social existences with a minimum suffering of pain, a minimum disruption of their lives.  In July 1863, for New York’s poorest whites–the Irish immigrants–that now meant making war on the City’s even poorer black population. 

Whereas Southern whites generally used biblical justifications for their racism, members of the North’s elite Anglo-Saxon community were more inclined to defend their social existences with what they held to be a “scientific” rationale; a vindication which assured them not merely blacks but all non-Anglo-Saxons were, by nature, their inferiors. Vassar University History Professor Anthony S. Wohl remarks that in the literature of the period Irish were depicted as “closer to the apes” than Anglo-Saxons. “Cartoons in Punch”, he observes, “portrayed the Irish as having bestial, ape-like or demonic features and the Irishman (especially the political radical) was invariably given a long or prognathous jaw, the stigmata to the phrenologists of a lower evolutionary order, degeneracy, or criminality.”  Wohl cites the noted British anthropologist John Beddoe, “who wrote in his Races of Britain (1862) that all men of genius were orthognathous (less prominent jaw bones) while the Irish and the Welsh were prognathous and that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who, in turn, was linked, according to Beddoe, to the ‘Africanoid.’”  Northern newspaper advertisements for servants placed by members of the middle and upper classes typically stipulated: “Irish need not apply!” 

While it’s unclear to what extent New York City’s poor Irish community accepted the “scientific” notion of their own inferiority, there’s no question that they protected their lowly status with the conviction it was true about all blacks.  In view of that sheltering racist assumption, then, consider how they saw their situation in July of 1863: In the South, the going price for a healthy male slave was $1,000.  The value of their own (obviously superior) lives, as established by the Enrollment Act, was only $400–the cost of a substitute if they were drafted/the sum they could earn by becoming substitutes themselves.  (Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery). Wealthy whites had long eased their consciences, and simultaneously mitigated racial animosities that might be aimed in their direction, through the provision of  private (though hardly adequate) social welfare services for poor blacks.  An orphanage located at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s poor black and Irish district, furnished food, clothing, housing and primary school education for 237 black children.  No similar institution existed for the children of destitute Irish.    

After burning down the draft board, the principally Irish crowd quickly became a 50,000 member army and went on the attack. At the outset the rioting army directed their anger not only at blacks but at New York’s elite, including individuals who were considered the elite’s protectors. Expensive store fronts were smashed, and Brooks Brothers Clothing factory was partially destroyed. They attacked “persons and institutions linked to the Republican Party,” “assault/ing/ well-dressed pedestrians whom they presumed to be Republicans and sack/ing/ the homes of wealthy citizens, which the/y/ assumed must be owned by Republicans.” “In lower Manhatan, rioters attacked and set fire to Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, the city’s most pro-Republican newspaper.”   Finally, they went after the police; “not only because of police efforts to contain the rioting but also because the Metropolitan /police force had/ close political affiliation with the state Republican Party.” (“Virtual New York City”).

However, given that the rioters’ sought to defend their social existences, going after New York’s middle-class and/or wealthy could not possibly get them very far; for the simple reason that both would, and did, have an influence over the City’s political institutions, including the police, which was commensurate with the wealth they needed those institutions to protect.  By the afternoon of July 13th, the first day of the Riots, the rage had begun to be focused on blacks.  At around 4 p.m., “several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc., advanced upon” the black children’s orphanage. While the children escaped, “the crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. . . . /which/ firefighters were unable to save”.  (Harris, op. cit.)   

On the docks, “an Irish mob then attacked two hundred blacks . . . while other rioters went into the streets in search of ‘negro porters, cartmen and laborers.’” “The Longshoremen’s Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that ‘the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry.’  But ‘other parts of industry,’ such as cartmen and hack drivers, not to mention skilled artisans, also sought to exclude black workers. The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove blacks not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and liesure spaces.”  (Harris).  

By the second day the rioters had become brutal.  According to Joel Tyler Headley, a reporter, the mere sight of a black person “in the streets would call forth a halloo, as when a fox breaks cover, and away would dash a half a dozen men in pursuit.  Sometimes a whole crowd streamed after with shouts and curses, that struck deadly terror in the heart of the fugitive. If overtaken, he was pounded to death at once. . . . Old men, any young children, too young to comprehend what it all meant were cruelly beaten and killed.”  (Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Great Riots). 

“Rioters made a sport of mutilating black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams–jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones–while a crowd of men, women and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging ‘vengeance on every nigger in New York.’ A white laborer . . .  rousted coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets.  A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lampost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin’s body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by the genitals.” (Harris.)

Predictably, a minority of Irish went to the aid of blacks. “When a mob threatened black drugstore owner Philip White in his store at the corner of Gold and Frankfurt Street, his Irish neighbors drove the mob away, for he had often extended them credit. And when rioters invaded Hart’s Alley and became trapped at the dead end, the black and white residents of the alley together leaned out of their windows and poured hot starch on them, driving them from the neighborhood. But such incidents were few compared to the widespread hatred expressed curing and after the riots”. (Harris)

Just as predictably, “whites who supported blacks were also targets of the violence.  They were beaten and their homes were destroyed. Blacks were forced to leave their homes because landlords were afraid that their buildings would be destroyed.  Businesses that served blacks were also destroyed.” (New York Post Online Edition). “All this,” the reporter Headley reflects, “was in the nineteenth century, and in the metropolis of the freest and most enlightened nation on earth.”

Under Lincoln’s orders, late in the afternoon of the fourth day of the riots “over four thousand federal troops arrived from the battlefield at Gettysburg to occupy the city and quell the rioters.”  The number of dead and injured blacks is still a subject of debate. Estimates of the number lynched range all the way from 11 to over 100, the number killed, from a couple dozen to 2,000, with 120 the most frequently cited figure.  Several thousand more had been severely injured.   

When looked at exclusively from the position of the Irish poor, was the riot a success?  Sadly, if protecting their base social existence at any cost was the objective, the answer to that question must be a resounding “Yes!”  When it was over, very few black competitors for low-paying jobs remained in Manhattan. Many had fled to what eventually became Harlem.  Others moved to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere.  

In addition, the City’s political authorities, Republican as well as Democrat, moved to alacrity to ease the threat of conscription that had confronted the Irish.  They immediately got federal officials to reschedule the draft lottery for the following month. When it resumed in August, New York “Governor Seymour argued successful that the federal government should reduce New York City’s draft quota from twenty-six thousand to twelve thousand men”. Finally, Headley remarks, the City’s Board of Supervisors “established its own Exemption Committee that paid for replacements for drafted policemen, firemen, and poor men with dependents. This decision virtually guaranteed that any New Yorkers who did not want to fight for the Union would not be drafted into service.”  From the institution of the draft, “through September 28, 1863,” Headley continues, “1,042 drafted men had provided substitutes, forty-nine men had paid the exemption fee, and only two had actually joined the Union Army”.

To be continued: