The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 2

Translated from a presentation at the party meeting in Viareggio on June 2006

Intermezzo on the American Revolutions

We consider it useful here to insert an excerpt from a party text of 50 years ago. As well as acting as confirmation of the views presented in the current work, it provides a good example of our methodology, which doesn’t represent history in a mechanical way, as a succession of events in which the economic substructure and political class power are always harmoniously aligned and travel along in parallel, but as a complex dialectic between the two, which can sometimes even appear inverted, but which over a longer timescale, and over a larger geopolitical area, necessarily see the laws of economy reasserted.

From: Russia in the Great Revolution and in Contemporary Society. Turin Interfederal Report, Sitting I, in Il Programma Comunista, 1956/12.

”American Abolitionist Revolution.”

”We have already had cause to reflect upon the American national revolution of the late 17th Century. Marx drew a parallel between this war of independence, which he called the signal for the French-European revolution which straddled the two centuries, and the war of secession between the Northern and Southern States, which he expected to signal a proletarian social movement in Europe, but which didn’t happen due to the wars of 1866-71.

”The war fought by the New England colonies to free themselves from the English was a war of independence but can’t really be considered a national revolutionary war like those in Europe, in Italy and Germany, etc. The racial factor was lacking insofar as the colonies were composed of mixed nationalities, although mainly that of the metropolitan State, and it was above all economic and commercial factors which prompted them to seek political emancipation.

”Much less can such a war be said to be a bourgeois revolution, insofar as capitalism didn’t arise in America out of local feudal or dynastic forms – there was no aristocracy or clergy to speak of there – and on the other hand the country it rose up against, England, had been completely bourgeois since the 16th-17th Century, when it had radically overthrown feudalism.

”The theory of class struggle, and that of the historical series of analogous modes of production which all human societies go through, should never be conceived of as banal and formalised symmetries; they should never be applied before arriving at an ‘Engelsian’ understanding of how to deploy dialectics.

”Always when referring to North American independence the Marxist school repeatedly noted how pre-1789, still feudal France, sympathised in a very concrete way with the rebellion against capitalist England; which had to then compensate itself by joining the anti-revolutionary coalitions, finally winning at Waterloo with the feudal Holy Alliance.

”In the case of the Civil War of 1861-65 the factors at stake aren’t national liberty or even race in any significant sense. The Northern States fought to abolish the enslavement of Negroes which was diffused throughout the South and defended by it, but it wasn’t a rebellion of the Negroes, who for the most part fought in the Southern formations alongside their masters. It wasn’t a case of a rebellion of slaves launched to abolish the slavery-based mode of production, which would then be succeeded by the aristocratic form with serfdom in the countryside and the free artisan in the towns. There is nothing in it comparable to the great historic transition between these two modes of production, which occurred at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and with the rise of Christianity and the barbarian invasions, both of which were conducive to the abolition, in law, of the ownership of human beings.

”In America the industrial bourgeoisie didn’t conduct a social and revolutionary war to wrest power from a feudal aristocracy, which had never existed in America, but in order to provide for a transition from forms of production which were extremely backward compared to the form from which bourgeois society historically has arisen: it wanted to replace production carried out on the basis of slave labour with wage labour, or with artisans and free peasant farmers, whereas the European bourgeoisies had only needed to fight to eliminate serfdom, much more modern and less backward than slavery.

”This shows that a class is not “predestined” to carry out one specific task in the transition from one social form to another. The American bourgeoisie didn’t have to devote its energies to abolishing feudal privileges and serfdom, but had to liberate society from a more backward form based on slavery.

”There is in this example an analogy with the task of Russian proletarian class, which wasn’t to pass from the capitalist to the socialist form, but to clear the way for historical transition before that, for the jump from feudal despotism to mercantile capitalism; without this impacting detrimentally on the doctrine of the class struggle between wage earners and capitalists, and of the succession of the socialist to the capitalist form, through the efforts of the modern wage earning class.

”The landowners in the South were beaten in the 1865 revolution by the industrial bourgeoisie, even though more backward in historical terms than the feudal nobles because they were slave owners, and though more modern than them because a mercantile social network already existed. The Northern bourgeoisie didn’t hesitate to take on the ‘regurgitated’ task of liberating the slaves, which had been absolved elsewhere by very different classes; by the feudal and Germanic knights, or by the apostles of Judea.

”It may be objected that this historical tidying up operation didn’t leave the capitalists in the North with any further revolutionary tasks to perform. But if the South were to have won the Civil War, which was not beyond the realms of possibility, then on the one hand the task would still have remained for the future, and on the other, the bursting out of American capitalism as it headed towards becoming world super power would have been very different”.

The Working Class and the War of Independence

It isn’t the object of this work to describe the War of Independence fought by the thirteen colonies which were later unified in the United States of America; a war which Americans call a ‘Revolution’, although in fact it was a civil war which did very little to revolutionise the system of production, apart from redistributing to the wealthiest section of the American bourgeoisie the profits which had previously been due to the Crown. It is worth however sketching out the main features of an event which changed the political landscape, and which over the ensuing decades would therefore influence the character of the North American worker’s movement.

The urban bourgeoisie, by now definable as autochthonous, was less and less prepared to allow the possibilities for expansion of the internal market to be mutilated by British colonialism, which had imposed a monopoly on trade, making the purchase of its own goods obligatory and blocking the development of indigenous manufacturing in order to reduce competition with its own industries (with some productive activities expressly forbidden, like hat making). England was the only permitted export destination for American commodities, which also had to be transported there on English ships. Imports, whether from England or elsewhere, could only arrive via English ports. From 1763 settlements to the west of the Appalachians were prohibited (which infuriated the Southern planters) and in 1764 the minting of money and the founding of local banks was forbidden (which increased pressure on the Northern merchants).

These restrictions on the local economy, which caused low pay and frequent bouts of unemployment, also impacted naturally enough on the proletariat. In the ensuing years, following England’s victory over France in the battle for supremacy in North America, the Crown, in order to offset the enormous debts it had occurred as a consequence of the war wouldn’t hesitate to impose a range of taxes, and these would hit everyone to a certain extent. Thus the English would unite the different classes in their resentment towards the mother country, with the notable exception of the colonial aristocracy, of course, who had more to fear from the people than from higher taxes.

From thence arose the continuous friction which would eventually lead to the Colonies rebelling against the mother country. There was no need in America for an economic and social upheaval to clear the way for a new mode of production; there was just the English bourgeoisie’s need to suffocate at birth any competition in the realm of commerce and industrial production. The battle was between two bourgeoisies, but obviously once it had got started it was difficult to be sure just where such a wide-ranging rebellion might lead. However, from a social point of view, the conditions that might have justified a major clash between the classes didn’t really exist, as shown by the fact that the franchise was quite widespread in the Colonies even before the war, although not amongst the workers, nor amongst the small landed proprietors. Neither was there much social conflict to speak of, the sole exception being Pennsylvania perhaps. Almost everywhere the workers constituted such a small percentage of the population that a revolution was unthinkable; and in the countryside, if the slaves in the South are excluded, the figure of the agricultural labourer was virtually non-existent. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had already carried out their revolution in the previous century, in England.

The citizen-soldier who formed the basis of the continental army was a peasant farmer, and indeed more than 90% of the colonials made a living off the land at the time of the war; but already a glimpse of the future could be seen in the cities. As commercial and trading centres, the ports of the North and South could boast a social structure that was much more varied than the countryside. In particular, there had developed the classes of free and of impoverished labourers, who often lived a hand to mouth existence. Out of 100 male workers in a typical big port, 15 were forced labourers in some form or another (slaves or servants), 25 were sailors and 40 artisans; another 5 made a living from various trades such as merchants, shopkeepers, officials and those in the professions. Then there were the women, who in the cities were already working outside the home in large numbers and in low paid, unskilled jobs. More or less everyone was paid in cash. But in the cities the general framework was now in place, and besides all the other urban activities and the presence of the wealthy classes, there also existed a large number of people who didn’t work and who lived a precarious existence on the margins of society: vagabonds, beggars, fugitive servants and slaves, widows and orphans, thieves and prostitutes, all of whom now constituted a good third of the urban population.

The artisans, the most important component of the city population, frequently educated, and proud of their craft and social position, didn’t welcome the Crown’s attempts to regulate the colonial economy, a process which was intensified after the Seven Years war (known in America as the French and Indian War) ended in 1763, and which provoked a severe depression in the cities in the early seventies. They were joined in their opposition to the mother country by the sailors, the Dockers and all the professions linked to the sea and the shipyards. More and more, these workers were to be found lounging in the taverns while the American ships rotted, empty, in the docks.

It was therefore the workers in the urban centres who would be the most active in the disturbances of the revolutionary period. The sailors in particular were full of resentment towards the Crown because of the atrocious way they were treated by the Royal Navy; most of them having been recruited with a bang on the head. They would form a subversive multi-ethnic and multi-racial force which was connected along the length and breadth of the Atlantic coast. The workers often had to cope with the pressure of competition from soldiers seeking work in their spare time, and that, incidentally, would be precisely what caused the first bloody confrontation, the so-called “Boston Massacre”. At other times they were forced to toil on military works for starvation wages. Probably the view was widespread amongst the workers that they would benefit from the reduction in imports connected to the dispute with the mother country: there would be more work; a prediction which in fact proved correct.

And yet the aggregations that played a determining role in spurring on the undecided strata of the bourgeoisie towards rebellion, the “Sons of Liberty”, were actually interclassist bodies, composed of artisans, skilled workers, small traders, shopkeepers and professionals, and in certain cases small farmers. As usual, it was the bourgeois intellectuals who provided the leadership, but often they merely articulated the mood of the lower classes, and in any case they were well aware that of all the various components of the rebellion it was the workers who were the most dependable. These radicals, mainly from Boston, made links with the artisans and the workers via a network of taverns, and artisans’ and mutual aid societies, disseminating a political vision which encompassed the opinions of the poorer classes, and anticipating the legitimate participation of artisans and workers in political activity. The middle and upper strata of the urban bourgeoisie, and of course the big landowners, were on the other hand far from convinced of the need for struggle and, as partners, they were never to be trusted, distributed as they were across the two warring camps. It is worth recalling that women were also active in the struggle, forming what was probably the first auxiliary corps in history, the “Daughters of Liberty”.

Groups arose which supported the “Sons of Liberty” amongst the workers in Ireland and England; they urged the rebels to persevere in their boycotting of English imports, even if major unemployment in England was the possible result.

During the first half of the 1770s, workers and artisans took advantage of the weakness and indecision of the bourgeoisie and conquered strong positions for themselves; something which for members of their class was unthinkable until then. In cities like New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, the workers’ representatives participated, on a par with the planters and the bourgeoisie, in the political organs that gradually filled the power vacuum left by the English. It was a phenomenon which took various forms, and spread to the rest of the colonies. In Boston, workers, artisans and peasants formed an association which managed to take over the city government. The merchants of the city complained that “at these meetings the lowest mechanicks discuss upon the most important points of government with the utmost freedom”. In Philadelphia, too, the “mechanicks” succeeded in expressing their strength and in 1770 held the first political meeting specifically reserved for the members of their class. In 1772 they organised a party, the Patriotic Society, to promote their candidates and their programme. By the middle of 1776, the “mechanicks” controlled the city.

After the Boston Massacre, in which the five people killed by the English soldiers were two sailors, a ropewalk worker, an apprentice and an artisan (emblematically it seems it was the coloured sailor, Crispus Attucks, half Black and half American Indian, who led the unarmed revolt) the watchword of the artisans/workers’ organisations was ‘arm for the inevitable conflict’. This meant the formation of a militia (the famous ‘Minute Men’), the gathering of arms and munitions, military training and, in the cities where English troops were stationed, the creation of a highly effective espionage system.

The first battles at Lexington and Concord, in 1775, were actually won thanks to the prompt mobilisation of the Minute Men, equipped with information about troop movements via their spy network. Following the news of the victorious battle, insurgents immediately took control of New York City, and the same happened in many other cities in the centre and South. Each time it was the Sons of Liberty who took the active role whilst the bourgeoisie tended to present the rebellion as a request, with weapons in hand, for reparation of wrongs suffered. It was the workers’ component of the rebellion which supported the most radical leaders (Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Christopher Gadsden) and got them to pronounce decisively for independence. Paine was convinced that it wasn’t possible to both remain faithful to George III and preserve liberty; independence would generate a democratic form of government and make America “an asylum for mankind” and “a haven of refuge for the oppressed peoples of the world”: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”.

Despite the resistance of the bourgeois conservatives, who didn’t want the struggle to lead to independence, the Committee of mechanics in New York instructed its delegates to vote for independence at the Continental Congress; and, in the home of a bricklayer called Graaf, Thomas Jefferson would draw up the historic Declaration of Independence. The Congress assembled in Philadelphia was however slow to take up the demand for independence; a hesitation which didn’t depend so much on any residual loyalist scruples, but rather on the presence of the popular armed masses, which had started to administer sound thrashings to the English troops. What would replace British despotism? Would the rich merchants sitting in Congress be able to continue enriching themselves, or was the way being cleared to anarchy and the rule of the lower orders? In fact, the Massachusetts masses had created an army, and Congress was asked to adopt it. Yes, but who would lead it? The solution came with the nomination of a Southern slave-holder, George Washington, who although a man of little military experience nevertheless managed to reassure the landowners, slave-holders and rich merchants; and to set their minds at rest regarding the peril of a social revolution and assaults on their property.

As the war spread, mobilisation would increasingly extend to the countryside and the hold of the propertied classes fatally increased. The working class and the artisans were strong in the cities but on the scale of the country as a whole they only constituted a small minority, and their political clout was bound to be reduced. But their decisiveness in the early stages was fundamental in propelling the ‘revolution’ towards Independence.

The workers willingly enrolled in the continental army and their class was the most highly represented within it; the inducement held out to the indentured servants was freedom, and if this caused some tension between the masters and the military authorities, such tension was soon alleviated by the compensation paid to the masters for time lost. For the blacks such possibilities didn’t exist. Only in the North were free blacks accepted into the army, although only after much prevaricating, and in general they acquitted themselves very honourably. Many Southern States on the other hand forbade their enrolment.

This was the colonies’ weak point, particularly of those in the centre and South, and it didn’t take the English long to exploit it. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, officially granted freedom to the slaves and servants of rebels who put themselves at the disposal of the English army. This certainly wasn’t because the English were in any way progressive, as evidenced by the fact that loyalist slave-holders would be insured against their slaves escaping, a prospect which meanwhile terrified the rebels, who nicknamed George III the “King of the negroes”. In fact all a proprietor needed to do to ensure that his escaped slaves would be returned was to declare he was on the side of the King.

Despite this, despite the ignorance and isolation of the great mass of slaves, the number of escape attempts multiplied over the course of the war, and tens of thousands of men, women and children – basically anyone capable of pointing a gun – presented themselves at the army quarters of Her Britannic Majesty. It is calculated that out of the 567, 000 blacks, both slaves and freemen, estimated to be living in the colonies at the outbreak of the war, around 100,000 presented themselves in this way: a real exodus which would have certain repercussions. And these in fact were only a small proportion of the slaves which had abandoned the plantations. Others had died in the attempt or been recaptured by the rebel troops. Not many were put to death, because the fact of the matter was they were still valuable merchandise.

Of those who reached the English lines, many died of hardship, mainly succumbing to illnesses encouraged by the terrible conditions in which they were held. When the English army abandoned Chesapeake Bay, only 300 out of the 2,000 blacks previously welcomed were still alive and capable of departing. And what is more, since the English had no vested interest in whether the ex-slaves died or not, they treated them even worse than the old masters: extremely hard work in conditions that no white would have tolerated, meagre rations, and horrible living conditions were their lot. Only very few of them were issued with weapons, although when given the opportunity they fought extremely well. How the English viewed the blacks became clear during the siege of Yorktown in 1781. Between 4,000 and 5,000 slaves had given Cornwallis their backing in the hope of earning their liberty. The siege meant there were serious food shortages, but instead of the remaining rations being divided up fairly amongst everybody, the slaves were given the food that had gone off; the putrid meat and the worm-holed biscuits. When even that was gone, the blacks were driven into no-man’s-land between the English and rebel barricades. And once they reached the rebel lines, what became of them then? The fact is, that rarely happened, because the greater part of these poor wretches died of hunger and illness, dragging themselves back and forth between the opposing armies who competed at keeping them at bay. Thus the black slaves who had fought in the great “Revolution”, for liberty and all the other principles that fill the history books, could only conclude that liberty certainly wasn’t on the agenda for them.

Apart from a few staunch patriots, the wealthy bourgeoisie didn’t contribute much to the war at all. They were more concerned to risk as little as possible and make sure they found themselves on the winning side. Indeed, as is their custom, merchants and manufacturers would continue to conduct a roaring trade during the war, angering even Washington himself who called them “murderers of our cause”.

Estimates of the forces on the two fronts differ quite substantially. According to one reliable estimate, a fifth of the colonists were actively opposed to the patriots. John Adams instead divided the population into thirds, and estimated one was in favour, one against and one neutral. The revolutionary leaders baptised these fellow citizens with the name “Tories” to emphasise their aristocratic origins and also to make the war of independence more resemble a popular uprising. But loyalism in general derived not so much from class interests as from complex social considerations, with often those who belonged to a minority remaining faithful to Great Britain. In New England, for example, the Anglicans, who were victimised and discriminated against by the Congregationalists, remained close to the Crown, whilst in New York and in Pennsylvania it was mainly the ethnic minorities, menaced by the rigidity of the protestant culture of English derivation, who defended the government in London. The political alignments also reflected wider tensions within the social structure. In the colony of New York the tenant farmers were against the idea of revolution insofar as their masters, the aristocrats and big landowners, had sided with the rebels. Similarly the smallholders in the west of North Carolina, who were unhappy with the conduct of that colony’s officials, and who had rebelled against them in the previous decade, protested by taking a loyalist stance. Even in the South there was no lack of planters ready to defend “liberty” whilst their slaves, in the rare cases they could make a choice, took the part of the English.

But remaining neutral would become increasingly difficult in what had effectively become a civil war, and many were forced to choose which side they would fight for. In fact, the forces in play would remain throughout more or less in a state of equilibrium. Washington, in any case, never had more than 20,000 troops at his disposal, and at certain points it was a mere 5,000. Both sides used the native Americans, who however tended to support the English, and with good cause. The rebels had to repress the loyalists by every means, thereby contradicting the very “liberty” they claimed to be defending (ironically it was actually the Sons of Liberty who were at the forefront of this repression): those not on the side of the revolution were traitors, subject to oppression, sequestrations, deportation, and imprisonment, whereas the English didn’t make provision for the same crime, although from a legal point of view they would have had a certain justification, seeing as how it was a case of their subjects rebelling. A large number of Americans therefore had Independence imposed upon them against their will, and hundreds of thousands would head for England; or to Canada, where after the war ended they would form the English speaking component of that country.

In a situation where the opposing armies were more or less in a state of equilibrium, the advantage the continental army had was the ease with which it could replace casualties and deserters, and also the fact it could engage in a guerrilla war. The English could only find replacements for their troops with great difficulty, and, considering their distance from the mother country, at great expense. The victory was only in small part due to the patriots, devoted to the cause though they undoubtedly were. On several occasions the continental army risked possible annihilation, and continued to exist only thanks to the help of France and Spain, who saw the war as a convenient way of bleeding the old enemy. It was the arms and provisions supplied by the French which allowed the victory at Saratoga (1777), not to speak of the victory at Yorktown (1781), in which a determining role was carried out by the French land troops and naval blockade which enabled the capitulation of Cornwallis’s troops.

Even if American society at this time was composed mainly of the petty and micro bourgeoisie, the bulk of the army was made up of proletarians, and it was their spilled blood which was the price of Independence. When a law was enacted in Connecticut making conscription obligatory for all men between 16 and 60 years old, excluded from its provisions were officials, priests, students and professors of Yale, blacks, those of mixed race, and native Americans. Those who were able to find a substitute, or who could pay five pounds sterling, were also exempt. And “Revolutionary” America would have no qualms about reinstating the practice which had aroused so much hatred against England: forced enrolment.

The war didn’t manage to stifle class conflict for long. Soon there was a general and inevitable rise in prices (in Philadelphia they rose by 45% in one month), and proletarians were furious to see the same people who had got out of fighting by paying for substitutes ignoring the laws that fixed commodity prices, whilst taking advantage of the freeze on wages. There were petitions, threatening mass meetings and riots. In Philadelphia sailors struck for an increase in wages and troops were called in to crush the protest and jail the strikers. This was nothing new: back in 1777 the militia had been used to repress the movement of the tenant farmers in the Hudson River Valleys (New York), who had taken Independence to mean the appropriation of land from the absentee landlords. But many of the latter, although they were aristocrats, had seen which way the wind was blowing, and after steering a middle course had finally sided with the rebels. And the lands of the loyalists were taken over by “patriotic” businessmen. In 1781 a large contingent on the rebel side, the Pennsylvania Line, mutinied. After having repelled the officers, killing one, they marched on Philadelphia where the Continental Congress, the ruling body of the revolutionary power, was in session. The crisis was resolved thanks to Washington’s cautious approach and the contentious issues, including that of back pay, were resolved.

And yet the revolution was not without social consequences which improved the situation considerably for the proletariat: the enunciation of the principles of individual liberty and equality, even if with limited objectives, had clear implications for the future conditions of slaves and servants. White indentured labour was already in decline, caused by the difficulty of keeping the flow of new arrivals constant; a difficulty which increased every time there was war in Europe.

Slavery was abolished in New England in the years after the war, and prohibited in the territories north of the Ohio River. In the central colonies it disappeared more gradually, but by the beginning of the 19th century only few slaves remained. In the South, of course, where the mass of slaves were concentrated, ‘the peculiar institution’ still remained firmly in place. But there was the feeling that it was nevertheless an abnormality that would soon have to be put right.

The sale of the great estates of the loyalists didn’t represent, as might have been expected, an agricultural reform. On the contrary, they were distributed amongst the magnates who headed the new federal State, who, as well as considerably enriching themselves, now had land they could rent out.

Apart from a few nobles who stolidly maintained their links with the Crown, there weren’t major displacements amongst the American ruling classes after independence was won: George Washington was from the start the richest man in the country, and Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc, didn’t lag far behind him. Other progressive measures were the reform of the inheritance laws, a notable extension of suffrage (though not in all States), the abolition of restrictions on landed property, and the westward expansion.

Over the next decades the discontent that originated in the class conflict in the East was channelled westwards, towards the ‘savages’ who were unwilling to surrender their ancestral land without a fight. But even after territories were wrested from them to the West, mainly the strip to the south of the great lakes (from Ohio to Illinois), the settler’s life would not be painless, since they would now become the object of the attention of the great speculators. Those pioneers who did manage to stake their claims had to fight on three fronts: against the Native Americans; against the State which required custom duties and taxes; and against the speculators who got them into debt, and often managed to take their land and convert them into tenants.

Despite the romanticised oleographs of the frontiers, most of the colonists lived on the edge of subsistence, and by the mid 1780s the situation had become explosive. The merchants and wholesalers had been trying to re-establish large-scale commerce with Great Britain, but the English merchants were no longer giving credit and were insisting on payment in cash. The former therefore had to request payment in cash from the retail traders, who in their turn then demanded immediate payment by the smallholders. Along with uprisings in Maryland, South Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the revolt in Massachusetts, led by the war hero Captain Shay, and other veterans of the War of Independence who had lost their properties due to debts and taxes, served as a wake-up call to the Confederation’s politicians. Samuel Adams would sign off a Riot Act which prohibited all gatherings of more than 12 armed persons, and empowering sheriffs to kill rioters. Thus even Adams, the champion of the right of the people to rebel, would end up by saying: “in monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death”. But the local militias would refuse to fire on the rebels, and the so-called Shay’s rebellion was only suppressed by a private army financed by the wealthy merchants of Boston, prefiguring the Pinkertons of the next century. There are undoubtedly certain features of the class struggle in the United States that are distinctly American.

If the Founding Fathers had thought that business would proceed on its way undisturbed if each State attended to its own affairs, then evidently they would have to think again. They would accordingly come to the realization that strong central government was needed to maintain order amongst the rebel slaves, the dissidents and the Native Americans. In 1787 they would have to reconvene at the Constitutional Convention and produce a Constitution which went beyond empty rhetoric and really reflected the interests of the classes which had urged separation from the mother country. Other important measures were those which aimed at preventing new territories from cutting adrift from the thirteen ex-colonies, a prospect which was more than likely given the social and economic situation.

The Constitution, which was approved in 1787, illustrates the complexity of the American system and helps us understand some of its distinctive features as they exist today. Whilst it was designed to defend the interests of a small elite of rich magnates (“Those who own the country ought to govern it” John Jay had said), it didn’t neglect the intermediate classes, such as the artisans, small farmers and professionals, who towards the end of the century formed an ample layer of the population (for example, half the population of New York). These classes formed a buffer, an insulating layer between the big bourgeoisie and the strata of the destitute, and of proletarians and quasi-proletarians: blacks, manual laborers, specialized workers, apprentices, farm laborers, native Americans and poor peasant farmers. In this way, better than in all other capitalist countries at that time, and indeed subsequently, it would be possible to exercise social control with a minimum of force and simply by using the Law, along with an immoderate use of nationalist and patriotic propaganda. Of course this masterpiece of social peace (which would not, however, be entirely without interruptions) was founded on the immense wealth of the country being snatched from the Native Americans, with preparations being made to take it in its entirety in the long run.

At the end of the 18th century it seemed as though the American people were well on their way to social equality, whilst the last vestiges of feudalism, which continued to linger in England, not least the monarchy, had been swept away forever. The great revolutionary slogan – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – hypocritical though it was, was interpreted by proletarians as authorization of their wish for a future of decent wages, bearable working hours, and humane living conditions. And on the other hand the great invention of the America war of independence was precisely the brilliant rhetoric of ‘Liberty’. Every class and every social layer, from the peasant farmers of the Hudson Valley to the coopers of Philadelphia, from the sailors of Boston to the traders in debt to England, from indentured servants thirsty for land to the skilled craftsmen of New York, all of them saw in the achievement of Liberty the solution to all their problems, the opening of a new world of wealth and well-being.

But such would not be the case. In the general transformation of the society that had arisen after the war the struggle would become more and more restricted to the two fundamental classes of the capitalist system of production, the working class and the class of capitalists. The other components of society were destined to decline, even if at certain times they would still play an important role.