1 - Notes on the Republocrats
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HOW CAPITALISTS RULE IN A CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY/pt.1
Notes on the Republocrats
By Vince Copeland
(First in a series)
Just as most of the great religions were born in rebellion and revolution, so the great Republican and Democratic parties began. And just as the great religions are now for the most part conservative pillars of the status quo, so the two major political parties have had the same fate and lost their original meaning.
The reason for this does not lie in "human nature" or in any natural weakness of people, but in the exhaustion of the social forces that first brought about these institutions and the growth of new forces that utilize them for different ends.
But their origins still have meaning for us--in the same way, perhaps, as the pictures woven into old tapestries, now threadbare and thin, can tell us what people once did and thought (and what they wanted us to think) long after the substance has disappeared. This illusion of the tapestry, as it might be called, is best dealt with by examining its history and evolution. We can find clues this way to more recent political developments and perhaps find out why some of the most undemocratic traditions are built into the system.
While both the Democratic and Republican parties were formed in revolution, they have evolved by counterrevolution into something different. Even their form--the "picture"--has been changed considerably, while their substance has been altered organically by the immense expansion of capitalism over the continent and throughout the world.
History, as opposed to the historical novel or movie, can seldom be understood merely by projecting the present into the past, by assuming that people always did the same things we do, just in different costumes. We must try to deal with these parties in the social framework in which they arose, keeping in mind the class interests they represented.
Class beginnings
A long time ago the two parties were arrayed against one another as the contending spearheads of two different classes--not so much an oppressed versus an oppressor class, but two different kinds of oppressors: owners of chattel slaves versus owners of capital, who employ wage slaves. From about 1824 to 1876-77, the Democratic party by and large represented the slave owners and the Republican party represented the capitalists.
But after the great betrayal of Black freedom in 1877, the two parties could be characterized with minor oscillations as the instruments of two political factions of the same capitalist ruling class. The Republican party favored the club against the working class. The Democrats advocated the carrot: the promise if not the performance of better things for the workers and oppressed.
Even this has to be modified in the case of the Democrats, since the former slave owners of the South, decisively beaten in the Civil War, were given "home rule~" at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. This was a more or less open terrorist dictatorship over the Black masses in the South under the Democratic party. It lasted in unrestrained form until the 1930s. It was somewhat softened over the next three decades and then disrupted by the great civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
Thomas Jefferson
Let us look first at the Democratic party, which predates the Republican party by about half a century.
Thomas Jefferson is generally recognized as the founder of the Democratic party in about 1800. He contained in his own personality some of the main contradictions of the party then, somewhat foreshadowing its contradictions today.
He was opposed to the trappings of aristocracy. But he was a slave master. He was opposed to the idea of building a manufacturing economy; he wanted a nation of small independent farmers, while his aristocratic colleagues were large slave-holding farmers. He was opposed to the "money power" but accepted the support of northern banks in his presidential politics.
How many of these contradictions were an accident of his personality, unconnected with his party? And how many were embedded in the social and political situation of the time, becoming essential features of the Democratic party?
White liberals have always been a little uncomfortable that this great Democrat was also a slaveholder. But other than praising him for freeing his slaves when he died or mumbling about slavery not being as terrible in 1800 as in 1860 (!), they don't have much of an explanation for this peculiar fact.
The rape of slaves
The right-wing Republicans of today, especially when they are trying to attract Black voters, attack Jefferson as a hypocrite and a fraud. They point to the persistent stories that he had liaisons with slave women and thus brought up some of his own children in slavery. Of course, a large number of wealthy right-wing aristocrats were also guilty of this barbaric practice.
But in spite of the self-serving attacks of the present-day right-wing, it is important to ascertain just how "democratic" Jefferson really was, if we want to understand the meaning and limitations of the word.
Did he believe in equality?
Certainly his language was democratic at times. "All men are created equal" and "God forbid that we should be 20 years without a rebellion" were certainly democratic sentiments for their day. As opposed to George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, who were all obsessed with keeping the people down and making property a sacred feature of the new Republic, this sentiment appeared to put him on the left wing of the revolution.
The fact remains, however, that he and his most famous supporters (those who became presidents) were slaveholders. And his most vigorous opponents, although autocratic and anti-democratic, were not.
How could he be a slave master and at the same time a believer in the equality of humanity, even just its formal equality "before the law"? Obviously, he could not.
It is said that slavery was already an institution when Jefferson came on the scene and that he did the best he could. But by the year 1800 the industrial revolution was already taking place, manufacturing was springing up--even in the South.
The anti-democratic Federalist Party of Adams and Hamilton, whose picture is still on the ten-dollar bill, was in favor of making the United States into a bourgeois manufacturing republic. However, the Federalists were so stupid in their arrogance that they hadn't any notion of democratic concessions or desire to maneuver with the common people. They preferred shooting them down.
The Federalists were associated with the old landed aristocracy, the super-rich swindlers and smugglers, kings' favorites and hidebound reactionaries, many of whom hadn't even been in favor of independence. John Adams revealed in his diary that he was against universal suffrage because people would vote to take the fortunes away from the rich and establish equality. Hamilton was even worse.
Cotton production
By 1800 even the production of cotton was yielding to capitalist methods with a vengeance. Whereas just before the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, the total U.S. export of cotton was only 378 bales a year, in 1800 it was 36,000 bales. Thus the super-exploited African slaves were now slaves of the world market and northern industry, as well as victims of the chain, the auction block and the lash. It was not the echoes of the ancient past that made Jefferson's rhetoric so impotent, but precisely the connection with money capital--the capitalism to which Jefferson thought he was so opposed and to which, as a matter of fact, he himself had to capitulate.
In the face of this we are taught as children that Jefferson was the democrat and Hamilton, Adams and Washington were the autocrats. There is no doubt about the latter proposition, but considerable about the former. And rather than look for historical truth in the personalities of these leaders, it would be better to examine the social systems they represented.
A rebellion he supported
When Jefferson spoke of having a rebellion in the United States every 20 years, he could not have been referring to slave rebellions. He made the remark in a private letter because of the 1786 revolt of Massachusetts farmers under the leadership of Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. It was a revolt of very oppressed small farmers against the usurious mortgages and high taxes imposed upon them by the wealthy rulers of the state, who were generally in league with John Adams and his friends.
They were the "money power" of the time in Boston and sharply opposed to Jefferson, particularly on the question of the rights of independent farmers, who often were in debt to them.
And one he didn't
It should be added that there was a good opportunity for Jefferson to support another rebellion just 14 years later. This was the slave uprising led by Gabriel Prosser in the year 1800. But the democratic statesman was too preoccupied with running for president and laying the foundations of the Democratic party to get involved with that one!
Of course, Jefferson was sincere enough in his defense of the independent small farmer, whom he seems to have regarded as the salt of the earth. But he would have been much more democratic if he had attacked the great big slave-holding farmers, who oppressed these small farmers of Virginia and other southern states as well as the slaves.
Next: A visit to Tammany Hall
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p.s. -- Apparently this first part of the series never was received or distributed by ACTIV-L, so we're repeating it. Apologies if you HAVE seen this before! Next: Part 3, coming up in a day or two!
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