The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Fundamentals of Historical Materialism Part III

North American Labor from 1600 to 2010

 

Chapter 21:Proletarian Origins:

From Puritanism to the Revolutionary War

Workers as well as farmers were often held in servitude in the English-speaking world of Old England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, often of a de facto slave type. - And, this situation lasted until at least the early 1800’s. An entertaining novel set in Scotland and the US, where mine workers suffered these circumstances, is worth your attention entitled A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett.

So the fact that the overwhelming percentage of New England’s population was or had been unfree (~75%) by the time of the Revolutionary War (1775 – 1881) did not change the general perception both at home and abroad, that “freedom” was extant in North America as it had never been in historical Europe. – And, in fact, it was.

Primarily this was because White’s who came in as temporary slaves (so-called indentured servants) eventually were freed or escaped servitude as part of the deteriorating ability of their feudal colonial masters in Old England to control the destiny of a land so far from home; which at any rate was being torn apart itself in a series of Civil Wars and revolutions.

The initial wave of 1600’s immigrants was religious and of the Cromwell variety – which is to say protestant of the Independent, Congregationalist, Puritan type; (remember the English Revolution, the English Republic and the English Civil Wars of 1640 – 1660 we discussed in Chapter 12 on Capitalism.) It featured those whose objective was to work in some way for a living, as well as those who planned on living off of them, as they had, in the Old World. Such hopes were usually extinguished rather soon for the latter, but among the former some of our White ancestors survived in their North American toeholds; despite hostile environments (both natural and cultural). Unlike the warm climates and already domesticated masses of “Latin” America awaiting the Spanish ronin who colonized them, the North Americans seemed to have picked the “hardest” way to go.

This English Revolution period, 1640-1660, witnessed the emergence of a true “New” England; one where the Cromwellian Puritans, Congregationalists and Independents of a variety of Church affiliations finally turned their beachhead settlements into true colonial towns. Their most distinguishing characteristic, vis a vis their Spanish counterparts to the south, was their addiction to self-help “work” as the source of their wealth, as opposed to living off the work of those being held in servitude. This was a new and completely different “social value” than that characterizing the feudalist occupation of New Spain. The protestant ethic had found a safe haven, and so had these protestant colonists – soon to be joined by Christians of the old and “official” (i.e., Roman Catholic) Church variety, many temporarily out of Papal favor in Europe.

As importantly, as Adam Smith reported in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, the American’s had proven that free labor in the end was cheaper than labor held in servitude. Free labor could be dismissed when no longer needed, while slave labor (both temporary and permanent) had to be fed, clothed, and housed all year round.

America is Labor Short

Nothing had plagued New England more in the 1600’s and 1700’s than the shortage of “hands.” So, it was not long before “temporary” slaves were imported – usually but not always White. As we have seen they were called “indentured servants”, and were ostensibly under contract to work for a certain person for two to seven years to pay the cost of their passage, at which time they would join their “free” (if impoverished) brethren, not yet truly petty bourgeoisie, on the land or in the towns. Recruiters sold these “packages” of temporary slavery with all the skill of modern used car sales hucksters offering many enticements (e. g., learn a trade; be all you can be; see the world; find a mate; become a “free” farmer, etc.) Yet an apple that turns out to be a lemon often leads to consumer rejection. – And, the reality the temporary slaves found awaiting them was far more severe than they had imagined; so the struggle to end being “unfree” often began as soon as the immigrants arrived in the New England colonies. The newcomers determined to make lemonade, and move on.

Yet, there is a big difference between being conscious of the unjust nature of feudal society and being class conscious of the proletarian variety. It would take the introduction of true capitalism, with all its technological diagnostic criteria in hand, before a true “proletarian” consciousness could emerge. In other words, one must have proletarians before one can have proletarian consciousness.

The Struggle to End being Unfree

Fundamentally, these de facto temporary slaves (at least the Whites) when abused or otherwise having become disaffected, could always run away and hide while farming in the western forests, or work as some kind of laborer, apprentice, or specialist guildsman in the large towns of the North (Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia.) Africans could often do this as well since a great many of them had come to New England as “freemen” or as “temporary slaves” in the 1600’s and 1700’s and had settled as “citizens” in the Northern Colonies. “Running away” had, of course, happened in Europe also, but was a far more effective “open door” to freedom in New England, with its de facto unlimited western frontier.

Once arriving in cities, those with the idea of being free laborers soon discovered workers could not legally band together and refuse to work, except at a certain wage and for a certain number of hours. All this was explicitly outlawed in New England as it had been in Old England. As, for that matter, was paying and/or receiving a wage higher than prescribed by the bourgeois bosses of the colonies This was the first challenge the immigrants confronted.

Unity vs. Collaboration

In the struggle for adequate wages or fees, working people learned only by combining to achieve some degree of unity could they earn a decent wage or fee for their labor Thus, the first half of the foundation for social progress was learning to achieve unity of purpose and action.

However, their economic struggles with the bourgeoisie were compromised by the necessity of letting the bosses run the progressive movement to replace feudalism with democracy of the capitalist sort (where the bourgeoisie rule, in other words, and settle their business among themselves politically in a “democratic” fashion). The bourgeois elements had the meeting places, the press, the elected offices held, the Church, and who else could lead. At any rate, this was the predominate ideological framework of that time (as it had been since the days of Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution). So, workers were always deeply involved politically alongside their bourgeois brothers – as younger brothers. Not as an independent class with its own inherent interests. Furthermore, many of these working people were also petty bourgeois or wanted to be (guildsmen working for fees; small craftsmen operating shops; small farmers.) Therefore, it wasn’t hard to convince them their political objectives should be the same as those of their employers and the more prosperous farmers (often called planters.) In practice if working conditions and wages were not blatantly unfair working people were willing to set aside economic demands in favor of political unity with their more prosperous neighbors. Under these conditions workers were willing to collaborate with the well-to-do.

Capitalist Technological Foundations Illegal

- And, there were good material reasons for proto-proletarian mechanics, artisans and apprentices, to think of the colonial burgeoning bourgeoisie as being like class brothers. At least on the surface. For example, the technological foundations of what was then “modern” manufacture were specifically prohibited by British colonial law from being exported to New England. Not that the North American bourgeoisie didn’t import them anyway – but, it made every aspect of their manufacturing endeavors illegal from the get go.

For example, blast furnaces and the know how to make them, were equipment and knowledge, carefully policed in British ports. US smugglers like John Adams and John Hancock were forced to assist in the disguising of mechanics and others with technical knowledge in order to get them aboard their ships and often their equipment had to be left behind. The hope being that these men could remember how the furnaces were built and maintained, so they could reconstruct them once safely in America.

It was illegal to produce wrought iron in the colonies. Illegal to bring in artisan mechanics. Illegal to make machinery. Illegal to export anything that didn’t first go through British ports on British ships. The entire Anglo-American enterprise was an exercise in illegal trafficking.

North American capitalists had to start out as criminals, and continue that way as a normal part of everyday business once they might get production underway. – And, finally, their sales activities at home and abroad were a further and equally serious criminal infraction. Working people saw that feudalist oppression was as hard if not harder on the well-to-do than it was on them!

The arrival of the Flying Shuttle (1755), the Spinning Jenny ((1760), and the Steam Engine c.1765, were great criminal, as well as technological, accomplishments and would have earned their importers the hangman’s noose had they been caught. In fact, it was the deep woods of North America which often had to be the locale for the construction of these furnaces and proto-factories, and in this the bourgeois importers naturally required the day to day assistance of the proto-proletarian and small capitalist farming, masses.

So, the material foundations of a united front were strong, constant, and overpowering.

In Conflict

However, where the antagonistic articulation between the bourgeoisie and the mechanics, artisans, apprentices and would be proletarians, in this new Less-than-Eden, were often to sharp to allow for class collaboration, Whites and Blacks could also take up arms and revolt. They did this often, and many times, together.

True chattel slaves in the Southern colonies mostly Black, often did revolt. – And, in turn either escaped to sanctuaries such as Florida or Mexico or were slaughtered by thugs employed by their overseers. Thus, this second half of the foundation for social progress was learning to be willing to engage in armed revolt. Something White poor people were also learning.

A united front with the bourgeoisie was de facto the way history unfolded. – And, while the struggle of Black chattel slaves and White temporary slaves were two distinctly different things, what this means for us, is that from this point forward in our studies we want to study two distinct trends in US working class consciousness formation. American White and free workers would have to contend with two tendencies. That is (1) unity with the bourgeoisie to achieve political success and (2) a willingness to fight the bourgeoisie and the slavocrats for economic success. Black slaves could not collaborate in any real way other than to submit to slavery and they had to learn to fight or flee.

{Note: today it is labor unity, and the willingness to fight back in open revolt, that constitutes the foundation for progress of all wage earning people in North America. It is for that reason the US Rulers spend so much effort and resources controlling all the media of communications (newspapers, books, and TV and Radio news and school textbooks.) Whatever happens the ruling oligarchy aims to (1) divide the people (destroy their unity) and (2) discourage “violence” on their part to redress their grievances.- And, with their Government apparatus in the States as well as Federally they pass endless legislation aimed at “atomizing” if you will the American people, turning one group against another, in the hope that constant and growing divisions among the masses will prevent unity from being achieved on their part. Today the fact we still need to get the right to organize a union through Congress shows us nothing has changed.)

With this background in mind let us turn to the situation with regard to wage earners in the period immediately preceding the Revolutionary War. When we do, we see among the Whites, these two general trends had begun to take precedence in the social and political struggles of the North Americans by 1765. (The point in time we have defined “Capitalism as a Stage” to have emerged – I suggest at this point you reread chapter 12).

Politically, first and foremost, was the demand of the immigrants for “democracy”; the second was the demand of the immigrants for “freedom” from British aristocratic economic oppression. Let us review them in that order.

The Struggles for Political Democracy and Economic Freedom

The initial wave of immigrants featured egalitarian ideas so common among the religionists of the puritanical-independent-Congregationalist Cromwellian variety in the 1600’s, and all of the New England toe-hold colonists could vote. By the 1700’s however, the poor had often been stripped of that right, and only the “landed” (property owning) or otherwise wealthy, citizens were allowed to vote (of course neither the temporary or permanent chattel slaves could vote; nor, the poor and wage- or fee-earning working people.) There were exceptions, or soon would be, in places like Philadelphia where persons renting apartments could vote (and this included many working people.) However, none of this anti-democratic movement in the colonies occurred without generating massive dissatisfaction, and as we have seen in Pennsylvania, workers sometimes won.

As you might imagine the tiny English-speaking world of that time was always affected in one part, when something happened in another part. We have seen that the word “all”, when talking about the English-speaking world, meant only the United Kingdom and Ireland, the New England colonies and some Caribbean colonies. Thus, as Old England went, so went New England, eventually (albeit with its new indigenous democratic inclinations.)

Cromwell had his most serious and final pre-English civil war debate (c.1640) with himself. He was trying to decide whether to make the attempt at bringing his version of Christian political and economic life to Old England, or chucking the whole thing, to join his fellow co-religionists in their pilgrimage to the New World. – And, this tendency continued for the next two centuries. Which is to say, this Old World vs. New World choice, awaited young English men and women, for over two centuries. The time it took to traverse the distance involved continued to shrink, so it was not surprising that revolutionary developments (or counter-revolutionary ones) in Old England continued to have reflections in the New World and vice versa.

In the midst of the Old English civil war (which led to the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords), in 1646, the American Nathaniel Bacon led a White revolt against the feudal parasitocracy headed up by the slave-owning planters (slavocrats) in the Virginia Colony. The slavocrats were able to defeat Bacon’s forces (largely White and of course poor) by drowning the revolt in blood (Bacon inconveniently died during the armed struggle.) But, before the rulers could finish their work the commoners had regained some of their rights. White men without property regained their right to vote for their political representatives, and the right to vote in the selection of officials of their church as well, at least temporarily.

Nearly half a century later, and one year after the Anti-restoration Revolution of 1688 in London, a follower of Bacon named Jacob Leisler led another armed struggle in New York City, in 1689, against the local aristocracy. This time the reactionary forces did not succeed in reversing the gains of the uprising. As you can see, in both cases the American revolts, while indigenous responses to local conditions, took their triggering cue from Old England, which in both cases was in the throes of bourgeois revolution. Also, in both cases there were two primary classes involved in insurrection. The small holding capitalist farmers of the countryside (about 90% of the White population in the American colonies) and the artisans-mechanics of the cities. The latter being the precursors to true proletarian status.

British Capitalism Faces First Colonialist Financial Crisis

Tea Party in Boston

It’s important for you to recognize at this point one critical factor in the emerging post-War (1856-1863) situation in Britain. Yes they won the war against France but they did so at the cost of about 60 million pounds! Parliament took various taxing measures including requiring the North American colonies to pay part of the bill - at least the ongoing part of supporting British troops and other British Government functions in the Atlantic colonies. This was an abrogation of the long ago won, full civic rights in colonial Assemblies, due to rich White Yankee Gentry, in the North American system of rule by White Male Wealthy “common” men. The Stamp Act and other taxing pieces of legislation culminated in the Boston Tea Party and led directly to the North American Revolutionary War (1775-1781.) The ultimate cause having been the British capitalist’s greed to seize French and other possessions on a global basis, which had led directly to the loss of the North American colonies altogether.

Technically this is more of a colonial war than an imperialist war in that the British and French capitalists were not trying to export capital at any important rate. That is, factories and the machinery within them were not being sent here and there and sold to anyone anywhere. Just the opposite actually as you have seen in this juxtaposition of British Imperialism versus North American colonists. But it was symptomatic in every way of what capitalism portended for the 19^th century.

The Origin of American Proletarians

It’s important here to note that Capitalism, for a century and a half after New England’s colonization, did not yet quite exist - in either Old or New England. Which is to say, that workers hired, and paid for their labor-power (wages), then placed at the factory bench, were not yet quite in existence – or, where in some large American cities, some small shops of this type did exist, they were limited by British colonial law, which allowed no would-be capitalist to hire more than ten such persons per shop. - And, of course, the New Englanders were still over half a century away from steam engines and machinery, as late as 1700. Yet, despite all these deficiencies it is clear that the American class from which true proletarians (factory workers) will emerge is the class of the guildsmen, mechanics, and artisans, of the pre-Revolutionary War period.

Secret Revolutionary Societies

When not religious, it would be secular revolutionary bodies, which served as the organizational forms around which the bourgeoisie organized its resistance to feudal authority in the American colonies. The latter were necessarily “secret” societies devoted to one or another aspect of the struggle against British rule. None was more important than The Sons of Liberty. These were capitalist organizations at-bottom, but the mixing up of working class and bourgeois politics as a consequence of the primitive condition of pre-capitalist development in the English colonies led the first truly working-class “union” type of organizations to embed themselves in these bourgeois secret societies. Among the first to do so were the Seamen’s association of New York City, who created their own branch of the Sons of Liberty they called the “Sons of Neptune.” These men led the strikes in New York against British imports, against British maritime policy, and in general against everything “British.”

Often, the small capitalist farmers in the American countryside allied with their city brethren or at least wanted to. – And, women organized as a separate and distinct group in the “Daughter’s of Liberty.”

In Ireland, and even in Old England, affiliate supporters of the Sons of Liberty were organized and active – seeing in their American brothers and sisters true allies against British ruling aristocratic oppression. After the Battle of Concord in 1775 these Irish and English supporters sent money to the widows and children of the American men who had fallen in combat. In 1778 there were riots in Dublin and London in support of the American cause which gave General Washington and his compatriot’s great solace, that the path they had chosen was indeed the right one. As Thomas Jefferson wrote about the violence of the North American revolutionary civil war, to paraphrase, “it would be better that there were no more than one man and one woman left in every country in the world than that things should go on as they have.”

Workers Take the Point

The most sophisticated American workers organized independently of the bourgeoisie by 1773 (two years before the fighting began) setting up in New York the Committee of Mechanics, making it their own branch of the Sons of Liberty, while the bourgeois elements operated through their “Committee of Fifty One”. The militants took over the revolutionary movement, sending money to the poor in Boston who suffered under British oppression (the British had closed Boston’s port); enforced a non-importation rule on shop-owners (forbidden to sell British goods by the Sons of Liberty); establishing contact with like-minded organizations in the other colonies (“Committees of Correspondence”); organized and enforced the decision not to allow any American workers to build for the British Army (barracks, forts, etc,);  and enforcing their own declaration that American merchants could not transport, supply or in any way support British troops.

Note: Sixty years ago in 1947, Philip S. Foner began the publication of his outstanding History of the Labor Movement in the United States (International Publishers [publishing house of the US Communist Party] 1947, New York) This series would run to eleven volumes by the time Foner was finished with it. I mention it at this point because I want those of you with a serious interest in the subject to turn to his books next in your studies. Remember the idea that a study or book has to be brand new to be most accurate is actually a silly idea associated with the bourgeois means of production. In science (and history is a science to us) we always build on the past.

From this point forward it is my task to focus on key turning points in the history of the North American working class movement; not to present a complete history which is at any rate a task beyond the one I have set myself in this volume, namely, your introduction to the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. But for intermediate and advanced studies this should be your next task.

American Revolutionaries Seize State Power: The War Begins

At any rate, as we have seen, for the most part the proto-proletarians and the native bourgeoisie of the New England colonies and their like-minded semi-capitalist {and even some slavocrat) planters of the southern colonies had forged, out of the material conditions of their lives, a de facto united front against British feudalism cum capitalism. The fighting began in April, 1775, in Massachusetts.

Only days after the Sons of Liberty had inflicted 300 dead upon the British at Concord their agents arrived in New York and their correspondents there seized state power in that great city. Revolutionaries seized power in Newark, New Jersey and Savannah, Georgia, shortly thereafter.

Within months, leaders of the Military Association of Philadelphia (mechanics and bourgeois elements) put together a conference of working and farming people. This body was a highly democratic “constitutional convention” which seizing state power declared a new “government” to be in existence in Pennsylvania. It’s assured “freedoms” included many if not all of those later to be incorporated in the “Bill of Rights” to the victor’s Constitution in 1790. – And, new armed forces were recruited to join the fight triggered by the people of Massachusetts.

Thomas Paine’s book Common Sense was published at this time. Paine was a commoner and proud of it. His propagandizing on the part of the emerging revolution was one of the great ideological victories of that time and recognized as such by all of the democratically inclined North American leaders. Note that in this book Paine demanded that workers should have the right to withhold their labor if they wished and not be required by law to submit to any set level of wages; nor employers penalized for going along if they wished to do so. Washington and Jefferson endorsed Paine, his book, and thus, indirectly, the call for workers to be freed to organize.

By the Spring of 1776, nine of the thirteen colonies had revolutionary governments –either new, as a product of seizure, or older bodies converted to revolution. By the summer of 1776, all of the colonies had voted for war and revolution.

A Continental Congress was formed in Philadelphia in 1776 and to it had streamed delegates from far and wide. Although conservative elements were present most of the delegates had been instructed to vote for war and revolution and so they did.

The war itself lasted until Red Coat General Cornwallis was finally cornered by the Continental Army and the French Fleet at Yorktown, in 1781. Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot provides the best motion picture account, I have yet seen, of the struggle from a southern semi-capitalist planter’s standpoint; and it demonstrates in its characters the various small farmer, working class, unfree and slave components of the Continental Army. I shall not pursue the matter here except to say, to paraphrase, with the victory at Yorktown “everything had changed.”

Perhaps that is an overstatement since slavery and various other forms of oppression existed almost everywhere in the fledgling nation, but a first step had been taken forward, into the future. A step as important to the international bourgeoisie and the emerging Capitalist Stage as Lenin’s step forward with the Russian Revolution and Civil War would be for the international working class movement, and the Stalinist Socialist Stage, 136 years later.

 

Chapter 22: Capitalism Unchained: 1781 - 1861

Great struggles between newly distinct, and now newly contending, class forces in North America had been unleashed with the successful conclusion of the revolutionary war. These struggles would intensify over the next four generations, even though, initially some bourgeois leaders like Thomas Jefferson succeeded in welding the masses of mechanics and poor but capitalist farmers together behind himself and other liberal big bourgeois elements in continuing class collaboration; specifically, for the purpose of taking control of the federal government. (The period of the Republican-Democratic Clubs of Jefferson that went on to support Andrew Jackson in his near civil war on behalf of the North American small business and capitalist farmer alliance he would inherit from Jefferson.)  Fundamentally, however, the simple fact was that capitalism as a productive system, with its inherited form of parliamentary government, had finally been unchained in North America.

From our perspective it is this unleashing of the productive power of capitalism that is now our foremost concern. So we shall turn to the rise of machinofacture and supportive infrastructure in North America – and, with it of course, the rise of a true proletarian class. Looking first at the technological foundations and then the interacting social organizational consequences.

Primitive Capital Accumulation

In this context “capital accumulation” does not refer simply to the amassing of money (finance capital – for the purpose of investment in next generations of machinery) but equally to the construction of the infrastructure for capitalist machinofacture as the predominate economic enterprise in the new nation. Not that you can do one without the other.

Money capital must come from somewhere; that is ultimately always from someone’s labor, and as we have seen comes initially in the form of surplus value. Now that labor would come from workers, farmers, and slave labor. In terms of capitalism’s core – machinofacture – money capital was sweated out of the 16 hour a day (six days a week) work schedule so common in the early 1800’s. With that money capital (derived as surplus value) American capitalists continued their investment in machinery and its factory installation and undertook the construction of the infrastructural pillars needed to support further machinofacture. This is the process of industrialization.

The process had begun in England and parts of the adjacent European continent and set the pace. It continued to be the way the “advanced industrial” countries became both “advanced” and “industrial” in Europe (supplemented by imperialism and its exploitation of colonial cheap labor after 1850) (Note: for that matter it continued to be the way Socialists of our Lenin variety would have to acquire capital in the Soviet Union and later China.) The eighty years from Yorktown (1781) to the Civil War (1861) were the period of primitive capital accumulation in the United States.

Off to a Great Start!

Prohibited by British colonial law from building a factory, Oliver Evans had to wait for Washington’s revolutionary victory to get his automated flour mill underway. He didn’t waste any time after Yorktown, and the next year (1782) began the final engineering that led to the completion of his factory in 1790, utilizing an advanced Watt steam engine, perfected only two years before, as the power source. That same year immigrant Samuel Slater and American David Wilkinson built the first Arkwright spinning machine factory in Pawtucket. Their first employees were children under 12 and teen-age women.

This spinning machine had been patented in England in 1769 but of course the Americans were prohibited from owning them, seeing them, having plans for them, and certainly from importing any immigrants familiar with them. Slater himself had to be smuggled into the New Republic so closely guarded was this capitalist textile technology.

Evans completely automated factory is a wonderful proof of how advanced the North American technological potential had become and his immediate post-revolutionary factory undertaking an excellent example of where unchained North American capitalism was headed. We know Evan’s licensed over 100 different millers to construct his fully automated flour mill and this further illustrates the potential of the new nation for basing itself on machinofacture. The rapid and safe (not to mention now legal) adoption (even when stolen) of the most advanced British technology now that the American bourgeoisie had state power, was inevitable as Slater’s smuggling and Wilkinson’s blacksmithing of the Arkwright spinning machine proved.

All of this is truly undeniable proof of where the Americans were going. Even though the reality was that the American nation was still overwhelmingly based on small capitalist farming.

Standardization of Parts and Assembly Line Manufacture

Interchangeability of parts in machinery was a great step forward and was pioneered in the new American nation by Eli Whitney. Whitney had acquired some fame for his invention of the cotton gin (which revolutionized cotton planting by turning the entire thing into a cotton growing industry, with the money capital sweated out of slaves) and was able to convince the US Government in 1798 to give him a contract for the mass production of muskets consisting of interchangeable parts. To begin with he divided his labor force into sections so that unskilled labor specializing only in the production of some specific part could be employed rather than the traditional (long and educationally expensive) vocational way traditionally employed, where one craftsmen made all the parts of a musket taking long periods of time to finish the gun. This was an assembly line. An entirely new way of going about manufacture. The same thing had been done in Britain earlier with regard to the production of blocks for naval vessels. You can see, I suspect, that in these two processes (the interchangeability of parts and the assembly line) the US industrial proletariat was emerging. Together these processes became known as the “American System.”

The American System of Mass Production

Thomas Jefferson acting as Washington’s Ambassador to France in 1785 saw first hand how a French Gunsmith named Le Blanc had created a new system of manufacturing, featuring individual parts so accurately machined that they were de facto interchangeable. Before Le Blanc could convince the French Old Regime of the utility of the new system Jefferson had convinced his government of the importance of mass production by way of interchangeable parts and a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for $800,000.

Interchangeability was possible because machine tools had advanced by leaps and bounds, allowing the perfection of manufacture of each part down to tiny measurements (tolerances). Now pouring into the New Republic were advanced lathes and other iron and steel working machines that could do a variety of highly specialized tasks (shaping, slotting and planning, milling, gear-cutting, boring and grinding, screw cutting, and many many more) with equal perfection. – And, because the secret of training previously unskilled persons to be sufficiently skilled do just one specific job – along the entire spectrum of machining of parts, each could be made into a job – allowed rapid manufacture of each part of a weapon. After which, the parts so perfectly made could be fitted together by still other workers to form the finished product. In short, highly accurate tolerances in machining combined with dividing the totality of work involved into a multitude of easily learned tasks, was the basis for the “American System” of mass production.

However before all this potential could even begin to be realized, the infrastructure of roads and waterways would have to be developed – and, hand in hand, with the introduction of advanced technology, it was developed.

Waterways, Steamships and Unions

General Washington went right back to work after Yorktown. (Not that winning the war hadn’t been work!) One of the first things he and his Army did was to authorize the construction of new canals to link up raw material sources to manufacturing and consuming cities, towns and ports. (During the 1780’s the US was under a loose Articles of Confederation as far as the civilian “government” was concerned and de facto Washington was ruling through the Army.) In 1784 he gave the go ahead to multiple plans for linking the eastern seaboard with the nation’s interior, including the construction of a canal from the Potomac to the Ohio River; another canal connecting Lake Champlain and the Hudson River and two more in Pennsylvania. .

The following year, 1785, a project was launched to improve river transport from Richmond, Virginia, to Buchanan, and this new navigable riverway included the first “locks” in the USA, the entire project ready by 1789. Finally, Washington pioneered the Intracoastal Waterway system that would allow the Americans great security from hostile states and pirates. The first construction phase was completed by 1805. Many new river and canal improvements were under construction in the South to support the emerging industrialized (with slave labor) cotton industry of the interior, beginning in 1785 with the Columbia-Charleston canal so that by 1820 there were a dozen lateral canals connecting with it, delivering cotton to the South’s greatest port city.

New York’s Legislature in 1792 authorized the construction of a navigable river and canal system to link Lake Oneida and the Oneida River, and simultaneously authorized improving the Hudson to fully navigable standards all the way to Lake Oneida. New York’s progressivism came to a new climax in 1817 with the order to build the Erie Canal which became a great success, opening New England to the Mid-West of the continent.

The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers began to be linked from Pittsburgh as early as 1805. This would soon connect the northern US with New Orleans, opening up vast new swathes of territory to citizens of the emerging Great Republic.

In 1786 John Fitch began experimenting on American rivercraft with steam. This culminated in 1802 with William Symington’s paddle-wheel boat, driven by a steam engine mounted astern and traversing several canals. Robert Fulton mounted his steam engine driven paddle-wheels on the sides of his first ship on New York canals as early as 1807. By 1825 steam engine driven paddle-wheelers were running all over American rivers and canals.

In the second decade following the victory at Yorktown, US workers began to organize trade unions. Beginning in Philadelphia in 1792. Journeymen shoemakers there were a power to be reckoned with by 1794, and by 1805 the New York shoemakers were a force to be listened to in that State. Right away these workers and their unions tackled the first obstacle; that was the long tradition of laws making union organizing illegal, with increasing success.

The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1819 and 1829

There had been previous economic dislocations in the New Republic. The decision of Jefferson to forbid trade with either Napoleonic Continental Europe or the British Empire had caused one such downturn. However, capitalism’s General Crisis, as the sole precipitator of economic panic, depression and dislocation, featured its first true appearance in the USA in 1819 as tens of thousands of workers were sent to the street, unemployed, in New York, Philadelphia and other cities of New England and the mid-Atlantic coast. Small capitalists were swallowed by big capitalists.

Workers still with jobs had to work longer hours for less money under terrible conditions. The majority of these workers by far were women and children under 12 years of age.

Naturally, resistance spread, trade unions were formed and labor began to act on its own behalf as a class, for the first time. Nevertheless the general crisis of capitalism continued to throw up new mass waves of unemployment in the cities as occurred seven years later in 1829

Workers had other options than starvation. Some fled on the new canals to other locations seeking employment. Others opted for new lives as capitalist farmers in the mid-West and northern Mexico (what is now the western half of the USA). Still others found employment at next to slave-labor wages as laborers in the construction of canals and railroads.

The Railroads, Iron and Coal, Unions

Americans both benefited from, and immediately improved upon, the British advances in steam-driven rail-riding locomotives. The first completely-steam locomotive-traversed railway, was in operation by 1830: the South Carolina Railroad. Within three years it had 136 miles of track in operation. In 1831, the British built John Bull locomotive was sold to, and in operation by, the New Jersey Camden & Amboy Railroad. The first US built (bogie) locomotive went into operation the following year (1832) and shortly thereafter (by 1833) British capitalists began exporting the same type of locomotive to American buyers.

Politically, class-conscious workers often supported the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party of the progressive capitalists. This continued the long tradition of class collaboration which overall had had good results. But, at the same time their most sophisticated elements were beginning by 1827, and the establishment of the country’s first Central Labor Council in Philadelphia, to see that they had to establish themselves independently as a class and political force. The General Crisis of Capitalism, and its constant, never-ending, introduction of new and improved generations of machinery, was forcing this conclusion to the forefront.

The General Crisis: The Depression of 1837

There would be a series of “depressions” in the capitalist business cycle after the Depression of 1829-1831, and they became increasingly devastating with each successive “recovery” until in 1837 the industrial collapse confronted workers with the absolute necessity (just to survive) of building on their experience to form permanent unions; permanent central labor union councils and permanent political programs.

The fight had generated unions with a worker’s program featuring two essential demands: (1) a ten hour working day and (2) publicly paid universal education for children.

The capitalists on the other hand continued their massive expansion in production with their most recent next generation of machinery. For example, previously dependant on British capitalists for their iron rails, American capitalists began rolling their own, with their newest Next Generation of Machinery, in 1844, as the recovery from the last round of mass layoffs and swallowing of competitors (as a result of the 1837 depression) was completed.

Origin of the US Labor Aristocracy

We have seen the emergence of capitalist factories in North America featured heavy reliance on women and children less than 12 years of age as their workforce. This kind of exploitation does not lend itself to the steady employment of family supporting workers which are the kind of workers that one must have to form a union with members capable of paying union dues on a regular basis. This is the definition of labor aristocracy.

The invention of Morse code in 1844 opened an entire new profession for someone to enter, as the system of telegraphy quickly spread throughout the nation and shortly thereafter the emergence of the railroad telegraphers union. These workers along with the permanent staff needed to run the locomotives, and man the trains both freight and passenger, constitute the origin of the railroad brotherhoods (railroad unions). These workers were militant about getting paid for the work they did and their position in the railroad industry gave them a powerful position from which to strike or slow down or in some other way affect their bosses. These workers were able to raise families successfully on wages secured by their craft unions. Thus US Labor was divided early on between the most oppressed section (largely women and children) in factories and others in the industrial process who had “good” jobs, meaning they could live on their wages and do so successfully raising families over extended periods of time. On non-Trade Union issues however these workers tended to be conservative in social outlook and were suffering always from petty bourgeois illusions. Two castes within the US working class had arisen and this social structural fact would continue as the central reality of working class political organization in the future.

We will discuss the division of the US labor movement along these lines in the following chapters. The unionized railroad workers (Brotherhoods or Unions) would form the mass base for the organization of labor by the most conservative elements of the working class movement after the US Civil War. In the meantime you should see them as the embryonic form from which this caste (labor aristocracy) will emerge in the AFL as we shall discuss below.

Personal Experience with the Labor Aristocracy

These railroad brotherhood craft unions were the road out of wage slavery and into the petty bourgeoisie for millions of workers. In fact, my paternal grandfather’s road out of the world of poor white trash was as a member of the telegrapher’s union where he made enough money to put four children through college – all out of the work he did at a railroad stop-in-the-wall called Davey just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. This during the Great Depression in the 1930’s, yet he had a job thanks to his union in this toughest of all environments. Accordingly, all of his life he was the strongest union man and with his illusions of becoming bourgeois (always tracking how his stocks were doing) he was simultaneously an arch-type right wing Gompers sort of anti-communist.

This vignette says everything that needs to be said about understanding the split in organized labor here and everywhere in the capitalist world. Successful revolutionaries have to learn how to live with and utilize the reality of working class division in such a way, so as to accomplish our objectives.

The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1854 and 1857

During the 1850’s there was as much expansion of the railroad system as the finance capital capacity of the time would allow. In 1851 the telegraph was employed for signaling arrival and departure schedules to trains running on this system for the first time. By 1860 there were 30,000 miles of railroad in the USA.

To supply the iron needs of farmers and industry including the railroads American iron production had grown from 50,000 tons in 1810 to nearly one million tons in 1860. Correspondingly coal had replaced wood in iron manufacture and coal mining jumped from next to nothing in 1810 to over 14.3 million tons in 1860.

As always the surplus value to finance all of this expansion was sweated by the capitalists out of the largely child and teen-age women work force to which were being added an increasing number of men. The depression of 1854 discharged 200,000 workers onto the streets and in so doing smashed their union organizations for the most part. 1855 saw a revival of worker enthusiasm for unions as more and more returned to the factory (albeit factories with new owners). This time they built relief funds for future strike actions to protect themselves and their gains and when the depression of 1857 again wiped out many unions there were a striking number that survived precisely because they had amassed sufficient funds for strike relief (of themselves and brother workers in other cities and States.)

As importantly, workers managed to set things straight with regard to their ideas about living today and tomorrow. Meaning they got rid of the utopians and began to concentrate on hours, wages, working conditions, building strike relief funds, worker controlled apprentice programs, the right to organize unions (without being simultaneously prosecuted with felony conspiracy charges being launched against them,) laws against company-store exploitation, and for mechanics liens. – And, for the first time many attempts were made to form “national” unions.

The American Factory System Transforms the Country

Progressive British capitalists had come to accept the reality that American capitalism was here to stay, so that in 1810 they allowed Francis Lowell the honor and privilege of studying their system of cotton manufacture at first hand. Returning home, with some of their money, and more gathered here as investment capital, Lowell established the first true all-process inclusive US cotton factory in 1815. His factory produced cloth, spun from start on machine looms and then woven into the final product. These products were being offered as commodities the following year. Machinofactured woolens were not far behind. By 1860 there was hardly a shoe or finished clothing product that wasn’t being manufactured, in whole or in part, in these factories. Young women workers supplied two thirds of the labor and surplus value was sweated out of them from 12 to 16 hours a day six days a week. Primitive capital accumulation was in full swing.

From 1840 to 1860 American manufacture had jumped from half a billion dollars to two nearly two billion, and workers employed increased about 70%. Factory cotton spindles jumped from 1.3 to 5.2 million. In 1860 woolen products jumped per annum to 70 million dollars compared to 21 million in 1840. Farm tools and machinery doubled in the same period from $10 to $20 million.

The American population tripled in size from 10 to 31 million people between 1820 and 1860 (two generations.) Only 5% of this 1860 population were factory workers but, after farmers, they had become the most important productive class. Most of them lived in cities over 100,000 in size (whose populations now made up about 8.5% of the country.)

US Labor on the Eve of the Civil War

From 1827 forward American workers had fought for political rights, the ten hour day, public universal education and the right to organize unions, and they had struck employers time and time again, virtually everywhere, in pursuit of these goals. They had to overcome a series of ideological barriers as well. For example, they had confronted (1) the utopian socialists, and reformers of the Owens, Fourier, and Evans type; (2) the tendency to always tail-end the progressive capitalists of the Jefferson and then Jackson variety; and of course (3) the racist ideologists of slavery (and anti-immigrant yellow journalism  a la Lou Dobbs, in the Free States.) Also, (4) the North American bosses were cleverer than their European counterparts and engaged in wholesale propaganda about the joys of the 14 to 16 hour work day. An example, would be the Lowell factory owners who produced, with literary contributions from working young women, their own nonsensical journal (political nonsense; the girls contributions were actually quite good.) The young Lowell women quickly organized their own counter publication.

Nevertheless, workers were finding their way forward as an independent class with its own inherent interests, and from time to time they formed their own Labor Parties (the first formed in Philadelphia in 1829, the second in New York, later that same year – The New York Working Men’s Party), fought for and secured universal public education, and institutionalized mechanics liens to insure payment for work provided. 

The Utopian Socialists Retard American Labor

Several different schools of thought arose among bourgeois intellectuals in Europe and North America after the French Revolution of 1789 and the attempted feudalist restoration in Europe of 1815. In the USA, these persons known as “utopians” for their belief that they could create a new perfect society to replace capitalism simply by winning over workers to one or another of their pie-in-the-sky plans and winning over progressive capitalists to go along, had in real world effect, the tendency to retard North American workers in their need to accomplish immediate needs. Such needs as unity, higher wages, standardized wages, better living conditions, public education, and a myriad of other immediate needs and concerns. In fact, it is this tendency to confuse ultimate goals with immediate concerns which continued to plague the world-wide working class movement for many decades. – And, for that matter continued to plague international communism in the 20th and even now in the 21st century. It is the Achilles heel of the ultra-left. The ultra-left, in other words, is not communist, despite pretensions of some of them to the contrary – but a kind of bourgeois infantile disorder (as Lenin later called it and them.)

Bourgeois elements were not anxious to participate in the strikes and other militant worker actions needed to accomplish these immediate goals. At the same time they were correct in asserting that within the framework of the capitalist system the workers would always be wage-slaves and subjected to the “shit end of the stick.” For that reason workers sometimes were confused – but not for long. It didn’t take long for them to realize that the core of the utopian reform movements always consisted in the self-delusion that capitalists could be called upon to help the workers. That the State or Federal governments could be made to serve labor as well as the big bourgeoisie and slavocrats who owned these governments.

The real world was where workers had to live at the moment. The struggle for decent hours, wages and working conditions had to be successful NOW. Furthermore, the total reorganization of society along non-capitalist lines was something that could not happen in the near future anyway. – And, would never happen without first disarming and removing the bourgeoisie from state and political power.

It took awhile to get rid of these utopian socialists and replace them with leaders who understood the need to accomplish immediate goals on the part of workers while simultaneously laying plans for reorganizing society down the road as the opportunity to do so became apparent. Most importantly, to figure out what this new society should actually look like. Marx and Engels discovered the laws of history, as society evolving from one sociocultural stage to the next, and thus, what the new society should look like based on these scientific deductions. Namely, those workers would have to seize state power and use it to reorganize society putting the marvels of science and technology at the service of humanity rather than the exploiters.

The struggle against Utopianism reached its conclusion when both the right wing socialists such as Samuel Gompers and the Left Wing socialists such as the newly arriving communists agreed that any belief that capitalist governments could be used by workers was an illusion no matter how put. Instead workers should fight for their rights to being paid properly directly with the capitalists involved. Along the way they could reward or punish capitalist politicians said the rightists and the leftists hoped that a new world would be created somehow by workers taking matters into their own hands. A shaky kind of unity because the theoretical foundation was shaky, and required surgically precise logic in order to keep both the Left and Right together. But, in the end utopianism was buried.

Marxism Arrives

As we have seen developments in Europe immediately affected North America and vice versa. Thus, the defeat of the European working class revolutionary activity of 1848-1850 resulted in the quick arrival of thousands of politically sophisticated workers who knew Karl Marx and Frederick Engels personally as well as having become familiar with their work. The Communist Manifesto that appeared at the very beginning of these revolts in Europe (January, 1848) was not the only example of such work. In fact, Marx and Engels had been circulating their initial “Critique” of capitalist production and their outline of Historical Materialism for some six years prior to the January Revolution of 1848. During the two years of revolution (1848-1850) Marx and Engels came to know most of the revolutionary leaders first hand.

Among their followers who fled to America was Joseph Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer escaped persecution in Germany and upon arrival in the New World (1851) when he was only 33 years old, he quickly proved to be the first competent Marxist theoretician in the Great Republic. Writing in a German-American publication he created in January of 1852, Die Revolution, he listed Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, along with himself and several others as the editors. In fact, he along with Marx and Engels had already been collaborating as editors in a revolutionary journal in Europe at that time. Thus within four years of the appearance of The Communist Manifesto in London, Marxism had officially arrived in New York; as had Marx and Engels (via surrogates.). (As a matter of interest, following Marx’s 1883 death, Engels would visit the US while completing his study of Lewis Henry Morgan’s research, however, Morgan died only days before Engels could get to him.)

In 1857, five years later, and just four years before the Great War between the Free and Slave States, several men formed the Communist Club in New York City. They also were followers of Karl Marx whom they knew well because of his work during the European Revolutions of 1848-1850, and his subsequent publications (e.g., the 1848 Communist Manifesto) including his contributions as the London correspondent of the New York Herald. Wedemeyer was a key participant.

Wedemeyer took the point in defeating the utopians and their various crack-pot plans, in demonstrating the need for combining temporary economic and political struggles for less than final objectives. By 1860 the utopians were pretty well finished off and Marxism had become the predominate ideological formation among North American working class intellectuals.

Also, by 1860, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, workers and their organizations had earned a leading place in American life. They would play a decisive role in Lincoln’s war victory over the Slavocrats. Chief among them would be the American followers of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association.

Dawn of Massive Capital Accumulation

Primitive capital accumulation had come to an end, and in its stead came a new massive capital accumulation process of a never before seen kind. The kind that created the greatest industrial plant in the world by 1865, to support the largest machinery supported army the world had ever known.

Fighting tooth and nail every step of the way for minimal rights to decent working hours, wages, and conditions, organized labor had played a critically important role in getting Capital to this stage in its development. By 1860 the average working day in the US Free States had been reduced from 13 to 11 1/2 hours and in the strongest working class States (e.g., Massachusetts and New York) the 10 hour day for mechanics and artisans had become the norm, and 11 ½ for factory workers. This, of course, meant, as you have seen, that the Next Generation of capitalist Machinery had to take up the “slack” (i.e., the difference from what had gone before and the new lower hours of labor-power input).

- And, what would have been the norm (sending more workers to the street) was offset by the onset of war and the massive demand of the Federal US government and the State governments for War Materiel (munitions, clothing, boots and shoes, weaponry, food.) As workers disappeared into the Federal Army (over half of it would be composed of working men and the other half by capitalist farmers at War’s end in1865) more machinery was introduced and more unskilled feminine and child labor absorbed into the factories.

Full employment and the constant escalating demand for new and better next generations of capitalist industrial machinery were the dual foundation for Massive Capital Accumulation of an entirely new sort.