American History 101

I was born in the US, and have lived here a great majority of my life.  I was raised with the same stories most Americans are raised hearing; the old familiar tales of how the “greatest country on earth” came to be. I was taught to be patriotic, to be loyal. I was taught to love the flag and the Star Spangled Banner, and Davey Crocket and Abraham Lincoln. We threw off the weight of the tyranny of King George III and fashioned an incredible and majestic nation the likes of which the world has never known.

This would be great and all, if it wasn’t precipitated on a complete, boldfaced lie.

History, as We’d Like to Believe it

You see, pretty much everything we’re taught about American history is false. Complete and utter hogwash. Squanto helped the Pilgrims, it’s true. It’s also true that he did so because he came back to where his village was, and everyone he knew was dead and gone. In their place, in his village were the invaders.  He still helped them out. Just before the famous settlements at Jamestown and others, a plague brought by the Europeans wiped out most of the population of Natives all along the coast. What had been a thickly populated area of Natives, with a society and people no more primitive than the Europeans who came, was reduced to a shadow of its former self in record time thanks to the greatest genocide ever known to humankind.

Christopher Columbus raped, pillaged, and end enslaved the natives he met. From the very beginning this country was not founded on an idea of  freedom, but one of racism, slavery and theft. Within a few years of the settling of what is now the US, slaves from the West coast of Africa would arrive, beginning the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  It would not end for hundreds of years.

Slaves, packed into the bottom of the ships, dying as they lay chained in their own filth, not even able to move. The stifling hot cabin making them pass out. Millions died in the infamous “Middle Passage.” If they tried to refuse the gruel they were given to keep them alive, preferring death over their horrible conditions, the slave traders would force them to eat with this:

It’s called a Speculum Oris, or “mouth opener”. It was forced violently into the slave’s mouth to pry his mouth open; which would then give the opportunity for the slave trader to pour the gruel down the slave’s throat. It only cost the slave a few teeth to do this, to deny him the right to die.

These slaves built the material wealth of the US. The founders of the US owned slaves whose ancestors had been brought over from Africa, from their homes and their villages and their families. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —” himself owned hundreds of slaves. Obviously he either didn’t consider slaves people, or he didn’t believe the words he wrote.

That’s not all. Immigrant workers, sharecroppers, oppressed and poor people of all nationalities built the country. All while the high minded plutocrats convinced the poor men and boys to die for their country. From the Trail of Tears, to the Transcontinental railroad,  America has been built on the backs of the oppressed, while those in power reap all the rewards.

Why Historical Revisionism?

The question is then, why this cult of America? Why do we speak of “Un-Americanism” as if there was some high cosmic ideal that we all were assigned to live under at our birth? Why are we shackled to the unending propaganda that somehow, the US is better, more moral, more just than any other country, when by any stretch of the imagination it’s not?

To keep you enslaved. You are enslaved. You most likely don’t own your own business. Even if you do, the bank probably owns it on paper. You work your whole life to make a living. Most people don’t think that they’ll ever get filthy rich, but they’d like a nice lifestyle. They want a decent place to live, enough food to eat, entertainment. They want to send their children to school, to college. They want to pursue their dreams. Most can’t. Most are left living vicariously through TV; seeing their favorite celebrity wear the clothes they’ll never see, let alone buy. Their idols making more money than 100 lifetimes of normal work. They go to work every day, putting in time, selling the only commodity they have. Their life.

They have the freedom to choose what job to have! You may say. They don’t have much choice though, nor can they choose how much they’re going to make. To even own a home, they must put themselves in 30 years of debt. A car for transportation is also expensive, even if you’re buying used. Food prices through the roof. After all they pay for, maybe there’s some left over for  a small amount of entertainment in your small amount of free time.

Day after day after day. Eat work sleep eat work sleep. You buy and you buy but you can’t fill the empty void inside you. You’re not living. You’re going through the motions of a robot. You’re nothing more than a commodity who makes the rich richer.

Then, the 4th of July comes. Red, white and blue are everywhere. Bunting hung on porches, flags flown from the eaves, the smell of gunpowder fills the air as we blow things up in celebration of our great country. We celebrate all the good that America is. The next day you go back to your soul crushing job. You make money for the rich capitalists, and barely make it through. Forget saving enough for your kids to get a good education, they’ll have to accumulate years worth of debt to achieve anything. Maybe they can join the military, they’ll be lauded as heroes as they try not to die for imperialist causes. Maybe if they make it out alive, they can go to college, still barely making it, to get a soul crushing job that won’t even pay for their kid’s education. Rinse, repeat, cash your little check.

Never though, do we teach our kids the truth of the horrible genocidal history of their country. We wouldn’t want them to question the country they were born into. We wouldn’t want them to think critically about their country. We wouldn’t want to progress beyond the politics of the 18th century. No, we stubbornly assert that we are the best in the world. Our cities crumble. We have trains systems from 50 plus years ago as the rest of the world moves forward. We talk about freedom while millions of our citizens are incarcerated in the horrible hell hole called the US prison system. The prison building companies get rich, the war profiteers get rich, the Wall St. gamblers get rich. The working mother struggling to feed her family falls into depression. The country moves on, continuing the centuries of exploitation and wage slavery. Those who work the hardest can barely survive, while the rich live off their trust funds. They go to Harvard and Yale, where they get set up for a life of luxury. Don’t worry, you can make it too. Just think of people like Bill Gates, he was a college dropout. OK, so his father is a rich attorney who sent him to the most prestigious school in the Seattle area, then to Harvard. Don’t worry about the fact that he had his daddy’s money to live on while he was busy stealing other’s ideas to make Microsoft. I’m sure if you “work hard enough” you can make it too.

The Way Out of Poverty

So why are so many Americans enslaved? Unable to break through the bullshit story of our past? Unable to see through the decades of propaganda? We are shackled to our propaganda, unable to think, unable to move. We believe vehemently that we are merely a step away from financial freedom. As our homes are taken, as we fail to pay our bills and they pile up, we keep telling ourselves that one day, we’ll catch a break, that all will be OK. To paraphrase the great John Steinbeck, we are convinced that we are temporarily displaced millionaires, not the oppressed proletariat. They have a hold on our minds, our labor and our very being. We are naught but cogs in the wheels of their machinery, making the money flow on the oil of the worker’s blood, sweat and tears.

It needn’t be this way. We shouldn’t have to live in a bleak world, looking to the future, not with hope, but with dread. We should be the masters of our ship, the guardians of our souls. We should realize that the very bounty of the earth is ours for the plucking. That we can live in harmony and peace. It will not be easy. It will not come through pleading and praying and begging. It will come by asserting the rights of all humanity. The right to food, the right to clothing, the right to an education and to health care. We deny the right of capitalists to hoard unlimited amounts of wealth to the detriment of the rest of society. We reject the capitalist idea of property rights, that one person or company can monopolize a portion of the means of production necessary for everyone’s livelihood.  We assert that we can build a better world through the unity, strength and work of the proletariat. We assert that all humanity is one brotherhood. We the proletariat, have no country. We are internationalists, who want the best for everyone, not just a few.

The only way forward is educating the working class. Tell them of the real history of the US. Tell them of the real nature of the material conditions. Talk to them about their problems. Help each other as much as you can. The only way that the world is going to change, is through a revolution of the mind, first and foremost. The material conditions for revolution are already here, we just need to show them to the world. The only way things are going to change, is by the forcible overthrow of all social conditions, and the end of the United States of America as we know it. Be brave. Be happy. A better future awaits.
“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Harriet Tubman

 

Socialism and the State: Part One

There is a long running debate on the left on the nature of the state, what it is, and how we should view it. All the way from Marx and Bakunin, to today, there are many debates on this topic. First things first, we should look at what the state is.

We need to look at the historical development of the state, and the nature of its existence. The capitalist state developed from the old feudal order.  During the enlightenment era, revolutions changed the way people thought about the state, and about the individual. What many today may be unaware of, is the fact that the modern state is a relatively new construct. Before the enlightenment, people didn’t think of themselves as citizens of states, but as subjects under kings, as lords with land, or as serfs under lords, etc. They identified with their local area, and had no real notion of the nation state as a distinct and sovereign entity. With the rise of such volumes as Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man among other writings and movements, came a movement that would throw off the old feudal order, and bring in the age of capitalism. The age of capitalism was brought in by the rise also of the bourgeoisie. The middle class, the merchants and the blacksmiths and small business people helped to drive the means of production out of the hands of the aristocracy, the kings, and the blue bloods, and into their own hands. This was a progressive movement compared to the feudal system. It was necessary that the means of production evolve beyond the primitive and oppressive system of feudalism.

The capitalist state was a result of the economic and political evolution of the means of production. Don’t be fooled though. While things had improved, they still had a long way to go. Capitalism would not stay the simple system it started out as for long. As the bourgeoisie gained more wealth and power, it began to concentrate in fewer hands. The vestiges of feudalism also still existed. As the industrial revolution began, those without land, or without the means of production, were left with no choice but to sell their labor to the capitalist class. The capitalist class kept expanding on this oppression of the proletariat, and class antagonisms grew as well. The modern state is a result of the antagonisms of the bourgeoisie against the working classes. It represents their interests, their goals and their government. It is designed to keep the masses in check, to make sure they stay in place, and perpetuate the capitalist system. In short, it is a by product of capitalism. Lenin wrote an extensive work on the subject of the state. In his brilliant The State and Revolution he lays out the ideas on the state, and the nature off its existence. In the first part of this famous work, Lenin talks about why the state is the result of class antagonisms. He lays out his theory on the state, and based his analysis on Engels’s work   The Origin of the Family, Property and the State.   He begins by quoting Engels.

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the ethical idea’, ‘the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)

The capitalist state is the result of irreconcilable class antagonisms, just as both Lenin and Engels realized.   The current capitalist state does not represent us, the workers. It doesn’t represent our interests. It enslaves, it empower the capitalists. It is the forceful hand of the capitalist class, oppressing.

We know this. Both Engels and Lenin recognized these facts. The next question is how are we to use this information? What does this mean to the worker? And how will the state be abolished? Those questions I’m afraid will come in Part 2 of this series. Until then, keep in the class struggle. Fight for the emancipation of all peoples.