A few words about Parker McQueeney’s letter in response to my article, “America as Conservative Democracy”:
I agree with McQueeney that Marxist historiography in the United States has been amazingly weak and pallid compared to France or the UK. There are a number of reasons why. McCarthyism and the virtual eradication of the communist ideology is one obvious factor. The veil of mysticism surrounding the Constitution, which serves to place off limits questions having to do with structure and political development, is another.
But a third has to do with the revolution itself. The events of 1775-83 are, in a word, confusing. The war for independence was undeniably fierce, claiming the life of perhaps one American in 35. It represented a fundamental break in the power structure in that it transferred authority from Westminster to what would soon be Washington, which is the textbook definition of revolution. But socially and economically, it was remarkably static. While changes would wash over the new republic in subsequent decades, remarkably little occurred during the revolution itself. Robert R. Palmer’s assessment remains valid:
The Anglican Church was disestablished, but it had had few roots in the colonies anyway. In New England the sects obtained a little more recognition, but [Puritan] Congregationalism remained favored by law. The American revolutionaries made no change in the laws of indentured servitude. They deplored, but avoided, the matter of Negro slavery.
The fact that the sans-culottes of Boston quickly deferred to George Washington, the richest man in the colonies, as their leader speaks volumes about the political nature of the struggle. So does the choice of another wealthy Virginian – Jefferson – to write the Declaration of Independence and a third Virginia slaveholder – Madison – to oversee the process of drawing up a constitution. In a country in which property ownership was widespread and most people believed they could get ahead if they worked hard enough, wealth was simply not controversial the way it was on the other side of the Atlantic. Americans admired wealth rather than questioning it.
So class struggle was under-developed while conservatism reigned. If 1776 seems to be revolutionary in some respects, it is the opposite in others. So what are we to make of all this?
Unfortunately, McQueeney’s effort to sort it all out is confused as well. Misstatements and misconceptions abound. He seems to think that extolling the French Revolution as the first truly modern revolution means “writing off the history of the rising capitalist class prior to 1789 … and thus obscur[ing] the macro-historical and international process of class struggle culminating in the social revolution of 1789 that indicated the capitalist class, as a ruling class, was here to stay.” He says that “the ousting of the British Empire from the 13 colonies” was revolutionary because it resulted “in a change of social relations by initiating the abolition of slavery in the North and setting the stage for the final confrontation between the Planter slaveocracy and capitalists in the Second Revolution of the 1860s and 70s.”
But no one is saying that capitalism arose ex nihilo in 1789. To the contrary, the development of an independent bourgeoisie goes all the way back to the high Middle Ages in northern Italy and the Netherlands. McQueeney is correct when he says that the American Revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery in the north, thereby setting the stage for the great showdown of 1861-65. But the initial result of the revolution was to strengthen slavery by surrounding it with so many constitutional protections as to render it legally impregnable and then allowing it to expand to the Mississippi and beyond. By the 1840s, the northern bourgeoisie was engaged in a deadly struggle with a southern plantocracy that was tightening its grip over the country as a whole. Rather than finishing the revolution, Radical Republicans had to undo the revolutionary settlement of the 1780s before heading off in a new direction.
McQueeney says of slavery and the destruction of Native Americans that, “[f]or the left, this is an attractive basis for rejecting the entire affair as a bourgeois revolution altogether (though Lazare’s argument that the second revolution was not a bourgeois revolution either seems new).” I’m not sure what this convoluted sentence means, but it seems to suggest that leftists see bourgeois revolutions are intrinsically phony, conservative and, well, bourgeois and that I see the US Civil War as belonging in the same category. But that’s not how Marxism views bourgeois revolution at all. To the contrary, it sees events like the English Revolution as not only fierce and radical, but progressive in that they helped society advance to a new level of development. The same goes for the US Civil War, which saw the expropriation of an entire class and helped America advance to a new level of development as well by replacing the old agrarian with a new one based on industrial capitalism.
So let’s recap. British colonization allowed some of the most advanced political and economic elements of the 17th century to put down roots in virgin territory and establish a proto-capitalist economy in a way that was seemingly natural and organic from the start. When the emerging bourgeoisie found itself hemmed in by British imperialism from 1763 on, it responded by casting off British control only to find itself groaning under a yoke imposed by the southern plantocracy. Is a revolution that substitutes replaces one yoke with another that is even worse a revolution at all? Or is it some half-formed quasi-revolution in between?
I think the latter is the only formula that makes sense. The so-called American Revolution was “conservative-democratic” in that it eliminated slavery in one part of the country while reinforcing it in another. It advanced a straightforward concept of popular sovereignty in which “we the people” demolish old constitutions and establish new ones in its place, only to impose a constitutional dictatorship that hems in popular sovereignty at every turn. Rather than the French events of 1789 and on, the American Revolution was thus much closer in spirit to pre-modern, and indeed anti-modern, revolutions that erupted in Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and France itself during the preceding decades. These revolutions were “conservative-democratic” in that they sought to turn the clock back to a golden age of freedom in the past rather than advancing to something bold, radical, and new. They were devoted to a fundamentally nostalgic program that Americans sought to institute as well. But, then, history is filled with patches like these in which people must take a step back before advancing two steps into the future.
Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution is nonpareil when it comes to the paradoxes of American political development. I relied on it heavily for The Frozen Republic and was struck by its intellectual sweep and richness when I recently read it again. It really belongs on every Marxist’s bookshelf.
Daniel Lazare
Apr. 29, 2023
