CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

America at 250: From a Contested Past to a Fascist Future?

Locke, Jefferson and Trump. Collage: Jeffrey St. Clair.

When 56 representatives from the 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776, it was over nearly 300 years since America’s first contact with Europe took place, in 1492. Some 2.6 million impoverished European peasants had descended on the “New World” like locusts, escaping from Europe’s feudal regimes or the agrarian capitalism that was dispossessing them of land in England.

In the first 200 of those years, much of the action, or devastation, had taken place in Meso- America and the Southern Hemisphere, as the Spaniards destroyed the centralized Aztec and Incan empires and smaller indigenous groups and subjugated their populations to serve as slave labor or other forms of repressed labor, a process that, along with the diseases the European brought with them, decimated the Native American population by the millions.

The Founding as Cataclysm

The much less centralized indigenous peoples of North America had proved to be more resilient in dealing with the land hungry Europeans. In addition to fierce resistance, they learned to use the colonial regime against the settlers, with some success. The Proclamation of 1763 negotiated between Native American confederacies and the British Crown, for instance, banned white settlers from moving into land west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The successful American Revolution was, thus, a tragedy for Native Americans, since one of their key allies in checking the settlers’ advance on their lands was eliminated, and with this went all the treaties they had negotiated with the British Crown. The genocidal consequences of the Declaration of Independence were underlined early on, when, on the pretext they were British allies, General George Washington ordered the total destruction of Iroquois settlements in what is now central New York state, a deed that earned the future president the sobriquet “Town Destroyer” from the indigenous population.

The founding of the United States also had catastrophic consequences for black people, who had been arriving as slaves in the English colonies since the early seventeenth century. It had been in Latin America and the Caribbean that the slave-based plantation economy first took hold in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with millions of blacks kidnapped in Africa and put to work on the other side of the Atlantic, most of them in the backbreaking and hazardous task of planting and harvesting sugar.

But the founding and first seven decades of the Republic saw the full flowering of the American South’s plantation economy, one that was ruthlessly efficient in exploiting black labor. Integrated into the global capitalist economy with its production of cotton, the South was far wealthier than the North, and the prosperity made possible by slave labor was accompanied by the Southern planter aristocracy’s control of the presidency, two houses of Congress, and the judiciary of the infant republic.

Genocide of Native Americans and the intensification of the exploitation of black slave labor went hand in hand in the South. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act saw five indigenous nations—the Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokees, Chickasaw, and Muscogee—forced out of their ancestral lands in the southeast between 1830 and 1850 to make way for cotton plantations.

Locke’s Twisted Legacy

Ideas, according to Marxists, have a dialectical relationship with material interests.  On the one hand, they reflect interests. On the other, they relatively autonomously shape the pursuit of those interests. As I wrote in an earlier essay, the dynamic interaction of revolution, expansion, genocide, and racism in the American enterprise cannot be understood without considering the massive influence exerted by the ideas of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. The thinker most associated with the American revolution, the founding of the U.S. state, and the U.S. Constitution, Locke is mainly remembered for his justification of the right to rebel if the sovereign or government violated the terms of its “social contract” with the people.

But equally influential on the settlers of America was Locke’s related theory of the origins of private property. Locke said that what transformed a person’s relationship to land from non-ownership to ownership was his mixing his labor with it. This is the foundational social relation, one that was forged in the “state of nature” before the creation of political society via the famous “social contract.” Indeed, the defense of this primordial relationship is the centerpiece of the contract between the sovereign and society.

Locke’s account of the origins of private property captured the psychology of the white settler. Escaping from the rigid agrarian class structures of Europe, the settler wanted, like a small peasant, to carve out and secure some land in what was regarded as “virgin territory.” As the famous scholar of liberalism, Louis Hartz, noted, the settler had a petty bourgeois mentality, one that was anxious to make ownership of land secure rather than to accumulate it. “Living in the world’s........

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