In an amazing show of ignorance, Republican Congresswoman and Tea Party Express' spokesperson Michele Bachmann stated that the founding fathers of the United States abolished slavery in her response to President Obama's State of the Union address.
To their credit, the founding members of the U.S. successfully emancipated millions of people from kings' monarchist rule. However, millions more still toiled in servitude. African Americans were considered only 3/5ths of human beings by the slave-holding rulers of the young nation. Further, women were still treated as the property of their husbands at the time, and many states did not even allow white men to vote unless they owned a certain amount of property.
This is why Karl Marx referred to many of the revolutions against monarchist governments, represented by the feudal economic system, as bourgeois revolutions. The bourgeoisie, or capitalists, seized power and established governments which primarily represented their interests.
The inability of the Tea Party and Republicans to correctly identify the problems with the U.S. Constitution as it was written nearly 250 years ago only displays their ignorance and further emphasizes which class it is that they represent today.
History is not something separate from the present, and those whose minds are not clouded by fanciful ideologies believing the individual exists separate from their society's history realize the past is linked to the make up of our present society.
Slavery continues to haunt African Americans. In the book The Hidden Cost of Being African American, author Thomas Shapiro not only illustrates that African American families have 1/10th the wealth of their white counterparts, but that the biggest contributing factor to this wealth difference is the African American families' lack of inherited wealth.
Similar wealth discrepancy is also observed between the sexes, and it is very likely that many in the white working class can trace their roots back to Europeans who came to the U.S. as propertyless indentured servants.
Wealth is one way to observe oppressions under capitalism, and it is the most widely observed measure of class oppression. But there is a distinct difference between how class is commonly discussed and how Marxism defines class.
Marxism emphasizes control as the determining factor of class. It recognizes people as being in either the proletariat, the class that works for others, or as being in the bourgeoisie, the class which owns the workplaces and commands the workers.
This recognition of class as not defined by wealth, but control, gives us an important method we can use when observing our nation's history, opens our eyes to many sobering aspects of the present day, and charges us with an important mission.
In Wage, Price and Profit Marx explained that, in the feudal economy that existed before capitalism, serfs would work a few days of the week using the land or tools provided to them by their lords to raise crops or make things that they needed to survive. In exchange for the use of the lord's property the serfs would then do unpaid work for him.
Once bourgeois revolutions like the American Revolution occurred, feudalism's serfdom was abolished and replaced by capitalism's wage labor. Theoretically, human beings were considered to be the owners of their labor, and could sell it to others who would hire them.
Unfortunately, not all people were considered human when the American Revolution occurred.
In the U.S. there were no lords, and so there were no serfs. Before the revolution, what was established in serfdom's place was slavery.
W.E.B. Du Bois documented the horrors of slavery and noted its relation to the class system which surrounded it in his work Black Reconstruction in America.
Slavery was similar to serfdom, in that the slaves belonged to other people and performed unpaid labor, but it became something far more terrible. In order to justify slavery in the emergent capitalist system, it was necessary to find a legal loophole to prevent African slaves from gaining the right to sell their labor like free men of European ancestry – so slaves were not considered people. What occurred in this time period was nothing short of genocide.
With great strife, the U.S. eventually recognized the humanity of those held as slaves and they too gained the ability to sell their labor. Even then, it took the U.S. nearly 100 years more to formally recognize African Americans as equal to white Americans.
In the present day, it is incredibly important to recognize this history. It is important not only because it is connected to the continued existence of social and institutional racism, but because it reminds us of the nature of class even now.
If wealth is regarded as simply an aspect of class, and class is instead determined by the control a person has over labor, capitalism both hinders movements for equality in general and is also incapable of solving the issue of class oppression.
Marx's Wage, Price and Profit not only condemns the use of unpaid labor, but it goes on to explain that capitalism's wage labor system continues to exploit workers by giving them no say in how the profit they generate through their work is used. This profit, of course, is owned and controlled by the capitalist.
Further, the nature of work is also determined by the capitalist, who has the final say in how things are done and who gives out orders with little regard for the personal issues of each worker.
As capitalism is defined by private ownership, it requires the majority of people to work in workplaces not owned by them but by someone else. With no workers, nothing would be produced. Capitalism necessarily places a majority of people at the command of others at any given time.
For true emancipation to occur, Marx realized that the workers had to be in control of the places where they worked. This is socialism, and this is what all people who advocate democracy ought to support.
In the Marxist view of history, class is something that has existed since the division of labor became necessary for increasing production at the beginning of human agricultural activity. It has existed and oppressed people to varying degrees, from the most terrible form of slavery to the very personal form found in modern capitalism. Throughout all these forms, the constant truth about class is that all those in the lower classes have had to follow the orders of those above.
In the present day, the best method to increase worker's self determination is in the labor movement. Union men and women represent workers in their establishment of contracts. This struggle is one that rises naturally from the desire of workers to be self-determining, and the labor contract represents democracy in the workplace. Marxists are so involved in labor struggles because they are democratic struggles.
If we are truly interested in worker's rights to self-determination and workplace democracy we have an important future goal.
In addition to our work against racism, sexism, and heteronormativity, all affronts to self-determination and democracy, we must fight for a democratic economy. Under capitalism, all oppressed people are in constant struggle with the tyranny of the straight white male capitalists.
In order to preserve our values, capitalism must be replaced. When straight white male capitalists are allowed to make most economic decisions, including the promotion of those they believe to be the most fit, the self-determination of all oppressed groups suffers. Our values are manipulated, our political concerns are undermined, and we are in constant struggle.
It is time to find ways to replace this system. We must begin drawing up practical plans for the nationalization of key industries and build systems that would come to allow labor unions to directly run businesses in a democratic method.
Until economic democracy is established and socialism comes into being, we all remain in servitude.
Photos: Workers protest Wall Street greed and demand a bailout for Main Street. (courtesy AFL-CIO, Flickr, cc by 2.0)
