Towards the Third American Revolution

The guiding star of political action, from the Old Mole’s point of view, is the democratic control and ownership of the wealth and resources required to produce our lives – everything that falls under the heading of capital. Pretty much all of this capital is now, directly or indirectly, under the control of the wealthiest tenth of the top one percent of the population, or, in the US, about 320,000 people. It is their interests in maintaining and expanding their power that dictates what the rest of us have to do, how we have to work, in order to live. Genuinely radical political action always aims at chipping away at, and eventually abolishing, the power of the capitalist class and the basis of that power, the private ownership of capital. The goal is a world in which we all together decide how we shall live.

This is what revolution is: fundamental change in the relations of property, and therefore

of the conditions of labor. To appreciate what it takes to make such a revolution, it is worth looking back at what has been called The Second American Revolution: the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. With the end of the War and the passage of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, the right to own human beings as property was abolished. The result was that what had been property, almost 4 million enslaved people valued at over three billion dollars, or 18% of the total of all US wealth, suddenly ceased to be property and all that wealth vanished from the economy. This was a revolution more radical than the first one of 1776 because it worked a fundamental change in property relations. 

Let’s look at the debate over slavery and the principle of private property in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The 5^th Amendment to the Constitution declares that no one can be deprived of their property without due process of law. Did that mean that the nation could not deprive enslavers of their property in human beings? Did it mean government could not prohibit moving slaves into new territories? The main issue in the 1830s and 40s was whether the government had the right to stop the expansion of slavery into new territories by admitting new states to the union as “free states.” Those who profited from slavery, not only those who owned and drove enslaved people in the South, but the many Northern investors in slaves and cotton, knew that slavery could only thrive if it kept expanding to keep up with the world market in cotton. Abolitionists and others who opposed slavery also understood this, and hoped to end it by confining it to where it already existed, and by repealing the laws that required Northern officials to return escaped slaves to their enslavers.

In 1836, abolitionists were calling for Congress to use its power over federal territory to end the slave trade and even to ban slavery itself in the District of Columbia. Here is how the South responded, as described by historian Edward Baptist in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism:

[South Carolina] Senator [John C.] Calhoun responded to these [anti-slavery] demands with a speech that outlined a foundational idea. He told the Senate that… the 5^th Amendment limited federal power over individuals’ property by decreeing that no one could be “deprived of his property without due process of law.” Calhoun now proceeded to build a sweeping principle on the back of this sentence. “Due process,” he insisted, could mean only “trial by jury” of a specific criminal. [What the abolitionists proposed] was the opposite of due process: legislative fiat that erased the property claims of a whole class of people. And, [said Calhoun] were not the slaves of this District property,” and were not their enslavers a whole class of property-owners? Presumably Congress could not prevent people from buying or selling said property, either, since salability is usually one of property’s characteristics.

Baptist goes on,

Calhoun was stating an idea that would eventually be known as the doctrine of substantive due process. The “due process” requirements to which the Constitution referred could not be fulfilled simply by passing a law, for a law that invaded the rights of property-owners ran up against something too fundamental for procedure to alter. In Calhoun’s vision, the Fifth Amendment was a geological outcropping that confirmed that beneath the Constitution lay an underlying substantive, tectonic plate of natural law that allowed owners to hold and use property.…

In 1847, Calhoun went on to argue that the 5^th Amendment denied Congress any right to require that new states … outlaw slavery, claiming, quote:

Resolved. That the enactment of any law which should directly, or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the states of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States [would unjustly discriminate between citizens of slave states and citizens of free states] and would therefore be a violation of the Constitution.” … He implied that the federal government should pass laws to enact the institution of slavery on federal territory, for to do otherwise would be to deprive individual slave owners , and indeed all southern whites – who were, after all, potential property owners, of their rights. (end quote)

It took a Civil War and a constitutional Amendment to remove human beings from the category of private property, and free them from the direct ownership of Capital. But capital still owns and controls the wealth enslaved people created, and it continues to expropriate the wealth that so-called free labor creates today and to dictate the conditions of labor and life.

To protect the rights of capital, the principle of substantive due process protecting private property that was laid down by Calhoun, is very much with us today. As Edward Baptist writes,

After the Civil War, pro-big business legal thinkers from the North would, ironically enough, take up a version of Calhoun’s idea. From the 1890s through the New Deal era, the Supreme Court repeatedly used substantive due process to strike down legislative attempts to regulate Gilded Age industry, protect workers’ rights, or break up monopolies. Substantive due process shaped (and continues to shape) the political economy of the United States in enduring ways.

 A good case can be made that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves for the wealth that was beaten and sweated out of them. But the wealth owned and controlled by the very wealthiest families rules our world to the extent that a recent study of political power concluded that the US is a plutocracy. Expropriating that wealth and putting it in public hands – that is the next revolution. Abolishing the private ownership of human beings was not easy. Neither will be the abolition of private property in the wealth our labor creates.

I’m Clayton Morgareidge for the Old Mole Variety Hour.

April 27, 2015