American Proletarian Republicanism

American Exceptionalism is based upon proletarian republicanism.

In England and the Commonwealth the rule of the Master over his 'servants' was postulated under the Master Servant Act which determined the condition of the working class as one of indentured servitude. This Act remained the basis of labour law in Canada even after it was reformed. However its concept of a fiduciary responsibility of the worker to the boss remains as the basis of all labour relations law to this day in the British Commonwealth.

Because America was founded upon the concept of the free land movement, which Edwin Gibbon Wakefield so bitterly complained about, this concept was actively resisted and the liberal ideal of a free contract for labour was embraced.

It was for this reason French and Irish Canadians in the 19th Century often traveled freely to the United States to work, and then came back home to farm. Which lead to bitter complaints from Nativist Americans about 'illegal immigrants' and 'Papists'.

It was quite common during the building of the Great Lakes Canals, the grunt work being done by Irish 'Navvies'. And it was this free movement of workers between Canada and the U.S. that led to Rebellion of 1837 in Canada where the rebels embraced the liberal ideals of American Proletarian Republicanism; free labour and free trade.

Citizenship and Justice in the Lives and Thoughts of Nineteenth-Century American Workers

DAVID MONTGOMERY
THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES
Delivered at
Brasenose College, Oxford University
April 29, May 3, and May 6, 1991

Master-and-servant legislation in Britain and the United States
shared the same roots in the fourteenth-century Statute of Laborers
and the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers. The law imposed criminal
sanctions against workers who left their employment without
the master’s permission. Those sanctions applied to wage earners
as well as to slaves, indentured servants, and apprentice.23 In
1823 the British Parliament renewed the law’s provision that abandoning
work could lead to criminal prosecution before a justice of
the peace and a sentence of up to three months at hard labor after
which the workers’ still owed their masters all contracted labor
time. The new British law did, however, eliminate the magistrates’
powers of supervision of conditions of employment, which
had been part of the Elizabethan law but had lapsed into disuse.
Daphne Simon has calculated that during the 1860s an average
of ten thousand men and women in England and Wales were
prosecuted each year for leaving their jobs, most of them agricultural
laborers, household workers, miners, and workers in potteries
and cutlery trades.

During the same decade that Britain’s Parliament renewed the
law of criminal sanctions, American courts discarded it. A book
by Robert J. Steinfeld sheds important light on this development.
Steinfeld argues that the decisive legal judgments hinged on the
claims of owners of indentured servants, and they were couched
in language that sharply contrasted the legal position of wage
earners to that of slaves. Although all northern states by 1820
either had prohibited chattel slavery or had decreed the eventual
manumission of all children subsequently born to slaves, migrants
from Europe who had contracted themselves into temporary bondage
for specified periods of time continued to arrive and be sold
in the ports of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. Pennsylvania,
the most common destination of such servants, had enacted
regulations of the trade by 1818, to require schooling for servants’
children and to inhibit the separation of families and the sale of
servants outside of the state.

Virtually all the new arrivals were sold to rural employers —
for labor in the fields, within households, or on construction
projects. In the northern cities the rapid disappearance of journeymen
residing within the households of employing artisans, the
substitution of day-to-day money wages for board and services provided
by the master’s wife (“found”), and the large influx of
immigrant journeymen after 1790 had undermined the eighteenth century
reliance of Philadelphia’s artisans on indentured whites
and of New York’s artisans on black slaves. In New York City,
where the owning of slaves had been remarkably equally distributed
throughout the white population before the Revolution, most
slaves of 1800 were found in households of the wealthy, and
bondspeople still employed by artisans had declined to only 18 percent
of the total. White artisans, laborers, and household workers
alike vociferously objected to being called “servants” and to physical
punishments, which they considered badges of servitude.26
Both chattel slavery in its New York and New Jersey agricultural
strongholds and indentured servitude on Pennsylvania
farms were plagued with runaways and with (often successful)
efforts of bondspeople to negotiate better terms with their owners.
Shane White’s study of the decline of slavery in New York has
produced evidence of many black slaves negotiating their way to
freedom through long-term indentures, especially after the enactment
of the gradual manumission law of 1799. Simultaneously,
popular antipathy toward bondage for white people created difficulties
for owners who sought to enforce the terms of indentures.

The troubled persistence of indentured servitude is revealed
by the experiences of Ludwig Gall — ironically a German follower
of Charles Fourier — who came to Pennsylvania in 1819 in
search of a site for a phalanstery. Gall brought eleven servants
with him. When they arrived in Philadelphia, Gall recorded:
They had scarcely come ashore when they were greeted as
countrymen by people who told them that contracts signed in
Europe were not binding here; . . . that they were free as birds
here; that they didn’t have to pay for their passage, and nobody
would think ill of them if they used the money instead
to toast the health of their European masters. . . , The last
scoundrel said: “Follow me, dear countrymen; don’t let yourselves
be wheedled away into the wilderness.”

Gall resorted to the threat of debtors’ prison to make his “companions”
repay their passage. He brought one defiant servant
before a justice of the peace and had him incarcerated, only to
discover that he (Gall) had to pay the prisoner’s maintenance,
and a late payment the second week set the man free. Although
that servant seems to have enjoyed his stay with a “boisterous
group” of three hundred debtors, who “formed their own little
republic” in the Walnut Street prison, the other ten were persuaded
by the threat of jail to indenture themselves to Gall for
three to four years, in return for Gall’s promise to pay them ten
dollars a year.

Gall’s troubles did not end there. His anxiety to rush the
servants out of the city before they learned the ways of American
life was well founded: five men whom he had boarded apart from
his family deserted him the day he left Philadelphia. The remaining
servants made Gall cut short his westward journey in Harrisburg.
Five days after his departure from Philadelphia, he wrote:
“Two of my servants deserted me between Montjoie and here
[Harrisburg]; and my choice was to continue the journey with
hired help, whom I should have to pay $2 a day, or stay here
perforce.” He rented “a pretty country house” with thirty-six tillable
acres, “precisely as much as the [one man and two women]
who remained true to me can care for with two horses.”

Alas, the remaining man did not “remain true” for long. He
soon demanded a seat at the family table and a good Sunday suit,
and on Gall’s refusal, he absconded. A neighborhood farmer
captured the man and had him jailed by the justice of the peace.
From prison the man spent six weeks negotiating the terms of his,
own release, while Gall paid his maintenance. His prison had
cards, whiskey, and in fact, growled Gall, “Methodists with a
misplaced love of humanity supplied him and his fellows with
an abundance of food and drink. . . . Indeed, everything was in
vain. In the end I had to let the fellow go.”

Just to rub it in, the “French-speaking Swiss immigrant,”
whom Gall hired in the servant’s place, threatened to drag Gall
before a justice of the peace for asking him to feed the horses on
Sunday (in violation of state Sabbath laws). Gall settled out of
court: paying the hired man half the anticipated fine.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company reproduced Gall’s
experience on a larger scale, when it brought some five hundred
laborers from Ireland in 1829, only to have them depart for Baltimore
or to nearby railroad construction, where higher wages were
available. Prosecution of the runaways proved prohibitively costly
to the company, and juries refused to convict the workers. Even a
federal judge who was willing to enforce Maryland’s 1715 statute
against runaway servants acknowledged that bound wage labor
was “opposed to the principles of our free institutions and . . .
repugnant to our feelings.” Both the canal laborers and those
working nearby on the new railroad struck several times during
the next six years over wages and over control of hiring, inducing
President Jackson to dispatch federal troops in 1834 to maintain
order. But no worker faced imprisonment for breach of contract,
such as they would have risked in England.

The repugnance felt by the federal judge had been written
into law by the Supreme Court of Indiana in an 1821 ruling on
The case of Mary Clark, a woman of color. The case was brought
by a free black woman in a free state, whose master made the
familiar claim that she had bound herself voluntarily in 1816 “to
serve him as an indented servant and house-maid for 20 years.”
When her suit for habeas corpus was denied by a lower court,
Clark appealed to the state supreme court, which set her free with
the resounding declaration that no one but apprentices, soldiers,
and sailors could be subjected to criminal prosecution for deserting
a job in violation of a contract. Because a contract for service
“must be performed under the eye of the master” and might “require
a number of years,” enforcement of such performance by
law “would produce a state of servitude as degrading and demoralizing
in its consequences, as a state of absolute slavery.”

Although legal commentaries soon began to quote The case of
Mary Clark, it did not appear frequently as a cited precedent until
after the Civil War. By that time the adoption by former Confederate
states of Black Codes — labor codes applying specifically
to African Americans, whose central feature was the imposition
of criminal prosecution for those who failed to sign one-year labor
contracts, or who left a job after they had signed such a contract —
had evoked a vigorous reaction, first from black southerners and
then from the federal Congress. “I hope soon to be called a citizen
of the U.S. and have the rights of a citizen,” a black soldier
from South Carolina had written in 1866. “I am opposed myself
to working under a contract. I am as much at liberty to hire a
White man to work as he to hire me, I expect to stay in the South
after I am mustered out of service, but not to hire myself to a
planter.”

The soldier’s conception of liberty was enshrined in the 1866
Civil Rights Act, and subsequently in the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution, both of which nullified contractual requirements
of the Black Codes, and put in their place national principles
of “freedom of contract” to regulate both economic and
family life. The promise sought by the black soldier of equal
application of the principle of employment at will had become the
law of the land. Its practical significance for the daily lives of
southern rural workers provides an especially dramatic illustration
of the impact of democracy on the law of wage labor and will
receive close attention in my final lecture.

SEE:

Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

"Are Anarchists Thugs?"

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Plutocrats Rule

American Fairy Tale

Slavery in Canada

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories

History of Slavery

The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

Cooperative Commonwealth=Free Market

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Universal Health Care and Charter Schools

The right wing loved Wisconsin when it adopted their Charter School program, despite it's failure, to create a market place in public education or improve test scores.

Now that Wisconsin wants to try socialized medicine ala Canada, well the wailing, wrenching and rendering of political breasts on the right begins.

Let Wisconsin Experiment with Socialized Medicine

John Stossel says " go for it, Wisconsin ". His theory is that perhaps their experience will finally demonstrate for all that the "socialist approach" isn't the way to go. Of course, as you might imagine, "free" health care isn't free: The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes.

Hopefully the empirical research that results from Wisconsin's experiment with Medicare, will be better than has been done with "For Profit Education" and Charter Schools.



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Ex Pat Attacks Medicare

In their summer issue of City Magazine; American Nativist Right Wing Think Tank; The Manhattan Institute has published an attack on Canadian Medicare,in response to Michael Moores Sicko. And they have an ex Canadian write it for them.

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care
David Gratzer

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.

Once again the American Right carts out the slander of long waiting lines in Canada, confusing as they do 'wait times' for waiting lines, conjuring up as they do images of lines of folks in the Soviet Union waiting for weekly rations of meat and bread.

And while giving examples of the right wing attempt to privatize health care in Canada, the writer misses the underlying point. While Canadians may accept a certain level of privatized services, for delivery of Workers Compensation for instance, they rely upon socialized medicine for the majority of their health care and they like it. Which of course just goes to prove we are socialists.

He is not the only ex-pat shilling for the right wing anti-Medicare lobby in the U.S.

Of course the ideal of a universal health care system that then allows for alternative delivery of some treatments, those too expensive, or experimental, or those needed for workplace injuries, is the basis of health care in Canada and Britain not for some citizens but for all, and finds a supporter in the very voice of Adam Smiths Capitalism; The Economist.

Nobody denies that the insecurity in America has been sharpened by the absence of a comprehensive health-care system. Most Americans still get their health care from their companies: lose your job, and you lose your insurance cover with it. All the main Democrats, but none of the leading Republicans, have promised to provide universal, affordable health care. Interestingly, even the most radical of the Democrats' health plans, that of Mr Edwards (see article), is hardly extremist stuff, relying on the private sector but tweaking the system to make sure that no one falls through the cracks and that costs are controlled.

“WE'RE right at the cusp of an ideological truce on health care,” declares a beaming Ron Wyden. The Democratic senator has reason to be pleased. A version of his Healthy Americans Act, an ambitious health-reform bill aimed at universal coverage that he has already introduced into the Senate, was due to go to the House this week. At that point, his bill will become the first bipartisan, bicameral congressional effort in over a decade to tackle the issue of extending health care to the country's growing legion of uninsured.

Today, though, Americans are increasingly unhappy with the health system. Congressman Brian Baird, a co-sponsor of the House version of the universal-care bill, argues that many millions have lost their employer-provided insurance since the failure of the Clinton plan and even more fear they might. Such widespread insecurity has breathed new life into reform.

That appeals to businesses, which, like individuals, are feeling increasingly insecure as the cost of employee health benefits continues to soar well above the rate of inflation. Wal-Mart, America's biggest retailer, has been loudly pushing for universal coverage, and the current bipartisan efforts in Congress have won praise from General Mills, a big cereal manufacturer, Aetna, an insurance giant, and other firms.

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Edward Gibbon Wakefield

In searching for a pithy definition of Fete Accompli I came across this in Wikipedia.

Like Stephen Harper here is another Tory politician Quebecers liked; Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

But unlike Harper his motto was; if elected I will not serve. Which meant they liked him a lot.

While active with the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon had maintained his interest in Canadian affairs. He was involved with the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, NACAI. At his instigation, the NACAI were trying to purchase a large estate just outside Montreal where they wanted to establish another Colonial settlement. Edward Gibbon pushed the scheme with his usual energy; apparently, the government did not object in principle but they strenuously objected to Edward Gibbon having any part of it.

But trusted or not by the politicians, Edward Gibbon was involved in the scheme. The NACAI sent him back to Canada as their representative; he arrived in Montreal in January of 1842 and stayed in Canada for about a year. At this stage , Canada was still coming to terms with the union of Upper and Lower Canada. There were serious differences between the French and English Canadians with the English Canadians holding the political clout. Edward Gibbon skillfully manipulated these differences; it was fairly easy for him to get the support of the French Canadians. By the end of that year he had got himself elected to the Canadian Parliament. It is perhaps typical of Edward Gibbon that, having been elected, he immediately returned to Britain and never took up his seat.

He went back to Canada in 1843 and spent some months there. However when he heard of his brother Arthur's death at the Wairau Affray, he immediately quit Canada and never returned. This appears to be the end of his involvement with Canadian affairs except that he was paid about twenty thousand pounds by the NACAI for his work in Canada. As always with Edward Gibbon, principles and profit seemed to go neatly together.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a scoundrel and a cad, a free land advocate, a realitor , opposed to the British Mercantile State Monopoly, and thus he was not trusted by them. Despite being in business with them in forming colonies as their real estate agent.

Competing schemes of colonial emigration with different implications for equality were promoted to create more consumers of British manufactured goods and producers of food. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plans were designed to recreate in British North America the inequalities associated with labour’s divorce from capital as necessary for social and economic development, but others sought the same end by means of the greater social equality that came from reuniting labour with capital. The poor and dispossessed in Britain who produced and consumed little could be transformed into agrarian property-holders in colonial societies dominated by such petty producers. A degree of inequality would persist, but the resulting colonial societies were far more egalitarian and therefore socially and politically democratic than Britain itself. In such a social context, nineteenth-century liberalism—its celebration of independence and equation of individual economic success with virtue—seemed especially plausible to contemporaries.

Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx outlines the origin of American Libertarianism, that shocked Wakefield; its exceptionalism as a free soil political economy, not a capitalist one. America was a truly free market economy as long as land was held as a public trust for private use.

As a commercial colonizer Wakefield was shocked his experiment had failed. It had not created a capitalist colony bound to the Mother Country, rather it had given free men, free land. But then again he was an idle speculator, a salesman of colonies for his masters.

And so in desperation as Marx points out Wakefield offers his masters a solution to end the free labour republic, taxation, expropriation of the land by the State and then selling it back to free men at such a high cost they have to become wage slaves instead of independent landowning producers.

This then is the secret of the political economy of Capitalism. That it must destroy the real free market by imposition of Statist taxation for capital accumulation. America as a colonial experiment had evolved into a Republic of Free Labour and Free Soil, something that most American Libertarians acknowledge as their exceptionalism. But this was too much for Old World capitalism and it needed a State that would tax property and then sell it off to the highest bidder. That as Marx says and they would concur;

that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

While vulgar liberaltarians leave out the capitalist and simply decry the State and Taxation as the villains genuine American descendants of the libertarian independent producers would embrace instead the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth as a way of challenging the State and its taxation of their 'public property'.

It is ironic that Marx who is assaulted as a statist by the right would embrace the libertarian ideal that the truly independent producer is also the owner of his own property, that is land. But as Marx says the secret to this form of private property is its communal ownership as public property of the producers.

• A View of the Art of Colonization by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1849.

• The Modern Theory of Colonisation last chapter in Karl Marx's Capital, Vol I focused on Wakefield's theory.

It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire.” So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-laborers, essential to these, is wanting.

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear, as respects the laborer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price.”

As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, not the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?

But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labor-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-laborer as wage-laborer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-laborers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labor-market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the laborer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working-class constitutes its living appurtennce, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also — the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labor must be constant and regular, because, first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more laborers; secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony.” The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

War and the Market State




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American Faux Pas

Americans can never get it right despite all their fawning over royalty.

It's the Queen who leads not some colonial upstart

who wishes he was King.














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Secularism Vs. Fundamentalism

The so called battle of ideas is not the West against the East it is secularism vs. religious fundamentalism. Secular Turks draw a political line You would never find this kind of political demonstration occurring in Islamic fundamentalist states, nor in Israel or America.

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Secular Democracy


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Goldbug

Now this is either a good reason (for investors) to invade Iran or a very bad reason to invade.....

United States Invasion of Iran Could Put Gold Over $1,000



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Israeli Rabbi Says Wipe Out Arabs

I wonder if this comment will generate the same world wide outrage and denounciation as comments made by the President of Iran.

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs."It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers".

And while there are apologists attempting to excuse his comments let us not forget that in Israel the law is too stike ones enemies first.

The Iranian nuclear threat is uppermost in the minds of many Israelis and Jews around the world who care for their coreligionists living in Israel . However, it seems that the case for a preemptive strike against Iran has not been properly made. From a Jewish legal standpoint it is clear according to Halacha (Jewish law) one must rise first and strike a person who clearly intends to deliver one a fatal blow.

Even if that threat is only 'percieved' and not a real one. Such was the case of Israels attack in the past on Iraq. An act that was a violation of international law.

And with the ramping up of politics of fear, which is what the War on Terror really is, Israelis are getting an itchy trigger finger.

Israel’s powerful deterrent is continually being downplayed by those who insist that the Israeli state is essentially as vulnerable as the Jews of Europe were in 1939.

Of the dozens of articles and speeches which express that fear, one stands out. It is by Benny Morris, one of Israel's top historians who made his name by exploring the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. He is no right-winger (although he has moved rightward lately) which makes his words especially significant.

In an essay in the "Jerusalem Post," called "This Holocaust Will Be Different," Morris offers this prediction.

"One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

"The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases….

"With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. “

The most distressing part of Morris's analysis (or prophecy) is its utter fatalism. “America will do nothing. Iran will get the bomb. Iran will use it on Israel. Israel will be destroyed. It's all inevitable.”

But Israel may not have to go it alone as the United States has ramped up its rhetorical hysteria over Iran in preparation for a potential attack, either by it or Israel.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Like WMD the evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq is also suspect.

Evidence is still inconclusive on Iran involvement in Iraq

Bush administration officials acknowledged Friday that they had yet to compile evidence strong enough to back up publicly their claims that Iran is fomenting violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release — most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.

As far as Tehran's involvement in Iraq is concerned, Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote Wednesday that " enormous controversy" still swirls around the issue of Iranian influence.

...much of the evidence the United States cites as proof of Iranian involvement remains secret and in some cases is disputed by the Iraqi government, too. This has created an uncomfortable analogy to the period before the Iraq invasion, when secret intelligence ultimately discredited pushed the United States toward war.

With the Real Politick of Fear, evidence does not matter to Israel of the United States, the mere use of pompous rhetoric and inflamatory statements by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being used as an excuse to prepare for war with Iran by chicken hawks in both countries.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week at the Herzliya conference that Israel could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Iran – that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel. The internal assessment by the Israeli national security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate. Since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear weapons. But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of the Israeli national security officials. -antiwar

As usual what is forgotten is that the President of Iran does not run Iran, like the President of the United States runs America. He is only one voice which is controled by the Mullahs and their councils.

The Baltimore Sun, in an editorial : "Iran is hardly a monolithic, march-in-step country; everything Iranian is not evil. But that's a hard sell to make in Washington...Iran's interests, in fact, are in some ways parallel to America's. Iran would not benefit from an Iraqi collapse into total anarchy, or from a wider sectarian war. Right now, Iran and the Sunni regime of Saudi Arabia, one of America's traditional allies in the region, have been trying to mediate a settlement in Lebanon.

The fact that this whole issue arose from Irans need to develop nuclear energy, not a bomb, in order to expand its infrastructure is completely lost in the whole chicken little reaction that nuclear energy = nuclear weapon. It is a deliberate obfustication of what Iran wants, which is nuclear power contracts like Pakistan and India have, not weapons, but access to nucelar technology and uranium.

They need an alternative energy source to grow their capitalist infrastructure since their domestic reliance on gas and oil is now restricted because of export demand.

At the meeting with Secretary of the Russian Security Council Igor Ivanov in Tehran over the past weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: "Our countries could set up an OPEC-type organization on gas cooperation."

Judging from the initial response, the majority of analysts think that this proposal is rooted in politics rather than economics.

This is not the first time the idea has been put forward. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Shanghai in June 2006 to establish what he described as cooperation "in fixing gas prices, and major flows in the interests of global stability."

Indicatively, the same idea was discussed during the recent Algerian visit of Viktor Khristenko, Minister of Industry and Energy: Algeria and Qatar could join the two countries. The resources of this potential cartel are very impressive - they account for more than 30% of the world's gas production, and their aggregate proven reserves exceed 60% of the total, which is comparable to OPEC's respective share in the global oil reserves - about 68%. The would-be cartel could include other members as well.

Malaysia has warned it will drop free trade talks with the US if it is asked to scrap a multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Iran, a news report said yesterday.

US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos has urged the suspension of negotiations to forge a free trade agreement with Malaysia until it halts a US$16 billion deal to develop gas fields in southern Iran.

The proposition of war with Iran is saber rattling by Israel and America, because their very visible military failures in Lebanon and Iraq have given strength to their regional enemies, which have increased not decreased thanks to Bush's War On Terror.

Now they must strike back, at least rhetorially, ramping up the threat that they will take unilateral action. Whether that threat will come to pass is another question. But it bodes ill for any resolution to the crisis of Middle East. Chickens, home, roost.

See:

Oil the New Silk Road

US Declares Economic War On Iran

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Free Unions

Here is an interesting post on the need for 'free democratic worker controlled unions' not state controlled workers associations.

How U.S. and other global corporations utilize government-controlled unions created by authoritarian nationalist regimes even as they claim to be liquidating the legacy of those regimes in the interest of economic freedom.





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Labour

Unions

Bureaucratic Collectivist Capitalism

The Need for Arab Anarchism

China Needs Free Unions

Independent Unions In China

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