The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 22: Capitalism Unchained: 1781 - 1861

Great struggles between newly distinct, and now newly contending, class forces in North America had been unleashed with the successful conclusion of the revolutionary war. These struggles would intensify over the next four generations, even though, initially some bourgeois leaders like Thomas Jefferson succeeded in welding the masses of mechanics and poor but capitalist farmers together behind himself and other liberal big bourgeois elements in continuing class collaboration; specifically, for the purpose of taking control of the federal government. (The period of the Republican-Democratic Clubs of Jefferson that went on to support Andrew Jackson in his near civil war on behalf of the North American small business and capitalist farmer alliance he would inherit from Jefferson.)  Fundamentally, however, the simple fact was that capitalism as a productive system, with its inherited form of parliamentary government, had finally been unchained in North America.

From our perspective it is this unleashing of the productive power of capitalism that is now our foremost concern. So we shall turn to the rise of machinofacture and supportive infrastructure in North America – and, with it of course, the rise of a true proletarian class. Looking first at the technological foundations and then the interacting social organizational consequences.

Primitive Capital Accumulation

In this context “capital accumulation” does not refer simply to the amassing of money (finance capital – for the purpose of investment in next generations of machinery) but equally to the construction of the infrastructure for capitalist machinofacture as the predominate economic enterprise in the new nation. Not that you can do one without the other.

Money capital must come from somewhere; that is ultimately always from someone’s labor, and as we have seen comes initially in the form of surplus value. Now that labor would come from workers, farmers, and slave labor. In terms of capitalism’s core – machinofacture – money capital was sweated out of the 16 hour a day (six days a week) work schedule so common in the early 1800’s. With that money capital (derived as surplus value) American capitalists continued their investment in machinery and its factory installation and undertook the construction of the infrastructural pillars needed to support further machinofacture. This is the process of industrialization.

The process had begun in England and parts of the adjacent European continent and set the pace. It continued to be the way the “advanced industrial” countries became both “advanced” and “industrial” in Europe (supplemented by imperialism and its exploitation of colonial cheap labor after 1850) (Note: for that matter it continued to be the way Socialists of our Lenin variety would have to acquire capital in the Soviet Union and later China.) The eighty years from Yorktown (1781) to the Civil War (1861) were the period of primitive capital accumulation in the United States.

Off to a Great Start!

Prohibited by British colonial law from building a factory, Oliver Evans had to wait for Washington’s revolutionary victory to get his automated flour mill underway. He didn’t waste any time after Yorktown, and the next year (1782) began the final engineering that led to the completion of his factory in 1790, utilizing an advanced Watt steam engine, perfected only two years before, as the power source. That same year immigrant Samuel Slater and American David Wilkinson built the first Arkwright spinning machine factory in Pawtucket. Their first employees were children under 12 and teen-age women.

This spinning machine had been patented in England in 1769 but of course the Americans were prohibited from owning them, seeing them, having plans for them, and certainly from importing any immigrants familiar with them. Slater himself had to be smuggled into the New Republic so closely guarded was this capitalist textile technology.

Evans completely automated factory is a wonderful proof of how advanced the North American technological potential had become and his immediate post-revolutionary factory undertaking an excellent example of where unchained North American capitalism was headed. We know Evan’s licensed over 100 different millers to construct his fully automated flour mill and this further illustrates the potential of the new nation for basing itself on machinofacture. The rapid and safe (not to mention now legal) adoption (even when stolen) of the most advanced British technology now that the American bourgeoisie had state power, was inevitable as Slater’s smuggling and Wilkinson’s blacksmithing of the Arkwright spinning machine proved.

All of this is truly undeniable proof of where the Americans were going. Even though the reality was that the American nation was still overwhelmingly based on small capitalist farming.

Standardization of Parts and Assembly Line Manufacture

Interchangeability of parts in machinery was a great step forward and was pioneered in the new American nation by Eli Whitney. Whitney had acquired some fame for his invention of the cotton gin (which revolutionized cotton planting by turning the entire thing into a cotton growing industry, with the money capital sweated out of slaves) and was able to convince the US Government in 1798 to give him a contract for the mass production of muskets consisting of interchangeable parts. To begin with he divided his labor force into sections so that unskilled labor specializing only in the production of some specific part could be employed rather than the traditional (long and educationally expensive) vocational way traditionally employed, where one craftsmen made all the parts of a musket taking long periods of time to finish the gun. This was an assembly line. An entirely new way of going about manufacture. The same thing had been done in Britain earlier with regard to the production of blocks for naval vessels. You can see, I suspect, that in these two processes (the interchangeability of parts and the assembly line) the US industrial proletariat was emerging. Together these processes became known as the “American System.”

The American System of Mass Production

Thomas Jefferson acting as Washington’s Ambassador to France in 1785 saw first hand how a French Gunsmith named Le Blanc had created a new system of manufacturing, featuring individual parts so accurately machined that they were de facto interchangeable. Before Le Blanc could convince the French Old Regime of the utility of the new system Jefferson had convinced his government of the importance of mass production by way of interchangeable parts and a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for $800,000.

Interchangeability was possible because machine tools had advanced by leaps and bounds, allowing the perfection of manufacture of each part down to tiny measurements (tolerances). Now pouring into the New Republic were advanced lathes and other iron and steel working machines that could do a variety of highly specialized tasks (shaping, slotting and planning, milling, gear-cutting, boring and grinding, screw cutting, and many many more) with equal perfection. – And, because the secret of training previously unskilled persons to be sufficiently skilled do just one specific job – along the entire spectrum of machining of parts, each could be made into a job – allowed rapid manufacture of each part of a weapon. After which, the parts so perfectly made could be fitted together by still other workers to form the finished product. In short, highly accurate tolerances in machining combined with dividing the totality of work involved into a multitude of easily learned tasks, was the basis for the “American System” of mass production.

However before all this potential could even begin to be realized, the infrastructure of roads and waterways would have to be developed – and, hand in hand, with the introduction of advanced technology, it was developed.

Waterways, Steamships and Unions

General Washington went right back to work after Yorktown. (Not that winning the war hadn’t been work!) One of the first things he and his Army did was to authorize the construction of new canals to link up raw material sources to manufacturing and consuming cities, towns and ports. (During the 1780’s the US was under a loose Articles of Confederation as far as the civilian “government” was concerned and de facto Washington was ruling through the Army.) In 1784 he gave the go ahead to multiple plans for linking the eastern seaboard with the nation’s interior, including the construction of a canal from the Potomac to the Ohio River; another canal connecting Lake Champlain and the Hudson River and two more in Pennsylvania. .

The following year, 1785, a project was launched to improve river transport from Richmond, Virginia, to Buchanan, and this new navigable riverway included the first “locks” in the USA, the entire project ready by 1789. Finally, Washington pioneered the Intracoastal Waterway system that would allow the Americans great security from hostile states and pirates. The first construction phase was completed by 1805. Many new river and canal improvements were under construction in the South to support the emerging industrialized (with slave labor) cotton industry of the interior, beginning in 1785 with the Columbia-Charleston canal so that by 1820 there were a dozen lateral canals connecting with it, delivering cotton to the South’s greatest port city.

New York’s Legislature in 1792 authorized the construction of a navigable river and canal system to link Lake Oneida and the Oneida River, and simultaneously authorized improving the Hudson to fully navigable standards all the way to Lake Oneida. New York’s progressivism came to a new climax in 1817 with the order to build the Erie Canal which became a great success, opening New England to the Mid-West of the continent.

The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers began to be linked from Pittsburgh as early as 1805. This would soon connect the northern US with New Orleans, opening up vast new swathes of territory to citizens of the emerging Great Republic.

In 1786 John Fitch began experimenting on American rivercraft with steam. This culminated in 1802 with William Symington’s paddle-wheel boat, driven by a steam engine mounted astern and traversing several canals. Robert Fulton mounted his steam engine driven paddle-wheels on the sides of his first ship on New York canals as early as 1807. By 1825 steam engine driven paddle-wheelers were running all over American rivers and canals.

In the second decade following the victory at Yorktown, US workers began to organize trade unions. Beginning in Philadelphia in 1792. Journeymen shoemakers there were a power to be reckoned with by 1794, and by 1805 the New York shoemakers were a force to be listened to in that State. Right away these workers and their unions tackled the first obstacle; that was the long tradition of laws making union organizing illegal, with increasing success.

The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1819 and 1829

There had been previous economic dislocations in the New Republic. The decision of Jefferson to forbid trade with either Napoleonic Continental Europe or the British Empire had caused one such downturn. However, capitalism’s General Crisis, as the sole precipitator of economic panic, depression and dislocation, featured its first true appearance in the USA in 1819 as tens of thousands of workers were sent to the street, unemployed, in New York, Philadelphia and other cities of New England and the mid-Atlantic coast. Small capitalists were swallowed by big capitalists.

Workers still with jobs had to work longer hours for less money under terrible conditions. The majority of these workers by far were women and children under 12 years of age.

Naturally, resistance spread, trade unions were formed and labor began to act on its own behalf as a class, for the first time. Nevertheless the general crisis of capitalism continued to throw up new mass waves of unemployment in the cities as occurred seven years later in 1829

Workers had other options than starvation. Some fled on the new canals to other locations seeking employment. Others opted for new lives as capitalist farmers in the mid-West and northern Mexico (what is now the western half of the USA). Still others found employment at next to slave-labor wages as laborers in the construction of canals and railroads.

The Railroads, Iron and Coal, Unions

Americans both benefited from, and immediately improved upon, the British advances in steam-driven rail-riding locomotives. The first completely-steam locomotive-traversed railway, was in operation by 1830: the South Carolina Railroad. Within three years it had 136 miles of track in operation. In 1831, the British built John Bull locomotive was sold to, and in operation by, the New Jersey Camden & Amboy Railroad. The first US built (bogie) locomotive went into operation the following year (1832) and shortly thereafter (by 1833) British capitalists began exporting the same type of locomotive to American buyers.

Politically, class-conscious workers often supported the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party of the progressive capitalists. This continued the long tradition of class collaboration which overall had had good results. But, at the same time their most sophisticated elements were beginning by 1827, and the establishment of the country’s first Central Labor Council in Philadelphia, to see that they had to establish themselves independently as a class and political force. The General Crisis of Capitalism, and its constant, never-ending, introduction of new and improved generations of machinery, was forcing this conclusion to the forefront.

The General Crisis: The Depression of 1837

There would be a series of “depressions” in the capitalist business cycle after the Depression of 1829-1831, and they became increasingly devastating with each successive “recovery” until in 1837 the industrial collapse confronted workers with the absolute necessity (just to survive) of building on their experience to form permanent unions; permanent central labor union councils and permanent political programs.

The fight had generated unions with a worker’s program featuring two essential demands: (1) a ten hour working day and (2) publicly paid universal education for children.

The capitalists on the other hand continued their massive expansion in production with their most recent next generation of machinery. For example, previously dependant on British capitalists for their iron rails, American capitalists began rolling their own, with their newest Next Generation of Machinery, in 1844, as the recovery from the last round of mass layoffs and swallowing of competitors (as a result of the 1837 depression) was completed.

Origin of the US Labor Aristocracy

We have seen the emergence of capitalist factories in North America featured heavy reliance on women and children less than 12 years of age as their workforce. This kind of exploitation does not lend itself to the steady employment of family supporting workers which are the kind of workers that one must have to form a union with members capable of paying union dues on a regular basis. This is the definition of labor aristocracy.

The invention of Morse code in 1844 opened an entire new profession for someone to enter, as the system of telegraphy quickly spread throughout the nation and shortly thereafter the emergence of the railroad telegraphers union. These workers along with the permanent staff needed to run the locomotives, and man the trains both freight and passenger, constitute the origin of the railroad brotherhoods (railroad unions). These workers were militant about getting paid for the work they did and their position in the railroad industry gave them a powerful position from which to strike or slow down or in some other way affect their bosses. These workers were able to raise families successfully on wages secured by their craft unions. Thus US Labor was divided early on between the most oppressed section (largely women and children) in factories and others in the industrial process who had “good” jobs, meaning they could live on their wages and do so successfully raising families over extended periods of time. On non-Trade Union issues however these workers tended to be conservative in social outlook and were suffering always from petty bourgeois illusions. Two castes within the US working class had arisen and this social structural fact would continue as the central reality of working class political organization in the future.

We will discuss the division of the US labor movement along these lines in the following chapters. The unionized railroad workers (Brotherhoods or Unions) would form the mass base for the organization of labor by the most conservative elements of the working class movement after the US Civil War. In the meantime you should see them as the embryonic form from which this caste (labor aristocracy) will emerge in the AFL as we shall discuss below.

Personal Experience with the Labor Aristocracy

These railroad brotherhood craft unions were the road out of wage slavery and into the petty bourgeoisie for millions of workers. In fact, my paternal grandfather’s road out of the world of poor white trash was as a member of the telegrapher’s union where he made enough money to put four children through college – all out of the work he did at a railroad stop-in-the-wall called Davey just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. This during the Great Depression in the 1930’s, yet he had a job thanks to his union in this toughest of all environments. Accordingly, all of his life he was the strongest union man and with his illusions of becoming bourgeois (always tracking how his stocks were doing) he was simultaneously an arch-type right wing Gompers sort of anti-communist.

This vignette says everything that needs to be said about understanding the split in organized labor here and everywhere in the capitalist world. Successful revolutionaries have to learn how to live with and utilize the reality of working class division in such a way, so as to accomplish our objectives.

The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1854 and 1857

During the 1850’s there was as much expansion of the railroad system as the finance capital capacity of the time would allow. In 1851 the telegraph was employed for signaling arrival and departure schedules to trains running on this system for the first time. By 1860 there were 30,000 miles of railroad in the USA.

To supply the iron needs of farmers and industry including the railroads American iron production had grown from 50,000 tons in 1810 to nearly one million tons in 1860. Correspondingly coal had replaced wood in iron manufacture and coal mining jumped from next to nothing in 1810 to over 14.3 million tons in 1860.

As always the surplus value to finance all of this expansion was sweated by the capitalists out of the largely child and teen-age women work force to which were being added an increasing number of men. The depression of 1854 discharged 200,000 workers onto the streets and in so doing smashed their union organizations for the most part. 1855 saw a revival of worker enthusiasm for unions as more and more returned to the factory (albeit factories with new owners). This time they built relief funds for future strike actions to protect themselves and their gains and when the depression of 1857 again wiped out many unions there were a striking number that survived precisely because they had amassed sufficient funds for strike relief (of themselves and brother workers in other cities and States.)

As importantly, workers managed to set things straight with regard to their ideas about living today and tomorrow. Meaning they got rid of the utopians and began to concentrate on hours, wages, working conditions, building strike relief funds, worker controlled apprentice programs, the right to organize unions (without being simultaneously prosecuted with felony conspiracy charges being launched against them,) laws against company-store exploitation, and for mechanics liens. – And, for the first time many attempts were made to form “national” unions.

The American Factory System Transforms the Country

Progressive British capitalists had come to accept the reality that American capitalism was here to stay, so that in 1810 they allowed Francis Lowell the honor and privilege of studying their system of cotton manufacture at first hand. Returning home, with some of their money, and more gathered here as investment capital, Lowell established the first true all-process inclusive US cotton factory in 1815. His factory produced cloth, spun from start on machine looms and then woven into the final product. These products were being offered as commodities the following year. Machinofactured woolens were not far behind. By 1860 there was hardly a shoe or finished clothing product that wasn’t being manufactured, in whole or in part, in these factories. Young women workers supplied two thirds of the labor and surplus value was sweated out of them from 12 to 16 hours a day six days a week. Primitive capital accumulation was in full swing.

From 1840 to 1860 American manufacture had jumped from half a billion dollars to two nearly two billion, and workers employed increased about 70%. Factory cotton spindles jumped from 1.3 to 5.2 million. In 1860 woolen products jumped per annum to 70 million dollars compared to 21 million in 1840. Farm tools and machinery doubled in the same period from $10 to $20 million.

The American population tripled in size from 10 to 31 million people between 1820 and 1860 (two generations.) Only 5% of this 1860 population were factory workers but, after farmers, they had become the most important productive class. Most of them lived in cities over 100,000 in size (whose populations now made up about 8.5% of the country.)

US Labor on the Eve of the Civil War

From 1827 forward American workers had fought for political rights, the ten hour day, public universal education and the right to organize unions, and they had struck employers time and time again, virtually everywhere, in pursuit of these goals. They had to overcome a series of ideological barriers as well. For example, they had confronted (1) the utopian socialists, and reformers of the Owens, Fourier, and Evans type; (2) the tendency to always tail-end the progressive capitalists of the Jefferson and then Jackson variety; and of course (3) the racist ideologists of slavery (and anti-immigrant yellow journalism  a la Lou Dobbs, in the Free States.) Also, (4) the North American bosses were cleverer than their European counterparts and engaged in wholesale propaganda about the joys of the 14 to 16 hour work day. An example, would be the Lowell factory owners who produced, with literary contributions from working young women, their own nonsensical journal (political nonsense; the girls contributions were actually quite good.) The young Lowell women quickly organized their own counter publication.

Nevertheless, workers were finding their way forward as an independent class with its own inherent interests, and from time to time they formed their own Labor Parties (the first formed in Philadelphia in 1829, the second in New York, later that same year – The New York Working Men’s Party), fought for and secured universal public education, and institutionalized mechanics liens to insure payment for work provided. 

The Utopian Socialists Retard American Labor

Several different schools of thought arose among bourgeois intellectuals in Europe and North America after the French Revolution of 1789 and the attempted feudalist restoration in Europe of 1815. In the USA, these persons known as “utopians” for their belief that they could create a new perfect society to replace capitalism simply by winning over workers to one or another of their pie-in-the-sky plans and winning over progressive capitalists to go along, had in real world effect, the tendency to retard North American workers in their need to accomplish immediate needs. Such needs as unity, higher wages, standardized wages, better living conditions, public education, and a myriad of other immediate needs and concerns. In fact, it is this tendency to confuse ultimate goals with immediate concerns which continued to plague the world-wide working class movement for many decades. – And, for that matter continued to plague international communism in the 20th and even now in the 21st century. It is the Achilles heel of the ultra-left. The ultra-left, in other words, is not communist, despite pretensions of some of them to the contrary – but a kind of bourgeois infantile disorder (as Lenin later called it and them.)

Bourgeois elements were not anxious to participate in the strikes and other militant worker actions needed to accomplish these immediate goals. At the same time they were correct in asserting that within the framework of the capitalist system the workers would always be wage-slaves and subjected to the “shit end of the stick.” For that reason workers sometimes were confused – but not for long. It didn’t take long for them to realize that the core of the utopian reform movements always consisted in the self-delusion that capitalists could be called upon to help the workers. That the State or Federal governments could be made to serve labor as well as the big bourgeoisie and slavocrats who owned these governments.

The real world was where workers had to live at the moment. The struggle for decent hours, wages and working conditions had to be successful NOW. Furthermore, the total reorganization of society along non-capitalist lines was something that could not happen in the near future anyway. – And, would never happen without first disarming and removing the bourgeoisie from state and political power.

It took awhile to get rid of these utopian socialists and replace them with leaders who understood the need to accomplish immediate goals on the part of workers while simultaneously laying plans for reorganizing society down the road as the opportunity to do so became apparent. Most importantly, to figure out what this new society should actually look like. Marx and Engels discovered the laws of history, as society evolving from one sociocultural stage to the next, and thus, what the new society should look like based on these scientific deductions. Namely, those workers would have to seize state power and use it to reorganize society putting the marvels of science and technology at the service of humanity rather than the exploiters.

The struggle against Utopianism reached its conclusion when both the right wing socialists such as Samuel Gompers and the Left Wing socialists such as the newly arriving communists agreed that any belief that capitalist governments could be used by workers was an illusion no matter how put. Instead workers should fight for their rights to being paid properly directly with the capitalists involved. Along the way they could reward or punish capitalist politicians said the rightists and the leftists hoped that a new world would be created somehow by workers taking matters into their own hands. A shaky kind of unity because the theoretical foundation was shaky, and required surgically precise logic in order to keep both the Left and Right together. But, in the end utopianism was buried.

Marxism Arrives

As we have seen developments in Europe immediately affected North America and vice versa. Thus, the defeat of the European working class revolutionary activity of 1848-1850 resulted in the quick arrival of thousands of politically sophisticated workers who knew Karl Marx and Frederick Engels personally as well as having become familiar with their work. The Communist Manifesto that appeared at the very beginning of these revolts in Europe (January, 1848) was not the only example of such work. In fact, Marx and Engels had been circulating their initial “Critique” of capitalist production and their outline of Historical Materialism for some six years prior to the January Revolution of 1848. During the two years of revolution (1848-1850) Marx and Engels came to know most of the revolutionary leaders first hand.

Among their followers who fled to America was Joseph Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer escaped persecution in Germany and upon arrival in the New World (1851) when he was only 33 years old, he quickly proved to be the first competent Marxist theoretician in the Great Republic. Writing in a German-American publication he created in January of 1852, Die Revolution, he listed Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, along with himself and several others as the editors. In fact, he along with Marx and Engels had already been collaborating as editors in a revolutionary journal in Europe at that time. Thus within four years of the appearance of The Communist Manifesto in London, Marxism had officially arrived in New York; as had Marx and Engels (via surrogates.). (As a matter of interest, following Marx’s 1883 death, Engels would visit the US while completing his study of Lewis Henry Morgan’s research, however, Morgan died only days before Engels could get to him.)

In 1857, five years later, and just four years before the Great War between the Free and Slave States, several men formed the Communist Club in New York City. They also were followers of Karl Marx whom they knew well because of his work during the European Revolutions of 1848-1850, and his subsequent publications (e.g., the 1848 Communist Manifesto) including his contributions as the London correspondent of the New York Herald. Wedemeyer was a key participant.

Wedemeyer took the point in defeating the utopians and their various crack-pot plans, in demonstrating the need for combining temporary economic and political struggles for less than final objectives. By 1860 the utopians were pretty well finished off and Marxism had become the predominate ideological formation among North American working class intellectuals.

Also, by 1860, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, workers and their organizations had earned a leading place in American life. They would play a decisive role in Lincoln’s war victory over the Slavocrats. Chief among them would be the American followers of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association.

Dawn of Massive Capital Accumulation

Primitive capital accumulation had come to an end, and in its stead came a new massive capital accumulation process of a never before seen kind. The kind that created the greatest industrial plant in the world by 1865, to support the largest machinery supported army the world had ever known.

Fighting tooth and nail every step of the way for minimal rights to decent working hours, wages, and conditions, organized labor had played a critically important role in getting Capital to this stage in its development. By 1860 the average working day in the US Free States had been reduced from 13 to 11 1/2 hours and in the strongest working class States (e.g., Massachusetts and New York) the 10 hour day for mechanics and artisans had become the norm, and 11 ½ for factory workers. This, of course, meant, as you have seen, that the Next Generation of capitalist Machinery had to take up the “slack” (i.e., the difference from what had gone before and the new lower hours of labor-power input).

- And, what would have been the norm (sending more workers to the street) was offset by the onset of war and the massive demand of the Federal US government and the State governments for War Materiel (munitions, clothing, boots and shoes, weaponry, food.) As workers disappeared into the Federal Army (over half of it would be composed of working men and the other half by capitalist farmers at War’s end in1865) more machinery was introduced and more unskilled feminine and child labor absorbed into the factories.

Full employment and the constant escalating demand for new and better next generations of capitalist industrial machinery were the dual foundation for Massive Capital Accumulation of an entirely new sort.