If you go to the doctor with a painful condition, she’ll ask you to describe the symptoms. If she’s any good, she won’t just prescribe a few pills and send you on your way—she’ll try to figure out the cause of your problem, where it came from. She’ll order some tests, and then she’ll do more. She’ll ask you when the symptoms arose. She’ll take your family history, asking about your parents, and even your grandparents. And that’s what we’re going to do—go through the history of America to discover the source of the profound problems we have sketched out here.

The Rise of Capital—on a Foundation of Slavery and Genocide

This country was founded on the twin crimes of the genocidal dispossession of its Native American (Indian) inhabitants, and the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans. But this essential and undeniable truth is constantly suppressed, blurred over, distorted and excused—all too often treated as “ancient history,” if admitted at all. But let’s look at its implications.

Modern capitalism arose in Europe, when the merchant class in the cities—the newly arising capitalists, or bourgeoisie—began to set up workshops in which they exploited peasants who had been driven off their land, as well as others who could not make a living any longer other than by working for, and being exploited by, these capitalists. This was the embryo of the modern proletariat—a class of people who have no means to live except to work for someone else, and that works for wages in processes that require a collectivity of people working together. The early capitalists, like their descendants, would take possession of and sell the goods thus produced, paying the proletarians only enough to live on, and thereby accumulating profit. They did this in competition with other capitalists, and those who could not sell cheaper were driven under; this generated a drive to gain any possible advantage, either through lowering wages and more thoroughly exploiting the proletariat, or through investing in more productive machinery, or both. This twin dynamic of exploitation and competition drove forward the accumulation of capital in a relentless and ever-widening cycle.

But this was not some linear or self-contained process. In fact, capitalism in Europe “took off” with the development of the world market, and that in turn was fed and driven forward by theslave trade. Ships would sail from London and Liverpool, in England, filled with the goods sold by the capitalists. They would unload these goods for sale or trade in the coastal cities of Africa, and fill their holds with human beings who had been captured in raids in the African countryside. They would then take this human cargo to the Americas and the Caribbean, to be sold as slaves. Then the ships would take the sugar, cotton, rice and other goods produced by the slaves in these colonies back to Europe, to be sold for use as raw materials or food. And so on, every day, year in, year out—for centuries. This slave trade and the slave economy that went with it—along with the extermination of the Native peoples of the Americas (the Indians) through deliberate slaughter, disease, and working them to death in silver mines—formed what Karl Marx called the “rosy dawn of the primitive accumulation of capital.”

The crime was enormous. Between 9.4 and 12 million Africans were kidnapped, sold and sent to the Americas as slaves. Over two million more died in the voyage from Africa, and enormous numbers perished in Africa itself, through the slave-taking raids and wars, followed by forced marches in chains to the coastal African cities to feed this market. At least 800,000 more died in the port cities of Africa, locked down in prison (the barracoons) awaiting shipment. Once in the Americas, slaves were sent to “seasoning camps” to “break” them—where an estimated 1/3 of the Africans died in that first hellish year.

Take a few seconds to think about the reality behind those numbers. THOSE WERE HUMAN BEINGS! Numbers alone cannot hope to capture the agony and suffering all this meant for over three centuries; the best these numbers can do is give a sense of the sheer scale and scope of the barbarity. But even today this is very little known, and what went into the foundation of American history is barely taught, if at all, in the schools, or recognized in the media and culture.

Those Africans who survived this hell were then forced to toil as slaves, doing the work to “tame” the Americas—to develop the agriculture that would form the basis for the new European colonies. A respected historian put it this way: “Much of the New World, then, came to resemble the death furnace of the ancient god Moloch—consuming African slaves so increasing numbers of Europeans (and later, white Americans) could consume sugar, coffee, rice, and tobacco.” Within Africa itself, the slave trade caused tremendous distortions in the development of Africa and gave rise to the major African slave-trading states in west Africa, as these states traded slaves to the Europeans for commodities that included guns.

Slavery existed in every part of the world and many societies before the transatlantic slave trade that began in the 1500s—but it had never before been carried out on this scale and with this nearly industrial-style inhumanity. That was the product not of uniquely evil men—but of men who became monsters by serving the demands of a monstrous new system whose only commandment was “Expand or Die.” This slave trade was so integral to the rise of capitalism that the sugar and tea produced by slaves not only turned huge profits, but also served as a very cheap way to feed empty calories and stimulants to severely exploited proletarians in Europe. And the labor organization of the sugar cane fields of Jamaica was adapted to the factory floors of London.

To justify this, the capitalists and slave owners drew on the Bible—which yes, does in fact justify slavery, in both old testament and new—and then later on pseudo-scientific ideologies of racism that claimed that Africans and Native Americans (Indians) were a “lower species,” inherently inferior. The fact that Africans had been kidnaped, tortured, enslaved, killed if they tried to educate themselves, forced to watch as their children or spouses were sold off to other parts of the country, and generally kept in an inferior position—this CRIME by the rulers was pointed to as “proof” that Blacks were inferior. Incredibly enough, these slaves were denounced as “lazy” by the parasitical slave masters whose great wealth the slaves created through their back-breaking labor!   These lies served both to “justify” the horrors of slavery and formed a crucial element in the “social glue” that held society together. This pattern, and this lie and its social use, have continued in different forms up to today.

The fact that these supposedly “inherently inferior” people had played a crucial part in building up highly developed societies and cultures in both Africa and the Americas, long before Europeans came to dominate these places, was an “inconvenient truth” written out of the official histories and textbooks.  And the fact that all human beings are all one species, with only relatively superficial differences in some characteristics, was also written out, with spurious racist pseudo-science substituted instead—lies that also come up in new forms today.

There was nothing inherent in Europeans that led to capitalism taking root there first—there were a number of areas in the world where capitalism might have taken off slightly earlier or slightly later if things had come together a little differently. But Europe is where capitalism did take off, and the dominance of the capitalist nations of Europe and then the U.S. (and Japan, which developed in a different set of circumstances) over the past five centuries is inconceivable without slavery.

“There Would Be No United States as We Now Know It Today Without Slavery”

Slavery fueled the foundation and rise of not just capitalism in general, but the U.S. in particular. This is not just a “stain” that can eventually be washed, or even scrubbed, away within the confines of this system; it is embedded in the very fabric of this society—indeed, the U.S. Constitution itself legally institutionalized slavery and deemed African-Americans to count as only 3/5 of a white person for census purposes.

In the recently published work, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, Bob Avakian wrote:

There is a semi-official narrative about the history and the “greatness” of America, which says that this greatness of America lies in the freedom and ingenuity of its people, and above all in a system that gives encouragement and reward to these qualities. Now, in opposition to this semi-official narrative about the greatness of America, the reality is that—to return to one fundamental aspect of all this—slavery has been an indispensable part of the foundation for the “freedom and prosperity” of the USA. The combination of freedom and prosperity is, as we know, still today, and in some ways today more than ever, proclaimed as the unique quality and the special destiny and mission of the United States and its role in the world. And this stands in stark contradiction to the fact that without slavery, none of this—not even the bourgeois-democratic freedoms, let alone the prosperity—would have been possible, not only in the southern United States but in the North as well, in the country as a whole and in its development and emergence as a world economic and military power.

Obviously, the way in which agriculture in the South developed was directly related to, indeed founded on, the system of slavery. But, beyond that, the way in which the U.S. related to the world market, and built up its prosperity and economic base in that way, was to a very large degree dependent on slave-based production. The interchange between the development of manufacture in the North and the development of agriculture in the South, for example—even when, before the Civil War, that interchange went to a large degree through the world market and through England in particular, where for example cotton would be sold to the textile mills in England and other products would be sold from England to the northern manufacturers in the U.S. —even that would not have happened in the way it did, on the kind of scale it did and with the prosperity that it led to, without slavery. Of course, this process—where, for example, cotton from the southern U.S. was to a large degree sold to England, rather than to New England—contributed over time to sharpening the contradiction between the slave system in the South and the developing capitalist system in the North of the U.S. But the point to emphasize here is that, in an overall and fundamental sense, the slave-grown products of the southern U.S. constituted a major factor in the development of the U.S. economy, in the North as well as the South. And the development of that economy, in turn, has been the essential underlying basis for the massive military machinery which is the ultimate enforcer of the role of the U.S. as a major world power.

In short: There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.

Avakian then goes on to discuss and analyze the importance of slavery to the mind-set and outlook of American society, and its political life in particular. To justify slavery and the theft of native lands, the lies and myths we described above were used to deem Black people and Indians as less than human, as social pariahs, or outcasts, not deserving of the “natural rights” due to all white men. The masses of white people of all classes, including the most exploited among them, were appealed to on the basis that by virtue of not being slaves they were in fact part of the master class (whether they actually owned slaves or not).

This poisonous master-class mentality did not die with the abolition of slavery—it continued, in new forms. In particular, each wave of immigrants that came over from Europe had to “fit itself into” the dominant relations of American society—they had to find an “economic niche” (usually toward the bottom rungs of the working class, at least at first) and they had to work out a relation to the dominant political and cultural superstructure of society. In doing so, these white immigrants often tried to distinguish themselves from Black people—and this often exploded into the open antagonism of white mobs rampaging against Black people and even lynching them—yes, in the northern cities as well as the South, as these immigrant communities defined themselves as “full-blooded” white Americans in violent opposition to Black people. This system reinforced the master-class mentality among northern whites with petty, but not insignificant, privileges in jobs and housing. And this became a major double-barreled shotgun for the capitalist ruling class: it blinded these white people and immigrants to their most fundamental interests as members of the proletariat, turning their anger away from the system that actually exploited and oppressed them, and turning it against the most oppressed and exploited people in society. And it gave them an “identity” as white Americans, with a set of expectations and entitlements to go with it—and to defend. A minority of whites opposed this madness, and took up revolutionary or radical or even just decently humane positions; but while very important—and we’ll return to its significance later—this sort of stand was far too uncommon. (A secondary, but important, effect of this master-class mentality among whites of all classes was to partly obscure the class character of the oppression of the masses of Black people—their position and role as viciously exploited proletarians, within the overall working class of the U.S.—and the many and close links between this class exploitation of large numbers of Black people, as part of the proletariat, and thenational oppression of Black people as a people.)

To return again to the period of slavery, it is important to be clear on an essential truth: the slaves fiercely resisted this. In the U.S. alone there were over 200 slave revolts, and the slaves of Haiti stunned the world when they successfully waged a 15-year revolution against first their colonial masters, then the British, and finally Napoleon’s armies. Even with these heroic revolts, it was only with the Civil War that the resistance finally bore fruit in the U.S., and the emancipation of Black people from outright slavery was achieved. Here too the masses of Black people—both runaway slaves and “freedmen”—played a crucial role. When finally allowed to join the Union Army, they died at twice the rate of white soldiers (while being paid lower wages for most of the Civil War)!

The Civil War

As pointed to in the passage cited from Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, the Civil War itself came about because of the clash between two different economic and social systems: slavery, based on plantation farming in the South; and capitalism, based on factory and other wage-labor centered in the North. The slave owners needed more land because their plantation system of farming used up the land so fast, while the northern capitalists wanted to control the country as a whole, both for resources and to further develop their control of the national market.  By the time of the Civil War, these two forces—these two social systems—were clashing on virtually every major question of economics. For example, factory production was just getting going in the North, and these northern capitalists wanted to erect high tariffs (in effect, taxes on imported goods) to secure the U.S. national market and “protect” their industries against the English capitalists, who could produce things much more cheaply; but the slave-holders insisted on low tariffs to enable them to easily trade with those same English manufacturers. And these basic economic conflicts found expression in politics, culture, and even religion—the Baptist and Methodist churches, among others, split into northern and southern branches over the “godliness” (or “ungodliness”) of slavery!

Why? Simply because people in the North had become enlightened? No. While there was a surge of more radical thinking in the North in the decades prior to the Civil War, and militant opponents of slavery such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown began to get a hearing and gain a following, this was ultimately an expression of more fundamental changes going on in the economic base of society—that is, the relations that people enter into to carry out production—and the intensifying contradictions within that economic base, and between that economic base and the political structure which had arisen on top of it.

In short, slavery had changed from being the stimulus that it was in the early days of capitalism into a fetter on the development of capitalism. The constitution that served the economic base of 1789—a constitution which legalized and institutionalized slavery—could no longer contain the intensified contradictions of 1860. Abraham Lincoln himself, the president of the United States during the time of the Civil War, was the political representative of the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he fought the war in their interests. In the view of Lincoln, the power of the slave states had to be at minimum sharply curtailed; and it was only when he was convinced that there was no other way forward that he went to war. Similarly, Lincoln delayed emancipating the slaves and then delayed allowing the slaves to enlist in the Union army until he was convinced that there was no other way to carry out his basic aim of “saving the Union.” Lincoln himself said:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The First Betrayal, After Slavery

The aftermath of the Civil War presented the now predominant capitalist class with an opportunity to truly integrate the freed slaves into the larger society. The slaves had poured generations of labor into the foundation of the society and then died way out of proportion to their numbers in the Civil War. Northern generals during the war had promised the freed slaves “40 acres and a mule.” As a matter of simple, basic justice it would have been right to divide the land that they had worked for generations among the former slaves, as well as the non-slaveholding whites; and as a matter of having a basis for political freedom, doing this was imperative. And it was imperative as well that these former slaves have the full political rights they had fought and died for—including the right to suppress the bitter, unrepentant ex-Confederate soldiers who, already in the waning days of the Civil War, were forming into secret paramilitary societies to violently attack the freed slaves and “preserve the southern way of life.”

But this was not done. Indeed, the true interests of the northern capitalists came out with their betrayal of Reconstruction. During this all too brief period of Reconstruction, in the 10 years or so after the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government had kept some of its promises and stationed troops in the South. These troops were there to prevent wholesale slaughters of Black people, and poor whites, who were striving to gain land and exercise political rights promised to them. But the capitalist class which now dominated the national government did this in large part in order to fully subordinate the former plantation owners; and when the ex-slaves and their allies fought “too hard” for their rights these same troops would be used against them.

Above all the northern capitalists wanted order and stability to carry out the further consolidation of their rule, as well as further expansion on the North American continent and internationally. The ferment and upheaval that would have gone along with everything that would have been involved in the former slaves playing a significant role in the political process or even exercising basic rights might have “sent the wrong message” to other oppressed people within the U.S.; and in fact, when in 1877 the U.S. troops were pulled out of the South, signaling the end of Reconstruction, they were immediately sent west—to fully crush the resistance of the Indians—and into the cities of the North—to violently suppress revolts of immigrant workers. Further, real freedom for the former slaves would have enabled them to resist the severe exploitation that was visited upon them, and thus would have made the re-integration of the southern economy into the larger society much less profitable for the ruling capitalists. So the Ku Klux Klan was unleashed in full force and played a brutal role in defeating and subjugating the freed slaves and progressive whites, often in bloody battles. Then the Supreme Court “made it all legal,” with the Cruikshank decision—which upheld the state of Louisiana’s decision to not prosecute the white perpetrators of the massacre of over 100 Black and white supporters of Reconstruction in Colfax, Louisiana—and Plessy v. Ferguson, which enabled states to legally segregate Black people.

In short, when the opportunity for integration on an equal footing into this society arose in the period after the Civil War, the “demands” of the economic base of the capitalist system, and the political superstructure that arises on and serves that base, overrode that opportunity…and the answer was NO. Equality was denied—and this denial was enforced through the most bloodthirsty means.

The new social order that came with the betrayal of Reconstruction forced most Black people into the position of working the land for white plantation owners in relations that were barely better than slavery. And some forms of the actual, literal enslavement of Black people continued, particularly in the South, long after slavery had been legally abolished. The masses of Black people were kept chained to the land by debt, by legal discrimination…and by violence. Through all this, rather than being integrated on an equal basis into U.S. life, Black people were forged into an oppressed nation within the Black Belt South during this period—denied all democratic rights, including the right to self-determination as a nation. 

Shortly after the Civil War, the capitalist system made a leap to a new stage—to a worldwide system of imperialism, which divided up the entire globe among a handful of powers. The re-entrenchment of white supremacy in a new form, after the Civil War, formed an important element in the U.S.’s rise to major power status among these imperialists. The cotton and tobacco produced by the bitterly exploited Black sharecroppers were the top cash crops of the U.S. from 1850 to 1890, and Black men who were arrested by southern sheriffs on the flimsiest of charges and literally sold as slave labor built the industrial infrastructure of the South. (Recently, Douglas A. Blackmon, in Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, documented the use of over 100,000 Black people in slave labor industrial projects, and the actual number is undoubtedly far higher than the 100,000 he has been able to document. Conditions in these camps, including widespread disease, systematic degradation, torture, including “waterboarding,” and a high death rate, call to mind the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.) At the same time, the reinforcement of the master-class mentality among large sections of whites strengthened their identification with the ruling class. And the reintegration of the southern ruling class elements into the larger capitalist class—with the southerners getting particular power in the Congress and being a major force in the military—reinforced the ruling class as a whole in its cohesiveness.

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