by Hazel Walker
Preface by Saul Wenger
The propaganda of the modern American state propagates the claim that the United States represents not only a democracy, but one of the greatest democracies on Earth! This propaganda holds that the United States is shining beacon to which, in characteristic American chauvinism, is declared to be a model all nations must follow.
Rooted in this notion is the liberal belief that the modern capitalist democracy in the United States treats all strata equally without any form of class domination. This article by Comrade Hazel Walker refutes this stance and proposes an alternative paradigm for understanding United States history — that of a slaving, plutocratic, settler-colonial state founded on genocide and the crudest forms of the exploitation of the majority by the capitalist minority.
Introduction
America is often hailed as “the land of the free,” but what does
freedom actually mean in this country? For many, it has always meant
something specific: the liberty of a small, powerful class of property
owners and capitalists to control, exploit, and profit. From the
founding documents to modern political rhetoric, American liberty has
been grounded in the principle of private property, which has shaped
both the legal and social structures of this nation. This deep
connection between property and freedom has led to a fundamental
contradiction — democracy, in its true form, becomes nearly impossible
in a society built on wealth inequality.
In this article, we will trace the philosophical and political roots
of American freedom, exploring the influence of thinkers like John Locke
and the ways his ideas were woven into the nation’s founding
principles. We will examine how property ownership became a key marker
of liberty and how this has historically excluded marginalized groups,
from Indigenous people to women and Black Americans. Further, we’ll
explore the contradictions inherent in a capitalist system that
champions competition while simultaneously concentrating wealth and
power in the hands of a few. Finally, we’ll ask the central question:
“Freedom for whom?” and argue that true freedom in America can only be
achieved when the economy and government are structured to serve the
needs of all people, not just the wealthy few.
The Pursuit of Happiness and the Right to Estate
Allow us to begin our investigation of American Freedom with our
Declaration of Independence, in which founding father Thomas Jefferson
famously wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new Government […]”
– Transcript of the Declaration of Independence, National Archives
The idea that a government ought to derive its right to rule from the
consent of the governed, the interests of “Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness” sounds like a noble set of ideals, that hardly
anybody would contest. But beyond vague platitudes of freedom and
democracy, what do we actually mean when we speak of these ideals?
John Locke wrote in his 1698 work, “Treatises of of Civil Government”,
that all men have equal and provable rights under the so called “laws
of nature” to “life, liberty and estate”. He said the same thing in his
work of the same year, titled “A Letter Concerning Toleration” where he
wrote that:
“Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body;
and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses,
furniture, and the like. It is the duty of the civil magistrate, by the
impartial execution of equal laws, to secure unto all the people in
general and to every one of his subjects in particular the just
possession of these things belonging to this life.”
– John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, pg.6
John Locke’s writings would go on to influence the liberal-democratic
thinkers who came after him, including the political establishment of
colonial America. In 1774, the First Continental Congress of the
American Colonies would meet to publish a statement in protest of the
“Intolerable Acts”, passed by British Parliament. In this statement
titled “Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress” they
argue that,
“they [the inhabitants of the English Colonies] are entitled to life,
liberty and property: and they have never ceded to any foreign power
whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.”
– Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, 1774 [Brackets mine]
In other words, the Americans rebelled against the British because
they saw the British government as trespassing on the rights to property
held by the American colonists. The right to property is to an
American, the right to the pursuit of happiness. The fact that the
framers of our constitution saw the right to property ownership as a
cornerstone of a just democratic society, is incontestable.
Private Property and Blood, the Historic Exclusion of Marginalized Groups
But the rhetoric of natural rights was never meant for all — and it
was enforced with violence. Polices like the Homestead Act were written
with this understanding, as in early America white settlers sought to
pursue their own happiness and freedom by claiming their own property,
where he may live free of government interference. For a time, most
white Americans could be called “free” in this sense. But for white
Europeans immigrating to America, freedom meant conquest. Land was
liberty, and liberty came through dispossession.
The land that
America was built on was not uninhabited. Every inch of American soil
was fought for and paid in native blood. The Indigenous people who came
before us were forcefully pushed off their lands. Those who signed
treaties with the Americans were betrayed, and pushed further and
further to the west as American settlers continually violated colonial
agreements with native peoples.
Further, the right to property
ownership was restricted to propertied white men only. Women were seen
as lesser than men, and were forced to cede their property to their
husbands upon getting married. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity act of
1974, many women were legally denied the right to even open their own
credit and banking accounts, in other words the right to financial
independence. Black people on the other hand, were treated only as
property, and they only gained the federal right to property ownership
after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, after the American
Civil War. Because the right to vote was tied to property ownership,
Women, Black people, and other minorities were in this way systemically
denied the right to political enfranchisement.
In other words,
the freedom of America, the ideals that this country was founded upon,
really referred to the freedom of property owners, land owners, the rich
and wealthy, white-male establishment, rather than the general public.
The Contradiction of Capitalism
Even ignoring the racial and sexual inequities of American propertied
freedom, American freedom has always been tethered to property — not
people. In a world of Ideals where everyone is entitled to the right, or
at least the opportunity to own land, all would be free in theory.
However, this conception of universal freedom is inconsistent with the
material and economic reality of American Capitalism.
Proponents
of the capitalist system will often speak of the benefits of competition
between enterprises. Buyers compete with other buyers to obtain goods
and services, and sellers compete with other sellers to obtain the
patronage of buyers. Through the competition of competing firms in a
free market, prices are inevitably driven down. The capitalist who can
bring about the lowest price, and the highest volume of goods and
services sold, will generally win out in the end.
Marxist
economists also understand this very well. As the means to produce are
further developed the amount of effort, labor power, needed to produce a
given commodity is reduced. Through machine tools, automation, and the
division of labor, the productive potential of the economy is increased,
and the price of goods fall. The rate of profit in this way has a
tendency to be lessened for each individual commodity. Therefore in
order to combat this tendency of the rate of profit to fall, capitalists
must expand their business to new markets or increase the exploitation
of the markets they are already in. Those capitalists who fail to lower
their prices and innovate upon the productive capacity of their firms
will inevitably be run out of business by more competitive firms,
because buyers have a tendency to prefer cheaper and more accessible
products over products that are expensive and antiquated.
Where
the proponents of capitalist economy fall short in their analysis, is
that they fail to take the competition between capitalist firms to it’s
logical conclusion. Eventually somebody wins the race. Somebody gets
first, second, and third place. The competition comes to an end, as all
processes do. Over time the less competitive firms are run out of
business, and the market becomes cornered by a small group of business
cartels and monopolies. Those who were ran out of business inevitably
find themselves cast into the lower class of workers and paupers, as
economic power centralizes in the hands of a few.
Marx wrote about this in his seminal work, Capital Volume One, where he argued that:
“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent
and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the
proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the
industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive
power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. The
relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with
the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in
proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a
consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its
torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers of
the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is
official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.”
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, Chapter 25, 1867
In this way, the supposed ‘freedom’ of capitalism is fundamentally at
odds with real freedom for the majority of people. The expansion of
capital inevitably leads to monopolies and cartels, where wealth becomes
concentrated in fewer hands, leaving the working class to bear the
costs of that accumulation.
Even in colonial America, we already
saw the embryo of capitalist accumulation. By the year 1774 50.7% of the
wealth held by those legally eligible to even hold wealth in the first
place was held by only 10% of the population of the Thirteen Colonies.
Keep in mind, this number doesn’t even include the masses of black
people, indigenous people, and women in the calculation, who were denied
property rights altogether. This contradiction, wherein the freedom of
the white man was defined by a right to property ownership in an economy
where a small class of elites already owned most of the land, was only
offset by colonial expansion of homesteading to the west as settlers
found themselves pressured to expand westward to stake their own claim
on indigenous soil.
However, eventually there was no more west to
conquer, and the lands of the first nations were occupied by white men.
Railroads and fences cut through the grazing land of native cattle
herders, and indigenous people were left with smaller and smaller
parcels of desolate and isolated land. With no more room for expansion,
the law of capitalist accumulation was allowed to play out freely, and
eventually white farmers would be gradually pushed off their stolen
lands in favor of agricultural conglomerates.
Democracy Denied
Despite the legal victories of the past century, true democratic
participation remains elusive. The rhetoric of ‘equal rights’ has not
transformed into a functional democracy, but rather a system where the
majority of citizens are politically disenfranchised by economic
inequalities perpetuated by capitalist structures.
Today the
right to vote and other democratic freedoms are no longer necessarily
restricted to those who hold property. In theory, Black people,
Indigenous people, women, and all other historically marginalized groups
have achieved legal equality, but centuries of exclusion from property
and wealth created deep structural disparities, where the majority of
those within the ruling class end up being white men anyways, because
they had already won the game before the rest of America had even gotten
the chance to play it. All that has changed now, is that in accordance
with the laws of capital accumulation, the average white man has been
cast into the same class of unpropertied workers that most Americans
find themselves in today.
As of 2021, 36% of America’s households are renters.
Even among those Americans who are fortunate enough to own their own
homes, even fewer own their means of subsistence. During the age of
Manifest Destiny, white Americans didn’t just own their homes, they
owned their farms and they lived off the land. However as of 2023, only
7% of Americans actually own a business.
Further,
even though all citizens have the same legal rights in theory, in
practice the general public is still politically disenfranchised.
According to a study from Princeton University, average citizens and
mass based interest groups have “little or no” influence on U.S.
government policy. Pro-change democratic majorities only get the
policies that they want 30% of the time. Further, even in the event of
super-majorities where 80% of the public overwhelmingly favors a policy,
that policy still has only a 43% chance of being passed into law.
As
of 2020, 63% of Adult Americans say that the government should ensure
access to healthcare, and 36% of Americans say this should be done
through a single national government program, while only 30% support the
current system of Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, only 6% of
Americans say there should be no government involvement of any kind. In
spite of this, we still see politicians pushing to undermine efforts to
improve government healthcare programs, and even go as far as to cut
existing healthcare polices. For example, the Trump administration has
cut the affordable care act by 90%, to only ten million dollars.
88% of Americans say that cannabis should be legal for medical or recreational consumption, yet it remains federally illegal.
62% of Americans support a 15$ per hour federal minimum wage, in spite
of the fact that the federal minimum wage remains a paltry and unlivable
7.25$ an hour.
85% of Americans support federally mandated paid medical leave, 82%
support paid maternal leave for new mothers, and 69% support paid
paternal leave for new fathers.
In spite of this there is no federally mandated paid medical or family
leave. 77% of Americans support limiting the amount of money that
individuals and groups can spend on electoral campaigns.
In spite of this, Super PACs, 501c4 Nonprofits, and Joint Fundraising
Committees are allowed to donate hundreds of thousands and sometimes
even millions of dollars to electoral campaigns.
Regardless of
whether or not you support any of these policies, it cannot be denied
that the enactment of these polices are the will of the democratic
majority in America. Yet we do not see these policies being pushed into
federal law, because they are blocked by politicians paid off by
financial interest groups. How ironic is it that the same politicians
that preach to us about upholding our democracy and defending our
republic are the ones who are participating in the same system of
financial corruption and backroom deals. Our democracy has been bought
and paid for.
Freedom for Whom?
Returning now to our Declaration of independence do you have a right
to life when you are denied coverage for life-saving and preventative
medical care, and stripped of the right to a livable wage? Do you have a
right to liberty, when your democratic voice can be overshadowed by the
interests of money in politics? Do you have a right to the pursuit of
happiness when property has been allowed to accumulate in the hands of a
small heavily racially segregated class of society that does not share
your interests?
Even if we were to turn back the clock of history
itself, redistribute the wealth so that ownership of private property
is equally distributed among society, because of the very same laws of
capital accumulation that got us here in the first place, we would
inevitably find ourself in the same circumstances of today, where
political power is invariably isolated in the hands of the ruling class
of capitalists and financial investors. It would be tantamount to
replacing companies Blackrock, Apple, Amazon, and Google with a
different set of monopolists. In fact this has been done before. U.S.
Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T and the American Tabbaco company were all
broken up by antitrust laws. Yet in spite of this, new monopolists and
cartels have always taken their place. Its doing the same thing over and
over again and expecting different results.
Thus we may now
answer the central question of this article. Freedom for whom? When the
vast majority of working people are systematically denied the right to
property in a society where political power is centralized in the hands
of those who hold property, it can hardly be said that there is any such
thing as real practical democracy for most Americans. In other words,
America is a financial oligarchy, and it has always been dominated by
financial interest and the interests of big land owners and slave owners
over those of the working class.
So we must ask ourselves do we
want freedom for the people, the public? Or do we want freedom for the
capitalist class? Do we want the freedom for businesses to exploit their
workers while the government that is support to protect the rights of
the public looks the other way? Or do we want the right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not just for the rich, but
everybody?
Therefore, we must move beyond the traditional
constraints of private property ownership, and advocate for the
socialist mode of production. Because only when the means of production
in society, today’s property is organized on a democratic basis for the
workers, when capital accumulation gives away, can we truly have a
functional democracy that is impervious to financial manipulation.
The
current constitution is often described as a defense of our natural and
inalienable rights. However this perspective fails to understand the
complex machine of money, power, and influence that allows for the
ruling class to maintain their power. We don’t have rights today because
a small group of rich people felt pitiful and decided to hand it to us.
Black Men faced the possibility of being lynched for voting yet they
still chose to show up to the polls. Women were beaten for marching
through the streets. Gay and Trans people had to riot in Stonewall
before we ever had the right to gay marriage and gender affirming care.
Rights
can overturned, constitutions can be amended or ignored. In 2022 Roe v.
Wade was overturned and women lost the federal right to safe abortions.
The current Trump Administration has decided that it can just deport
U.S. Citizens even legal migrants with no trial or hearing to countries
they have never even been to. As the Trump administration marches ever
onward and erodes legal norms, the ruling class violates the agreements
and concessions made to the working class.
Call to Action
The Declaration of Independence clearly states,
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and
to provide new Guards for their future security.”
– Transcript of the Declaration of Independence, National Archives [Brackets Mine]
The founding fathers may have narrowly interpreted the “pursuit of
happiness” to serve their own interests, but that does not strip the
words of the value that they should hold in the heart of every American.
If we understand life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as
inalienable rights belonging to all people — especially workers, not
just the wealthy and powerful — then the call for change becomes not
only justified, but necessary. When the people are systematically
disenfranchised, ignored by an increasingly authoritarian state, it is
not just their right — it is their duty — to resist.
In conclusion, if we as Americans truly seek to honor the ideals we
claim to uphold, then the current government must be dissolved by a mass
movement of the democratic workers. A new and revolutionary democratic
order — rooted in free political participation, public ownership of the
economy, and government transparency — must be created. We must push for
a complete reconstruction of our economy under a socialist mode of
production. Only then can we build a society that is genuinely free and
just for all, regardless of race, sex, gender identity, sexual
orientation, age, disability, religion, or any other axis of oppression
used to divide us. Only then can we truly say: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights.
- Jones, Wealth of a Nation to be, Table 6.2; the Cambridge Economic History of the United States Volume One, pg 204
- Pew Research Center, As national eviction ban expires, a look at who rents and who owns in the U.S.
- Pew Research Center, As national eviction ban expires, a look at who rents and who owns in the U.S.
- Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
- Statista, Established business ownership rate in North America in 2023, by country
- Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
- Trump cuts to Affordable Care Act program will hit hard in Tampa Bay
- Most Americans Support a 15$ Federal Minimum Wage
- Americans Widely Support Paid Family and Medical Leave, but Differ Over Specific Policies
