2016 Postmortem

Last edited Wed Oct 7, 2015, 11:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Locke, Rousseau, Smith: ie. liberalism. They were influenced by liberalism, the political corollary of capitalism--capitalism as posited against mercantilism and democracy as posited against monarchy. The Constitution is the quintessential liberal document and hence the quintessential capitalist document. It codifies the concept of individual rights, which is an essential component of capitalism and stood in contrast to the collective rights of pre-capitalist societies. The American revolution was called a revolution because it overturned colonialism--colonialism which depended on mercantilism.

Democracy is a political system. Capitalism is an economic system. Our Founding Fathers were the wealthiest men of the land, slaveholders and large Northern landholders. They were not ordinary Americans. In fact, they set up a series of mechanisms designed to distance government from the people. The government served their interests, and the constitution protected slavery. In the mid-19th century, as the economy became increasingly based on manufacturers, the nature of the economic elite shifted from wealthy landowners to factory owners. At the turn of the 20th century it was the industrialists whose names are well known, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.... Certainly you couldn't suggest that our economy was not capitalist in that era?

If the early Republic wasn't capitalist at its foundation, what was it? Was it mercantilist? Feudal? What was its economic system? When did it become capitalist? I wonder if you actually know what capitalism is? Have you read Marx's Capital?

My points have nothing to do with the Clinton campaign. They derive from my background in history, a discipline in which I hold a PhD. The position is not right-wing but rather founded in Marxism, but Marxists certainly are not the only ones who make that point.

You take the mythology you learned in grade school as undisputed fact, and therein lies the problem. Ask yourself this. At what point was the US government "of the people"? At its founding when only white male property holders could vote, when a great portion of the population was enslaved and others denied full citizenship? Did it represent the people during Jim Crow, when only straight white men had full rights? Our government was representative in that it provided greater participation than under monarchy, but it never represented the people as a whole.