Your celebration is a thin
veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages.
-Frederick Douglass,
1850
Men make their own history, but they
do not make it as they please; they do not
make it under self-selected circumstances,
but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brains of the
living.
-Karl Marx, 1852
Rancid Optimism
February 06, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-
Counterpunch - In
announcing his retirement from the absurdly
powerful U.S. Supreme Court during a press event
at the White House, the gabby octogenarian
Stephen Breyer recently held up his pocket copy
of the U.S. Constitution and waxed sentimental
on the greatness of the nation he loves. Breyer
said that the USA was a great democratic
“experiment” – “an experiment” that is “still
going on…My grandchildren and their children,
they’ll determine whether the experiment
still works. And of course, I am an
optimist, and I’m pretty sure it will,”
Breyer said.
“Revolting Barbarity and Shameless
Hypocrisy”
The United States was an “experiment” alright
– an experiment in racist savagery and class
rule. I wonder if Breyer has ever read The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
a harrowing account of life under Black chattel
slavery written more than half a century after
the ratification of Breyer’s holy constitution.
I wonder if he’s ever read Douglass’s brilliant
1850 speech “What to the Slave is the Meaning of
the Fourth of July?” – the address in which
Douglass observed that:
to the American slave, …your Fourth of
July…[is] a day that reveals to him, more
than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelly to which he is the
constant victim. To him, your celebration is
a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy
license; your national greatness, swelling
vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty
and heartless; your denunciations of
tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your
shouts of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns, your
sermons and thanksgivings, with all your
religious parade, and solemnity, are, to
him, mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover
up crimes which would disgrace a nation of
savages. There is not a nation on the earth
guilty of practices, more shocking and
bloody, than are the people of these United
States, at this very hour. Go where you may,
search where you will, roam through all the
monarchies and despotisms of the old world,
travel through South America, search out
every abuse, and when you have found the
last, lay your facts by the side of the
everyday practices of this nation, and you
will say with me, that, for revolting
barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America
reigns without a rival.
The Man of Business on the Mountain:
“Silent Profits” and “the Quintessential
American Story”
In retirement Breyer might also want to read
up on the author of the July 4th 1776
Declaration of Independence (DOI),
Thomas Jefferson, who was anti-slavery in his
youth but went on to prevaricate about the slave
system that paid his debts. One of many wealthy
white widowers who used young female slaves for
sexual release before and after the American
“revolution” (which was fought partly
to ensure the survival and expansion of North
American Black chattel slavery), Jefferson
enjoyed prominence as a “revolutionary leader”
while keeping some of his own children as
slaves. Justice Breyer can start with Henry
Wiencek’s heralded volume, Master of the
Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
(2012), which dug into previously overlooked
evidence in Jefferson’s papers and new
archaeological work at Jefferson’s Monticello
site to paint a depressing picture of
Jefferson’s stunted, penny-pinching world.
As one reviewer notes:
‘Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book
based [shows that] … We must… follow the
money… Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of
business and public affairs who makes a
success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks
to what he calls the “silent profits” gained
from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral
universe that he and thousands of others
readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking
out a slave-equity line of credit with a
Dutch bank to finance the building of
Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens
when visitors are dismayed by his apparent
endorsement of a system they thought he’d
vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story.
Slave boys are whipped to make them work in
the nail factory at Monticello that pays
Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are
divided from children in his ledgers… Slaves
are bought, sold, given as gifts, and used
as collateral for the loan that pays for
Monticello’s construction―while Jefferson
composes theories that obscure the dynamics
of what he himself called “the execrable
commerce.” Many people saw a catastrophe
coming and tried to stop it, but not
Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had
become deeply corrupted, and an oligarchy
was getting very rich. Is this the
quintessential American story?
Breyer should also read historian Edward
Baptist’s prize-winning study The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and Rise of
American Capitalism. Baptist shows that
19th Century U.S. cotton slavery was a highly
profitable capitalist project based on the
ruthless oppression and systematic torture of
Black workers in forced labor camps and rape
sites known as “plantations.” Racial bondage and
exploitation on a massive scale produced the
surplus value that fueled the United States’
emergence as a player in the world of capitalist
nations before the Civil War, Baptist shows.
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It was one Hell of a profitable experiment,
critical to the rise of early industrial
capitalism across the Atlantic world.
When Predator Extended the Sphere
Bryer should also consult Anthony F.C.
Wallace’s
account of Andrew Jackson’s genocidal ethnic
cleansing of Native Americans (the “five
civilized tribes”) from the Southeastern United
States – the mass-murder murderous US removal of
Indigenous nations to clear the land for the
depredations of cotton slavery. Then he could
turn north to read historian Kerry Trask’s study
of the so-called Black Hawk War of 1832,
critical backdrop for
Chicago’s transcendence of Manchester as the
miracle city of the Age of Capital and one
of many bloody, one-sided “settler” triumphs on
the corpse-filled frontlines of “the American
experiment.” After some of their warriors
challenged the occupation of their sacred lands
and homes by white “settlers,” the Sauk and Fox
Indians lost 600 people in the August 1832
“Battle of Bad Axe,” in southwest Wisconsin.
“While the Sauk refugees were preparing rafts
and canoes,” Trask
writes, “the armed [U.S.] steamboat Warrior arrived,
whereupon Black Hawk tried to negotiate with its
troops under a flag of truce. The Americans
opened fire, killing twenty-three warriors.” One
US officer who “served” in the assault recalled
that “as we neared them they raised a white flag
and endeavored to decoy us, but we were a little
too old for them.” Hundreds of Sauk and Fox men,
women and children were shot, clubbed, and
bayoneted to death at the confluence of the Bad
Axe and Mississippi Rivers. US soldiers scalped
the dead. They cut long strips of flesh from
dead and wounded Indians for use as razor
strops. The slaughter was supported by cannon
and rifle fire from the Warrior, which
picked off tribal members swimming for their
lives. The United States suffered 5 dead in the
“Battle of Bad Axe.”
Another “quintessential American story,” one
of countless massacres that pock-marked the
white “settlers’” “democratic” conquest of
Native North America (Google up the Mystic
River, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee massacres
for starters), which included the massive
levelling of forests and prairies and the
colossal destruction of animal life. The
genocidal butchery inflicted on the continent’s
original inhabitants by “Predator” (Ward
Churchill’s term for the invading
Caucasians) was curiously consistent with the
DOI’s slanderous description of what
the Man on the Mountain called “the merciless
Indian savages[’…] known rule of warfare…an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes,
and conditions.” Here Jefferson anticipated the
exterminist practices of the nation’s beloved
Founder George Washington, known to the Iroquois
as Conoctocaurious, meaning “Town Taker,”
“Burner of Towns,” and “Town
Destroyer.” In 1779, during the so-called
American revolutionary war, Washington ordered
and organized the
Sullivan Campaign, which carried out the
annihilation of 40 Iroquois villages in New
York.
Along the way, the glorious Father of Our
Great Experiment in Freedom and Democracy owned
more than 300 Black slaves. He expected the Black
chattel humans on his 1790s Mount Vernon
estate to work from before sunrise to after
sunset six days a week. At the end of the U.S.
“revolutionary” war, he demanded that the
British return all escaped slaves in their
possession to their “rightful owners.”
The Great Experiment was driven to “extend
the sphere” –
James Madison’s imperial recommendation for
diluting any chance of meaningful organized
rebellion by those at the bottom of the
propertarian republic. It stole its vast
Southwest and California from Mexico through the
barrel of a gun, gaining thereby the task of
murdering Comanches and Apaches. The
one-sided “Mexican-American War” featured the
mass slaughter and rape of Mexican civilians
along with the bloody occupation of Mexico City.
US-American “Manifest Destiny,” the white
nationalist myth that just this war of conquest,
had no more moral or scientific legitimacy than
the divine right of kings.
After it lost more than 600,000 people in a
Civil War
resulting from Southern slaveholders’
determination that the election of Abraham
Lincoln posed an existential menace to their
racist system, the U.S. let the South
re-establish cotton slavery in new, post-chattel
forms and launched the bloodiest industrial
relations and labor history the world had ever
seen. During the Great Labor Upheaval of 1877,
US troops fresh from slaughtering Sioux children
were deployed to crush immigrant workers who
were designated as “white savages” by the
nation’s capitalist press. The largely
immigrant-based workforce in the nation’s giant
new “Jungle” of deadly mines, mills,
slaughterhouses, and factories was demonized as
racially inferior and dangerous despite its
European origins. For leading an Eight Hour
movement and questioning the class rule of the
new industrial and commercial bourgeoisie,
Chicago social revolutionaries were executed in
grisly short-rope fashion
at the behest of the malignant merchandising
mogul Marshal Field on November 11, 1887.
Its industrial rise fueled by chattel and
wage slavery, the great “democratic” US-American
“experiment” would soon expand its
sphere-extending predation beyond its borders as
it joined Europe in the imperialist division of
the world. “Exceptional” America enlisted its
gendarmes in the murder of people its forces
called “Apaches” and “niggers” in the
Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central America.
The next two centuries would see the United
States directly and indirectly exterminate
millions, mostly nonwhite (East Asians above
all), in the names of “freedom” and “democracy.”
(For a summary of the carnage, which was
continuous with the savagery of the initial
continental sphere-extension, see my 2019 essay
“The
World Will Not Mourn the End of U.S. Hegemony”).
Who Controls the Present, Past, and
Future
This is some of the Trumpenvolk- “triggering”
history that Youngkinian Kens and Karens want
(in the name of opposing Critical Race Theory
[CRT]) their children to never learn. Beneath
claims of wanting to protect children from
trauma, the real purpose behind their
determination to send real US-American history
down Orwell’s memory hole is to make past
crimes invisible so as better to repeat them.
Neo-Confederate
palingenetic “Make America Great Again”
nationalism requires a whitewash of the past. By
absurdly labelling real history CRT,
paranoid-style Republifascist
thought-controllers get to add a swipe at the
intellectual class (always a key fascist target)
and to suggest that they are sheltering youth
from allegedly dominant “cultural Marxism” and
the global communist conspiracy. Never mind that
liberal CRT discourse is limited to some law and
graduate schools and academic journals. It isn’t
actually “taught” in US-American K-12 education.
“Who controls the past,” Orwell’s mind-managing
ruling Party tells its whitewashers
in the dystopian novel 1984,
“controls the future. Who controls the present
controls the past.”
A Penny on the Dollar “Democracy”
Here we are 246 years after the Man on the
Mountain took projection to new heights by
calling Native Americans genocidal “savages” in
a document that upheld “liberty” and proclaimed
that “all men are created equal” even as it
helped launch “revolution” to save North
American slavery and ethnic cleansing from
British suffocation. The vicious “experiment”
lives on in a savagely unequal nation – a
world-leading mass incarceration, mass shooting,
and
covid death state where the top thousandth
has
as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and
where (in a remarkable reflection of slavery’s
long reach) “black families have just
one cent for every one dollar of accumulated
wealth that white families have.” Yes, a “penny
on the dollar”: you
read that correctly.
In other news, democracy is a distant dream
in this de facto class dictatorship, where
“politics is the shadow cast on society by Big
Business” (John
Dewey) and majority public and progressive
opinion is
regularly cancelled by concentrated wealth and
power. How could it not be? As the Supreme
Court Justice Louis explained in 1940, “We may
have democracy, or we may have wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t
have both.” The “exceptional” US-American
“experiment” –
exceptional among rich nations for the
extremity of its poverty, inequality,
ill-health, violence, segregation,
incarceration, and more terrible to mention – is
caught up in a vicious oligarchic circle. The
more harshly separate and unequal it becomes,
the more plutocratic it gets; the more
plutocratic it gets, the more harshly separate
and unequal it becomes.
This is Happening Now and Here
Stephen Breyer’s “grandchildren and great
grandchildren” will “determine if the experiment
still works”? Has Breyer read any of the
relevant climate research on where the American
and related global capitalist experiment is
leading livable ecology quite soon?
Environmental catastrophe, the natural outcome
of capitalism’s anarchic addiction to endless
growth and its lethal dependence on fossil
fuels, is already underway. It’s happening to
all of us and other living things now, with
permafrost eruptions and ever more extreme
weather events and epidemic drought taking place
in the present moment. It’s not even clear how
many future generations will survive. And
capitalogenic ecocide is intimately related to
the fascist threat here and abroad,
as Andreas Malm has shown: it promises to
bring about precisely the kinds of material
societal crises that are the breeding grounds
for fascist movements and the consolidation of
fascism-as-force regimes.
Fascism “can’t happen here.” Is that so? We
have learned just how remarkably close the
Orange Fascist Insect (the OFI) and his minions
came to stealing the 2020 election. Whole
slates of fake Electors were in place to
hand contested states to Herr Trump if only Mike
Pence had played along on January 6, 2021.
Ex-military and ex-police paramilitary
Oath Keepers were organized as Quick Reaction
Forces positioned just off site “to rapidly
transport firearms and other weapons into
Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed
at using force to stop the lawful transfer of
presidential power” on the day of the attempted
insurrection,
More than one year later, January 6 is seen
as inspiration and prologue – a “great dress
rehearsal” (to steal Lenin’s description of
Russia’s 1905 revolution) – for millions of
Americans and most of the nation’s elected
Republicans see it in a favorable light or feel
compelled to say they do. Donald Trump’s
Hitlerian Big Lie of a Stolen Election is
accepted by
three in four Republicans. Nearly a third of
whom would like to see Biden removed even before
the next presidential election. Vast swaths of
the white Amerikaner “homeland” believe that
political violence is justified now to “save
American culture” from the supposedly in-power
“radical Left.”
The OFI is back on the hate rally campaign
trail,
promising (in essence) to pardon the OKs and
other “fascist marauders” (Congressman Jamie
Raskin’s accurate phrase) who tried to subvert
the peaceful, bourgeois-democratic transfer of
power last year. (Trump apparently considered
trying to offer a blanket pardon to the fascist
rioters
before he left office). He has made a
Horst Wessel-like
martyr out of the putschist military veteran
Ashli Babbitt and is calling “for the
biggest protests we’ve ever had” to terrorize
the Black female prosecutors who are
investigating his crimes. Responding to the
fascist leader’s call, the
New York Times reports, “the
prosecutor examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to
overturn the election in Georgia
immediately asked the F.B.I. to conduct a ‘risk
assessment’ of her building’s security.”
Trump has
recently endorsed Republifascist candidates in
Michigan who advocate pulling the plugs on
voting machines and
coming to polling places “locked and loaded.”
Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a right-wing
celebrity by killing Black Lives Matter
protesters with an illegally owned AR-15, will
surely garner a post in a second Trump
administration. As we learn that Trump tried to
enlist the
military in seizing voting machines in
contested states after the 2020 election, the
right wing Congresswoman Liz Cheney is right:
“He has acknowledged that he was trying to
overturn the [2020] election. He is making it
clear he would
do this all again if given the chance.”
As fascist mobs threaten election, school,
cultural, and public health officials and
workers (including now even school nurses and
librarians!) across the country and as the right
bans books that tell the truth about slavery,
Native American genocide, sand the Nazi
Holocaust, it seems likely that the
Republifascist Party and its thugs will soon
extinguish previously normative bourgeois
electoral democracy and constitutional rule of
law.
“Civil war” and national “implosion” seems
practically inevitable by numerous highly
informed accounts. “The much-proclaimed
‘shining City on a Hill’,” Revolutionary
Communist Party leader
Bob Avakian rightly and wryly observes, “is
full of fascists.” And not just in rural
backwoods and farm towns. The disproportionately
petit-bourgeois people arrested for breaching
and trashing the Capitol Complex on January 6,
2021, were
mainly from “Blue America” suburbs where whites
feel threatened by rising minority
population. White members of fascist big city
police unions can’t wait to pull their triggers
on people who protest the Trump or DeSantis coup
of 2024-25. The urban police forces that turn
out en masse and to great media
applause to honor their fallen comrades (like
Ella French in Chicago last summer and Wilbert
Mora and Jason Rivera in New York last week) are
loaded with authoritarian personalities and
neofascists. These “Blue MAGA” forces are ready
to advance white nationalist lawlessness in the
name of law and order.
“We have a little less than two years,”
says Cooperation Jackson leader Kali Akuno,
“before the neo-Confederates and fascists
install a reactionary dictatorship by the end of
January 2025” – no small matter in world
history’s most powerful state. Not merely
fascism but
white power genocide is on the table in the
world capital has made here and abroad.
“The Democrats need to stand up to this,”
liberal friends tell me. Know any other good
jokes? The Weimar Dems,
Sheldon Wolin’s “inauthentic opposition,”
are hopelessly wedded to bourgeois democratic
institutions that the Republifascists are
smartly wiring never to “work” (Bryers’s word)
again. They have little to offer beyond passive
and
hollow resistance.
What an abject moral and generational
surrender it is for an 83-year-old man still
enjoying mad privilege at the pinnacle of the
imperialist world system to say in the face of
all this that the preservation of (so-called)
democracy is a project for future generations –
and to cheerfully identify himself as an
“optimist” and say he’s “pretty sure” the
(supposedly democratic) “experiment” will “keep
working.” Really, judge? Breyer’s own absurdly
powerful body (the Supreme Court) is set to
re-impose the de facto female slavery of forced
motherhood next June unless millions of
US-Americans take to the streets and public
squares to stand up for the basic human rights
of women of childbearing age on March 8th –
International Woman’s Day. The Supremes seem
likely also to significantly roll back local gun
control in a bitter and divided nation saturated
by weapons and plagued by a rolling epidemic of
mass shootings. (The Armed American Madhouse
already feels overdue for another one of its
recurrent, tragically normalized and
overdetermined mass casualty gun violence
events, be inflicted by some angry white male
“radicalized” by right-wing media and by a
disintegrating society that the anti-science
pandemofascist right has helped turn into a
Covid-19 Sanctuary State.)
Imagine an Actual City on a Hill
Speaking of history weighing “like a
nightmare on the brains of the living,” I never
cease to be impressed by the durable
paranoid-style power of the fascistic
neo-McCarthyism that lets the U.S. right call
both the lying, neoliberal and warmongering
Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations party of
the Clintons, Obama, and Biden and the US
government “radical Left,” “socialist” and even
“Marxist.” The right Amerikaner noise and hate
machine has millions of its unmasked followers
believing that Joe Biden is “the Trojan Horse of
socialism” and Kamala Harris takes instructions
from the writings of Chairman Mao!
Imagine if the USA had an actually radical
Left government instead of a perverse Manchinian
oligarchy well down the overlapping paths of
fascisation and terminal environmental
catastrophe. It’s a beautiful thing to
envisions. In a revolutionary socialist North
America, the leading financial, media, military,
and energy corporations would be expropriated,
nationalized, and thoroughly transformed in
service to the common good. Fossil fuel
extraction and burning would be massively
curtailed as part of a rapid transition to
renewable energy. Health care and not just
health insurance would be nationalized,
socialized, and otherwise transformed in service
to the common good. The former US capitalist
global empire would be thoroughly repurposed and
radically transformed to spread global eco
socialist transformation. Workers councils would
be formed to coordinate with the revolutionary
government to transform and repurpose economic
activity in accord with eco socialist
priorities. Parasitic bourgeois profits and
anarchic capitalist “market rule” and
competition would cease to exist. The
bourgeoisie as a class would be socially and
historically abolished, its parties and media
rendered harmless. Homelessness and poverty
would be abolished. Fascists would face
merciless liquidation. Racism and sexism would
be designated as official societal enemies and
crimes along with classism and ecocide. They
would be deeply understood as matters of
societal and institutional structure, policy,
and practice and not merely as problems of
subjective prejudice and belief. Women’s
reproductive rights would be fully and
immediately restored and guaranteed. Opponents
of public health would face severe penalties and
have zero right to spread murderous
disinformation. Real and honest history would be
rigorously taught from K through college and
beyond, not to traumatize young people but to
inspire them for the popular and democratic
liberation of humanity, rescuing and properly
telling real stories not only of oppression but
also of people’s rebellion, and resistance.
“To Show That What Looks Like a
Rational Conclusion is Mistaken”
A rancid imperial superpower turned
revolutionary state that did all that would be
something like a shining city on a hill.
Imagine. It could happen. I get my faith, very
different from Bryer’s decrepit and fraudulent
optimism, from the many conversations I have in
which people agree – despite all the capitalist
and revanchist propaganda to which they are
regularly subjected – that this is a kind of
future that would “work” and that is worth
fighting for: revolutionary socialism.
Is my radical conviction and even (admittedly
guarded) optimism misplaced? Perhaps but that’s
a question for “above it all” odds makers and
intellectuals sitting on distant Mandarin
perches that hold no interest for those of us
who know that it’s now an existential choice
between eco-socialism or potentially terminal
catastrophe. Believing in the chances for
revolution no matter what the betting odds is
actually the rational choice.
As Noam Chomsky has explained:
‘I think an objective observer, from
Mars, let’s say, looking at the human
species would conclude that they’re an
evolutionary error—that they’re designed in
such a way that leads them to destroy
themselves, probably much else along with
them. That would be a rational conclusion.
We can decide whether that conclusion is
right or wrong. Fate: that choice is in our
hands. I don’t think it’s a question of
optimism or pessimism. But do we make the
choice, the effort, to show that what looks
like a rational conclusion is nevertheless
mistaken? That’s up to us.’
It’s not about the crystal ball, comrades.