Notes on the early class struggle in America - Part 1
The birth of the American proletariat
“The discovery of gold and silver in America; the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production.”[1]
"In bourgeois mythology the first settlers to America were free men and women who built a democratic and egalitarian society from scratch in the New World.
The reality is that the American proletariat was born into bondage and slave labour, faced barbaric punishment if it resisted, and was forced to struggle for its basic rights against a brutal capitalist regime that most resembled a prison without walls.
Capital’s slave labour colonies
Eager for their share of the spoils, at the end of the 16th century the mercantile capitalists of the City of London set out to plunder the natural resources of the New World. The first English colonies in North America were capitalist enterprises from the start, where even the Puritan pilgrims who embarked on the Mayflower were expected to turn a profit for their wealthy backers. But to exploit this New World capital needed labour.
In Central and South America the Spanish enslaved millions in their thirst for gold. Not finding the expected mineral riches, English capital was forced to turn to the cultivation of the tobacco plant, and for this it needed a huge regimented workforce. The local indigenous people proved too difficult to enslave in sufficient numbers and resisted the violent invasion of their homeland, but fortunately for England’s merchant adventurers a supply of labour existed much closer to home; over the preceding centuries the English peasantry had been driven off its land and, in Marx’s description, “turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labour.”[2]
These terroristic laws were used to banish so-called “persistent rogues” to “parts beyond the seas”, which meant that tens of thousands of men, women and children deemed a threat to social order and surplus to domestic capital’s needs were simply rounded up and shipped off to work in the tobacco fields of Virginia, where many were worked to death or tortured if they tried to escape. Among the first to be sent were children, half of whom were dead within a year. The largest single group were convicts; and since hanging was the standard punishment for the most trivial offences there was no shortage of ‘criminals’ who could be granted royal mercy in exchange for transportation to the colonies – although death rates were so high that some pleaded to be hanged instead. Others were in effect political prisoners of the English bourgeoisie in its ruthless struggle for domination of the British Isles. In an operation that bears striking similarities to the 20th century Stalinist gulag, royalist prisoners of war, Quakers, English rebels, Scottish Covenanters, Irish Catholics, Jacobites and dissidents of all kinds were disposed of by being forcibly transported to America to be worked to death as slave labour. Ireland had long been singled out by the English ruling class for this kind of treatment and unknown numbers of Irish men, women and children were sold into slavery before and after Cromwell’s bloody conquest and ethnic cleansing.
Nearly two-thirds of all white immigrants to England’s American colonies – some 350-375,000 people – arrived as indentured servants, required to work for anything from three up to eleven years or more in return for their passage and basic needs. Indenture is often presented as a benign contractual system. In reality it was a form of time-limited slavery, as well as a highly profitable business for the merchants involved, who employed recruiting agents to waylay, kidnap or lure the unsuspecting into boarding ship for America, where they became the personal property of their owners and could be bought and sold, punished for any disobedience, whipped and branded if they ran away. Many were children. Even if they survived to the end of their bondage they were far more likely to join the ranks of the proletariat than to own one square inch of the New World. [3]
In its insatiable appetite for profit, capital enslaved anyone it could get hold of without discrimination: Africans, Native Americans, English, Scots, Irish, French, Germans, Swiss... The first African slaves arrived in 1619 but until the end of the 18th century the majority of slaves in America were European. . .
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