Democracy v. Capitalism: historical considerations

Capitalism, with its pop culture’s projection of cheap glamor and frivolity, retains a strict fixation on the immediate present moment of gratification, and denies any validity to the boredom of past and future. Democracy, on the contrary, embraces human narrative, is committed to the unfolding and the retelling of individuals’ life histories, and follows unflinchingly the true stories of human history, in all their tragic nobility and comic absurdity.

To this end are added here historical considerations to help situate democracy’s current state of struggle within the broader context of American and world historical developments. Only by understanding the sources in past events of our present institutions, ideas, prejudices, and antagonisms, is their any hope of countering negative forces successfully and to see clearly the paths forward to be followed.

From the freebooting conquistadors who sought out and waged wars for the golden riches of Mexico and Peru, to the hunters, trappers and woodsmen who first established trade links with Native North Americans, to the forcible liquidation of Southeastern tribes by Andrew Jackson to expand white settlement, to the war of Texas Independence, and onward to today, the European presence in the New World has been dominated by a culture of coldly calculating profit motives, with an eye toward expanding private property for European descendents. The landscapes of America have always been regarded chiefly for their potential pricetags. The “freedom” of the New World has been, from the time of Columbus, not least the freedom of opportunity to strike it rich.

In the early 1600s, British, Dutch and French settlers began colonizing the Atlantic seacoast while under the sovereignty of European crowns, and they engaged in commerce and acquired raw materials under their competing economic authorities. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the British colonial societies banded together and boldly declared their independence from England, against an oppressive government whose arbitrary tyrannies had grown intolerable, and amid the general atmosphere of European Enlightenment idealism concerning revolutionary “rights of man.”

Ideas about truly universal suffrage, abolition of slavery (both racial-chattel and debt slavery), even radical transformations of traditional private property relations, were all current in the 1700s and were known to the colonial “Founding Fathers” who rebelled against their (quite literal) British fathers.

Nevertheless, America was not established on a broad footing of universal democracy, nor as a genuinely representative government. What was forged instead was a more limited practical compromise between the moneyed interests of the traditional property-owning classes, on the one hand, and the emerging ideals of progressive society, on the other. Thus the first stage of the American Republic defined as “citizens” only white men, its Constitution favored the colonial ruling class of landowners, and the racial-chattel slavery of the South was left untouched, protected implicitly by the Constitution’s protections of private property.

Native Americans were wholly ignored; legally and constitutionally speaking, they were an invisible and mute feature of the wild natural landscape itself. They were also foreign nations, as they remained throughout the United States’ westward expansion, and as they remain today, living as subjugated autonomous nations on “reservations,” under treaty terms that are still unhonored and trampled by paternalistic policies of a foreign conqueror’s government.

The first two hundred years of the United States were a gradual, tempestuous struggle to expand democracy—abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the two-day work weekend, abolishment of child labor, etc. But always this was a struggle against entrenched and shifting forces of reaction and regression, and these forces were and have always been strong, violent, coldly calculating and unscrupulous.

United States foreign policy in the nineteenth century was centered on establishing the US on as wide a territorial footing in the New World as possible. Before the Civil War, American interests lay in winning the game of North American colonialism; by buying or driving out the British and French from the Great Lakes and “Louisiana,” where Spanish holdings also had to be acquired; by establishing a clear line of demarcation between the US and the still British colonial Canada to the north; by wresting as much lands in the Southwest and West from Spanish-Mexican occupation, settlement, control and influence.

Throughout this time and even more so after the Civil War, this colonial expansion also entailed continual wars of elimination and eradication with Native American peoples. These wars often were, properly speaking, genocidal in effect and even in design. American popular hatred of the “Red Savage” was widely disseminated in academic parlance, in the press, and in popular culture alike. Like the deeply rooted racism of the South, which had developed as an integral part of the slaveowning ideology, anti-Indian attitudes were a largely unquestioned common core of the nineteenth-century American psyche. The Red Man was “doomed to die out,” and white “Civilization” was being spread by a divinely decreed “Manifest Destiny” across the North American continent.

In their opposition to the encroachments of white settlers, in their tragic struggles for self-preservation against militarily overwhelming armies, and an unscrupulous free enterprise system of private property and commercialism that was nevertheless foreign to the conceptions and communal mores of most tribes, Native Americans were widely demonized as “terrorists,” as “insurgents,” as “lawless barbarians.”

It is hardly a stretch to compare the Sioux warriors of the 1870s with the peasant Vietcong “communists” of the 1970s, comparisons many Native Americans themselves made at the time when they left their reservations to fight overseas in Uncle Sam’s Army (read, for example, John Fire Lame Deer’s testimony in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions). Nor is it a stretch to compare today’s Middle Eastern traditionalists (whether in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, etc.) to the disparate nations of the American West who banded together in the 1880s-90s in common to oppose the commercial-military-religious juggernaut of US imperial expansion. In each case local populations are fighting to preserve their way of life and freedom of self-determination in the face of an arrogant invading force intent on subjugating, or “pacifying” them, and taking control of their environment and its valuable resources.

Readers inclined to doubt the description of the US conquest of North America as genocidal imperialism, thinking this some inflammatory “revisionist” picture of our history, would do well to remember the last states to be formalized in the Union. Before Hawaii and Alaska were finally brought under the umbrella of federalism in 1959, the last states were New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, and Oklahoma in 1907. New Mexico and Arizona, along with the Dakotas, are the states with the largest native occupied and reserved lands today. And Oklahoma—formerly “Indian Territory”—had finally been opened to white settlement in 1889, after it had been used as a last desperate containment camp for dispossessed and defeated tribal vestiges, driven there by forced march on foot or shipped by railcar, from South, North, East and West after defeats in wars.

By this time America was forced to become involved in the self-destruction of Europe, in WWI and, following in short order, WWII. Then, in the wake of the Second World War, the phoenix of the United Nations came to birth out of the ashes of a corrupt and self-immolating over-technologized corporate-military civilization. In its charter the UN declared an end to colonialism, and that people’s everywhere ought to be able to determine their own futures, be subject to no dominating imperial powers against their will.

Nevertheless, it still took the United States until 1959, under increasing pressure at home and around the world, to settle on statehood for Alaska and Hawaii as a way to incorporate the last two most glaringly colonial occupations under American hegemony. Needless to say, the colonialist nature of the American presence in Hawaii (to say nothing of Alaska) has always been brazen and blatant. Even today no caring and observant visitor to the islands of Aloha can be unmoved by the Hawaiians’ continued resistances to American domination, to statehood itself, and the local movement to reestablish native sovereignty.

It is generally forgotten and ignored now, in America’s pious fictionalization of World War II, that the US was the ally of Communist Russia in fighting and defeating Nazi Fascism. Far more than an alliance of convenience joined us with the Soviets. We also shared a social liberal idealism, a vision of an equal, fair and just society where all people might live happy, healthy lives, free from exploitation and slavery. What destroyed the USSR was not communism, but kleptocracy, plutocracy, despotism, and militarism run rampant. These same forces have undermined and are now destroying American civil society as well, and the democratic spirit that has fostered it.

Now, as the “last world superpower” the US-backed (but not controlled) global corporate machine is assaulting democracy and stable civil societies everywhere. They will stop at nothing—not even at dismantling American civil society as it has been up to now, and a major cultural force for spreading the real radical vision of the Enlightenment—to pursue the entrenched interests of expanding global capital, of extracting from every corner of the world every last ounce of “resource” that can be “extracted” for sale and gain, and leaving the planet a wasteland of production, consumption, and, finally, total social disintegration.

A grim picture, surely, but one that is easily foreseeable in the ways and means of technological capital today, with its ethically bankrupt culture of “profit” and “development.” Nevertheless, it need not be the planet’s only possible future. We can change the course of events. But we must think smart, act courageously and creatively, and be willing to try radical experiments in social arrangement, in political systems, in energy production, and in how humans relate to and interact with one another and the planet.

To be continued....