[Marxism] Re: Pearl Harbor, etc.--reply

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>"conspiracy" hardly describes a process that went on in the open and 
was debated vigorously, loudly and at length. It's like saying the New 
York Yankees are conspiring to win the American League championship. 
--Carroll

You are correct in saying that technically this is not a conspiracy. 
However, my rhetorical point is that the American people believes that 
this is a democracy and that in the political sphere, at least, we 
freely and fairly choose our leaders. The conspiracy is that the ruling 
class and the media of today and the past hide the real condition of 
our political life. It is hidden in full view. Of course, my rhetoric 
was designed to show that the known machinations of the capitalist 
system are what we should be concerned with, rather than hidden 
conspiracies.

Of course, some conservatives argue that the United States is not even 
supposed to be a democracy. They claim that it is a republic—not a 
democracy. What I argue is that by describing the origin of our system 
and how undemocratic it is, we can show that it is, in fact, not even a 
truly democratic republic. How much more dramatic evidence do we need 
than that the 22 smallest states, with a population equal to that of 
California, have 44 senators, while California only has 2!

>>> When well-meaning people affirm, for rhetorical effect, that the 
Constitution declared Afro-Americans to be only three-fifths human, 
they commit an error for which American historians themselves must 
accept the blame. (Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology 
in the United States of America”) --Carroll

Among those well-meaning people we must include the American 
abolitionist movement.

The Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, is our 
most important document. It is a slave document and its legalistic 
phraseology embodies the social attitudes of the times. As you, or 
perhaps Fields, points out, the authors of our constitution would never 
have used a phrase 3/5 human, at least not to your face.

The rhetoric that slaves were only 3/5 human is a rhetoric device that 
says that hundreds of thousands of souls who labored for the benefit of 
a few and were in fact considered chattel like a cow or a horse or a 
pig instead of citizens who could, taking account of the property 
requirements of those days, vote or aspire to vote for their own 
representatives and have all the other rights of citizenship is not 
only mine, but I trust all well-meaning people. The whole rhetoric of 
the slavocracy was that they were sub-human, somewhere between an ape 
and a human. I am not going to bother to look up appropriate quotes. 
There are hundreds, if not thousands.

>>>Secondly, the 3/5ths clause was a compromise between opposing 
interests. Here is Barbara Fields's account:
(Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United 
States of America," New Left Review, May/June 1990, pp. 99-100)

>>>Emphasis: The slaveholders wanted slaves to count as "full persons" 
for representation, _zero_ for taxation. The north wanted the opposite. 
"Conspiracy" is utterly out of place here. It is difficult to 
understand the centrality of racist oppression in U.S. history if one 
replaces analysis with careless rhetoric.

>>>It also meant that the southern taxes were higher than they would 
have been if "non-free persons" had counted as Zero-fifths, and that 
northern taxes were higher than they would have been if "non-free 
persons" had counted as five-fifths!

Yes, the South did agree to “potentially” pay taxes on the basis of 
population, although that was not the common method at the time.

But this was not a compromise at all, although some historians of 
popular textbooks may be happy to use this phrase. There was no 
argument; they didn’t sit down and negotiate it. It was an easy 
agreement. After all, the South was also getting the benefit of 5/5 of 
the labor of their slaves, while only potentially having to pay for 3/5 
of their labor. That’s not a compromise, but a win-win situation for 
the slavocracy.

See below for a view contrary to Ms. Field’s. *

>>> the use of "fascist system" here is worse than careless usage. To 
apply the term so indiscriminately utterly confuses understanding of 
the many various forms of oppression (past, present, future) under 
capitalism. In a series of posts on lbo-talk several years ago Yoshie 
demonstrated brilliantly that loose usage of the epithet "fascist" 
plays into the hands of the Democratic Party. If the Bush 
Administration were a fascist threat the policy of the ABBS would make 
perfect sense. But there are many kinds of authoritarian state and 
fascism is by no means the most common form. Nor is it the form that 
most threatens us now.

You are incorrect in thinking that my reference to fascism means that I 
am one of those that loosely uses the word to describe contemporary 
phenomena. I assure you that I am completely at the other end of that 
spectrum. I use fascism to identify the organization and political 
system in the South that defeated Reconstruction on the ground and that 
lasted until the formal achievement of civil equality throughout the 
country as a result of the great struggles of the 1960s.

It is my hypothesis that what took place in the American South 
following Reconstruction was an early form of fascism. I believe that 
the terms “Jim Crow” and "caste system" are unfortunate--almost 
euphemisms. They are completely inadequate in describing or summarizing 
the organized violent onslaught against black citizens who had won many 
social, political and economic rights during Reconstruction. To defeat 
them, the capitalist state, directly in the South and with the 
conscious agreement of the Northern-based rulers, unleashed bodies of 
armed men to pulverize and destroy black organizations and black-white 
cooperation.

The full development of this first fascism took more time than in the 
Italian, German, Spanish and other forms, yet it advanced with similar 
motives and organizational structures. And it achieved similar results.

One might argue that it could not be possible to have fascism in the 
South while there was bourgeois democracy in the North. This was not 
such an anomaly. After all, Southern chattel slavery co-existed with 
Northern capitalism. The extent of the violence required to destroy 
chattel slavery is a testament to how contradictory that marriage was.

From Brian Shannon
_______________
*
"The Electoral College Votes Against Equality"

By Vikram David Amar and Akhil Reed Amar

While the United States tries to persuade the Arab world to embrace 
democracy, ethnic equality and women's rights, at home we're set to 
pick a chief executive via an electoral college system that was 
designed in part to cater to slavery and to accommodate the 
disfranchisement of women.

As we all were reminded in 2000, the presidential candidate with the 
most popular votes nationwide does not necessarily win. Instead, the 
Constitution allots to each state a certain number of electoral votes 
based on population. Conventional wisdom holds that this system was 
originally aimed at giving smaller states a boost: Every state, no 
matter how tiny its population, would get at least three electoral 
votes. But, in fact, every one of the early presidents came from a 
populous state, and over the course of two centuries only three 
presidents have come from low-population states: Taylor, Pierce and 
Clinton.

In a system in which each state awards electoral votes on a 
winner-take-all basis, large states loom, well, large. So do swing 
states, where each side focuses its campaign because it has a realistic 
chance to win a statewide majority and thus the state's entire 
electoral bloc.

If helping small states does not really explain the electoral college, 
what does?

At the founding of the country, the deepest schisms ran not between 
large and small states but between North and South. At the 
Constitutional Convention, when Pennsylvania's James Wilson proposed 
direct national election for the president, Virginia's James Madison 
countered that such a system would enable the North to outvote the 
South; under direct election, the South would get no credit for its 
half-million slaves, none of whom, of course, would be able to vote. 
The electoral college system that ultimately emerged gave the South 
partial -- three-fifths -- credit for its slaves.

Virginia was the big winner, thanks largely to its massive slave base. 
Under the 1800 census, the free state of Pennsylvania had far more 
eligible voters than Virginia but got 20% fewer electoral votes. 
Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought 
or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were any slave 
state to free slaves who then moved to the North, it could actually 
lose electoral votes.

For 32 of the Constitution's first 36 years, a slaveholding Virginian 
occupied the presidency. In 1800, Virginia's Thomas Jefferson beat 
Massachusetts' John Adams because of the three-fifths handicap. Had 
slaves not been counted, Adams would have won. With this pro-slavery 
bias of the system in full view, Americans in 1804 adopted a 
constitutional amendment (the 12th) that pointedly preserved the tilt 
toward slavery while fixing other electoral college glitches caused by 
the emergence of national political parties.
. . .
Vikram David Amar is a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. 
Akhil Reed Amar is a law professor at Yale.
Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2004

_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism