7. Progressively fewer persons are self-subsistent, outside the capitalist economy. To do so, they need to possess their own means of production and consume a minimum of commodities that are purchased from others. They are neither wageworkers nor employers. Small numbers of people live by begging. Their numbers are exceeded by institutionalized individuals, those who live in jails and prisons. About one in fifty American adults are prisoners. A lesser number are in the armed forces, and in a real sense, can be regarded as workers rather than as self-sustaining. Persons who are too ill or young or who care for other members of their families may receive support from governmental bodies. Their number is falling drastically as such programs are severely reduced. Around one-fifth of all children live in poverty; many do not have health or dental insurance. Growing numbers lack regular shelter or access to meals or schooling. More than a century ago, when American Indians were suffering the loss of their lands, they received reservations as a consolation. Today's poverty-stricken children, owning no lands or other assets that today's elites can acquire, lack reservations and dwell unconsoled."
Taken from Chapter 12 - Conclusion of "A Short History of American Capitalism by Meyer Weinberg," the above paragraph gives a good example of how the author presents his material in an easy to read format any politically astute worker in America could read without serious obstacle. Each chapter of this book closes with a summary allowing the reader to dart back and forth between chapters and still form a basic concept of the growth of the American economy and the political culture of its institutions as shaped by the owning class, and/ or those whose "means" allow them to be regarded as capitalist. I read this text in one sitting and skipped over chapter 2: Indian America, 3: Colonial Economy, 6 Standard of Living under capitalism 1790 - 1865 and chapter 11: Human Cost of American Capitalism 1945-2000, deciding to swing back and read them after writing this quick review and before filing it away. Having steered clear of reading such books concerning "American Capitalism History" - for perhaps 12-15 years, a broad smile arose within, while reading the Introduction. The author establishes his theory framework and leaves little to chance or needless pondering by defining capitalism, the timeframe of its fundamental consolidation in American society and uses "by 1900," as the index. For one whose economic reading of American history views the emergence of Wall Street Imperialism in the aftermath and as the result of the Civil War, the defeat of Reconstruction and consolidation of its economic and political hegemony during the 1890s, I knew this was going to be a rough ride. Although no one pinpoints the exact date a distinct social phenomenon arises, the general date attached to the fact of the emergence of Wall Street imperialism is linked to 1895 and Booker T. Washington's famous Atlanta speech. This is so because Washington's speech and reality crystallized a new configuration of class and economic forces in American history. Nevertheless, Chapter Four "TWO WORKING CLASSES, 1790-1865" is very impressive in outlining the growth and evolution of products created at the hands of private individuals - in the main owning their own tools, mentioning the role of the merchant as trader and owner of the money form of wealth, the slow growth of product exchange, i.e. evolution of the power of the commodity form and the scope to which enslaved labor was deployed. Enough data is presented to form a solid opinion and characterize American society amongst those who take serious the wealth of material Marx and Engels wrote concerning the character of slavery in America and America role in the evolution of the world market. The author's personal point of view - established in the Introduction and contained in his definition of capitalism, does not present any obstacle for anyone with a desire to understand the economic centers of gravity North and South. This chapter opens on the basis of the economic development transforming America and in five paragraphs carries one to the fountain of truth and this made it a good read. "Cotton exports were of critical national importance during the years 1815-1843. Foreign exchange poured into the United States and financed the import of machinery and other manufactured goods. In the years after 1843, American exports of manufactured goods and grains lessened the relative importance of cotton exports. Meanwhile, however, cotton production continued to stimulate various industries in the United States. Referring to the northern center of shoe manufacture in Lynn, Massachusetts, Paul Faler observes "many a fortune was made in the Southern trade during the years before the Civil War."14 The flow of cotton northwards and then overseas stimulated the development of financial and shipping services that could not be provided by southern firms.15" Things were not all cotton behind the "Cotton Curtain." In unraveling the scope to which the enslaved workers were deployed, Weinberg gets right to the point and throws a one liner closing that that implies recognition of the opt forgotten Appalachia Question. "Enslaved workers labored in mining, manufacturing, crafts, and on canals and railroads. Around 1820, in the present West Virginia, rented enslaved workers worked along with Englishmen and Welshmen.20 In the eastern part of Virginia, most ironworkers were enslaved laborers. At the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond about half the work force was made up of enslaved workers. Seventeen pig iron establishments in Tennessee were staffed with about 1,000 enslaved workers.21 Bradford notes, "at the furnaces and forges slaves... did everything but manage the establishments. ..."22 "The elite among them," he continues, "were the refiners, molders, and blacksmiths, and because a skilled slave was as valuable as two ordinary hands, many ironmasters owned a few skilled [enslaved] workers."23 "Early on, when railroads were first built, planters frequently invested in the enterprises by contributing the labor of enslaved workers who worked on the roadbed.24 As time went on, they became more important. As Licht points out: In the antebellum period, hired slaves formed the backbone of the South's railway labor force of track repairmen, station helpers, brakemen, firemen, and sometimes even enginemen. The southern railroads ... faced strong competition for slave labor from the agricultural sector. As a result, southern rail companies were forced in many cases to purchase slaves directly and provide for their upkeep.25 "By 1860, the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis railroad had spent $128,773.29 for enslaved workers.26 (After the Civil War, when racial segregation of the work force was brought about by the railway unions, free blacks were denied access to some of the same jobs they had worked while enslaved.) Throughout Southern Appalachia "trained slaves ... operated boats to inland regional markets, like Richmond, Lynchburg, Augusta, Savannah, or Columbia."27 (End of Quote) Weinberg presents amazing data and facts but apparently has a devil of a time making political sense of these facts, although his political observations are anti-keen. One can earnestly speak of two working classes as the Civil War opened. The authors Introduction prepares the reader for the strange features one encounters on the road of American history and for many employing slaves in industry as industrial workers is beyond strange and enters the world of the absurd. Acknowledging Karl Marx writings on the evolution of the private owners (individual) of instruments generating the initial impetus of co-operation, the emergence of the bourgeois property relations, the growth of the manufacturing system on the basis of the latter, and its transition into the industrial mode of production - the totality of these processes, which since Marx has simply been referred to as "capitalism," Weinberg faces the complexity - the absurdity, of that, which is specific to American history, as it passes through several transition: "The first, from 1600 to 1790, is characterized by handicraft-subsistence production alongside elements of a semi-capitalist economy stemming from commercial production of tobacco. The most commercialized sectors of the economy were predominantly staffed by enslaved and semi-enslaved workers. During the second period, 1790-1865, several industries became organized along capitalist lines and some sectors of agriculture lost their subsistence character until by the period's end agriculture as a whole was producing for the market. A working class of free and unfree elements is then growing rapidly. In the third period, 1865-1920, economic development attains an extraordinary pace as industry and, increasingly, agriculture becomes subject to capitalist forces." The difficulty in unraveling the various phases in the evolution of the bourgeois property relations, the growth of private producers and product exchange, i.e. the commodity form, and that peculiar institution of plantation slavery apparently does not consist in their intrinsic evolution as links in the chain of the world market - being created by and on the basis of bourgeois property relations, but in a so-called comparative relationship measuring the trajectory of how the bourgeois property relations and the private producer evolved within the framework of feudal society and its transformation in the form of wealth from landed property to movable wealth - property or the money/capital relationship. "Marx did not deal centrally with the United States. While Marx identified free labor with capitalism, in the U.S. free, semi-free, and unfree labor was important; capitalism in England evolved out of feudalism but only some of the latter's remnants could be glimpsed in the U.S.; in England, the agricultural economy first became capitalist while in the U.S. it lagged behind manufacture. The U.S. was the first modern capitalist country to develop from a colonial status, from a slave base, and with an enormous natural-resource endowment." After given what seems to be a compulsory need to make sense of "individualism" - dare I say bourgeois individualism or private individual ownership rights and however this is articulated in the social and ideological sphere by individual philosophers, the author points out: "In colonial America, the business corporation was almost unknown. During all the years before 1789, only thirty such firms were formed and virtually all of them failed.6 With the opening of the nineteenth century, however, the real history of the modern business corporation began." "History is all but absent from the pages of the Left and the Right in the United States. Left journals rarely deal with the history of American capitalism. Nor do references to the subject appear in articles devoted to analysis of the contemporary scene. In other words, economic history seems to be irrelevant. Capitalism in Left discussion becomes only contemporary American capitalism. And it is an unchanging capitalism. How it originated is a mystery. More is written about the history of English capitalism, although the particularities of English and American history are extremely different." The author has set himself an ambitious task and rises to the occasion. By assembling in an easy to read package a mountain of facts and data one can make political sense of American history and be inspired to read or reread much of the writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels anew. As a concise short course in American history Weinberg's "History" only seems to lack perhaps two paragraphs on the mechanization of agriculture and the liquidation of the 11 million sharecroppers and how they ended up moving into the lower section - unskilled, of the working class. As a political narrative one encounters contradictory concepts embodied in the simplest of terms. "While Marx identified free labor with capitalism, in the U.S. free, semi-free, and unfree labor was important," is a seemingly innocent statement of an obvious fact. However, when one investigates Marx meaning of "free labor" and produce the various text he uses the concept "free labor," "free laborer" and "wage laborer" it becomes clear why the author uses the term enslaved laborer and enslaved worker to describe the slave laborer status prior to the Civil War. The Marx deploys the term "free labor" primarily to mean "unattached to ownership of means of production." That is to say what constitutes the "free labor" of the individual in history the degree to which he is "unattached to ownership of means of production." The fundamental legal relationship consolidated in the superstructure on the basis of the individual relationship to property - means of production, which becomes codified as law or the ethical relations of bourgeois society, evolves on the basis of this "unattached ness." Marx traces this relationship in Capital through its three primary phases; handicraft or simple co-operation, manufacture and modern industrial production relations. Chapter 4 made it necessary to swing back and read chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 "INDIAN AMERICA." Here the two paragraph summary does not do justice to the story the author weaves around the compiled data that tells the bloody story of "Indian removal" or as it is called by Marxist "the primitive accumulation of capital" and its impact on what would become the United States of North America. In explaining aspect of slavery during this early colonial period, the term enslaved worker is deployed as opposed to "unfree laborer" although the economic content of these workers in 1690 bear little resemblance to that of the enslaved workers of the 1800s - one-hundred years later. For reasons I cannot explain my browser would not let me open Chapter 3 and it is probably for the best. The political logic of this "Short History" had from the beginning moved with an inverse logic: the longer the data and facts became the shorter the history. Chapter 10, "THE FADING TRIUMPHS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM 1945-2000," contains a three paragraph summary and a whopping 165 footnotes, 91 paragraphs, 380 lines and roughly 8,000 words and I understood that things were going to get extremely ugly. To speak of "A Short History of American Capitalism" between 1945 and 2000 and leave out the driving economic transformation within America during this period borders on the criminal. Within the state that is the multi-national state of North America, the mechanization of agriculture, the liquation of the sharecropper as a class - that is the destruction of the historic small producer (petty bourgeoisie) defines the period from 1940 through about 1982 or the period of the mass marketing of the personal computer. Let us leave aside the Civil Rights Movement as the political logic defining social and economic relations in America during this period, an oversight inexcusable. The fundamental mechanization of agriculture and the more than less absolute proletarianization of the peoples of America is a historical economic process of immense proportions. This process is as important as the economic processes leading to the Civil War and defines the composition of our working class and its line of trajectory as a class undergoing qualitative reconfiguration. What is being questioned is not the economic data presented or even how the existence of the Soviet Union conditioned and to a significant degree altered the flow of finance capital but the political logic of this chapter, which flows from the author's politics in Chapter 9. Chapter 9 has even more footnotes - 179, than Chapter 10 and is titled: THE TESTING OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM, 1920-1945. Here is the opening lines: "American capitalism underwent three testing during 1920-1945. From 1920 to 1929, corporate firms prospered as never before, the national government presided benevolently in the interest of business, and profitability reached record levels. Economic rewards were very unevenly distributed. Nevertheless, its heritage consisted in the second testing period, 1929-1940, the Great Depression, the most destructive economic catastrophe of American history. American participation in World War II, during 1941-1945, constituted the third testing. Unemployment all but disappeared, large-scale industry prospered, and the political power of the capitalist class was restored. Vast military expenditures were the primary force behind the third testing." If this passage had been written in the 1960s - it would still he horribly flawed, but historically understandable. To be written and published in 2002 is simply wrong. Between 1920 and 1982 the most obvious and dynamic transition in America is the absolute separation of the American people from agriculture, the liquidation of the sharecropper as a class, the destruction of the family farm and the absolute urbanization of the population. This of course means the absolute industrialization of American society. This is the economic content of Chapters 9 and 10 and how this process played itself out in the social and political sphere. The summary in Chapter 9 is most disheartening. The final paragraph states: "In each of the three sub-periods of 1920-1945, American capitalists confronted a different test. During the 1920s, corporate business pretty well had its own way in economic and political affairs. Governmental policies were largely responsive to corporate interest, tax legislation favored the rich, in just about every major industry unionization was slight. Federal and state courts were deeply anti-labor. Yet, corporate America proved unable to maintain these conditions in the face of the economic decline of the Great Depression. During the slumping economy, the capitalist class lost some of its luster, but little of its wealth. It also yielded somewhat of its political power while retaining a good deal of its voice in moderating New Deal policies. Altogether, a mixed bag. It was, however, during wartime that American capitalism passed a most consequential test: It more than recovered its leadership role of the 1920s. In addition, it became a major factor in military and foreign policy as well as a paramount element in the making of domestic economic policy. A half-century later, capitalist considerations were still dominant." This was more than one could bear. Chapter 5 RISE OF THE CAPITALIST CLASS, 1790-1865 is equally interesting and presents a wealth of data concerning the rise and consolidation of the capitalist class as it arose on the bourgeois property relations or as the author states commercialism. The genesis of this commercialism is of course to be found in the countries and trade associations responsible for colonizing America in the first place. That is to say the impulse of colonization was not to reproduce the age-old feudal estates of Europe. By now my patience had grown thinner, along with my arteries and to prevent the slow down of blood flow to the heart and brain, I quickly read the remaining chapters and start deleting the down loads of this text I had made. Weinberg's enslaved workers are and were proletarians in chains. The author misses the essence of the meaning of "the value producing system," "bourgeois property relations," "industrial production" and why/how slavery in America drove the transition from manufacture to industry in our country. Consequently, he misses the living compistion of our working class and what sections are spontaneously drawn into the economic struggle for survial and the battle against the state. Talk about being 30 years behind the curve and missing the economic and political logic that compelled the author to unravel why the slave of the plantation belt in the 1800s, was an enslaved worker in the first place. To present the data that proves a point and then miss the point reminds me of the age old slogan of the Negro College Fund: "A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste." Or rather, "A Mind can be a Terrible Thing." Melvin P.
