Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is: Part II

With the plague of Justinian, smallpox, and the Black Death all descending upon the native nations of the Americas at once during the Columbian Exchange, there would be no such threat to American nazbol democracy, at least not from them. Because America's capitalist history was so good to white Americans, it had to be an unending tragedy for my fellow Natives (like many Americans, I'm descended from both), a litany of broken treaties, exile, kidnapping, extortion, torture, genocide, and most importantly, resistance. We lost repeatedly against an overwhelming imperialist power with an invisible demon army of plagues at its (at first) unwitting command.

The frontier not only raised democratic rights for white people, but it also raised economic power. The sparseness of the frontier led to a high cost of labor, much higher than Europe's until the early 1900s. This, I believe, is directly correlated with America's belated and anemic socialist movement compared to Europe, as well as America's economy overtaking Europe's in the same time period. Though America was far more capitalist than Europe, higher wages kept it in the free market sort of capitalism typified by Lenin in The State and Revolution longer than the rest of Europe, and delayed the transition to finance capitalism. Higher wages also led to higher demand, creating a larger capitalist economy to start with before decaying towards fascism. The only modern economy in a similiar situation to 1800s America's is Australia. Labor markets are much tighter there due to a surfeit of resources and a relative lack of people to process them.

The American frontier, as defined by the Western historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was closed and full of people by 1890, So, that explains why the first native-born American socialist party of note, the Socialist Party of America, only came to any sort of prominence in the early 1900s - the price of labor had finally begun to permanently decline in relative terms. The frontier could no longer absorb excess labor or excess production, and an increasingly proletarian America only then began looking to proletarian solutions to their problems. But without the extensive experience of socialism that the European countries had, they were easily led astray by FDR's New Deal, and support for socialism fizzled.

But there was an important caveat in that last paragraph: "native-born." Socialism had already been part of a ruling coalition in American bourgeois democracy once before Eugene Debs ever ran for President. Indeed, Debs even alluded to it once in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, when he said "The Republican Party was once Red. Lincoln was a revolutionary." But where had it come from?

In 1848, a wave of revolutions swept over Europe, and especially over the still-disunited German principalities. The revolutionaries were a mix of liberals, anarchists, and socialists. These revolutions were brutally crushed by the monarchies of Europe, and hardest in the German principalities. Many of the German revolutionaries fled for their lives to exile, most of them to America. German revolutionaries in particular held one thinker above all in their esteem: Karl Marx.

They brought that esteem with them to the New World, where they found themselves already in the rough-and-tumble of American democracy in the early 1850s. The Democrat Party was a monolith throughout the slaveowning states, and their opposition - the Whigs, the Free Soil Party, the Know-Nothings - were scattered apart on that very issue. These German revolutionaries ended up coalescing with remnants of these three parties, and the Northern industrial interests that backed them, to make the Republican Party.

The Republican Party's name was chosen as a nod both to the anti-monarchical nature of the American revolutionaries of 1776, and the German revolutionaries recently arrived. Its original ideology was strongly pro-worker, in the unsophisticated and non-programmatic way that's always sprung organically from working class movements in America. There wasn't any highfalutin' language about the means of production, or any other socialist jargon recognizable to the middle class. But there was an ironclad dedication to abolitionism to better the lots both of the slave and of the free men expected to compete with slaves, there was the principles of the Homestead Act of 1862 in embryo, and they were willing to be preached to and led by average workers, even farmboys-turned-lawyers from the absolute sticks like Lincoln.

The Republican Party didn't win its first election, but ran its own Bernie in John Fremont. "Free land, free men, Fremont" did not carry the 1856 election against James Buchanan, who was a sort of accelerationist figure sending slave patrols into the North for his racist masters. But four years of Buchanan, and the utopian liberal narcissism that led Stephen Douglas to split the Democrat vote against Lincoln, allowed this not even ten-year-old party of radicals to sneak into power.

Abraham Lincoln's political line on slavery, as abhorrently reformist and racist as it often was, was the left wing of the possible at any given moment. The left wing of the possible, as Lenin noted, is the correct line at all times and places. A contemporary of Lincoln's who agreed was Karl Marx.

Marx never visited America, but a friend of his who emigrated named Charles Dana (who would go on to serve as Lincoln's secretary) got him a job as an opinion columnist for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, the chief Republican paper of the day. Marx' fame as a radical communist, his admirers in the German-American revolutionary cohort, and his ardent Unionism meant that he would go on to write over 500 editorials, both signed and unsigned (the unsigned ones being the opinion of the paper as a whole), in the lead-up to the American Civil War. To put this into context, at the time of the founding of the Republican Party, Karl Marx was its Rush Limbaugh, its chief opinion-haver in the media. The party of Reagan and McCarthy once ideologically sat at the feet of a German Jew and the most legendary communist of all time.

Continue reading Part III