ulture this common ownership becomes a fetter on production. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stages is transformed into private property.
“But at a higher stage of agricultural development, brought about by private property in land itself, private property in turn becomes a fetter on production as is the ease today, both with small and large landownership. The demand that it also should be negated, that it should once again be transformed into common property necessarily arises. But this demand does not mean the restoration of the old original common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, on the contrary for the first time frees production from all fetters and gives it the possibility of making full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.” (Anti-Dühring, pp. 156-7.)
Champions of capitalism such as Conant imply or imagine that, thanks to its unique features and exceptional capacities, capitalist America is set apart from the rest of the capitalist world. All its peculiarities and powers, however, will not suffice in the future, any more than they have in the past, to enable the bourgeoisie in this country to escape the operation of the laws of the class struggle. These laws, which formerly worked in their favor, are now more and more turning against their regime. Although American capitalism may follow paths marked out by the special conditions of its own historical development, these lead toward the same ultimate destination as its European counterparts: the graveyard where obsolete social systems are buried.
The transition from ancient Indian collectivism to the various forms of production rooted in private property also casts considerable light upon the ways and means by which the forces of bourgeois society arrived at their present eminence in America.
In their catalogue of crimes against humanity, the spokesmen for capitalism include the expropriation of property without “just compensation,” the use of violence to overturn established regimes and the resort to extra-legal measures. They add, as the crime of crimes, the extermination of entire populations, for which the term “genocide” has recently been coined. These self-professed humanitarians ascribe such aims above all to “Marxist” and “Communist” devils. In contrast they hold up the angelic respect for property rights, love of peace, regard for law and order, preference for gradual change by democratic consent and other virtues presumably inculcated by American “free enterprise.”
This is a handy set of principles to justify the capitalist regime while defaming its opponents. But all these principles have little application to the conduct of the bourgeoisie in American history. They have been honored, if at all, more in the breach than in the observance.
Historians fired by zeal to indict the opponents of capitalism (for these offenses) should first direct their attention to the ancestors of contemporary American capitalism. No class in American history invaded the property rights of others more ruthlessly, employed violence so readily, and benefited so extensively by revolutionary actions as has the American bourgeoisie on its road to power.
The precursors of the monopolists acquired their property by expropriating the Indians, the British crown along with its Loyalist lackeys, and the slaveholders, not to mention their continued stripping of the small farmers and self-employed workers. They affected these dispossessions of other people’s property, not simply by peaceful, legal or democratic means, but in extremely violent, high-handed and militaristic ways. Wherever they could not get what they went after by bargaining or money, they took by main force or direct action.
The conquest of the Indians, as we have seen, takes its place in this series of events as the earliest and crassest case of the rapacity, ferocity, and duplicity with which the bourgeois forces smashed the impediments on the 