oncentrate attention upon that side of American historical development whereby precapitalist methods of production and forms of property were displaced by ascending bourgeois relations. They largely ignore other aspects of the same process. It is true that the regimes following Indian tribalism multiplied the powers of production through the practices and passions of private ownership and “free enterprise,” improved techniques, widened culture and opened new vistas to mankind. But these acquisitions had to be paid for by increased inequality and the intensified oppression of the rulers over the ruled. Precious qualities of freedom and fraternity were lost in the shift from primitive collectivism to modern capitalism. As a result of the prevailing class division of society, humanity has remained stunted and defective.
Yet bourgeois thinkers assume that the triumph of capitalism coincides with the highest attainable summit of human existence. History is to be halted while the American people perpetually salute their capitalist commanders in the reviewing stand. How does such an outlook essentially differ from that of the slaveholders who could not adjust themselves to the advent of higher social forms?
In reality, the steps leading to the consolidation of capitalism were only a prelude to the building of a truly civilized life for the American people, and not at all the crowning acts of American civilization. These remain to be taken as the next great stage of our evolution matures and as we move toward socialism.
In the anti-Marxist polemics of spokesmen for capitalism, there is a fatal inconsistency. On one hand, they point to the unlimited potentialities of abundance in -the manufacture of motor cars, atom bombs, supersonic planes, and other things – in a phrase, to the dynamic nature of our productive forces. On the other hand, they demand that these productive forces remain forever encased in capitalist ownership. While everything else is subject to improvement, capitalist control of the productive facilities and the political system which protects it are to be considered immutable. These alone are exempt from radical reconstruction and so close to perfection that they cannot be surpassed, at least not in any foreseeable future.
Whatever changes there may be, they say, must remain within the boundaries of capitalist relations and cannot overstep them. The method of social development must be restricted to small doses of change portioned to the needs of the ruling class.
There is no warrant for such arbitrary assumptions in American history, in the dynamics of our productive forces, or in the present state or prospects of class relations. The forms of property and methods of production in America have undergone at least three vast transformations in the past. When Indian tribalism, British-born feudalism and Southern slavery collided with the new bourgeois forces of production, they were demolished. How absurd it is for the defenders of capitalism to bank for its salvation upon the very expansion of the productive forces which, increasingly stifled by capitalism, must lead to its downfall.
These students of history stubbornly refuse to learn from the past when the slow, steady evolution of social conditions exploded at critical junctures into tremendous upheavals which overturned the old order. American history is full of such sudden transitions and forward leaps. After the Indian tribes held the continent for thousands of years, invaders burst in from overseas, ousted the natives, and built an entirely different type of society here. Mother England dominated her thirteen colonies for over a century and a half until abruptly within a decade a definitive break occurred between the former ruler and the American people. Then, beginning with 1800, the planting power became predominant in national affairs – until the election of Republican President Lincoln in 1860 unleashed the Civil War.
Such reversals of existing conditions, resulting in a radical reconstruction of American society, are not at all restricted to the past.