p and “free” disposition of the land and its products.
These material stakes account for the obdurateness of the conflict which persisted through four centuries and for the implacable hostility displayed by white settlers of all nationalities toward the Indians of all tribes. This was also responsible in the last analysis for the impossibility of any harmony or enduring compromise between the two. One or the other had to yield and go under.
That is how the materialist school of Marxism interprets the cruel treatment accorded the Indians and the reasons for their downfall. If this explanation is accepted, prevailing views of early American history must be discarded. School children, and not they alone, are taught nowadays that the first great social change in this country came from the patriots’ fight for independence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the light of the foregoing analysis, this long-standing misconception has to be rejected.
The colonial uprising, for all its importance, was neither the first social transformation in America, nor can it be considered the most fundamental one. It was preceded, interwoven, and followed by the white invasion and penetration which overthrew the Indian tribal network. This process of struggle, undertaken to install the rule of private property and its corresponding institutions in place of communal property and its specific institutions, was an even more radical social upheaval than the contest between the colonists and the mother country.
The struggle of the eighteenth century was waged between forces and institutions which, although rooted in different countries and in different historical backgrounds, nevertheless shared identical relations of private property at their foundations. The fight against the Indians on the other hand arose from the unbridgeable chasm dividing archaic society from modern civilization, primeval communism from budding capitalism.
The grand course of social evolution on American soil falls into three main stages. It starts with the development of the Stone Age many thousands of years ago. This primitive period reached its peak in the Aztec, Mayan and Incan cultures, and came to a close with the invasion of the white man at the end of the fifteenth century.
The second great epoch begins with the bringing of civilization by the Europeans. It proceeds through the various phases in the formation and transformation of bourgeois society which have culminated in the national and world supremacy of the American monopolists. The third stage, arising out of the second, had its inception with the birth of large-scale industry and the wage-working class.
What are the relations between these three overlapping epochs which mark off decisive steps in the advancement of American society? It is characteristic of the low theoretical level of .bourgeois historians that they do not even broach this question, although it is fundamental in American history. They view capitalism as the sole system of society with solid substance and enduring structure; all others are passing phantoms. Indian tribalism, as we have noted, is to them a forgotten relic; socialism a horrible specter or an impossible fantasy – while civil society in its capitalist forms remains an eternal necessity. Consequently they cannot see or admit that there are distinct stages of American history; that these distinct epochs are interlinked in a necessary chain of connection; or that any significant sequence of development can be discerned in the complex social process.
Nevertheless, behind the sequence of social forms which bridged the transition from savagery to civilization on this continent, there is a lawfulness. Although it had endured for thousands of years, the communal organization of the Indian tribes had to give way before the superior forces of private property. When the feudalists tied up with English rule and later the slaveholders blocked the further development of the productive forces, they, too, were extinguished by the creators of capitalist power.
The bourgeois thinkers c