Denying that communist ideas had their origin in Hegelian philosophy, the young Karl Marx writes, “Socialism and communism did not emanate from Germany but from England, France and North America.”Footnote 1 It is well known that England and France produced a wide range of pre-Marxian socialists, from the Levellers and Diggers; to Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals; to the utopian schemes of Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. But Marx's suggestion that the United States was one of the origin points of socialism may come as a surprise. Socialism is often taken to be a political tradition that emerged in the specific context of nineteenth-century Europe, always out of place in America, where status inequalities were absent and class conflict was marginal to political life.Footnote 2
“Why no socialism in the United States?” famously asked by Werner Sombart, is a twentieth-century question.Footnote 3 Throughout the nineteenth, European observers often described the American labor movement as “far more advanced (or threatening, depending on the writer) than its British and Continental counterparts.”Footnote 4 This perception was shared by the young Marx, whose writings throughout the 1840s often point to the USA as the country where class struggle is most developed. While sharing many ideas and organizational forms with workers in Europe, the Americans had a particular advantage: only in the northern USA did the socialist and labor movements develop in the context of near-universal manhood suffrage.Footnote 5 Seizing on this opportunity, journeymen organizers formed Workingmen's Parties in Philadelphia, New York, and other northern cities in the 1828–32 period, producing what Helen Sumner calls “the first labour party in the world.”Footnote 6 These “Workies” (as they were known) occupy a distinctive place within the history of socialism: they were the first to embrace a strategy of organizing a working-class political party and seizing the democratic state for their collective self-liberation. With universal suffrage, a working-class majority could take political power electorally and expropriate the rich.
Historians of socialism have not always recognized this contribution: G. D. H. Cole's sweeping history of socialist thought, for instance, omits these early Americans entirely.Footnote 7 But the Workies’ significance for socialist history goes beyond merely having come first. In what follows, I argue that Thomas Hamilton's Men and Manners in America was an important part of the empirical material that originally led Marx to communism in the summer of 1843, an idea first put forward in the early 1960s by Marx scholars Maximilien Rubel and Lewis Feuer.Footnote 8 Not only did the USA provide a crucial demonstration that political freedom would not itself mean the end of human domination, but it also furnished a form of practice quite distinct from the apolitical varieties of socialism Marx had long resisted: a mass workers’ party aimed at democratic social revolution. Further, I show that Marx knew more about the Workingmen's Parties than even Rubel and Feuer realized: in 1845 he read a second work that discussed their ideas in detail, Thomas Cooper's Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, which argued that the only way to ensure a workers’ party never came to power would be to eliminate universal suffrage.Footnote 9 Marx incorporated material from this work in his polemics of 1846–7, pieces that marked his decisive break from antipolitical socialism, and offered the first clear expression of the political orientation found in the famous Manifesto and later works.
This analysis is significant for understanding not only the place of the Workies in the history of socialist thought, but also the role of political democracy for Marx. One of the oldest and most contentious disputes in Marx scholarship concerns his theoretical orientation towards bourgeois rights, democracy, and politics as such. Even scholars who have recognized the great importance Marx placed on political democracy have struggled to explain this orientation. In what follows, I show that Marx differed from other European socialists in that, for him, the socialist transformation would involve the working class as a whole exercising political power through the democratic state. Hence civil liberties and working-class suffrage were prerequisites for socialism. This idea drew on the example of the Workingmen's Parties of antebellum America.
Socialist antipolitics and workers’ democracy
Before turning to Marx, a brief overview of the relationship between pre-Marxian socialism and democratic politics is in order. The American and French Revolutions played an important role in the development of socialist thought, less for their victories than for their failures. As these republics eliminated legal privileges, they revealed an enduring stratification of wealth and power that seemed to thrive in an environment of political equality. This was the basis of the idea that modern oppression stems not from political sources but from the distribution of property. The USA served as a continuing example of this after the Restoration eliminated most political freedom in Europe.Footnote 10 As early as 1805, English socialist Charles Hall speaks of a “rising aristocracy” of wealth in the democratic “American States.”Footnote 11 As John Francis Bray writes, “if the working classes of the United Kingdom should obtain any or all of the political changes [already implemented in America], they would remain in almost the same condition of poverty and ignorance and misery as they are at present.”Footnote 12 The “negative example” of enduring inequality in the American republic, as Gregory Claeys puts it, played an important role in Robert Owen and his followers’ belief that “representative institutions and popular sovereignty were incapable of resolving the complex and deeply divisive problems of a market-oriented and industrialising society.”Footnote 13 Consequently, many socialists concluded that political change was irrelevant.
Further, the tumult of revolution led many of the early socialists to reject democracy entirely—as the reign of ignorance or tyranny of the majority—in favor of apolitical technocratic administration. Saint-Simon famously held that government must be treated as a matter of expert administration, a “positive science” to be restricted “exclusively to a special class of scientists.”Footnote 14 Robert Owen called the “elective principle” of government “equally defective” as the “despotic” principle, and advised against universal suffrage on the ground that the “existing generation … is not prepared for a government in accordance with all the laws of nature.”Footnote 15 This Platonic authoritarianism was shared even by the anarchistic tendency in early socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon agreed with Saint-Simon that “political truth or science” is “as independent of our approval as is mathematical truth,” and therefore any imposition of mere “will as law”—even a “vote of the majority”—must be considered “illegal and absurd.”Footnote 16 Consequently, the antipolitical socialists rejected both the ideal of democratic self-rule and revolutionary methods of change.Footnote 17 Convinced that they had determined a form of a harmonious order that everyone would consent to, they either counseled the voluntary establishment of harmonious communities or sought to convince existing rulers to implement their enlightened schemes through a mere appeal to reason, an approach which later earned them the label “utopian.”
Alongside this current of socialism was an expressly revolutionary variety, which in its own way remained nonetheless apolitical. This was a form of insurrectionary communism inspired by the example of the Conspiracy of Equals as described in Philippe Buonarroti's famous 1828 memoir, which became known as “Blanquism” after its leading exponent, Louis Auguste Blanqui.Footnote 18 Despite their republican language, the Blanquists were nearly as indifferent as the utopians towards political reforms, and for similar reasons. If only a select few know the true principles of society—and possess the incorruptible virtue necessary to carry them out—then the only worthwhile objective is for that small group to seize power in a coup, followed by a dictatorship in which the masses would be reeducated and prepared for life in the new system.Footnote 19 Utopians and Blanquists alike conceived of poor workers not as political agents but as merely suffering beings that needed saving.Footnote 20 Democratic politics could play little role in such an understanding of social change.
If most European socialists saw in the democratic republic only the impotence of politics, their American counterparts came to an opposite view. When Robert Owen toured the USA in the mid-1820s, the journeymen's trade union movement gave a warm reception to his economic ideas, but took issue with his apolitical approach to change, which sought the cooperation of rich property owners as both investors and leaders in his experimental communities. Disillusioned by years of conflict with their employers and disappointment with bourgeois politicians, the American workers had learned to take their interests into their own hands. In an influential 1826 work, Philadelphia printer Langton Byllesby argues against Owen, “History does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogatives, or the oppressor relinquished his advantages in favour of the oppressed.” Quite the contrary: whenever “a radical alteration has taken place … it has uniformly been impelled, prosecuted, and finally adjusted by the sufferers.”Footnote 21 To impel such an alteration, the workers turned to politics.
Whereas property qualifications disenfranchised their counterparts in the constitutional monarchies of Europe, most wageworkers in the northern states had attained suffrage by the late 1820s.Footnote 22 The founder of the Philadelphia Workingmen's Party, journeyman cordwainer William Heighton, writes that workers possess “the means of … attaining … real liberty and universal independence” in “the right of universal suffrage,” the “power to choose our own legislators.”Footnote 23 Unlike the European socialists who rejected politics as the mere imposition of will, the American workers turned to politics precisely because they understood their social emancipation as requiring imposing their will on their oppressors. The rich and powerful would certainly oppose the workers’ efforts to transform society. But, as machinist and leader of the New York party Thomas Skidmore writes, universal suffrage effectively puts it “out of the power of a few, to defeat, frustrate, or delay, for any considerable time, the wishes of the many.”Footnote 24 All they needed to do, Heighton writes, is elect “men of our own nominating, men whose interests are in unison with ours.”Footnote 25 By taking the power of law—legitimate coercion—away from their oppressors and appropriating it for themselves, the workers could transform society in spite of powerful opposition.
Beyond supporting a range of immediate reforms such as a mechanics' lien law and the abolition of debt imprisonment, the Workingmen's Parties put forward proposals of two sorts for radically remaking society. One, championed by Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, aimed at making the “means of equal knowledge … the common property of all classes” through universal, compulsory public education.Footnote 26 The other was a much more radical idea: the total expropriation of the rich. Thomas Skidmore and Alexander Ming Sr. called for a “State-Convention” in New York elected by truly universal suffrage—by “woman” as well as “the red man, the black man, and the white man”—that would “claim all property … both real and personal,” and “order an equal division of all this property among the citizens.”Footnote 27 After this initial “general division,” redistribution would become an automatic mechanism of intergenerational inheritance: all property of those dying in a given year would be divided equally among all those reaching maturity.Footnote 28
The terms “socialism” and “communism” were not yet in use in the 1820s; instead, Skidmore and Ming's proposal was dubbed “agrarianism,” a term referring to the Gracchi's agrarian laws of land limitation and redistribution in the ancient Roman Republic.Footnote 29 Although he invokes the Roman example himself, Skidmore's concept of productive property extends well beyond land.Footnote 30 The workers’ convention will “appropriate… the cotton factories, the woolen factories, the iron foundries, the rolling mills, houses, churches, ships, goods, steam-boats, fields of agriculture, &c … as is their right.”Footnote 31 When the New York party approved this plan, they described it as nothing less than a “revolution” against the rich, but one that could be “civil … since three hundred thousand freemen in this state have the power, through their votes at the ballot boxes, to bring it about, without resorting, as most other countries must do, to the use of the bayonet.”Footnote 32 This was the first articulation of the idea that socialism would involve a working-class majority exercising constituent power to expropriate the rich and reorganize property.
It is sometimes alleged that the Workies were not socialists, since they did not propose abolishing private ownership.Footnote 33 But by that criterion, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon were not socialists either. The Workies’ economic ideas overlapped with those of English socialists in the goal of eliminating social classes and the relations of exploitation and domination that constitute them. Skidmore held that after equalizing property, “there shall be no lenders, no borrowers; no landlords, no tenants; no masters, no journeymen; no Wealth, no Want.”Footnote 34 Overall, they shared a form of socialist analysis common to the early labor movement on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 35 But in their ideas about class organization and political activity, they struck out into new territory. To William Heighton belongs the idea of organizing a political party of wageworkers as a class, and to Thomas Skidmore that of a general expropriation through the exercise of worker-led popular sovereignty. This was far more communistic in the Marxian sense than anything on offer from European socialism at the time.Footnote 36 It is with respect to politics that Harris is right to refer to the Workies as “American forerunners of Marx.”Footnote 37
In the 1829 elections, the agrarian leaders Skidmore and Ming each received over six thousand votes, falling just short of being elected to the New York state assembly.Footnote 38 Unsurprisingly, this caused something of a red scare among the American propertied classes, as we will see reflected in the writings of Hamilton and Cooper. “By throwing open the polls to every man that walks,” the New York Journal of Commerce howled, the republic is left defenseless against the “Agrarian party.”Footnote 39 Although at first unanimously adopted, the agrarian platform was so controversial that Robert Dale Owen saw the need to resort to underhanded maneuvers to marginalize and ultimately oust Skidmore and Ming, splitting the movement and contributing to its early demise.Footnote 40 Although the parties disintegrated in the early 1830s, the Workies’ ideas lived on, in part by passing into new organizations such as the National Reform Association of the 1840s, and in part by crossing the Atlantic.Footnote 41 Perhaps the most significant of the Europeans who learned from the Workies’ example was Marx.
Hamilton and American democracy
Marx first came across the story of the American Workingmen's Parties in the summer of 1843, the period of his transition from simple democratic republicanism to communism, perhaps the most important months of his intellectual life.Footnote 42 He had spent the previous two years as a crusading journalist, polemicizing against conservative newspapers and Prussian state censors from the radical republican standpoint of Young Hegelianism.Footnote 43 Holding that “the state [is] the great organism, in which legal, moral, and political freedom must be realised,” young Marx differed from Hegel only in that this required a democratic republic.Footnote 44 The law is “the conscious expression of the popular will” and “the positive existence of freedom,” but only if the legislature consists of “the people's self-representation.”Footnote 45 Denied a free press and democratic rights, the German people were dehumanized, reduced to philistines concerned only with private gain, meekly submitting to the powers that be.Footnote 46
Marx was by no means a socialist in this period, and it was not for lack of exposure.Footnote 47 Starting in the fall of 1842 he worked alongside Moses Hess—the first of the Young Hegelians to embrace French socialism—and began attending the latter's socialist discussion group (though Marx admits he did not devote “long and profound study” to socialist works at that time).Footnote 48 Hess espoused an antipolitics akin to Proudhon's, and given Marx's devotion to the cause of political freedom, it should hardly be surprising that he kept socialism at arm's length. Marx had nothing but contempt for those shirking the necessity of challenging “those in power” and undertaking “the laborious task of winning freedom step by step,” and this certainly described the antipolitical socialists.Footnote 49 If anything, his journalism was pushing him away from Hess's views. The Prussian state's reliance on “expert opinion” in dismissing the distressed Mosel winegrowers’ pleas for aid convinced Marx that technocracy is nothing but “a one-sided and arbitrarily established point of view” incapable of understanding “the real nature of the world” as the multitude of citizens see it.Footnote 50 This critique of state administration challenged Hegel's idea that an independent state bureaucracy can adequately tend to general affairs, and solidified Marx's view that rational rule can only be popular self-government.Footnote 51 This deeply democratic outlook was antithetical to technocratic socialism, shared in its anarchist variety by Hess.
When the Prussian censors shut down his newspaper, Marx took a break from journalism and spent the summer of 1843 in Kreuznach working on a critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in which he planned to reveal “constitutional monarchy” as “a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself.”Footnote 52 As Leopold argues, this was not an abandonment of empirics for philosophy, but instead “a movement away from the anachronistic German polity and towards a critical engagement with the modern state,” the essential features of which Marx believed Hegel had captured.Footnote 53 This required extensive empirical research. Since the “correct theory must be made clear and developed within the concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things,” Marx immersed himself in works of world history at Kreuznach, filling eight notebooks with excerpts from twenty-four books.Footnote 54
Alongside revolutionary France, a particularly important object of study was the United States, since this was the only democratic republic that still survived.Footnote 55 At Kreuznach, Marx read three works on the country: Alexis de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America; Gustave de Beaumont's Marie: or Slavery in the United States; and a German translation of Men and Manners in America, the log of Scotsman Thomas Hamilton's tour in 1830–31, shortly before Tocqueville and Beaumont.Footnote 56 Marx references all three works in “On the Jewish Question,” which debuts his radically revised understanding of modern politics developed at Kreuznach.Footnote 57 On the eve of this retreat, Marx still espoused the view that the “French Revolution” had “restored man,” and that achieving a “democratic state” would overturn “the dehumanised world ” and “transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims.”Footnote 58 However, in the course of Marx's empirical research, he discovered a key flaw within the modern republic, and concluded that true emancipation would require the abolition of private property. The United States plays a crucial role in that analysis.
In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx considers Bruno Bauer's idea that religious belief has lost its historical vitality and would disappear if the continental monarchies’ religious censorship were swept away. To evaluate that claim, Marx turns to “the North American states,” since these are the only places where “the political state exists in its completely developed form,” in other words, where the state is most secular and “political emancipation” is most “complete.”Footnote 59 Marx cites “Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton” to demonstrate that the USA is “pre-eminently the country of religiosity.” Where the state has lost its religious character and religion has become a strictly private affair, religious thought does not fade away. On the contrary, it “displays a fresh and vigorous vitality.”Footnote 60
But Marx holds that religion is merely “the theory ” of an earthly “distorted reality,” and so it “should be criticised in the framework of criticism of political conditions.”Footnote 61 The fact that religion spread vigorously in America therefore suggests that something of political reality remains distorted even in the democratic republic. Marx finds this distortion in the contrast between the political equality and common interests of citizenship, and the social inequality and conflicting interests in the private sphere.
As Marx now sees it, political emancipation in the democratic republic effects a split within the individual, on the one hand raising them to “a communal being” as an equal part of the sovereign body in the state, and on the other hand reducing them to a “private individual” in civil society.Footnote 62 By raising the state to “the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of [all the] particular elements of civil society,” the political revolution effectively depoliticizes and privatizes people's “sensuous, individual, immediate existence.”Footnote 63 Civil society's organizing principle is therefore “the right to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion … without regard to other men, independently of society,” which makes it a “sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes.”Footnote 64 Having expected to find “thinking beings, free men, republicans” in a democracy,Footnote 65 Marx quotes “Captain Hamilton” to depict a people instead enslaved to abstract wealth:
[the New Englander] is a sort of moral Laocoon, differing only in this, that he makes no struggle to be free. Mammon has no more zealous worshipper than your true Yankee. His homage is not merely that of the lip, or of the knee; it is an entire prostration of the heart; the devotion of all powers, bodily and mental, to the service of the idol. He views the world but as one vast exchange, on which he is impelled, both by principle and interest, to over-reach his neighbours if he can.Footnote 66
The narrow, servile, philistine egoism that had dismayed Marx in absolutist Germany not only endured in America but seemed to flourish. Further, his readings show this selfish pursuit leading to great inequalities of wealth and power. As Hamilton writes, “It is the fashion to call the United States the land of liberty and equality … [But this] is mere nonsense. There is quite as much practical equality in Liverpool as New York. The magnates of the Exchange do not strut less proudly in the latter city than in the former.”Footnote 67 This view contradicts that of Tocqueville and Beaumont, who describe America as a “society of perfect equality” where “a protracted conflict between the different classes” is impossible.Footnote 68 As Marx quotes Hamilton in his notebook, “In America there exists but one kind of aristocracy (that of money), and the impulse it awakens is, of course, violent in proportion to its concentration.”Footnote 69 Unlike in Europe, the American aristocracy rules not through legal privileges but through apolitical economic coercion. Hamilton observes that although “in (the Northern) States” no one can “claim property in the thews and sinews of another” any longer, “the power of compulsory labour” nonetheless remains in another form. Despite their “enjoyment of equal rights,” those without productive property are forced to offer themselves up to “the most rigorous and iron-hearted of despots,” whose motto is “submit or starve.” Consequently, chattel slavery has disappeared only to be replaced by “the vassalage of stomach.” Hamilton describes the free wageworker as “a masterless slave.”Footnote 70
Thus the sorts of domination and servility Marx had seen under absolutism are not abolished by political democracy, but let loose in the private realm of civil society. This alleged sphere of individual liberty reveals itself as one in which man “regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.”Footnote 71 To complete the depravity, “political life,” the sphere containing the promise of democratic self-determination and republican freedom, “declares itself to be a mere means” for securing the rights of private property in civil society, in effect subordinating itself to the predatory egoism of the rich.Footnote 72
From this analysis, Marx concludes that “political emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction.”Footnote 73 In the “political revolution” that established political equality and freed civil society from politics, “man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property.”Footnote 74 The democratic republic not only resolves the contradictions of monarchy but contains contradictions of its own: contradictions whose resolution would involve overcoming the separation between state and civil society. Though nowhere directly stated in the Kreuznach writings, the clear implication is that this change involves transcending the core component of civil society: private property.Footnote 75
But how precisely is this transcendence to be carried out? The only possibility that “On the Jewish Question” explicitly considers is one it rejects: Jacobin terror. Here, the political authority, positing itself as the “real species-life of man,” attempts to impose its own abstract image upon “religion, private property, and all the elements of civil society.” In doing so, it “seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society,” which can only bring it into “violent contradiction with its own conditions of life.” It pursues “the abolition of property” in its own way, but this merely leads to “the maximum [price fixing], to confiscation [of church and émigré property], to progressive taxation,” all measures that nonetheless presuppose and reaffirm private property.Footnote 76 The rise of the Jacobins involved the suppression of not only the royalists but also the sans-culottes. Marx's notebooks take special notice that all discussion of an agrarian law had been banned “since the National Convention on 18 March 1793 set the death penalty on proposals of the kind.”Footnote 77
If not Jacobin terror, then what?Footnote 78 In the Kreuznach writings we only find allusions to some transformative potential in universal suffrage: “Electoral reform within the abstract political state is … the demand for [the state's] dissolution, but also for the dissolution of civil society.”Footnote 79 The abstractness of these passages has caused considerable debate. Avineri's interpretation, that the “act of the state in granting universal suffrage will be its last act as a state,” is clearly inconsistent with Marx's description of the USA as “the political state … in its completely developed form.”Footnote 80 Other writers offer the more promising interpretation that “universal suffrage would lead to the dissolution of the state,” but it remains nonetheless unclear why this would be the case.Footnote 81 By pairing Marx's Kreuznach writings with material from Hamilton, we can construct a plausible narrative of what he may have had in mind: suffrage as the instrument of lower-class revolutionary agency.
The workers’ party
Just before his Kreuznach studies, Marx wrote that he placed all hope in identifying “the existence of suffering human beings, who think,” a mass constituency for change.Footnote 82 In his view, conflict between antagonistic forces is what drives all historical transformations: “Without parties no development, without division no progress.”Footnote 83 This is precisely what Hamilton sees developing within American democracy: “In [New York City] a separation is rapidly taking place between the different orders of society. The operative class have already formed themselves into a society, under the name of ‘The Workies,’ in direct opposition to those who, more favoured by nature or fortune, enjoy the luxuries of life without the necessity of manual labour.” This passage is the only excerpt from Hamilton that Marx underlined in his notes, demonstrating that he saw special importance in it.Footnote 84 Such worker self-organization was accompanied by political claims against class distinctions. The Workies “make no secret of their demands,” Hamilton relates. Since private schooling creates “an aristocracy of knowledge, education, and refinement, which is inconsistent with the true democratic principle of absolute equality,” the first among these demands is “equal and universal education.”Footnote 85 “But,” Hamilton continues, “those who limit their views to the mental degradation of their country, are in fact the moderates of the party”:
There are others who go still further, and boldly advocate the introduction of an Agrarian Law, and a periodical division of property. These unquestionably constitute the extrême gauche of the Worky Parliament, but still they only follow out the principles of their less violent neighbours … Only equalize property, they say, and neither [rich nor poor] would drink Champagne or water, but both would have brandy, a consummation worthy of centuries of struggle to attain.Footnote 86
As Hamilton sees it, the issue of education is just the tip of the iceberg; the working-class political program logically concludes in the demand to equalize property. It may be this section of Hamilton which Marx has in mind when he writes that in the democratic republic, “the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society,” by which “[m]oney and education are the main criteria.”Footnote 87 These are precisely the two aspects of social inequality that the Workies’ program politicized, and they reappear in his famous Paris “Critique,” which debuts the idea of the proletariat as revolutionary agent.Footnote 88 In Kreuznach, Marx suggests that the emancipatory limit of the “political revolution” is that it merely “resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionising these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism.”Footnote 89 Revolutionizing the components of civil society—education and property—was precisely the Workies’ aim. By repoliticizing this depoliticized sphere on a democratic basis, the atomization of civil society would be abolished as well as the division between state and society itself.
Far from considering these plans an idle fantasy, Hamilton instead makes the startling claim that their enactment will in the long run be inevitable. The workers’ party may not yet be “so numerous or so widely diffused as to create immediate alarm. In the elections, however, for the civic offices of the city, their influence is strongly felt,” and as the country industrializes, “the strength of this party must be enormously augmented.”Footnote 90 The USA is “destined to become a great manufacturing nation,” and eventually “the great majority of the people will be without property of any kind.”Footnote 91 So, Hamilton assures his readers, “the great struggle between property and numbers” will inevitably come—the only “doubt regards time, not destination.”Footnote 92
The future working-class majority poses this threat only because of universal suffrage: “The institutions of the United States afford the purest specimen the world has yet seen, of a representative government; of an executive, whose duties are those of mere passive agency; of a legislative, which serves but as the vocal organ of the sole and real dictator [Herrn], the people.”Footnote 93 Popular election renders the representatives “abjectly dependent on the people,” and so they are “compelled to adopt both the principles and the policy dictated by their constituents … They are slaves, and feel themselves to be so.”Footnote 94 This situation means that the merchants, “the great capitalists of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia … [are] effectually excluded from political power.”Footnote 95 Although the workers are subjugated within civil society, the tables are turned in democratic elections where wealth counts for nothing and each person has an equal vote. Losing direct control over the state leaves the rich at the mercy of the majority whose labor they live on—and Hamilton predicts that this will be their ruin.
Marx describes it as a momentous advance when “the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has occurred in many states of North America.”Footnote 96 For him, the free society of the future will not, as Proudhon thinks, end majority rule, but instead will be a “true democracy,” which raises the “representative system from its political form to the universal form” so that everyone takes part in “deliberating and deciding on the general affairs” in their “everyday life.”Footnote 97 Although falling short of this, political emancipation is nevertheless “a big step forward,” in that it realizes (albeit in a partial way) the masses’ desire “to give themselves a political being,” to become “actual (active) members of the state,” and remake the law as their own “free product.”Footnote 98 Whereas apolitical socialists consider the question of universal suffrage “altogether unworthy of attention,” Marx sees it as expressing “in a political way the difference between rule by man and rule by private property.”Footnote 99 That this difference is not merely symbolic is shown in the property-owning classes’ fierce opposition to suffrage reform “in France [and] England.”Footnote 100 The opposition has only been overcome in the northern USA: “Hamilton quite correctly interprets [universal suffrage] from a political point of view as meaning: ‘the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial wealth.’” It was only through victory in political class conflict that the “non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner” in America.Footnote 101 Marx excerpts a lengthy quote in his notebook as Hamilton expresses the American property-owning classes’ anxieties over universal suffrage:
Let it be remembered that in this suffering class will be practically deposited the whole political power of the state; that there can be no military force to maintain civil order, and protect property; and to what quarter, I should be glad to know, is the rich man to look for security, either of person or fortune? There will be no occasion however for convulsion or violence. The Worky convention will only have to choose representatives of their own principles, in order to accomplish a general system of spoliation, in the most legal and constitutional manner … whenever a numerical majority of the people shall be in favour of an Agrarian law, there exists no counteracting influence to prevent, or even to retard its adoption.
Hamilton has heard “many of the most eminent Americans of the Union” confide their belief that such a “period of trial … is according to all human calculation inevitable.” If universal suffrage came to industrialized England, “the journey would be performed with railway velocity. In the United States … it may continue a generation or two longer, but the termination is the same.”Footnote 102 As Hamilton describes it, a capitalist economy and a political democracy conjoin to make social revolution unavoidable. On the one hand, current property relations create a growing number of oppressed and impoverished wageworkers, eventually becoming the majority of society. On the other, universal suffrage will enable that class to take control of the state and expropriate the rich.
It is a commonplace that Marx's “discovery of the proletariat” occurred in Paris in the months after his Kreuznach retreat. It is certainly the case that he first explicitly identifies the proletariat with the coming social revolution in his famous “Paris Critique.” But most of the literature misses that the premonition of this is contained in his Kreuznach writings, prior to any direct exposure to the Parisian workers’ or socialist movements. In these pieces Marx identifies the “non-property owners” as the agents who brought about universal suffrage in America, and connects this extension of suffrage to the coming abolition of the modern state and civil society.Footnote 103 Hamilton offered a vision of the future of the United States in which these nonowners would destroy the regime of property simply by exercising their democratic rights and turning the state to their own ends. This is what drew Marx's attention in Hamilton's writings.
Cooper and working-class rule
As we have seen, Marx's conversion to communism emerged from close analysis of struggles for democratic self-determination and the limits of the bourgeois state and private property in France and America. Hal Draper correctly writes that Marx came “to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent extension of democratic control from below.”Footnote 104 But the abstract analysis in the 1843–4 writings lends itself to misinterpretation. The critiques of the “rights of man”Footnote 105 and the limits of “political emancipation” have led to a long tradition of interpreting Marx as an antipolitical socialist.Footnote 106 Identifying his idea of communism not with popular self-government but with technocratic administration or anarchic, spontaneous cooperation à la Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Proudhon, many have seen Marx's immediate demand for democracy as a mere transitional measure, radically disconnected from the principles of the society to come.Footnote 107 More extreme authors allege that Marx had no “concept of democracy other than one of illusion or mystification,” or even attribute to Marx a “hostility towards the modern representative state” that blinded him to “the significance of manhood suffrage and the democratic republic.”Footnote 108 As we shall see, when Marx publicly clarified his own understanding of politics in 1846–7, it was in polemics against approaches of precisely these sorts.
Upon arriving in Paris in late 1843, Marx devoted himself to a new intellectual project with Moses Hess and (starting in late 1844) Friedrich Engels, focusing on a materialist critique of idealism, the study of political economy, and a theory of alienation in capitalism. But through the trio's early collaboration, an important difference remained in the background. Hess and Engels were apolitical socialists in the French style: for them, democracy was neither means nor end. Hess argues that since the basic source of inequality is “not political but social … [no] form of government has created this evil, none will heal it.”Footnote 109 Similarly, Engels cautions the English workers, “Social evils cannot be cured by People's Charters.”Footnote 110 Further, he praises Proudhon for “having proved that every kind of government is alike objectionable, no matter whether it be democracy, aristocracy, or monarchy, that all govern by force; and that, in the best of all possible cases, the force of the majority oppresses the weakness of the minority,” even endorsing the “conclusion: ‘Nous voulons l'anarchie!’”Footnote 111 Both Hess and Engels agreed that the coming change would be “social” and not “political,” dealing with economic organization alone and superseding elections, the state, and law.Footnote 112
During their period of collaboration in 1844 and 1845, Marx had not yet determined his own orientation with much clarity, for instance, suggesting the possibility that a mass uprising of the proletariat in Germany might bypass a purely political revolution and advance right to socialism, an idea he would soon reject.Footnote 113 But in this time, he still reiterates the idea that the question of “Suffrage” involves “the fight for the abolition [Aufhebung] of the state and of civil society.”Footnote 114 This tension with the other socialists remained in the background as long as Marx focused on criticizing the Berlin Young Hegelians. However, over the course of writing with Engels and Hess in 1845–6 the manuscripts later dubbed “The German Ideology,” Marx came to regard antipolitical socialism as a more pressing concern.Footnote 115 This involved a serious conflict with his coauthors in early 1846, after which Engels for the most part adopted Marx's political stance.Footnote 116 Marx's turn against antipolitical socialism was partially precipitated by the proliferation of a vulgarized form of the trio's ideas, “True Socialism,” which took Proudhonian antipolitics to its most reactionary conclusions.Footnote 117
While a political campaign to wrest a liberal constitution from the Prussian monarchy was heating up in the mid-1840s, the True Socialists took up pen and podium to oppose these efforts. Like some recent scholars, Karl Grün interprets Marx's analysis of the USA in “On the Jewish Question” as exposing the futility of political action.Footnote 118 “In the political world everyone is dependent, each is a slave,” Grün writes. “Where is dependence greater than in North America?”Footnote 119 For editor Otto Lüning, “bourgeois freedom” is useless, since it merely trades the “slavery of the nobility” for the “rule of capital.”Footnote 120 The next revolution would not be a political one, Grün says, but instead a “revolution against politics itself.”Footnote 121 Consequently he urged his readers against political agitation and instead toward the “practical instruction for immediate peaceful, legal, inviolable association” offered by Proudhon.Footnote 122 Unsurprisingly, the Prussian censors did not give the True Socialist newspapers much trouble.
Marx's polemics in 1846–7 are often ad hominem, and this has led some scholars to overlook the political stakes involved.Footnote 123 It was in these arguments against Proudhonian antipolitics that Marx and Engels clarified and publicly set forth their signature brand of revolutionary, democratic communism. Against the preachers of harmony and voluntary association, they stress the need for mass politics: communism must be a “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority.”Footnote 124 Workers’ movements of this kind—namely “the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America”—can only develop in certain political conditions, in particular “the freedom of the press and the freedom of association,” and only with universal suffrage can they rise to the “position of the ruling class.”Footnote 125 In the monarchies of Europe, therefore, the first step would be “a democratic reconstruction of the Constitution on the basis of the People's Charter,” which they expected to require a “democratic revolution by force.”Footnote 126 And so, as Marx and Engels set about battling the Proudhonists within the German émigré workers’ movement in 1846–7, they could appropriately refer to themselves as “democratic communists.”Footnote 127 Their main programmatic objective was to turn this movement toward winning political freedom.
In articulating this position, Marx again employed material from the USA. In the summer of 1845 he read the work of Thomas Cooper, a former English Jacobin who had moved to South Carolina and become a professor of political economy and public apologist for nullification and slavery.Footnote 128 Feuer missed Marx's second encounter with the Workies because he consulted only the 1826 first edition of Cooper's Lectures.Footnote 129 This material is contained in an extra chapter added in the 1830 reprint, which features an extended criticism of socialist views.Footnote 130
Beginning this section with an argument against the English socialists Thomas Hodgskin and William Thompson, Cooper goes on to discuss Mr. “Byllesby, Messrs. Al. Ming, Tho. Skidmore, and the mechanic Political Economists.”Footnote 131 Like Hamilton, he describes the New York Workies as having both a moderate wing focused on public education and an extrême gauche focused on property:
I see gleams of Mr. Hodgskin's reasoning, not merely in the proposals of Mr. Byllesby, and Messrs. Ming and Skidmore's writings in New-York, but in some of the proposals of Frances Wright, who insists on the propriety of not merely educating the children of the poor, but of feeding and clothing them also, during the period of their gratuitous education … Still more extravagant are the propositions of Messrs. Ming and Skidmore, (Free Enq. New York, Jan. 1830,) viz: at the death of any member of the community, to abolish the exclusive claims of his widow and children, and to divide his property among all the members of society who have just arrived at adult age!Footnote 132
Whereas Feuer writes that “Marx [probably] never heard of Thomas Skidmore,” we see that Marx indeed encountered the names of several important Worky leaders through Cooper.Footnote 133 In fact, in the bibliography of political economy that Marx was compiling, he wrote down the names Ming, Skidmore, and Byllesby and described them as “American radicals against property.”Footnote 134 It is precisely this group Marx refers to when he writes, against Karl Grün's presumption that German philosophers will bring the Americans socialism, that they “have had, since 1829, their own socialist-democratic school, against which their economist Cooper was fighting as long ago as 1830.”Footnote 135 As Marx sees it, the “most consistent republicans” are the first to discover the social question “at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is eliminated.” “Socialism and communism” first arose in “England, France and North America,” precisely because it was these three countries that first undertook modern republican revolutions.Footnote 136 Self-important philosophers like Karl Grün, Marx suggests, lag far behind these real historical movements.
Cooper, like Hamilton, rejects universal suffrage, a system in which “a majority may, and if there be no check, always will oppress a minority.”Footnote 137 But he goes beyond Hamilton in his practical suggestions. Since the government could so easily fall into the hands of the “roguish portion of society” seeking to enact “the proposals that the mechanics combine to carry into effect,” Cooper urges “those who have property to lose … to combine in self defence.”Footnote 138 To stop the agrarian threat, we must abrogate the alleged “right of every human creature in society, to give his assent by himself or his representative, to every law by which he is to be bound.”Footnote 139 Marx quotes Cooper's arguments against universal suffrage at length in an 1847 article:
One of the most famous North American political economists, Thomas Cooper, who is also a radical, proposes: 1. To prohibit those without property from marrying. 2. To abolish universal suffrage, for, he exclaims:
‘Society was instituted for the protection of property … What reasonable claim can they have, who by eternal economic laws will eternally be without property of their own, to legislate on the property of others? What common motive and common interest is there between these two classes of inhabitants? Either the working class is not revolutionary, in which case it represents the interests of the employers, on whom their livelihood depends. At the last election in New England, the master-manufacturers, to ensure votes for themselves, had the candidates’ names printed on calico, and each of their workers wore such a piece of calico on their trouser-fronts. Or the working class becomes revolutionary, as a consequence of communal living together, etc., and then the political power of the country will sooner or later fall into its hands, and no property will be safe any more under this system.’Footnote 140
Here, in a much more direct way than he had with Hamilton, Marx cites the case of the USA to demonstrate the revolutionary potential of universal suffrage for workers’ self-emancipation. Thanks to having already won the democratic republic, Marx writes, the American workers now “form a political party” whose “battle-cry” is no longer “rule of the princes or the republic, but rule of the working class or the rule of the bourgeois class.”Footnote 141 Cooper remarks that the working class's ascent to power is “now exultingly expected by the mechanic meetings of New-York and Pennsylvania.”Footnote 142 Painting precisely the same picture of America's future as Hamilton does, Cooper makes it the cornerstone of his argument against universal suffrage:
I do not believe the mischief of that tyrannical and absurd maxim, “The will of the majority ought to govern,” is yet sufficiently understood among us … If [we accept it], then the minority has no right. If so, then the minority has no privileges, no property, no safety. Let but the majority determine uncontrolled, what is for their own good, and decree it, then are the minority, in the strictest sense of the word, slaves … Suppose the representatives of the mechanics, who are now openly advocating an equal division of property among adults, under the auspices of Messrs. Alex. Ming and Thomas Skidmore, in their prospectus and defense of it, (Free Enquirer, N. York, for Dec. 1829, and Jan. 1830,) to become the efficient legislative majority? What a glorious range of rapine and of plunder, would present itself to the benevolent advocates of the right of robbery!Footnote 143
Cooper's vision of “the political power of the country” in the hands of “the labouring classes” being used to “legislate the property of the wealthy into the pockets of the idle and needy” is precisely Marx and Engels's vision for Europe's republican future.Footnote 144 This is the infamous “dictatorship of the proletariat.”Footnote 145 They describe “the political rule of the proletariat” as a government resulting from the achievement of a “democratic constitution,” which will undertake to wrest “by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.”Footnote 146 Their coy characterization of this process of democratic expropriation as “despotic inroads on the rights of property” reflects that the property-owning class consider such measures to be, as Cooper put it, “tyrannical,” nothing but bare “robbery,” “rapine and plunder.”Footnote 147 However tongue-in-cheek, the phrase also encapsulates an essential distinction between Marx and Engels's view and that of antipolitical socialism. They, like the American Workies, held that socialism would not be brought about through universal consensus, or the private, voluntary actions of individuals. Instead, it would require the oppressed majority enforcing its will upon the privileged minority through a democratic state. Marx and Engels agreed with conservatives like Hamilton and Cooper that universal suffrage would be the means with which the working class would abolish private property. The tyranny of the majority experienced by the property owners would be democratic self-emancipation for the workers.
Conclusion
Contrary to a widespread misreading, Marx was stringently in favor of robust political rights and conceived of communism as essentially a democratic mass movement. As a growing body of scholarship argues, he is best understood as a theorist of the struggle for republican freedom and democracy in the conditions of modern capitalism.Footnote 148 Unlike the antipolitical socialists, Marx saw the northern USA as uniquely situated for socialism precisely because it had already solved the basic political problem facing Europe: the workers could vote. Despite trailing far behind England in industrialization, “in a democratic, representative state like North America class conflicts have already reached a form which the constitutional monarchies are only just being forced to approach.”Footnote 149 This observation stands twentieth-century ideas of American exceptionalism on their head. As Rubel writes, the Workingmen's Parties showed Marx something many others missed: the “revolutionary implications of American democracy.”Footnote 150
The failed revolutions of 1848 taught Marx that universal suffrage could accompany state repression of the workers’ movement, and underscored the importance of the broader political and social conditions of such suffrage.Footnote 151 He also revised his views about the proximity of a socialist revolution in the USA. In his 1840s zeal, Marx had glossed over Hamilton and Cooper's remarks that they expected it would take at least “a generation or two,” or “half a century,” before the working class would form a majority and their doomsday scenarios would become an immediate concern.Footnote 152 Marx's writings in the 1850s suggest that the conflict between capitalists and workers would not fully emerge in the United States until western settlement had ceased and chattel slavery had been abolished.Footnote 153
Although Marx complicated his early view of America, he continued to claim throughout his political career that it is in the “democratic republic … that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion,” and that under the conditions of “universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people's militia, etc.” the working class can make its right to vote “an instrument of emancipation.”Footnote 154 And this meant that while in despotic countries “it is force which must be the lever of our revolution,” certain countries “like America, England,” and others offered the possibility that the workers could “seize political supremacy to establish the new organisation of labour … by peaceful means.”Footnote 155 And so through the end of his life Marx continued to see real insight in Thomas Hamilton's remark that the democratic state offers workers the chance “to accomplish a general system of spoliation, in the most legal and constitutional manner.”Footnote 156 This was precisely the opportunity that Heighton, Skidmore, and the other American workers saw when they formed the first socialist parties in the 1820s.
