“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” asked abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1852, in what has been described as one of the greatest speeches in American history.
“I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” said Douglass. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloodier than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
Douglass’s speech was unsparing in its moral condemnation of the “hideous and revolting” conduct of his country, and much of it could continue to be said of our government today, as it honors corporate property rights over the very life of humanity and the planet. The Douglass speech marked a milestone in the abolitionist movement, its turn away from relying on “moral suasion” as the cornerstone of its activity. This speech represented the sophisticated mingling of moral vision with practical political agitation that came to be known as “political abolitionism,” and actually led to the real-life emancipation of U.S. slaves in 1865.
Douglass accurately observed that there was an antagonism tearing American society apart: “a horrible reptile coiled up in your nation’s bosom.” That reptile was chattel slavery, the subjugation of millions of its people as subhuman “property” with no rights that a white man was bound to respect. The growing free-labor industrial means of production in the North became locked in antagonism with a federal government based on the slave-labor agricultural capitalism of the South. Douglass found that he amplified his effectiveness when he used the human rights principles in America’s very founding documents to rally his audience against slavery. He described the Declaration of Independence as “the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” He upheld the U.S. Constitution as a “glorious liberty document” because of its anti-slavery principles of habeas corpus, republicanism, a more perfect union, and the right to life, liberty, and personal property.
WHAT ARE PROPERTY RIGHTS?
The 1861-65 Civil War rewrote the Constitution by abolishing the barbaric institution of slavery. No other progress could be made until this was done. But the Constitution still continued to embody a contradiction between human rights and property rights. This has emerged once again in the 21st century as an antagonism. The “coiled reptile” in America today is the propertyless section of the working class that is increasingly living in squalor, separated from the former capitalist economy, while the billionaire ruling class continues to defend corporate property. Displaced workers today cannot physically survive without material means of support, and they cannot obtain them without demanding their distribution based on need. They are compelled to politically attack the private property system. The conflict is every bit as irrepressible as the one in the pre-Civil War period.
The heart of the issue today, as it was in the case of slavery, is the definition of exactly what are property rights, to whom they belong, and what they encompass. Outside the slave plantations, American society in the 18th century consisted almost entirely of small producers, artisans, farmers, casual workers, and tradespeople. Early American patriots like Thomas Paine optimistically envisioned a free and peaceful economic system of commodity exchange. Their projections were flawed, however, by their blindness to the role of slavery and the theft of Indigenous land that the entire system rested on. The radical republican political principles in the Constitution itself were in fact only made possible by exclusion of the most decisive section of the Southern workforce from the government.
The intentions and moral limitations of the founders are not the real issue, however. The real issue lies in the underlying principles and what they mean to us today. Based on the small producer economy, the Constitution necessarily confused the question of property rights by overlapping what we now call private property with what is known as personal property.
A capitalist economic system such as America’s blurs the distinction between private and personal property. However, there is a vital difference between the two. Wikipedia points out that personal property (or possessions) includes items intended for personal use (e.g., one’s toothbrush, clothes, vehicles, and money for buying articles for personal consumption). A home that one’s family lives in is considered personal property.
Private property, however, properly speaking, is investment property. It consists of ownership of land and natural resources, or socially produced technology, infrastructure, financial institutions, or means of production. It is property that is used not for meeting personal needs but for earning income. Nineteenth century slaves were investment property. Most private property today is corporate investment property.
The distinction between personal and private property was especially confusing in housing, because in small producer society, the home was frequently also the location of economic production. With the development of large-scale industry and agribusiness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, housing assumed its modern role primarily as a consumer good for those that live in it (although corporate and other landlords still treat it as investment property).
The deliberate conflation between housing as a home for personal use and housing as an investment helped keep the working class disorganized, segregated, and confused throughout the 20th century. Although only a small minority of Americans own private property, properly defined, many of the majority who own their homes (and other items) as personal property have been misled to believe that they have a stake in the preservation of corporate private property. As Ronald Reagan tried to argue in 1967, “Freedom is based on the right of the individual to personal ownership of property, and this basic human right cannot be infringed by majority rule.” This idea is not only false, but it becomes dangerous, and a threat to democracy itself, when corporations are on the offensive against workers as they are today, in the same way that the Slave Power was in the 1850s.
THE FASCIST OFFENSIVE
As early as the 1840s, the slavery proponent John C. Calhoun developed the “substantive due process” doctrine, in order to outflank the use of democratic political power by Northern industrialists, workers, farmers, and abolitionists to block the expansion of slavery. His essential argument was that since slaves were property, the constitution protected the slave system with no political, legal, or territorial limitations whatsoever.
Despite the vastly different economic and political conditions, the major ideological debate today is remarkably similar to that of the 1850s. Just as Calhoun argued that the constitutional right to own slaves trumped democracy then, today’s rulers argue that the right to corporate private property supersedes and ultimately eliminates every other right.
A 2017 Guardian article points to the views of the recently deceased Koch brothers’ ideologist, James McGill Buchanan:
“Buchanan was strongly influenced by … the property supremacism of John C. Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses …. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that ‘despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.’”
It is up to political revolutionaries to confront the “property supremacism” of the ruling class today, just as those of the 19th century did. What Abraham Lincoln said then is still true today: that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness remains a “stumbling block to all those who … might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”
Far from depending on private property, real freedom today requires restricting, limiting, and ultimately abolishing private property. Freedom includes ownership of personal property necessary for use by oneself and one’s family, including one’s home, but not investment property used to exploit or exclude others from the means of subsistence. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, real freedom is participation in power. Participation in power is commonly called democracy, and real democracy includes public control over the economic institutions that shape our lives. When revolutionaries explain this class antagonism and the class interests behind the fascist offensive today, they play their role of elevating the political consciousness necessary to defeat it. This is the path to the peaceful, cooperative society we are striving for.
July/August 2022 vol.32. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
