The New Socialist Handbook by Dan Tucker

Author:Dan Tucker [TUCKER, DAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

EARLY AMERICA

It will come as a surprise to no one that Native Americans practiced a form of socialism before European settlers arrived. This principally took the form of communal ownership of land—the most vital resource to a society of hunters and gatherers, and for some, cultivators of food crops. This was why, when Peter Minuit, the leader of the Dutch colony in New Netherland, offered the Lenape Indians the equivalent of twenty-four dollars in trinkets in exchange for the island of Manhattan, the Lenape most likely looked at each other and said in Lenape, “Uh, sure, these are really nice trinkets, we’ll take them, and you seem decent enough, there’s plenty of room, you can be part of our group that uses this land too.” Many historians believe that the Lenape had no concept that land could be privately held.

What’s more surprising is that, by some standards, America’s Founding Fathers implemented policies that today might be considered socialist, at least by some. (Sean Hannity, I’m looking at you.) No less a capitalist than A-Ham insisted, at great political cost, that the debts of the individual colonies incurred before and during the Revolutionary War should be combined into a single federal debt, to be managed by a new national bank—the very one I alluded to at the outset of this chapter. The federal assumption of debt is great news if you’re a debtor state like New York. But it’s terrible news if you’re Virginia, where the thriving slave economy allowed you to pay off your war debts with relative ease. This was at a time when the former colonies were still thought of as more akin to countries, united in a loose confederation. Suddenly, while reading the newspaper on the veranda of your plantation house, you learn that you’re funding your uncouth rivals in the North and their distasteful mercantile economy! Hamilton convinced his political nemeses Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to go along with the plan by guaranteeing them that the permanent capitol of the US would be in the South. The significance of that concession now seems almost laughable; the economic engine that Hamilton created in the form of the national bank and a national debt—for those keeping score at home, quite literally the nationalization of a key component of the economy—has driven the nation’s economic and geopolitical growth ever since.

That’s a debatable analysis of the national bank, though you can almost hear Hannity, had he been alive at the time, thrashing Hamilton for his “socialist” ideas from a soapbox in front of Federal Hall. The point is that in Hamilton’s shrewd and canny mind, there was an acknowledgment of a significant economic benefit to shared ownership and control of one of the key factors of production. That benefit has played out in spades—the American economy became the world’s largest less than a century after Hamilton’s federal assumption of the debt and establishment of a national bank. But then so have the ongoing tensions between federal power and states’ rights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.