Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 3

This is the third and final part of this series. The author writes: The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society.” Having “engaged” Away With All Gods! six months ago, I’d like to respond to this seriously as well.

by Pavel Andreyev

Jefferson as (Eighteenth-Century, Bourgeois) Rebel

One can observe with Aptheker that the American Revolution did not transform the new country’s society. But the model of government established with the Constitution of 1787 was a significant advance in the construction of bourgeois democracy and influenced the French constitutions of 1789 and 1791, among many others.

Isn’t it important to recall that more than any U.S. leader, Jefferson embraced the French Revolution, the greatest and most influential of bourgeois-democratic revolutions? Even as his colleagues’ enthusiasm waned after the public executions of the French king and queen, Jefferson maintained a revolutionary perspective. He asked in 1793, has “ever such a prize [been] won with so little innocent blood?” He declared that while he regretted the deaths of innocents, “rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”

Shays Rebellion

We can roll our eyes at this statement, which seems, in fact, excessive. But how many other North Americans in positions of influence, or persons of influence anywhere in the world, would have expressed that kind of passionate revolutionary sentiment in 1793? In 1776 Jefferson wrote,

“The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exclusions and incapacitations are removed.”

In January 1787, while ambassador to France, he responded from Paris to reports about Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. This was in its principal aspect a revolt of poor yeomen against high debt, high taxes, and property qualifications for voting.[31]

Jefferson wrote:

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government… God forbid that there should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

This is significant. Is he not saying “It’s right to rebel” — at least for whites of his class, and maybe some others?

Jefferson didn’t concede that right to slaves, although in a letter to James Monroe in 1800 (when Jefferson was vice president) he seemed to waffle on the point. He referred to the slaves involved in the Gabriel Prosser Revolt in Virginia as being one “of the two parties” involved in a conflict, having “rights” like the other party (the slave-owners) and having been “unsuccessful” in obtaining their ends. [32] (One thinks of Marx’s famous dictum, “Between equal rights, force decides.”) [33] Jefferson recommended against “a policy of revenge” against captured slave leaders, ten of whom having been condemned to death were reprieved and banished from the state. [34]

Jefferson undoubtedly believed in Black inferiority, at a time when the leading scholars of his world expressed that belief.[35] And if there were paternalistic aspects to his treatment of his domestic slaves, he employed brutal overseers of his field slaves, dozens of whom attempted to escape. [36]

There are contradictions between and within his words and deeds.

This is the case with his relationship to Native Americans as well: on the one hand, an apparent genuine respect for the indigenous people that extended into an academic study of native vocabularies; on the other, a determined policy to remove Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi. All that needs to be honestly assessed. But the assessment of the historical actor shouldn’t end there, and there’s no good reason to demand a “rupture” with a figure whom Howard Zinn calls “an enlightened, thoughtful individual.” [37]

Upholding Bourgeois Revolutionaries as Historical Figures

One can to an extent “uphold” and “extol” a bourgeois revolutionary for the principal aspects of the historical role he or she played.[38] We can note that Jefferson wasn’t as forward-looking as a Tom Paine or a Maximilien Robespierre, although he was arguably more progressive than, say, the early bourgeois revolutionary Oliver Cromwell. [39]

How should twenty-first century revolutionaries relate to any of these people? We can’t just say they were members of a ruling class in some historically constructed class system and leave it at that. In the 1640s Cromwell led a revolution that, in Engels’ words, “provides the exact model for the French one of 1789.” Engels thought he was “Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one.” Yet Cromwell was guilty, as Engels notes, of “barbarities” in Ireland on a horrific scale. [40] That said, it wouldn’t make sense to reject and condemn him (or Jefferson) for NOT being what he couldn’t have been — a proletarian revolutionary and internationalist — and for living in the period and class society that he did. [41]

We can approach the American Revolution and Jeffersonian Democracy reproachfully, emphasizing what they weren’t and what they didn’t do. Or we can assess them (maybe even respect them) for what they were: a limited bourgeois-democratic revolution and ideology corresponding to a still nascent, dynamic capitalism that had (for a time) an ongoing and largely positive influence in the Americas and world.

As late as January 1865 Karl Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, “From the commencement of the titanic American strife [outbreak of the Civil War] the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” [42]

(It might be relevant to mention here that when, in the 1989 epic Civil War film Glory — about the all-Black 54 Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — director Edward Zwick depicted a Black soldier hoisting the U.S. flag over Ft. Wagner, the Revolutionary Worker defended this. At that time [1863], the writer argued, the U.S. flag meant something different than it means today!) What should we make of this? That Marx (and Lenin, quoted above) was confused about U.S. history? That they were unaware that, steeped in the slavery-tainted Jeffersonian democracy from the outset, that star-spangled banner could in no way ever represent any kind of historical progress? Was Marx stubbornly clinging to a bourgeois-democratic outlook?

Avakian’s “unsparing critique” would seem to indicate so. But such a critique makes no sense.

The RCP maintains that its chair is “one of those special leaders who transformed the world in which he lived.” Forgive me if I don’t see that great-leader quality in his recent talks. And I don’t see the dialectics. Lenin while reading and delightedly engaging the long dead thinker Hegel (a contemporary of Jefferson) once wrote, “Dialectical idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than metaphysical, undeveloped, dead, crude, rigid materialism.”[43] Lenin’s words were aimed at some of the Marxists of his time.

Give me the clear, nuanced, radical mind and eloquent pen of a Jefferson any day — over the affectations of “science” found in the transcribed sermons of Bob Avakian.

Footnote

[31] See the discussion in Zinn, pp. 91-95

[32] Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 224

[33] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 225

[34] Aptheker (1974), p. 219

[35] It’s interesting, though, that he read and respected the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who had written that Africans were the equals of whites “concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities.”

[36] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/interviews/stanton.html

[37] Zinn, p. 89

[38] Abigail Adams for example was arguably a female bourgeois revolutionary.

[39] For an appraisal of Cromwell by the important British Marxist historian Christopher Hill, see God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990)
[40"> Marx-Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, p. 469 (from Vorwärts, vol. 70, 1844)

[41] Might we not as well criticize pre-Neolithic humans for failing to develop agriculture? History is all about the evolution of forces and relations of production and the roles individuals play within constraining matrices.

[42] http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

[43] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), vol. 38, p. 277

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