Jefferson examined and judged
This is the first of a three-part series written for Kasama.
by Pavel Andreyev
The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods! earlier this year. According to the RCP, it
“…needs to get out broadly into many streams of political and academic life: campuses, high schools, progressive movements, the legal community and intellectuals, and among the oppressed people in this country, opening up debate about the real nature of this system and the need for communist revolution.” [1]
Having “engaged” Away With All Gods! six months ago, I’d like to respond to this seriously as well. [2] What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. [3] I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG! Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). [4] Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”
Engaging Bob Avakian Again
It seems to me there are two problems with Avakian’s approach. It involves, as we will see, both a one-dimensional portrayal of Jefferson and a crude distortion of the historical record. And it involves a departure from historical materialism that isn’t at all helpful as we try to understand such issues as democracy (or what’s represented as such) in today’s world. A materialist understanding of the particularity of historical moments helps us to better understand the particularity of our own time.
But if you reduce history to a timeless morality tale — pounding home how bad people started this country on a bad basis and so (regardless of the historical process since) we have to “rupture with” those people and that historical heritage — you’re really precluding such understanding. We need to examine historical phenomena in their process of development, in their specificity, in their true contradictoriness — not project a kind of “original sin” factor into a country’s history and demand a redemptive, shunning process (as opposed to analysis) as the means to overcoming oppression.
Avakian’s “Scientific” Analysis of Jefferson’s Historical Role: A “Fitting Representative” of Slave-owners
Avakian begins with an anecdote about how he was once told (way back in 1979) by an African-American journalist that he was “awfully brave” for criticizing the U.S. system the way he did. She added, “You know, they kill people for saying what you’re saying.” This comment, according to Avakian, gets “right to the essence of ‘American democracy.’” It is “the essence” of U.S. democracy to kill people [like himself] for criticizing it.[5] Although Avakian surrounds American democracy with quotation marks, implying that it’s not really a democracy, he implies that from its historical inception the principle aspect of the U.S. political system has been the murderous intolerance of critical challenge.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Avakian suggests, represents this vicious essence. Noting that Jefferson is widely admired among progressive people as “the personification” of a “radical and popular democracy” that was never realized, he declares instead that “to put this in… blunt, and scientific—terms, Jefferson stands as a personification and a concentration of many of the illusions of people in the middle strata in particular, and more specifically many in the intelligentsia, who have not ruptured with, and in fact stubbornly cleave to, a bourgeois-democratic view of the world.”
Avakian mocks the old Communist Party USA for upholding Jefferson, and the American Revolution of 1776-1783, as progressive in their time. [6] He warns:
“You cannot get rid of this system if you proceed on the basis of upholding and extolling one of the main representatives of that very system, someone who is indeed emblematic of what that system is all about… You cannot change all this while at the same time clinging to the ideas and ideals that characterize this system and dominate this society—ideas and ideals of which Thomas Jefferson is, in fact, a fitting representative.”
The RCP chair seems to reject the possibility that one can uphold an historical figure for roles he or she played in a given period; that one can distinguish between principal and secondary aspects of historical figures’ roles; and that systems “represented” by such figures themselves can evolve from the revolutionary to the reactionary.
But how does upholding Jefferson as a bourgeois revolutionary during a period of rising capitalism, or even critically accepting some of his ideas, prevent us from getting rid of the vicious system under which we live today?
This question merits some discussion, but Avakian seems disinclined to examine it seriously. Rather, he rejects any positive evaluation of Jefferson as a matter of “clinging to” the ideas underpinning the slave system. One is again reminded of how he demands that Christians either literally believe the Bible (including its acceptance of slavery) or not, with no options in between! [7]
Avakian wants to fix the terms of discussion: either/or. Either you understand that Jefferson represented (indeed personified) the slave system, and is thus a figure to repudiate, or you “cling to” old CP-style patriotic opportunism.
This is a highly simplistic approach to history.
It’s not the same type of simplistic approach one finds in Stalin’s writings, which posit a near-universal series of “inevitable” stages corresponding to modes of production and imply that individuals should be evaluated as “progressive” or “reactionary” depending upon how they relate to the interests of the “rising” class. [8] (Bourgeois revolutions are progressive; the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution and Jefferson a bourgeois revolutionary; thus, Jefferson was progressive.)
Avakian has appropriately rejected that crude model. [9]
But he posits something equally crude but less accurate: slavery is horrible; Jefferson owned slaves; hence Jefferson was, in the main, reactionary and deserving of the sharp exposure the self-described scientist Avakian can provide.
Far from the complex figure depicted in biographies by historians, morally torn by the issue of slavery and publicly and privately urging its abolition, Jefferson was in Avakian’s portrayal “one of the main representatives” of the slave-owning class enthusiastically promoting the slave system.
An Undialectical View of the American (Bourgeois) Revolution
Avakian of course recognizes that Jefferson and the other “founding fathers” were bourgeois revolutionaries; he declares that “Jefferson, and his political philosophy, stand in a real sense as an emblem of what is in fact bourgeois democracy—and in reality bourgeois dictatorship—in the history of the United States of America.” [10] He doesn’t however acknowledge the positive side of this in world-historical perspective.
Marxist scholars have generally:
(1) viewed the American Revolution as a progressive phenomenon, with profound implications for anti-colonial movements in Latin America and bourgeois revolutionary movements in Europe, especially France;
(2) seen it as “incomplete” in that its rhetoric of equality was irreconcilable with the realities of slavery and other forms of oppression (compatible with capitalism but not integral to it); and
(3) regarded it as a “work in progress” providing a structural framework for broader democratization, particularly in the form of the expanding franchise. [11]
Some basic facts seem beyond dispute. The revolution freed the Northern merchants from the burdens of British governance and allowed for the rapid development of industry. It produced a constitution by 1787 that gave the electorate (a majority of adult white males) greater participation in decision-making than existed in any other major country. This served the interest of the ruling class(es) at the time. [12]
Thus Lenin, in a letter to American workers in 1918, described the American Revolution as “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars.”[13] In 1951 the Communist Party historian Herbert Aptheker noted that as a “fundamentally colonial” revolution it lacked the “profoundly transforming quality” of the English and French revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and “its thorough-going nature was limited …by its compromising with and then acceptance of the pre-feudal form which did characterize American colonial society — namely chattel slavery — something to be undone in a future revolution [the Civil War].” [14]
One detects some historicism here in Aptheker’s approach — the idea that bourgeois revolutions are good virtually by definition, representing “progress” in relation to prior “feudalism” and paving the way for subsequent socialist revolutions.
There are problems with that concept, and with any conception of history that posits a necessary sequence of stages and places the human subject at the mercy of “inevitability.” That is not Marxism.
As Marx and Engels point out:
“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” [15]
Marx did not posit an inevitable sequence of modes of production, each more liberating than the former, inexorably culminating with classless society. He explicitly denied that his “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe” in Capital constituted “an historico-philosophic theory of the marche générale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man.”16
There are no iron laws of history.
The American Revolution didn’t have to happen the way that it did, and it certainly didn’t produce “the most complete development of man” possible at the time.
Still, Marxists (I think correctly) posit a general directionality in history, acknowledging the prospect of setbacks. [17] And Marxists have properly categorized the American Revolution along with the English Revolution (1640-1660) and the French Revolution of 1789 as one of the key bourgeois revolutions in world history, sweeping away absolute monarchies, hereditary aristocracies and structural barriers to the accumulation of capital by merchant classes.
Breaking with “Jeffersonian Democracy” and Breaking with Historical Facts
Avakian doesn’t see the American Revolution as a step forward towards “the complete development” of humanity but as a big fraud.
He seeks to expose it as such through his talks/transcripts — apparently designed for audiences he thinks will encounter a “scientific” analysis of U.S. history for the first time. Much as he demands a break with religion, Avakian demands a break with “Jeffersonian democracy” as the premise for revolutionary consciousness.
Why should we “rupture with” this icon of “American democracy”?
Here is Avakian’s main thesis: not only was he was a slave-owner but,
“Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the aristocratic large landowning and slaveholding class in the southern United States, in opposition to the interests of small farmers—and, of course, this was also in opposition to the interests of that group of individuals who most glaringly did not have independence economically, or in any other way: the slaves, who did not actually count as individuals in the eyes of the slaveholders” [emphasis added].
In other words, Jeffersonian democracy — even as currently conceptualized among the progressives Avakian wants to challenge — is rooted in the slave-owning class. How slavery relates logically and concretely (particularly after 1865) to the components of Jeffersonian democracy (republicanism, constitutional government, individual rights, the principle of representative democracy, separation of church and state, opposition to a standing army, doctrine of separation of powers, freedom of speech and press, etc. — some of which we might want to retain after a communist-led revolution) is never really spelled out. [18] Certainly Jefferson expressed a “bourgeois-democratic view of the world,” as Avakian states. But was the acceptance of slavery integral to that worldview? Or was it, as Aptheker suggests, a matter of “compromising…to be undone” in the Civil War? [19]
Avakian acknowledges that “you can find statements by Jefferson where he says that slavery is in fact a blight and that it will have negative consequences for some time to come.” (I will cite some of them below.) But he adds:
“There have also been misinterpretations of what Jefferson wrote about slavery. To take one important example, there are passages he wrote in drafts of the Declaration of Independence—some of which did not, but some of which did, make it into the final version of that Declaration—where the King of England and the British government were strongly condemned for supposedly imposing the slave trade on the United States. Now, there were, in fact, ways in which Jefferson and the slave-owning class in Virginia generally were opposed to aspects of the international slave trade, even while they themselves were involved in selling slaves to other states and to slaveowners in other territories. In this, the essential motivation of these Virginia slaveowners was that they didn’t want the price of a slave being driven down, since they themselves had become major sellers of slaves within America itself.”
In other words, any expression of anti-slavery sentiment was all window-dressing. But to what end? Jefferson’s historical legacy? (Obviously his words against slavery don’t protect him from the mighty pen of a Bob Avakian, two hundred years down the road!)
The following is the famous passage that Jefferson wrote for inclusion in the Declaration of Indpendence that was cut from the final adopted version:
“[The British king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”[20]
To suggest that Jefferson wrote this out of the desire to increase slave prices for Virginia landowners is a stretch. And Avakian does not, in fact, prove that Jefferson intended that passage to be interpreted any way other than literally.
In his Autobiography, Jefferson claimed that in 1769, as a 26 year old member of the Virginian colonial legislature, he had proposed “the permission of the emancipation of slaves.”[21] (Was this too a mere cynical ruse?) Avakian’s “one important example” pertaining to the Declaration draft is hardly damning.
His case rests on something else: the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that doubled the size of the United States.
Next in Part 2: Misunderstanding the Louisiana Purchase
* * * * * *
FOOTNOTES
[1] http://rwor.org/a/146/letter_on_comm-jd-en.html
It should be noted that while the publication is promoted as a “major new work” the tapes constituting the almost unaltered text have actually been available online for two years.
[2] For my review of Away With All Gods! on the Kasama site.
[3] This is not intended primarily as a contribution to the discussion of bourgeois (“Jeffersonian”) and socialist democracy, which Mike Ely has called for on the Kasama site. That’s a worthy but separate project, particularly given the Nepalese comrades’ assertion that a multi-party democracy is the crucial political mechanism for staying on the socialist road or for avoiding capitalist restoration.
[4] Bob Avakian, Away With All Gods! (Chicago: Insight Press, 2008), pp. 18, 83
[5] Somehow one recalls Avakian’s statement “On the Occasion of the Death of Willie “Mobile” Shaw” in December 2005. Avakian said that Shaw, an African-American communist, had (at some unspecified point in the past) “said to me: ‘You are the only hope we have.’ I have kept those words in my heart, with a deep sense of responsibility to live up to them.” http://rwor.org/a/027/avakian-statement-willie-shaw.htm
[6]Avakian notes that the Communist Party, USA maintained “Jefferson Bookstores” outlets through the 1960s (and beyond).
[7] Avakian (2008), p. 34
[8] See Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938; Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976)
[9] See Revolutionary Worker, no. 1178 (December 8, 2002)
[10] By the way, Avakian repeats this expression “in a real sense” seven times in this text, and “in an overall sense” four times. This repetitive, pompous manner of expression, and the inclusion of wholly unnecessary clauses adding padding to his material, is characteristic of his “body of work.”
[11] For a useful overview of the older Marxist scholarship see Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution, 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1951), p. 19f. Howard Zinn suggests that the “Founding Fathers…kept things as they were” while using the Constitution “to build a broad base of support…” He even states that the Constitution was “perfectly designed to build popular backing for the new government…” See Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 99, 101. But I have not found any Marxist work arguing that the American Revolution represented some sort of social retrogression.
[12] Some would divide the bourgeoisie of the time into capitalists and slave-owners (with antagonistic interests), while others see the slave-owners themselves as capitalists of a sort.
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), vol. 28, p. 62
[14] Aptheker (1951), p. 22
[15] Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 385. This is from the 1844 work The Holy Family.
[16] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), p. 377. This was written in 1877, when in response to crude simplifications and distortions of his theories Marx was obliged to occasionally aver “I am not a Marxist.”
[17] We are, as a species, interacting with our environment in such a way as to better understand it, ourselves, and ways to improve human existence. While “History” is not a wind-up device producing predictable results, stages or outcomes, the application of human reason does generally produce “progress,” even though anti-rational ideologies such as fascism have in modern times produced widespread disillusionment and despair.
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