Josh Land's Last Dream

"Adding the slaves to the calculation of wealth distribution would not bring early America up to the level of European inequality, nor would it change the fact that inequality rose sharply as the 19th century progressed. But, that point aside, no account of life in the U.S. could overlook either the slaves or their descendants."


"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

"Americans of African descent have profoundly influenced the political economy, culture, and physical landscape of this country in every imaginable way. To take an example relevant to this context, as David Roediger shows in his admirable book, The Wages of Whiteness, slavery greatly inhibited the development of class consciousness of white workers, who were all too easily persuaded that wage labor represented a kind of freedom in contrast with slavery. This delusion of independence and superiority persists today, over 130 years after the end of slavery, in highly racialized notions of welfare dependency and the "underclass," disparaging caricatures that help sustain white workers' identification with their bosses' politics and perpetuate countless abuses of black Americans. We have so racialized class that class is often barely visible - which is not, by any means, an attempt to subordinate race to class, since you can hardly talk about one without talking about the other."

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation."

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class."

"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
 

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