Capitalism’s rise concentrated property, corrupted courts, and birthed a two-party dictatorship. The Civil War ended slavery, yet the bourgeoisie had already buried popular rule. Join us on Telegram , X , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su This is the second and final article marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. Like the first, it revolves around the functioning of the democratic system that American authorities continue to promote to this day. In the first article, I addressed the exceptional circumstances that made possible the birth and development of democracy in the United States. In this second article, we will see how it was buried by the very bourgeoisie that created it.
During the colonial era, a system had been imposed in which the governors of the colonies (representatives of the King of England) appointed a separate body of judges, parallel to the popular jury. This aristocratic legacy remained as a tool of the largest property owners in the United States and gave rise to the Supreme Court. Whereas in the colony there were judges appointed by the representative power of the Crown, in the independent republic these judges were appointed by the president. Thus, one part of the judiciary was under the control of the people, but the other remained alien to that popular control. The preservation of this feudal garbage was one of the greatest misfortunes to befall American democracy. Thomas Jefferson was unsparing in his criticism of this body foreign to a democratic republic, emphasizing its corporatism, corruption, arbitrariness, and lack of popular control over what he called a “seriously anti-republican” power. As early as 1789, he wrote: “Were I called upon to decide whether the people had best be omitted in the Legislative or Judiciary department, I would say it is better to leave them out of the Legislative. The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them.”
The same occurred with the federal Senate, which came to be elected by state legislators and placed itself above them, becoming increasingly independent from them. Capital needed a legislative body antagonistic to the power of the people and representative of the power of money, as Jefferson denounced.
The natural means by which the people exercise their power is the unicameral legislature. And a legislature that, directly controlled by the people, makes the laws, executes the laws, and corrects any failure in the execution of the laws. The separation of powers accompanies the social division of labor, the division of social classes, and the growing distance between rich and poor. The judiciary was the branch most naturally manageable by the emerging ruling class because of the very function of judges: preserving order. Bourgeois order is not popular participation—this is merely a transitional stage that the bourgeoisie must utilize, and therefore tolerate, in order to develop. Bourgeois order is capitalist private property. The American Constitution—as with any bourgeois constitution—is the deepest guarantee of private property. As private property developed—and with it the growing differentiation of classes and the emergence of a threatening proletariat—it became separated from the people, whose body of citizens had originally consisted of proprietors, of individual workers who owned themselves. The mass importation of European workers and the abolition of slavery in the South, generating an abundant supply of labor power for the reproduction of capital, finally freed the large capitalist from competition with the small producer and even with his own wage laborer. The concentration of property at one pole led to the absence of property at the other. The judiciary merely followed its natural course in protecting private property, now increasingly accumulated in fewer and fewer hands.
The executive branch would have to follow the same path. And that is what happened. As long as free competition had not yet produced economic concentration and the first major monopolies, there was no need for a strong executive. Economic development was only beginning to produce the first industrial workers, and class contradictions had not yet sharpened—unlike in France, a genuine whirlwind of class struggle. But the emergence of modern factories, the narrowing of competition, and the growth of the proletariat required, as the political expression of the new economic situation, an equivalent centralization of the State, granting the president a freedom that governors had never possessed.
As property became concentrated, the State became concentrated. As the majority no longer possessed property, it also began to lose its political rights. Even the legislature succumbed to the concentration of property: whereas before practically everyone possessed relatively equal conditions for conducting political campaigns, now the largest proprietors enjoyed advantages in electing themselves and their representatives. Federal legislators decided to increase their terms of office compared to state representatives (who served one-year terms, and senators two-year terms).
The process had begun of moving from the concentration of power in the hands of the people—still carried forward by their vanguard, the rising bourgeoisie—to the concentration of power in the hands of bureaucrats above the people and serving the already established bourgeoisie, which now needed to control the people. “The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities,” Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “how then should the great majorities outside Parliament not wish to decide?” Therein lay the great threat to democracy!
The bourgeoisie attempts to present the separation of powers as more democratic, but this division is arbitrary and serves the regime of domination, weakening the people’s original institution and transferring power to those who oppress them. In 1891, Engels was able to diagnose—and accurately forecast—the corruption of American democracy when he stated that it was in the United States that the independence of the State from society had advanced furthest, where two parties representing distinct sectors of the same bourgeois class had transformed state politics into a vast capitalist business enterprise.
One final point that cannot be omitted regarding American democracy is the slavery of Black people (Native Americans were not even integrated into society, to the point of being exterminated, and women, as in previous societies, did not enjoy full rights, something that would only be conquered with the Russian Revolution). The soil of the South was suited to extensive production and therefore to the development of large landed property. The condition of the slaves (who were not citizens) and the absence of the small producer guaranteed the economic—and therefore political—domination of a landowning oligarchy.
Based on the slave labor of a large part of the population, the South was therefore politically far more backward than the North. Social stratification was pronounced. Not only a fully developed structure of domination, the Southern states were also an expression of backward productive forces, whereas the Northern states represented their opposite: progressive productive forces, and a still fragile machine of class domination. Moreover, the slave mode of production was an obstacle to economic progress and, as the big bourgeoisie became master of the Northern states, it needed to do the same in the South. The unification of the country after the Civil War against the slaveholding oligarchy of the South, which led to the emancipation of the slaves and the end of large landed estates, was the last great democratic achievement of the bourgeoisie in the United States. In Marx’s words, “the highest form of popular self-government yet realized” defeated “the most cruel and shameless form of human slavery recorded in the annals of history.” This made possible the definitive development of the capitalist mode of production, together with the discovery of gold in California.