Read on Twitter
It’s important that we understand the establishment of the United States with its declarations of natural liberty as the creation of a “republican tyranny”, a system in which the absolute authority of each owner, as an island unto himself over and against his subjects, an
individual god in a society of gods, in a nation modeled upon the Roman idea of paterfamiliae. The coincidence of a nation of slavers expounding the most radical ideas of inalienable rights to non-interference is a contradiction but not a paradox— the master’s liberty increases
proportional to his ability to expropriate and control his subjects and their activity. This dynamic was not resolved in the Civil War; to the contrary, it was universalized and evolved into the system of wage slavery, the domination of radically free owners over a great sea of
subjects who are not the sole property of one master but of the class of masters as a whole. The story of the United States is not one of a spark of fundamental emancipation expanding and triumphing over its unfortunate imperfections. It is the story of a blow struck by the
purest modern (proto-)capitalist class, an assertion of their rights over and against the mass of people, punctuated with massive upheavals born of the struggle of those dominated against this regime. All the progressive realizations of liberal ideals have been the result of
slave rebellions and uprisings, whether those slaves were black chattel or workers racialized into whiteness. The accomplishments made in this country in the name of liberty have all been the product of class struggle, with the fiercest resistance from the “free” masters and the
most revolutionary valiance of the enslaved subjects, not the further realization of the ideals set forth on this day in 1776. The liberty of the exploiters is the domination of the producers. We can only realize the emancipation of both of these benighted, alienated classes of
people through the abolition of the regime of property; we can only achieve true democracy through the creation, in our own revolutionary triumph, of the cooperative commonwealth; the workers republic.
