The Power Problem of Revolutions
What came to be known as Shay’s Rebellion that left Massachusetts alone with the responsibility of dealing with the attempted coup against the Massachusetts was the prime mover in calling forth of the convention to establish a type of national government. Less known is that the same consequences that led to the rebellion in Massachusetts was only the last pre-constitutional attempt of less affluent citizenry to rebel against the authorities within the states.
Five years earlier in Massachusetts itself, Job Shattuck had attempted to organized the citizenry in Groton. Less than a year later a much larger rebellion began in Uxbridge, but that also included dissatisfied farmers in Rhode Island who seized their own lands back from constables that had seized them.
What has become known as the rebellion of Daniel Shays actually once again crossed state lines, as there were Connecticut farmers both involved in the Massachusetts insurrection, but who were developing plans to revolt against the policies of the Connecticut legislature. The rebellious forces were not singularly united behind Shay either, but were three forces that agreed to unite in their attempt and coordinate their attack. One of these militias was led by Luke Day and consisted of Connecticutans who agreed to join with the Massachuttans, led by Luke Day. The third militia was led by Eli Parsons and situated north of the others near Chicopee.
At issue also was exactly what land belonged to each state. One resolution that totally bypassed the federal government of the period under the Articles was a treaty signed in 1786 between New York and Massachusetts known as the Treaty of Hartford. So people were not always certain of what state they were in, and often they would find two differing states legislating laws and trying to apply them. (This did not necessarily end with the establishment of the constitution, and earlier in our history there were several supreme court cases that reflected a need to resolve these border issues).
In New York the conditions that led to the largest (numerically speaking) slave insurrection in US history that had begun in 1766, but had sort of been put aside during the revolution because the “white slaves” under the patroon system saw an opportunity of the revolution against Britain to open the doors to their freedom, found themselves forced back into servitude by the New York government after the revolution. (The patroon system actually was not abolished until 1846). And so the insurrection flared up again, creating a near permanent divide in New York politics.
Why do I call it slavery? Well the tenants could not own land, if they fled the platoon plantations they could be forced back onto the land, they had no legal standing, need have no jury trials to be punished, and didn’t even count as ¾ of a citizen for census persons. They were merely not existent automatons who amassed fortunes for their overseers.
Supposedly they were “renters”. But the rent was the entirety of their produce and their sustenance was whatever the patroon owner granted them from their produce. They couldn’t leave the plantation to go buy anything for themselves, and thus had no ability to save for the time beyond the end of their contract. While contracts were to individual farmers and their families, if a young man married a young woman their contracts might not be concurrent and if a child was born the child couldn’t be freed even if one or the other parent’s contract ended before the child reached maturity. True, they couldn’t be individually sold, but their contracts could be.
So tell me how this is not slavery? (By the way black slavery didn’t end in New York until 1827, but still nineteen years before all slavery was abolished in New York.
The Regulators Insurrection in the south, again had more than one militia group involved, and though generally seen as having ended by 1771, and primarily unique to North Carolina where the major battles took place, is actually kind of untrue. After being defeated in battle, many of the regulators simply hid in the upper reaches of the North Carolina and southern Virginia mountains and remained there for nearly two centuries. Some fled into the Tennessee and what would later become the West Virginia highlands.
In Tennessee the separatist government of the Watauga Association would begin in 1772 and continue beyond the revolution into the days of the Articles (and beyond to the days when Tennessee would become a state.) And of course during the reign of The Articles, the State of Franklin declared itself to be independent of Virginia in 1784.
The State of Franklin was declared when North Carolina granted a portion of what would become eastern Tennessee th as a repayment for their war debt loaned by Virginia to them during the Revolution. The remaining Regulators wanted no part of being under the thumb of Virginia any more than they had wanted to be oppressed by the wealthocrats that had tried to control them in North Carolina and declared themselves independent of Virginia in founding the State of Franklin.
One of the issues of course in Tennessee becoming a state, was Virginia never accepted the State of Franklin as independent and appointed a nearby plantation owner to be their representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses. ( It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than I am capable of describing it, and took several twists and turns, and my thumbnail sketch leaves out so much it is nearly ahistorical, so I am going to refer you to the references at the conclusion of this article. The problem even then no one source is complete, and to put all the pieces together one must refer to multiple sources to get the entire story.)
But I wish to get to the real issue in this discussion and that is the power problem of revolutions. As I mentioned a few days ago, the example of Thomas Jefferson. The key passage in the declaration for American independence is not the oft-quoted beginning, but the following passages on the right of dissatisfied persons always having the right to rebel. After the constitution itself was established, Jefferson frequently would comment against its permanency and comment that continuous revolutions should be necessary.
Jefferson really did believe black slaves should be freed, though he did not have much confidence in their ability to govern. But rather than being hypocritical (or maybe that’s what hypocrisy is) his lack of desire to free his own slaves was that he believed that his governance of the slaves on his plantation was wiser and kinder and “better”. Although he would not attempt the marxian or owenistic reforms of Joseph Emory Davis a half century later, he actually thought under his tutelage and leadership, his slaves were as free as an inferior people can be.
The issue was not about whether others should free their slaves, of course he knew they should be free and for the same reason as Madison feared freeing the slaves, notably his rather famous comment that slavery was like “holding a wolf by the ear, we can neither hold him nor let him go.” But that view is exactly the power problem of revolutions.
Revolutionary ideas of freedom that lead people to revolt are the attempt by the powerful to hold the wolf by the ear. People will continually struggle to be free and holding them will never be successful; but letting them go will always replace the balance of power.
As such the idea of freedom becomes a power play. People who are let go now reverse the scales and become the wolf who has been let go.
Nowhere in history is the insidiousness of the issue more relevant than observing the French Revolution. It actually was successful in breaking free of the authority of the french monarchy at the time, but the failure was they had no idea how to enforce their new found freedom other than through a reign of terror. The reign of terror itself is not unusual, but in the French Revolution the chaos and terror that ensued was the direct result of multiple players wanting freedom for themself and power for themselves, and none of the other “freedom seekers” were willing to concede to anyone taking power (beware of the dream of anarchy!). But in general the revolution that takes power often institutes a reign of terror on those that formerly held power in order to control people to their own perspective of giving them freedom. But the French Revolution was so swiftly ended by their reigning terror upon themselves in such an open manner.
The idea of freedom is the bribe, that once in power becomes the means of suppressing others, by the Idea itself.
There is a great difference in the ideological perspective of freedom and the practicality of enforcing the ideology. If freedom means, say, removing the authority of the power elite; then whatever ideology of that elite was needs to be suppressed; thus merely exchanging the ruling ideology rather than reforming the means of obtaining power. Stalin did nothing different than the czars. He used the same system of justice and punished opponents in the same system of gulags that the czars had done. But the czarist ideology was the ideology of the pyramidal authority of czar-lord-bureaucrat-serf. The church’s power often resided in both the realms of lord and bureaucrat.
Stalin did nothing to change the structure whatsoever of this authoritarian diagram. The party became the lords and the bureaucrats and the head of the party became the czar. Nor did his purges against his lords and bureaucrats differ from those of the czar who often imprisoned the intelligentsia of forced them to flee into exile. But Stalin offered the idea of freedom from Czarist oppression. Like the French he often turned against other revolutionaries that had enabled him. But unlike the failed French, he did so to keep his own power but in a manner that declared them opposed to the freedom that would come.
The French were not as disposed to disagree on their grander purpose but on the minutia of the terror their “freedom” demanded and the ever-increasing necessity of eliminating anyone who might have been able to carry out their newly proclaimed freedom.
One of the greatest pieces of literature ever written on this eternal conflict may be The Bronze Horseman, a poem by Pushkin. In this poem Pushkin poses the problem of the “little man” whose happiness is destroyed by the great leader in pursuit of ambition. He does this by telling a “story of St. Petersburg” set against the background of the flood of 1824, when the river took its revenge against Peter I’s achievement in building the city.
The poem describes how the “little hero,” Yevgeny, is driven mad by the drowning of his sweetheart, and begins wandering through the streets. Coming across a bronze statue of Peter I seated on a rearing horse. Yevgeny envisions that the tsar in the stature is being depicted as the conqueror over the waves, and that Peter’s mastery is the cause of his grief. Yevgeny threatens the statue and, in a climax of growing horror, Yevegeny finds himself being pursued through the streets by the “Bronze Horseman.”
When the structure itself is threatened successfully then other structures themselves of similar authority combine to minimize and rebuke the authority. For this reason, “people’s” revolts like Wat Tyler’s working class rebellion in fourteenth century England, or the multiple miner’s revolts in the U.S.; any slave revolts, etc… throughout the world’s history always result in swift actions by authorities to suppress them through a united front.
Should one succeed on a national basis, like the Haitian revolt against being enslaved by the French on Hispaniola, then the countries united against them. Could Haiti have succeeded if America had not opposed them (the one revolution Jefferson had no sympathy for and did not wish to succeed) have had a different outcome, or would it have eventually reverted to the Haitian dictatorships that would follow in the centuries to come and the chaos that resulted from those dictatorships had the entire half-island not been suppressed into poverty and blockaded from any resources? How can we know?
One of the mysterious empires of all time was the Mayan. Never really one empire, but a series of empires that would concentrate all the wealth into one leading city who would control both the rituals and the wealth until the environment decayed to the point no one supported the capital city and its leaders. The city decayed internally by losing all external support until it became more or less a wasteland and the remaining inhabitants departed from the environmental wasteland. For a decade or so there would be no dominating authority and then a new leader in a different capital would start the process all over again.
In more recent times, we see a similar occurrence to Haiti, when Castro overthrew the American sponsored regime of Fulgencio Batista. I tend to believe Castro, that he had no intention of being “communist”, at the dawn of his victory over Batista. In the first years, Castro wanted to show that people could successfully outproduce what the sugar companies that had long dominated the production were able to accomplish.
Castro, though never having been a laborer, went into the fields himself to work in solidarity and with the promise that the wealth produced from the harvests would belong to those that participated in the harvest. Other non-farm workers, from taxi drivers to professors, came to the fields to participate and for two years they produced more sugar than had ever been achieved under the American corporations.
It was America, joined by other western nations, that boycotted the bountiful harvest and it languished in the fields to rot. With no where to turn, Russia made a deal, they would buy Cuban sugar and tobacco if Castro declared himself to be a”Communist.”
Never again did Castro or the nation’s non-farmers march to the fields in pride to produce together a national bounty. Never did they again achieve the results of those first two harvests. Castro retreated more or less inside his palace and became what we had claimed him to be—-would that have happened otherwise? How can we know if revolutions against the structure are forced into failing by a unified stance to impoverish them?
This becomes the paradox of the power problem of revolutions. They either maintain the structure under different leaders who reframe the definition of Freedom to be the freedom of the newly empowered; or they are prevented from gaining enough traction to restructure the system of what power actually means.
So to conclude by returning to the American revolution, the assumption that removing Britain as the authority, gave many working class (which at the time was almost entirely rural workers) hope that the government of the new colonies would be restructured in a way that those who bought their produce would no longer keep the producers of the wealth (the farmers) subservient to the merchants who controlled the wealth. But the “leaders” of the revolution did not define freedom in such a way. They simply tried to obtain their freedom from Britain but to maintain their own control of government. So Americans ofttimes began to feel they were being pursued by the Bronze horseman.
American independence produced an ideological Freedom that never equaled its practical structuring of its proposed ideological theorem.
This is why framing the question we face today as a choice between Autocracy and Democracy remains problematic for me. Of course I don’t want “maga-autocrats” to take control of the structure. Of course if they succeed there will follow a reign of terror to seize all power and the offer of a new ideological Freedom such as occurred in the Russian revolution (most evidently, but not exclusively).
The problem is the current ideological concept of Freedom has not given satisfactory freedom to most. And should the democratic party (those favoring democracy over autocracy, not the party claiming to be Democrats) win in ‘24, perhaps Biden said it best, “For how long?”
But after that I depart from Biden to some extent. I think he gets it that it is economic control that people are rejecting. What I fear he does not grasp is the idea that “greatness” is a “fake” idea. Greatness of a nation always has to include consuming the citizenry to that greatness.
Unless the question is reframed from the greatness of either the nation or the greatness of the individual the promise of the american democratic idea fails to bring forth the promise of Freedom that greatness makes into subjugation. Yet I think the constitution grants the opportunity for a great deal of leeway in creating an economic doorway to a better governing structure.
Of course it is about economics…but what is economics other than a discussion of how to supply resources? What needs to be restructured however is who is control of the resources, not how to distribute the resources.
The question that has plagued history is control of resources, so if any have control over the resources, then by controlling the resources, they end up controlling people. This is the problem America has been unable to address. It does little good to free slaves and limit their access to the resources.
A person not in control of his own resources remains enslaved by those who do. The issue that drives attitudes that blacks are somehow inferior is a “fake” issue. The issue is that the white who does not control his own resources has been faked into believing he would be more in control of his resources were he not in competition with the black American.
It cannot be framed in the terms of stupid people; many well educated, i.e., supposedly smart people, have the same ideology. Of course resources are what resources be.
To reframe the issue from being in charge—anyone–of the resources is a distortion of the issue of what is the best way to use the resources. There is no one right answer to that question, but there is definitely a wrong answer. The wrong answer is that resources belong to an individual, or an entity, be it a corporate or government entity.
Redistribution centered on either public or private control is not the way to look at the question at all. Does it really matter if the government controls my access to water or if a private company does? Either way my access is limited.
But we can’t let this mean extreme individualistic control either, by some sort of idealistic belief that somehow everyone could be individually capable of entirely becoming self-provident. There of course needs to be a communitarian access that provides the needed resources, but the communitarian (governmental) approach needs to be subject to the needs of the individuals. Neither can be supreme to the other. That becomes a precarious balancing act that can never be achieved by engravings upon stone. It becomes a daily struggle to engage itself that never expects it shall achieve its goal.
The one thing that is historically evident is all revolution are against powers who are seen to be in control of the resources and replacing the “ownership” or “distribution” of the resources is the power problem revolutions are unable to resolve.
Everyone needs to have his own power in accessing the resources to achieve his survival and fulfill his desires. But no one can accomplish this singularly without bringing conflict with another into the discussion. The singular individual can accomplish this only in conjunction with the others who can each put forth themselves in how to achieve that,
No individual can be consumed into a majority or a minority. And the only notion I can offer as to defining Freedom must include what individuals are willing to give to the community and how the community distributes the individual gifts so that every individual has his needs and desires met.
The status quo of “our democracy” will not suffice, because it has continually failed to address the power problem that the ideology of democracy presents.