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16 February 2026

THE DUST HAD barely settled after the US attack on Venezuela, and the seizure of its oil industry, when Donald Trump was imposing an oil embargo on Cuba, threatening war on Iran and demanding the US takeover of Greenland.

This is naked imperialism – red in tooth and claw. The claim that the United States stands for democracy has been exploded abroad. But likewise democracy is disappearing fast at home in the US, with the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis. At the time of writing, six other people – all immigrants – have died in ICE custody so far this year, on top of the 32 last year.¹

The USA is getting closer to Dimitrov’s characterisation of fascism as the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”² Behind the big oil, gas minerals and ‘defence’ companies, who stand to gain from this naked imperialism, are institutional investors like State Street, BlackRock and Vanguard, as internet searches will show. Those companies also have significant stakes in Big Tech, which is embedded with the military and involved in the deployment of a massive techno-surveillance state in the US.³

So much for “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. But was the United States ever free, democratic and exceptional? Was it destined to spread the values of liberty and democracy globally? In our lead article here, Stephen Scott exposes that myth. The article is a long read, but we print it in full because of its timeliness in the current situation. Going right back to the founding convention in 1787, the author shows that the Constitution was written by wealthy white men to defend their interests against the poor, and chief among those interests was slave ownership.

“From early on,” he says, “an elite colonial land-grabbing class … contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best,” exploiting the unfree labour of indentured servants, African slaves and Native Americans, all of whom – as well as women – were then disenfranchised by the Continental Congress. This elite class was inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, and in both the South and the North gained from that “peculiar institution” of slavery, the former through direct exploitation, and the latter through bank loans to the slave owners.

As Stephen also shows, the ideas that sustained the notions of race and a class-stratified slave society were birthed and developed together, the concept of ‘whiteness’ not existing until about 1613, but thereafter being used, along with a bogus early ‘race science’, to underpin a racialised stratification in early American thought. It took the Civil War to end slavery, and even after that was over “Divisions [maintained] amongst the lower classes, throughout the South, served as a powerful and effective hegemonic tool of supremacy.”

The US has never come to terms with its past, and white supremacist views are very much present today in its attitude to former colonial peoples in Latin America, and in secretary of state Marco Rubio’s ‘new colonialism’ vision expounded at the Munich Security Conference on February 14.⁴

Stephen Scott’s article is followed by two shorter articles commenting on recent actions by the US. Indian Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik characterises this as a “gangster phase” of imperialism, but says it cannot last for long, because “The people of the world, especially of the Third World who have been victims of imperialism, will not allow themselves once again to remain in thraldom to imperialist domination.” Marc Vandepitte says that “the historic dominance of a single superpower, the US, is visibly crumbling” and that “Washington and the Western allies are desperately trying to reverse that trend” because “maximum profit and the maintenance or expansion of Western transnationals, tech companies and financial institutions … is at stake,” and this is “the clash of the 21st century.”

Marc points out that Rubio is “a pronounced China hawk” who considers that “the power struggle between the US and China will determine the entire story of the 21st century.” Many European governments, including our own, will take the same view. To sustain that position, an entire industry of anti-China propaganda has been built up on both sides of the Atlantic. In his article here, Mark Blacklock exposes the activities of that nexus in Britain.

The following contribution, by Arnaud Bertrand, focuses on China from a different perspective. A speech by Chinese president Xi Jinping was widely quoted in Western media, because he explicitly called for the Yuan to “possess global reserve currency status”. But, as Arnaud explains, they have missed the point, because the speech wasn’t about challenging the dollar. Rather, it was about the role of ethical finance under socialism and internationally, building “a financial system that the world has decided to trust.” That is the real power struggle between the US and China.

Three more articles complete this edition of CR. Richard Clarke defends Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 against detractors, and maintains, like Eric Hobsbawm, that it emerges “with flying colours”. Then Ruth Pitman looks at the application of the categories of dialectical and historical materialism in Marxist-Leninist education. Finally, in his ‘Soul Food’ column, Nick Moss introduces us to the terrific writing of worker-poet Matthew Rice.

Our next edition is planned to be devoted to the centenary of the 1926 General Strike and Miners’ Lock-Out.

Notes and References

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/deaths-ice-2026-.

2. G Dimitrov, ‘The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International’, in The United Front, Lawrence & Wishart, 1938, p10.

3. https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-06-05/how-the-us-is-turning-intoa-mass-techno-surveillance-state.html. 

4. Morning Star, 16 February 2026, https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/rubio-gives-green-light-new-era-us-european-colonialism. 

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Introduction

This investigation is a deliberate examination into the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical foundations which undergirded America’s early colony and its newly birthed land of liberty’s class-stratified slave society – combined with a closer look at the contradictions which lay within the notions and/or paradoxes of early American equality, freedom, race and enslavement (commencing in the seventeenth-century). This study will therefore contend that, to appreciate the early interpretations of American political organisation, it is essential to understand its beginnings – centring on the US Constitution. The review will initially focus principally (however not exclusively) on the distinct influences of important personages such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris and others – steeped in early American thought and thus influenced by renowned Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith – exemplified and exhibited in the celebrated Federalist Papers, with a specific and detailed focus on No 10 by James Madison; additionally including Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, which will help to outline and undergird the key arguments put forth by this study. 

Many of those notables that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in that historic year of 1787 were intent on framing a resilient centralised government that stood in accordance with Adam Smith’s essential maxims which affirmed that 

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all;”

contending that civil government 

“grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”

Consequently, this analysis will challenge that long-held notion which has described early American thought and society as “egalitarian, free from [the] extreme want and wealth that characterised Europe.” In fact, as will be demonstrated throughout the work, citing an array of noted scholars and academics, this exploration will prove that property, class and status played a significant, although perhaps not an exclusive, role in the development of that early colony and its nascent nation.

The intricacies of these contradictions will be examined in further detail throughout this study, arguing that it is impossible to avoid the fact that status, class and race performed a major part in the views and doctrines woven within the principles and legal mechanisms formulated by those luminaries in that early republic. In fact, the following quote, extracted from a communiqué written by a French diplomat (positioned as the chargé d’affaires), to his government in 1786, on the eve of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, helps to delineate the top-down attitudes and devices engineered by the men historically known as the ‘Framers’:

“Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated ‘gentlemen’. … Almost all of them dread the efforts of the people to despoil them of their possessions, and, moreover, they are creditors, and therefore interested in strengthening the government and watching over the execution of the law …. The majority of them being merchants, it is for their interest to establish the credit of the United States in Europe on a solid foundation by the exact payment of debts, and to grant to Congress powers extensive enough to compel the people to contribute for this purpose.”

As supported, evidenced, and argued by famed bottom-up historians like Michael Parenti, Charles A Beard, Michael J Klarman and others, the concepts of class and ownership and their European legacy greatly contributed to the initial composition of that early American dominion and its proprietorship stratum. In fact, as Professor Parenti demonstrated, 

“[F]rom colonial times onward, ‘men of influence’ received vast land grants from the [English] Crown and presided over estates that bespoke an impressive munificence.”

He also reveals the stark differentials woven within the colonial class structure, exposing the fact that: 

“By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons … [and, beyond that,] In the interior of Virginia, seven individuals owned 1.7 million acres.” 

This exhibits a structuralised formulation of wealth concentration from early on. Parenti additionally notes that, some 27 years prior to the Continental Congress:

“By 1760, [some] fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, shipping, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard.” 

He brings to the fore a clear demarcation between the few and the many, property ownership and capital accumulation in that newly formed land of ‘equality’, which will be explored and surveyed in further detail within this work.

This study is in three parts. Chapter 1, below, will do a deep dive in part, by focusing on documentary evidence penned by the Framers themselves. In addition, it will seek to challenge existing historiographical debates, as noted, by displaying both the negative and positive legacy left by the men who articulated the US Constitution in the city of Philadelphia in 1787. Furthermore, a major theoretical element of this retrospective will be working with, and challenging, the classifications and clashes within the so-called American ideals of Independence, Liberty, and Equality, through studying an array of viewpoints from historical masterworks by Gordon S Wood, Woody Holton and others as mentioned below. 

Chapter 2, ‘Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class in Early America?” will follow. Finally, Chapter 3 will take a cogent look at ‘The Atomisation of the Powerless and the Sins of Democracy’, historically from antiquity and beyond, by reflecting upon the judgements, attitudes and viewpoints, from a class perspective, of the privileged faction of men that forged that early nation’s crucial founding doctrines and documents. Also, these chapters will take a thorough look at the varying constructs of race and class throughout the American experience from the 18th, 19th, and the early part of the 20th centuries. 

Overall, this study will demonstrate the importance of understanding just how class, ownership, and status, as per race, position and wealth, demarcated the early American experience within governmental and societal structures, rules and regulations from 1787 forward. Surveying the uniqueness of the US Constitution (both pro and con) along with its Amendments (known as the Bill of Rights) will help provide a nuanced understanding of both the said document and the men who formulated it, and how it later impacted on social movements and social discord, from abolitionism to civil rights. The study will deliver not just a structuralised economic and political viewpoint, but a humanistic perspective. Moreover, it will incorporate historical and scientific classics by such noted scholars as Edmund S Morgan, Edward E Baptist, Barbara J Fields and Nancy Isenberg – to name just a few. 

The foundations of racial divisions mentioned above were clearly measured by 16th-century English theorist and statesman Francis Bacon, when he penned: 

“The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men.” 

As so determined, Bacon defined racism as an innate element of human nature. Hence, this study will challenge that hypothesis, in part by arguing that divisions of race within the human condition are social constructs that ultimately benefit those that exercise those dictates.

Chapter 1:  An American Paradox: The Marriage of Liberty, Slavery and Freedom

What were the underlying moral and ideological contradictions woven within that newly birthed land of freedom’s class-stratified slave society?

We believe we understand what class is, that being a material social division rooted in relations to the means of production, in which ownership and control of capital generate affluence and privilege, while the exploitation of labour power produces want and neglect. “The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told – dramatised – without much reference to the existence of social classes.” The story, in the main, is taught and/or conveyed as a tale of American exceptionalism – as if the early American colonies, and their break with Great Britain, somehow miraculously transformed the constraints of class structuralism, resulting in a greater realisation of ‘enriched possibility’. 

This conception of America was galvanised by the men who formulated its constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 with great elegance – an image of how a modern nation “might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world traditionally dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.”⁸ America’s most beloved myths are at once encouraging and devastating: “All men are created equal,” for example, which excluded Indigenous Peoples and African Americans – penned by renowned American statesman and philosopher Thomas Jefferson in his landmark Declaration of Independence written in 1776 – was effectively employed as a maxim to delineate, as historian Nancy Isenberg presents, “the promise of America’s open spaces and a united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad.”⁸ But the tale is much darker, more troublesome and abundantly more nuanced than that.

From early on, an elite colonial land-grabbing class, in that fledgling America, contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best. After settlement, starting as early as the 17th century, colonial outposts exploited their unfree labor: European indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, and their offspring – describing such expendable classes and people as “human waste”.⁸ When it comes to an early settler-colonial mentality of not only conquest but profitability as an exemplar, “coined land” is the term used by noted 18th century political philosopher, scientist, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin to refer to, or celebrate, the intrinsic monetary value woven within the then brutal land acquisition and/or theft from the Indigenous Native American population at the time – appropriated land which was later “privatised and commodified” in the hands of venture capitalists, described as “European colonists.” These attitudes of hierarchy over “the people out of doors”, as those eminent luminaries that gathered in Philadelphia later referred to them, were long held. This phrase, according to noted professor of history Benjamin Irvin, was largely defined to incorporate not only “the working poor” that clamoured in the streets of Philadelphia during the Convention of 1787, but all peoples who were disenfranchised by that newly formed Continental Congress, “including women, Native Americans, African Americans, and the working poor.” In fact, as Isenberg demonstrates, notions of superiority from the upper crust of that early society toward “[t]he poor, [or waste people] did not disappear, [on the contrary], by the early eighteenth century they [the lower classes] were seen as a permanent breed.”⁸ That is, a taxonomical classification, viewed through how one physically appeared, grounded in one’s class and conduct, came to the fore; and, this prejudicial manner of classifying and/or categorising bottom-up human struggle or failure took hold in the United States for centuries to come – which will be further explored within subsequent chapters. 

These unfavourable top-down class attitudes toward the poor or ‘waste people’ emanated from what was known at the time as the mother country, that is, England itself – where, as early as the 1500s and 1600s, America was not viewed as an “Eden of opportunity”, but rather as a “giant rubbish heap,”⁸ that could be converted and cultivated into productive estates, on behalf of wealthy landowners through the unloading of England’s poor and destitute, who would be used to develop that far-off wasteland. Again, as Isenberg contends, “the idle poor [or] dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck.”⁸ That is, before it became celebrated as the fabled “City on a Hill,” auspiciously described by John Winthrop (English Puritan lawyer and then governor), in his well-known sermon of 1630, to what was then the early settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

“America was [seen] in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers [and English elites alike] as a foul, weedy wilderness – a ‘sink-hole’ [perfectly] suited to [work, profit and lord over] ‘ill-bred commoners’” 

– clearly defining top-down class distinctions from early on.

Returning to those eminent American men that later devised the doctrines and documents which conceived of a “new nation” built on individual liberty and freedom, further examination begs the question: ‘freedom for whom and for what?’ This study will delve deeper into who those men were and how their overall attitudes toward the general populace, as far as class, education, rank, and proprietorship, eventually led to a decisive result known as the US Constitution. 

To appreciate the US political and economic structure, it is essential to understand its original formulation, starting with the said constitution. Those dignitaries who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were intent on framing a strong centralised government in adherence with what they believed to be Adam Smith’s fundamental dicta, quoted above, on “the defence of the rich against the poor” and “the acquisition of valuable property.”³ As political scientist and author Robert Ovetz argues, the mechanisms and/or devices designed and implemented within the US Constitution were contrived from the outset to thwart any and all democratic control. Equally noted, the Framers’ brilliance was in formulating a virtually unalterable system which offered, through clever slogans like “We the People”, an assurance of participation within the constructs of a Republic, all the while permitting “a few to hand-pick some representatives”, whilst the majority thus surrendered “the power of self-governance”. The US, still to this day, lauds itself as a ‘democracy’, yet, from the outset, as argued, that illustrious landmark charter was nefariously intended to “impede democratic control of government” all the while foiling “democratic control of the economy”.¹⁴

Under careful observation, no section of the US Constitution is more misconstrued and misinterpreted than its Preamble. Moreover, the term, “We the People”, for example, was, and still is to this day, deliberately employed as a rhetorical device in the form of a ‘philosophical aspiration’, separating it from the dry legalese that composes most of the rest of the charter. This, perhaps, is why the Preamble has grasped the attention of the common everyday citizen. It embodies the hopes and values of ordinary people, cunningly expressing what they would ideally like the Constitution to achieve in practice – even though in truth it does something distinctively different. In fact, if we survey the meaning of the doctrines found within the Preamble, we find a set of material relations dating back to the 1700s which were brilliantly devised to deliberately constrain economic and political democracy: 

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The “Blessings of Liberty” run amiss. Those elite Framers in 1787 utilised the inclusive language of “We the People” while at the same time implementing a complex structural formulation which would stave off the will of the common people at every turn. The 55 of the 74 delegates who showed up on the scene were in fact a cohort indistinguishable from each other as “wealthy white men”, of whom only a small number were not rich (but nevertheless affluent). They viewed themselves as “the People”, who would not only be provided liberties under that newly devised constitution, but also offered themselves the power to control the authority within that newly formed centralised government.

By bringing the term “insure domestic Tranquility” to the fore, an early American top-down class paradigm was made evident by those men of property. The US Constitution was the result of the repercussions of the American Revolution and decades of class conflict from within. Cogent warnings were provided by not only Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,⁹ which cautioned against “convulsions within” and “exciting domestic insurrections amongst us”, but also by the man considered “the father of that newly formed nation”, General George Washington. In statements in the run-up to the Constitutional Convention, in correspondence to his then erstwhile comrade-in-arms and chief of artillery, General Henry Knox, Washington (supreme commander of the American revolutionary colonial forces and hero par excellence) projected clear class distinctions, fears and/or biases which lie at the heart of this study: “There are combustibles in every state, to which a spark might set fire.” 

Hence, as professor of law Jennifer Nedelsky asserts, what Washington believed was necessary was a statutory formulation of control, instituted and devised by the upper crust of society, in the shape of a constitution “to contain the threat of the people rather than to embrace their participation and their competence”; or else, as stated in a second letter to Knox, and demonstrating an elite fear most pronounced, 

“If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail – and every thing will be turned topsy turvey”. 

A good exemplar of a “spark that set fire”, which struck fear in the hearts of that elite class of men assembled in Philadelphia, is famously known as Shays’ Rebellion (29 August 1786 to February 1787). Led by Daniel Shays, a former American army officer and son of Irish immigrants, this culminated in a bottom-up armed revolt that took place in Western Massachusetts and Worcester, in response to a debt crisis imposed upon, in large part, the common citizenry; and, in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades, as a remediation for outstanding war debt. The rebellion was eventually put down by Colonial Army forces sent there by George Washington himself – staving off the voice of the people, in that newly formed land of liberty. 

What “Tranquility” actually meant, as established by the Framers, was a centralised government formulated within the constitution, with the ability to halt and/or suppress conflict or unrest that threatened “the established order and governance of the elite.” Shays’ Rebellion, in combination with the possibility of slave uprisings and Native resistance, offered the justification for creating, and later expanding, a domestic military force as penned into the Charter by Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), American political leader and contributor to the Preamble outlined above. Morris cleverly emphasised the necessity for a general fiscal “contribution to the common defense” on behalf of his class interests, warning of the possible dangers of both “insurrections” and “invasions”, as outlined in detail in Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution.¹⁷ In summary, by centralising a military power within a national charter, the elites got their own protection force against the possibility of the majority’s “popular despotism” as described by Washington himself – thwarting any and all popular resistance to elite rule. In fact, by 1791, just four years after the Constitutional Congress met in Philadelphia, that newly formed nation’s military force tripled its cost and increased its number of troops.

In challenging that ideal of promoting “the general Welfare” within a class paradigm, William Manning (1747 – 1814), American Revolutionary soldier, farmer, and novelist, was one of the few voices at the Constitutional Convention that stood up and pushed back against the elite coup that was evidently taking place. After having fought in the Revolutionary War, as a common foot soldier, he began to believe that his military service and sacrifice carried little weight with the elites who surrounded him. He also delineated the fact that those measures, which reflected Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and (the first President of the Continental Congress) John Jay’s views and policies, created a poisonous atmosphere, ideology, and division between the “Few and the Many”. William Manning feared that by locking “the people out of doors” out of government, the Founders were implementing measures such as Hamilton’s economic vision for that newly formed nation “at the expense of the common farmer and laborer.” When it came to Shays’ Rebellion, for example, his views were commensurate with those of the uprising, but not with their methods of armed resistance. Based on his staunch democratic values, he called upon the common man to forcefully use new organisational tactics by directly petitioning the government to redress grievances. 

Manning understood the economic divisions as implemented. In 1798, he authored his most celebrated work, The Key of Liberty, in which he displayed what he believed to be the objectives of the “Few” – which were to “distress and force the Many” into being financially dependent on them, “generating a sustained cycle of dependence.” Manning argued that the only chance for the “Many” was to choose those leaders that would battle for those with lesser economic and political authority. What Manning understood so well was that those early colonial financial interests defined their own class “influence and benefits” as “the general Welfare” which was, in his view, in diametrical opposition to much of the population. 

Alexander Hamilton’s celebrated financial plan, alluded to above, put that early nation on a trajectory of economic growth, through a concentration of wealth in the form of property and holdings which would serve his class best, “…so capital [as] a resource remains untouched.” Hamilton delivered an innovative and audacious scheme in both his First and Second Reports on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit issued on 13 December 1790. Again, on behalf of his class interests, that newly devised federal government would purchase all state arrears at full cost – using its general tax base. Hamilton understood that such an act would considerably augment the legitimacy of that newly formed centralised government. To raise money to pay off its debts, the government would issue security bonds to rich landowners and wealthy stakeholders who could afford them, providing huge profits for those invested when the time arrived for that recently formed Federal government to pay off its debts. Charles A Beard, Columbia University historian and author, in his famed book, An Economic Interpretation of The Constitution of The United States, succinctly outlines Hamilton’s class bias woven within his strategy on taxation, revealing a significant economic top-down class preference and formulation of control from the outset:

“Direct taxes may be laid, but resort to this form of taxation is rendered practically impossible, save on extraordinary occasions, by the provision that ‘they [taxes] must be apportioned according to population’ – so that numbers cannot transfer the burden to accumulated wealth”

Beard summarises:

“The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.” 

Given the United States’ long history of top-down class biases and bottom-up class struggle, to be further explored within this research, Beard provides a cogent groundwork. 

James Madison, elite intellectual and statesman, was and is traditionally proclaimed as the ‘Father of the Constitution’ for his crucial role in planning and fostering the Constitution of the United States and later its Bill of Rights. For many of the Framers, with Madison in the lead, the Articles of Confederation (previously formulated on 15 November 1777, and effectuated on 1 March 1781) were a nefarious compact among the 13 states of the United States, previously the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, which operated as the nation’s first framework of government establishing each individual State as “Free and Independent” – eloquently encouraged and outlined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.⁹ From a class vantage point, the phrase “establish Justice”, as devised by Madison within the Preamble above, meant in an idealistic sense that the government would apply the rule of law impartially and consistently to all, irrespective of one’s station in society. But in fact the expression explicitly points to the Framers’ “intent to tip the balance of power back in favour of the elites.” Notably, by early 1783, in his famed ‘Notes on Debates in Congress’, dated 28 January 1783, some four years prior to the ratification of the US Constitution on 12 December 1787, Madison had well defined what “justice” had meant to him and his cohorts by asserting that

“[T]he establishment of permanent & adequate funds [in the form of a general taxation] to operate … throughout the U. States is indispensably necessary for doing complete justice to the Creditors of the U.S., for restoring public credit, & for providing for the future exigencies of … war.” 

As argued by eminent professor of history Woody Holton, “establishing Justice” envisioned for Madison doing what some of the States were reluctant and/or incapable of achieving – ie the payment of debts for the elites by “safeguarding their property” whether it be slave, land, or financial.

How class and race maintained supremacy

In essence, the cleverly devised Three-Fifths Compromise outlined in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, conceived by Madison, not only preserved and reinforced the atrocity of slavery, but it also made stronger the power of property produced by the capitalisation of all human labour. The minority checks embedded in the constitutional power of taxation ultimately prevented all types of what the Framers referred to as “levelling”, ie a fair and equal redistribution of wealth and resources amongst the general population.¹⁷ In doing so, the Constitution serves in perpetuity to protect wealth from what the Framers feared most: “economic democracy”. Unambiguously, the Three-Fifths clause established that three out of every five enslaved persons were counted, on behalf of their owners, when deciding a state’s total populace as per representation and legislation. Hence, before the Civil War, the Three-Fifths clause gave disproportionate weight to slave states, specifically slave ownership, in the House of Representatives.

A final element written within the Preamble of the US Constitution, and worth further mention, is the famed idiom “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity”, a phrase that concisely encompasses the opinions of the Framers and their historical and material view of the possession of ‘Private Property’ – greatly influenced and inspired by English Enlightenment philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704). In his famed The Two Treatises of Civil Government, Locke argued that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb or goods of another”, defined as “Natural Rights”. As a result, the Framers, most of whom were large landowners, were intent on designing a centralised government that would singularly protect and defend ‘private property’. The US Constitution fosters this by placing a collection of roadblocks and/or obstacles in the way of majority demands for ‘economic democracy’ – what, on numerous occasions, James Madison himself described as an oppression, enslavement and/or tyranny of the majority. 

In a land without nobles, Madison declared that “the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the wealth of the nation.” Madison’s compatriot John Dickinson of Delaware was in full accord, proclaiming that the Senate should be comprised of those that are “distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.” Additionally, Pierce Butler, wealthy land-owning South Carolinian, stood in complete agreement, confirming that the Senate was, “the aristocratic part of our government.” Those elite men, as members of that Continental Congress, cleverly formulated, largely on their own behalf, “a plethora of opportunities to issue a minority veto of any changes by law, regulation, or court rulings” that might menace their property ownership. In essence, that charter known as the US Constitution was brilliantly constructed to ensure an elite control and privilege that would last for ‘posterity’ – forever unchanged and unchangeable.

There is a wealth of evidence, as demonstrated, that the US Constitution was originally designed and implemented not to facilitate meaningful bottom-up systemic change, but ultimately to avert anything that does not serve the benefits of the propertied class. Let us keep in mind that meaningful change from below has always been hard-fought, but not impossible. It took roughly 78 years from 1787, and, a Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865, culminating in the loss of nearly 620,000 lives, to officially abolish slavery under Amendment 13 (ratified on 6 December 1865).¹⁶ Until then, human bondage was a long held and integral form of property ownership within the United States – to be further examined within this work. 

Reflecting succinctly on the underlying class interests during and prior to the ratification of the US Constitution, two indispensable statements, concerning ‘human nature’, from two essential minds, as per class, which undergird the views here summarised, are as follows: Benjamin Franklin keenly observed that any assemblage of men, no matter how gifted, bring with them “all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interest and their selfish views.” This stood ironically in accordance with Adam Smith’s

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,”

which demonstrates Smith’s historical view regarding an innate class perspective of wealth concentration.

■ For Chapters 2 and 3, please consult the complete journal edition.

Notes and References

¹ Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History, Federalist Nos 1-10, research guide, accessed August 27, 2023, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10.

² T Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, WH Peden ed, University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

³ A Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ,G Routledge, London, 1893, pp 556-560.

⁴ M Parenti, Democracy for the Few, Thomson-Wadsworth, Boston, 8^th edn, 2008, p 40.

⁵ Louis Otto quoted in H Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington (1783-1793), International Publishers, New York, 1976, p 41.

⁶ Parenti, op cit, p 40, sourcing the works of: SH Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1964; DM Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1992.

⁷ The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, with Prefaces and Notes by the Late Robert Leslie Ellis, Together with English Translations of the Principal Latin Pieces, vol 4, J Spedding, ed, Longman & Co, London, 1861, p 64.

⁸ NG Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Penguin Books, New York, 2017, p 1ff; also America Was Never Class-Free: On Foundational Myths and Deep-Rooted Inequality, 21 June 2016, at https://lithub.com/america-was-never-class-free/.

⁹ Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, America’s Founding Documents, US National Archives, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

¹0 B Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency, 3 April 1729, at Founders Online, US National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0041.

¹1 D McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2020, p 178.

¹2 B Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp 1-18.

¹3 J Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630’, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, Boston, Mass, 1838, Vol 7, pp 31-48, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html.

¹4 Isenberg, op cit, p 3.

¹5 R Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few, Pluto Press, London, 2022, pp 2-3.

¹6 Ibid, p 41.

¹7 The Constitution of the United States, US National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution.

¹8 S Fraser and G Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2009, p 40.

¹9 ‘George Washington to Henry Knox, 26 December 1786’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0409.

²0 J Nedelsky, Private Property, and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and its Legacy, Univ of Chicago Press, 1994, p 159.

²1  ‘George Washington to Henry Knox, 3 February 1787’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0006.

²2 GH Nobles, ‘Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution’, in Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding, AF Young and GH Nobles, eds, New York University Press, 2011, p 213.

²3 G Washington, Farewell Address to the People of the United States, 19 September 1796, US Senate Historical Office, pp 13, 15, at https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf.

²4 RH Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802, Free Press, New York, 1975, p 120.

²5 W Manning, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,” 1747-1814, M Merrill and S Wilentz, eds, The John Harvard Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1993, p 113.

²6 Ibid, pp 164-6.

²7 Ibid, p 162.

²8 A Hamilton, ‘Final Version: First Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit, 13 December 1790’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0227-0003.

²9 A Hamilton, ‘Final Version of the Second Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit (Report on a National Bank), 13 December 1790’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0229-0003.

³0 CA Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Anodos Books, 2018, p 88.

³1 Ibid, p 164.

³2 Ovetz, op cit, p 44.

³3 J Madison, ‘Notes on Debates, 28 January 1783’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-06-02-0037.

³4 W Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Hill and Wang, New York, 1st edn, 2008, pp 87-88.

³5 Ovetz, op cit, p 96.

³6 John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, G Routledge and Sons, London, 1884, p 160.

³7 ‘James Madison to James Monroe, 5 October 1786’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0054; ‘James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787’, at Founders Online, US National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0274.

³8 James Madison quoted in MJ Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016, p 210.

³9 John Dickinson quoted in ibid, p 210.

⁴0 Pierce Butler quoted in Klarman, op cit, p 210.

⁴1 Ovetz, op cit, p 53.

⁴2 M Farrand, ed, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1911, p 642.

⁴3 Smith, op cit, p 342.

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