Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

society of settlers. The large majority of settlers were of the
property-owning middle classes (insofar as classes had yet
become visible in the new society): tradesmen, selfemployed
artisans, and land-owning farmers. Every European
who wanted to could own land. Every white .settler
could be a property owner. No wonder emigration to the
"New World" (newly conquered, newly enslaved) was so
popular in Old Europe. No wonder life in Amerika was
spoken of almost as a fable by the masses of Old Europe.
Young Amerika was capitalism's real-life Disneyland.
The Euro-Amerikan class structure at the time of
the 1775 War of Independence was revealing:
80% bourgeois
& 4
petit-bourgeois
P
10% - Capitalists: Great Planters, large
merchants, etc.
20% - Large farmers, professionals,
tradesmen & other upper-middle
elements.
40% - Small land-owning farmers
10% - Artisans: blacksmiths, coopers,
C
carpenters, shipwrights, etc.
15010 - Temporary workers, usually
soon moving upwards into the
ranks of the small farmers
5% - Laborers(26)
Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740
with an estate worth 81 £ (which places her well in the
middle of the small-medium farmers). That sum
represented the value of 200 acres of farmland, 3 1 head of
cattle, 15 of sheep, 29 pigs, 1,463 lbs. of tobacco stored for
market, 5 feather beds, 2 old guns, assorted furniture,
tools and kitchen utensils, and the contract of an 8 yearold
indentured child servant. No wealth, no luxury, but a
life with some small property, food, shelter, and a cash
crop for market.(28) Certainly a far reach upwards Tram
the bitter, bare existence of the colonial Afrikan proletariat
(or, for that matter, the British or French proletariat
of the period).
Although there were Euro-Amerikan craftsmen
and workers they never coalesced into a proletariat because
they were too privileged and transitory in condition. It is
important to grasp firmly that the mere presence of settler
craftsmen and workers doesn't automatically mean that
they were a conscious class. With their extra-proletarian
living standard and their future in the propertied middle
classes, most settler workmen had no reason to develop a
proletarian consciousness. Further, the rapid turnover of
settlers in these strata left no material basis for the formation
of a class.
Not only was the bourgeois class itself quite large,
but some 70% of the total population of settlers were in
the various, propertied middle classes. The overwhelming
majority were landowners, including many of the artisans
and tradesmen, and an even larger portion of the Euro-
Amerikans were self-employed or preparing to be. The
small "poor" element of lumpen and permanent laborers
was only 5% of the settler population, and without influence
or cohesion in such a propertied society. We can
see why Virginia's Gov. Fauquier complained in 1759,
while bemoaning his inability to attract settler recruits for
the militia: "Every man in this colony has land, and none
but Negroes are laborers. " (U.S. imperialism still has this
same problem of white military recruitment today.)(27)
The plantation areas, which were obviously the
most dominated by a small elite owning a disproportionate
share of the wealth, showed no lesser degree of general settler
privilege and unification. South Carolina was the state
with the highest degree of large plantation centralization;
yet there, too, no settler working class development was
evident. The South Carolina settler class structure shows
only an intensification of the same bourgeois features evident
at the national level:
i
3 % - Great Planter elite (above 1,000
acres landholding)
86% 15% - planters (500-999 acres)
bourgeois 8% - merchants & shopowners
&
5% Professionals
petit-bourgeois 42% - Middle & small farmers (under
500 acres)
10% - Artisans
14% - Laborers (majority only temporary)
When we speak of the small, land-owning farmer
as the largest single element in settler society, it is important
to see what this means. An example is Rebecca
We can see this more clearly when we examine the
details of work and wages. Rather than the massproduction
factory, the Colonial-era workshop was a setting
for the highly-skilled, piece-by-piece, hand production
of a few craftsmen. Even a shipyard customarily only
employed five to ten artisans and workers of all types,
total. The workshop was a business owned and managed
by the Master artisan, who might employ in his workshop
one or two journeymen artisans and several apprentices,
servants or slaves.(29) It is easy to grasp how, in small settler
communities, social and class lines were blurred and
still unformed. For example, most of the settler artisans
were also small farmers who grew some or all of their own
food.
While some artisans never advanced, others were
already becoming small capitalists, since the historic extension
of the craft workshop was capitalist manufacture. The
most famous Colonial-era settler artisan, Paul Revere, was
not only a silversmith and an artist-engraver, but also a
dentist and the small capitalist operator of a copper foundry.
In the Colonial era the majority of Euro-Amerikan artisans
and wage-laborers eventually bought farmland
and/or business property and rose into the middle strata.
The special and non-proletarian character of settler
artisans and workers (which has been so conveniently
forgotten about by today's Euro-Amerikan radicals) was
well known a century ago by Europeans such as Marx and
Engels. In 1859 Marx wrote of "...the United States of
North America, where, though classes already exist, they
have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange
their elements in constant flux.. . "(30) What
Marx saw in this class fluidity was the ultimate privilege of
settler society-the privilege of having no proletariat at all.
He later pointed out: "Hence the relatively high standard
of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost.
It cannot prevent the labor market from being continuously
emptied by the continuous conversion of wages
10 laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The