Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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position of wages laborer is for a very large part of the<br />
American people but a probational state, which they are<br />
sure to leave within a shorter or longer term."(27) And<br />
Marx was writing not about a momentary or temporary<br />
phase, but about basic conditions that were true for well<br />
over two centuries in Amerika.<br />
Those settlers never had it so good! And those<br />
Europeans who chose or were forced to work for wages got<br />
the highest wages in the capitalist world. The very highest.<br />
Tom Paine, the revolutionary propagandist, boasted that<br />
in Amerika a "common laborer" made as much money as<br />
an English shopkeeper!(32) We know that George<br />
Washington had to pay his white journeyman carpenter<br />
i€ 40 per year, plus 400 lbs. of meat, 20 bushels of corn,<br />
and the use of a house and vegetable garden. Journeymen<br />
tailors in Virginia earned i€ 26-32 per year, plus meals,<br />
lodging, laundry service, and drink.(33)<br />
In general, it's commonly agreed that Euro-<br />
Amerikan workers earned at least twice what their British<br />
kinfolk made-some reports say the earnings gap was five<br />
or six times what Swedish or Danish workers earned.(34)<br />
Even a whole century later, the difference was still so large<br />
that Marx commented:<br />
"Now, all of you know that the average wages of<br />
the American agricultural laborer amount to more than<br />
double that of the English agricultural laborer, although<br />
the prices of agricultural produce are lower in the United<br />
States than in the United Kingdom.. . "(35)<br />
It was only possible for settler society to afford<br />
this best-paid, most bourgeoisified white work force<br />
because they had also obtained the least-paid, most proletarian<br />
Afrikan colony to support it.<br />
Many of those settler laborers were iddentured servants,<br />
who had signed on to do some years of unpaid labor<br />
(usually four) for a master in return for passage across the<br />
Atlantic. It is thought that as many as half of all the<br />
pre-1776 Europeans in Amerika went through this temporarily<br />
unfree status. Some settler historians dwell on this<br />
phenomenon, comparing it to Afrikan slavery in an attempt<br />
to obscure the rock of national oppression at the<br />
base of Amerika. Harsh as the time of indenture might be,<br />
these settlers would be free-and Afrikan slaves would<br />
not. More to the national difference between oppressor<br />
and oppressed, white indentured servants could look<br />
hopefully toward the possibility of not only being free, but<br />
of themselves becoming landowners and slavemasters.<br />
For this initiation, this "dues" to join the opnressor<br />
nation, was a rite of Dassage into settler citizen-<br />
ship. For example, as early as 1629 almost one member out<br />
of six of Virginia's House of Burgesses was a former indentured<br />
servant. Much of Pennsylvania's prosperous<br />
German farming community originally emigrated that<br />
way.(36) Christopher Hill, the British Marxist historian,<br />
directly relates the European willingness to enter servitude<br />
to the desire for land ownership, describing it as "a temporary<br />
phase through which one worked one's way to<br />
freedom and land-ownership."(37)<br />
This is important because it was only this bottom<br />
layer of settler society that had the potential of proletarian<br />
class consciousness. In the early decades of Virginia's<br />
tobacco industry, gangs of white indentured servants<br />
worked the fields side-by-side with Afrikan and Indian<br />
slaves, whom in the 1600s they greatly outnumbered. This<br />
was an unstable situation, and one of the results was a<br />
number of joint servant-slave escapes, strikes and conspiracies.<br />
A danger to the planter elite was evident, particularly<br />
since white servants constituted a respectable proportion<br />
of the settler population in the two tobacco Colonies-accounting<br />
for 16% in Virginia in 168 1 and 10% in<br />
Maryland in 1707 .(38)<br />
The political crisis waned as the period of bound<br />
white plantation labor ended. First, the greater and more<br />
profitable river of Afrikan labor was tapped to the fullest,<br />
and then the flow of British indentured servants slacked<br />
off. The number of new European servants entering<br />
Virginia fell from 1,500-2,000 annually in the 1670s to but<br />
91 in 1715.(39) However, the important change was not in<br />
numbers but in social role.<br />
Historian Richard Morris, in his study of<br />
Colonial-era labor, says of European indentured servants<br />
on the plantations: "...but with the advent of Negro<br />
slavery they were gradually supplanted as field workers<br />
and were principally retained as overseers, foremen or<br />
herdsmen."(40) In other words, even the very lowest layer<br />
of white society was lifted out of the proletariat by the<br />
privileges of belonging to the oppressor nation.<br />
Once these poor whites were raised off the fields<br />
and given the chance to help boss and police captive<br />
Afrikans, their rebellious days were over. The importance<br />
of this experience is that it shows the material basis for the<br />
lack of class consciousness by early Euro-Amerikan<br />
workers, and how their political consciousness was directly<br />
related to how much they shared in the privileges of the<br />
larger settler society. Further, the capitalists proved to<br />
their satisfaction that dissent and rebelliousness within the<br />
settler ranks could be quelled by increasing the colonial exploitation<br />
of other nations and peoples.