The Material Incentives behind the 4th of July

A frequent question that comes to mind about colonial America before the American revolution is: just how high were taxes anyways? The mainstream, government-approved narrative about the colonial times is that the British were brutally taxing Americans, and in return gave no political representation to Americans. Today, DMSG is going to dive into the story behind this, getting to the meat of the argument and seeing if the official narrative holds up. As a group of materialists, DMSG believes revolutions don’t happen without good material incentives to do so, as the act of starting one requires at a minimum thousands of people willing to risk their lives. It should be stated that before we dive into the reasons behind the American revolution, that DMSG is not by any means anti-American, but rather reserves the right to laugh at American propaganda like it laughs at any other country’s propaganda. All is fair game to a true dialectical materialist.

To provide a reference point to how taxes were before the American revolution, in 1765 the average person in Great Britain was taxed 312 pence annually. In 1765, the average American colonist in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, meanwhile, were taxed 12 pence annually. In 1765, the average American colonist in Virginia was taxed 5 pence annually. This tax burden comes out to 4% and less than 2% for American colonists, respectively, of what the citizens of Great Britain paid to their government in taxes annually. From the time period between 1765 to 1776, taxes on Americans were increased greatly through custom duties to 20 pence per head, which came out to about 6% of what Great Britain’s citizens paid per head. These tax increases were justified by the British authorities as a way to pay for the expense of keeping 10,000 British troops in America to ensure its safety, as Great Britain had already covered the debts America owed during the French and Indian wars.

So how then did the American proletarians come about believing that it was a good time to rebel? A conspicuous example of how little of a proletarian-borne revolution the American revolution was can be found in examining the pedigree of its founding fathers, most of who were wealthy merchants or landed gentry in America with a lot to lose. Why did these people, who lived so comfortably in their pre-revolutionary predicaments, all have the similar material incentives to risk it all and rebel? If they benefitted from vastly lower taxes than their peers across the pond, what made them so willing to betray Great Britian? French philosophy at the time, which denounced monarchs and talked about the natural freedoms of man, were gleefully consumed by the Founding Fathers and other patriots by the 1760’s, with France being seen as a counterpoise to British rule.

Rousseau spoke of laws being crafted for the general good, and of sovereignty not residing within monarchs but within groups of people. “All men are created equal,” as said by Thomas Jefferson, owed a great deal to Rousseau in its thinking and idealism, but that doesn’t answer the question of material incentives. How would a political system that gave all power to the voting masses, that advocated the equality of man, resonate so strongly with an upper-class group of revolutionaries, who were not only divorced from the struggles that the average working man faced but many of whom were also slave owners on top of that? In dialectical materialism, material conditions determine social conditions, and as you might begin to see, it doesn’t quite add up just yet. Interestingly, the drafters of the constitution may have been mostly inspired by Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which argued that the best way to avoid despotism was by creating a government of checks and balances. The question of what the merchant class had against monarchism and despotism comes to the forefront, when you look at their appeals to universal legal rights and building a state where no monarch was needed nor could arise. All in all, something happened here that few Americans have picked up on, which involves evolving class interests and covert French funding.

The caste system in England, which was headed by the royalty, supported by the nobility, and so on, had existed for centuries with little disruption beyond the occasional death in the Royal family or new concessions granted by the royalty to the nobility in return for their continued support. The nobility saw the royalty as a centralizing source of power, that guaranteed them their properties and privileges through the force of the state, and the nobility supported the royal dynasties in return with taxes, troops, and the recognition of the royal family’s divine right to rule. It was a system that worked well, as it justified itself in a simpler economy where managerial roles were simple enough to be hereditary roles and the ownership class of nations could not allow dissent between its members, in a time when wars between nations were fought over conquest and forceful acquisition. Infighting in these times risked invalidating the claims of every decisionmaker, if a foreign power were to take advantage of the situation or if the royal family were to perish, with their noble supporters’ having their territorial claims consequently invalidated. The class interests of the nobility and royalty were permanently entwined together, creating a mostly cohesive government, but this was strained as Great Britain entered the age of mercantilism. The Royalty, unlike the nobility, cared not where the taxes came from, and were more than happy to benefit from the newfangled merchants that had begun to flourish during mercantilism.

Great Britain, as it emerged onto the world stage as a superpower, began to leave behind its stable feudal roots in order to reap the rewards of international trade in an era where profits from engaging in it were staggering. As England blossomed into an international empire, a new class arose within British society that had interests counter to those of the nobility: the merchants. No longer were the landed gentry and idle rich of the nobility the captains of industry, but rather the industrious and adventurous merchants, who conducted trade internationally in order to reap the highest profits they could. The Founding Fathers were not nobility, but they were definitely wealthy merchants, who had no role in decision-making or guarantees of wealth like their noble counterparts, who were part of a class that was beginning to supplant the nobility as the wealthiest class aside from the royalty in the British Empire. The merchant class, that relied on good trade relations to prosper and which had a natural incentive to argue for the equality of man, as it challenged the status of a caste system that had left them voiceless, had many bones to pick with Great Britain.

The Seven Year War, fought between England and France over commercial interests, brought great disruption to the world due to clashing interests of different nations’ royalty. England, Prussia, and Hanover fought against France, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, and Spain. The conflict greatly disrupted trade relations, as the international powers fought against each other for the sake of acquiring new lands, resources, and colonies, the plunders of which weren’t distributed to the merchants as they had no state-backed claim over the spoils. The Seven Year War was fought in continental Europe, as well as in the various European colonies, with some of the fighting taking place within America and Canada. The merchants across the European world took an economic loss, for a war fought by proletarians on behalf of royal families who wanted to enlarge their own coffers. In feudal times, this idea of royal families fighting over territorial and commercial claims made sense, as the greater your territories were, the greater your wealth since wealth was so directly tied to land and raw resources. As the world became more and more integrated economically, where the economic surplus derived from resources grew year after year as technologies were developed to refine and generate more profits out of the same resources, wealth became less attached to territorial acquisition. For the royalty, who helmed states and reaped the rewards of conquest as it nevertheless enlarged their tax base, the push for war would always exist. The nobility of these different royal dynasties often reaped the rewards as well from war, being given more territories in reward for their loyalty and continued support. Overall, the interests of the decision-makers in the state apparatus of every European country at this time began to contrast with the rising class of the merchants, creating the social conditions that created what we know today as classical liberalism and capitalism.

For the merchants, who’s wealth was tied to commercial ventures and enterprises, war became largely an unnecessary disruption. In a world where the same resources generate more and more revenue with each passing decade, fighting over territories and destroying the means of production became counter-productive to the wellbeing of society. In a world where free trade generated more and more profits, to the point that it began to dwarf domestic industries in many respects, war proved to be an unnecessary disruption to the flow of trade. In addition to this, when the merchants had become the primary owners of these means of productions, and watched their assets get periodically razed or acquired by foreign powers, the sense in supporting monarchs fell flat. The Founding Fathers had a material and political interest in staging revolt against a foreign power that gave them no say in matters that impacted the stability of their livelihoods as merchants. The feuds of European royal families, that inevitably became wars that threatened the assets of merchants across the globe, began to be seen as unnecessary burdens. It was at this point that the class interests of Great Britain’s royal family and the merchant class of America began diverging, as the ways in which they created profits were so markedly different. This gave rise to the economic system of capitalism, where the business owner reigned supreme, as well as the philosophy of classical liberalism, which was the merchants’ philosophical rebellion against monarchism.

The Founding Fathers and many American colonists alike, who had indulged in the liberatory philosophies of France, were eventually given covert aid by France to start engaging in revolution against Great Britain. America, due to its vast quantity of natural resources, was an incredibly profitable colony for Great Britain and the severing of these relations was seen by France as a way to upend the British Empire’s unparalleled dominance following the Seven Year War. In the ensuing years, American and French forces joined together time and time again to take on the British, and when the war was over, the merchants of America and France were the ultimate beneficiaries. The philosophical underpinning of capitalism and classical liberalism had been stamped out in the American Revolutionary War, and the French took these ideas back with them to France, where a rebellion took place against the French Monarchy starting in 1789. More than just the birth of America, the Revolutionary War marked the birth of capitalism, an economic and legal system distinct from the system that the merchants of America and France had inherited from their feudal masters. Despite all the talk of equality and freedoms in the Founding Fathers’ meetings, this notion of egalitarianism only extended to the rich in America in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The lip service paid to these idealistic and noble concepts was extended to encompass the merchants’ soldiers and underlings, in order to serve as propaganda for proletarians fighting a war based on American merchants separating from their foreign masters. On paper, once the war was over, liberalism was revealed to be quite different than how it was portrayed as the legal and legislative system of a newborn America was stamped into being. As Lenin once said, “freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for the slave owners.”

The merchants had not only the sole say in their government, but also in the regulation of themselves as well, as following the revolutionary war only land-owning, college-educated, white protestant males could vote. While these restrictions on who could vote were gradually reduced, it should be noted that at the very beginning of America’s birth, it was a place formed by the merchants for the merchants. The workers who lived in America were at best the beneficiaries of the new freedoms that came with living under the guardianship of a wealthy merchant class that ruled the country. The Gilded Age that came about in the next century was a natural result of this relationship that the merchants had with the government in America and ushered in waves of reforms and movements that lead to the middle class that we saw arise in the 20th century. This Fourth of July, understand that the war was not fought for your freedom, but for your landlord’s freedom, your boss’s freedom, and so on. The America you are familiar with, that you glorify on this day, was a temporary reaction to the country created by the Founding Fathers, and as the days go on, Americans will once again become more used to the Gilded Ages that this country was designed for. as those 20th century reforms are nullified by corporate lobbying. God Bless Americans., not America.

Source: Palmer, R R: The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959), Princeton University Press