Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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