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taxation and other measures to give aid "alike on the high<br />
and low, the rich and the poor ..." of settler society.(l5)<br />
Jackson was the historic founder of today's<br />
Democratic Party; not only in organization, but in first<br />
welding together the electoral coalition of Southern<br />
planters and Northern "ethnic" workers. He was the first<br />
President to claim that he was born in a log cabin, of lowly<br />
circumstances. This "redneck" posture, enhanced by his<br />
bloody military adventures, was very popular with the<br />
mass of small slave-owners in his native South-and with<br />
Northern workers as well! Detailed voting studies confirm<br />
that in both the 1828 and 1832 elections, Jackson received<br />
the overwhelming majority of the votes of immigrant Irish<br />
and German workers in the North.(l6) White workmen<br />
joined his Democratic Party as a new crusade for equality<br />
among settlers. In the New York mayoral election of 1834,<br />
organized white labor marched in groups to the polls singing:<br />
"Mechanics, cartmen, laborers<br />
Must form a close connection,<br />
And show the rich Aristocrats,<br />
Their powers at this election.. .<br />
"Yankee Doodle, smoke 'em out<br />
The Proud, the banking faction.<br />
None but such as Hartford Feds<br />
Oppose the poor and Jackson.. . "(17)<br />
Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular<br />
reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these<br />
movements were only attempts to more equally distribute<br />
the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That's<br />
why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no<br />
place in these movements.<br />
The line between oppressors and oppressed was<br />
unmistakeably drawn. Afrikan and Indian alike opposed<br />
this "Jacksonian Democracy". The English visitor Edward<br />
Abdy remarked that he "never knew a man of color<br />
that was not an anti-Jackson man0.(l8) On their side, the<br />
white workingmen of the 1830's knowingly embraced the<br />
architects of genocide as their heroes and leaders. Far from<br />
joining the democratic struggles around the rights of the<br />
oppressed, the white workers were firmly committed to<br />
crushing them.<br />
Even as they were gradually being pressed<br />
downward by the emerging juggernaut of industrial<br />
capitalism - faced with wage cuts, increasing speed-up of<br />
machine-powered production, individual craft production<br />
disappearing in the regimented workshop, etc.-those<br />
Euro-Amerikan workers saw their hope for salvation in<br />
non-proletarian special privileges and a desperate clinging<br />
to petit-bourgeois status. At a time when the brute labor of<br />
the Empire primarily rested on the backs of the unpaid,<br />
captured Afrikan proletariat, the white workers of the<br />
1830's were only concerned with winning the Ten-Hour<br />
Day for themselves. In the 1840's as the Empire annexed<br />
the Northern 40% of Mexico and by savage invasion<br />
reduced truncated Mexico to a semi-colony, the only issue<br />
to the white workingmen's movement was how large would<br />
their share of the looting be? It is one thing to be bribed by<br />
the bourgeoisie, and still another to demand, organize,<br />
argue and beg to be bribed.<br />
The dominant political slogan of the white<br />
workers movement of the 1840's was "Vote Yourself A<br />
Farm". This expressed the widespread view that it was<br />
each settler's right to have cheap land to farm, and that the<br />
ideal lifestyle was the old colonial-era model of the selfemployed<br />
craftsmen who also possessed the security of being<br />
part-time farmers. The white labor movement, most<br />
particularly the influential newspaper, Working Man's<br />
Advocate of New York, called for new legislation under<br />
which the Empire would guarantee cheap tracts of Indian<br />
and Mexican land to all European settlers (and impoverished<br />
workmen in particular).*(19) The white workers literally<br />
demanded their traditional settler right to be petitbourgeois-"little<br />
bourgeois", petty imitators who would<br />
annex their small, individual plots each time the real<br />
bourgeoisie annexed another oppressed nation. It should<br />
be clear that the backwardness of white labor is not a matter<br />
of "racism", of "mistaken ideas", of "being tricked<br />
by the capitalists" (all idealistic instead of materialist formulations);<br />
rather, it is a class question and a national<br />
question.<br />
This stratum came into being with its feet'on top<br />
of the proletariat and its head straining up into the petitbourgeoisie.<br />
It's startling how narrow and petty its concerns<br />
were in an age when the destiny of peoples and nations<br />
was being decided, when the settler Empire was trying<br />
to take into its hands the power to decree death to<br />
whole nations. We keep coming back to genocide, the'inescapable<br />
center of settler politics in the 19th Century. So<br />
to fully grasp the politics of emerging white labor, we must<br />
penetrate to the connection between their class viewpoint<br />
and genocide.<br />
* The Homestead Act of 1851 was one result of this campaign.<br />
2. The Popular Appeal of Genocide<br />
By 1840 most of the Indian nations of the East had tradictions within the fragmented settler bourgeoisie, betbeen<br />
swept away, slaughtered or relocated. By 18W the ween planter and mercantilehndustrial ~apital~contradic-<br />
Empire had consolidated its grip on the Pacific Coast, tions which were reflected in all facets of settler society.<br />
overrunning and occupying Northern Mexico. The Empire The tremendous economic expansion of the conquests was<br />
had succeeded in bringing the continent under its control. a catalyst.<br />
These victories produced that famous "opportunity" that<br />
the new waves of European immigrants were coming for. The ripping open of the "New South" to extend<br />
But these changes also brought to a nodal point the con- 28 the plantation system meant a great rise of Afrikan slaves