This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff
question from our Patreon community and this one comes from Patreon member James
Leo. He's referring us to a conversation among Conservatives on various Conservative platforms.
Conversations swirling around the claim quote, “that the founding fathers of the United States
were clearly and explicitly against Socialism and for Capitalism.” And James Leo wants to know
what I think about that in view of the fact that Socialism versus Capitalism really wasn't an issue
until well after the United States’s founding fathers had left the scene. So, let me respond.
First, I'm going to set aside a simple reality, whatever the founding fathers
may have believed, and I'll come to that in a moment,
what they believed had to do with the environment they were living through across
the middle and into the latter part of the 18th century. We are currently in the 21st century.
So, whatever they thought believed did then isn't necessarily what we ought to think or believe now
and the smartest among them would have readily acknowledged that reality given that they were
departing in many important ways from what people had thought centuries before them.
But, I’ll put that aside. Let's deal with it on its face. Karl Marx was born in 1818,
and the founding fathers you know Jefferson, Hamilton, the Adam's brothers and so on
were long dead by then. So, Marx didn't reach his maturity until the 1830s and 40s and it was a
historical memory, the American Revolution and the founding fathers by that time. The so-called
struggle between Socialism and Capitalism doesn't really get going in anything like a sustained
discussion, debate, argument until well into the 19th century. Karl Marx is famous for essays he
wrote on the American Civil War that was his time, not the American Revolutionary War or its founding
fathers, but let me take it a step further. No more famous founding father exists than Thomas
Jefferson and what kind of economic system did Thomas Jefferson support— endorse to the
extent that it came to be known as Jeffersonian democracy? Here's the economic system that Mr
Jefferson had in mind. He had derived it from the writings of a famous British thinker John Locke
and he was also influenced by folks around John Locke and their image of a good economic system.
The one that Thomas Jefferson wanted to establish in the United States in place
of the Feudalism of most of Europe, still at that time, was a situation we would nowadays call
self-employment. Jefferson's image was of a country composed of farmers,
craftsmen, craft women, small merchants, John Locke's idea was expressed in a famous statement,
“no person should own more property than he himself can cultivate”.
In other words, in John Locke's language, which always used the male pronoun,
you should not have the relationship called employer-employee and you know what that
relationship is Capitalism. Because that's what Capitalism is, the organization of production not
as master and slave, not as lord and serf and not as self-employed individual, but rather a group of
people with a tiny minority, the Capitalists, running the show and accumulating the wealth
and telling the majority, the employees, what to do. That was not what Thomas Jefferson had
in mind and it was not what that most important founding father wanted for the United States.
As to Socialism, the question is whether Capitalism or Socialism are the better
bases, economic foundations for what the founding fathers committed themselves to life,
liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, brotherhood, and democracy,
I’m listing the major goals. so-called of the French Revolution as well as
the American Revolution. Has Capitalism provided those things? I don't think so.
Socialism indeed developed, and certainly this is true of Karl Marx, precisely out of the
critical notion, if you like the critical sense, that Capitalism had promised to bring liberty,
equality, fraternity, democracy and so forth, but hadn't done so. And so you needed a further
change from Capitalism to Socialism to actually achieve the liberty, equality, fraternity etc.
That was in the minds of the leaders both of the American and the French revolutions. So in short,
I think our Conservatives are very enthusiastic. They're very upset these days that Socialism is
showing such a profound revival and becoming, again, the big challenger to Capitalism. So,
they're trying to develop arguments to hold all that back and in their excitement they overreached
and made allies out of founding fathers, whom if you look at them carefully are very very
open-ended in how they might react, were they to still be alive, to the question of Capitalism
versus Socialism here in the 21st century. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work