America and the world are entering another great era of revolution. Economic revolution – the destruction of the old industrial forces of production by modern electronic technology — is irreversible. Social revolution is polarizing society more and more into two new classes — the super-rich, supra-national financiers of Wall Street on the one hand, and millions of dispossessed workers on the other. Completion of the revolutionary process requires organizing and developing the revolutionary political consciousness of the dispossessed — the only social force capable of reorganizing society along the cooperative lines necessary to correspond to the new forces of production.

This task requires us to wage a war of ideas. We are at one of those critical turning points where once again the battle for the soul of America is breaking out. Efforts are underway to build a mass movement for fascism and wrap it up in the trappings of patriotism. In this environment, victory in this war of ideas requires us to revisit and study the revolutionary nature of the ideas that shaped our country.

The quintessential American patriot and revolutionary was Thomas Paine, the English immigrant who settled in Pennsylvania in 1775. “The country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears,” he wrote. In fact, it was Paine who actually first coined the name “United States of America.” His ability to grasp and articulate America’s cause of independence – and its revolutionary spirit — points the way for us today, in a time of even greater social dislocation.

The ruling class has been struggling to deconstruct and recast Paine’s ideas in an attempt to legitimize a fascist corporate dictatorship. Genuine study of Paine shows that their effort cannot succeed. Paine dedicated his life to defense of the small producer: the artisan, farmer, tradesman, laborer, and poor. His vision was of a world without kings, a world without privilege and oppression. Once understood, it can never be twisted to enshrine today’s global corporations as an expression of traditional American values.

Dedicated to Revolution

Thomas Paine dedicated his life to the advancement of the great world revolution that broke out in 1776. He was an active leader in both the American and the subsequent French Revolution, and strove mightily for revolution in England – from where he was ultimately exiled after conviction for “seditious libel.” The ringing defense of revolution in the U.S. Declaration of Independence drew on the revolutionary spirit created by the publication and mass dissemination of Paine’s Common Sense in early 1776. “A nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and establish such as accords with its interest, disposition, and happiness,” he wrote.

In Paine’s day (as in our own) it was the enemies of democracy and revolution who made mindless appeals to “tradition” and “precedent.” As Paine pointed out, it was not whether ideas were new or old that was important, but whether they were right. When Edmund Burke argued that the people lacked rights because their ancestors had forfeited them, Paine mocked him as advocating tyranny beyond the grave. “The circumstances of the world are constantly changing,” he wrote, “and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.”

Bourgeois Revolution

It is good that Paine recognized this, because while his politics were brilliant, they were circumscribed and limited by the content of his time. The revolutions that he led were bourgeois revolutions. They were designed to free the nascent capitalist economy of the day from the shackles of Old World feudal trade barriers, taxation, and oppression. Paine was a student of his contemporary, economist Adam Smith, and he wholeheartedly embraced Smith’s doctrine of the market as an invisible hand. “All the great laws of society are laws of nature,” Paine wrote. “Those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals or of nations, are laws of mutual and reciprocal interest.”

Although Paine spoke out against slavery, he was active in Pennsylvania and failed to grasp the stranglehold that slavery was imposing on America’s fledgling republic even in the eighteenth century. He could not predict the invention of the cotton gin and its explosive impact on the subsequent growth of slavery. Neither could he foresee the enormous concentration of capital and the mortal threat it posed to democracy, even after slavery was overthrown. What he did observe was the capitalism of small producers that predominated in his lifetime, and he believed its expansion would lead to universal prosperity and peace.

In spite of these limitations, Paine’s ideas have nothing in common with the corporate apologists who attempt to twist his doctrines to fit their modern agenda. His treatise on the Rights of Man was the first great manifesto written in defense of what we now call human rights. It served as the bible for the English working class movement for over a hundred years. While he bitterly opposed taxes for support of monarchy and war, he equally forcefully fought for the taxes, loans, and currency reform necessary to support the revolutionary army and the normal civilian functions of government. He later went further and proposed progressive taxation to finance a visionary program of entitlements to food, shelter, and employment for the poor, social security for the elderly, and public education for children and youth.

Paine understood even in his day that human society required definite limits to property rights. “It is a position not to be controverted,” he wrote in Agrarian Justice, “that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE.” Paine’s view was that cultivation of land gave it an added value that should accrue to the person who cultivated it, or to one who inherited or purchased it. However, this created an unforeseen and adverse effect. “The landed monopoly has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss; and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before. In advocating the cause of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right and not a charity that I am pleading for.”

Paine proposed a National Fund created with inheritance taxes to compensate all without land with a substantial payment at age 21 and an old age pension to commence at age 50.

Vision and Propaganda

Although capitalism and its politics have by now been transformed completely – and capitalism has in fact arrived at the end of its life – Paine’s vision of a world without want is as fresh and revolutionary today as it was when he first wrote it. “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.”

Ultimately, Paine’s greatest contribution was that he actually invented the art of modern political propaganda. He was the first to deliberately write for a mass audience, and as a result he developed an entirely new political language and discourse. He literally transformed the meaning of words such as republican, democrat, and revolutionary into positive terms. Before Paine, “revolution” was primarily an astronomical word denoting a cycle. Paine popularized it as a political concept signifying liberation from oppression, and called for revolution as the necessary condition for establishment of a just civilization.
Common Sense made the American revolution possible by identifying its cause and galvanizing the population around it, even after the fighting had already begun. “Had independence been delayed a few months longer,” he later wrote, “this continent would have been plunged into irrecoverable confusion: some violent for it, some against it, till, in the general cabal, the rich would have been ruined, and the poor destroyed.”

Above all, Paine celebrated and embodied a revolutionary spirit of freedom, and stamped it irrevocably on the character of the American people. He knew there could be no freedom without economic freedom, and in his day capitalism offered that promise. Today that economic freedom can only be realized in a cooperative society where the means of production are owned and controlled by the public. Paine’s spirit will serve us well in the gathering battle for that freedom and against modern-day corporate fascism:
“We have too high an opinion of ourselves even to think of yielding again the least obedience to outlandish authority.”

 

Major writings by Thomas Paine:

Common Sense 1776
The Crisis 1776-83
The Rights of Man 1791-92
The Age of Reason 1794-95
Agrarian Justice 1797

Biographies:

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and
Revolutionary America,
1976 and 2005
Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine
and the Promise of America, 2005

July.2010.Vol20.Ed4
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