💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › conspiracy › CN › cn10-91.txt captured on 2020-10-31 at 22:37:55.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 10 Num. 91
=======================================
("Quid coniuratio est?")
-----------------------------------------------------------------
THE PERFECT SLAVE THINKS HE'S FREE
==================================
"Nos han dado la tierra." ("They have given us the land.")
-- Juan Rulfo
Circa 1600s, in England, the land owned the yeomen and the
British Lord owned both. The yeomen were part and parcel of the
estate.
But then it occurred that the land would be more profitable to
the British Lord if he raised sheep on it. Due to manufacturing
advances, a growing wool trade led to seizure of the common lands
for sheep pasture. The British Lords managed this through their
Parliament. "Strong and active peasants were transformed into
wageworkers or sturdy beggars; city streets were filled with
paupers." [1]
Many of the displaced yeomen came to America, where they again
became serfs (indentured servants) for awhile. "Penniless and
lowly Englishmen, arrested and convicted for any one of the
multitude of offenses then provided for severely in law, were
transported as criminals or sold into the colonies as slaves for
a term of years." [2]
In America, tremendous estates were owned by Lords of the Land.
Holland set up a "patroon" system giving feudal rights and
privileges to select colonizers. The Dutch West India Company
presided over the arrangement, and several British companies
"chartered by royal command with all-inclusive powers... held the
trade and land of the greater part of the colonies as a rigid
monopoly." English immigrants "ardently expected that in America
land would be plentiful. They were bitterly disappointed." [3]
Still, there were not enough laborers. In 1619 a Dutch ship
brought the first group of black slaves to Jamestown. In the
South, the economy depended on agriculture. Slavery was the prop
of that system. In the North, the Lords of the Soil, through
their feudal powers, monopolized trade and manufacture. "All
power was concentrated in the hands of a few landowners." The
feudal lord "forced his tenants to sign covenants that they
should trade in nothing else than the produce of the manor...
[The feudal lord] claimed, and held, a monopoly in his domain of
whatever trade he could seize." [4]
The British king's Proclamation Line of 1763 forbid settlement
west of the Appalachian Mountains. But home-grown elites refused
to let go of their vast landholdings, so tension grew. In *Rural
Radicals*, Catherine McNicol Stock explains how "British army
officers told [frontier Americans] that their best chance of
gaining freehold land was to support the British in overthrowing
the landlords -- while their landlords told them exactly the
reverse." [5]
The American Revolutionary War was fought. Subsequent to that
conflict, the Land Lord class gradually declined and a
manufacturing/merchant class gained ascendancy. A new type of
slave -- the wage slave -- was born. Writes Gustavus Myers (a
"leftist," by the way),
If the proletarian white population had been legal slaves,
as the Negroes in the South had been, much consideration
would have been bestowed upon their gullets and domiciles,
for then they would have been property; and who ever knew
the owner of property to destroy the article which
represented money? But being "free" men and women and
children, the proletarians were simply so many bundles of
flesh whose sickness and death meant pecuniary loss to no
property-holder.
Most workers did and do pay rent to that same class that
expropriates the product of their labor. The luckier who own
their own land must still pay a yearly tribute to the apparatus
of Monopoly Capital.
Recently, an "improvement" on the wage-slave system has been the
"temping" of the American worker. After Monopoly Capital has
claimed the fruit of their labor, a few crumbs are tossed to the
workers and they are expected to go warehouse themselves -- at