Founding Fathers Bourgeoisie

[tradeunionsupporter]

Where the Founding Fathers of the United States of America Bourgeoisie why or why not thank you ?

[Johnny Kerosene]

All of them were rich white guys, and most of them owned plantations.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Edited:

Were the Founding Fathers of the United States of America Bourgeoisie? Why, or why not? Thank you!

I am a total grammar Nazi, and my grammar is still not 100% there.

To answer your question: yes, they were.

[reformnow88]

Yes they were the fact that they said all men were equal under god but continued to allow slavery and own slaves themselves says it all.

[Tablo]

Their relations to their laborers varied. Depends on how you would interpret it. I think it would be fair to say they were all bourgeoisie, even though some relied primarily on slave labor rather than wage labor.

[Tommy4ever]

Weren't they all slave owners rather than bourgeiosie? I'm not sure if capitalism ad really arrived in a big way to America by that point.

Closer to feudal lords than bourgeiosie.

[Tablo]

Weren't they all slave owners rather than bourgeiosie? I'm not sure if capitalism ad really arrived in a big way to America by that point.

Closer to feudal lords than bourgeiosie.
There were definately those that relied on a more feudal system of labor, but there were a lot more slave owners. A lot of the northern founding fathers were legit bourgeoisie.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

and most of them owned plantations.


Um no, most of them didn't. Many of those from Virginia and south did, but the majority did not, even if one is just considering the 'intelligentsia' and not the actual soldiers.

I believe they were capitalists, even if that term and class were just in their infancy. To call them feudalists is further distortion of what feudalism means and, quite frankly, the whole discussion of classifying them (or any revolutionaries really) under some label like bougey or feudal is a bit ridiculous and shows a lack of critical thought. I really loathe all those terms, and pretty much all terms used to simplify history. It's literally one step away from "good vs bad," and by slapping labels like 'proletarian' or such really defeats using modern hindsight that would, yes, take more time and research but avoid the pitfalls of forgetting or even altering history.

Sorry I don't mean to spout but holy fuck I got into it with some tea partiers about the subject a couple days ago.

"Well, my granddaddy didn't need the government to help him!!!1! Liberty less govt....."

and blah blah blah blah blah

It gets frustrating, and all I am saying is that either way simplifying history to fit a pre-conceived notion you have (justify yourself) is really getting to me with the tea party hijacking US history.

For example, this whole fucking notion of "Founding Fathers" is a simplification of history and complete bullshit itself. On the one hand, we hear "The Founding Fathers believed in a limited govt that respects liberty" and on the other "The founding fathers were all rich white plantation owners." Both views are historical bullshit and tailor made for those who don't want to study history but would like to justify themselves that completely ignores the fact that these founding fathers fucking hated each other and their differing views on government.

Not so much trade union here, who I don't mean to lambast in the slightest, but fucking tea partiers re-writing history is bullshit.

god had to get it off my chest

[Ocean Seal]

Where the Founding Fathers of the United States of America Bourgeoisie why or why not thank you ?
No, many of them were land owners with slaves. They were more or less a feudal elite than a capitalist elite. However, there are exceptions Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. They were both bourgeoisie. Were any of them average people like proletarians or "yeoman" farmers as Jefferson described? No.
So mainly bourgeoisie and feudal elites.

[VeritablyV]

None of them were workers, sorry, and they were simply products of their time trying to escape what was left of Feudal oppression, even if that meant oppression in a new system(conveniently with a lot of them not on the bottom).

[L.A.P.]

Understand that even Marx said the implementation of capitalism was a revolutionary thing in itself, so trying to classify the Founding Fathers of the United States as not legitimate revolutionaries due to class relations is ignorant of history and Marxist theory.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

None of them were workers? Wtf? That's like "Lenin wasn't a worker, Trotsky wasn't a worker, Stalin wasn't a worker so there, no workers involved at all."

The hotbed of revolutionary sentiment wasn't the aristocratic south, it was New England's shipping industry, especially around Boston.

[VeritablyV]

Yes, none of them were workers, denoting where they stood economically.

Aristocratic south? Ok? Didn't say anything about that..

[graymouser]

It's drastically simplifying things to call the founding fathers bourgeois, considering that bourgeois relations has barely come into existence at the time.

Benjamin Franklin was a classic "bourgeois," that is, a middle-class man who had a print shop and several other businesses in his time, but he was never a factory owner or someone who lived primarily on stocks. George Washington was a slaveowner and general, neither qualifying him for bourgeois status. John Adams was a lawyer, placing him squarely in the nascent petty bourgeoisie. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner and a lawyer. John Jay was another lawyer, as was James Madison. James Monroe was a lawyer, independently wealthy and owned slaves. Alexander Hamilton was a clerk and a student before the revolution, became a lawyer. Of the major founding fathers, Franklin was the closest to the forerunners of what we would see as the industrial bourgeoisie, and Hamilton's aspirations were very close to what we would look at as financial capital.

I disagree that slaveowners were basically bourgeois. This is turning a scientific term into a mark of scorn. Slaveowners were actually the opposition to the nascent bourgeoisie among the ruling classes; their interests were counterposed to one another's, and although the system was rigged to keep a truce between these classes, things came to a head of course in the Civil War.

[Tim Finnegan]

I would say that the class of the individuals comprising any given collective that we may decided to call the "Founding Fathers" is honestly secondary to the class character of the revolutionary movement and the early republic, and that character was most certainly bourgeois. The revolutionary period was a political revolution, rather than a social one, the fact of capitalism in the British economic sphere having been firmly settled a good generation before the Revolutionary War with the final suppression of the Gaelic aristocracy in the aftermath of the failed 1745 Jacobite Uprising. It brought about a bourgeois state, in the form of a (quasi-)democratic republic, rather than the mutt-state entertained by the British, which at that time incorporated both bourgeois and aristocratic features.


It's drastically simplifying things to call the founding fathers bourgeois, considering that bourgeois relations has barely come into existence at the time.
Actually, I would say that in the Britain and its colonies the bourgeoisie was by then well-established, simply in a primitive, rural form. The British shed largely feudalism between the late 16th and early 18th centuries, and by that time the land-owning class were agricultural capitalists, regarding land as capital and increasing utilising it through systems of wage labour rather than through tenancy. They were quite often quasi-aristocratic in mindset, and many hadn't really gotten the hang of developing or accumulating capital- Edmund Burke frequently and publicly chastised his fellow Anglo-Irish landowners for their absentee landlordism and economic slovenliness- but they were capitalists none the less.

[Drosophila]

All of them owned slaves except for Adams.

They also made a shitty Constitution that protected capitalism rather than freedom.

[Pretty Flaco]

All of them owned slaves except for Adams.

They also made a shitty Constitution that protected capitalism rather than freedom.

Capitalism didn't exist yet.


And in liberal movements that followed the American revolution, you'll see the leaders coming from upper class backgrounds, generally. The upper class were the only ones that had access to education and the ability to read on a mass scale until the 19th century.

[Tim Finnegan]

They also made a shitty Constitution that protected capitalism rather than freedom.
Property, maybe, but not "capitalism". That's a set of social relations to which there was no contemporary alternative besides feudalism, which wouldn't exactly have been a step forwards.


Capitalism didn't exist yet.
It did, just in a primitive form. Generalised commodity production emerged in the British Isles over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, and its agricultural form was well-established by the period of the Revolutionary War. The British economic sphere (which included British North America) was an exception to the usual rule that capitalism emerges in cities and spreads to the countryside; rather, in Britain it grew in the countryside and in doing so allowed the cities to realise their capitalistic potential. A rather grim illustration of this is the fact that the Revolutionary War happened in the same period as the Highland Clearances, a mass cleansing of the Scottish Highlands in which landowners expelled their peasant tenants to make way for wool-producing sheep herded by waged shepherds. Given that this region was the last holdout of feudalism, coming only now to a system of wool-production that had been seen in the hills of Southern Scotland and Northern England for over a century, I think it's safe to say that capitalism was a fact of life in the English-speaking world.


And in liberal movements that followed the American revolution, you'll see the leaders coming from upper class backgrounds, generally. The upper class were the only ones that had access to education and the ability to read on a mass scale until the 19th century."Upper-middle", rather than "upper", I'd say. In most of Europe, the aristocracy still reigned, so radicals tended to come from a background of small capitalists and professionals- Wolfe Tone was a lawyer and the son of a nouveau riche farmer, for example, while Robespierre was a lawyer from a family of lawyers. They would be considered upper class today, quite probably, but not at the time.

[Le Socialiste]

All of them were rich white guys, and most of them owned plantations.

^ This. Not to mention you couldn't vote or participate in elections unless you were a landowner.

[graymouser]

I would say that the class of the individuals comprising any given collective that we may decided to call the "Founding Fathers" is honestly secondary to the class character of the revolutionary movement and the early republic, and that character was most certainly bourgeois. The revolutionary period was a political revolution, rather than a social one, the fact of capitalism in the British economic sphere having been firmly settled a good generation before the Revolutionary War with the final suppression of the Gaelic aristocracy in the aftermath of the failed 1745 Jacobite Uprising. It brought about a bourgeois state, in the form of a (quasi-)democratic republic, rather than the mutt-state entertained by the British, which at that time incorporated both bourgeois and aristocratic features.
If we're considering class character, the early American republic was a tenuous alliance between the rising bourgeoisie in the North and the slave-owning class in the South. This is why it was a partial democratic revolution, not accomplishing many of its basic tasks until the 1860s, when the bourgeoisie had moved beyond being merchants, small shopkeepers and landowners and into industrial capitalism as such. Of course, the second revolution was also frustrated, and so remains.

The first democratic revolution's incomplete gains haunt the nation; the quasi-aristocratic Senate, which was created as a bulwark against abolitionism in the more populous North overwhelming the South, continues to allow small states free rein politically over the affairs of the country. And so on. (It also added to the horror for the Native Americans, but that's another story.)

[Tim Finnegan]

If we're considering class character, the early American republic was a tenuous alliance between the rising bourgeoisie in the North and the slave-owning class in the South. This is why it was a partial democratic revolution, not accomplishing many of its basic tasks until the 1860s, when the bourgeoisie had moved beyond being merchants, small shopkeepers and landowners and into industrial capitalism as such. Of course, the second revolution was also frustrated, and so remains.
This is certainly a fair point. While I would say that, as I detailed above, the Anglo-American landowning class constituted an agricultural bourgeoisie, it's probably fair to say that they and the urban bourgeoisie differed in both economic character and in ideology to make lumping the American Revolution in with those of 1776 or 1848 as an unqualified "bourgeois" revolution unwise. Perhaps it is best thought of as a mid-way point between the English revolution of 1640-1660 and the bourgeois Continental revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries?


The first democratic revolution's incomplete gains haunt the nation; the quasi-aristocratic Senate, which was created as a bulwark against abolitionism in the more populous North overwhelming the South, continues to allow small states free rein politically over the affairs of the country. And so on. (It also added to the horror for the Native Americans, but that's another story.)
This likely has a lot of truth to it. Both the UK and the US experienced bourgeois revolutions when there respective bourgeoisie were both very underdeveloped when compared to the those during the later Western European revolutions, and they both have rather backwards political systems, so there does seem to be a pattern emerging there...

[727Goon]

Bourgeoisie or not, they were basically just a bunch of white racist pigs with a few good ideas. I don't see why they're so glorified in this supposedly progressive age.

[Che a chara]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/picture.php?albumid=568&pictureid=7141

[NewPartyTendency]

I don't care about the native americans, they all wanted a stupid 'confederation'. The articles of confederation was shit.

I'm unsure about the Bourgeoisie in the 1700s. I think US was in four wars before the Working mans organization settled in the US. (Revolutionary, 1812, Mexican-American, and Civil War) The Bourgeoisie had to fund all that warfare and that was probably best. America could been a monarchy after 1812. I think US were near 100% of GDP debt all that time. Being a marxist in the wild west would've got you shot by confused unsophisticated, unintellectual cowboys.

[hatzel]

I don't care about the native americans, they all wanted a stupid 'confederation'. The articles of confederation was shit.

I'm unsure about the Bourgeoisie in the 1700s. I think US was in four wars before the Working mans organization settled in the US. (Revolutionary, 1812, Mexican-American, and Civil War) The Bourgeoisie had to fund all that warfare and that was probably best. America could been a monarchy after 1812. I think US were near 100% of GDP debt all that time. Being a marxist in the wild west would've got you shot by confused unsophisticated, unintellectual cowboys.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what any of this post is trying to say. Feel like trying to explain the significance of any of it...?

[Agent Ducky]

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what any of this post is trying to say. Feel like trying to explain the significance of any of it...?

Same. It didn't make a whole lot of sense tbh O_O

[Tim Finnegan]

Being a marxist in the wild west would've got you shot by confused unsophisticated, unintellectual cowboys.
Ah, yes, Marx's world-famous call-to-arms, "Workers of the world, unite, as long as you're not those smelly, uneducated Texan ranch-hands. Bleugh. We don't need them, that's for damn sure. Miserable, common things. Anyway, er, yeah, revolution and so on. Hop to it." :rolleyes:

[RGacky3]

Being a marxist in the wild west would've got you shot by confused unsophisticated, unintellectual cowboys.

I doubt it, there was no red scare yet.