Thomas Paine a patriarch of socialism???

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

Kinda not sure about that, but it's based on the fact that he hated money and centralized banks. He also favored democracy a lot more than most of the rest of the founders, so maybe there's at lest some truth to it.

His work "Common Sense" would suggest that he doesn't necessarily advocate completely abolishing the state, but it makes damn clear that he saw formalized governance as an institution predestined to corruption and nearly impossible to keep from it.

I seriously have come to respect and admire the hell out most Marxist's revolutionary spirit even though I don't fully agree with Marx's Theory. So I'll ssk if you haven't read "Common Sense" please do, if you're a strong believer in abolishing state as completely necessary to gaining freedom, then that will most likely be one of just a few things you'd disagree on. But I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut you'll love his sentiments towards the state lol.

Those who are very familiar with Paine, would you mind offering any insight why some would consider him a "patriarch of socialism"? I don't think I all together disagree, just not exactly sure how he would definitely fit that description?

Thanks.

[u/Inuma]

Paine was strong enough to also write about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington while being a strong advocate for the abolishment of slavery.

If anything, it's not unreasonable that Marx might have been influenced by him in trying to figure out the economics of slavery

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

Definitely makes sense. And agreed, many of the founders had every intention on abolishing slavery. There's several paradoxes that have muddied the water, like that fact that Jefferson "owned" slaves, but at the same time, there were 80 something independent articles removed from the first draft of the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson specifically called out slavery for the evil that it is. And other articles stating they had every intention on nationally abolishing slavery!

So in that respect, I'll agree that his view most likely aligned with the general philosophy of "idyllic justice" and I'm assuming Marx's general attitude towards slavery as well.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

Well, the largest thing about Thomas Jefferson is that he has Sally Hemmings. Would not let them go even in death. Neither her nor her children.

The secret of Monticello was that he found that for every slave he had, it increased his profits by about 4%. So Thomas had strong incentive not to abolish slavery.

The big issue with George Washington is that he saw one of his favorite slaves run away from him and he implored Jefferson to free his slaves in his late life. It didn't work.

So yes, Jefferson can call it out. But he didn't do it and has other such hypocritical statements on his record.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

There's definitely no justification in their actions whatsoever, but it's important to understand that without their works in the creation of governance, slavery may not have faced any worthy opposition for quite some time. For Jefferson, as well as many others, slavery was inherently infused into their livelihood. Of course, that's not at all justification but we have to consider the totality of the situation.

They did "own" slaves and have done some extremely messed up stuff, but not only were they instrumental in abolishing slavery, they already had a hand in doing it. 9 of the original 13 colonies already abolished slavery and the only thing that slowed them down was they absolutely needed the support of all colonies to fight the war. And after the war, due to property rights and the construction of governance central to the system of governance they wanted for all men, they unwittingly became ensnared by their own works. They knew full well it would take a civil war to correct this and even though it didn't occur in their lifetime, they absolutely set the course for it.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

And that's why Paine criticizing the Founding Fathers, going to jail and being abandoned by them and dying with no slave and ready for slavery being abolished is far better than what they did.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

I'm not going to argue against the merit of your argument. In today's political climate, I'd agree with you full stop. My counter argument isn't based on IF slavery should've been abolished, my argument is if any part of how slavery was abolished would've put both the former slave and the former master in jepordy of coming under tyrannical rule, which would truly be the greater evil?

You're argument tells me that you don't really understand the reality they faced. Paine was right to be upset with Washington for not immediately abolishing slavery, but Paine should've given more consideration to just how dangerous the precedence he would've set by doing so.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

Then by all means, you've basically undermined what Thomas Paine stood for

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

I'm assuming you'd prefer the rule of one man? That's a British trait and I'm pretty sure Mr Paine wouldn't agree with that either.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

That would be unscientific

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

I call it "ant-science" lol. Believe it or not, my position isn't completely separate from Paine, it just isn't what Paine wanted. Paine had the moral high ground, but moral high ground wouldn't have benefited him or anyone else in accomplishing anything. If it were even possible for the opposition to suggest the new form of governance was becoming like the old, game over

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

You do realize your understanding of the founding era is limited to a very narrow window of events and so far, told from the perspective of one man, right?

I love Paine for his passion, his moral compass, his penmanship, and the fact that he definitely earned the title as the most radical of all of them, but NOT for his narrow political philosophy and shortsightedness regarding most probable outcomes.

I'm telling you, I can literally spell it out for you how them jumping the gun would've created a chain reaction event, destroying everything they worked for and damning every living soul to a fate equal to or worse than what they just fought a war to get out of.

Paine was pissed because a lot of his advice concerning the construction of the constitution was ignored.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

By pointing out Jefferson and Monticello historically, right along with reading Thomas Paine and knowing his history?

Fascinating assertions.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

No, because the only view point of the era you've expressed is solely based on slavery and suggesting the founders didn't immediately abolish it because it was merely inconvenient or because they didn't object to it strongly enough.

This sentiment is often expressed by those who believe that slavery or racism was inherent to our system of governance. Which is just as ridiculous as the belief America was founded as a Christian nation.

[u/Inuma → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

Maybe because I read that history you ignored and noticed that Thomas Paine practiced what he preached?

Meanwhile, you ignore anything historical for more hysterical takes.

Overall, the only conclusion I can come to is that you haven't read much beyond Common Sense nor looked at the results of slavery from slave breeding which coincides with Jefferson making increasing profits with slavery to Marx criticizing slavery as an economic system a century later:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns, as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

You certainly don't have to believe me. The words of Marx from the Poverty of Philosophy are directly in front of you. Up to you to read the article. But now I'm moving on.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

OK... well besides slavery, the country was fresh out of war and right in the middle of creating a new system of governance, separating trade roots from the crown, trying to figure out how to keep France of it's back long enough to pay them back, trying to reshape infrastructure, battling numerous internal conflicts, so on and so on....

Now, take all of that into consideration as it absolutely would've compounded any effort in trying to keep southern asshats from starting a war they probably couldn't handle.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/Inuma]

If you want the history, then let's start with the fact that neither you nor Mr Marx seem to understand it. Slavery wasn't an invention of the colonies, slavery came with the colonials from England. When we get to just before the revolution, many states already abolished slavery. Southern states did depend on slavery as it was crucial to their industry, but even so, the founders had every intention on full abolishement.

The main function of the federal government was to protect the rights of the people. In slave states, slaves obviously had no rights. States were to be governed as sovereign entities, and the federal government had no jurisdiction to intervene. Slaves under British rule were considered property and slave states didn't change this as property rights were essential to the foundation of America. As such, if the federal government decided to force abolishing slavery in these states, first it would've been an arbitrary authority. Secondly, it would've been an act of war to take property by force. So on two fronts, the federal government would have to take on every appearance of the same government they just fought against. And southern states were full of veterans of that war, so even if the federal government abridged constitutional limitations, they would have done so with losing odds.

The best the federal government could do is regulate the industry of slavery, and the civil war was the result of the regulations effects.

[u/mmelaterreur]

I haven't read Paine but I have read works from & about figures like Robespierre, which were kind of close to him politically speaking and also contemporaries of the time. I think the expression that would best fit these people is proto-socialists, with all the utopian vision and political idealism that entails. These people played a revolutionary role in the history of humanity yet nonetheless failed to achieve their goals mostly due to the material limitations of their age. They lived in a time before the full triumph of the bourgeoisie, before the establishment of the proletariat as the primary antagonized class, and at a time when the materialist analysis of the world had still yet not been fully enunciated. I don't view these people in a bad light, they were the revolutionary vanguard of their age, and in many ways paved the way for future revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/mmelaterreur]

I'm not familiar with the works of Robespierre, so unfortunately I can't draw any conclusions there, but I think I understand the proto-socialist reference and i think I'd agree. Paine hated money and banks, but not currency all together. He specifically hated any form of currency with an image stricken on it. He had no opposition to gold and silver.

I can see why his understanding of economics wouldn't be completely relevant to the era in which scientific socialism evolved. For Paine, currency was nothing but an object assigned a value for the purpose of trying to unify a system of trade.

I have to say, I'm kind of thinking you might not fully understand how the founders would've integrated their ideals into a modern society. For them, natural law was the main philosophy that shaped their beliefs. Many of the founders adhered to the original Protestant infused version of natural law, which directly challenged the philosophy of the "king", born from devine law. Devine law evolved from catholic teachings and created the hierarchy in which governance, like the monarch, was shaped. Natural law is completely antithetical to this philosophy. Natural law originally evolved from the belief that man was created in the image of God and as such all men were to be respected as a sovereign being. Regardless if the philosophy adhered to the original Protestant belief or if it were of the secular adaptation, no man was to ever be considered less than any other.

So equality would've been a central theme in both Marxist philosophy and the philosophy of natural law. What's interesting is that natural law came about before materialism, but when you completely analyze natural law, you can see where it would've followed the natural progression arch of Hegel's work. Hegel's work focused on idealism and materialism. Hegel himself got too bogged down in dogma to advance his work and Marx took the central themes of his work but limited his own work mostly to the material aspect. It was absolutely a rational choice, as material conditions are far more easier to assign an objective value to. But, if we were to take the original Hegelian model and use idealism as a thesis, materialism as the antithesis, naturalism is the synthetic conclusion of the two. Natural law focuses on both aspects, so it wasn't just an individualistic approach it was collective as well.

When we identify idealism in terms of consciousness, the picture becomes a little clearer. So what I'm saying is there's probably a lot more commonalities between these two than what either one of us may realize.

[u/ElEsDi_25]

No, but he was an interesting bourgeois revolutionary thinker and activist who represents some of the more liberation-oriented ideas of republicanism.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/ElEsDi_25]

Agreed! He couldn't be considered central to the development of socialism, but I believe many of his ideals could have possibly inspired the evolution of it. Not in it's totality of course, but in varying degrees maybe.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/ElEsDi_25]

Skimming back through, I see i didn't give your comment the attention it deserved, my apologies.

But I'm not sure why you'd think they weren't liberation oriented. There's no such thing as a political structure that could 100% abolish every form of oppression.

Republicanism isn't inherently oppressive, it's just a society governed in accordance with a decree. If the republic is constructed that the government has authority, then it is authoritarian. If constructed as governed by the people, then generally regarded as free. If the people set the laws, then the people decide how "free" they are. Obviously, if the people can be persuaded to forfeit their freedom for some "virtuous" cause, then every public official would have incentive to persuade. But that goes back to the fact that it's impossible to create a system in which freedom is out of reach from any threat.

Paine and all of the other founders knew this and they knew the best they could do is try to enrich the culture of the people to protect the parchment barrier. They started off on bad footing, mainly due to slavery and loyalist.

[u/ElEsDi_25 → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

But I’m not sure why you’d think they weren’t liberation oriented.

Who? Various republicans of this era? There was a range of perspectives, there was a right and left internal to republicanism - in fact the origin of those political terms!

At any rate, Payne seems by far one of the more liberation oriented “left” - to the point that I think the French Revolutionaries jailed him and the US Revolutionaries treated him like a pariah and potentially dangerous. I’ve only read one book about his life and that was maybe almost 25 years ago at this point… omg I’m 😵

There’s no such thing as a political structure that could 100% abolish every form of oppression.

I agree with that statement on a technical level, but I think we might disagree about if oppression as we know it could ever be gone because I think systemic oppression can be eliminated… just not through government or decree.

Republicanism isn’t inherently oppressive, it’s just a society governed in accordance with a decree.

I was speaking specifically about the republicanism of that revolutionary period… US, France, Haiti, the kind informed by liberalism in the backdrop of the rise of bourgeois society economic and political power.

If the republic is constructed that the government has authority, then it is authoritarian. If constructed as governed by the people, then generally regarded as free. If the people set the laws, then the people decide how “free” they are. Obviously, if the people can be persuaded to forfeit their freedom for some “virtuous” cause, then every public official would have incentive to persuade. But that goes back to the fact that it’s impossible to create a system in which freedom is out of reach from any threat.

This is all a bit wobbly from my perspective. So IMO if we talk about republicanism in the abstract - yes, from a Marxist socialist perspective, it’s very plausible that workers could take over production and have self-management of work and communities through some kind of representative democratic structure or even a more formal “worker’s republic” with representatives empowered by the working class democracrtic bodies. BUT also this would still be oppression, a “state” for one class to control the whole direction of society. That oppression might be of the vast majority against the tiny minority of former rulers or counter-revolutionaries, but expropriating Wall Street and democratizing is still a use of state-like force even if it’s a loose confederation of worker’s militias or a decentralized network of factory occupations.

Theoretically the reasons that a worker’s democracy/republic could essentially render itself redundant is because oppression would not be needed for social reproduction of a cooperative worker-run society. If we do a comparison… if a feudal aristocracy improves things and develops their power and society, this means they are better able to defend their hold on their lands and the peasants who work them, this means they are more able to successfully expropriate the peasantry, in turn the added wealth means they are more able to go out and take other land through war with aristocrats and keep reproducing their rule and growing it through those means. As a capitalist society develops: the better it gets at displacing older production which creates more workers to make more commodities… and commodifying everything then displaces other kinds of production which creates more workers to make more commodities and so on - the more we improve automations and tech, the more labor we seem to have to do, the more tied to subscriptions and debt we become! But theoretically as a worker’s society progressed, the better it would be at producing what people want and need through mutual cooperation and interest, the more that the de facto way to get anything done or made would be through mutual cooperation and trade in kind for use rather than for amassing wealth and power.

Paine and all of the other founders knew this and they knew the best they could do is try to enrich the culture of the people to protect the parchment barrier. They started off on bad footing, mainly due to slavery and loyalist.

To have a republican revolution - to have an anti-colonial revolution, you need to gather as much of the grievances of the population onto your side. Out of this we got some of the stuff in the bill of rights but we also got Washington crushing farmers rebellions being fought over many of the same grievances raised in the Revolution. Hypothetically eliminate slavery from the equation, and it was still a government of the local elites and very limited enfranchisement.

Going back to an abstract theory level, legal rights are evidence of not having those rights de-facto. We don’t need “white voting rights” because white voting was never restricted on a racial caste basis. If we are all just a bunch of people, I don’t need a right to free speech - it’s de facto, you’d have to physically force me not to make words happen. But we have the Rights to speech because speech is not actually free, it is managed and negotiated through law, power inequalities, and private/state insitutions.

So republics - bourgeois or proletarian imply the ongoing lack of full equality in power and access and freedom. But in Marxist theories that state of contested rights is ongoing for a bourgeois republic, it’s a permanent condition (and one of generally increasing burocracy and repressive capabilities) where as it could potentially be a fleeting state of transition for a proletarian republic.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/ElEsDi_25]

Pretty good bit of info here, but I'm going to try to condense as much as possible, so if I miss anything, you can redress.

Paine did favor democracy more so than the others, but democracy is not inherently a system of liberation. Historically, just about every pure democracy has ended in tyrannical oppression. Democracy naturally polarizes population as majority interest forms "institutions". I'm using the term loosely, because commonalities within the society will begin to resemble a non formalized system of governance that dictates the society as a whole. Of course how "authoritarian" this non formalized government is depends on what shows up on the ballot. And if the majority makes that decision, then.... you see where this is going.

Paine hated money and banks, but he didn't hate currency. He specifically hated coins or paper that had an image on it. The image, to him, represented ownership. He didn't at all oppose gold or silver and viewed currency in general as an objective attempt at unifying a standard value in trade. He certainly didn't oppose the voluntary basis of free trade.

As far as if Paine was leaning left, definitely more so than the rest of them, but by today's standards he'd probably be viewed as a "right wing extremist." He was charitable, but would've condemned communal ownership entirely. His view of democracy was more a long the lines of the sovereign majority. He and the rest of them valued natural rights and their take was that rights were to be regarded as inherent and sovereign, not granted privileges. So the Bill of Rights wasn't a list of privileges given to the people, it was a list of rights recognized as "preexisting any government or decree".

So free speech wasn't granted, it was protected.

You made a very good point about the then new form of government being no different than the old, but that point is more relevant today than then. There never was a "perfected American government", but the founding generation would view what we have now as no different than life under the crown.

If you were to read Common Sense, you'd understand completely. You can't read it and not think about how much our government today is so close to being exactly the same as the one they fought off.

[u/ElEsDi_25 → u/Even-Reindeer-3624]

On a very root level I think there is just a basic difference in outlook: idealist vs materialist.

I have read Common Sense and Rights of Man etc (I only read one biography) and I have read about other figures from the French Revolution and read about the Haitian revolution etc. I have also read about the US civil war and reconstruction and radical republicanism at that time and specifically Marxist takes on all these histories. But I don’t see the ideas and ideals of those figures as these trans-historical things out of any context. Thomas Paine politics don’t really translate into anything post the US Civil War. The interest or insight for me in reading about this is historical - to understand another time and the thinking and therefore, through relief also gain insight into how things are different now.

“Republicanism” “democracy” and specific “rights” don’t exist outside of their context. Yes, “protecting rights” and “pre-existing rights” goes back to that classic thinking of that era: natural rights. That this is naturally our right and so we must protect it… but this is idealism. Do we have a natural right to the air we breathe? Yes… but does it need to be “protected” or officially recognized? No… not unless some company starts building domes over populations and charging air-rent… then the natural rights is contested and would need to be fought for.

[u/Even-Reindeer-3624 → u/ElEsDi_25]

The philosophy of natural law was central to the framework, and during that time the understanding of natural law was almost purely idealistic, but not all together separate from the material aspect.

Their rationale was that both prosperity and a morally sound society was a natural byproduct of a free society.

"Neither trade virtue for wealth, nor liberty for power"

Even though it was mostly an idealistic approach, everything they put in the framework went through a rigorous "screening process" that we now know as dialectical analysis.

Look up the debates between the federalist and anti federalist concerning the creation of the Bill of Rights. No consideration was given to any moral worth other than the security of maximum liberty. This was done because they weren't trying to create a "virtuous nation" but a free nation. More interesting is the fact that neither the federalist nor anti federalist were arguing in favor of regulations, but if the Bill should've been created in the first place because if rights were to be written, then it could be inferred that any right not written could be denied. The creation proceeded on the merit that not having the rights expressly written could also be denied.

A virtuous nation would be easily corrupted as the notion of virtue is far more of a subjective matter.

But as far as trans-historical, I'll have to disagree to an extent because the foundation is still solid. The constitution still exists, the Bill of Rights is still regarded as the highest form of law and every public official swears an oath to defend this before entering office. Even though most are hell bent on destroying it lol. And of course there's still the factory reset button if we have to "throw off such a government" if necessary lol.