In the history of the American labor movement, the frontier evoked an escape from the treacheries of capitalism for a chance at a life of self-sufficiency and the realization of one’s freedom. Even after the supposed closure of the frontier, many Americans, including plenty of workers, found a romantic nostalgia for a past where securing a peaceful life on a homestead somewhere was actually viable. It was reflected in a variety of popular movements by sections of workers and farmers to secure free land for themselves (of course, involving the dispossession of Indigenous Americans). This can be traced as far back as Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, to the Land Reformers of the 1840s, and to the Populist Party of the Gilded Age. Of course, it was on this basis that Jefferson and his successors in the Democratic-Republican, Democratic, and early Republican Party found popular support, as their ideas of land reform and opposition to banks and speculators were followed.
This approach towards political economy, however, found that in practice capitalism did not turn out in the ways they imagined. On the contrary, it was the likes of Karl Marx and his followers that claimed to demonstrate the folly of the frontier, and the natural course of capitalism’s development. In concrete terms, what did these ideas about the frontier amount to in practice? Further, how did classical Marxists at the time (the school of history most invested in studying independent workers’ movements) see the role the frontier played in shaping the labor movement? Ascertaining this would allow us to see that despite the loud voices of the Land Reformers calling for a return to Jefferson’s dream as a god given right, Marxist analysis demonstrates how these trends were but the historical reflection of the declining yeoman farmer in the death throes of their existence.
Following American independence and the early discord of the early republic, the Democratic-Republicans ended up victorious following the defeat of John Adams by Thomas Jefferson. This is particularly significant as it was Jefferson’s vision for America’s future economy that ended up dictating the path the republic would take in the coming decades. Jefferson’s understanding of political economy was clearly expressed in Destutt Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy, which Jefferson edited and broadly concurred with. While drawing heavily on the French Physiocrats [who saw agriculture as the source of wealth], Tracy differed from the Physiocrats in that he adhered to the labor theory of value.1 On that basis, Tracy posited that small subsistence farmers and agricultural laborers (the “undertakers of the most necessary fabrications”) were the only sources of value from which land can be considered productive, and their well-being must be secured to have a prosperous country (Tracy 1817, 94-95). In contrast, large landowners who don’t work the land themselves produce little value themselves, and are little more than lenders to those tenants and farmers who actually work the land (Tracy 1817, 87). This understanding motivated Jefferson’s struggle against the land speculators following independence, who sold land at exorbitant prices to those who could afford parcels valued at hundreds of dollars2 , and also tied his (and by extension his party’s) conception of “land to the tiller” to broader farmer populism. It was in this way that many early farmer movements evoked his name as representative of their vision for the American dream.
On the composition of those early farmers and journeymen, it was generally understood by American historians that modern industrial capitalism didn’t start in the Northern United States until the 19th century, particularly after 1840 (Foner 1947, 91). The version of capitalism outlined by Marx in Capital, that of a large, homogeneous mass of workers concentrated in factories owned by the large industrial bourgeoisie, was nowhere to be found in the early Republic. By and large, most workers were still handicraftsmen or a part of larger groups of manufacturers run by a master craftsman. Consequently, it was still common for former journeymen and mechanics to become business owners themselves (Foner 1947, 140). While there were early “combinations” of unions, they rarely became permanent, and were often dissolved as soon as “fair wages” were negotiated with the owners (Foner 1947, 69-70).3 Many of the workers were also farmers, and consequently, only worked part-time in order to supplement income. As a result, whenever businesses shut down due to instability or just the weather, farmers stayed home (Foster 1947, 192-193). Where there were permanent craft unions, they appeared exclusively in the few urban centers that existed, such as Philadelphia or New York, and only then in certain professional trades. This directly correlated to the fact that the frontier never allowed immigrants to become too concentrated in the cities in the early years, as they were able to go to the frontier to satisfy the demands of labor out west.4
It was under these conditions that early working-class politics developed, distinct from the mainstream battles between the industrialists and planters in securing rights to combine into unions, rights to suffrage, and higher wages/shorter working hours. As a result, it tended to side with the Jeffersonian Democrats, including Jackson (the first “common man” president), who advocated for broader democratic rights (for white men), as well as free access to land. When industrial capitalism got started, as generations of workers who had been separated from the land emerged, agrarianism played a significant role in independent working-class politics. The second labor party in America, the Workingmen’s Party, was founded in 1829, which contained a faction led by Thomas Skidmore (one of the founders of the party), who advocated for leaving the factories and redistributing land to the workers (Foner 1947, 134-135). After this faction fomented a split and the party soon collapsed, it emerged again (with many former leaders from both factions) following the 1837 crisis. Land Reformers and Utopians aimed to prevent the ills of capitalism through the distribution of public lands for individual and collective ownership of free land, respectively (Foner 1947, 183-188).5
Having failed this attempt, this land reformers continued to return in public advocacy among Radical Republicans for the Homestead Act (Foner 1947, 286), some extending the privilege to Black farmers who would get 40 acres and a mule, from land expropriated from plantation estates. Up until the Populist Party,6 workers demanded land reform and an 8-hour working day in the same program (269-270). Despite this, a permanent industrial working class did form, which condemned the land reformers to being a large but diminishing group of idealists, pining for a dream that no longer was possible. It should be no surprise then that it was in the years following the passage of the Homestead Act that some of the most militant action by labor was mobilized for a national trade union struggle, without any illusions on “voting yourself a farm”. Many small farmers simply couldn’t compete with large agricultural production, which could weather protracted crises and undersell their competitors. Even the Populists, who had significant popularity into the 20th century, had policies oriented more towards preserving the livelihood of the small farmers that remained rather than extending the possibility of land grants to the tens of millions of industrial workers (McPherson 1892, 269-270). Jefferson’s hopes for a prosperous agrarian America, populated by small farmers and artisans were dashed, and the workers moved on without him.
So, how did Karl Marx make sense of these particularities? The earliest writing by Marx on the question of American agriculture goes back to 1846. Many German Communists left7 left to the United States due to political persecution, including a Hermann Kriege, who joined up with the Land Reformers and wrote on their behalf (Marx 1846, 666). Kriege elaborated their platform of securing, through legislation, 1.4 billion acres of North American land, so that every American farmer could have 160 acres for themselves as is their “inalienable right” to “the communal heritage of all mankind”. Marx, having yet to even write the manifesto, provided a scathing critique of Kriege in his usual polemical style:
“So in order that the soil shall remain “inalienable communal property”, for “all mankind” to boot, a start must be made without delay on dividing it up; Kriege here imagines he can use the law to forbid the necessary consequences of this division, that is, concentration, industrial progress, etc. He considers 160 acres of land as an ever-constant measure, as if the value of such an area did not vary according to its quality. The “farmers” will have to exchange, if not their land itself, then at least the produce of their land, with each other and with third parties, and when this juncture has been reached, it will soon become apparent that one “farmer”, even though he has no capital, will, simply by his work and the greater initial productivity of his 160 acres, reduce his neighbour to the status of his farm labourer. And is it not then immaterial whether “land” or the produce of the land “falls into the hands of rapacious speculators”?” (Marx 1846, 42-43)
He then proceeded to calculate that 160 acres per farmer would sustain around 44 million people, proving the ephemeral character of this “eternal” dream of small proprietorship. There are a few things that can be extracted from this passage. First and foremost, Marx is explicit that free land is necessarily a temporary condition (if one at all, as this is critiquing Kriege’s ideas, which themselves were unsubstantiated rather than a material analysis of its own). It is a temporary condition not only because there is only so much land to go around, but that insofar as private property relations hold (and they do under this system), capitalism will spontaneously develop, with one section of farmers becoming farm laborers and another a possessor of capital to hire these laborers. In other words, just by the free competition rendered by private ownership, capitalism will emerge. So, by settlers struggling for access to free land, while intended as a struggle against the big capitalists, it at best allows for the development of capitalism throughout the frontier.
When Marx published his first volume of Capital in 1867, his understanding of the development of capitalism in the colonies had only been substantiated further. The final chapter of his book, titled “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” concludes his analysis of capitalism with a critique of E.G. Wakefield’s systematic colonization theory. Wakefield suggests that in order to ensure access to cheap labor, which was difficult to come by in colonies, states must intervene and artificially raise land prices (Marx 1867, 542). Marx uses Wakefield’s theory and lamentations on the difficulty of securing laborers who have access to free land to explain that, despite what bourgeois economists may think, capital is not a thing, but a social relation. Quite literally, capital ceases to function if it isn’t employed through the hiring of labor-power8, as Wakefield himself demonstrates, by citing failed attempts in Western Australia to “import” capitalism (Marx 1867, 541). Consequently, as long as wage laborers have access to free land, where they can be hired “at any price” to fill the high demand for labor one day, the next day they can become an independent proprietor (Marx 1867, 543). This describes the situation in the United States in the years following independence, and, to an extent, the 1840s.
However, by the 1860s, as Marx says himself:
“On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, etc., in brief, the most rapid centralisation of capital.9 The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level.” (Marx 1867, 545)
This chapter shows that while providing the conditions for the development of capitalism on the terms he described in his 1846 critique of Kriege, frontier settlement delayed the development of large-scale industrial capitalism. This is because large-scale industrial capitalism requires a dispossessed class of workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, and without depriving workers from access to land through artificial price increases, a permanent working class will not develop. At least, it will not develop for a while.
20 years later, in an 1887 American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote a preface and appendix, including an assessment of the American labor movement up to that point and an overview of the land question. He described in great detail how the American working class was moving at a pace far faster than it is in Europe, and how, as far as the struggle for an 8-hour working day was concerned, the militancy was striking. Nowhere can the reader see a fluid working class with narrow interests. In the appendix, he reiterates many of Marx’s points:
“There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labour and to become’ farmers, dealers, or employers of labour, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become – and with every chance of success, too – the leading manufacturing nation of the world – such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; not even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year.” (Engels 1887, 6-7)
It was with this context that he assessed what he described as the 3 labor parties that could represent the working class in the United States: “Henry George’s Party” or the United Labor Party, the Knights of Labor (the largest party at the time), and the Socialist Labor Party. Engels’s problems with the latter two were more organizational in character, but with George, who believed “land-monopolization to be the sole cause of poverty and misery” (Engels 1887, 4), Engels took the time to explain in lighter terms what Marx did to Kriege decades before. In it, though, Engels does make an important distinction on the communist perspective with respect to land ownership. Whereas George only wanted the land to be held in common (and then redistributed), Engels further explained how land is only to be held in common as it is part of private property and, therefore, part of the means of production, which should be held in common by the workers10.
Some 30 years later, exiled in Switzerland, Lenin took the time to write an analysis of American agriculture, based on American census data from 1900 and 1910. The purpose was mainly to prove to his political rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, who wanted free redistribution of land to the peasants, how, rather than creating a communal utopia (as Kriege and George believed), this redistribution would create the very same conditions of capitalism his rivals looked to avoid. That was exactly why America, the model country for free proprietorship, was the perfect test case for how land redistribution turns out in practice. Using the statistics, Lenin proved how the small farmers were being expropriated across the board. From the mortgaging of their properties to banks to maintain possession for a few more years (Lenin 1915, 92), to the resale of their land to capitalists who engaged in larger scale and more capital intensive production (Lenin 1915, 39-40), “living by the “labor of their own hands”” was coming to an end (Lenin 1915, 102). In particular, Lenin showed that even though the data suggested a growth in small farms, this misleading figure actually pointed to the fact that self-sufficient homesteads were being transformed into capitalist ventures dependent on agricultural labor (Lenin 1915, 88). These capitalist farms specialized in producing certain commodities such as milk or vegetables, and shouldn’t be confused with the subsistence farmer (Lenin 1915, 39-40).
Here, Lenin no longer saw the transience of the earlier working class, and therefore had little to say on the idea of the frontier initially preventing the deprivation of laborers from the means of production. Instead, he clearly concluded: “The absence of private property in land in some parts of a vast country does not exclude capitalism—our Narodniks11 should make a note of this!—on the contrary, it broadens its base, and accelerates its development.” (Lenin 1915, 88). This brings us to the other end of the duality of the frontier and its relationship to capitalism (and by extension, the labor movement). Marx in 1846 mostly wrote on the aspect of the frontier which blunted the process of capitalist development, foreseeing an aspect that inevitably leads to its further development. In 1867, he presented both sides of the coin, leaning slightly towards the particular expansion of capitalism following the Civil War, indicating the frontier’s role in catalyzing this process. Engels in 1887 presented the latter aspect, that of the frontier accelerating the development of capitalism as principle, while still paying tribute to Marx’s earlier explanation. Lenin, in 1915, dropped the tribute altogether as if to tell the Land Reformers: “I told you so”, with a sense of haughtiness.
Philip Foner, the American historian relied upon for this essay’s Marxist history of the American labor movement, who wrote in the 1940s, also paid tribute to this dual role of the frontier on capitalist development. Of course, it can be the result of his focus on the labor movement, as opposed to the frontier itself, but throughout his writings, Foner only makes passing reference to the frontier. At certain points, it almost seems that he’s forced to acknowledge the frontier because his primary sources, working-class newspapers and trade union records, make explicit reference to it. Foner does explicitly point out when the working class he’s studying is or is not transitory in character, but he does not take the time to evaluate the political economy of the West in general, or the homestead in particular. Neither does he make anything beyond a passing reference to the existence of Indians on the frontier, and he neglects to expound on any role they played on the frontier or the labor movement more broadly. It requires a careful reading to find out just how land hungry these transitory workers were, and how these tendencies persisted even beyond the formation of a permanent proletariat.
This brings us to a broader evaluation of the Marxist perspective on the frontier and its relation to the labor movement. Marx and Engels themselves were invested in the early American movement, and so took the time to evaluate other bourgeois political economists and their conceptions of capitalism, in the context of a nation with free land. With that understanding, Marx and Engels struggled with the sections of workers who yearned for a time when workers could retire as farmers on some homestead. Lenin, writing in a different time and different context, proved how futile the idea of free land for the working class was, while struggling against the Land Reformers within his own country. Foner’s broader points can also be explained in a similar way. Foner demonstrated how, at each step, the working class only continues to develop its consciousness further, seeing land reform as only a passing fancy before the workers could get serious and develop a politics befitting their revolutionary character. Despite this, there is a consistent (even international!) struggle with a quite stubborn idea, that can be traced back to Jefferson and the French physiocrats, the idea that the misery and toil of capitalism is something that can be avoided if only there was land to go around. In Russia, the Marxists ended up winning over the Narodnik Land Reformers. But in the United States, to this day there are sections of working-class people who are still pushing for free access to land, at best securing that American Dream which never panned out for the majority of toilers.
What does this say then about the reality of the American frontier for the labor movement? It means that even if a worker secured a homestead for themselves 200 years ago, it was not long before they or their family would lose it, regardless of whether it took one generation or five. Economic realities did not concern themselves with the sentiments of workers in the 1840s, and neither do they concern themselves with those factions of working-class people trying to redefine them today12. The Land Reformers in practice pushed for the dispossession of natives from their land, and ended with little to show for it. Years later, what workers appreciate most isn’t the fact that they were able to apply for a homestead up until the 1980s, but, instead, the many fruits of the protracted struggles for workers’ protections and rights. Somehow, enough workers are still attracted to the idea of small proprietorship, which lures them towards an idealized frontier in the form of escapist fantasies based on the frontier myth.
Works Cited
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude. A Treatise on Political Economy. Edited by Thomas Jefferson. Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan, 1817.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Panther, 1969
Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor. New York: International Publishers, 1947.
Lenin, V. I. Collected Works. Vol. 22, December 1915–July 1916. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels Collected Works: Marx and Engels 1845- 1848, Vol. 6. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010.
McPherson, Edward. A Handbook of Politics for 1892: Being a Record of Important Political Action, Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, National and State, From July 31, 1890, to July 31, 1892. Washington DC: Philp and Solomons, 1892.
- The French Physiocrats, though inconsistent in this, generally believed that value is
derived from nature or the land. Therefore, they premised large scale agriculture and
natural fertility above all else, and tended to dismiss the role of the small peasant
proprietor. The Labor Theory of Value, however, was developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo to see labor as the source of value. That is to say, land is worthless without people going there to clear the land, till the soil, and harvest the crops as far as the economy is concerned. ↩︎ - Regarding the monetary value of dollars this is not adjusted for inflation, when adjusted the cost would be hundreds of thousands of dollars, in any case an exclusionary amount of money. Regarding farmer populism, this is how they viewed the merchants who often were one and the same as the land speculators: “The greatest advantage of external commerce, the only one meriting attention, is its giving a greater development to that which is internal. Merchants, properly so called, facilitate commerce, but it exists before them and without them” (Tracy 1817, pg. xxxiii). This demonstrates how Jefferson saw the merchants as a means to facilitate the interests of the laborers, rather than the other way around. ↩︎
- “In 1778 the journeyman printers in New York combined and demanded an increase in wages. They sent a letter to their employers informing them that ‘as the necessaries of life are raised to such enormous prices, it cannot be expected that we should continue to work at the wages now given; and therefore request an addition of Three Dollars per week to our present small pittance.’ Unless the request was granted, they declared, they would not continue to work. After the increase was reluctantly granted the printers saw no reason for continued existence of their organization and abandoned the association.” ↩︎
- For clarity, many craftsmen in the cities were immigrants, as elaborated by Marx (Marx 1867, 545). Wages were abnormally high in the colonies because of the high demand for labor. The direct consequence of this meant getting paid relatively high wages, which they then used to accumulate savings and leave for the frontier. This emigration from the cities into the countryside drove up labor demand which created a cycle of high wages in the cities leading to savings for workers to leave the cities leading to high wages in the cities and so on. ↩︎
- The Land Reformers refers to a broad group of laborers who pushed for access to free land for workers to move to, as a way to avoid capitalist exploitation.
Utopians or Utopian Socialists were (in the United States) followers of the ideas of Charles Fourier or Robert Owen, both suggesting that laborers went to the countryside to build utopian communes as a way to free themselves from capitalist exploitation. The difference between the two is that land reformers wanted homesteads for private ownership while the Utopians opted for collective ownership in the communes (the Fourierists operating them more like a workers cooperative while the Owenites communes resembled actual communal ownership). ↩︎ - A faction of Utopians who joined the Socialist Party are another faction with this program. ↩︎
- Notably, the designation of “Communist” was only coined just a few years back. ↩︎
- Labor-power, to be clear, is the capacity to labor rather than labor itself. Labor is the actual act of laboring, but workers aren’t hired for the act of laboring (as say, a handyman would be), they’re hired for their capacity to labor for the duration of the working day (however long that is). ↩︎
- It’s interesting how the largest volume of the most prominent Westerns are set after the Civil War, when history shows that it already is the beginning of the end of the frontier. The romantic fatalism to it doesn’t appear stick as much if there’s still more frontier to be had. ↩︎
- A pattern could be seen in how the American workers, while incredibly militant in the economic struggle for higher wages and shorter hours, appear to always emerge on the political scene in multiple factions which tend to dissolve into more factions rather than converge into a larger labor party. Necessarily one of these factions always includes some form of Land Reformer, a tendency which seems to be getting diminishing returns with starting off in the Workingmen’s Party as the majority position ending up as a minority. Though always sizable, to the extent where it can be seen to divide the political coordination of the working class on a regular basis. ↩︎
- The Narodniks were effectively Russian Land Reformers with terroristic
characteristics, they later formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party. ↩︎ - In particular the “Back to the Land” Movement that came out of the 60s comes to mind. However, it arguably can be extended to the contemporary Land Back Movement for indigenous and black communities, since the logic still holds that securing land for themselves insofar as private property persists that it’ll just recreate capitalist conditions. ↩︎
Mount Tai Study Circle 