The XXI Century American Revolution- Part 2

Within the Beltway perimeter are the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, all the ministries, the agencies linked to the Executive Branch, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and the headquarters of almost all political and social organizations that have any relevance in the US. There are political battles, clashes of interests, disputes and internal fights that daily shake up the political life of the country, but have immediate reach and repercussions throughout the world. In the few square kilometers of the Beltway, the daily drama of the theater of construction of the American state unfolds. By 2005, there was a state of turmoil in the Beltway.

Throughout 2005, the problems for the Bush government were accumulating, and the resistance of the mass movement in the country to its policies was constantly growing. The Bush Administration suffered strong disapproval for its racist policy towards New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In Iraq, dark clouds were advancing over the PNAC because the Iraqi resistance was spreading and strengthening. The invasion had received worldwide repudiation, and within the country the anti-war movement was growing, as support for the invasion decreased. The curtailment of democratic freedoms with the Patriot Act regime had caused growing resistance among different segments of the population, and movements emerged that expressed their opposition to that policy.

The situation of the economy began to show dark clouds, to the extent that the contradictions in the "boom" of "subprime" mortgages emerged . The popularity of the Bush Administration was declining and rejection was growing especially among the most neglected and oppressed sectors of the population that New Orleans represented. The combination of the PNAC crisis, with the rise of the mass movement in the country against Bush's policies, increased the levels of tension in the Beltway, and a serious political crisis began to develop as an expression of the problems that the Bush government faced. They accumulated day by day, irremediably.

Beltway on fire: Complaints and political crisis

The political crisis resulted in scandals and complaints that began to break out in 2005 and affected officials of the CIA, the Executive Branch and security agencies. At the end of 2005, the "CIA-Gate" scandal reached high tension , which had actually begun on July 14, 2003 when the media revealed the name of the undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. The revelation of the name of the covert CIA spy came as a shock to Vice President Cheney because Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's "right hand man," was the main person accused of leaking the agent's name to the press. Revealing the identity of a secret agent is considered a federal crime, and suspicions indicated that the Bush Administration itself had leaked the name of the CIA agent in revenge against Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Plame's husband had been sent at the request of the CIA to verify on a mission to Nigeria if there was nuclear trafficking with Iraq, at a time when the Bush Administration needed to demonstrate the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify the invasion of Iraq. Bush raised Iraq's possession of WMD in his State of the Union address. But Wilson denied Bush in an article in the New York Times, saying that his research proved that Saddam Hussein never bought enriched uranium in Niger. Wilson's denial was considered by the Bush Administration as an affront, and the leak of Valerie Plame's identity was undoubtedly revenge in punishment for the rebellion of an official considered second-rate.

The scandal was worsened because the government itself had committed a federal crime, according to section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which states that it is illegal to intentionally disclose information identifying an undercover agent. The scandal was such that prosecutor Fitzgerald had to subpoena President Bush himself, and other White House officials, in addition to Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, John Hannah, advisor to Cheney Homeland Security, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card; and spokesman Scott McClellan, among others. As the details of the case became known, and it was confirmed that the revelation of the identity of the undercover agent had come from the White House itself, the tensions in "Beltway" became more serious and important. It was a major political crisis, because what shook the Beltway was that Fitzgerald could file criminal charges against Cheney, which had a direct impact on the White House and the Bush Administration.

In October 2005, the jury investigating the scandal charged Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, with federal crimes for perjury, perjury and obstruction of justice. Lewis Libby, who was one of the most important officials of the government and the PNAC, was among the 25 prominent promoters of the PNAC since 1997, and resigned after being formally accused of charges that could mean up to 30 years in prison. The political crisis exceeded the Libby case, and began to shake the entire state superstructure of the country. In Federal Justice the case was known as United States v. Libby , under which Libby who considered himself a disciple of Paul Wolfowitz, the leader of the PNAC, was sentenced to prison.

On July 2, 2007, President Bush, seeking to mitigate the crisis, eliminated the prison sentence, stating that he found it excessive. However, by October 2005, two thirds of the population, 66%, believed that the country was on the wrong track, approval for Bush continued to oscillate at its lowest levels, and he continued to lose confidence even among traditionally Republican sectors. including white evangelicals or Republican women. The crises and cracks within the Bush cabinet, the internal tensions between officials and ministries were growing steadily. The political crisis unleashed between mid and late 2005 in the Bush Administration, hit the top leadership of the government, and had repercussions on Parliament, political parties, security agencies, the Pentagon, and pressure groups, but it hit above all to the Executive Branch.

Differences between William Kristol and Donald Rumsfeld broke out in the Cabinet, while Colin Powell's situation became unsustainable. In the Legislative Branch, the crisis was expressed with the divisions that began to occur in Parliament, where divisions and contradictions worsened in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party representative bloc began to divide between the wing led by Joseph Lieberman that vigorously supported the maintenance of troops in Iraq, and another wing led by John Murtha, who advocated a rapid withdrawal.

In that same period at the end of 2005, the crisis broke out in the Republican bloc of representatives when Thomas DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in Parliament, fell, denounced for illegal management of electoral funds, conspiracy and money laundering, which represented a harsh blow to the government. DeLay was a fundamental piece of the Bush Administration in Parliament, and had imposed strong discipline on the bloc, leading strongly the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. But in the midst of the scandals, divisions and internal fights that occurred, along with the present contradictions, the most historical and structural contradictions of the country's political regime also worsened. The Beltway was boiling, developing not only the crisis linked to the failure of the PNAC, but also the crisis acting on the contradictions contained in the country's political regime for a long time.

The crisis unleashed in the Beltway shook the waters of the most complex and contradictory political regime that exists in the world. The political regime of the United States of America is a complicated network of opposing political institutions, with interests that are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory, which intersect and constantly fight. The complexity of the US political regime is characterized by the coexistence of institutions that are complementary, and at the same time antagonistic, and that establish critical relationships among themselves. Plagued by intrigues and confrontations, the interests of these institutions are sometimes opposed, sometimes complementary. The political regime of the United States is a subject whose study we will begin to outline, and it constitutes a fascinating topic.

The republican political regime

The Beltway is the heart of the republican regime, which emerged at the end of the 18th century with its classic division of three powers: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Most citizens of the country or the world when they look at the existing institutions in Washington, the Parliament, the White House or the Supreme Court, assume that they were always there. But it's not like that. Taking a look at history, those institutions did not exist; it took a long process of revolutions, wars and struggles for them to appear. We must then define what the political regime is. For Nahuel Moreno: "The political regime is the different combination or articulation of state institutions that the ruling class (or a sector of it) uses to govern. Specifically, to define a political regime we must answer the questions: What is the institution? fundamental government? How are other state institutions articulated in it? (1)

This political regime of the state appeared in complete form after the great revolutions that the bourgeoisie carried out against feudalism. Institutions such as the Executive Branch in charge of the administration of the state and execution of laws, or the legislative branch in charge of creating laws, norms and regulations, were built over the centuries. As the first young capitalist republics emerged, these institutions, or others, such as the Judicial Branch, evolved to apply laws through the courts. This regime is, as Moreno suggests, an articulation of institutions that represents the dominant class, in this case the social class of the bourgeoisie or capitalists. For centuries, this class made progress in establishing the capitalist mode of production, without yet holding the power that was in the hands of the class of nobles, who had dominated the economy and society in the preceding centuries.

To gain power, the bourgeoisie had to confront absolutism, the monarchs, tyrants and kings who were still the ruling class in the main countries of the world, and displace them through violent revolutions. This is how George Novack explains it: "During the formative stages of capitalism, six great uprisings marked the decisive steps in the advance of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The first was the Dutch revolution of the late 16th century, by which the Netherlands They gained their independence and established their republic. The second was the English revolutions of the 17th century, which ensured the supremacy of the British bourgeoisie and its parliament. The third was the revolt of the American colonialists, who created the United States. The fourth was the French revolution, which was decisive in the demolition of the old order in Western Europe. The fifth was the less victorious revolutions of 1848 on that continent. The American Civil War was the final act in these series of struggles by means of which the world bourgeoisie "It achieved sovereignty and the democratic revolution carried out its mission...Except for the latter, such revolutions were fundamentally directed against the dominant powers of the feudal hierarchy: the Church, the monarchy, the nobility and the lords." (2)

What we see in the Beltway is then the result of a historical process. It was in the midst of the development of the revolutions of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that the institutions evolved whose articulation by the bourgeois class constitutes what is known as the " republican regime" or "regime of democracy." The bourgeoisie had to create its own state to replace the feudal state, and had to build a particular articulation of state institutions, called the bourgeois democratic regime. The development of the bourgeois democratic regime had theorists who formulated its fundamental postulates in the works of John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In the United States he had Franklin, Paine, or Madison. The works of all these authors inspired all new generations of revolutionaries, free-thinkers, theorists of the state and the bourgeois regime.

But this process in the United States had a particular development. The peculiarity of the republican regime that emerged in the US has to do with the fact that it was the product of a revolution, but different from the English or French one. While in England or France the revolutions faced totalitarian regimes, kings, and tyrannies of absolute monarchs, the North American revolution was a revolution that, in addition to facing tyranny and monarchy, faced an empire. It was an anti-imperialist revolution that defeated the largest empire of that time: The British Empire. This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: "... there were two great bourgeois democratic revolutions in the entire world, and the first was anti-colonial in nature, the Yankee, North American bourgeois democratic revolution. It occurred before the French Revolution. There were two revolutions, one of a colonial, democratic type, and another of a non-colonial democratic type..." (3)

The First North American Revolution of the 18th century was also a global conflagration, in which all the powers of the time intervened: Holland, England, France, and Spain. The First North American Revolution was part of the "Age of the Democratic Revolution" , a chain process of revolutions that only achieved triumphs in France and the United States. This is how Novack explains it: " Professor RR Palmer has characterized the four decades that range from 1760 to 1800 as "the era of democratic revolution"...the challenge of democratic forces to the aristocracies, patriciates, oligarchies and privileged orders in...Switzerland, America, Holland, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Poland and Hungary, during the latter part of the 18th century. When these protest movements ended or were extinguished around 1800, the revolution had triumphed only in America and France. But the greatness of the achievements made in these two countries on two continents "authorizes such designation for this period." (4)

To understand the emergence and character of the republican political regime in the United States, it is necessary to understand what the revolution was like that gave rise to the complex of institutions located in the heart of the Beltway. Developed as part of a global process that Palmer called the "Age of the Democratic Revolution" , the first North American Revolution was the US War of Independence, which gave rise to the country and its institutions. Let's analyze it now, reviewing some of its most salient facts.

The First American Revolution of the 18th Century

The War of Independence took place between the years 1775-1783, and broke out as a result of the intolerable condition to which the 13 colonies were subjected by the British Empire. The shipowner industry of the Yankee bourgeoisie that supplied the British naval industry, and the industry in general, functioned under strict controls and under unfavorable conditions of exchange and production. Commerce suffered from the monopoly imposed by the metropolis, and the taxes that London applied to the colonies were increasingly high and abusive, such as the Sugar and Molasses Act, 1764, the Currency Act ,1764), or the Stamp Act of 1765 (Stamp Act, 1765).

This entire unfavorable situation suffered by the 13 states was imposed with policies of repression, curtailment of democratic freedoms and oppression. Among the entire population that inhabited the colonies, discontent was growing that was soon evident in the creation of groups opposed to the king, such as the so-called " sons of liberty " led by Samuel Adams or John Hancock. The various groups of Patriots convened in a Congress of Representatives of nine colonial legislatures in New York, from October 7 to 25, 1765. Both this first meeting of nine states, which issued on October 19, 1765 the "Bill of Rights and Grievances", like others that were produced, did not in principle have the objective of Independence. Those who proposed Independence were a minority, and the majority of the colonists demanded better conditions in their status as citizens of the British Empire. But the violent attitude of British Imperialism did not give margins to those who sought to negotiate better conditions with London.

Violent incidents such as the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, and popular protest mobilizations such as the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 broke out in the American colonies. The Empire did not want to appear weak in the face of the American colonists. , and other regions of its vast domains, for which it reacted by militarily occupying Boston in 1768. At the same time, the Parliament of London enacted a set of laws called Townshend Acts of 1767, and then the so-called "Intolerable Acts" of 1774 that cut the powers of the autonomous institutions, and those of British officials and military personnel increased. Since the colonies lacked representation in the English Parliament, the colonists considered such taxes and laws illegitimate, as they were a violation of their rights as Englishmen, which is why they began to raise the slogan of "No taxes without representation. " The rebellion gave rise to the first organizations that aimed at the development of a political regime different from the colonial one imposed by the British Empire. Groups of Patriots organized themselves into " Committees of Correspondence ", a secret or "shadow" government that would result in the creation of alternative institutions of power in each of the majority of the colonies.

These alternative institutions were called " Provincial Congress ", and spread throughout Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire. In Virginia and Maryland, Conventions called the Assembly of Freemen were formed. Over the course of two years, the provincial congresses or their equivalents effectively replaced the British government apparatus in the colonies, culminating in the unification of all of them in the First Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774. The Continental Congress emerged as the most important revolutionary institution. It was the one that centralized the governments of the 13 colonies, unified the armies and war efforts, drafted the documents and finally declared Independence. The First Congress issued a " Petition to the King " on October 25, 1774, which was not heeded, after which a trade boycott of British goods was established. London responded by promoting new "restrictive laws", the Restraining Acts, of February 9, 1775.

The Empire and the Continental Congress sought agreements and negotiated the crisis in 1775, but attempts to negotiate with the " Conciliatory Resolution " of February 27 and the " Olive Branch Petition " of July 5 failed. Hostilities began in April 1775, and the War was a process of years of cruel battles and confrontations, which included everything from the actions of a popular guerrilla of the colonists such as the "Minutemen", to political agreements that involved the powers of the period like France and Spain. Some of the key milestones of the war were first the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, which occurred in present-day Middlesex County, Massachusetts with a victory for the Patriots. The Battle of Bunker Hill, on June 17, 1775, was a Pyrrhic victory for the British, who although they eventually took and occupied Boston, suffered more than 1,000 casualties, almost a third of the forces the British had in place. Massachusetts.

The Empire authorities had between 15 and 20% of the population under their control, and only controlled some coastal cities, while the Patriots controlled between 80 and 90% of the territory. After the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British authorities considered the situation so urgent that the governor was pushed to proclaim martial law, and to promise freedom to slaves who joined the king's army, through the Dunmore Proclamation, on 7 November 1775. The British Empire rearranged its entire military plan in order to crush the North American Revolution. Almost a year after the Battle of Bunker Hill the British retreated and evacuated Boston.

The maneuver unleashed euphoria in the colonies, and victory bells rang in the cities, while people took to the streets to celebrate the defeat of the invader. But the British withdrawal was not the end of the occupation, but rather a military counteroffensive plan seeking to control an important port, to bring supplies, troops and replacements. New York became a point for that objective, because it was easy to attack and was the key to access to the Hudson Valley. To defend New York, the Continental Army and American militias were quickly deployed to defend a city that was surrounded by water on all sides and could be attacked from many sides.

It was decided to create several forts at the most important points of the city, its coast, and nearly 20,000 soldiers worked for weeks preparing for the British attack. The troops of the Patriot army had no combat experience, some regiments barely knew how to shoot a gun or had completed military service. They had little discipline because the soldiers were fishermen, blacksmiths, carpenters, musicians, it was a popular army, of common and humble people with a trade who had voluntarily enlisted in the militias, today fighting and tomorrow dispersing to go harvest the crops. , or take care of the family.

On June 29, 1776, New York Bay presented a colossal spectacle: An enormous forest of masts with the arrival of the Royal Navy with more than 100 ships, 500 transports and supply ships, 23,000 British regular soldiers, plus 10,000 German mercenaries. , thousands of civilian workers, and Army women. The largest amphibious demonstration by a European power in the world landed that day in Staten Island, New York. It was the prelude to the battle of New York, David against Goliath. The Empire's army was a professional army, with 15 generals with an average age of 48, and 30 years of military service. The average American general was 43 years old, with 2 years of military service. British soldiers had an average of 9 years of service. The Patriot soldiers only had a few months of experience.

The Empire hired a total of 30,067 German mercenary soldiers from the Hessian Army between 1776 and 1782, among the most expensive elite troops, run by the mercenary soldier merchant entrepreneur Friedrich Wilhem II Landgraf, from the German state of Hesse-Kassel. British military power was responded to by the Patriots with a political maneuver of great courage. On July 4, 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies unanimously voted for the Declaration of Independence, establishing the birth of a new country, the United States. From this political decision arose a political regime based on a confederation of sovereign states, with a Unicameral Congress in which each state had one vote, and acted as a representative government of all the states, whose representatives were selected by the legislative assemblies of each State.

This political regime was established through the Articles of Confederation, a 13-point document that united the 13 colonies to support the Army. The response of the British Empire was to initiate the invasion of New York. British General Cornwallis in a spectacular amphibious operation, with all types of landing craft deployed artillery, troops and horses, while the British ships of the line opened fire on the beaches and fields of Long Island, a sea of ​​red jackets descended on the aboard their barges, jumped from the boats and pursued the American pickets, outnumbering the Patriots by almost two to one. The Hessians caused terror in the troops by attacking with their bayonets, the latest in military technology of the time, which was a weapon unknown to the Patriots.

General George Washington was forced to evacuate his soldiers, giving the British control of New York, with an unprecedented show of force and coordination between fleet and army worthy of the world power. The British Empire had managed to put the Patriots to flight, take New York, and after the victory, launched the invasion of New Jersey, with the strategy of controlling various corridors and lines of rivers, especially the line of the Hudson River. The leaders of the Imperial army knew that New England was the toughest rebel focus and that by controlling the Hudson River they could divide the region in two and advance with a powerful force composed of Hessians, Jägers, Highland battalions, light infantry and grenadiers. The other side of the empire's army was the Patriot army immersed in a deep crisis.

At the end of 1776, George Washington's American army was destroyed, it only had 3,000 soldiers, ragged and hungry, far from the 30,000 soldiers at the beginning. The end of contracts with the militias and the arrival of winter, together with the wear and tear of the battles of recent months and desertions, had left the Patriot forces depleted. The troops were poorly dressed, half-naked and the vast majority barefoot. Tents were scarce, morale was low, and many doubted that the Revolution would be successful; George Washington's leadership was doubted and there was talk of establishing relations with the British to put an end to the revolt.

Congress decided to evacuate the city and establish the government in Baltimore. Panic had spread through the capital and many members of the Patriot elite believed that by Christmas the Hessians and the British would be at the city's gates. Some had even begun to evacuate the city with all their belongings. But in the worst and most critical moment of the Revolution, an unexpected actor appeared on the scene: The people. Empire troops needed to get New Jersey to supply and shelter more than 10,000 men. Reinforcements, replacements and supplies had to be moved from the United Kingdom by ship, on a journey of more than 3,000 miles by sea, the British army had to live off what it could gather and gather in the colonies themselves, in order to survive in a such a big country. The British army needed food, fodder for horses and roofs for shelter. In theory, the British troops had to pay for everything they requisitioned, but looting and abuse of authority by the imperial soldiers began.

The settlers fled or hid whatever they could when the British and Hessian troops approached, and the people of New Jersey refused to give them support. The locals offered resistance and began to carry out spontaneous uprisings against the invaders. This was not in the Empire's calculations. The situation of the powerful British army began to become increasingly complicated. He was hated by the people, who saw him as an invader, he did not get local support or the supplies he needed. Thomas Paine launched the document "The American Crisis" which appealed to the deepest feelings of citizens to fight against tyranny, at the same time that the British army's logistical problems were aggravated because they were increasingly dependent on supplies by sea.

The First American Revolution was an enormous mass mobilization. Thousands of people mobilized from the town to fight, because behind each patriotic soldier, there were families, affections, friends who gave support. Those who did not fight harassed the Empire's troops, organizing ambushes, deception, espionage, informing Patriot leaders, writing pamphlets. An immense network of collaboration and resistance, a gigantic mobilization, is the explanation that despite its overwhelming technical superiority, the Empire's army found itself in an increasingly difficult position. Although the Royal Navy allowed transport convoys to reach safely, the transported volume of supplies was not sufficient to keep up with the consumption of British troops and Hessian mercenaries.

Among the first spontaneous uprisings was that of Philemon Dickinson, leader of a local militia, who, attacking and using guerrilla methods, began to harass the garrisons located on the Delaware, acting when the enemy appeared in small numbers while they were looking for food or forage. James Ewing, one of his officers from Washington, set up guerrilla movements in the Trenton area, harassing and carrying out lightning attacks in a "commando plan." The success of these attacks lay not so much in the damage they caused but in the tension and physical and mental wear and tear they caused on the enemy troops.

The situation for the imperial army began to become a nightmare. Colonel Rall, leading the Hessian troops at Trenton, watched with alarm as his troops were attacked when they went out to forage or seek supplies. These attacks did not cause many casualties but they did cause continued attrition, with men captured when they tried to search for firewood, or a soldier suffering a fatal casualty in a small skirmish, when he was ambushed during a patrol. The Hessian troops in Trenton were beginning to suffer significant wear and tear, and suffered a lack of sleep or rest due to continuous alarm signals, sporadic skirmishes, the surprise appearance of rebel pickets, or false alerts of imminent attacks. Taking advantage of this situation, Washington carried out the extraordinary crossing of the Delaware River on December 25, 1776, in which thousands of Patriot soldiers, facing inclement weather, cold and the worst conditions, crossed the river and attacked the Imperial army by surprise.

Revolutionary morale raised, and after the successes at Trenton, several battles followed, until those of Saratoga in September and October 1777. In the first battle of Saratoga the British won, but suffered many casualties. In the second, the United States army took advantage of the vulnerable position of the British and defeated them. France, the other power of the time and enemy of England, came to the aid of the United States, with the Treaty of the Alliance of 1778. That treaty, together with that of Aranjuez, signed with the kingdom of Spain in 1779, was what It balanced the forces between the contenders, both land and naval. British military capacity was far superior to the forces of the Patriots, but the agreements signed with France and Spain balanced the forces.

This, added to the fact that the majority of the population overwhelmingly supported the revolutionaries, sealed the fate of the war, which had its final episode at the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. American and French forces They surrounded the British soldiers led by George Cornwallis and defeated him. With Cornwallis's surrender, more than 7,000 British soldiers were captured, the last large contingent of the British army in the United States. Lord North, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the American Revolution, lost power in March 1782 and the new Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham, wanted to make peace with the United States.

The victory of the Patriots was a colossal event that shocked the world. European elites could not believe the news coming from America: The all-powerful British Empire had been defeated. The fight of David and Goliath was repeated again: The Empire was defeated by a poor and barely nascent nation, which had a humble popular army and a precarious economy. As George Novack explains: " The settlers of the 13 states were the first people in the Western Hemisphere to break free from subjection to European powers and embark on their own national career. Theirs was the first victorious colonial revolt of the capitalist era, a feat. truly unprecedented given that, since Roman times, no colonial people had successfully managed to break free from the domination of a mother country" (5)

The Revolutions of Holland and England and the evolution of Parliament

The Second Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781. The Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783 enshrined the triumph of the patriots with Great Britain's recognition of US independence and renunciation of any British claim to its territory. As soon as the unity demanded by the Revolutionary War became unnecessary, the Continental Army was disbanded, although it retained a very small force. Thus, in that first Confederation that formed the United States, each state had its own army and 11 of the 13 states had a navy. But the most important thing is that after the years of the cruel and hard war for independence, the feelings against tyranny, against the empire, against the monarchy, for democracy and freedom took root very strongly in the North American people.

And along with the discredit of these institutions, Parliament emerged with strength and prestige as a fundamental institution in opposition to the monarchy, in the figure of the Continental Congress. This was the basis of the consolidation of the bourgeois democratic regime in the United States, and such were the feelings that took root in the people, that 7 months after the victory at Yorktown, several officers suggested something reasonable in the context of the 18th century: that The United States should establish a monarchy and George Washington should become king. Washington immediately rejected the monarchy as inappropriate and dishonorable, demanding that the issue never be raised again. And when a group of officers in 1783 threatened a coup against the Continental Congress to secure their pay, the so-called Newburgh conspiracy was immediately quelled by George Washington.

This is how Parliament emerged in the United States, an institution that is a fundamental piece of the republican regime, nestled in the heart of the Beltway. But it emerged as a product of the development of a revolutionary organization, the Continental Congress born to unify the Provincial Congresses, which directed the War and diplomacy by signing agreements with foreign powers, drafted the documents of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, which acted as a first Constitution. However, Parliament was not born in the young republic of the United States; the history of this institution dates back to previous centuries with the Dutch and English revolutions. Although both Parliament and the Constitution of the United States are institutions that emerged from the First American Revolution, they are not the pure and exclusive creation of the revolutionary leaders, known as the " Founding Fathers", Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine, George Washington, or James Madison. Parliament had emerged earlier in history and the Patriot leaders were influenced by the model of England and Holland, in whose successive revolutions Parliament had a great role.

The English Parliament had emerged based on the Great Council, the monarch's advisory body during the Middle Ages. The Great Council was a convention called by the English monarchs where bishops, abbots, barons and earls participated, convened when the king needed to raise money through taxes. To the extent that the primitive capitalist Forms of Accumulation developed in Europe, the bourgeoisie as a social class was gaining more and more weight and economic and social importance, which was reflected in the composition of the calls of the Great Council. The growing presence of capitalists and bourgeois in a world still dominated by the nobles was expressed in Europe in the integration of new organizations and Parliaments, or in agreements such as the Cortes of León of 1188, the Magna Carta of 1215 in England, the Catalan Cortes of 1192, or the Golden Bull of 1222 in Hungary.

All of these new institutions and agreements, in various ways and reasons, limited the powers of the king, and required a series of democratic demands. In England, the growing influence of the bourgeoisie was expressed in the composition of Parliament made up of representatives of the Church and the nobles, pillar elements of feudalism, but also made up of representatives of the bourgeoisie from the counties and the most important cities. Parliament was imposed on the king following the letter of the Magna Carta, but the nobility and the kings resisted, trying to sustain and strengthen the institution of monarchical absolutism.

That is why a revolution was necessary to impose parliamentary forms in England, which was led by the French nobleman Simon V de Montfort, who with the Battle of Lewes on May 14, 1264, defeated the Plantagenet monarchy. After Monfort's triumph, the convocation of Parliament was carried out without prior royal authorization, and had a political novelty: Along with the bishops, abbots, counts and barons, 2 bourgeois from each borough were summoned, elected in their municipalities or neighborhoods of the kingdom. The representation of the bourgeoisie and its elective nature was a revolutionary measure for the time. Simon de Montfort was forced to impose it to compensate for the power of the monarchy and the nobles, which began to institutionalize the participation in the parliament of knights and bourgeois known historically as the meeting of "the Commons". The nobility unleashed a counteroffensive, by which Montfort was defeated and killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, and the king's authority was restored.

But there was no turning back from the revolution and Simon V de Montfort remained for posterity as one of the fathers of parliamentary democracy. In 1341, the nobility and clergy were summoned separately for the first time, creating what would effectively be an Upper House, called the House of Lords, and a Lower House, called the House of Commons. However, the English bourgeoisie had not yet managed to consolidate a democratic regime such as the one it aspired to develop. The king still had a veto over Parliament's decisions, and the House of Lords was more powerful than the House of Commons. However, the power of the nobility decreased at the end of the 15th century due to the 100 Years' War, which had a particular chapter in England with the Wars of the Roses. In it, a good part of the nobility died on the battlefield, or were later executed for their participation, many aristocrats lost their lands, and the nobility entered the final stage of its history.

However, even when feudalism entered its final stage of decline, the nobility established the supremacy of absolute monarchy in England through the Tudor dynasty with the Imperial Crown. The absolute monarchy and the king were supported by the powerful House of Lords, which subordinated all the movements of the House of Commons.

While this was happening in England, the confrontation between the nobles and the bourgeoisie reached an international level and crossed Europe from the mid-16th century to the entire 17th century. This process reached an acute point with the Dutch Revolution. Known as the 80 Years' War or War of Flanders. The War was fought by the bourgeoisie of the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Charles V, who headed the powerful Habsburg absolute monarchy. In history books the Dutch Revolution is presented as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. The fact is that at that time, political parties did not exist as we know them today, and the different social sectors acted defending their interests organized in religious orders, or churches.

Thus, the bourgeoisie organized the different Protestant religious orders in Burgundy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and Holland, against the powerful alliance of the Habsburgs, the Holy See and the Inquisition, which were the highest authority in Europe. The Dutch Revolution had similar characteristics to the First North American Revolution: It combined democratic demands with the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation, in which the United Provinces defeated the powerful Spanish Empire and achieved, in 1648, the recognition of their independence. And it had another common characteristic with the First North American Revolution: It was led by Parliament, which was the States General, an assembly that originally brought together the three states, nobility, clergy and bourgeoisie.

The States General were convened by the Burgundian dukes when they needed funds, but in a complex process they resulted in the institution that directed the war, constituted the Republic of the United Provinces, formed a confederal Government that exercised power, and controlled the two great trading companies of the country, the East India Company and the West India Company. The nascent Republic consolidated the figure of the Stadtholder, an embryo of the figure of the Executive Branch, Prime Minister or President. Thanks to this modern political system, the United Provinces emerged as a world power thanks to its powerful navy and merchant fleet, and above all, due to the development of new capitalist Forms of Accumulation such as Commercial Companies and Manufacturing that acted, in economic terms, in a complementary way, in that stage of capitalism.

Commercial Companies were a Form of Capitalist Accumulation constituted by companies of investors that obtained profits based on the dominance of trade between metropolis and colony and the exploitation of labor in the discovered colonies. They acted at the service of the dominion of vast colonial territories in which these companies acted as a true state and government, made investments, developed manufacturing and exploited local labor, which allowed them to obtain enormous profits.

On the other hand, Manufactures were capitalist companies that produced goods based on the exploitation of manual human labor. In manufacturing, the division of labor was established within the establishment, and the exploitation of human labor allowed the emergence of the first relations of salaried production, although the working class, or working class, still had an embryonic development at that stage of capitalism. (5) Thanks to these economic and political advances, Holland experienced an important economic and cultural boom, becoming the great power and the most important country of the time.

The Dutch Revolution shook the international political arena and was an incentive for the English bourgeoisie, faced with the absolute monarchy of the Stuarts, successor of the Tudor dynasty. In England the House of Commons sent the Petition of Right to Charles I in 1628, demanding the restoration of his liberties. But Charles I's response was to dissolve Parliament, and govern without it for 11 years. Following the financial disaster of the Bishops' Wars, the Stuarts were forced to summon Parliament so that they could authorize new taxes, forming the assemblies known historically as the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament that met with various recesses and forms between 1640 and 1653.

Tensions between the king and his parliament increased and deteriorated further. This led to the outbreak of the English Civil War between the burgesses and nobles which began with the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 and culminated in the final victory of the Parliamentarian forces led by Oliver Cromwell. Parliamentary forces executed Charles I in January 1649, and established the Republic, based on Parliament, in alliance with the new model army, abolished the House of Lords and exercised power from the House of Commons. The Revolution had a left wing embodied in the so-called "Levellers", a political movement made up of the primitive detachments of the English working class.

To confront the right wing and the left wing of the Revolution, Cromwell dissolved parliament and exercised a dictatorship: he crushed the Levellers, and exercised power with the title of Lord Protector of the kingdom. He refused to be king, and called for different parliamentary forms, based on the document called " Humble Petition and Council ." In that document he proposed a political regime based on Parliament, with the House of Commons elected as the Lower House, a House of Lords composed of nobles of the kingdom as the Upper House, and a monarchy subordinated to the constitution serving parliament and the laws. of the nation.

The nobles reacted with a counterrevolution to restore the Stuart monarchy. Supported by nobles from France, Spain and Scotland they launched a coup led by army general John Lambert. Scottish forces led by George Monck, along with international forces, invaded England, summoned Parliament and reinstalled the monarchy and the House of Lords. Charles II returned to England as King in May 1660, and reestablished the absolute Stuart monarchy, which dissolved parliament in 1861. Upon the death of Charles II, his brother James II advanced the Stuart counteroffensive, seeking to restore the power of the Catholic Church in England.

Not content with consolidating its counteroffensive in England, the absolutist Stuart dynasty began to establish the possibility of reaching agreements with Louis XIV of France, to take the absolutist counteroffensive to all of Europe. There was the possibility of an international agreement between James II, head of the Stuart absolute monarchy, who was carrying out the counteroffensive in England, and Louis XIV, the so-called " Sun King," head of the Capetian absolute monarchy in France. Louis XIV summarized the program of monarchical absolutism with a phrase: "I am the state".

Faced with the danger of the unity of both powerful absolute monarchies, the European bourgeoisie reacted by gathering a powerful force in Holland to invade England. This force was financed by the city of Amsterdam, by bankers from Portugal, Genoa and Lombardy, such as Pope Innocent million guilds. The one who led the bourgeois coalition was the powerful Orange-Nassau banking oligarchy, headed by William III of Orange, who rented 400 transports, and negotiated the contracts of 14,000 German mercenaries from Brandenburg, Württemberg, Hesse-Kassel and Celle. William had a hard time convincing the Dutch ruling elite that such an expensive expedition was really necessary, but when Louis XIV attacked Dutch ships in French ports, the bourgeoisie understood that they had to act quickly.

The Dutch were careful to appear as an "invasion" to the English people, so the Dutch fleet of 53 warships was placed under the command of the English Rear- Admiral Arthur Herbert. The so- called "Glorious Revolution" triumphed when the troops of the bourgeoisie defeated James II at the Battle of Reading, a military action that was accompanied by strong anti-Catholic demonstrations in Bristol, Bury St. Edmuns, Hereford, York, Cambridge and Shropshire and the assault of a Protestant mob on Dover Castle. The Stuarts, the Queen and the Prince of Wales fled to France, and in 1689, the Convention of the Parliament of England declared that James's flight meant a declaration of abdication. William III of Orange acceded to the throne of England and sanctioned the Bill of Rights.

The content of the Bill of Rights is in the text of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of 1776, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 that was signed in the French Revolution, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The Bill of Rights states that the King cannot make or eliminate laws or taxes without the approval of Parliament, cannot collect money for his personal use without the approval of Parliament, and cannot recruit and maintain an army in peacetime, without approval of Parliament. It enshrines that elections of members of Parliament must be free, that Parliament's words cannot be hindered or denied, and that Parliament must meet frequently.

The Bill of Rights was supplemented by another law, the Toleration Act, which grants religious freedom to Anglicans, freedom of public worship, the right to open schools, and access to all public offices. The Parliamentary monarchy regime imposed by the Glorious Revolution prompted the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, the first central bank in the history of capitalism. And the Ministry of Commerce (Board of Trade), which allowed the English and European bourgeoisie to obtain important commercial advantages.

This gave an enormous boost to English capitalism and the works of intellectuals who laid the foundations of scientific and political thought such as Newton, Pope, Leibniz, Swift and John Locke, with his "Essay Concerning Civil Power " of 1690. And the revolutions that occurred gave more and more relevance to Parliament. When the Patriots carried out the First American Revolution in the 18th century, they did nothing more than follow in the footsteps of the revolutions that had preceded them.

Contradictions and evaluation of the bourgeois democratic regime

The Continental Congress that gave rise to the US Parliament, followed in the footsteps of the Dutch States General, Simon de Montfort's House of Commons, the Parliament throughout the English Civil War headed by Oliver Cromwell, and the Parliament definitively consecrated by the Glorious Revolution led by William of Orange. The various parliamentary forms that developed throughout the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were continued with the States General, and with even more radicalized parliamentary forms that emerged in the French Revolution. These first and incipient parliamentary forms and outlines of a political regime served as a basis for the Patriot Chiefs to build the republican political regime in the United States, and to place Parliament in it as one of its central institutions.

The Patriot leaders who had to write the Constitution of the United States looked at themselves in this mirror of revolutions. But in the development of this task, they encountered another contradiction. Those who promoted these political regimes and held power, displacing the nobles, were a property-owning class of magnates and businessmen, a very rich oligarchy of capitalists and bankers, who feared the poor people as much as they had feared the kings they themselves displaced. As a result of the fact that power was passing from one rich property class to another, and that this oligarchy of capitalists and bankers who took power feared the people, the regimes they promoted gave very limited freedoms to the poor masses. As Novack puts it : "The tenacious bourgeois republic established by the Dutch pioneers was much more oligarchic than democratic. In 1640, the Dutch statesman François Van Aersens declared that the government of the Netherlands was really an aristocracy, "where the people have no voice" (7)

Behind the Dutch revolutionaries were powerful capitalist banking houses, the Amsterdam business community that in the 15th century became the main European commercial port for grain from the Baltic region. Wealthy businessmen owned trading companies that hunted whales off the coast of Svalbard, traded spices in India and Indonesia, and founded manufacturing companies in New Amsterdam, now New York, South Africa, and South America. The fact that the interests of these business layers were defended by absolutist governments, monarchs or leaders who held noble titles should not be misleading. The absolute monarchies already openly defended the capitalist businesses of the Genoese, Portuguese, Venetian, Castile and Aragon, Burgundy, and Lombardy and Netherlands banking businessmen. Even the papacy itself was already an institution that had stimulated and developed capitalism for several centuries, controlling powerful companies, businesses of all kinds, commercial, financial, and real estate.

Feudalism was eaten away to its roots by powerful capitalist companies that dominated the economy of entire regions, installed manufacturing on the 5 continents, exploited indigenous labor and trafficked millions of slaves from Africa. Already since the 14th and 15th centuries, behind the absolute monarchies the powerful interests of capitalist businessmen were expressed: behind Charles V and the Habsburgs was the Fugger bank, or the Rothschild banking dynasty, which operated throughout Europe. Behind William of Orange was the very rich Nassau oligarchy of Burgundy. These layers of businessmen had to remove the feudal state to build their own state, but they feared giving too many freedoms to the poor and industrious masses on whom they had relied, to carry out the revolutions against the nobility. And this was precisely the second contradiction that the Patriot leaders encountered, many of whom were also rich landowners, owners and possessors of slaves.

As George Novack explains: "Although the new native ruling class, composed of merchants and other large property owners in the North and planters in the South, took the reins of power from the British officers... They only gained command of the country, disputes arose in almost all the states of the confederation, from 1783 to 1787, between the patricians and the plebeians to decide who should govern and how they should do it..." (8) The limitations on the democratic rights that the new republican regimes were intended for the poor masses, they were the product of the contradiction that the bourgeoisie experienced between the need to carry out a revolution against the old exploiting class of the feudal lords and their empires, but at the same time, maintain private property of the means of production and change.

This is how Novack explains it: The reasons for these restrictions were stated frankly by the leading spokesmen of the upper classes... John Adams, who was to be the second president, wrote in 1787-88... "It is essential to liberty that the rights of the rich are assured; if they are not, the rich will immediately be robbed and will become poor, and in turn they will rob their thieves, and in this way neither the freedom nor the property of anyone will be respected..." (9) The friction between patricians and plebeians, rich and poor, in the nascent republic had begun from the very beginning of the First North American Revolution. As Novack states: "The war of liberation from Great Britain was intertwined with a civil war in the colonies between the Conservatives and the Patriots. The committees raised by the insurrectionary masses in each locality, crowned by the Continental Congress, were instruments to destroy royal authority and serve as bases of power for the revolutionary cause. The frictions and conflicts within the class coalition that made the revolution were sometimes very acute" (10)

These class contradictions had been developing since colonial times, when the country was governed by the British Empire, and social and class differences were already emerging in the colonies. There had been Bacon's rebellion in Virginia in 1676, or Jacob Leisler's peasant revolt of 1689 in New York, which were expressions of those class conflicts. As Howard Zinn explains: " ...After Bacon's Virginian Rebellion in 1760, there were eighteen new attempts to overthrow colonial governments. There were also eight black revolts in South Carolina and New York, and forty riots of different nature...the colonial elite had to deal with the classist anger of the poor whites - the servants, the tenants, the urban poor, the landless, the tax payers, the soldiers and the sailors...as that the gap was opening between the rich and the poor...the country was not "born free", but was born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landowner, poor and rich." (11)

This tension between the rich and the poor was expressed 5 years after the triumph of the First North American Revolution in the Shays Rebellion, the popular uprising that occurred in Massachusetts on August 29, 1786. It was a rebellion of the peasants and poor people, among them many war veterans, who with weapons in their hands, had to mobilize to defend their rights. The rebellion was led among others by Daniel Shays, a veteran of the American War of Independence, hence the name. The rural agricultural population found itself after the War of Independence suffering serious abuses, forced to pay taxes of all kinds, municipal, provincial and federal fees.

They were harassed by sheriffs, bailiffs and lawyers, they suffered frightful misery and ruin, which led them to sell their property or their livestock for less than their value, to overcome poverty and save their families. When they could not respond to the demands they were subjected to by merchants or civil authorities, Massachusetts farmers began to lose their land and other assets.Unable to meet their debts and tax obligations, many poor Massachusetts farmers like Daniel Shays who had been soldiers in the Revolution found themselves upon returning home threatened in court with losing their few assets to debt, when even many payments were owed to them by the army.

This gave rise to strong resentments against the tax collectors and the courts. The peasants moved to close the district courts. In the final months of 1786 peasants mobilized to stop court hearings on taxes and debt collection. At the outbreak of the insurrection, the masses of poor peasants began to organize an armed force, for which they planned the seizure of the Springfield weapons arsenal.

The commercial bourgeoisie of Boston decided to organize a private militia to repress the peasants. James Warren wrote to John Adams on October 22, "We are now in a state of anarchy and confusion bordering on Civil War." The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court accused those leading the protest of being "disorderly, riotous, and seditious persons" Massachusetts Governor Bowdoin ordered the legislature to suspend habeas corpus with a new legal distinction: rebellion in a republic, as opposed to a monarchy, must be punished by execution. The Massachusetts state legislature passed bills authorizing the imposition of martial law, giving the governor broad powers to act against the rebels.

The legislature also passed the Disqualification Law prohibiting any rebel from holding office or being elected. The rebellion was defeated, several hundred of its participants were charged, and although most of them were pardoned under a general amnesty, 18 men were found guilty and sentenced to death. Shays' Rebellion showed the class contradictions of the nascent republic: Freedoms for the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, very limited rights for workers, peasants and poor people.

However, for the historical evaluation of the parliamentary regimes that emerged at that time, even when the Shays rebellion revealed their political and social contradictions, it is necessary to place the analysis in its historical context to evaluate them correctly. For the time, these regimes were an enormous advance if we compare them with the brutal regimes of absolute monarchies, tyrannies and the Holy Inquisition that had dominated Europe in the preceding centuries. The replacement of the regimes of nobles and kings with the bourgeois democratic regime was a step forward in history, because even with their limitations, these republican regimes were enormous advances in democratic rights. Precisely for this reason, the replacement of a political regime with a more progressive one was a process that took centuries, and involved enormous wars and revolutions.

The death of millions who gave their lives was necessary to achieve these freedoms, and the bourgeois democratic regime of the United States was no exception. This is how Novack explains: "Despite its limitations, the Yankee Republic was the most progressive democratic government in the world . world at that stage of expansion of global capitalism. Its existence gave courage to the democratic forces of the Old World in their often disheartening struggles against the ancient and oligarchic regimes. Its example of victorious resistance, against the largest empire in the world, would provide "a powerful stimulus to the wars of independence that the Latin American people would wage against the weaker Spanish colonization in the following century. Thus, the United States constituted an operating model of democratic and republican government born through the revolutionary action of the masses." (12)

The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787

In the study of the development of the republican regime we have seen the historical evolution of Parliament, and how it came to be located at the center of the political regime of the nascent republic. We will now see the change that occurred in the bourgeois democratic regime after the Constituent Convention of Philadelphia that took place between May 14 and September 17, 1787. After it, the political regime was drastically modified and went from a structure of sovereign states, to a more centralized power. Until then, the United States was a decentralized state, power residing in the sovereign states, loosely united by the Articles of Confederation.

In this regime, Parliament was located as the central institution. But after the Philadelphia Convention, the central institution became the Executive Branch, which began to displace Parliament from the center of the political regime. In this way, the United States went from being a Confederation to being a Federation with a strong central government. The change was imposed by the bourgeoisies of the economically stronger states on the weaker states, and was stipulated in the drafting of the Constitution that attempted to respond to the enormous political, social, national and international challenges that beset the young republic. .

The United States had defeated the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, and had gone through its first internal upheaval with Shays' Rebellion. This shock was analyzed as something positive by Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to his friend William Stephens Smith, he stated: "The tree of liberty must be restored from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural fertilizer." The United States was a small country, with barely 3 million inhabitants, and the powers of the time, Spain, France and England, disputed interference in its destinies. The nascent republic was beset by debts to France and the Netherlands, had no tax collection system, and had thousands of slaves. It was a country with different bourgeois sectors fighting for their interests, peasant masses in crisis and without a definitive Constitution, except for the Articles of Confederation that weakly united the 13 states.

The Patriotic Leaders had to establish a new state and a political regime without there being many models to draw inspiration from: There were not many bourgeois republics in the world that served as an example. The French Revolution, which was a great laboratory for building a republic, had not yet occurred. To carry out the sessions of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the delegates elected George Washington, the top leader of the First American Revolution, to preside over the convention. The debates essentially revolved around two positions: The Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. The one that finally prevailed in the Convention was the Virginia plan, intensely worked on by the delegation of that state, which arrived before the other delegations to Philadelphia.

The Virginia delegation began meeting daily with state delegates to negotiate a plan that proposed a strong federal government that would make and enforce national laws, collect national taxes, and a Parliament with representation proportional to the inhabitants of each state. state. This plan sought to leave behind the articles of Confederation and advance a more centralized regime, with an Executive Branch and a Parliament elected by popular vote. It was a plan supported by the most economically powerful states with the largest population. The small states presented the "New Jersey Plan" which proposed a unicameral legislature with one vote per state, as it had worked until then.

After long and difficult negotiations, an agreement called the "Conneticut Compromise" was reached, promoted by Robert Sherman, delegate of that state, with which a bicameral Parliament was agreed, with a Lower House elected by representation according to the amount of population, as proposed by the Virginia Plan and the Upper House with representation of two senators for each state, regardless of the number of inhabitants, as proposed by the New Jersey Plan. This bicameral Parliament was a concession that the promoters of the Virginia Plan made to the smaller states that promoted the New Jersey Plan, to avoid a breakup of the newborn republic. In this way, the political regime was established as a federation with a Bicameral Parliament, which satisfied the interests of both parties.

This political regime turned out to be a fairly novel regime for the time, which included the development of an advanced Constitution. The Constitution was designed with a Preamble as a brief introductory statement, then the articles that establish the description of the 3 powers, first the Legislative, then the Executive, and the Judicial, in addition to their powers. It also describes the process necessary to amend the constitution using the amendment method. It establishes that the Constitution is the supreme law that is above state laws and constitutions, which must not conflict with the laws of the federal Constitution.

Thus, the oldest Constitution among the most important that exists today emerged, in the midst of great and historic debates and negotiations, which sought to support their positions in texts based on great legal theorists. The Bill of Rights were 10 amendments added in 1791, inspired by the English Bill of Rights of 1698, which included the due process clause, a legal principle that establishes the minimum guarantees of every citizen before the law. It also included jury trials, the right to bear arms, a ban on excessive bail, and an end to cruel and unusual punishment. The Constitution included a series of changes that were historical novelties, such as, for example, the presidential election by popular vote, or the design of an Executive Branch, issues that were advanced for the time, something so unusual that those who agreed to it feared that the people thought that they were carrying out a coup d'état or creating a tyranny.

The Patriot Chiefs did not want the figure of a strong, central executive power to be confused with the nepotism of common figures at that time such as an absolute king, or a despot. European politics was dominated by the figure of all-powerful officials such as Colbert or Mazarin in France, which led the Patriot Chiefs to explicitly specify that the President is elected by indirect suffrage by an electoral college with a term of 4 years. The president was consecrated as head of the general administration in charge of diplomacy, international treaties, and commander in chief of the army, who expresses his work agenda to Congress, with the message of the Union.

To declare war, the Senate must approve it, and in times of crisis, it has the right of veto, which can be neutralized with a two-thirds vote. Regarding the Judicial Branch, Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court (in English, Supreme Court), composed of a chief justice, and associate justices appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. They have the power of judicial review, to declare federal or state laws and federal or state executive branch laws unconstitutional and divided the nation into judicial districts and created federal courts for each district.

The Constitution established the removal of any federal official through impeachment in the event of a serious failure. In relation to voting, it was established that the president and congressmen were elected by suffrage, but at that time, only male citizens of European origin, property owners and Protestants had the right to vote. Neither women nor racial or religious minorities had electoral rights, which raised a problem: What representation would slaves have? Slaves made up about a fifth of the total population and 40% of the population of the Southern states. A debate began at the Philadelphia Convention about whether slaves would be taken into account as part of the population in determining representation in Congress, or not. The slave bourgeoisie maintained that slaves should be considered people in determining representation, but since they were the property of their owners, they should not have a vote or pay taxes.

Delegates from states where slavery had disappeared argued that slaves should be included in taxes, but not in determining representation. Finally, a compromise was agreed by which three-fifths of the slave population would be counted, both when distributing taxes and for the distribution of members of the House of Representatives. Ten states had already outlawed slavery, and many delegates to the Convention denounced it. But Georgia and the two Carolinas threatened to leave the Convention if the slave trade was prohibited, so, to avoid a breakup of the country, the Convention resolved that Congress would have the power to prohibit the slave trade, but not before At least 20 years would pass, that is, from January 1, 1808. Thus, the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia left an iron contradiction planted in the country: The nascent republic was born making great innovations in the political regime, but maintaining relations of slave production, with retrograde characteristics and enemies of civil liberties.

The contradictions of the nascent US republican regime

These contradictions are explained by the economic and social interests that were behind the bourgeoisies of the economically strongest states that prevailed in the Convention. All of the resolutions adopted by the Convention except the first were written by Virginia Representative James Madison and reported by Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph. Virginia was the strongest state at the time. After the writing of the Constitution, the state gave the country what was called the "Virginia Dynasty ", Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, 4 of the first 5 presidents, came from Virginia. The power and preeminence of Virginia at that time in the country is explained by its economic and political location, which was a product of the evolution and birth of the states that constituted the Union.

Virginia was born as a result of the business venture promoted by the British Empire, which multiplied after the defeat of the Spanish Empire at the hands of the Dutch revolution in the 16th century. This led the powers to take advantage of the crisis in Spain to launch colonies in America. England launched colonization imitating the model of Spain, and in that first stage, Elizabeth I extended contracts to individuals starting in 1578 throughout North America. The contract extension process unleashed a movement of settlement of private settlers, which included the emigration of political and religious dissidents, Presbyterians, Quakers, Puritans, etc. who obtained permits to settle in North America, in areas as far away as possible from the Spanish Empire.

This phase of waves of settlers included the group of Calvinists who traveled on the Mayflower, and founded the Plymouth Colony and Province Town in 1620, among others. In general, those first particular colonies failed because the Europeans did not adapt to the harsh conditions, they suffered from the climate, food, diseases and hunger. They also did not have the capital to make the necessary investments to guarantee the success of the company, which did happen from the second phase of colonization in which the concessions and royal certificates were for Commercial Companies that, together with the Manufactures, were the Forms of Accumulation predominant in that stage of capitalism.

The power of Virginia arose from the activity of the Commercial Companies that obtained royal charter in 1606: the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, named in honor of Elizabeth I who was called "the Queen Virgin". The Virginia Company of London ended up constituting a true business hub from which branches and subsidiary businesses emerged that gave rise to new locations, colonies and states. The Virginia Company of Plymouth was established in the north in the New England area, where also the pastor John White founded Massachusetts, a large Puritan colony as part of a society and investment group that obtained permission and purchased the territory of the Bay of Massachusetts. Also in that area, Roger Williams, a Puritan pastor who promoted Rhode Island, established his congregation in Narrangaset Bay where they founded Providence.

Connecticut was born from the congregation founded by Thomas Hooker who also promoted religious freedom, and founded the city of New Haven. Pennsylvania was settled with a large expedition of 23 ships with Quaker travelers, in the territories granted by the king to real estate businessman William Penn for his services to the crown. Throughout the region that was called New England, the economy was based on shipbuilding, whaling and rudimentary crafts, with agriculture very poor due to the hostile climate and barren land. The economy of the region revolved around colonies of peasants who, having lost their lands, or having suffered expropriations in Europe, came to America in search of land to settle and live.

Business profits were not the center of these regional economies; the only business activities that did prosper were those of merchants, such as a sector of capitalists dedicated to the slave trade, such as the one headed by the DeWolf family of Bristol in Rhode Island. , who amassed a fortune from the slave trade, rum distillation, and property plantations in Cuba and Guadeloupe. According to historian Lorenzo Johnston Greene the slave trade in the New England economy "created a wealthy class of slave traders." In any case, this circle of merchants was very narrow, and their business activities were very dependent on the southern states that used slaves on a large scale on plantations. The rest of the settlers in New England and the Northern states only sought land for self-sufficiency.

The distribution of the land among the peasants was a type of primitive agrarian reform carried out through the colony's Assembly. This distributed the lots to the religious congregation that requested it so that the community could distribute it. The colony's Assembly and religious communities replaced communal lands, which were being expropriated in Europe by imperial armies. The development of a self-sufficient peasant economy, and limited business development, caused the activities of the Plymouth Virginia Company to cease.

Its activity was absorbed by the Virginia Company of London whose promoter was the businessman Bartholomew Gosnold, which was established as a limited company in 1606 in the Chesapeake Bay area, where the current states of Virginia and Maryland are located. This company, unlike the Plymouth Virginia Company, was very successful in developing business in an area of ​​influence that extended to the Caribbean and the Sommers Islands, today Bermuda. He had important investors such as Thomas West, Lord de la Wax ablish an economic base with farms and plantation establishments, where tobacco was grown, corn and rice for export to Europe.

A policy of incentives was established so that the colonists could convince relatives and friends to emigrate, while children were collected from the streets, orphanages, prostitutes, and criminals from English cities and prisons to take them to Virginia. The settlement process became more fluid as Virginia became a commercial center, and took a huge leap when the arrival of slaves to Jamestown began, according to Howard Zinn: "In 1700, there were already 6,000 slaves in Virginia , which was equivalent to 8.3% of the population. In 1763 there were 170,000 slaves, which was equivalent, approximately, to half of the population" ( 13) Virginia was the economic center of the nation, which is why it gained the right to become the political center of the country.

Linked to the activity of the Virginia Company, Maryland emerged, a colony created in 1632 by Catholics marginalized in England, led by the businessman Cecilius Calavert, also known as Lord Baltimore, highly appreciated for his service to the crown. North Carolina was a detachment from Virginia, the same as South Carolina founded by the 8 "Lords Proprietors". By 1775, North Carolina had about 175,000 inhabitants, 100,000 whites and 75,000 black slaves. Georgia was separated from the Carolinas, named in this way in homage to King George of England. This colony was the product of the activity of the Commercial Company called " Maritime Corporation for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America" ​​(in English, "Trustees sea Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America").

Kentucky was also a county of Virginia, and this entire area was established as a manufacturing enterprise starting in 1730, when cotton cultivation was established, the success of which caused the entire region to begin to be called the "Cotton Kingdom. " This area also included the colonies established by French business activities. The French financier Antoine Crozat, who had a monopoly on trade around the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Illinois, developed businesses in the French possessions located around the Mississippi from which the states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi emerged. In these colonies, the slave trade brought from Africa was also used, and later these states were integrated into the economic-social complex called "Kingdom of Cotton."

The business activities developed in Virginia by brothers Stephen and Moses Austin gave rise several decades later to states such as Missouri and Texas. The states of New York, New Jersey and Delaware emerged as a result of the activities of the Commercial Companies of Holland and Sweden, later appropriated by England. The entire process of emergence of the states that made up the Union was a very complex process that far exceeds this brief outline that we offer here as a synthesis, but it is necessary to present this synthetic description to understand why the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention arose from a bourgeois democratic political regime so complex and contradictory that it sought to achieve a balance between powers.

This system of checks and balances, like the separation of powers, comes in legal terms from Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism, and is also attributed to Montesquieu. But, although inspired by them, the political regime that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention is essentially a system that emerged as a result of the contradictions that beset the nascent nation, a young country that had to prevent the danger of establishing a dictatorship, or tyranny, and at the same time had to establish a strong central government. He had to create a Federation, of a handful of autonomous states, with very diverse economies and interests.

He had to prevent a weak nation from falling into the clutches of some of the powers that dominated the world stage such as Holland, England, Spain, Portugal or England. This is how George Novack explains it: "the American revolutionaries created the first of the great constitutional conventions (constituent assemblies)... They also established an effective federal system of states that would operate within a united democratic republic... They drafted a written constitution that marked strictly the powers that the government could and could not exercise and to which a later amendment added a specific Code of Rights. They explicitly made civil authority superior to military authority" (14)

That is why the approved Constitution sought to ensure that some institutions limit others, with mechanisms such as the president's veto over laws approved by Congress, or the power of Congress to alter the composition and jurisdiction of federal courts. But also granting unprecedented democratic freedoms to the people, as Novack explains: "...Although still limited in many aspects, the rights of the people were considerably extended in several fields. The right to vote was expanded under the constitutions of many states and was representative governments were established. The criminal codes, terribly harsh, directed against the poor, were softened" (15)

At the same time, the regime had to contemplate the interests of sectors of capitalists such as the commercial bourgeoisie of the Northern states, with those of the landowning bourgeoisie of the Southern states, which resulted in a very contradictory articulation of institutions. In this articulation there existed some of the greatest democratic freedoms unprecedented in history, as Novack explains: "Although the new native ruling class, composed of merchants and other large property owners in the North and planters in the South, took the reins of power...the revolution began a process of internal democratization that overwhelmed the resistance of the rich and gave ordinary non-slave people more freedoms than any other nation then enjoyed." (16) However, as Novack states , these rights were for non-slave citizens.

The situation for slaves was very different, which established a situation of coexistence of enormous democratic freedoms for one sector of the population, and the denial of the most basic civil liberties for another. The most modern advanced laws were in collusion with the retrograde institution of slavery, which the bourgeoisie of Virginia, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas defended. These aspects explain the complexity of the republican regime established at the Philadelphia Convention. There are other aspects of an economic-social nature that we must also unravel to understand the complexity of the political regime that emerged in the Convention.

And to do this, we must address a controversy that has existed for many years among scholars, analysts and historians about the emergence of the United States, and the development of its political and social regime. Many authors from various currents, as a result of the existence of slavery in the Southern states, propose that at the time of its birth the United States was not a capitalist nation. With various arguments and nuances, these authors present the existence of a landowning oligarchy and slave production relations in the Southern states as proof that at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, the country had a feudal sector. And that the US had two different economies, a capitalist sector in the north, and a non-capitalist sector in the South. From this analysis we conclude that the United States, at the time of its birth, was not an entirely capitalist nation.

This view is totally wrong. The nation that emerged from the First American Revolution and was reaffirmed in the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787, was absolutely capitalist. It is true that non-capitalist relations of production were established in the southern states. And it is also true that the aspect of the land-owning oligarchs of the southern states, who went to Oxford and Cambridge to cultivate themselves, developed a culture of great gentlemen, and exploited thousands of slaves, prohibiting them by law from all kinds of rights; It had more appearance of a feudal class than a capitalist class.

But contrary to appearances, we must understand the essence of the phenomenon, to understand the political and social dynamics of the Southern states. Contrary to what many authors have proposed, the states led by this elite were not only not feudal, but had the most advanced capitalist development in the country. For Karl Marx, colonization in the Northern states is based on the constitution of colonies of free peasants who seek to own their plot of land and settle as settlers.

On the other hand, in the southern states, the colonies are true capitalist companies. This is how Marx analyzes colonization in the Northern states: "Here we must distinguish two types of colonies. In the first case, they are true colonies...the mass of colonists dedicated to agriculture, although they have contributed from the metropolis a capital, more or less large, does not constitute a capitalist class and even less is its production a capitalist production. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, peasants who work for themselves and whose primary and fundamental concern is to provide for themselves, to produce their own means of life. , for which reason their fundamental product does not have the character of merchandise, since it is not intended for commerce. The surplus of their products, after covering their own consumption, is sold or exchanged for imported manufactured articles, etc. Another part of the settlers, smaller, established on the coast, on the banks of navigable rivers, etc., create commercial cities. But neither can their activities be classified, in any way, as capitalist production. (17)

In relation to the colonization process that gave rise to the Southern states, Marx stated: "In the second type of colonies, the plantations, are from the very moment of creating commercial speculations, centers of production for the world market where there is a capitalist production regime, although only in a formal way, since the slavery of blacks excludes free wage labor, which is the basis on which capitalist production rests. It is, however, capitalists who manage the business of "trafficking in blacks. The system of production introduced by them does not come from slavery, but is grafted onto it. In this case, the capitalist and the landowner are one person." (18) 

Nahuel Moreno explained it categorically: "The Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch colonization in America was essentially capitalist. Its objectives were capitalist and not feudal: to organize production and discoveries to make prodigious profits and to place goods on the world market. They did not inaugurate a system of capitalist production because there was no army of free workers in the market in America. This is how the colonizers, in order to capitalistically exploit America, are forced to resort to non-capitalist production relations: slavery or semi-slavery of the indigenous people. Production and discoveries for capitalist objectives; slave or semi-slave relationships; feudal forms and terminologies (as well as Mediterranean capitalism) are the three pillars on which the colonization of America was based." (19)

Moreno agrees with Marx that the colonization of the North is predominantly by peasants: "If there is a place in America whose colonization is not capitalist, it is the northeast of the United States... Europeans who wanted land went, or stayed, to this region. , climate and production like those of Europe...This immigration gave rise to a small peasantry that supplied itself and placed the slight surplus that remained on the market. Seen from a historical angle, this immigration continued the magnificent tradition of European Middle Ages to colonize new lands with independent peasants. But in North America there was a difference that would be fundamental: the excess of land prevented the growth of a feudal landholding class, although there were attempts to do so... the northern United States must be defined as a region colonized by waves of small farmers who did not support pre-capitalist production relations and who, as a consequence, were constituted for centuries in an internal market in continuous growth. The northeastern United States inherited the advantages of European feudalism: small agrarian production, without its tremendous disadvantages: a class of feudal landowners, inevitable parasites, in the future bourgeois production" (20)

Given that the working class had just emerged as such in the world, according to Moreno, colonization did not have properly speaking capitalist relations of production: " The truth is that there can be no other Marxist definition for the Spanish-Portuguese colonies and the southern United States. than that of capitalist production specially organized for the world market with pre-capitalist production relations. If we liked paradoxes we could say... that the southern United States and Latin America were colonized in a capitalist way but without giving rise to capitalist relations and that the northern United States was colonized in a feudal way (peasants who sought land and nothing more than land to sustain themselves) but without feudal relations." (21)

In that stage of capitalism, Commercial Companies and Manufactures worked in a complementary way: Commercial Companies such as the Virginia Company of London, developed Manufactures, that is, companies where human manual labor was exploited, and the division of labor was established within of the establishment. The southern oligarchy used slave production relations in manufacturing, although very different from the slavery of previous periods of history such as that of the Romans, or Greeks, who produced almost exclusively for an internal market. The slavery imposed on Southern manufacturing continued the experience of the companies established by the British Empire whose production was destined for the international market. In the manufacturing establishment, production was divided into 2 parts: one dedicated to the cultivation of goods such as tobacco, corn, or sugar for export, and another to the consumption needs of the vast population that made up manufacturing: it included the production of their own food, weaving their own cloth, and building their own houses at home.

Manufacturing production had 2 different models, on the one hand the "Virginian model" that was developed mainly in Virginia and Maryland, and on the other the "Jamaican model", which was developed in Georgia and the two Carolinas. In Virginia and Maryland the farm was relatively small, with slaves and black and white rural workers doing work together in the fields. The slave owner lived on his plantation year-round, considered it his home, and often formed intimate relationships with slaves and their families that continued from generation to generation. As Novack explains: " George Washington's home, for example, contained a weaving establishment. Other planters owned spinning and weaving mills that employed not only slave labor, but white servants on a wage labor basis." (22)

In the Jamaica model applied in Georgia and the two Carolinas, the farms copied the manufacturing model that had been imposed on the island of Jamaica for the production of sugar, where large masses of African American slaves were exploited who progressively replaced the contract settlers. . The farm was managed by supervisors and foremen, the owner of the farm did not reside there, he only visited it sporadically. This plantation system was used to produce cotton, and the so-called "Cotton Kingdom" was established , destined for export to the large English factories of the Manchester textile industry, but also to Europe and the colonial internal market.

This is how Novack explains it: "Until the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the capitalist plantation system in the English colonies was perfected on the largest scale in Jamaica. Economically considered, the entire island became one vast plantation dedicated to the cultivation of cotton. sugar cane and the manufacture of sugar, which was then sent abroad for sale. The plantations...belonged to absentee owners resident in England and managed by hired superintendents. They were extremely productive and worked entirely by hand of slave labor...The workers were strictly classified and worked in squads, under close supervision...The small farmers who had originally populated the island were expelled and gradually disappeared" (23 )

In summary, the two types of manufacturing establishments in the Southern states introduced machinery and division of tasks within the farm, at first small establishments in the search for precious minerals, later for the cultivation and exploitation of raw materials such as tobacco, rice, and corn. Later, huge farms with cotton cultivation destined for export to the large English factories of the textile industry in Manchester, and also to Europe and the colonial internal market, which allowed them to establish the most advanced capitalist development. They are capitalist establishments whose production revolves around the profits of their owners.

Therefore, although at the origin of the United States, 1 in 6 citizens was a slave, the country was born as a capitalist nation. Today in the country there is a profound process of review and reunion with the past, of re-examination of slavery and the role and understanding of the most contradictory aspects of the Founding Fathers. But to understand these aspects, it is necessary to put aside any subjective vision, based only on the personality, or ideas of Jefferson or Washington, for example. These subjective aspects are important, but completely secondary when it comes to understanding its contradictions.

Many works attempt to reveal the apparently contradictory character of many of the Founding Fathers. They were capable of being politically on the barricades alongside the French people fighting the absolutist monarchy, or suffering serious inclemencies and performing heroic feats facing the British Empire, and then returning to the farm and continuing to cruelly exploit thousands of African Americans. This behavior seen with contemporary eyes appears as a tremendous inexplicable contradiction, but for the time they experienced it as something normal and natural.

Their behavior and actions are not understood only by psychological or personal aspects; they can only be understood if one investigates the powerful economic and social driving forces that gave rise to them, including in the analysis the class sector to which they belonged, which determined by complete his actions. They are part of a powerful manufacturing bourgeoisie, with the appearance of feudal oligarchs, but in essence, bourgeois of ancient lineage, who exploited very rich manufactures to supply national and international markets. Only in this way can the contradictory nature of his political actions be understood. And only in this way can the contradictions of the political regime that they imposed in the country they founded be understood: They were the local representatives of the international class of the manufacturing bourgeoisie. This class, to defend its interests, was capable of confronting imperialism, tyrants, and carrying out progressive tasks just as Dutch manufacturers did in Europe.

The Dutch manufacturing bourgeoisie had the guts to confront the Habsburgs, the "Sun King", the Stuarts and anyone who stood in their way. But this same social class of Dutch manufacturers, while facing terrible tyrannies, overthrowing them, and giving the world some of the political innovations that would last for centuries, were developing the capitalist system in the world, for which they enslaved million people on five continents. The most important change in the US political regime was carried out by this sector of social class, little studied and analyzed. This change had a global impact, hundreds of nations in the world have imitated and copied it following the model of its Constitution and preambles, but it was imposed by a sector of the bourgeois social class, little understood by the social sciences.

This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: "The important thing is that this capitalist production originated from the beginning of colonization an indigenous capitalist class, independent of the merchants and the bureaucracy, the bourgeois landowners. Latin American history has not yet been studied starting from this overall characterization: the existence from the beginning of an indigenous bourgeois class linked to regional production. This class is similar to that of the southern United States that gave Washington. Liberal historians and their Marxist emulators have ignored the existence of that class because it was not an industrial bourgeoisie and they have classified it as feudal landowners, when, on the contrary, it is a much more progressive bourgeois class than thecomprador commercial bourgeoisie" (24)

With the change that was established at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the regime went from a decentralized country to a strong central state with 3 powers, the Constitution, and the Amendments or Bill of Rights, which was an enormous advance. But at the same time, as this change was imposed by a slave-owning exploiting class, it established a contradiction that would forever mark the history of the United States. It established the paradox of the establishment of a regime of democratic freedoms unprecedented in history, imposed by a social class that based its political and social supremacy on reactionary and retrograde social relations. This paradox prepared the conditions for the country to travel the path from the First American Revolution to the Second American Revolution, with the Civil War.

A new change in the regime: Political parties emerge and the Federalist predominates

After the Philadelphia Convention, and in the next 70 years of the country's history until the Civil War, the entire axis of the political situation passed through the struggle between the slave-owning manufacturing bourgeoisie of the South and the industrial bourgeoisie of the Northern states. This is how Novack puts it: "Whoever does not keep in mind the fact that the center of gravity of American politics during the first seventy-two years of its existence is precisely in this great conflict runs the risk of losing the common thread in the labyrinth of events... " (25) 

After the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia, all the leaders of the North American Revolution such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Franklin, etc. came out in a common "front" to defend the Union and the Constitution. Faced with the special Conventions called by the states to debate and decide their approval or rejection, all were "federalists" and defended the formation of the new federation, in debates that were very hard and difficult. In many cases, the intervention of the Founding Fathers was decisive for the states to approve the new Constitution.

But that "front" that they formed to defend the new Constitution, as soon as the government was formed, it was torn apart. The social and political contradictions that confronted these two most important capitalist sectors in the country broke that "front." This is how Novack put it: " As soon as...the machinery of the new government had been set in motion the former allies found themselves opposed to each other on a number of important issues. Their struggle for supremacy resumed on a broader scale in the framework of the Republic. Seven decades of parliamentary struggle, and ultimately a civil war... were bound to determine... who was dominating the United States." (26) This process gave rise to another change in the bourgeois democratic regime: The first political parties emerged, constituted and developed as such, something that is common today, but which at that time was another novelty of the republican political regime of the USA. USA

In his first cabinet, Washington appointed Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Both officials headed the two political parties that gave rise to the country's first political party system. On the one hand, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were among the representative sector of merchants and bankers from the Northern states, who organized around the Federalist Party. This was in fact the first political party in the United States, whose network of supporters was urban, and they promoted a political program of establishing a strong central state, the creation of a national bank, the establishment of tariffs and taxes, they were commercially protectionist, and inclined to abolish slavery.

On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the representatives of the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the South, who began to organize themselves into the Democratic-Republican Party. Their program was for greater autonomy of the states with respect to the central government, and they did not view the central bank favorably. They were slaveholders and advocated free trade with Europe. In the more than 70 years that go from the I to the II North American Revolution, the fight between these 2 sectors went through 3 stages: In the first stage with Washington's presidency, the Federalists exercised supremacy. Although Washington declared himself independent of both parties, he actually supported the Federalist program, as Novack states: " In the first period of their relations during the administrations of Washington and Adams, the commercial capitalists controlled the Federal machine. Piloted by Hamilton, "The far-sighted American statesmen most succeeded in enacting the most important parts of their program." (27)

But it was not only the political-social location of these two sectors of the dominant classes that divided the waters between the two parties. So did the impact of international events: Two years after the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia, the French Revolution of July 14, 1789 was a shock that shook the world. A mass insurrection took the Bastille by storm, detonated the seizure of cities and towns in all the provinces, provoked the insurrection of the peasantry, imposed the Declaration of Rights in August, and decreed the end of the feudal regime, which mortally wounded the monarchical absolutism and King Louis XVI. This is how Novack explains it: "The central revolutionary event of the bourgeois era was the uprising in France at the end of the 18th century...it produced by far the greatest impact and had the greatest international influence of all the social and political uprisings of the bourgeois era...developed in the richest, most populous and most cultured country on the continent. Its events, ideas and institutions, as well as its armies, went beyond national borders...The spectacle of the crown, the Church and other venerable institutions being overthrown by popular uprisings, raised enthusiasm and invited emulation" (28)

The French Revolution was the final link in the chain of revolutions that characterized the "Age of the Democratic Revolution" that Novack and RR Palmer defined between 1760 to 1800. The Federalists did not view the French Revolution favorably. Washington considered the beheading of kings and nobles by the revolution excessive. On the other hand, the Democratic-Republicans supported the Revolution, Jefferson had just been ambassador to France and enthusiastically embraced his ideas. The impact of the French Revolution unleashed the revolution in Haiti, the most profitable French colony, and between 1791 and 1804 the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery and proclaimed the Republic in a country with 452 thousand black slaves, a cry for freedom that resonated in the island, after the fall of the monarchy in France.

But in addition to the economic-social conditions of the time, and the impact of international events, it was another decisive element that drove the evolution of political parties in the history of the country. A profound economic-social change was taking place in the capitalist system. Until the 18th century, capitalism, the predominant Form of Accumulation was Manufacturing, manufacturing capitalists were at the forefront of the development of productive forces, and spearheaded the most important political-social changes.

The manufacturing bourgeoisie of the Southern states were the local representatives of that international class, but in the mid-18th century a new Form of Capitalist Accumulation began to emerge that contained and surpassed manufacturing: Industry. This Form of Accumulation operated enormous and profound changes in capitalism and the world economy. In industry, the capitalist incorporated machines, which replaced manual labor, with which the establishment became a factory. The division of labor combined with machines allowed mass production, which increased productivity and the exploitation of labor, which promoted a qualitative leap in production.

For this reason, the industry involved a leap in the process of capital and profit accumulation. This process began with technical innovations such as that of John Wyatt, who announced his spinning machine in 1735, which revolutionized the textile industry. The introduction of machines also allowed a radical change in production and commerce because it revolutionized transportation and communications. At the beginning of the industry, the most important technological innovations were the steam engine and the so-called Spinning Jenny, related to the textile industry.

But after them, new machines and technologies emerged and were a permanent improvement of the production process that included agricultural production, with which the industry also began to absorb the production of the countryside, the sea, fishing and raw materials. When industrialization was introduced in the countryside, revolutionizing all production, the production of the countryside ended up being absorbed by the industry and becoming one more variant of the Forms of Industrial Accumulation.

With industry a new sector of social class emerged, the industrial bourgeoisie. And along with it, the modern salaried proletariat emerged, which consolidated the capitalist mode of production with its two fundamental social classes: the bourgeoisie that already existed and a modern new class that, although it had appeared sporadically before in history, did so now. for the first time in an organic and massive way: the working class. This is how Federico Engels explains it: " But it has been precisely this industrial revolution that has everywhere brought clarity to class relations, which has eliminated a multitude of intermediate forms, bequeathed by the manufacturing period and, in Eastern Europe, even by the guild crafts, creating and bringing to the forefront of social development a true bourgeoisie and a true proletariat of great industry . " (29)

The Axis of Accumulation, that is, the geographical center where this Capitalist Form of Accumulation developed was England. The predominance of England had been sealed in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which led to England gradually displacing other powers such as Portugal, Spain and Holland, which had been the world center of Manufacturing, from the center of capitalism. If Manufacturing worked in a complementary manner with Commercial Companies, Industry was complemented by Banks, which constituted the Form of Financial Accumulation characteristic of industrial capitalism. England was the vanguard in the development of a new Regime of Capitalist Accumulation, which had Industry as the Predominant Form of Accumulation.

This is the reason why the industrialist bourgeoisie of the Northern states wanted to continue establishing privileged relations with England, given that the industrialists and bankers of the North were interested in promoting the new Regime of Accumulation in the brand new and recently constituted nation. When wars broke out in Europe in 1792, with France and Great Britain competing for world hegemony as the main contenders, Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party advocated aligning themselves with France, establishing restrictions on British trade. But the Federalist party prioritized relations with Great Britain and carried out a pro-English foreign policy, which is why both the Washington-Hamilton and Adams Administrations practiced neutrality in the European conflict, which was the line that London imposed. to his allies.

The pro-English foreign policy of the Federalist administrations was continued with the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between Her British Majesty and the US, commonly known as Jay's Treaty which was signed in 1794, and ended the issues pending since the Treaty of Paris of 1783 after the First American Revolution. The Jay Treaty allowed 10 years of commercial exchange, with British possessions in India and the Caribbean, in the midst of the wars that shook Europe. Jay's Treaty also established the withdrawal of British army units from the Northwest Territory west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River, and resolved to establish arbitration over border problems with Canada.

Support for the treaty announced by Washington was decisive for its ratification by 2/3 of the Senate in November 1794. From the British perspective, its war with France required improving relations with the United States, to prevent the United States from falling into the French orbit. The Jay Treaty angered France, which captured nearly 300 American ships bound for British ports in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Caribbean. President Adams, anticipating a war with France, promoted the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which sought to put limits on the immigration of foreigners and the press's criticism of the government. These were laws against French refugees who participated in American politics and against Republican editors or Irish immigrants, who were considered potentially dangerous in the face of the pro-British politics of the Federalists. The law increased the waiting period to obtain naturalization and authorized the expulsion of foreign citizens.

Faced with increasing tensions with France, Federalist President Adams sent a diplomatic delegation to Paris to negotiate the peace that was achieved with the Treaty of Mortefontaine. But the division between the bourgeois sectors of the North and the South had worsened. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison strongly opposed the Jay Treaty and the Alien and Sedition Act. Both launched a national opposition campaign, in which they denounced the unconstitutionality of these laws in resolutions drafted for the assemblies of Kentucky and Virginia, positioning themselves as bulwarks in the defense of democratic rights. His campaign laid the foundations for the constitution of the Democratic-Republican party and Jefferson resigned his position as Secretary of State, a fact that publicly manifested the rupture between the Founding Fathers.

But not only foreign policy divided both parties, internal politics also divided them day by day. One point that accentuated the division was the creation of the first legally established Bank of the United States in 1791 by Congress. The federalist industrial bourgeoisie promoted the creation of the central bank, as part of its strategy to develop the regime of industrial accumulation, and it was devised by Alexander Hamilton to settle the debts that the country had since the War of Independence, and establish a stable currency. The existing currency in the country was the "Continental" note created to pay the expenses of the revolution and liberation of the United States, but the excessive printing of the Continental to finance the expenses of the war of independence, caused serious inflation and depreciation of the currency, incorporating the phrase "it is not worth a continental" , to this day in the country's culture.

There were at that time in the country more than 50 English, French, Spanish, Portuguese coins in circulation, vouchers issued by states, cities, stores, and companies in large cities. The values ​​of these currencies were tremendously unstable, making it almost impossible to carry out transactions, develop a trade or grant credits, the value or exchange rate of both the party agreeing to receive it and the person granting it was never known. The depreciated Continental and the existence of unstable currencies turned the country into a paradise for speculators. The most affected were the humblest sectors and the distant inhabitants who suffered the degradation of their assets, as well as the distances and primitive paths leading to values ​​being unknown and transactions impossible.

There was a need to have a new strong and valuable currency, which led Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury in George Washington's government, to impose through the legal decree signed on April 4, 1792 that the country adopt as its own currency to the Mexican "daler" , called "dollar" in English phonetics. The Mexican "daler" had emerged in 1535 by order of Charles V, King of Spain and Emperor of Germany, in the newly discovered silver mines of Mexico. The King ordered that a coin similar to the one used in Europe be minted under the name " thaler" ; name that is an abbreviation of "Joachimsthaler", the valley in northern Bohemia in which the silver mines that provided the metal to coin it were located. The coiners carved the 2 pillars of Hercules formed by the coasts of the new and old world, whose stylized image formed an "S" crossed by 2 vertical bars.

Hamilton promoted the adoption of the new currency, and the creation of the Mint where it would be minted, in addition to a plan to create taxes to finance the constitution of the Central Bank. This was established with initial financing based on the sale of 10 million dollars in shares, the purchase by the United States government of the first 2 million, and the rest for sale to be purchased by citizens of the country or foreigners, although the latter would not have a vote in board meetings. The requirement for the purchase is that a quarter of the purchase price would have to be paid in gold or silver.

Under these conditions, the Bank of the United States could technically hold $500,000 in real money and could make credit loans. The Bank was established as a private company, whose charter could not be denied until 1811, during which time no other federal bank could be authorized to operate, while the states would be free to create interstate banks. The creation of the Central Bank allowed the control of finances and credit on a large scale, while limiting the actions and credit capacity of the states. Hamilton, seeking to establish a tax scheme to finance the Bank, established taxes on the import duty of alcoholic beverages, and increased the tax on domestically distilled whiskey and other liquors. This was the origin of the Whiskey Rebellion, a popular uprising, in which the existence of the authority of the central power was revealed since it was repressed for the first time with the sending of federal troops, unlike what happened with The Shays Rebellion.

The Second Period: The predominance of the Democratic-Republican Party

In the year 1800, Jefferson won the presidential elections and the Democratic-Republican Party came to power, opening a second stage after the First American Revolution. This stage was characterized by the absolute predominance of the Democratic-Republican party and the crisis and disappearance of the Federalist Party, which meant a new change in the country's political regime: With the Parliament, the Executive Branch, the Judiciary and the army consolidated, the political party system was reduced to a single party. In March 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States and appointed James Madison as Secretary of State, with which the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the Southern States, which was the most economically powerful sector, began to promote its program to deepen the capitalist accumulation that they had developed and controlled.

The Democratic-Republicans had until then developed an implacable and systematic opposition to the measures of the federalist governments, and although the interests of both bourgeois sectors were in a certain and complex way intertwined, the confrontation grew and the Northern bourgeoisie lost ground. before the most powerful manufacturing bourgeoisie of the South, which is why it had to permanently give in to the pressures of the southerners. The project of the industrial bourgeoisie was still incipient and embryonic, industrial capitalism was just beginning in the world and they intended to carry it forward in a small, barely developed, and very poor country. On the contrary, the manufacturing bourgeoisie was based in Forms of Accumulation that had a development and a consolidated structure, it was a more powerful class, with more capacity and resources, which allowed it to develop political campaigns with professional methods, and advanced innovations to the era that strengthened them until they took power.

The impetus of this political process was at the service of the development of the manufacturing accumulation regime, for which it was necessary to obtain more territories in which to establish more manufactures, plantations and slaves. The "Kingdom of Cotton" had to be expanded and extended, so the country's territory had to expand towards warm areas, suitable for its cultivation, that is, towards the south. The Jefferson Administration carried out the Louisiana Purchase, which increased the country's national territory by more than 2 million square kilometers. But at the same time, intensive manufacturing production caused soil exhaustion in the states known as the "Kingdom of Cotton", which required more territory and forced the southern oligarchy to occupy more fertile lands that would allow production to develop.

In turn, the states where the soils were exhausted became suppliers of slaves to the states that were incorporated into the "Cotton Kingdom." This is how Karl Marx explained it: "The cultivation of the export articles of the South, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried out by slaves, is only remunerative, as long as it is carried out with large bands of slaves, in on a massive scale and in large areas of naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which does not depend so much on the fertility of the soil, but on the investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery.Hence the rapid transformation of states such as Maryland and Virginia, which previously employed slaves in the production of export goods, into states that accumulate slaves for export to the deep south. Even in South Carolina, where slaves make up four-sevenths of the population, cotton cultivation has been almost completely immobilized for years due to depletion of the soil. In fact, by force of circumstances in South Carolina it is already has become in part a source state for slaves, already selling slaves for $4 million a year to the far southern and southwestern states. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new territories becomes necessary, so that a part of the slave owners with their slaves can occupy new fertile lands, and a new market for slave suppliers is established. Therefore, for the sale of slaves, it can be created by the remaining section. It is, for example, undoubted that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been annihilated long ago" (30)

The policy of establishing political and commercial agreements with France, who sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, led the Democratic-Republican government to maintain neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon had won a decisive victory at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, and as a consequence there were no major military conflagrations in Europe in the following years, although tensions and disputes between France and England for dominance of world capitalism reached all continents and regions. To the extent that the Democratic-Republican Administration established agreements with France, tensions grew with England, which viewed the change in US foreign policy unfavorably. The US passed on the Jay Treaty signed by the administrations Federalists that almost led to a war with France, to the agreements with France carried out by the Democratic-Republican administration, which led to a war with England.

At the end of Jefferson's second term, Jefferson's decision to retire from political activity was known within the Democratic-Republican Party, and Madison was the candidate to succeed him. Madison won the presidential election in 1808 with relative ease since there was no opposition, the Federalist Party had collapsed and only retained some support in the New England region. One of the reasons for the collapse and subsequent disappearance of the Federalist Party was the death of one of its founders, Alexander Hamilton, who died after fighting a duel with the vice president and member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Aaron Burr.

The first serious problem that the Madison Administration had to face was the crisis in diplomatic relations with Great Britain. As tension between London, Paris and Washington grew, the conflict crossed all regions and continents: Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula unleashed revolution in the South American colonies against Spain, the English navy blocked American ships to prevent them from trading with France, and the clashes extended to India or Africa. Britain decided to tighten the noose and armed the indigenous tribes in the Northwest Territory to harass the Madison Administration. The United States considered the boarding of its ships an affront to the country's sovereignty, and Congress, led by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, approved a declaration of war against Great Britain. The declaration was issued with the opposition of the Federalists who, if they went to war with Great Britain, refused to provide financial support or soldiers and even threatened the secession of New England.

But the Democratic-Republican Administration discovered that war was almost impossible because there were no funds. Their own policies led them to that situation: The Democratic-Republicans were demolishing the Federalists' economic scheme: they had dismantled the Bank of the United States, and reduced the tax system. That is why in the Union message, Madison asked for a war plan to build ships and strengthen the army, in the face of the imminent war with Great Britain that began in 1812. The war with England developed with the battles in the Northwest Territories, of the Great Lakes, on the Canadian border, in Baltimore, and the important conflagration of New Orleans, in which the British were defeated.

The Empire attacked Washington in 1814, destroying the White House, the Capitol and other public buildings. But the US army contained the British and peace was finally signed through the Treaty of Ghent. Meanwhile in Europe, Napoleon had been defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. The war ended, and a period of relative peace and economic growth began in the world and the United States. This consolidated and strengthened the Democratic-Republican Administration.

However, the war with Great Britain was also part of the territorial expansion strategy of the Democratic-Republican Administration that continued to be carried out in the midst of the conflagration. President Madison promoted the colonization of the Northwest Territory after the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, which began to materialize a fundamental aspect of the territorial extension strategy: the removal of Indians from their tribal lands.

This process of removing the Indians from their lands involved a true genocide that had an exclusive protagonist: Andrew Jackson. This is how Howard Zinn explains it: "The "removal" of the Indians was necessary to open the vast American territory to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money...Andrew Jackson was a real estate speculator, merchant, slave trader and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history...he became a national hero in 1814, when he fought at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a thousand Creeks, of whom he killed eight hundred... When the war ended, Jackson and his friends began to buy the lands confiscated from the Creeks and Jackson had himself appointed commissioner of the treaty issued in 1814, by which the Creek nation was left without half of its territory..." (31) 

The Treaty with the Creeks Indians set a precedent. The expropriation of lands that these civilizations had occupied for centuries combined, in the strategy of the manufacturing bourgeoisie, attacks and exterminations with treaties that, according to Zinn, skillfully opened cracks between the primitive communist communities.

This is how Howard Zinn explains it: "... It granted the Indians individual ownership of the land, thus managing to open fissures between them, breaking the custom of communal land ownership, bribing some with land, leaving others without it." , introducing competition and collusion among them...Between 1814 to 1824, in a series of treaties with the Southern Indians, the whites seized three-quarters of Alabama and Florida, a third of Tennessee, a fifth part of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson played a key role in these treaties, using bribery, deception, and force to seize more land, as well as employing his friends and relatives. These treaties and these violations of Indian territory allowed the establishment of the cotton kingdom and the establishment of slave farms...Jackson had extended the white colonies to the border area of ​​Florida, which was property of Spain. Here lay the towns of the Seminole Indians, and some black slaves took refuge Under the pretext that it was a sanctuary for runaway slaves and plundering Indians, Jackson began to make raids in Florida, which he said was essential for the defense of the United States. It was the classic prologue to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, which ended with the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on school maps with the discreet motto of "Florida Purchase, 1819" - but in reality it was born from Andrew Jackson's military expedition beyond the borders of Florida, burning Seminole villages and capturing Spanish forts, until Spain found itself "persuaded" of the need to sell...This is how Jackson became governor of the territory of Florida..." (32)

All of this expansion policy laid the foundations for the formation of a new state of the Union on the basis of the old Northwest Territory that was called Indiana. In 1810, the Democratic-Republican Administration annexed western Florida that belonged to Spain, and the dispute over the Texas territories began with Mexico. The new states admitted to the Union were Louisiana in 1812, and Indiana in 1816. Meanwhile, the Federalist Party, which had taken a pro-British and secessionist stance in the war with Great Britain, dissolved and disappeared from the political scene. In the presidential elections of 1820, the Democratic-Republicans did not even have opposition since the disintegrated Federalist Party did not nominate any presidential candidate. Consequently, Democratic-Republican President Monroe was re-elected almost unanimously in elections in which he obtained 82.9% of the Representative positions, that is, 155 of the 187 positions in dispute. With such overwhelming dominance and almost non-existent opposition it seemed that the party was at its peak, but in a very short time things changed dramatically, causing a new change in the country's political regime.

The Third Period: The Democratic Party and the Republican Party emerge

The third period of the transition between the I and the II North American Revolution occurs with the crisis of the Democratic-Republican Party, with which the 2 political parties that are pillars of the bourgeois democratic regime in the United States emerge: The Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The country's political system was mutating again and from the bowels of the Democratic-Republican political party itself the 2 tendencies that would later make up the 2 parties emerged. Very soon internal battles began in the Democratic- Republican Party between Andrew Jackson, greatest hero of the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams, Monroe's Secretary of State who came from the Federalist Party, William H. Crawford, Monroe's Secretary of the Treasury; and Henry Clay Speaker of the House of Representatives of Congress. Various factions followed these leaders, so much so that although the party increased the number of representatives and managed to monopolize 88.7% of the seats; In practice, that majority was diluted because they divided into rival groups.

When the Democratic-Republican Party chose William Crawford as its presidential candidate, the unity of the party had already been destroyed, and the organization had in fact divided. Crawford received important support from former presidents Jefferson and Madison who retained great influence as founders of the party; but his support could not avoid the crisis. Jefferson could only watch, helplessly, the process of disintegration of the party he had founded and brought to power.

The division and polarization within the moribund Democratic-Republican Party reflected the increasingly extreme confrontation between the industrial bourgeoisie of the North and the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the South, which forced agreements and arrangements to avoid a total confrontation. The most important of them was the Missouri Compromise, of 1820, between the representatives of the slaveholding and abolitionist states in Congress to maintain the balance that then existed between the 11 non-slaveholding states and the other 11 slaveholding states.

When discussing in 1819 the law of admission of the new slave state of Missouri, this would unbalance the composition of the Senate, which was made up of two representatives from each state. There were two senators for each slave state, which were: Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. The Senate also had 2 representatives from each non-slave state which were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The negotiated solution reached on March 2, 1820 was to incorporate 2 new states: 1 slave state, Missouri, and another non-slave state, Maine, which depended on the state of Massachusetts.

The establishment of a dividing line, defined by the parallel 36º 30', as the future limit of the western slave and abolitionist states, known as the Mason-Dixon line, was agreed upon, from which, with the Missouri Compromise, the line Mason-Dixon became a symbol of the division and cultural border regarding slavery in the country. The crisis and the confrontation between the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the south and the industrial bourgeoisie of the north gradually erased the borders between the old political parties; There were former Federalists who supported Jackson, while others were with Adams.

On the other hand, former Democratic-Republicans allied themselves with Federalists, while former Federalists supported Democratic-Republicans. For this reason, the presidential elections of 1824 were going to imply another change in the country's political regime. They were the first presidential elections in which the popular vote would directly elect the members of the Electoral College. At that time, the majority of the States reformed their state laws so that the citizens themselves and not the State Legislatures were the ones who chose the officials called Presidential Electors; who in turn had the responsibility of electing the President of the nation.

In other words, the republican political regime went from a Third Degree presidential election system to a Second Degree one, thus allowing direct popular suffrage to define the composition of the Electoral College in charge of appointing the President. The presidential election continued to be indirect, but the reform gave all citizens, regardless of their social class, economic level or degree of education, a direct and decisive participation in the presidential election. Those who still could not have access to the vote were women and blacks, both slaves and freedmen, but the increase in voters and their gravitation made a new political element of enormous importance emerge. Along with the influx in voting, the "business" of politics and elections emerged, with which fraud, the network of influence peddling, political clientelism and the electoral machinery became the order of the day.

That is, he had to choose between Jackson, Adams and Crawford. Clay, upon being eliminated from the presidential race, reached an agreement with Quincy Adams, by which the latter agreed to appoint him Secretary of State, in exchange for which, he used his powerful influence in the House of Representatives. Thanks to his agreement with Clay, Quincy Adams was elected President with the support of 13 states, against 7 that supported Jackson and 4 for Crawford. Jackson and his supporters denounced the political agreement designed to "steal" his victory. 

In fact, it was quite ironic that in the first election by popular vote, the winner was designated by a political agreement that left out the candidate with the most votes and benefited the one who had lost in popular votes. But this revealed that the election by Electoral College was obsolete, in fact, one of the most undemocratic elements of the bourgeois democratic regime created by the Founding Fathers, which persists to this day. The case of the 1824 elections demonstrated that the indirect election system gave rise to compromises and fraud. In fact, the event of someone being elected president who did not have a majority of votes happened repeatedly in the country's history, such as the case of the 2000 elections, where Bush defeated Gore.

If the complex and decisive electoral campaign had seriously hurt the Democratic-Republican Party; the result meant his end. The wounds could not be healed, and no one had any interest in reconciling the warring factions; Rather, the confrontation worsened, because the former Democratic-Republicans who supported Jackson decided to make a fierce opposition to the Government of John Quincy Adams. Jackson and his supporters, representatives of the southern manufacturing bourgeoisie, effectively founded a new party that would eventually be known as the Democratic Party. Adams and Clay founded the National- Republican Party, which a few years later failed and disappeared; but many of its members, led by Clay, would found the Whig Party of the United States, which emerged as a representative of the interests of the Northern industrial bourgeoisie.

Between both bourgeois sectors that were developing the dispute for control of the country, there was a huge class of peasants and small farmers who were also fighting to defend their political-social interests. But this class was never able to establish its interests independently of the 2 large bourgeois sectors, either they followed the industrialist bourgeoisie of the North already organized around the Republican Party, or they followed the manufacturing bourgeoisie of the South organized around the Democratic party.

This is how Novack explains it: "The role of farmers in 19th century American politics is a magnificent example of the axiom that an economically subordinate class cannot be the supreme power in political life. American farmers lacked internal cohesion , the integrated economic strength and the broad political perspective to run the nation. By far the largest part of the population, they were also the most heterogeneous and dispersed... A part of the Western cultivators found their main markets in the industrial East and Europe, and another in the slaveholding South. Economic dependence led to political dependence. A section of the farmers adhered to the planters' Democratic Party, others tied themselves to the parties of the Northern bourgeoisie, the Whig, and more. late to the Republican Party" (33)

Despite the disintegration of the Democratic-Republican Party, and the new political geography that was emerging, the southern bourgeoisie continued until 1948 managing the political machinery of power, already clearly organized in the Democratic Party. With the Administrations of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Burén, the Democratic Party deepened its strategy of extermination of indigenous societies and expropriation of new territories, in the service of territorial expansion.

As Howard Zinn explains: "The ranch system, based on the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and rice in South Carolina, spread to the fertile new cotton lands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and needed more slaves...When Jackson became president, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi began to introduce laws to extend the authority of the states over the Indians in their territory. The Indian territory was divided for distribution through the state lottery...Treaties signed under pressure and by deception divided the tribal lands of the Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws into smallholdings, making each individual easy prey for contractors, speculators and politicians. The Creeks and Choctaws remained on their individual lands , but many of them were deceived by the real estate companies...The Creeks, deprived of their land, lacking money and food, refused to go west. Some hungry Creeks began to attack white farms, while the Georgia militia and the settlers attacked the Indian villages. Thus began the Second Creek War...The forces that led to the "moving" of the Indians...Were born from the rise in the price of land, and the greed of businessmen. The Indians were going to end up dead or exiled, the real estate speculators richer, and the politicians more powerful." (34)

Thousands of indigenous settlers were displaced to the West, under the promise of the federal government to grant them economic aid and give them new lands. But these aid and lands barely appeared and a large part of the Indian population died in the long journeys of forced exodus. The Indians who rebelled were killed by the federal army, which gave carte blanche to white immigrants and settlers to settle in the occupied territories. The expansion went beyond the Rocky Mountains, and collided with Mexico.

This is how Zinn explains it: "To the southwest was Mexico, which had won its independence in a revolutionary war against Spain in 1821. Mexico was a huge country that included Texas and what we know today as New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and a part of Colorado. After a campaign of agitation, and with the help of the United States, Texas broke with Mexico in 1836 and declared itself the "Republic of the Lone Star." In 1845, the US Congress incorporated it as a new state of the Union. Now James Polk, an expansionist from the Democratic Party, was in the White House..." (35)

Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas and therefore defended the limits of 1819. However, the United States, Great Britain and France accepted the affirmation of Texas as an independent state, thus advancing the dispossession of a vast territory that belonged to a nation like Mexico, weak and recently independent. In the years that followed, the Texas legislature claimed even more Mexican territory as its own, eventually coming to claim the Californias. In 1845 the United States annexed Texas through a joint resolution of Congress, precipitating war with Mexico.

Among those who opposed the war with Mexico were the abolitionists, according to Zinn: "... the American Abolitionist Society said that the war "is waged only for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating the slave regime throughout the vast territory of Mexico... On January 21, 1848 Frederick Douglass, former slave, Orator and writer extraordinaire, he wrote (in his Rochester newspaper, the North Star) of "the present war - unfortunate, cruel and iniquitous - against our sister republic Mexico seems a scapegoat of Anglo-Saxon greed and love of dominion" (36)

With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 1848, the war ended by which Mexico's border was established on the Río Grande, after being stripped of vast territories such as Texas, as well as a wide strip of territory that included Alta California, New Mexico, and large portions of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, in a large expanse known as the Mexican Cession. According to Zinn, after the dispossession of Mexico:    "The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, was a concession to the southern states in exchange for the admission into the Union of the Mexican territories conquered in the war (especially California) as free states. of slavery. The Law made it easier for slavers to capture former slaves, or simply, the capture of blacks accused of fleeing..." (37)

A turning point was occurring in political relations and the situation in the country. The manufacturing bourgeoisie applied increasingly violent and undemocratic methods as it lost economic and political weight, while that of the industrial bourgeoisie grew. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, promoted by senator and Democratic Party leader Stephen Douglas in 1854 for the creation of the states of Nebraska and Kansas, precipitated the battle for Kansas, which was the prelude to the civil war. According to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery should not be allowed in both new states. But the Kansas-Nebraska Law annulled it by stating that whether those states were slaveholding or not, the citizens decided through "popular sovereignty."

Its promulgation unleashed the battle for Kansas, in which the southern oligarchy sent armed bands that terrorized the colonists, to displace them from their lands, and obtain more territories where they could establish more manufactures, plantations and slaves. The Democratic Administration of President Franklin Pierce encouraged the immigration of thousands of pro-slavery nonresidents from Missouri to Kansas who rigged elections by fraud and intimidation, and established a pro-slavery government in Lecompton. In response, northern abolitionists flooded into Kansas, wrote Kansas' first constitution (1855), and elected the Free State legislature in Topeka.

In a message to Congress on January 24, 1856, President Franklin Pierce declared the one established in Lecompton as an official government, and the one elected in Topeka as a rebel and insurrectionist. He received a response from Republican Senator Charles Sumner who took the floor to denounce the threat of slavery in Kansas, in a speech remembered as "The Crime Against Kansas", which ended in a row in the Senate. Violence continued to increase. President Pierce led nearly 500 US Army soldiers, and with their cannons trained, ordered the dissolution of the Free State Legislative Assembly. In response, abolitionist militias were armed such as the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, led by Colonel Charles R. Jennison, which began to have the nickname "Jayhawkers", for being an army that confronted pro-slavery ruffians. The Jayhawkers invaded farms, looted estates and freed slaves, in a true battle for Kansas, which went down in history as the "Bleeding Kansas", and caused new changes in the country's political regime.

On the one hand, it led to the disappearance of the Whig party, which was divided between those in favor of a slave-owning Kansas and those who fought for an abolitionist Kansas. On the other hand, it led to the creation of the Republican Party, made up of the most determined anti-slavery supporters, who promoted the fight for Kansas, with money, weapons and soldiers. This is how Karl Marx explains it: "Scarcely had the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed...when armed emissaries of the slaveholders...knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by means of the greatest atrocities without precedents, evict their settlers from the territory colonized by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. But they provoked a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but especially in the Northwest, an aid organization was formed to support " (38)

Also the fight for control of the institutions by both competing bourgeois sectors was what led to invasions, armed actions and disputes. As Marx explains: " As is known, the representation of individual states in the House of Representatives of Congress depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of free states grow much more rapidly than those of slave states , the number of representatives of the North was bound to surpass that of the South very quickly. The real seat of political power of the South was increasingly transferred to the US Senate, where each state, whether its population was large or small , is represented by two senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore requires a continuous formation of the new slave states. However , this was only possible through the conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the territories belonging to the United States first into slave territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc" (39)

This is how the fight for control of institutions, political parties, states, and the army was precipitated. Even the institutions confronted each other, as a prelude to invasions, armed actions and disputes. In the landmark Scott vs. Sandford trial of 1857, Dred Scott, an African-American slave who had been taken by his owners to states where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, attempted to sue for his freedom. The Supreme Court of Justice, in an aberrant historic ruling, declared that blacks, whether slaves or free, could not be citizens of the United States and, therefore, lacked standing to sue in Federal Court. The pro-slavery ruling of the Supreme Court trampled Federal laws, Parliament, and the state Constitution, as Marx explained: "... This Court, which has nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had has long been the most willing tool of slaveholders. It was decided in 1857, in the well-known Dred Scott case... that slaves could be forced to work in the territories by their owners, so each individual slave owner had the right to introduce slavery into hitherto free territories against the will of the majority of the colonists" (40)

The evolution of the republican political regime of the United States

The "battle for Kansas " was the preamble to the Civil War, 4 years after the events in Kansas began, the historic conflagration between the Union army and the Confederate army, which opened a new political, social and economic stage in history. of the country, with events that gave rise to new institutions and changes in the political regime. To the extent that we have reviewed the different stages of history, we have seen how the institutions that are today part of the republican political regime emerge. When we analyze the political crisis that arose in 2005 in the Bush Administration, we see how it had an impact on the different institutions that make up the political regime.

But at the same time, all this evolutionary analysis that we have done here allows us to understand how the institutions of this regime are part of a historical evolution, a genetic process with different phases and periods. We saw how the republican political regime is at first a weak articulation of confederate states, united by the Articles of Confederation. Then, to the extent that the triumph of the First North American Revolution is achieved, Parliament emerges as the central institution of the regime. At the same time, we saw how Parliament is an institution whose history and evolution does not only belong to the history of the United States, but is also linked to the history of Europe and the successive revolutions and struggles that are part of the evolution and emergence of the capitalism.

Then, with the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the republican regime evolved into a strong central state, and a more centralized set of institutions centered on the Executive Branch, in which the Constitution, amendments and the Judicial Branch emerged. Later we saw how, to the extent that conflicts break out between the different bourgeois class sectors, the manufacturing bourgeoisie on the one hand and the industrial bourgeoisie on the other, political parties emerge in the midst of the internal and external conflicts of the crisis. with France and Spain. In the period in which the manufacturing bourgeoisie dominates, there is a war with England, and later with Mexico.

The Federalist Party, the Democratic-Republican Party, the Whig Party, and finally the Democratic Party and the Republican Party emerge and evolve. All of these institutions that we have analyzed emerged in that first period of 75 years of development of the country, and allow us to thoroughly understand the origin of the contradictions of a complex political regime, the bourgeois democratic regime that emerged in the United States, which will be taken as a model. of almost all the capitalist nations that are going to emerge in the world.

But these institutions of the bourgeois democratic regime are not the only institutions that are in the Beltway today. There are other institutions that emerged long after the country's republican regime was formed. For example, when we analyze the political crisis unleashed in the country in 2005 with the Libby case, we see that the crisis hit institutions such as the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, which coexist with Parliament, the Supreme Court and the White House. . But institutions such as the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and even the current structure of the US Armed Forces appeared much later in the historical reality of the country. These institutions emerged as a result of the profound social and political changes that operated in capitalism, which included changes such as the emergence of new social class sectors, or the appearance of new capitalist Forms of Accumulation, which in turn produced changes in the structure of the state and the political regime of the country.

In turn, these changes impacted the country and the world. To the extent that these new institutions emerged, they expressed themselves and modified the political regime of the country as a result of the fact that the new institutions that emerged became embedded and began to coexist with the old institutions of the republican political regime that emerged in the first 75 years of life. of the nation. In this way, what we know as the Beltway was formed. The economic, political and social driving forces that gave rise to the emergence of the new institutions, the complex and contradictory relationships between the new emerging institutions and the previous ones existing as part of the republican regime, the different locations that these institutions have in the Beltway, which explain The scope of the crisis and political changes that began to operate in the United States since 2005 are the subject of analysis in the following chapter.

Notes

(1) Nahuel Moreno. Revolutions of the 20th Century.

(2) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(3), and (4) Nahuel Moreno. Painting School 1984

(5) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(6) The End of Multinationals. Chapter V General Law of Forms of Accumulation. Amazon 2012

(7), (8), (9) y (10) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(11) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(12) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(13) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(14), (15) y (16) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(17) and (18) Karl Marx. Critical history of surplus value, Volume II, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 331 et seq.

(19), (20) and (21) Nahuel Moreno. Four theses on Spanish and Portuguese colonization, thesis II 1948

(22) and (23) George Novack "The Colonial Plantation System" New International December 1939

(24) Nahuel Moreno. Four theses on Spanish and Portuguese colonization, thesis II 1948

(25), (26), y (27) George Novack. The Struggle for National Supremacy, 1789-1848. Agosto 1939

(28) George Novack. Democracy and Revolution Pathfinder Press 1977

(29) Federico Engels Antiduhring

(30) Karl Marx. The American Civil War. Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861

(31) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(32), y (33) George Novack. The Struggle for National Supremacy, 1789-1848. Agosto 1939

(34), (35), (36) y (37) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(38), (39) and (40) Karl Marx. The American Civil War. Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861

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