American history is the history of a struggle for a truly free and equal society that is responsible to all of its citizenry. Lincoln abolished slavery and defeated the rebels who sought to continue that evil institution, but he was assassinated before he could complete his Reformation, resulting in over a century of freedom in name alone for the blacks in the South. They were no longer called slaves, but they were still made to work for almost no compensation in extreme conditions, and had little access to land, education or political representation. The struggles of the 20th century Civil Rights movement have mostly corrected this great wrong committed against the blacks of this country, but it has not ended inequality. The same could be said of the Womens Movement and the Chicano Movement. This is because the nature of our system of politics and economics is fundamentally designed to promote economic inequality. When we look at the history of this nation, we must look at it with a modern perception. We should take it as a given that all races and genders are innately equal, and move from there to look at the more general picture. The essential struggle between the rich ownership class, in Marxist terms the bourgeoisie, and the poor working class, the proletariat. This core conflict has continued, essentially unaltered, since ancient times. American capitalism is not a product of the free thought of our Founding Fathers, but is instead a system that originated in the ancient war-like agrarian empires of the ancient world. Although the system of representation and the idea of liberty were both reformulated be the founders, they failed to make any significant changes to an economic system that was inherited from the British monarchy. The only difference that has been made by Civil Rights and other progressive movements is that it is now at least theoretically possible for a more diverse array of people to enter the upper class, something that equality-seekers applaud even though, as we have all observed in our day-to-day lives, the vast majority of the upper class is still white and male; occupationally, they are still the money managers, the land owners, the lawyers and the business executives that they have always been. When it is taken for given that all people are essentially equal, this conflict takes on a new light. People of our generation can see that although our laws have changed to be more apparently fair, the system of inequality and exploitation has not changed in any fundamental way because the machine of capitalism produces inequality as its number one product, or perhaps one could say that inequality is produced as one of the major externalities of any system in which the working class is segregated from the ownership class. The struggle for equality in this nation has been profoundly misguided throughout, because it has tended to ignore this fact. In the United States and in the capitalist world, people are generally aware of the nature and the natural product of capitalism but choose to ignore them because they believe that they may one day be able themselves to take advantage of the nature of the system and thereby rise up in the world. This naïveté has led us to believe that if everybody of all races, genders, sexualities and religions is legally permitted to join the bourgeoisie class that this would make the country more fair. But fairness is contrary to the nature of our economic system, and will never be arrived upon until this system is demolished and replaced. In order to rise up in the world, we must first rise up and fight for a freer and more equal way of doing business in the world.
