1. “Blood From Every Pore”¶
Core Argument¶
1. “Blood From Every Pore”
This chapter opens by confronting the widespread dismissal of Marxism in the United States, a rejection rooted in its false equation with Stalinist Russia. The USSR, it argues, was a bureaucratic caricature of the democratic socialism envisioned by Marx and Lenin. Far from being a foreign ideology, communism has far deeper roots in America than capitalism itself. For millennia, Native American societies lived without private property, the state, or wage labour—genuinely communist formations. Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of Iroquois democracy, founded on liberty, equality, and fraternity, directly influenced Marx and Engels, and provides the theoretical backbone for Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Lenin’s vision of a state with recallable officials, equal wages, and no standing army—the democratic constitution of the early Soviet Republic—thus derived from an American source.
The destruction of these societies was not westward expansion but genocide. European colonisation exterminated the Arawaks by 1650; disease, including deliberate smallpox via infected blankets, killed up to 80% of some populations; and scalp bounties were paid. This is Marx’s primitive accumulation of capital—capitalism born “dripping blood from every pore.” The “Indian Wars” were one-sided expropriations, later falsified as heroic myth, as in the propaganda of “Custer’s Last Stand.” The truth of the Battle of the Little Bighorn—where Native warriors outmanoeuvred the US Cavalry—was suppressed, avenged at Wounded Knee in 1890. The Vietnamese people suffered similar erasure: even in antiwar films, they appear only as “collateral damage,” not as heroic resistance fighters.
Yet the American revolutionary tradition also has communist roots. The Pilgrim Fathers were left-wing refugees from the counterrevolution after Cromwell’s death, holding property in common and sharing the products of labour. Their colony operated on the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” though poverty broke it down. They established republican democracy with a people’s militia and compulsory public education. Class struggle existed from the beginning. After Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), plantation owners replaced white indentured labourers with African slaves, degrading all manual labour and depressing wages. Even Jefferson, who wrote “all men are created equal,” owned over 200 slaves. The American Revolution did not abolish slavery; a second American Revolution was necessary.