Independence and Industrial Capitalism

Yet the egalitarian ideal of left-wing American patriots would ultimately be doomed by another revolution whose impact few could have predicted: the Industrial Revolution. In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson describes how economies of scale and the advantages of hierarchically organized production characteristic of industrial capitalism rendered the free-market egalitarianism of the patriots obsolete.

American revolutionaries like Paine and even Jefferson envisioned an America dominated by freeholding farmers. Sole proprietors would own their own farms, sell off their agricultural surplus on a free market, and in exchange buy whatever manufactured goods they could not produce themselves. But, Anderson writes, “the technological changes that drove the Industrial Revolution involved huge concentrations of capital” that had to “be worked by many hands.” The fantastical efficiency of industrial production compared to agriculture came with astronomically high input costs in both labor and capital.

The combination of class war and technological advancement made a society of small, independent farmers economically untenable. Over time, the consolidation of land ownership and the efficiency of industrial production forced most people to begin looking to wage labor rather than independent farming for their livelihoods. Although wage labor was quickly becoming the dominant means of subsistence in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, it was a state that many American patriots and abolitionists considered little better than slavery — even long after the end of the Civil War. As late as 1883, Frederick Douglass remarked that “there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”

Yet over 140 years later, some form of “wage slavery” is still the fate of most Americans. “Most workplace governments in the United States,” Anderson argues, “are dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them.” While most Americans today happily celebrate the abolition of royal tyranny every year on the Fourth of July, we too often neglect a much more pervasive tyranny that is still with us — the exploitation and domination endemic to the modern workplace.

Freedom and Equality Today

The vast majority of Americans are not free from arbitrary authority and coercion, as most are no doubt well aware. In Private Government, Anderson recounts horror stories of life on the labor market: from Tyson poultry workers being forbidden from using the bathroom, to Walmart workers being accused of “time theft” just for greeting their coworkers.

But while capitalism has made the freeholding ideal of individual independence the patriots fought for anachronistic, that’s no reason to cast aside their dream of a free society. The progressive core of patriot ideology was a vision of society free from arbitrary, involuntary, and inescapable servitude, a state that capitalism condemns most workers to.