Conception of Equality in U.S. Declaration of IndependenceLooking at the concept of equality given in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, it is necessary to keep in mind that when the Declaration was issued it was primarily addressing other countries, especially France, which the U.S. revolutionaries seeking independence from Britain were mobilizing to help them defeat the British. At the level of nations, treaties can only be signed between equals. Thus, the U.S. Declaration of Independence served to put the U.S. on an equal footing among nations with its own independent standing. Without the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. could not have approached France to make arrangements to fight the British. It is a Declaration, like the Constitution, made by men of property within a system of slave labour, to devise a means for these ruling factions to sort out their conflicts. One of these was the ability of the various factions to raise their own armies, against the people and each other. The conception of equality they established recognized themselves to be equal members entitled to pursue their life (slavery), liberty (accumulation of property) and happiness (wealth). The slave oligarchy was included in "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America," on the basis that those who can raise their own private armies promise not to do so and instead accept a single public army, the Continental Army. The private armies, south and north were used to wage war on the majority, called "the multitude" by the founding fathers, the "propertyless." The significance of this is not that they were white men of property and slave-owners as such but that their compromise with slavery, their merger of the system of slave labour with the system of wage-slavery holds as long as the multitude agrees not to question the supreme political power of the slave power and industrial power. The Constitution and the arrangements it establishes, which decide all questions of war, revenue, taxes, crime and punishment, affirms the compromise with slavery and the compromise between democracy (the people) and the oligarchy. To this day that compromise enshrines the rights of the oligarchy, and that the oligarchy alone can determine the limits to its rule. The Declaration of Independence was written by slave owners yet it proclaims that "all men are created equal." This refers to the solution presented by the French enlightenment movement to the dilemma of how to make property rights judiciable and not a matter of the whim and arbitrariness of a king which claimed divine inspiration. It is nonetheless logically incompatible. The founders attempt to make it compatible with the rest of the Declaration and later the Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, but they fail, leading to the Civil War. Neither did the enslaved people accept it at the time of the Civil War and before that and nor did those who were declared the propertyless multitude, the mob, accept it either. The U.S. system first attempted to merge slave labour with wage-slavery, which proved incompatible. The Civil War served to eliminate private property in the form of a slave labour system, an accomplishment of the people. But rule remained in the hands of the oligarchy and the system of wage-slavery remained and was expanded -- a system so incompatible with the requirements of today that it can no longer even sort out the conflicts within the ranks of the oligarchy, thus ever raising the danger of civil war at home and more imperialist war abroad. It most certainly is incompatible with the demands of the people for empowerment. The more the phrase "all men are created equal" is used to justify what cannot be justified, the more the concrete inequality which exists is brought to the fore as a result of the lack of mechanisms to hold those who commit crimes against the people to account. For Us, Accountability Begins at Home. Only when the peoples
can exercise control over the decisions which affect their lives and
take responsibility for the results, can the
human and social environment even begin to be humanized. (With files from the Ideological Studies Centre -- ISC)
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