On Power and the Path Forward
A Comparison of the Views of a Marxist Activist with the Democratic Views of Aaron Burr
Today, my friend Don DeBar gave an interview that was important — and had some remarkable similarities to a precis that Aaron Burr gave to Napoleon in 1810. (See transcripts below.)
Don’s interview is important because he discusses revolution and the need for power to the people. Burr’s 1810 precis, which also discusses revolution (in Mexico), is equally important because it (along with supporting documents) reveals something not only about Burr but about America.
I’m not sure whether my friend, Don DeBar — an American Marxist “man of the people,” activist, radio show producer and frequent cable TV commentator (and with whom I disagree on quite a few issues) — will appreciate being compared with Aaron Burr. (He says: “As long as it’s not ‘they’re both dead’ I’m cool with it.”)
But let me start by saying that I do not share the opinion most Americans have of Burr. Whether you are educated or not, a historian or history buff or largely ignorant of American history, it is more likely than not that you think Burr was a villain and traitor.
Bear with me please and try to keep an open mind. Because I am going to align Burr with democratic ideals.
I do not share the negatively biased view of Burr. Not in the least. I can’t prove it to you here in this dispatch, so I’ll just let it be said: Burr was no villain and no traitor. He was, in my opinion, a patriot and a long-serving and extremely popular politician, a visionary whose life, career and reputation he allowed to be sacrificed by President Thomas Jefferson via the latter’s fabricated “Burr Conspiracy” and trumped-up trial for treason.
Why do I say that Burr allowed himself to be sacrificed by Jefferson? Because in my opinion, Burr saw the damage he’d incur on the nation if he destroyed Jefferson. Burr could easily have taken Jefferson down — before, during, at or after the treason trial. But he didn’t. He chose not to.
Burr was a consummate lawyer. And the government’s case — which was constructed and directed by Jefferson himself (quite in violation of separation of powers principles) — was laughably weak. So weak in fact that after the government completed its presentation of the case, Burr moved for acquittal without having put on any defense whatsoever.
And he was acquitted. Without having put on his defense!
Not on a technicality (as so many today still assert) but because there simply was no evidence of treason.
The so-called technicality was that the Constitution does not allow for prosecution of conspiracy to commit treason. Nonetheless, the case failed because there were no acts of treason. Oh, he had guns on his boats! (Well everyone in those days on the frontiers had guns!) He had men in military array! (No, they were just men gathering to join Burr’s adventurous expedition and maybe even be ready to fight a war with Spain, which Jefferson was daily proclaiming he was going to declare any moment!)
From Jefferson’s own list: Burr had enlisted men “in a regular way”! (What’s a regular way? Jefferson’s Secretary of War had encouraged Burr to enlist men in case of war with Spain and had even given him blank muster papers to use!) Burr had mentioned the “prospect of civil war” to the governor! (First of all, Burr was suggesting that the local government’s extreme actions could lead to civil war, but gee, if saying that is treason, I’d better watch out as I’ve been predicting the same thing lately.) Burr had finally “capitulated . . . as between two independent & hostile commanders!” (The state was making war on Burr. Orders to capture or kill him had been sent out and Burr learned that assassins were on his trail. Clearly he was just supposed to lie down and die instead of “capitulating.”)
These were what Jefferson listed as “overt acts” — proofs of treason! (Thomas Jefferson to William B. Giles, April 20, 1807.)
It was absurd. For the rest of his life, Jefferson had to (and did) keep up the pretense that Burr was guilty. (That Jefferson knew Burr was innocent I think I proved pretty clearly in my book “Malice: Thomas Jefferson’s Conspiracy to Destroy Aaron Burr.”)
In truth, Burr was never a usurper or coveter of power. He believed deeply in democratic systems and insisted on strict adherence to them. Even during the contentious, soul-destroying 1801 electoral tie between him and Jefferson, Burr lost favor on both sides by insisting that he would neither concede to Jefferson nor accept the office of the presidency for himself except through democratic processes.
Burr was a democrat in both party affiliation and worldview. He believed strongly in the power of the people, in the right to self-determination, and in the “revolutionary” principles of democracy.
So what about my Marxist friend, Don DeBar? He has some important things to say. Burr’s words on these subjects are important too for what they say about revolution and our system of government. Let’s take a look and compare. (Burr, of course, was not a Marxist or a communist. The terms didn’t even exist then.)
(John Goodwyn Barmby, an English Victorian utopian socialist thinker, is credited with the first use of communism in English, around 1840. Marxism was first publicly formulated in 1848 in the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution.)*
On Power in the People
In the interview, DeBar makes some crucial points. He believes and Burr believed in what I view as a core principle of democracy: rule of the people, by the people, for the people.
The question of whether our governments are actually governing FOR us is a critical one right now, perhaps as critical as it was in 1776. With a pandemic, lock-downs, claims of election fraud, an attack on the Capitol, alleged insurrection, indictments, fears of the Deep State, and a renewed widespread focus on freedom and liberty, we are at a new and yet familiar crossroad.
Right at the outset of his interview, DeBar declares: “power should be in the hands of the people.” This was a phrase Burr would have agreed with. He had worked throughout his life to gain rights for ordinary working people and had once remarked about a noisy crowd of electioneering Democrats “They are the expounders of the Constitution!” (James Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (Mason Bros., NY, 1858; Johnson Reprint, NY, 1967), p. 613.)
And again, during the 1801 electoral tie, at great cost to himself, Burr refused to engage in anti-democratic activities and insisted that he had to be elected democratically or not at all. That is, despite tremendous pressure from Jefferson and from party leaders on both sides, Burr insisted on carrying out the will of the people through their representatives in the electoral college and finally in the House of Representatives, where the Constitution stipulated any tie was to be resolved. The consequences for Burr’s “treason” in failing to defer to Jefferson were severe. Thereafter, Jefferson shut Burr out of his administration and began gathering his cabinet and New York Democrats together to destroy Burr.
After Burr’s expedition failed in 1806–7 and he was arrested, the former Mississippi Attorney General George Poindexter admitted that Burr had “supplied us with schoolmasters, singingmasters, dancingmasters, and doctors in abundance.” So far from wanting to take America by force, Burr was in fact supplying ordinary settlers to the frontier.
On The Working Class
DeBar says that “for a Marxist, power should be in the hands of the working class.” Interestingly, in the late 1790’s Burr worked behind the scenes to obtain voting and banking privileges for working class people:
By 1800, artisans who had once obtained loans from Federalist-controlled banks could no longer do so. Astute politician Aaron Burr therefore established a Republican-controlled bank that lent freely to artisans and thereby won them over to the Republican ticket.
(Robert E. Wright, Artisans, Banks, Credit and the Election of 1800 (Penn. Mag. of Hist. & Biog., Vol. CXXII, №3 (July 1998)) p. 211.)
Artisans were skilled tradesmen; “mechanics” were ordinary tradesmen. Burr managed to get the NY Assembly to pass a bill that permitted working class men (mechanics) to jointly acquire property in order to meet the property acreage ownership requirement to vote. (Beatrice G. Reubens, Burr, Hamilton and the Manhattan Co., Parts I and II, Political Science Quart., 72 [1957]; 578–607 and 73 [1958]; 100–125 and Alfred F. Young, The Mechanics and the Jeffersonians: New York, 1789–1801, Labor History 5 (1964), 247–76.))
Burr might have been raised in the upper class but he was a progressive, a man of the people, by and for the people. He was not a Marxist but he understood class struggle and believed that power resided in the people. However, he believed (at least at that point) that the Constitution protected the rights of the people.
On Revolution
Don says that “Whenever you have power alienated from people — and placed in a repository somewhere, whether it’s the state or a monopoly, whatever it is, there are people that will gravitate towards that and will say ‘Aha! That’s where it is and I’m going to get it!’ And you have to watch that. But you know, the task of a revolution and if there’s a vanguard . . . is to teach the people how to deal with that.”
Don adds: “That’s the same situation the people are in after a revolution. You think the bad guys are gonna go away? You think it’s gonna be jubilee? That’s where they’re gonna fight the hardest — when they’re wounded , almost fatally, they’re gonna try to rip your throat out. What’s your strategy?”
Burr talks in his precis to Napoleon about what it would take to prepare the Spanish (Mexican) people for revolution and independence from an oppressive ruler. He tells Napoleon’s ministry clerk Louis Roux that the Spanish Mexicans have none of the advantages the Americans had in asserting their independence: “There is no method of application, no manner of organizing as a group (no assembly, no meeting point). The desire for independence is universal and even ardent, but it cannot be manifested. *** They have no way of making [their feelings] known [to the world] — no public assembly.”
Don in his short interview doesn’t propose a strategy. He merely raises the question: “What’s your strategy?” And his question concerns what to do after a revolution.
Burr, on the other hand, suggests that one needs a “manner of organizing as a group” — a public assembly, in order to effect a revolution. Presumably, Burr might also suggest this was necessary during and after a revolution as well.
Given that Burr had not only served as a public servant during peacetime (crucially from 1784–1800) but as a regular soldier and an officer during the American Revolution (1775–1783), we can assume he was well-versed in both peacetime and wartime strategies. And again, his focus was always on public service and democratic processes: public assembly, electioneering, people as the expounders of the Constitution, etc.
(And despite Jefferson’s claims that Burr sought to make war with Spain in violation of the Neutrality Act, it was Jefferson who was repeatedly provoking war with Spain. Further, despite Jefferson’s assertions that Burr wanted to create an empire of his own, it was Jefferson who was ambitious to expand the American territories into Spanish lands, all the way to the Pacific. He and Madison called this their “empire of liberty.” Burr’s activities, had they been allowed to play out, might have actually not only put a halt to Spain’s warlike activities but exposed Spain’s covert aggressive tactics for all the world to see.)
Don suggests the necessity of revolution. He says: “You’re gonna have a struggle . . . To me the end game . . . the next phase that I’d like to get to [is that] the state withers away.”
Burr believed revolution in Spanish Mexico was inevitable. He repeatedly said so. He did not wish to provoke it but he wished to be prepared for it, both with respect to the possibility of Spanish invasion of U.S. territories and in order to help liberate the Mexicans from the oppressive rule of Spain.
This is perhaps the main difference between Burr and DeBar. As an attorney and politician who had long served in government, Burr believed in “the state,” as long as it was democratic and merit-based.
In Burr’s opinion, the Jeffersonian system was corrupt: “A certain Junto of actual and factitious Virginians[,] having had possession of the Govt. for 24 years[,] consider the U.S. their property and by bawling ‘Support the Adm[inistratio]n.’ have so long succeeded in duping the republican public.” According to Burr, the Jeffersonian system “bestowed [offices] merely to preserve power & without the smallest regard to fitness.” (AB to Joseph Alston (his former son-in-law), Nov. 15, 1815 (on the nomination of James Monroe) (Klein, Burr Papers, 2:1165).)
But Burr still believed in the Constitution and rule of law. I share this belief.
Is revolution inevitable now?
Is it? My friend Don thinks so. Many people on both the right and left, and in the middle, think so. Trump seems to be trying his damnedest to provoke one. The stars and planets seem to be in alignment.
Biden, on the other hand, is trying hard to bring peace and prosperity (complacency?) within U.S. borders, while elsewhere, according to some (who obviously oppose him), provoking proxy wars fought by others at our behest, potentially leading to all-out nuclear war.
The issue, I think (domestically at least), comes down to whether you believe the state is too corrupt to serve the people, whether the systems are in the hands of the powerful, whether there is a judiciary system and rule of law that still applies to all. Or not.
You either believe that change can happen within the current system, that the system can still serve the people. Or you don’t.
But the biggest problem to my thinking is that revolutions, insurrections, civil wars cannot be controlled. Once you open that door, there is no way to go back and close it again. Once you go down that road, you’re talking about neighbor against neighbor, in the streets, with guns and machetes in hand.
Beyond that (if you get there), revolutions can (and often do) result in dictatorships. We need to make sure the baby doesn’t get thrown out with the bath water. What’s your strategy? I’m sure Burr would have things to say about this. And I’m sure we’ll hear more from my friend Don.
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TRANSCRIPTS
(1) Don DeBar talking with Craig Pasta Jardula on Convo Couch.
“I agree that centralized power is in essence alienated power. I mean power should be in the hands of the people. And you know, for a Marxist, power should be in the hands of the working class.
You have the conditions to deal with that you have to deal with, when that, you know, like today what’s the world like, what do I do to protect socialism and what exactly is the most essential part to make sure we keep and then what do I gotta adjust in order to stay here?”
***
“Whenever you have power alienated from people — and placed in a repository somewhere, whether it’s the state or a monopoly, whatever it is, there are people that will gravitate towards that and will say “Aha! That’s where it is and I’m going to get it!” And you have to watch that.
But you know, the task of a revolution and if there’s a vanguard (without going into that too much) is to teach the people how to deal with that.
And so, you know, it’s one thing if the state is powerful — — the real question is, who owns the state? If the state is powerful and the people own it, in real terms, I don’t mean ‘Oh well here’s a deed to the state but it’s being managed by Bob.’ I’m talking about if the decisions are actually made in one fashion or another by the people, then there’s not a problem with that.
You’re gonna have a struggle — look, you’ve mentioned it before: I’m a Marxist, I’m a communist. To me the end game, quote unquote, at least the next phase that I’d like to get to — the state withers away. The people conduct their business without the need for coercive measure because they know what to do.
We have all kinds of assistance, whether it’s machines, or whatever the hell comes after machines, you know, to help rationalize production and minimize, you know, the effort put in by human beings to produce the necessities and the luxuries of life, whatever. Whatever that whole process is, I’m for that and I believe that at some point in time you won’t need something that we call ‘a state’ right now.
But you know Libya for example didn’t have a state like that. It really wasn’t it was a gov’t of the people and what happened when it was attacked was you had basically a couple of militias fighting back and NATO bombing the shit out of the country for seven months from March to Oct 20th and it collapsed.
If you’re gonna survive in a hostile world, you gotta be able to take care of yourself. Your father probably told you that when you were a kid. Mine did. My father said to me when I, before I go to the playground, “Some kids are gonna wanna beat you up. What are you gonna do about it?” “I dunno!” “Well you better figure it out cuz they’re gonna do what they want with you otherwise.”
That’s the same situation the people are in after a revolution. You think the bad guys are gonna go away? You think it’s gonna be jubilee? That’s where they’re gonna fight the hardest — when they’re wounded , almost fatally, they’re gonna try to rip your throat out. What’s your strategy?”
(2) Aaron Burr on the Spanish Colonies (ie. Mexico)
Burr, “having understood that it would be agreeable to His Majesty, the Emperor [Napoleon], to see the Spanish American colonies independent and in a state of hostility against Great Britain, offers to accomplish these two aims.” He adds: “His ultimate design would be to expel the European authorities, Spanish, and British, from this continent and from these waters.” He “does not propose to conquer the Spanish colonies, but only to shield them from Spanish domination.”
Burr provides the following observations:
“Of all the systems of colonial government adopted by the European powers, that of Spain is the most rigid and has been pursued with the most inflexible severity. The political oppression and the commercial monopoly (of the mother country) would have been endured by the natives without a murmur (if they had been allowed to share in the advantages); but they are not permitted to hold any honorable or important positions. They are treated like a class of beings of an inferior quality of nature, and they are designated only by insulting ignominious epithets.
They had not even thought or imaged that there was any remedy for these ills until the revolution of the United States came to show them one. The spirit of independence, aided by the action of internal trials and the powerful and alluring influence of the United States’ example became general at that time in the whole area of Spanish America. But they did not know and do not know even today how to begin. The fact is that they have not the means for doing it.
The English colonies were already organized for a revolution. Each one of them had its colonial assembly chosen by the people, authorities loyally instituted around the government. They did not even need to change the established forms. In some of these colonies it would only have been a question of ousting the governor or a small number of other officers placed by the King of Britain.
The Spanish colonies have none of these advantages. There is no method of application, no manner of organizing as a group (no assembly, no meeting point). The desire for independence is universal and even ardent, but it cannot be manifested. The acts and expressions (of feeling) of the Spanish colonial governments must not be confused with those of the inhabitants. The feelings of the natives [by natives is meant those of European blood] are not known to the outside world. They have no way of making them known — no public assembly.
They are just so many separate atoms of the same nature in truth, but without cohesion and agreement.”
(Summary of conversations with Aaron Burr, to Napoleon Bonaparte by Louis Roux, clerk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, 1–13 March 1810, (in Mary-Jo Klein, ed., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton Univ. Press, 1983, 2 vols.), vol. II, pp. 1112–13 and 1107- 8.)
* (N.B. I am not a communist, a Marxist, a socialist, or even a political scientist. Neither can I profess to have studied Marxist, socialist, or communist doctrines or systems. I identify as a Progressive Democrat. My observations here are exclusively textual and based on the plain meaning of the words.)
