A revolutionary of his time

Tom Paine: A Political Life
By John Keane
Little, Brown and Co, 1995, 644 pp., $48.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon Thomas Paine was cheered by millions of common folk back in the 18th century. He wrote what were perhaps the three political best-sellers of that century defending democratic rights — Common Sense, The Rights Of Man and the rationalist's bible, The Age Of Reason. He got up the noses of the "dominant classes, pickled in port and privilege" (in John Keane's delicious phrase from this new biography of Paine) who loathed him. After a colourful, if not particularly political, youth (apprentice corset-maker, pirate, Methodist preacher and public servant collecting excise revenue), Paine eventually blew the whistle on corruption in the Excise Branch and defended his colleagues' claims for improved wages. Sacked because of this, he left in disgust for the American colonies in 1774 with the revolutionary war for independence just around the corner. Common Sense, the first of his blockbuster pamphlets, roused the American republican fighters against a "silly, distant, pretentious, profligate" and, above all, oppressive English monarchy. Paine returned to England to bring home the revolution against undemocratic rule by the rich and their allies in Church and Crown. Conservatives like Edmund Burke were attacking the French Revolution and arguing that "we fear God, we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests and with respect to nobility". Sucks to that, said Paine, who detested deference. The Rights of Man was his response, a powerful argument for representative democracy, which shook England from crowned head to artisan toe. As the government moved to repress the democratic agitation, Paine escaped to revolutionary France. Elected to the National Convention in 1792, Paine, however, found himself out of his depth. A revolutionary against autocratic systems of government, Paine was a moderate on economic issues. He believed in private property and market competition. An extremist in America and England, he was amongst the most moderate of the Girondists (who represented people of property) in France, and an opponent of the Jacobins (who appealed to the poor urban artisans and labourers). In an environment of panic and fear of aristocratic counter-revolution, Paine was jailed and narrowly escaped the guillotine. With the fall of Robespierre, and the end of the radical phase of the revolution based on popular power, Paine was released but grew disenchanted with the new rule by men of wealth and the later dictatorship of Napoleon. He retired to America where he died in 1809. A great story of a life "lived to some purpose", as Paine wrote, but Keane unfortunately shares Paine's political limitations. Keane is untroubled by Paine's conversion to the principles of the market in the split between the wealthy capitalist patriots and the poor in the American Revolution, and Keane detests the Jacobins in the French. The French Revolution in its radical Jacobin years prompted a spiral of counter-revolution and revolutionary violence because it threatened the rule of wealth and promoted the entry of the popular masses onto the political stage. For Keane, such profound social revolution was bound to lead to heartbreak and tears. He trots out a woeful collection of anti-revolutionary clichés fresh from the vaults of Red Scares of the past: "violence begets violence", "revolutions suck the blood of their own children", and "ruthless revolutionaries, cold-blooded schemers, ... savage and cruel and drunk with power" spoil a moderate, clean revolution. An anti-Marxist like Keane can champion Paine because of Paine's absence of Bolshie economic levelling or revolutionary democracy which goes beyond parliamentary representation. Paine argued for equal civil rights but in economic society, he thought, one is either employer or employed, and the state must not tamper with this other than with controls on monopoly capital, minimal standards for workers' wages and conditions, and social protection via pensions and health care — the very manifesto of the modern social democrat. Paine's "rights of man" were the rights of all men (not women) to choose who to be governed by, not to rule themselves. Paine did not argue for economic democracy because he could have no conception of how economic power subverts parliamentary democracy into rule by the rich. It was to be a further 20 or 30 years before the bulk of the people Paine spoke for, the independent but pauperised artisans, were to be driven down by the logic of capital accumulation into the ranks of the modern proletariat, and whose formation of trade unions to engage in the class struggle against capital provided the basis for Marx's socialist theory. Paine had nothing to rely on for his hopes for a harmonious and rational world other than "common sense" and "reason" which could only be pop-guns against the economic power of the ruling class. But Paine showed weavers, miners, labourers and artisans that reason can cut through the undergrowth of custom and superstition which kept people isolated and powerless. Paine opened the minds of the pre-proletariat and later generations of workers to the realisation that what the priests said about the Bible, or the rich about society, is wrong, and that something should be done about the rights of the poor for a share in their world. The poor worked out for themselves that their weapon would be organisation and combination. Those who believe in the rights of the common person today can still cheer our Tom Paine.