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I've just heard that jaw-dropping clip from the president offering his expert warnings about the environmental dangers of windmills. I’m sure that, between them, the various media outlets have given a far bigger and louder platform to his idiocy than they've ever given the advocates of wind power. Such is life for us, as unwilling denizens of the Opposite World structured by the American ruling class. Like the president, corporate media regularly disparages work by anyone whose perspective they’d prefer to dismisses, perhaps especially so for those who've spent years, decades, lifetimes actually studying a subject. Their priority is, first and foremost, showcasing whatever will goose its readership/viewership and the advertising revenues linked to them. In this context, we should welcome the 1619 Project for popularizing what scholars of American History generally have been studying and discussing for half a century: Race cannot be separated from any major event in our history, and the nature of power means that these have been shaped by the imperatives of white supremacy. These insights should actually surprise nobody on a Marxism list, though, if they do, we have all the more reason to praise the project. However, I would not uncritically embrace the New York Times without a few caveats. To state the obvious, causality requires sifting and processed of those diverse motives. In a large and complex population, a broad spectrum of concerns motivates individuals. The nonslaveholders in the Confederate Army or small town kids of all backgrounds enlisting to fight for the U.S. in Vietnam might tell us all sorts of things about their motives. Rather than take these on face value as explanatory of the general cause of the war. Rather we weigh them critically. Then, too, we can't take the outcome of the process as an indication of what motivated those who participated in it. In particular, people my age hopefully have recollections of their parents talking about what hopes they had coming out of the sacrifices of World War II. Most did not struggle because they wanted the permanent warfare state and the Mutually Assured Destruction insanity that emerged. I suppose you could say that this was “one of the principal causes” of WWII—it certainly had to motivate some in power or we wouldn’t have gotten them—but it would be misleading to read this backwards into the past. In the wake of the American Revolution or the Civil War, there were always many people who protested the outcomes as less than they had expected. Certainly, some of the slaveholding gentlemen in slaveholding states opposed secession and became Unionists because they rightly saw secession and war as likely to result in the destruction of the institution of slavery. Did that mean that one of the principal causes of the Union in the Civil War was the preservation of slavery? Some with racialist hypernational politics opposed the Axis in WWII, but that did not mean the Allies favored fascism. At least such erroneous assumptions in these cases would have something from which to leap to a conclusion. To me, though, the fundamental objection to the assertion that the American Revolution was about saving slavery from its abolition by the British are obvious. This refurbished old Tory whitewash of the British Empire is applied over an undercoat of American parochialism. First, the American colonies did not square off against a British Empire eager to abolish slavery. In fact, it did not do so for several generations after the American Declaration . . . Maybe somebody had a TARDIS. Then, too, the empire's move against slavery never emancipated the imperial economy from slavery. Indeed, not only did it make a series of exemptions at the behest of the East Indian Company, but the entire Industrial Revolution rested as firmly on the textile industry, the cotton trade from the American South, and its reliance on African slavery. This British reliance on slavery provided the Confederacy with a strong base of support within the government and provided the Confederacy’s main hope for the salvation of its own independence from the U.S. and the salvation of its “peculiar institution.” Most directly, the American Revolution became an American Revolution—a unitary experience—only after the fact, in the establishment of unified national government with a unified policy. In practice, colonists organized their rebellion through their colonial governments, which forged a common military force and a foreign policy but balked at almost any other move the direction of a national policy. Slavery did not have the same economic power in northern colonies as in the southern—Vermont never had slavery at all. Then, too, the history of the war itself reflected the British belief that they had their strongest support in elite circles among the slaveholders of the South. In this sense, the primary causes of the revolution should reasonably be sought in the grievances common to the colonial governments that waged it, and slavery hardly represented a common cause. The record of the Revolutionary generation on slavery was deplorable, but hardly unmixed. Staring as the struggle for Independence still raged, state governments in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania withdrew the legal sanction for slavery. By 1804, every state north of the Mason-Dixon Line had done so. More substantively, the nascent national government explicitly excluded slavery from the Northwest territory. All the shortcomings notwithstanding, this ensured a sectional base for organizing an effective active opposition to slavery on all levels, including the overt defiance of Federal law in the aid and shelter of runaway slaves. Certainly, the black abolitionists who rooted their arguments in the language of the Declaration of Independence and regularly celebrated the role of African Americans in the Continental Army did not understand the American Revolution as an attempt to avoid the abolition of slavery. Certainly, John Brown thought so, as did all of the Radial Abolitionists. Frederick Douglass even saw the end of slavery as an implicit transformation of American national identity, that would include African Americans. Marx and the entire of the Marxist movement in the U.S. shared this view. These may be arguable positions, but I have yet to see some substantive reason for doing so. Solidarity, Mark L. PS: Perhaps part of the problem is that people think a "bourgeois revolution" is a process that's required to do something for us. The adjective is the key to who owns that process. The people generally get only what we could grab out of the shift of power, but it's hard to find a "bourgeois revolution" that actually presented us with the kind of genuinely democratic transformation we would want. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
