Yesterday I posted a link to an article titled 10 Things You Should Know
About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ to the Marxism mailing list
written by Imara Jones, who has a BA in political science from Columbia
University and an MA in economics from the London School of Economics.
Item 5 in Jones’s list (“Defense of slavery, more than taxes, was
pivotal to America’s declaration of independence”) did not sit well with
some of our subscribers, all of whom were veteran Marxists and amenable
I am sure to the classical definition of 1776 as a bourgeois revolution,
or what is sometimes referred to as “the first American revolution” that
would be fulfilled—like Jesus’s second coming—by Lincoln’s Civil War.
One old hand said this:
I think this is a very questionable essay on the “Things” the essay
lays out. I would proceed with caution on some of this stuff, especially
on the economics and the ‘reason’ the colonies pushed for independence.
Another, not quite as long in the tooth as the first, was even more
dismissive:
I put this in the same category of article as “10 things you won’t
learn about space from Star Wars.”
As it so happens, I keep a copy of Gary B. Nash’s “The Unknown American
Revolution”, a “revisionist” study of the type I am particularly keen
on. For those who have been following my analysis of the bourgeois
revolution over the years, I am more than a bit skeptical of the
“revolutionary” bourgeoisie—particularly when it comes to slavery. When
the Communist Party was in the giddying heights of its pro-America
populism during the New Deal, I wonder why nobody with both feet on the
ground and a grasp of American history would have advised against the
idea of naming the party’s school in New York after the slave-master
Thomas Jefferson. But, hey, that’s just me.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/lord-dunmore-and-the-ethiopian-regiment/
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