On Jan 10, 2013, at 12:15 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
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.
Of course defense of slavery was more important than taxes--taxes, because easily negotiable, were totally unimportant. What was essential, far more than slavery, was western expansion (ie., genocide). Washington was a major land-speculator on native american lands and his fellow genocidalist Jefferson made sure that condemnation of native americans and the British laws protecting them had a prominent place in the Declaration.
"the classical definition of 1776 as a bourgeois revolution" is, as you suspect, quite wrong. It was the opening act of US imperialism.
Shane Mage This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Herakleitos of Ephesos
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