Information on the American Revolution

rosa roja
Marcus, do you really want to attack us as servants of the bourgeoisie? I think what we have in common is that we are sensitive to imperialism and the genocide that goes with it. It's up to you whether you wish to look away from it, but no political party that looks away will ever lead a socialist revolution. As for Gordon Wood, I don't know much about him, but he is clearly a bourgeois historian, and seems to be a favorite of Newt Gingrich to boot.

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Maxwell  Marcus • 11 hours ago
Sorry Marcus no matter your intent you got this one wrong in a colossal fashion.

The founding fathers in almost all cases did everything they could to protect the propertied and disenfranchise the working class people. Whatever is in the DOI or Constitution that suggests protection of the interests of the working class people was the bare minimum so as not to make it too obvious that the people who fought the Revolution - while the founding fathers stood on the sidelines testing the winds - were
being completely sold out. In short order, the property-less were excluded from political meetings, denied the franchise, and betrayed on their promised pay and pensions.

The main impetus behind the American Revolution was NOT an innate aversion to taxation but an uprising of the merchant class against the oppressive East India Trading Co., the world's first large "corporation."

Colonists could not make their own ironware; it had to be purchased from company outlets that sold the goods manufactured back "home" in Great Britain. The list of prohibited items goes on and on. After all,
why else incur the expense of "colonization" -- such as stationing troops and underwriting "explorations" and issuing land grants -- if not to bring the raw materials and profits back home?

Other "revolutionary" interests began to coalesce: Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, and the "class struggle" was replaced with more of an "independence" motif

The founding documents were designed to reign in the "mob" - the mob that had actually fought and won the Revolution.

You are saying to ignore what they did and focus on what they said. I would submit that this is exactly what many people do in all areas of politics, and it is exactly the way they get fooled again and again.

The man who wrote "all men are created equal" owned slaves. One of the men who assisted in producing that document was angling for a lucrative land grant from the crown a month earlier, and used a finagled position as postmaster to eliminate his rivals and build a printing empire. Another man who assisted with those flowery words called for the exclusion of the property-less from political participation and enacted the Alien and Sedition Act. Other "fathers" used the revolution to pull off massive real estate swindles. And that is only the beginning.

You will find their portraits in your wallet, and that is appropriate. They created a system where money is power, and where they and others like them who came later would come out on top and have all power.

Of course they used flowery words - otherwise, how could they have pulled off the deception?

Over the years people have taken their words seriously and fought to bring them into reality, starting with the workers associations right after the Revolution, and then with the Abolitionists in the 1830s and on.

You can honor and remember those fighters if you wish but please not the deeds or words of the "founding fathers."


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Marla
This is just my interpretation of war that in most cases they are usually started by the exploitation of the poor and disenfranchised by the wealthy and the American Revolution was no exception. True, the Colonist (or Patriots) may have wanted their freedom from what they believed was tyranny but that never excluded them from being tyrannic of their own right. The Colonist took land, killed innocents, robbed native populaces of resources and shelter and displaced families (sound familiar?)

Exploitation of one human being by another is the truest ugliness of capitalism. Both sides had much to gain and much to lose and it was both sides who were funded by large sums of money to propagate bloodshed all in the name of freedom and liberty. In school, I too was taught to believe that America could do no wrong simply on the basis that was the American Revolution and how it always stood for what was right. No one spoke of disease, starvation, and the brutal slaughter of indigenous people, and no one ever said to me it was a rich man's war (like most wars are) because it definitely took a lot of finance to keep it rolling.

In the end it was the rich man who gained his "freedom" the exploited never had such a luxury.

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Infarction • a day ago
The words of Jefferson, et al are beautiful in their richness and vision, and indeed, they are world-shaking even today. Yet, in the main, the American war for independence from the British Crown was mostly a war led by one rich white-man's club against the "tyranny" of another rich white-man's club.

The waving of little US flags that were made in a sweatshop in some distant hellhole, notwithstanding, the US is still far from the pillar of democracy that many of its rulers proclaim it to be. The US Constitution still allows for slavery of those incarcerated in the for-profit gulag run by the oligarchy. Financial inequality is at a point not seen in the US in nearly a hundred years. The notion of free quality education is but a distant memory. The empire's eternal wars for profit continue unabated.

Whatever high-sounding phrases the nation's founders composed are just echoes in the breeze. These are long forgotten as the occupying police forces across "the land of the free" continue their summary executions at will. The president of the US declares that he will look forward, not backward regarding the war crimes of past administrations as he declares the right to imprison and murder anyone on the planet at his whim. The banksters are too big to fail and jail.

Happy 4th of July? Don't make me laugh!

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Maxwell
I think when modern Americans read the bios of the "Founding Fathers" (what again did they "find" in a stolen land?),they can't look at them objectively because that precise mix of qualities and backgrounds set the pattern for a new type of aristocracy distinct from the European aristocracy, and a new type of tyranny, and that became the model for what we take for granted to this day as the qualities that are appropriate for leadership and power. John Kerry's bio e.g. would fit in nicely there - wealthy, educated, married into money, law background, connections. We can't imagine any other narrative for success, any other hierarchy, any other path to power, so the bios of the founding fathers don't seem remarkable or interesting to us. "Of course. That is the way the world works." We unconsciously look at those bios from the viewpoint of the American ruling class, and we can't see the American aristocracy because we are immersed in the pervasive apologies for it and assume it as an inevitable and unavoidable state of affairs. "He is a pretty smart and accomplished man." "You can't argue with success." "Well he has done some good things."

The pattern that was set by the Revolution and the Constitution persists today. The net results of that pattern are tyranny and destruction. Who was set free by the revolution and for what purposes? Who is protected by the Constitution? Those who find a way to rise, to make a fortune one way or another - born to it, marry it, use capitalism to amass it, kiss up to it as some sort of court jester - as with the attorneys for the wealthy and powerful. This is a distinctly American pattern, and is not a law of the universe or the inevitable outcome of something about human nature.

This new class - from New England shipping magnates to slave traders to bankers to real estate speculators to brokers to dealers and developers,with their connections and law degrees and control over the legislatures - ascended to power and remains in power. Those whose skills and contributions cannot be leveraged into massive fortunes are left behind. We can't expect a nurse or a teacher to make a fortune selling their skills on the supposed free market, and that means they are powerless in the American system, unless they organize, and the history of the country is an ongoing ruthless suppression of such organizing.

The Revolution liberated, and the Constitution protects, a new group of striving, upwardly mobile men and a particular path to amassing wealth and gaining power. The crown was a check on their lust for power. The working class didn't benefit by the Revolution and is not protected by the Constitution. Were that true, then we would expect to find that the working class would have been dramatically worse off in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and in the UK itself over the years.

We are to believe that because we threw off the monarchy, and because we
don't have a European style landed aristocracy, that we are therefore “free.” Pointing out that there were working class men fighting in the Revolution who, "whether or not they had property demanded the franchise" tells us nothing. Working class people at all times and places have yearned to overthrow the tyranny of the aristocracy. That doesn't legitimatize or mitigate the replacement of one tyranny with another.


 I have not lost sight of what the Constitution and the American Revolution are purportedly about. I was educated in the public schools in the US that repeated the myth of freedom and equality in the US everyday.

I simply object to blatant hypocrisy. Lots of pretty words about high ideals were written by slave masters and landowners, who would not give the poor or even their wives the same equality that these rich white men felt entitled.

I admit, you had going until you brought up Bernie Sanders. That tool of the Democratic Party simply corralled the gullible back into the Democratic Party. He was a supporter of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama from the get go.

This illustrates the points I've made in the posts on this thread. What has really changed in the US since the lauded revolution. It appears to me that the counterrevolutionary forces have rolled back whatever hopes workers might have had at any point in US history. The nation is still ruled by the aristocracy, even after 240 years.

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Aaron Aarons • a day ago
For those interested in a left critique of the settler-colonists' rebellion against English rule, I recommend The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne. I also recommend an earlier book, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution by Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen.

And yes, slavery and White supremacy, including the suppression and near-extermination of native peoples, should be treated as more important than the issues like hereditary limited monarchy and heavy-handed treatment of the settler population by the mother country. If that's "identity politics", it's preferable to the white identity politics that underlies United States nationalism.

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 лидия  Aaron Aarons • 17 hours ago
I could add the recc of "Settlers" by G. Sakai.

лидия  Human6 • 17 hours ago
Slavery was not something out of order in USA capitalism - and nothing "pre-feudal", but very modern - slaves produced to capitalist market and the Northern capitalism depended on their labor too. It was a capitalist slavery, so to speak.
And do not forget that this "liberation" struggle was based on the Native's dispossession and genocide and opened the opportunity to even more of the same. Not unlike the Zionist "struggle", no wonder that some Zionists saw in USA colonization a good example to themselves - like Jabotinski, for ex.

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Aaron Aarons
"Did the Revolution of '76 overturn property relations? No, but it was a vital step towards doing so in 1865."

The settler-colonial counter-revolution of 1776 had, as one of its consequences, the survival -- and more than mere survival! -- of chattel slavery in the United States for three decades after its 1834 abolition in the British Empire! It did, however, accelerate the expropriation of the communal lands of native nations and the conversion of those lands into capitalist property, or into the semi-feudal property of slave-owners.

And it is obscene to compare the colonial-settler rebellion of 1776 with the Irish rebellion of 1916 that Lenin was referring to. If there was an analog in pre-partition Ireland to the American insurrection, it was the threatened Ulster Protestant rebellion against the possible recognition by the British state of majority rule in a united Ireland. Other analogous colonial-settler rebellions against the British Empire were the Zionist war against both the British state and the indigenous people in Palestine, and the white 'Rhodesian' "declaration of independence" in Zimbabwe in 1965. None of these rebellions deserve the support or praise of anybody on the left.

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http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/14/8-myths-and-atrocities-about-christopher-columbus-and-columbus-day-151653

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/05/18/american-history-myths-debunked-no-native-influence-founding-fathers-113702

https://blackmattersus.com/10537-bad-old-racial-profiling-interview-with-victim/?utm_source=service_worker&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=push20160408

https://www.emaze.com/@AOQITTLO/Civil-Rights

http://libcom.org/news/brexit-tanks-eu-working-class-12062016

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/whitney-dunlapfowler/the-black-history-month-o_b_9253710.html?utm_hp_ref=bv-life
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solerso  rosa roja • 3 hours ago
It also ignores dozens of European peasant revolts and movements to weaken the power of the nobility from the late 14th century right up to 1776
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rosa roja
To expand on my original comment, the article is not only ahistorical, but it is embarrassingly Eurocentric. What are we to make of a sentence like this? "Before the American Revolution, society for nearly 2,000 years had been based on the aristocratic principle, the "great chain of being," and the divine right of kings." (Or this: "the American Revolution provided THE ideological and political impetus for the French Revolution and ALL subsequent democratic, egalitarian and socialist movements"(!))

Exactly what "society" and where are you talking about? Do you mean the Islamic civilization that led directly to Europe's "enlightenment"? Perhaps you mean the egalitarian Iroquois federation in eastern north America, which provided the inspiration for parts of the US constitution and, in my opinion, provided the example that inspired the early socialists in Europe (and which demonstrably inspired the womens' movement centered in central New York. Even the site of the famous meeting at Seneca Falls, is named for one of the Iroquois nations). If we are honest, the article can only be called childish.