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I sincerely admire Horne's productivity and much of his work, but you can pay for too much haste. A fuller refutation would require a small volume in itself. Much of it would be a repeat of what Herbert Aptheker and others have written about the subject, though I would make a somewhat different approach in one key respect. A bit of googling in the Marxist Internet Archives, as well as generally, will provide statements and restatements of it. But my objection doesn't rest on the authority of tradition. It just doesn't make sense to think that we can separate the ideology and values generalized among a colonial people from those imposed by the colonizer. White supremacy was part and parcel of the rationale imposed on the colonies from the beginning, not something that the colonists conjured independently. Again, revolutions are complex processes and people have different motives, but anyone asserting that the colonists in general wanted independence because imperial Britain was about to eliminate slavery has a heavy burden of proof, and I've not seen anybody make it. (It's like saying that Vietnam was struggling to get out from under the U.S. out of fear that it would actually pass the Equal Rights Amendment.) I think the classic Marxist analysis of what a bourgeois revolution is explains why they did not act consistently against slavery. You certainly can make the case that slavery was placed on the path to destruction in North America after 1776. And, yes, history took its own sweet time in this. And, yes, I don't like it. But back to that expression "bourgeois revolution." Note the adjective. Now, as to that one key respect on which I'm not comfortable with the standard Marxist approach to the American Revolution . . . the fate of native Americans. Simply put, the British, for reasons of their own that mimicked the earlier pragmatism of the French, sought to restrict Euroamerican expansion and ethnic cleansing. The trend after 1776 deepened the worst aspects of this. But, of course, what did the English Revolution do for the Irish . . . or pretty much anyone who wasn't English? Again, back to that expression "bourgeois revolution" . . . . ML _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
