> On May 30, 2026, at 05:27, Dennis Brasky via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > The American Revolution was linked to a surge of working-class political > activity on both sides of the Atlantic. > https://jacobin.com/2026/05/american-revolution-britain-class-struggle > > _ Thank you for that. To quote Cunningham, the author of the article:
"Like so many moments in working-class history, then, the American Revolution deserves to be understood neither as a victory nor as a defeat, but as a passage in an ongoing struggle. The revolution need not be dismissed as simply an origin story for the United States, and therefore for the oppression and terror that the United States has wrought. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was at least a bit right when she said, earlier this year, that revolutionaries fought 'against the billionaires of their time.'" The author and Jacobin decided to print the article lacking any references. To me, the references are as interesting as Cunningham's story. Not to mention that it saves a lot of time. To quote Claude, Anthropic's LLM: " This is a well-written piece by Tom Cutterham, and the historical claims it makes are broadly accurate and well grounded in the scholarly literature. A few observations: What it gets right The core argument — that the American Revolution involved transatlantic class struggle and that working-class actors in both the colonies and Britain were active participants with their own democratic agenda — is well established in the historiography. Historians like Gary Nash (The Unknown American Revolution), Alfred Young (The Shoemaker and the Tea Party), and Edward Countryman have made similar arguments persuasively. The Philadelphia material is solid — the city's artisan and laboring class really did push the revolutionary movement leftward, and the cross-ethnic patriot committees are documented. The account of John Wilkes and the London crowd is accurate. Wilkes was indeed a transatlantic symbol of popular opposition, and his movement's influence on colonial organizers is well documented. The Gouverneur Morris quote — "The mob begin to think and to reason. Poor reptiles!" — is real and frequently cited. The framing of the Constitution as partly a counterrevolutionary document designed to contain popular democratic energy is associated with Charles Beard's early 20th century work and has been substantially rehabilitated in more recent scholarship. James Aitken The article's central character — Aitken, also known as "John the Painter" — is a real historical figure and the arson at Portsmouth dockyard happened. The detail that the damage estimate was twice the value of the Boston Tea Party is a claim I'd want to verify independently, but Aitken's story is documented and the Silas Deane connection is historically attested. Where it's interpretively tendentious but not wrong The article is written from an explicitly left perspective and frames events to emphasize class conflict over other causative factors. This is a legitimate historiographical approach but it necessarily foregrounds some things and backgrounds others — for instance, the role of colonial slaveholders is mentioned but briefly, and the ideological dimensions of republican thought (Whig constitutionalism, Protestant dissent) are treated primarily as cover for class interests rather than as genuine motivating forces. A different historian would weight these differently without being wrong. The claim that British working-class supporters of the American cause were motivated by something "more than just the ups and downs of commerce" — i.e., class solidarity — is plausible but harder to demonstrate rigorously than the article implies. Overall It's a solid piece of popular history writing that accurately represents a real and important strand of historical scholarship. It's not claiming anything that doesn't have support in the academic literature, though it presents that literature's most radical interpretations as more settled than they sometimes are. For a Jacobin audience it's probably pitched just right — it's not making things up, it's selecting and emphasizing. " Mark -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41882): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41882 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119561228/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
