Re: [Marxism] : Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the US

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Gerald Horne, who notably authored biographies of WEB as well as Shirley Graham 
Du Bois as well as editing the Du Bois encyclopedia, repudiated this notion of 
a bourgeois revolution as a) an emancipatory project that came up short on 
slavery, as well as b) something grounded in a significant progressive effort 
altogether.

Instead he has argued convincingly that the goal of the American rebellion 
against the crown was explicitly and intentionally about the preservation of 
slavery as a response to the inroads being made by abolitionists in the British 
parliament. The entire set of taxes upon goods that fueled “no taxation without 
representation” was taxation on goods produced by the slave trade!  See his 
Counterrevolution of 1776 and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism for more 
information. I interviewed Horne about this discussion last year.

https://washingtonbabylon.com/six-questions-dr-gerald-horne-p1/

Pertinent quote:

AS: Where do you think the idea that American independence as a ‘bourgeois 
democratic revolution’ was a step forward for mankind came from? 

GH: First, it seems to me that you can call these events a ‘bourgeois 
democratic revolution’ as long as you have a major caveat, which is that, if 
this was a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’, let’s not have any more! Let that 
be the last one!

If you are going to use that term then critique that term. And I would say that 
is particularly true in the United States, which is the seed bed of critiques 
of revolutions that have happened worldwide since 1776. There’s an entire 
industry with people making good livings criticizing every revolution since 
1776, sometimes in a one-sided manner, be it the French revolution, the Cuban 
revolution, the Russian revolution, etc.

That shows me folks in the United States are capable of doing a multi-sided 
critique of revolutions except 1776, where they come to this absurd conclusion 
that ‘Oh, it went well, except, you know, the genocide and mass enslavement.’ 
It reminds me of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia when the mayor said 
afterwards “Well, everything went fine except we destroyed the neighborhood.”

What kind of thinking is that?

Part of the problem is that until the anti-Jim Crow movement took flight, many 
Black historians in particular were barred from the archives or even were 
barred from graduate school and that handicapped the ability of those who might 
be most disposed to take a critical look at history.

Now obviously it doesn’t speak well for those that did have access to the 
archives that they could not come to this conclusion because, as I’ve been 
saying for some years, this is not a difficult case to make. This was not 
rocket science coming to these conclusions!

What was created was an apartheid state. It was like going to South Africans 
and saying ‘Well, the Nationalist Party, they did well for the Afrikaner 
people, it was a whole affirmative action program for the Afrikaners that 
lifted many out of poverty and that served as a precursor for what might happen 
to the Africans under nationalist party rule.’ If you took that position, 
people would laugh you out of court!

But basically that’s what has happened in North America, the ability of the 
1776 regime to take land from Native Americans and redistribute it to European 
migrants and lift them out of poverty, I guess that serves as a template for 
bettering the lives of Native Americans.

Best regards 
Andrew Stewart 
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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2019 19:48:13 +
From: Brian Kelly 
To: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu
Subject: [Marxism] Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in
   the US
Message-ID: <1fc1fda9-1098-4af5-a01e-73dae0785...@me.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8

Please share link: 

Brian Kelly, ?Slave Self-Acitivty and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United 
States: Jubilee and the Boundaries of Black Freedom,? Historical Materialism 
27.3 (2019): 31-76.

available here: 
https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/27/3/article-p31_2.xml<https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/27/3/article-p31_2.xml>

"What is needed urgently...is a frame- work that can move beyond the 
juxtaposition between high politics and slave self-activity and map, with some 
precision, the convergences and antagonisms between the bourgeois revolution 
and ground-level slave initiative. The point is not to find a middle ground 
between high politics and black agency, but to offer a framework that can 
explain their essential, dynamic interaction in the most important 

[Marxism] Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the US

[Brian Kelly via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
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Please share link: 

Brian Kelly, ‘Slave Self-Acitivty and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United 
States: Jubilee and the Boundaries of Black Freedom,” Historical Materialism 
27.3 (2019): 31-76.

available here: https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/27/3/article-p31_2.xml 


"What is needed urgently...is a frame- work that can move beyond the 
juxtaposition between high politics and slave self-activity and map, with some 
precision, the convergences and antagonisms between the bourgeois revolution 
and ground-level slave initiative. The point is not to find a middle ground 
between high politics and black agency, but to offer a framework that can 
explain their essential, dynamic interaction in the most important 
revolutionary upheaval in US history and offer a coher- ent explanation for 
Washington’s ultimate failure to deliver on the promise of black freedom. 
Potentially, such an interpretation offers a key not only to un derstanding the 
dynamics of wartime emancipation, but to the whole of the period analysed by Du 
Bois (1860–80) – tumultuous years encompassing war, the attempt to construct 
bi-racial democracy in the liberated South, and the decisive defeat of that 
project in Reconstruction’s violent overthrow." 

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