I've always considered the American Revolution a textbook example of a bougie revolution, in that a fuedal aristocrat's rule was overthrown by landowning capitalists not of the old fuedal nobility. IIRC Marx said something similar about it.
But last night a friend challenged that idea by pointing out that the fuedal base of society was de facto maintained via slavery, even if de jure there was no longer a king. In their interpretation, the war for independence wasn't actually a revolution, as the old divisions of nobility/serfs were maintained and simply rebranded along racial lines of white/Black, with indigenous peoples being considered almost completely outside the polity, similar to how many Jewish and Roma communities were regarded in Europe.
Thoughts?
Also wasn't sure if this went in history or askchapo
Yes and the poverty the sharecroppers were kept in was absurd. I've seen photos that looked like they were straight out of some war ravaged country but it was actually just rural Mississippi or Alabama. Starving kids. Shacks with dirt floors, no running water, no doors nor windows. Easily treatable diseases maiming and killing people. Unfortunately blacks in this country still face a lot of this even if it's urban rather than rural.
Your take isn't galaxy brained. Capitalism emerged out of feudalism and it emerged unequally across the globe. Those different, unequal developments are the contradictions which drive history. Idk if you've read Hammer and Hoe (you should if you haven't) but some of those sharecroppers organized with the CPUSA in the 30 and 40s. They would go on be crucial advisors for the civil rights/black activists of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The semi-feudal system of the south, distinct from its marginally better counterpart in the north, would be the locus of civil rights organizing for decades.