I feel like I’ve read plenty about the historical materialist understanding about how the US constitution was formed and its class characteristics, but a lot less about the actual act of declaring independence. I do know how a bunch of the founding fathers made fortunes from land speculation via genocide and stealing indigenous land; and how the Brits wouldn’t let the yanks do that because they didn’t want to start another incredibly expensive war with the native peoples. I’ve also read of Gerald Horne’s thesis about how the founding fathers were worried that GB would totally outlaw slavery. I have a lot respect for Horne, he’s great but frankly I think that theory has little to no concrete evidence supporting it. But those two are the only materialist analyses of independence that I’ve seen so far.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Gerald Horne's thesis is essentially correct. The British Empire was more willing to pivot away from slavery and they did so because they realized constant slave rebellions destabilized the wider empire. Moving away from slavery was a worthwhile sacrifice if say, company rule in India was secure. Horne talked about how colonial troops, as in soldiers levied from the colonized population, would be used to put down colonial uprisings from a different colony. This was pretty much practiced by every single major empire like Rome in order to divide and conquer the colonized subjects. There were Algerian troops when the Vietnamese waged their national liberation struggle against the French (and as the story goes, Algerian POWs were reeducated by the Vietnamese and once they returned to French Algeria, they decided to wage their own national liberation struggle). But once an African slave has a musket in his hands and military training, there's no way to re-enslave him without the slave soldier turning on his masters.

    Meanwhile, the ruling class of the US white settler population derived their entire fortune from slavery. Obviously, a pivot away from slavery would be completely unacceptable because they would be financially ruined. The idea of armed African colonized soldiers was also completely unacceptable even if used as shock troopers against the Indigenous. Notice how outside of a brief period where buffalo soldiers were a thing, the US never really recruited Black people as front line soldiers in order to steal land from the Indigenous. Black people would be forced to do almost every demeaning and toiling tasks as slaves, but dying for the sake of stealing Indigenous land had to be reserved for white settler soldiers. The settler-colonial state's fear of armed Black people exists to this very day. Why else would Reagan sign that gun control bill into law? It was because the BPP demonstrated with fully loaded rifles.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Horne's Counter-Revolution of 1776 is a heck of a read. I definitely recommend it to everyone here. Fascinating stuff. Great to read up on uprisings of the enslaved. I recently finished Beard's Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution and found it to be an interesting epilogue to CR1776. I had no idea the Constitution was basically a Federalist coup of the Articles of Confederacy in response to an agrarian uprising.

      • DoubleShot [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        1 year ago

        There’s a Cosmopod episode where Matt Christman talks about the book, it got me pretty interested to read it.

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          The first half was such an info dump that I thought my head was going to explode, but once Horne catches you up things smooth out and become more managable to keep up with around chapter 5. Important read though.