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.

  • mazdak
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • nohaybanda [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      In their defence, this is something the British definitely would and have done.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        If it wasn't so profitable in China they'd totally have shipped opium to the US. Which gives us the concerning prospect of the South trying to Jem Hadar their slaves.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not an uncommon thought at the time. Bach's coffee cantata makes a lot more sense if you view it as a type of proto stoner comedy.

  • ProfessorAdonisCnut [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    It wasn't just the potential cost of another war with native peoples, it was also their reduced ability to control or extract wealth from inland colonization compared to the coast.

    I find the fear of abolition by the British somewhat hard to believe, the slave economy of the 13 colonies at the time was predominantly tobacco (and sugar elsewhere), which was waning in viability as the founders saw it. Meanwhile the abolition movement in Britain barely existed at the time of the American revolution, let alone being seen as an imminent prospect in the lead up to it. Even for decades afterwards there was far more British focus on opposing any continuation of the Atlantic slave trade (something the USA actively joined them in) than abolition of the practice itself; after all by then the vast majority of slave ships were destined for their rivals in South and Central America, while the British colonies that used slave labour were self-sustaining.

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

    I can't quite remember, but Sakai might have had a take on this in settlers. But really, it generally boils down to the interests of the British empire conflicted with the interests of profit and capital, and so the only tangentially attached American capitalists were able to rebel.

  • Dolores [love/loves]
    ·
    1 year ago

    basically the moment you permanently set up a a new settler ruling class in a non-metropolitan area you've created a situation where the local elites of the colony and the metropole have conflicting interests. the settler ruling class want to concentrate wealth & power, the metropole requires them to be shipping it back. in this way it's a premodern phenomenon, and something that was streamlined out of capitalist accumulation. it was unfeasible to extract the wealth of the americas without sending loads of supervisors & labor over for good---the imperial conquest of africa ooth was carried out by people who mostly returned to the metropole & didn't need to stick around to compensate for shipping/communication times

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    England had trouble managing a colony that was across the atlantic so they kept hiking up taxes to make it worth it. This pissed off the proto-bourgeoisie who liked having money, so the proto-bourgeoisie among the American merchants and planters decided to take a gamble and declare independence. Also the American ruling class wanted to expand westward into indigenous territory in spite of treaties the British crown had with indigenous tribes. Granted, it's not as though the British crown was going to honor those treaties forever, but the crown wanted to break those treaties on their own terms, when they thought it was the right time, while the ruling class among colonists wanted unfettered indigenous genocide, and the crown wasn't letting them have that.

    So basically proto-booj complaining about "muh taxes and muh regulations"

    EDIT: Your post says all this so I'm not sure I understand the question. There doesn't need to be much more to it.

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      deleted by creator

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

      kept hiking up taxes to make it worth it

      Fun fact, the Boston Tea Party happened because of lower taxes on tea. The American bourgeoisie were selling smuggled tea to avoid paying taxes and were pissed they couldn’t make bank anymore when the East India Company was allowed to sell cheaper tea.

  • meth_dragon [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    reading veblen has made me depressed

    feels like everyone just ends up ditching material conditions and mostly discount it as a secondary effect in favor of status signaling once socioeconomic conditions improve past a certain point with the end result being hillary-apartment

    someone needs to invent the field of ideological engineering

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      deleted by creator

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      deleted by creator

      • meth_dragon [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        i think confucianism tried to mitigate this by putting merchants at the bottom of the class ladder but that is like a bandaid on gunshot wound tier of fix

        just feeling doomerpilled about unseating the primacy of status relations at a societal level once you get past basic subsistence conditions

        • UlyssesT
          ·
          edit-2
          15 days ago

          deleted by creator