Title is a joke but it's a lot of info to process and if anyone else here has read it they should converse with me about it.
One thing I was thinking about when I was in the middle of it was the fact that I have heard some pop materialists (podcasters don't misunderstand me) who are quick to disagree with the book's premise, saying it's too focused on only one aspect of the revolution. And even in the text, Horne mentions frustration with people who overlook racism in favor of only class analysis
I was only a history minor in college, I'm not well-read enough to dispute either of these positions. But the idea of the revolution being primarily a sort of "brexit to keep slaves" fits so well into my understanding of the situation, so I'm finding myself leaning towards Horne's position.
So naturally I want internet strangers to help me decide instead. What true proletarian elements of the revolution am I ignoring?
This author talks a lot about how the early momentum of the American Revolution had a proletarian character- with the first year of open hostilities and the handful of years before that being characterized by riots and runaways- and was later coopted by gentry and businessmen. It's an analysis that pretty broadly applies to other state-threatening events, especially color revolutions: they aren't orchestrated from the ground on their own, but rather occur as capitalists work to steer any unrest in a direction that favors them.
The French Revolution was pretty similar, started with hunger riots in Paris which spiraled and were taken over as a vehicle for the grievances of the bourgeoisie.
If we're lucky there are organized communist revolutionaries to steer the unrest