RE: emancipation and the american revolution

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My comments are addressed to the discussion and not to any particular
person  (I am developing an intense anti-bourgeois dislike of personal
ownership in debate, associated as it is becoming in my mind, with an
adversarial contest that has no other purpose but profit-and its
flipside):

Many Southerners, including some people of color, owned slaves in the
Revolutionary-Thirteen-Colonies-and-fledgling-United States up to the
Ante-Bellum days of Dixie --*BUT* the most slaves were owned by the
least people.  The biggest plantation owners, of whom there were few,
owned the most slaves.

Some time ago we discussed whether the Glorious Revolution was a
"bourgeois-democratic revolution."  I do not believe there was a
conclusive negation of that hypothesis, that indeed there were
institutional changes that advanced the position of the bourgeoisie,
that is the capitalist class --(most imporantly, economically and
politically, and not "the middling classes")-- relative to the
blueblooded aristocracy.

While on the whole the War of Independence was more a power grab of
great landowners (Charles Beard introduced this iconoclastic notion to
the American academy some time ago), there were also elements of motive
(e.g., Tom Paine) and outcome (abolition of primogeniture) that add
credence to the claims of a bourgeois-democratic American Revolution.

Splits in elites' competing interests *plus* temporary political
compromises made by  necessity can open the revolutionary moment.  This
is why some historians, such as W.E.B. DuBois, refer to the Civil
War/Reconstruction as the Second American Revolution --in effect, or by
lost potential.  You may demand, dyspeptically, definitively: "Well, was
it a fucking revolution or not?!"  I would ask you identify why it could
be, and why it could NOT be. There has quite clearly not been a
socialist revolution in the United States, yet.  I would tend to
sympathize with Karl Marx in his optimism for the Union side, as opposed
to any other possibility at the time.

The take-home message in this discussion is what leads to splits in
them, and how to encourage such splits--as well as what causes splits
among us, and how to manifest the compromises, concessions, alliances,
and will to realize the revolutionary moment, and stoke it.