The American Revolution: What The Left Gets Wrong (Part 2)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- Part 2 of my podcast with Marxist Historian James Vaughn on the American Revolution
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James Vaughn is a Marxist historian and professor at the University of Chicago. We discuss the history of the American Revolution and what people on the left tend to get wrong about it. James explains how the "progressive" narrative of the American Revolution differs from the classical Marxist position on the American Revolution and the history of bourgeois revolutions in general. In the previous episode, I asked asked James questions regarding the role of slavery in the American Revolution and in this episode, we focus more on the question of genocide and the racism of the American Founding Fathers. The totality of the American project and its contradictions are important to analyze for leftists, and that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Outro Music by Karl Casey
Part 3 is exclusive for Patrons only: www.patreon.com/OneDime
Listen to the full podcast before jumping to conclusions. Throughout this episode and the last one, I asked Professor Vaughn some tough questions regarding the American Revolution's contradictory legacy.
This year I also read Gordon Wood's books "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" and "Empire of Liberty" which seem to back up a lot of what Prof Vaughn says, minus the whole Marxism part that we discussed before. If anyone has any evidence or strong points to counter what Vaughn is saying, I am all ears. As I do with all major events, such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I like to understand the full contradictory truth of an event, rather than running with a one-dimensional narrative about it. Feel free to share your thoughts, what you agreed with, and what you disagreed with in the comments below!
I feel like it's sort of obvious the he never demonstrates the existence of this "radical bourgeoisie". We can talk about whatever good points that individuals with a platform (important) in different classes had, without laundering the history of British and American colonialism. I'm also unmoved about the implication that the left has any major misconceptions toward the benevolence of the British mercantilists and colonialists, or the evolving aristocracy in the U.S. south. Just unimpressed.
It's just fantasy, pure apologia.
This was interesting, but I have two main issues:
While I think he’s right about the founders not predicting the English abolishing slavery, I wish y’all had discussed how many of them were land speculators, and that the English actually kinda-sorta honored their treaties with native Americans. It’s even stated as a grievance in the Declaration.
And he arbitrarily narrows the definition of ‘racism’ to suit his narrative. The comically complex laws which based one’s rights/status on the race of parents, grandparents, etc date back to the very earliest days of the Atlantic slave trade. The idea that racism was invented-rather than just given a pseudo-scientific update-in the 19th century seems downright dishonest coming from someone presuming to educate people about history.
Actually, third issue:
Pointing to the benevolent, enlightened language they used to describe their aims and motivations seems naive. Does he also believe that our modern statesmen just want to spread “freedom” and “democracy”?
More importantly, if you could prove they really believed their own bullshit-would it really matter? Outcomes matter more than intentions, as far as I’m concerned.
(Hope I’m not being rude. You have an outstanding channel.)
@Vesta_the_Lesser funny enough, I was one of those people until my early 30s. Prompted by Jordan Peterson, I gave myself the assignment to investigate those kinds of things, mainly to win debates, and what I learned led me to respect and ultimately endorse communism.
I’m not interested in western libs’ misconceptions about outcomes; I’m talking about the actual, material outcomes themselves.
This is desperate last ditch attempt to salvage the reputation of the Founding Ethnic Cleansers. None of this mangled garbage should be taken seriously.
.... yea idk i ... might have to listen again but this felt like a lot of mental gymnastics to handwave essential pieces of the shell country that the colonies started as to begin with ...
That 2nd wave KKK in PA is for real. It’s not really entirely gone, trust me. I’m from Pittsburgh, but I’ve been all over this state. Lived in several parts of central PA, spent a good amount of time in eastern PA, and in the right areas you have some scary racism. Like, idk if there’s many actual sundown towns any longer, but there’s definitely areas that you don’t want to be if black..
Does it really matter if an insignificant minority of people who are of african descent own property and so can vote if the vast majority of african descent are enslaved? Does that not make the actual reality of the founding father's revolutionary project incredibly racist in practice, seeing as the constitution, even if it doesnt mention skin colour, doesnt apply to the vast majority of black people anyway due to them being enslaved? Maybe the founding fathers didnt think they were racist, but what does it matter, especially if the framework of what they created with "the founding" could easily be hijacked by a racist populist like Jackson?
I could be wrong, but does James not recognize the enslaved in the south as an enslaved proletariat as Dubois does? I do think that's a key factor that is often forgotten.
How could Washington have believed Native Americans could be integrated into American society when he burned their villages for decades? His name was George "Conotocaurius" Washington for a reason. American mythology is alive and well.
He didn't burn their villages because he thought they were subhuman, he burned their villages because that's how he waged war. The man set fire to Manhattan because his British enemies were occupying it. The German soldiers did not commit atrocities in Belgium in 1914 because the Belgians were an inferior race, they did it because they were at war and the civilians were not cooperative. Washington's formative military experiences were in a campaign with British friendly indigenous people against the French colonials and their indigenous allies. It's possible he had positive views of Indians and still subjected them to state violence, because he did the same thing to French, British, and American people at various points in his military career.
@@evanfreshman2450 He didn't enslave Africans because he thought they were subhuman, he enslaved them because that's how he grew tobacco.
Thank you for bringing the discussion back to the point at the very end. It was hard to get through all the "the founders weren't technically racist" talk. I get his annoyance with progressives overplaying their hand with "the US was founded on racism", but I feel he overplayed his hand contradicting them. If the response was "it's more complicated than that", that would have been fair. History always is. But insisting "the wealth of Europe and the US is only this one thing", feels equally reductive.
Yes, the founders had very pretty words about liberty. Those words have resonated through just about every liberatory movement since. But their actions didn't match their words. They build a system that granted freedom to those with property. Maybe they did assume everyone would eventually get property, but that isn't what they built. And the undeniable racism of the Jacksonian era grew out of what they built.
These conversations with James Vaughn are really great. He’s an amazing historian.
Fantastic interviews!
I wish that this guy and C. Derek Varn and Gabriel Rockhill would debate
This is just a bunch of arguing over technicalities on the definition of racism. Useless.
I’m not as educated formally but this sounds like revisionism of the American project from James, I think there is good content here but ultimately I can’t agree in good faith.
Completely agree. This guy is way too nice to liberalism. Losurdo’s narrative is way more compelling than whatever this dude is selling
I agree with this too. Almost every academic/podcaster/commentator that gushes about the American Revolution and the American constitution (hello Doug Lain and Chris Cutrone!) ultimately comes across as a purveyor of a rebranded American exceptionalism. Cutrone, for example, has actually said that American military and economic hegemony might be a good thing because if the United States goes socialist it can help spread global Communism to other parts of the world. I just can't take that seriously.
@@basstrip73 or perhaps you just aren't thinking hard & seriously enough about what a socialist politics must eventually be to have any kind of success towards its goal. Cutrone is deliberately provocative in his statements about american hegemony because he is trying to make a point about the fact a socialist politics must also push for hegemony if it is to be successful. It's going over your head because you have been brainwashed by 1980/90s neoliberal cultural studies 101 nonsense.
As far as I can tell, the only unforgivable sins Doug & Chris have committed is actually reading the texts leftists all pretend to, challenging them to look at just how dead their political projects are, and then attempt to get them to think seriously about what a new project would have to look like.
@@basstrip73If you're going to believe that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” then it strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism to be favorable towards US economic hegemony. I heard somewhere that there were communists in high levels of post WW2 US government who also took that position. If true, that was stupid, dangerous and naive back then. What were they going to do? Link up with comrades in USSR and take over? All kinds of "no" on that count. And the situation is even more far-fetched now for that kind of thinking. US economic hegemony destroys labor power. Capital serving oligarchy - and ALL of us serving capital cos we're all stuck in this f'd up machine. Then, somehow, magically, USA "turns socialist". How's that supposed to happen? What? did these people learn Marxism from Edward Bernays?
Just what I needed. Thanks for the hit. *Inhales*
I agree that new social relations of free labour were avsolutely essential in the incredibly fast development of exteeme wealth accumulation in the US compared to other parts of the world, but to say it had nothing to do with enslavement and expropriation of land because those things occured everywhere and when in history seems dismissive. Maybe I misheard and Professor Vaughn didnt say it had "nothing" to do with enslavement and expropriation, but rather that wasnt the only thing that lead to the amazing accumulation of wealth in the US.
Yeah. It’s actually a non-materialist approach to history. Cause the question of wealth accumulation begs the question of who and how is this wealth being accumulated. His history has also indegenous peoples as objects of history. We don’t get to see the dynamics of their historical development, they are just feature in some background. And why and how the democrats form and the basis for political cleavages between different factions that are politically integrated (those whose votes are counted for instance) disappears.
He also doesn’t delve deeper into how the development of bourgeois society is intrinsically linked to depopulation and and the destruction of African societies. Like when he mentioned the royal african company, it’s well known that it was actually after the collapse of the royal african party that Atlantic slavery became more extensive and brutal. And this freeing up of the slave trade was intertwined and justified by liberal arguments regarding free trade, and the tyranny of the monopolies held by the royal african company.
The question of capitalism isn’t a matter of wealth creation - virtually all modes of production has wealth creation as a feature. But it is whether what’s driving the wealth creation is capitalism or the dependencies created on people towards capitalism and production for each other as, yes there is freed labor, but that labor is also free to starve. And the destruction of other modes of production compels producers to engage in what was an expanding global system of production and exchange. And it’s in that context that the American revolution should be made sense of.
Cotton kingdom slavery *had* to expand, that is move to other areas, as cotton in particular exhausts the soil, and quickly. That's why the slaveholders had to insist on their right to move to new land, in turn meaning slavery had to be legal in new territories/states. They required it to continue to grow cotton at scale.
"They would be able to pull the indigenous people into it and integrate them within it"
"Pull" is a very funny way to say "force"
The bourgeois society they were building was a settler society from the outset. It required european capitalist imposition on indigenous society as well as "free" land. Without indigenous land, that american bourgeois project does not happen. It does not develop. Indigenous land and subsequent genocide was required for the american project to flourish.
Nobody is arguing that something like this is true to some degree. But, what James points out is that there is far more to the story of the bourgeois revolution than the bad things colonists did.
If all your politics has to say about the past is "white man bad," not only is it missing a ton of the realities of history, it's never going anywhere.
@@kspfan001"True to some degree" is being so incredibly generous to the truth, that it is misleading.
America can't happen without slavery and global South exploitation
No it's not funny or strange at all. It's perfectly standard english.
@@kspfan001to be fair to them, they didn’t say the “white bad” part, but overall I agree that the value in what James is doing here is problematizing the left reductionist versions of the development of the US as being purely a product of gross oppression, dispossession, enslavement, and genocide. Those things are all part of the history in various ways at various times, but there’s so much more to it, and if we’re to be serious about a historical materialist and dialectical understanding of how modernity formed, we need to understand and acknowledge the aspects of thar development that not only weren’t so problematic, but were actually quite revolutionary in their time. I don’t agree with many things James had to say (mainly, I take issue with some of the framing), but I think conversations like this are valuable and important. I just think it is also important to understand where someone like Losurdo is coming from.
Lol no. Listen
You gotta have this guy on again. I'd love to hear him speak more on Marxism and politics but this was pretty awesome. Thank you
There is part 3 on Patreon!
I'm not convinced by James' explanation of why America got so rich/ that it was self-sustaining.
However it's reminded me yet again not to forget, that reality/ history is always more complicated and nuanced than is presented 🤠💜
I think his argument should have been that liberal economics are producing wealth faster without necessarily resorting to land expropriation. Obviously expropriation of land from the indigenous people was a massive contributor that drove up wages and expanded the total productivity of the society. He's right that if it could have happened peacefully and the indigenous people could have contributed voluntarily, that would have been more beneficial to everyone, but I don't know how you can argue it didn't have a huge impact regardless. His argument about slavery is more complicated. I think he's discounting that slavery depressed labor costs which provided competitive advantages over free labor, especially with the costs of slavery increasingly falling on the state, not just on beneficiaries of slavery. Obviously this was harmful to labor but it was beneficial to the producers or they wouldn't have done it.
@@evanfreshman2450 Apologies for the delayed response, however I pretty much agree with what you've said.
Vaughn keeps saying “brought in” when referring to how the so-called founding fathers wanted indigenous peoples to give up their “uncultivated” land and their “uncivilized” way of life to join US bourgeois society, Stills sounds like Lemkin’s conception of genocide to me 🤷🏼
At the time of the American revolution around 90% of free males were property owning. The proletarianisation occurs once the Industrial Revolution begins in the US.
The US has been very good at on-going change, but not on consolidation of change...a fact mentioned in the video on inverted totalitarianism
So we need to do manifest destiny in the project as they don’t often own those and how do people treat and feel in something they can have a sense of permanence in?
I think the idea of the open frontier in America forgoing any radical revolutionary socialist movement has some merit. It's easier to put off dealing with certain contradictions if you have an extensive amount of land that people can claim and live as yeoman farmers versus in Europe, where more people had been fully proletarianized.
I'm trying to understand the point about how America didn't become very wealthy due to slave labor but rather due to the social relations of Beourgeois society. I get (not fully understand but kinda have an inkly as to why) you might be able to profit more from wage labor than slave labor but I don't understand how we can say that American industries that benefited from cheap cotton and other slave produced goods did not lead to the country building wealth out of slavery? Is he suggesting that if there were never any slavery or land appropriation in America, the USA would have gotten even richer?
So after all that James has said about it, I don't get what the point of Marxism is. Or is that the point of James being a Marxist historian? - to show that there is no point to Marxism?
“Americas wealth didn’t come from slavery but an increase in labor productivity” WHERE DID ALL THAT LABOR PRODUCTIVITY COME FROM JAMES??
Yeah like there’s no doubt a SUBSTANTIAL amount of Western wealth came from the slave trade, slave-produced goods, or trade with and from colonies established on stolen Indigenous land. Like slavery was what the entire economies of the southern states and Europe’s Caribbean colonies.
Ah, I will try an answer here. A combination of greatly expanded land area and resources, the energy of new arrivals and new technology. You can make a case for market protection too.
Slaves are very low cost but they don't work as hard as people getting well paid for one job who know they have another after lunch. Fact.
Remember, the parts with all the slaves was the parts without money or technology. The part that lost, in fact.
The revolutionary social potential of bourgeois society -- the society of free labor and property. Bourgeois society is much better equipped to perform productive labor than is traditional/feudal society.
@brocklewis9693 everyone - that's what I meant to say, but with the right words in the right order.👍
There have been slave societies for millenia. All built on top of the bones of millions killed in all sorts of military campaigns from east Asia to western Europe to Africa to the Americas. None of these societies had the kind of labor productivity of bourgeois society.
There's no talk here about historic developments from the rise of an independence movement in the 1760s to the ratification of the 1787 constitution (i.e., the period of "The American Revolution" in the broadest sense). Mostly Vaughn presents an argument about how abstractions of reality presented by thinkers from different periods should be understood, i.e., ideology. The new historians of capitalism describe things that happened, generally without addressing the counterfactual issues of whether it was inevitable or the only possible source of wealth for buergerliche Gesellschaft. Vaughn's critique is to build such counterfactuals about what would have or should have happened if bourgeois or civil society were implemented in accordance with its true principles as Vaughn understands them. This approach ends up with ideological proscriptions about how we should label things, not descriptions or understandings of history. For example, he makes no mention of the actual events surrounding Washington as land speculator, owner of hundreds of slaves, or supreme military commander who ordered the ethnic cleansing of the Iroquoia lands that became western New York state. Washington et al are exclusively the avatars of bourgeois or civil society as Vaughn understands these concepts.
21:57 Monroe Doctrine
54:00
If America was truly founded by racism then what does this mean for Thomas Paine the Father of the American Revolution.
This guest reeks of desperation.
Ok so were the founding fathers evil geniuses, or well meaning idiots?
!!!
This guest is a doof. I'd have liked to see more pushback on his runaway narrative