Examining The Bourgeois Revolutions
Added 2023-01-17 14:24:36 +0000 UTCThe question what is and what isn't a revolution is one that recurs every year when it comes to examining the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is particularly the case when it comes to considering the American Revolution of 1765 to 1791 and the founding of the United States. Authors such as Gerald Horne, Howard Zinn and Domenico Losurdo have all made claims as to the wholly reactionary nature of the USA to the point where they seek to downplay the revolutionary nature the American Revolution or claim (as Horne does) that it was actually a counter revolution.
In this episode I consider these arguments and the attitude that Marx, Engels and Lenin took on the question of the American Revolution and the later American Civil War. In doing so I argue that Horne, Zinn and Losurdo have all taken anti-Marxist, petit bourgeois positions on this question.
Episode Image is 'The Siege of Yorktown' painted in 1836
Episode Outro is 'There's a Better World A'Comin' by Woody Guthrie
Comments
Perhaps I was more generous to Losurdo in my reading of "Liberalism: a counter history" than I ought to have been.
Joshua Brady Arnold
2023-01-20 14:59:10 +0000 UTCPerhaps I was more generous to Losurdo in my reading of "Liberalism: a counter history" than I ought to have been. My impression of the contrasting of Calhoun against the Yankee bourgeoisie was to expose a certain shallowness of the latter, thus exposing the civil war as not a moral issue - which it obviously wasn't because why would millions of Americans die for blacks? - but rather an issue of bourgeois interests (Yankees) against agrarian planter interests (Dixie). I didn't think Losurdo was trying to be moralistic but maybe I'm biased.
Joshua Brady Arnold
2023-01-20 14:59:07 +0000 UTC
