What manufacturers? And American merchants and bankers in those days were mostly petty-bourgeois (owning their own modest means of non-agricultural production and actually working it themselves), and, more importantly, mostly marginal in numbers, function and power compared to the landed. That didn’t last long after the Revolution (despite the hopes of Jefferson), but it was clearly the case at the time.
In this case, yes, indeed it is.
Fair enough, but if you look at the structure of the economy at that time it becomes quite clear that this was the result of conscious British policy, rather than a reflection of any natural process of economic development. American manufacture was restricted by British law, and exports of goods were restricted to the British market alone. Nonetheless there were manufacturers (mainly artisans like blacksmiths and shipbuilders), as well as merchants and bankers (which you yourself admit were bourgeois), and they only way they could develop further economically was through throwing off the political yoke they had been bound with. The bourgeoisie in America existed prior to 1776, and by 1776 they were quite conscious of their political aims as a class. Therefore the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and as its aim was the political liberation of an economic and social class, it is class struggle.
Oh, and I do admit I imperfectly understood the British side of the equation. Feudalism had very little to do with it, but insofar as taxes and duties went to support the monarchy (which was and is a holdover from feudalism), it was not completely absent from the picture, either.
Quite true, and well-known to the Founders, and not ignored in their speeches; but, if you know the history of the time, it is extremely hard to believe such economic ambition was a principal reason, even a subconscious one, for their going to war.
Oh, come on. How could it not be conscious if it was well-known to the Founders and wasn’t ignored in their speeches?!
And just because you find it hard to believe doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Personal incredulity and all that.
I did not say they were unconscious of it. I said that winning a chance for America’s merchants and manufacturers to make a lot more money wasn’t a principal motive for the war, not even subconsciously.
Even the bourgeoisie sometimes take political action for non-economic reasons.
Big woo-hoo! Fidel Castro is still funnier than Zeppo!
Best wishes,
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Explain, then, the phenomenon of the ‘solemn covenant’ as evidenced here. Seems as though plenty of people were aware of the economic limitations placed on them by Britain well before 1776, and took political action for those reasons. Do you therefore assert that those economic reasons suddenly ceased to apply, or dropped from the public consciousness, as of July 4, 1776?
Or, as an afterthought, what about the Boston Tea Party? Was that solely for non-economic reasons?
It also occurred to me to go back and look at the OP because, frankly, I’d forgotten what the original question was.
Marx didn’t predict the death of the middle classes. When he wrote the Manifesto, almost sixty years after the last great bourgeois revolution in Europe, he opened it up by describing what was already going on:
“Make the rich pay.” Marx
“Make the rich play.” G. Marx
Well, that didn’t last long . . . Since Marx’ time, class conflict in the industrialized world has almost always involved more than two sides. The upper working class, rightly or wrongly, rarely sees any interests in common with the lumpenproles and often interests in conflict, the white-collar middle class rants against organized labor and wants to distance itself from the proles and is ready often as not to ally with bourgeoisie against them, etc., etc. And intraclass ethnic/racial/cultural divisions complicate the picture still further.
What, exactly, defines the ‘upper’ working class? And do you have any responses to my previous questions about political actions taken for clearly economic reasons just before the outbreak of the American Revolution?
IIRC, the merchantilist laws predated the Revolution by a couple of decades; what got the colonials literally up in arms wasn’t having to pay a tax on tea, it was that the British Parliment could unilaterally impose it. The colonials had only to look to Ireland and Scotland for examples of how entire countries could be reduced to imperial possessions of the homeland by for example literally being taxed to pay for the soldiers occupying their country. If the American Revolution was a “class war” fought by the American bourgeoisie, it was mainly over their being excluded from the British bourgeoisie, who had represenation in Parliment while the Americans did not.
Sorry Olentzero, but IMHO you’ve fallen into the trap of ideologically redefining all possible evidence to fit the tenets of your theory. The “beauty” of Marxism is that anything and everything, interpreted through Marxism, is proof that Marxism is true.
And which was therefore political action taken over economic issues. Which BG disputes. You’re asserting that I’m redefining evidence to fit the theory without actually stating how I do so. I would greatly appreciate it if you would.
My point is exactly that: the mercantilist laws predated the Revolution by at least a couple of decades, so therefore the political actions up to and including the Revolution had an economic basis. It is impossible to assert that the actions taken up to 1776 could have economic reasons but suddenly on July 4th those economic reasons suddenly ceased to apply. I have no doubt that the American bourgeoisie would have been quite satisfied to gain representation in Parliament and carried the matter no further, but since Parliament and George III remained intransigent on the issue, they found they had no choice but to give Empire the finger and go their own way. It was class struggle.
So what it comes down to is that from a Marxist’s point of view, everything is class struggle, therefore Marx was right.
“Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” Thackeray
Heh. All kidding aside, what set of events could, hypothetically, falsify the stuff?
Fussell, again, is no sociologist, but I think he got that in one:
I think you’ll agree that, as I said, we rarely find much sense of class solidarity, and sometimes we find actual hostility, from the high proles so defined as to those below them.
(The above was written in 1983, but IMO that does not make it significantly dated. The class structure of American society has changed far less from then to now, than it did from, say, 1965 to 1983. '83 was around when such things seemed suddenly and unaccountably to stop changing (to the disappointment of radicals but rather to the relief of the majority). They didn’t really stop changing, of course, but dramatic social upheavals did stop; since then, the middle class has been declining very definitely and steadily, but by an attrition almost too slow to notice – and too slow to threaten its cultural continuity, so that we still have essentially the same middle class as we had in the 1950s, even though it now comes in more colors, just as Britain still has essentially the same aristocracy it had in the 18th Century, even though most of its members are descended from 19th-Century parvenus. But that’s another discussion.)
I recall you have asserted in the past, IIRC, that there are only two classes in America, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the difference is that the first has to live by work or welfare and the second has independent means. (Which would make proles even of Fussell’s upper-middles, or most of them.) That is defensible in a way – at least, pointing out that very real and all-important yet generally ignored dividing line between the two has value – but you must acknowledge that, as stated, it is very much a minority viewpoint.
None as yet. You may be right, I’ll have to review your link – and other relevant posts in this thread – and get back to you. I still believe, as I said, that even the bourgeoisie sometimes take political action for non-economic reasons (using “non-economic” to mean “not for the sake of personal or class profit”); but perhaps not in this particular case. A superficial glance offers no grounds to doubt my position that winning a chance for merchants to make more money was not a principal motive for the Revolution. The most persuasive analysis of those motives that I have read to date is Michael Lind’s in The American Way of Strategy.
But not characterized by any expectation of making vast fortunes in manufacturing or foreign commerce. That lay in the future.