AOC: “America was founded in revolt of British aristocracy. The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. It’s actually the most American thing in the world for us to be fighting for the working class. It’s actually patently un-American to transform our country into a place of kings and landed gentry”

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[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

Whether or not that “lineage” connects to a future socialism in America, I’ll leave that up to future historians.

I mean, the best I can come up with is that American Independence exacerbated, and failed to resolve, the contradictions of chattel slavery, which ich led to the Civil War, and Reconstruction. And I think, despite their shortcomings, did represent genuine social Revolution, and a has a lineage that American Socialists ought to claim.

But claiming the American War of Independence, in a vacuum, just... Does not make sense, when you look at the class composition of the people who led it.

To try and steel man the argument, there definitely were popular sentiments in support of Independence from the nascent working class, slaves, etc. They burned down the homes of British officials for reasons beyond just bourgeois whining about taxes.

The Boston Massacre was a massacre of working-class sailors. The first of which to die, Crispus Attucks, was a runaway slave.

And that's not to mention all of the concurrent slave revolts, and some of the proto-radical ideas but forward by Thomas Paine.

So there's not nothing there for modern Socialists to look at. But taking the standard American history narrative, which ignores the fact the the energy of the lower classes was utterly captured or put down by the 'founding fathers', just ain't it.

Also all the killing of indigenous peoples that it eventually helped facilitate is hard to ignore