Guerrilla History - The Counterrevolution of 1776 w/ Gerald Horne

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we close out Black History Month with a very special guest, the great Professor Gerald Horne. In this episode, we talk about heroic creation myths of the United States, and the actual history in order to deconstruct these myths.  This episode will be largely based on Gerald's books The Counterrevolution of 1776:  Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States, The Dawning of the Apocalypse:  The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long 16th Century, and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism:  The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean.   Gerald Horne is the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.  His research interests are unbelievably varied, encompassing biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, to The Haitian Revolution, to Hollywood in the '30s-'50s, to Jazz and Justice.  Be sure to check out his bibliography, you're certain to find something that interests you! Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.          

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bou? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Hockamaki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? Terrific. So happy to be here with you, Henry. I'm always glad to see you, Adnan. Always glad to see you. And also, I'm joined by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio. and co-host of the Red Menace podcast.

Hello, Brett. How is it going there? Any more snow recently? Yeah, more snow every day, it feels like, but I'm incredibly excited to have this conversation with Gerald Horn. I couldn't agree more. Our guest today, as Brett just said, is Professor Gerald Horn, who's a historian.

He's actually the chair of the history in African American Studies Department at the University of Houston, and really one of the great public intellectuals that we have in the United States right now. And I don't mean that lightly. I really do think that Gerald Horn is one of our foremost intellectuals and somebody that, if you're not aware of him, aware of him already listeners, prepare yourself for an excellent conversation that's sure to come and be ready to open your pocketbook and get a few of his books because you're certainly going to want them. But Adnan, let's start with you.

You've actually interviewed Professor Horn a few times before on the David Feldman show, and you were the one who contacted him to come on to. guerrilla history. So why don't you introduce the books that we're that we're really going to be focusing on here? Of course, Gerald Horn's written almost 40 books at this point, but we're going to focus on a few. Why don't you introduce these books and talk about perhaps why we're going to be looking at these books? Well, the 1776 Commission published a report and we had a chance to tear to shreds for the rank. abuse of history that it was, and it just reminded us of how much we have invested in U.S. origins and in the myth-making around U.S. origins.

And if there's one historian who has, I think, for a broad audience, done more to overturn a lot of those myths, it would be Professor Gerald Horn, particularly initially starting, with his book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, which came out in 2014 and was published by New York University Press. He really reorients the way we understand the beginnings and the foundations of this country. But what's interesting is that he situates his analysis so much in the context of broader global or at least Atlantic history. So we tend to think of this as an American story because it's the origin story for the United States of America. But he puts it in the

context of slave resistance taking place across the Americas and in the Atlantic world. And he in another book goes to a prehistory and context of the 17th century that he's as being very critical to what will happen later. And that book was called The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century, North America, and the Caribbean. And that was just published in 2017. And as I said, it situates, you know, settler colonialism and slavery as these foundations for the societies that are being established in the Americas

that he sees as the background and necessary context for really understanding what kind of a nation the United States is. But then just this last year in 2020, he published another companion book to this same story that goes even further back into the 16th century and we would say has a real global perspective on transitions that are taking place in the early modern period and is his way of thinking about what happens and how to explain what modernity is. And this book is called The Dawning of the Apocalypse, The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler, Colonialism, and Capitalism in the long 16th century.

And it's very seldom that you would find an American historian who would feel, feel that it's valuable or important to go back to the 16th century to talk about the consequences of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and pressure being put in the Balkans in Eastern Europe that has consequences as a result for the way in which European powers start to explore further into the Atlantic world and begin a process of raiding and then systematizing raiding and enslavement of Africans on the west coast of Africa and taking them and transporting them to territories that they're now conquering and dispossessing its original and indigenous inhabitants of. This is really quite a turn. And so it's these sort of three

books that go together. They're a very interesting package of interest. So we wanted to have a conversation in light of, you know, Black History Month to think about the deep roots and the deep origins, the deep histories of the United States and of the black experience and the context in which somebody like Professor Horn who sees it in an Atlantic and a global context could tell us about it. And I just want to mention to the listeners, if you heard Adnan mention our talk about the 1776 Commission's report, and you're wondering what we're talking about, that was an intelligence briefing that we made as a Patreon exclusive.

So if you're looking for a bonus content that we put out relatively frequently, including extra full episodes of just the three of us, and if you're particularly interested in that 1776 Commission Report and our take on that, check us out on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Gorilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. your support really helps the show continue. So I figured I'd just throw that out there in case any of you are wondering where where that 1776 Commission Report episode that we're talking about is. But Brett, why don't we turn over to you?

What do you have to say in looking forward up to this conversation with Professor Horn? Yeah, absolutely. I think the 1776 project is a good place to start because if that represents a historical, reactionary, idealist nonsense, Gerald Horn is the perfect corrective to everything wrong about not only that little piece, but about that whole understanding or misunderstanding of history. I think Gerald Horn is an essential read and an essential historian for anybody who considers himself on the left, particularly in the United States when it comes to these books, highlighting the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism.

And one of the benefits is not only is he a wonderful historian, he is such a lively and engaging human being. So as you'll quickly find out as you listen to this interview with him, any other interview he's ever done immediately sort of wraps you up and brings you along for his storytelling. So he's a wonderful historian and person. And the way I wanted to do this intro is to read the end of his preface because I think it speaks to his humanity, to his sense of humor, and also to the sense that we should all have, which is that we are in history. We're not standing outside of it watching it. We are the products of it and we're the conscious agents of changing it going forward. And so I'm just going to read the end of this

preface and then toss it back to you two. So Gerald Horn writes in the preface to the counter-revolution of 1776, my Manhattan ecstasy in January 2012 proved to be short-lived, as I sought futile to hail a taxi from the sidewalk abutting the New York Historical Society on Central Park West after gathering my glittering research nuggets on colonial slavery. Yet I recall thinking at the time that these taxi drivers, some of whom had a dark skin tone similar to my own, were rudimentarily reenacting the drama I had just researched moments earlier. That is, I was seemingly enduring what is now a reigning Manhattan cliche, being bypassed by taxis because of the color of my skin, the outward manifestation of

African ancestry. That is to say, as a putative descendant of mainland Africans who had fought the formation of a slaveholding republic, then a Jim Crow regime, I was continuing to incur a penalty as a result, this time in the form of having to walk part of the way to my next destination. As had happened previously in Gotham when I was subjected to such a slight, I recalled my experience earlier in the century teaching at Hong Kong University, when this former colony had just reverted to Beijing's rule. Their taxis would zip past Chinese to pick me up on the presumed premise, perhaps, that I was not indigenous, but possibly a tourist or diplomat capable of a nice tip, or at least a foreigner bearing no felonious intent. On the face of things,

things Chinese cabbies perceived me to be less of a threat than those in my ostensible homeland. Even then I was wondering if China's rise would have a positive impact on the dire plight of my Ebony compatriots in North America, just as Spain had centuries earlier. As I ambled along in the wintry climb of Manhattan, I smiled to myself, thinking that, dialectically, the added exercise I was receiving might allow me to live to fight another day, confirming the continuing viability of jiu-jitsu-like maneuvers which had allowed us Africans to survive for centuries in an ocean of hostility.

A heartening thought to ponder, roughly 240 years since abolitionism had begun to assert itself dramatically in London. And again, I just think that says it all. That says the sort of person he is, how he thinks historically, and connecting his own plight and the plight of African Americans today to this long, torturous history of white supremacy, settler colonialism and slavery.

Yeah. So I know we want to keep this intro nice and short because, well, we're going to try to keep Professor Horn as long as we can. After all, it's not every day that we get to talk to Professor Gerald Horn. But I guess to close out this introduction, let's just talk briefly about why these books, and particularly the Contra Revolution of 1776, is important and why we're bringing on Gerald Horn to talk about it. So just briefly, and I guess I'll start. I think that it's important for us to realize that the pervasive mythology, and this goes back to what both Brett and Adnan were saying earlier,

but the pervasive mythology surrounding the foundation of the United States of America is filled with inaccuracies and whitewashing, both literally and figuratively whitewashing. So, of course, we turn a blind eye to a lot of the, let's say, darker stains of our past. And again, I'm using this in an alliterative way. But a lot of the darker stains of our past in order to hold ourselves up as the shining example of democracy, the shining example of a better future. And Professor Horn really does rip down this basically a Manichaean view of history where, British bad American democracy good he really tears this down to the ground and says you know

there there absolutely are there is great this story there's not good and bad there's not good and evil there's everything in between here on both sides and we we tend to not focus on these these darker sides when talking about the foundation of the United States of America and instead focus on, you know, the things that inherently are good in the foundation of the United States, or we create falsehoods entirely that sound good, but weren't actually what the American Revolution, or as Professor Horn calls it, the counter revolution, what what they were actually about or what it was actually about. And so this book is really important for grounding us in the analysis that this so-called

revolution shouldn't be held up on a pedestal as some unimpeachable force of good in history. And I think that this conversation is really going to lay that out for us. So Adnan, do you want to give your brief thoughts on the conversation to come before we wrap up with Brett? Well, just to say that I think that one thing that's really important about his work, well, there's so many things, but one thing about the counter-revolution of 1770, is how much it is a frontal assault on the apologetics that we have talked about and that everyone is aware of, particularly in conservative thought, but even in liberal thought that sees the conditions of slavery as somehow ancillary to the foundation of the United States, and that even if it was enshrined in the Constitution in various ways, that this is some aberration from these ideals that are progressively going to unfold over history to ultimately fulfill these ideals. And what Professor Horn's work has done is really situate this liberal, Democratic, Republican

document of something like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution in a much broader and serious history of enslavement of Africans and its consequences, not as an aberration, but is absolutely constitutive to the revolutionary moment. And it also shifts from making the protagonist in some fashion the so-called revolutionaries of the settler class in colonial North America rebelling against the British crown, it shifts the focus and the agency in some ways from them who are so-called founding fathers who have this active role in creating this wonderful new country courageously rising up, it shifts the historic agency from them to resistant, rebellious,

enslaved Africans in many cases who are armed or who rise up in revolt and through their agency create the fears that impel a reaction against progressive forces of liberation to preserve their privileged positions and that that's the story of the American Revolution. I mean, it's absolutely wonderful the way he flips the script completely. and I think it's really also very important. I mentioned that what's unique about his work, maybe not completely unique, but it's certainly for a popular audience,

is how much he globalizes his story. So when you only look at the United States or these territories and you frame your story entirely within the activities of these white male, you know, European descent, settler colonialists, you get a certain kind of distorted vision. But when you open it up and you look comparatively at what else is happening in the hemisphere, the interlink linkages between the 13 colonies and what's happening in

Spanish, Florida, and in French, New France, what will become known as Quebec, and look at the Caribbean and look at how this is connected with a transatlantic. slave trade, or when you think about how this is a response to pressures taking place in competition in the Mediterranean and the eastern part of Europe, suddenly the story looks really different. And you can see what processes are common and part of a larger story and what things are unique and specific to this country. So that's, I think, some of the areas that I would like to talk about with him is looking at this transition from a long duray sort of perspective, starting with the 16th century all the way into the late 18th, late 18th century, which is a real

period of transition, of contestation where major changes are taking place across the world, and how, you know, we situate the United States as a product of these. of this larger story. Yeah, absolutely. I think Adnan said it all right there. I would just add, you know, leftists aren't immune to this sort of myth-making about the U.S. And in many ways, subtle and overt,

different factions of the left broadly conceived can buy into elements of this mythologized history, particularly when you separate it from these other processes going on globally, you can at least limp away from it with a very one-dimensional and malnourished conception of American history. I think there is one thing that leftists make a mistake on, they generally follow Marx in this idea that capitalism was

progressive force over feudalism. And in some ways that's true, although people like Sylvia Federici have complicated even that notion, putting forward the theory that capitalism itself can be thought at least in part as a counter-revolutionary sort of force to the rising populist powers of peasants and the primitive accumulation that went along with that. But Gerald Horn does that really well with the American Revolution because I think that those are often conflated. If a leftist can say capitalism is generally a progressive force over feudalism, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to say, and therefore the American Revolution, although imperfect, was more or less progressive. Gerald Horn turning that on its head and making you

understand the American Revolution as a counter-revolution is incredibly helpful and is actually the thing in part done to preserve the existence of slavery. as the British crown was moving away from slavery and moving towards abolitionism. There was vested financial interests in this rising merchant class, not only in the south, but in the north as well, that had a vested financial interest in maintaining slavery. And he makes that very clear and lays out the history. And then downstream, you get much better and clear understandings of things like the Civil War, for instance, and modern-day settler colonial white revanchist reaction that we're facing off with.

today. So that's where I'd leave it and I'm excited to get into this conversation with Gerald. You and us all, Brett, I'm sure that we're all excited to talk to Gerald Horn and listeners will be back and one second with our interview of Gerald Horn. Hope that you're looking forward to it as much as we are. We're back on guerrilla history and we're joined. by our distinguished guests, and it's truly an honor to say that we're joined by Professor Gerald Horn, who's John Jay and Rebecca Moore's chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He's written, what's the latest count, almost 40 books at this state,

including a wide, wide variety of topics, everything from boxing to jazz, to Hollywood, to Paul Robeson. But I'll name a couple of his books just in case you people are looking for something to pass your pandemics with reading, because you're not going to find much better than what Professor Horn puts out there. Some of his books that I'd recommend are Paul Robeson, the artist is revolutionary, race to revolution, the United States and Cuba during slavery and Jim Crow,

confronting black Jacobins, Mao, Mao in Harlem, W.E.B. Dubois, a biography. Black and brown, African Americans, and the Mexican Revolution. And then the three books that were going to be focused today, The dawning of the apocalypse, slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America in the long 16th century, the apocalypse of settler colonialism, the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism, and 17th century, North America, and the Caribbean, and the book that we're going to start off with, the counter-revolution of 1776.

Professor Horn, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on here, and I can speak for all of us when I say that I'm a big admirer of yours. Thank you for inviting me. Of course, it's our pleasure. So without further ado, let's get into here. We're going to talk about the counter-revolution of 1776, and we already talked about in our introduction about how the narrative surrounding the foundation of the United States is really entrenched. And it's almost based on misconceptions as much as it is on actual historical fact. And so why don't I just unleash you?

allow you to kind of talk through your narrative of the counter-revolution of 1776, possibly starting with the glorious revolution of 1688. Okay. So the so-called glorious revolution of 1688, 1689 in England, in many ways, is a revolt by the merchant class against the monarch, not least because in 1672, the monarch had established. established the Royal African Company, which was an attempt to add a system to the sort of inchoate process of ensnaring and enslaving Africans in particular.

The merchant class wanted to elbow in to this lucrative process, which helped to bring eye-watering, eye-popping profits. Sometimes you could invest. $1 and get $1,700 back. And with that kind of profit, you had some who might sell their first born in order to enter that dirty business, not to mention some African they didn't know. And so, and fundamentally the so-called glorious revolution, which clipped the wings of the monarch at root, and in essence, was about a naked grab for, filthy lucre. And what happens is that the monarch is set on a path to being a figurehead.

I think it's fair to say that Queen Elizabeth in 2021 does not exercise the kind of authority and power that King Henry VIII did in the 1530s, for example, which I think is a gross understatement. So with the merchants forcing the deregulation of the African, enslaved trade, free trade in Africans is how I put it, the merchants descend upon Africa with the maniacal energy of craze bees, manacling and handcuffing every African in sight, dragging them across the Atlantic, leading to an exponential rise in profiteering, not to mention a significant and profound increase in the number of enslaved Africans, not least in the Caribbean, Jamaica, and Barbados in the first instance.

And this helps to turbocharge the sugar plantations, since they have so many laborers. But it also tends to turbocharge ferocity because it should not be seen as a revelation that people do not necessarily want to work for free, particularly work under the lash, and also have this rather noxious system of white supremacy and racism imposed upon them. So this leads to slave revolts repeatedly, which in any case had been a characteristic of the Caribbean leaning up to the end of the 17th century, because part of the problem from the point of view of London with the Caribbean was that the African population so outnumbered the settler population. So what happens as the ferocity and intensity of slave revolts begins to skyrocket in the Caribbean,

you have many of the settlers make the Great Trek, as I call it, from the Caribbean to the North American mainland, and historians of Southern Africa might recognize that phrase, great trek, because I adapted from that historiography, which describes what happens in the 1830s after London takes over South Africa and tries to impose the abolition of slavery and the settlers, who were mostly an amalgam of Dutch and French Huguenots, the so-called Afrikaners, begin to make the Great Shreff Northward to escape the jurisdiction of London. In any case, the settlers began to flee onto the North American mainland, but that does not have. necessarily solve their problem, even though they are outnumbering the Africans on the North American mainland, which is part of the key to understanding the subsequent history of the United States of America. That is to say that they were not able to escape slave revolts because

you had slave revolts in New York City, assisted by the French and Quebec in 1712 in South Carolina, 1739, 1740, assisted by the Spanish in Florida. New York again, a few months later, assisted by the Spanish and the French. And so at a certain point, London decides that if these settlements in North America are going to be viable, they have to eliminate the threats posed to their existence and survival from French Canada, Quebec, and from Spanish Florida, which leads to the seven years war, 1756 to 1763. As you know, London is infamously able to defeat the French in Canada leaving behind, shall we say, a still restive Cuebecois population, and at least temporarily is able to oust the Spanish from Florida.

farm. Since London had executed this grand maneuver on behalf of the settlers, they go to the settlers in North America and try to collect taxes to pay for this expenditure of blood and treasure. But perhaps because the settlers were so accustomed to getting things for free by dint of slave labor, they were in no mood to pay taxes, which, as you know, is still a tendency of the 1% in the United States as we speak. London also made the maneuver through the so-called rural proclamation of 1762, 1763, to keep the settlers from moving west invading the territory of the indigenous population, the Native American population. But this brings London into conflict with real estate speculators, such as George Washington, for example, just like in June

1772, when the courts in London seek to illegalize slavery in England itself, there is a fear on the North American mainland that this decision could leapfrog the Atlantic. calling into question and jeopardizing these grand fortunes built upon slave labor and dispossession of the indigenous population by dint of, quite frankly, genocidal methods. And this creates a very combustible situation that explodes in 1775, 1776, they're about triggering what many call the American Revolution, which I call a counter-revolution in light of its underlying purposes, and also in light of its underlying history and subsequent history. It's a rather strange revolution, indeed, that leads to enhanced genocide, mass enslavement, even though, I'm afraid to say, that forces left, right, and center, at least in the United States, and even some of our

friends in Canada, who really should know better, since they're the next door neighbors of these genocidaires, still have accepted in whole cloth this novel interpretation of these events of the 18th century. And, of course, if you look at the subsequent history, other than what I've just outlined, you also get a glimpse of the preceding history. What I mean by that is, if you look at the overrated, vaunted U.S. Constitution, which in its First Amendment calls for freedom of religion. In some ways, this was an attempt to circumvent the religious wars that had gripped Europe, not least since Martin Luther in 1517, had inaugurated the secession from the Vatican, from the Catholic Church, or for that matter, trying to circumvent the pernicious bigotry of anti-Semitism,

which had gawed Europe for some centuries. Indeed, you may know that England had expelled this Jewish population in 1290, 1291, but in contestation with the Catholic powers led by Spain, and to a certain degree, France, London, which had moved towards the Protestant faith under Henry the 8th in the 1530s, made the grand great compromise of seeking to incorporate the Jewish population that was fleeing the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing from Spain and Portugal in the first instance. Of course, some of these Jewish refugees fled to Protestant Holland. Some fled to Muslim Ottoman, Turkey, for example. So the First Amendment was an attempt to reconcile these religious tensions. It was intermittently successful.

What I mean is that even today in the United States, you have anti-Semitism, for example. Anti-Catholicism has been beaten back to a degree. But all of this, of course, was in aid of a larger purpose, which is creating a new kind of identity politics. of whiteness. That is to say, those who had been warring on the shores of Europe, English versus Irish, English versus Scots, English versus Welsh, British versus German, German versus Pole, Pole versus Russian, Serb versus Croat, Northern Italian versus Southern Italian, the list is endless. All of a sudden, in a maneuver that would make Madison Avenue blush, when they cross the Atlantic, they're rebranded as, quote, white. which in the trade union movement, of which I have been a part, we used to call that pork chop unity. Unite on the basis of mutual gain. And mutual gain, of course, is seizing the land of the indigenous, stocking it with enslaved Africans. And that becomes, I'm afraid to say, the subsequent history of the United States. Now, needless to say, the black folk in North America were not passive observers to this historical process. Even mainstream and bourgeois historians acknowledge,

although they don't try to explain it, that by several orders of magnitude, black people, oppose the so-called patriots led by George Washington. They did not engage in class collaboration. They engaged in class struggle. What I mean is, if you look at this process of settler colonialism, which has gripped North America for centuries now. It's a classic example of settler colonialism. That is to say, if you look at the settlement of what came to be called North Carolina in the 1580s, it was a multi-class formation that crossed the Atlantic on behalf of the 1% in London. Just like in 1607, when London establishes its toehold in what they call Virginia, it's sponsored by the grantees of London, including early investors in the East Indian Company, early pillagers of West Africa, et cetera.

And there's a kind of class collaboration, although if you're interested, we can talk about a kind of class struggle that does erupt to a degree amongst the European settler. But in any case, I would say class collaboration has been the understudied, understated theme of settler colonialism. And you can't begin to understand the Trump phenomenon. You can't begin to understand January 6, 2021 without understanding class collaboration, even though that may come as a revelation to some of my friends on the left in the United States, who oftentimes torture the electoral figures until they scream. that it's only the 1% that voted for Trump, which is mathematically impossible in the land of 320 million for 74 million to vote for Trump in November 2020 and the 74 million only being part of the 1%.

The figures do not add up. And in any case, to return to this thread of class struggle amongst the Africans, of course, this continues as the United States attains liftoff and the War of 1812, where the United States and Canadians, please take note, sought to seize Canada for its own narrow purposes, and then, of course, burning the precursor of today's Toronto, and in return in August 1814, the red coats descend up on Washington, D.C., and return the favor. And of course, they're joined by black people who attack Washington as well, sending President James Madison and this girl, the spouse, Dolly, fleeing into the streets one step ahead of the posse. And then the black people get on the ships and flee to Trinidad and Tobago, where their descendants continue to reside.

In retaliation, of course, you have the national anthem of the United States, the star-spangled banner, a very, militarized national anthem, by the way, which in his third stanza, not surprisingly, attacks black people specifically because of their so-called lack of patriotism, although I'm not sure why you should expect patriotism from an enslaved population. I mean, you really must be diluted. I mean, you must be smoking the drapes to believe that sort of nonsense. So in any case, throughout this period leading up to the U.S. Civil War, you had class struggle amongst the Africans, sometimes with arms, even though the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the right to bear arms, did not apply, surprise, surprise, to the indigenous population,

nor the black population. It was for the settlers so that they could rally easily to put down uprisings by the indigenous and the settlers. But nonetheless, as you know, in 1831, Annette Turner and brothers and sisters in Virginia got hold of weapons and began an uprising against slavery before they were captured and executed in mass. But in any case, I think I've strayed beyond the purview of your question. So I'll stop here for a follow. Yeah, so there's a million directions that I could take this. in, I think I'll choose this one. If we are to understand the revolutionary war, as you say, convincingly, as primarily a counter-revolution and we understand slavery as instrumental to the

development of American capitalism, how do these two things together help us more fully understand the civil war, specifically, which you mentioned towards the end of your answer? There's a lot of myths around all of these things, of course. But with those two things in mind, how does it help shed more light on what the Civil War was actually about? And how, as you mentioned, I believe, the Confederates were claiming to be the true heirs in some ways to the Founding Fathers. Well, as I say in the final pages of my 1776 book, quite literally, I'd be the last person to object to the abolition of slavery. But to put forward this idea that, That which historians know this, that when the Civil War erupted, as Lincoln made it clear, that if to save the union was the primary purpose, and if that involved keeping slavery, so be it, if it involved abolition of slavery, so be it, because abolition was a secondary purpose, as you know, part of the argument in North America, circa 1861 was basically,

to limit the expansion of slavery because the slave-owning class was habitually expansionist. And I should also say it would be a mistake to suggest, as some tend to do, to think that amongst the settler class, the two major factions were pro-slavery and abolitionists. I think it may be fair to say that if you have a dichotomy between pro-slavery and anti-slavery with a further definition that anti-slavery could mean no black people allow period. I mean, if you look at the early history of Oregon, which has fortunately been the site of tumult in recent months, oftentimes with the activist raising the slogan, a slogan that I think in many ways is visionary, objecting to the state based on stolen people on stolen way. That is to say, stolen people being the

African, stolen land being indigenous. So Africans, excuse me, Oregon, as it was being launched into the Union in 1850, said no Negroes allowed. That's one of the reasons why Portland has one of the smallest black populations to the state. So I think it's fair to suggest that on the cusp of the U.S. Civil War, you had a pro-slavery faction clearly in Dixie. You had an abolitionist faction centered principally, I would say, in the black community with some Euro-American allies, such as the great John Brown. And as a footnote, I was trying to watch Good Lord Bird with Ethan Hawke. I couldn't watch it. I mean, because they seem to be trained John Brown as being an absurdist figure. And I just couldn't.

But if anybody wants to clarify, because I didn't watch the whole thing, because I couldn't. We actually did a brief episode among the three of us talking about John Brown in light of the series. And I had exactly the same reaction to the first and second episode that they were portraying him as something of a madman, even a buffoon in various ways in attempting to re-center a kind of black voice that was cynical about. John Brown's real intentions and motives because they were full of fancy and outrageous and that he was incompetent in his goals. Over the course of the series, it improved. But I did think that that was interesting. It may be worth checking out the rest of it, but that's just as a note that I completely understand your perspective on that, on that series. I'd read this article in the New Yorker about Ethan Hawke, and the actor who plays John Brown, who of course is a celebrated Hollywood figure.

And he had said, growing up, Paul Robson was one of the heroes. So I said, I got to watch, you know, this guy says Paul Robson is one of his heroes and he's playing John Brown. I got to watch this. But I have to say, I couldn't get past the first five minutes. But in any case, to go back to the thread. So you have this pro-slavery faction. Admittedly, you have an abolitionist faction, centered in the black community, because obviously they don't want slavery with allies like John Brown and others. But then you have the white man's country faction, which is a huge faction.

And in some ways, the white man's country faction is the triumphant faction of post-1865. The white man's country faction is sort of the tip of the sociopolitical iceberg amongst the settler class to a degree to this very day. Having said that, I should also say that one of the central aspects of the U.S. Civil War that oftentimes receives an attention from bourgeois historians, mainstream historians, is the fact that it accelerated the process of dispossession of the indigenous population. I was reading a tome by self-proclaimed radicals the other day that was saluting the Homestead Act, the early 1860s, whereby the U.S. government basically was turning over Native American land to these settlements. Somehow, I guess they feel this leads to, I'm not sure what their thing. I won't speak for them. But in any case, the Civil War was a disaster for the indigenous population. Even though the Native American population was split, some fought with the Confederacy, some fought with the union government, all of them got shafted, irrespected. And,

And so this obviously accelerates capitalist development post-1865 because with the ongoing expropriation and wars against the Native Americans that stretch forward from 1865 to the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, you have their land taken and railroads built oftentimes with cheap Chinese immigrant labor, by the way. And this infrastructure project, in some ways, serves a similar purpose to, say, similar infrastructure projects of the United States. For example, mass electrification or the interstate highway system, construction of airports, et cetera. So it gives a shot in the arm to capitalism just as the war profiteering. which was humongous during the U.S. Civil War, with tax dollars turned over willy-nilly to plutocrats of various sorts, also helps to boost capitalism in the capitalist class, which in many ways is the story of the U.S. Civil War,

although I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge that another aspect of the U.S. Civil War that's still bedeviling this country is the expropriation without compensation of the slave-owning class, which creates an embitter class, leading directly to the Ku Klux Klan, racist terrorism, the foiling of black voting rights, and the foiling of the expansion of democracy, which turns in a formerly enslaved labor class into a cheap labor class, So in some ways, a disguised slave labor class because, you know, after the U.S. Civil War, you have the so-called convict lease system whereby black people are arrested on flimsy grounds and then leased out to various entrepreneurs to basically work for free, which helps to create this culture that's still with us.

in fact, is detailed in the documentary by Ava Duvine, the Hollywood Black Woman Hollywood director, called 13th. This prison industrial complex, which is still a fix to the United States of America, which provides these black people to work for next to nothing in prison. So once again, I'll stop and let you intercede. I have a brief interjection before I let Adnan ask his question, and this is just for clarification on my part. You mentioned about Portland being very, very white based on its history, but also, correct me if I'm wrong, but Georgia was originally kind of founded as a all-white colony.

And yet today, it's, I believe, the most racially diverse or the most black in any case state in the United States. So maybe just very briefly, am I right on that? Georgia was founded as an all-white colony, correct? 1730s, absolutely. It was a way to throw up a wall. When I talk about this in my 1776 book, to throw up a wall between South Carolina, which was a citadel for slavery and Spanish Florida.

And as noted, with Stoneholds revolt in 1739, 1740, you had Spanish coming into South Carolina, stirring up the ninoes. So you have this all-white colony, so-called in Georgia. The problem there was that it's recreating the class tensions of Europe by having all Europeans, because some of the Europeans have to be workers and some are going to be into 1%. And so you're just creating class tensions, which can be destabilizing to settler colonialism. And then the settlers are a past master of smuggling. And so almost from the beginning, you have to smuggling.

to Georgia and slave Africans. And as you suggest, the 2010 census showed that Georgia had more black people than any of the U.S. state, which shows that the all-white colony project didn't necessarily work. And I'm eagerly awaiting the figures from the 2020 census. There's so many directions. This is fantastic. Maybe to come back to the backdrop historically and ideologically of the 1770s. counter-revolution, as you have it.

Obviously, a lot of American historians have a very different view about it. You know, and, you know, there is something to these Republican, you know, and democratic ideals and so on that gets discussed a lot as a response either because of, you know, the idea of no taxation without representation or other. other kind of complaints against the, you know, the imperial government. But there are some who suggest that there were some radicals. And, you know, like Thomas Payne and common sense and that there was this radical enlightenment tradition that was philosophically and politically important. So I'm just wondering, how do you situate some of the more radical? Like, of course, the Constitution

we know was, and many American historians will characterize the Constitution as turning away from the more radical and egalitarian possibilities of, you know, the Declaration of Independence and so on. And they will point to, you know, Thomas Payne, common sense, you know, rights of man and these kinds of ideals. How do you situate that kind of European Enlightenment tradition in the context of the history that you're talking about? Is it possible that there are more than one kinds of thing going on? Or do you see some way in which this is important and appropriated by this settler class to achieve their political ends? How do you deal with those arguments about people who want to see that philosophical and political heritage involved? Well, first of all,

with regard to Tom Payne, I don't think that some of our friends on the left have dealt with him adequately. What I mean is if they had dealt with him adequately, they'd look at his reservations about the Haitian Revolution, which was a true revolution, 1791 to 1804, in some ways a direct response to the formation of the United States of America. And like many of these Europeans and Euro-Americans, Tom Payne was queasy about the Haitian Revolution. And he was not alone. I think in order to understand the United States contextually in relationship to Britain, for example, the country from which is seceded, you have to understand that Britain had a certain kind of aristocracy of lineage, so to speak, and the United States basically establishes an aristocracy of race.

Now, admittedly, there is a broader base in terms of an aristocracy of race than aristocracy of lineage. And so I understand why many of our friends of European descent had been a bit blinded, if not bedazzled, by the fact that they were able to get certain rights in the United States that they did not necessarily enjoy in the mother country. I understand, just like I understand, when Raphael Trujillo, the 1930s dictator in the Dominican Republic, when he was in the process of massacring Haitians on overtly and crude racist grounds, was opening the door to fleeing Jewish people from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Because he had a project of so-called whitening in terms of what he perceived to be this race conflict with Haiti, the neighbor with which he shares the island we call Hispaniola. So I would understand if there were certain Jewish folks who found refuge in Hispaniola, why they might view the Dominican Republic benignly. perhaps even positively, but in the long run, I don't think that's a very sound point of view.

And so likewise, since presumably black people like myself are supposed to be considered citizens and equal, I can understand why you would have this sort of race lens with regard to our presence in the antebellum era, where our interests are overlooked, swept under the rug, et cetera, in the interests of building a nation intentionally or not misinterpreting so-called Bush-Wat Democratic rights, which, after all, and not just Bush-Wat Democratic rights, they're racially coded rights, as I reflected with regard to the Second Amendment, to the U.S. Constitution. Oftentimes, there are rights designed in principle to repress people like myself. So I think it's long past time in 2021 to have a new vision of the history of this country that takes seriously the idea that people like myself are not going away anytime soon and whose interests should not necessarily be glossed over, just like, for example, a Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, who, as you know, put Biden over the top in 2020 in South Carolina primary

has suggested that the national anthem be jumped and replaced by the Negro national anthem, lift every voice and sing. I would also say to our friends on the left, where I keep hearing this anthem, this land is your land, whenever I go to left-wing meetings, and of course, replicated at the Biden inauguration, interestingly enough, that that is an insult to the indigenous population because this land is their land

and we're living here at their sufferance and we need to have some sort of settlement that takes their interests into account and stops sweeping under the rug these meddlesome issues which in a sense belong in the 19th century and it's time I think for us to advance to the 21st century

particularly since even sober, even less than sober commentators are suggesting that you have a mass base for fascism in this country, and a lot of it has to do with a kind of nostalgia, a kind of revengeism on the part of certain segments of the settler class, and our friends on the left are not helping things by overlooking the true history. history of this country, which in many ways feeds into this revengeism, which ultimately, if we're not careful, is going to consume us all. You're giving me so much red meat to try to chase after all of these threads that you're putting out there. But I definitely need to make sure that we get back to 1776. So I'm going to backtrack a little bit. But before I do that, I just want to mention that. I do love the fact that you keep reiterating how overrated our constitution is. And just as an aside for Adnan and Brett, we definitely should be doing an intelligence briefing on the unratified French constitution of 1793 at some point, because I don't think that there's

too many people in the United States that know about it. And, well, they should. And anyway, Professor Horn, I've got kind of two points that tie back to what we were talking about early on in the conversation regarding 1770. that I think that we should just try to, you know, nail down a little bit more. The first being the involvement of the slaves, the blacks, with the British in the Revolutionary War and maybe try to tie a bow on why that is that there was, as you said, an order of magnitude more blacks fighting with the British than there was with the colonists at that time.

And then the other thing that perhaps you can tie it into the same answer is the role of property in the revolution, because I don't think that we've really touched on the role of property in the revolution, but of course, that's inextricably tied to it, though it's never really discussed. Well, many in your audience may be familiar with Lord Dunmore, the last colonial governor of Virginia. And on the cusp of 1776 as the settler class, was beginning to erupt, Lord Dunmore throws fuel on the fire by seeking to tell the Africans that if they sigh with London, then they'll be free. And of course, there was a stampede to his side. But at the same time, this infuriated the sentence because, as I say in the 1776 book, There had always been this lurking fear that London would seek to recruit Africans to discipline the settlements.

And given the fact that on the cusp of 1776, a significant percentage of the denizens of North America were indigenous, African, et cetera, perhaps up to 20% African, and that may be an underestimate. And given the fact that London, even to that point, had been recruiting black soldiers into its ranks, which had continued to do after the formation of the United States of America, this was unsettling to the settlers. And in many ways, you could draw a parallel between Lord Dunmore and Abraham Lincoln, because the Emancipation Proclamation, which was devised in 1862 to be coming into effect in 1863,

was in many ways of warfighting measure because it leads to enslave Africans given an incentive, just like Lord Dunmore had given an incentive, to flee enslavement to the side of the Lincoln government, And ultimately, I think something like 179,000 black men in particular, donned the blue uniform of the Lincoln government and helped to crush the Confederacy. There are a few more stirring examples of class struggle than the enslaved, destroying slavery, guns in hand. And interestingly enough, as you probably know, those states that did not defect to the Confederate states of America, it had slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation did not necessarily apply to them, for example. So it's a warfighting measure, just like Lord Dunmore had a warfighting measure.

And this was nothing new. In my 16th century book, I talk about how the maritime John Brown, which is the term I used for him, Jacques. Desoria in the 1500s, in the area ranging from the northern coast of South America to the Florida streets, was raising havoc in Spanish settlements by promising freedom to the enslaved in return for joining his hearty band. So this has the downside, however, of infuriating the settlers. In fact, some have suggested that in terms of inducing the settlers to break the law, to break their allegiance to the crown, to break their allegiance to London, a signal factor was Lord Dunmore's edict. And in turn, as I talk about in the 1776 book, you even had fabrications about the black people siding with London against the settlers in order to stir up. the settler class, which of course reminds us of the politics of the United States in 2021, where you try to use the black scare and the specter of so-called black crime

to stampede many Euro-Americans to the right. It's a very successful tactic as the Republican Party and even the Democratic Party could well illustrate. And so I would say once again, that what was at issue with regard to these events kicked off by 1776, ultimately is property, not only what I've been referring to in terms of the property and the slave Africans, which is what I've been stressing, but as noted, with regard to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the land of the indigenous population, which land space, speculators like George Washington are lusted after. We really need a text for those of you who are in touch with the graduate students that focuses on the question of land speculation as a motive force in North America. I would say particularly in the United States, I would imagine in Canada as well, because I'm doing a project on Texas right now, which was an independent nation from 1836 to

1845 seceding from Mexico because Mexico had moved towards abolition of slavery in the preceding years. And it's apparent, it's evident that land speculation helps to attract many settlers, Europeans, not only from Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia, et cetera, but all the way from Europe. They're flooding into Texas for the goal of the, the goal of the obtaining land. And of course, this leads to endless cycles of conflict with Native Americans who know how to fight, such as the population we call the Comanches, the population we refer to as the Apaches, which leads to decades of bloody war before they're virtually liquidated. That's actually perfectly sort of set up for this next question that I wanted to ask,

because, you know, one outgrowth of the idealist and often, you know, white supremacy, retelling of American history, is this sort of, you know, in its more softer forms, the ahistorical conception of slaves as generally passive. But even in some more belligerent forms, there are actually some reactionary American textbooks that even portray the slaves as more or less grateful for free housing and whatnot. Teaching children this is they grow up in this society. And one of the things I really appreciate about your work is you just, I mean, systematically destroy all of this myth-making, these creation myths around U.S. origins. And one way you do that is you highlight the slave revolts and show them as a long historical process from the very

beginning. But you also love to emphasize, as you just did, the indigenous resistance to settler colonialism as well. So I was wondering about the intersections of these struggles. Did these different groups consciously sort of always see each other as allies in a common struggle or was it much more complicated than that? Just the intersections of those two liberation and resistance movements is what I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on. Well, the short answer is that it's complicated. I mean, as I said, I'm doing this project on Texas now. And like many historians, I was entering this project with certain hypotheses and certain premises on Amongst which were certain alliances between the Africans and the indigenous.

But as I was going along with the research, I kept coming across contrary signals. And so the way U.S. historians work, for example, they stick to their hypothesis of premise, even though they see contrary evidence, where my idea is you try to explain to the audience, to your readers. Why there might have been complications, why there might have been conflicts between the indigenous and the Africans in Texas in the 1830s and the 1840s, and perhaps thereafter. Having said that, I should also say that Florida is oftentimes given as the leading example of collaboration between the African, and the indigenous population are going back to the 1500s because as I tell the story

of the invasion of North America is not in the first instance by Londoners, it's by the Spanish. And it's in Florida, in particular. And there is a settlement established in what is called St. Augustine, Florida, which exists at this very day. And from the inception,

there were enslaved Africans brought by the Spanish, and from the inception, there was a kind of a trade in Africans between Spanish Cuba and Spanish Florida. And from the inception, there were alliances between the indigenous and the Africans against the Spanish settlers. Indeed, one of the reasons we're communicating in English right now in North America is that as the English were moving to establish their settlement in Virginia, what they call Virginia, circa 1607, the Spanish wanted to intervene, but they were so tied down fighting the indigenous and their African comrades that they were not able to, allowing England to establish this foothole in North America, which ultimately expands through the entire continent.

And this alliance in Florida continues, I already mentioned, the slave revolt in South Carolina in 1730s and how that gives rise, even revolts before that gives rise to this attempt to construct a white colony in Georgia between South Carolina and Florida. This continues after the U.S. takeover of Florida, about 200 years. years ago. And there's a phenomenon called the Negro Fort. There have been a number of books written about the Negro Fort because it's a fascinating episode. Before the U.S. takeover of Florida, the indigenous and the Africans have been working with London to establish this Negro Fort, which was armed to the teeth. Of course, London had an interest in perhaps punishing its former colony, perhaps preventing its growth. And of course, I need not detail why the Africans and the indigenous might want to fight these settlers under the U.S. flag.

And the Negro Fort ultimately was dispersed, but then that led to a series of wars between these forces and the United States. Some of the bloodiest wars, the United States was involved in, in some ways, exceeding in chronology and length the war in Afghanistan from 2000. 2001 to 2021 and counting. Matter of fact, exceeding by far in length, the war in Afghanistan. On the other hand, if you look at the Yonacci War in South Carolina, circa 1715, for example, you'll find that London and the settlers had insisted black people to fight the indigenous population. So it's a mixed picture.

I mean, I'm not able to give you, I mean, in fact, if I could, I could probably do it if I had some time to give you some sort of quantitative answer with regard to, were the Africans more prone to side with the indigenous versus the settlers, my initial response without doing the calculations would be, yes, they were more prone to side with the indigenous, but I haven't done the calculations. But it's a mixed picture. And then, of course, it's complicated by the U.S. Civil War because the last Confederate general to surrender in 1865 is an indigenous general, Stan Wattie, who was Cherokee. Of course, the Cherokees tried to assimilate. They had enslaved Africans when they were forced on the long march, Trail of Tears from Georgia to Oklahoma, supposedly their home forever.

They were enslaved Africans marching alongside with them. And many of the Cherokees were quite hostile to the U.S. government for good reason. And so many of them sided with the Confederacy. I'm not sure if that was for good reason. But then they lost, and then a battle erupted as to whether or not the Africans would be accepted under Cherokee sovereignty.

Actually, that struggle continues to this very day. Also, since some of you are in the United States, tonight on the public broadcasting, there is a documentary about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 a century ago

where this black community in Oklahoma is routed, subjected to a pogromp, most of the narrative doesn't point out that one of the reasons you had so many black people with a kind of wealth in Tulsa as opposed to other U.S. cities is that these black people under Confederate indigenous rule were some of the few black people who actually got the kind of reparations of 40 acres of a mule. But then what happens is that 100 years ago, the settlers say, you know, you know what, you Negroes have much too much. So we're taking that too.

So any of it, that's my long-wooded response to your question. Well, I want to, my proclivity is to take us further back in history since I'm interested in earlier periods and these origins. But also, I just wanted to comment that this is also one of the things. that I find so interesting about what you've done with these three works, is that in revising radically this narrative of 1776 and the revolution by looking at the background to it, slave insurrections and so forth that are taking place in the 13 colonies and in the Caribbean, is that you're going further back in time and you're also globalizing the story. So instead of this being just a national story, it's about events and processes that are taking place across the Atlantic.

It involves, you know, major world systems being reorganized and reframed. And interestingly, you also kept going further and further back, which I'm very interested in why you, you know, felt that you had to, what it was that you were finding when you went further back, and how that reframed maybe what you think. But the key issue seems to me, the heart of the juxtaposition, you know, really the heart of all of this seems to be, from my perspective, a transition from forms of religious exclusion and identity to the construction of whiteness, white supremacy, and a whole racial regime, a racial regime of capitalism, a racial regime in politics, a racial regime basically in organizing society on that level of exclusion and whose part. part of this in-group. So I'm really intrigued by how you see that dynamic unfolding. And if that's part of the reason why you had to keep going further and further back, because the European wars of religion, you know, there's both an internal, you know, Christendom story, which is of heresy becoming an actual problem where, you know, it's no longer a heresy. It's called

Protestantism because it wins in all the other, you know, dissident. movements get suppressed and so they're called heretics. So there's that internal kind of problem of how to resolve major conflicts within Europe and then in the settler colonies that they establish. And the other

one is, of course, you know, religious difference with Jews and with Muslims. Jews as an internal you know, kind of dissident religious community that's suppressed and oppressed and you mentioned that, you know, that they're

expulsion and that something of the dynamics of anti-Judism that becomes later anti-Semitism is also relevant in your story and also confronting this Muslim threat that is a rival in geopolitical terms and in religious terms. So there seem to be too dynamic and this period as you go further back is very crucial for resolving these problems. And it's not so clear to us in the 18th and 19th century histories, we don't, especially 19th and 20th centuries, we don't think about religion as being that relevant. So I wanted you to talk a little bit more about that transition. And is it a real break or, you know, how does Christianity in some ways contribute to a kind of construction of whiteness? Well, I agree. It's not a real

break, although as today in Western Europe in particular, you've had much more of a de-emphasis of religion, whereas in the United States, I would argue that as a nation that it was at the tip of the spear during the Red Scare and the Cold War, which was an international phenomenon, or global phenomenon, the United States had to repress close. class-based entities and organizations more enthusiastically than some of its pure nations. And I think that then that creates a kind of ideological vacuum that leads to the recrudescence of religion as a factor. And indeed, you can't watch the video from January 6, 2021, or try to understand the Trump phenomenon, the Trump base of 74 million without understanding what even the mainstream

calls white Christian nationalism, which in my estimation is sort of an outgrowth of this repression of the class project. But to return to what I take to be the nub of your question, as you know from the 16th century book, in many ways it begins with the crusades at the end of the 11th century, where you have a certain unity of Western European Christendom, and the othering, as they say, in the United States of the Muslim population towards the end of reclaiming what they call it to be the Holy Land. And as I see it, that whole process carries the seeds of the succeeding project, which is the race project. And in fact, the internal antagonists, to use your term, speaking of the Jewish populations, as I say in the first few pages, of the 16th century project, many of the tropes and the modes of persecution that are visited upon the Jewish population in England before they're expelled or sort of transferred in some ways to other populations, such as the black population, in terms of anti-miscegenation, for example, in terms of sort of distorting their physiognomy, for example.

And I think that one of the reasons I keep going back is that it's a desperate effort to try to get to the roots of the issue because I think, as you know, many of us don't write history just for the sake of writing history. I mean, I've told the story about the mainstream historians who go to a physician and the physician wants to take. a medical history and because physicians feel if they take a medical history they know what afflicted your parents and your grandparents and your great grandparents they can provide a better diagnosis for yourself and the mainstream historian is sort of puzzled by this whole process because they feel that you should just study history for history sake and so they don't think that it should be studied so you can come up with diagnosis so i'm trying to come up with a a diagnosis so that I can come up with a prescription so I can help this process of overturning

this monster. And so therefore, that's one of the reasons why I keep going back. And I'm not sure if I've gone back as far as I can, even in talking about the end of the 11th century. I just read this book about this youngest story in the UCLA called Divine Variations. And he takes the story back to the origins of Christianity itself approximately 2,000 years ago. And then he fast forward to the 18th century and the 19th century, which I think is a mode that's worth pursuing. And I think that one of the reasons we try to look at this as a global phenomenon, because it is a global phenomenon.

I mean, the United States is not a thing in itself. I mean, it does not operate in a vacuum, even though you could be easily misled to think otherwise. We all know, even mainstream its story has acknowledged that the rise of national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean and elsewhere, along with a socialist camp, puts pressure on the United States to try to do something about its more horrific forms of Jim Crow. And that kind of global process is not unique to the 20th century. You have to understand the rise of Ottoman Turkey and the pressure it was placing on the Western Europeans, particularly in the 15th century, which then impels the Iberians to almost, they're almost fleeing from the Ottoman Turks as they begin to set sail for across the Atlantic and further south, for example. So I think we have to understand all these phenomena because I think part of the, you know, you have this phenomenon now in the United States called Afro-pessimism. And, hey, if I didn't understand what was going on in the world, I'd be pessimistic too.

I mean, surrounded by all these reactionaries, you know, these white Christian nationalists, neo-fascists, armed militia groups, they had infiltrated 18,000 police departments, the U.S. military is on a pause right now to try to deal with white extremists. in its ranks. So if I were just focused on the United States, I'd be pessimistic too. As a matter of fact, I'd probably be looking to move, quite frankly. And actually, I am thinking about moving, even though I'm not pessimistic. So that shows you where that's at it. So in some, as I say in the last pages of the introduction of the 16th century book, you've had this transition from religion to race to class. the general crisis of the race system ignited by the Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1804, creating an entire crisis for that entire system, causing London to come to the conclusion of the better part of wisdom is to end its role in the African slave trade at 1807, then 1830s moving in slavery itself. And then with the destruction of the slave system, you have the fertile conditions in the United States at least, and I would say in many sites globally, for the rise of class-based systems, unions, working-class parties, ultimately a socialist system.

But then, as we know, that system began to retreat. And once again, you have the rise of this white Christian nationalism. Although I'm optimistic that we can turn back this latest iteration of intense religiosity. And I say this particularly after the aftermath, in the aftermath of January 6th, 2021, which I really interpret it as a hinge moment in the history of the United States. well um since you brought up class you know maybe we just each have a a final question we've been so generous with your time but since you brought up a class i did want to follow up um with just one remark that uh robin kelly made about uh the 16th century book um that it unraveled some of

the secrets of so-called primitive accumulation and i guess what that question what What I'm asking about is how you see the development of capitalism being very intimately connected in this period of transition from feudalism. We were talking about the construction of whiteness during this period, but also this period of transition from feudalism to capitalism. You know, historians have started now to talk about it a little bit, you know, a little bit more. But it used to just be glossed over in these sorts of even Marxist histories, you know, based histories of, you know, know, how do we get to industrial capitalism so that now we have people finally starting to look at how colonial exploitation enslaved labor was all constitutive of the forms of accumulation that allowed for the so-called European takeoff. And so in addition to U.S. origins, it seems that you

might, you have something to say here about how capitalism really gets going, you know, that is not always incorporated into how we think about that development as an internal European social relations question without these inputs of, you know, exploitation on a grand and global scale. So I'm wondering if, you know, how do you see this story of capitalism being informed by and informing this process during this kind of early period? Well, fortunately, there are others who have addressed this question. I would look at the Nigerian historian, Joseph Iniquori, England, and the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, Eric Williams of Trimdad and Tobago, capitalism and slavery, a new edition that's coming out within weeks. Walter Rodney of Guyana, how Europe underdeveloped Africa. And actually, I think my 17th century book is more illustrative of the seeds of capitalism than the 16th century book, which is obvious reasons, since once you've given it, closer to the Industrial Revolution, once you get closer to the late 18th century and Adam Smith, you're able to more easily espy the roots. And in the 17th century book, I talk about how in the

1650s there is a turning point with the rise of republicanism and Oliver Cromwell and the temporary retreat of the monarch, well, the beheading on the monarch to be blunt. And this then is accompanied by the expansionist tendencies of Oliver Crumwell, not only in Ireland, where he's still a despised figure, and that's part of the primitive accumulation process as well, but also in the Caribbean, because his initial plan in the 1650s was really to else the Spanish altogether from the Caribbean. But he succeeds in Jamaica and at the same time

that Oliver Cromwell is ousting the Spanish from Jamaica you have the Dutch comrades, Protestant comrades of London. They had temporarily seized Brazil from the Portuguese. But at that particular moment in history the Portuguese

have come roaring back. Many of those who are allied with the Dutch or Jewish. They fear the inquisitorial policies of Spain's neighbor. They're looking for a place to flee to and serendipitously from their point of view. There's Jamaica. In Brazil, they had made significant advances in terms of sugar being produced by enslaved labor. They bring those processes to Jamaica and ultimately throughout the so-called British possessions in the Caribbean, which leads to the sugar boom, which sends a flood of wealth and capital into the coffers of London because sugar is not only used to sweeten your tea and coffee, it's seen by some as a

miracle drug. And this accumulation of wealth, then allows London to further strengthen its military. It allows London to strengthen its Navy because one of the secrets of London, as a glance at the map will indicate, is that it's an island monarchy and on the one hand does not have to spend as much on a land army as its neighbor across the channel, France, has to do.

But it has to spend quite a bit on a Navy to not only guard its shores, but also to more easily reach lands that are being plundered in its backyard, such as Ireland, and this building of a Navy and a building of ships then helps to create a working class, which then is paid wages. And then that allows for the circulation of the wages in terms of buying goods and building more housing and all the rest. It also allows for the transport of more settlers across the Atlantic in these vessels that are built, which in turn creates more wealth for London. It allows for the transporting of more Africans from West Africa to the Caribbean. And now you begin to see that we arrived where we began, talking about the glorious revolution and the rise of a merchant class and the rise of the great wealth that they're creating, that they're helping to create, I should say, and that this then plants the seeds of this iniquitous system we refer to as capitalism. which is still bedeviling us based upon the shameless exploitation of legions and the crass and gross exploitation of what could be called a number of plutocrats. A system that is still with us today, a system that at least in the United States has been heavily based upon a class collaboration.

I have a review coming out in the nation. out of New York in a few days. And one of the points I make there is that class collaboration can be considered one of the highest forms of white supremacy. And white supremacy can be considered one of the highest forms of class collaboration. And it's that factor that is a, to an extent,

to this point, has been a stabilizing factor, although I would like to think that its role as a stabilizing factor is beginning to erode, at least we can only be so lucky. And listeners, just to be aware, when Professor Horn says, in a few days, we're recording this on February 8th. So, yeah, it'll already be out by the time that you're hearing this. So Professor Horn, I've got just a very, the question won't be brief, but I'm going to ask you to keep your answer brief so we can get to Brett's final question. question, but this is going to allow you to pitch one of your other books.

So there are parallels between the counter-revolution of 1776, which we've been talking about, and your book Race to Revolution, the United States and Cuba during slavery and Jim Crow. Namely that, as you point out, Cuba was temporarily under British control at some time, and the British did undertake some of these, you could think of them as regulations or restrictions on slavery, and it caused a lot of tensions with the mainland here. I don't know if you want to just talk about some of those parallels and then perhaps about kind of how crazed the slave trade was in driving the influx of Africans into Cuba after 1776 then.

Well, in a brief piece in the American Historical Review that I published maybe a year or two ago, I tried to suggest briefly that you can draw a thread from the glorious revolution to 1776 to 1836 when Texas accedes from Mexico to 1861, when finally the slavery as a locomotive for profiteering and change begins to be reversed, at least in the United States, by 1861, although those slave, pro-slave forces were triumphant 1688, 1776, 1836. Cuba figures in because, as suggested, in the aftermath, and during the Seven Years' War, 1756 to 1763, London had temporarily taken over Cuba.

That's part of the process of relieving pressure on its settlements from Georgia heading northward to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And there's a lot of consternation amongst the wild enslavers of these settlements, because London, even then, is trying to restrain some of their lust in terms of, because they thought that Cuba was underslaved to use that term. And so they wanted to bring in more. And that's another point of conflict that leads to the revolt of 1776. Interestingly enough, for the so-called Revolutionary Republic, by the 1790s, the United States had replaced Spain as the major transporter of Africans to Cuba, which is a strange outcome for a so-called Revolutionary Republic. And to fast forward, even today, although we are optimistic that the current regime in Washington will move towards normalizing relations with Trump. Cuba. It's no secret that there are still those in the United States who, as was said in the 19th century, they see Cuba as a white apple that will fall from the tree into the hands

of Uncle Sam. So Cuba has been a major focus of the so-called Republicans. And North America for decades, if not centuries. So you ask for a brief answer, so I'll stop there, although I could go on. And it's true that every one of your books could be and deserves a full episode of its own. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we're very grateful for the generosity that you've given us with your time today, Professor Horn. Last question, and, you know, this entire episode has been thinking about history, which is crucial to understanding the present, but I'm also interested in your vision of how to move forward. So given everything we've discussed today, what are some of your thoughts on the way forward

generally for the socialist left generally and for black and indigenous liberation movement specifically situated as we are here in 2021? Well, the short answer is that a prime objective for those forces you just mentioned should be strengthening working class organization. unions in the first instance, not only in the United States, but particularly in the United States. And with a particular emphasis on strengthening unions that have a significant base of what in London they call BIPOC, black indigenous people of color, that is to say, in their ranks. and I think that this would go a long way to creating muscle that would be useful for the entire progressive movement because my experience has been that when unions are strong, the entire progressive movement is strong,

and that ultimately I think that this could lead and would lead to more or a or more political parties based upon this union strength, not least in the United States of America, but I would say once again throughout the world. Now, I would like to think that we may be on the cusp of that particular trend. I mean, there's talk about at least introducing to the U.S. Congress legislation with regard to making it easier to organize unions, of course, there's going to be resistance. But the fact that there is even talk about it is a gigantic step forward because if it is introduced that allows us to mobilize, but it's not just those organizations as well. I've been kicking myself lately because the Black Lives Matter movement has been encountering some problems lately.

And I have to say that it doesn't come as a surprise to me, but I didn't write about it, didn't speak out about it on any venue, because, you know, these are young people I figured, you know, they don't want to hear from an old fart like myself. But now that they're encountering problems, I'm kicking myself because I think the problems could have been circumvented of problems of decentralization, you know, the romanticizing of decentralization, the romanticizing. of leaderless resistance, so to speak. But still, you know, the movement is still with us. It's still vibrant. We need replicas of that movement in the Native American community in particular, in the Latinx community in particular, in the Asian Pacific community in particular.

Because I think that ultimately, we have to see an organizing of all of these different exploited groups in the context of organizing a working class movement with these movements of creating rivulets that create a mighty stream, a mighty river, that will be powerful enough to tear down these walls of oppression that are currently holding us back. Amazing. Simply amazing.

had, again, listeners, the great, and I don't use that lately, the great Gerald Horn, John and Jay, John Jay and Rebecca Moore's chair of history and African American studies at the University of Houston on the show to talk about several of his works, but with a focus on the counter-revolution of 1776, slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America. Professor Horn, it was an absolute pleasure having you on the show, and I know that I speak for both of the guys when I say, come back, please, in the future. Last thing that I'm going to have you do before we let you go and we go into our wrap-up, what's the next thing that the listener should be looking out to come out from you?

Well, since the archives are closed, some of the projects I've been working on a sort of in a state of suspended animation. You know, I'm working on a project on Texas. There was a line in the New York Times just a few days ago that said Texas is to the United States as the United States is to the world. That is to say, as sort of a reactionary beacon, so to speak. So I'm looking at the early history of Texas and what I perceive and what I perceive to be the roots of U.S. fascism,

which I see is embedded in the Lone Star State. And I'm working a project on Washington, D.C. as well because actually one of my recommendations for the progressive movement today is that it go all out for statehood of Washington, D.C., to create two senators who would be probably the most progressive senators in that body. Despite gentrification, Washington, D.C. is still about 50% black, for example. And one of the things I'm pointing out in this book is how that demography has hampered U.S. imperialism. For example, I might even start the book with the Secretary of Defense in the early 1970s

trying to go from the Pentagon to the White House for a meeting to plan bombings of Vietnam. But all the Negroes are demonstrating. So he's stuck in traffic. So it sort of slows down that entire process. And then since I'm spending so much time in lockdown, I've started this project just by reading old books and what's online about Egypt and Ethiopia post. U.S. Civil War, because what happens after the U.S. Civil War is that a number of the Confederates moved to each, believe it or not. And by the 1870s, they're leading invasions of Ethiopia.

Believe it or not. So I'm working on this project. It's in the infant stages of these U.S. nationals in Egypt and Ethiopia. And then, of course, you have to sort of expand to look at Sudan, For example, today's Eritrea, which, of course, is once part of Ethiopia. You know, the Suez Canal. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of having the project go from the creation of the Suez Canal, which is a turning point for the British Empire, 1869, because it allows London to get to India more easily. And then London decides, well, you know, we should just take over Egypt altogether,

which happens by 1882, up to 1956, the Suez Crisis, which is a turning point in the history of imperialism, because you have this piratical attack by Israel, Britain, and France on NASA's Egypt, that fails. And it has enormous implications for the British Empire and for French imperialism. So that's another project. And then also much more in the embryo stage than infant stage is this project about the southeast Asia. I had started, I wanted to do it initially. There's this guy. You can look them up. The White Raja of Sarawak, the Brook family. They rule, they rule Sarawak in Southeast Asia from

the mid-19th century up to the Japanese invasion of the 1940. So I wanted to do something on that because one of the things I learned about British imperialism and British colonialists, not far behind or the Yankees, I mean, tailing off. like in my book on Kenya. It turns out that the richest settler in colonial Kenya was actually a Euro-American, for example. But since I'm in lockdown,

I'm not sure if I can, there's not enough in terms of dissertations, master's theses. So I'm thinking about expanding to Southeast Asia, then I can get to the Philippines, so I know there's a lot of the Philippines. And they put that in the whole context

of the U.S. and Southeast Asia with a focus on a black American. So anyway, those are my projects. Listeners, if you didn't believe me when we were introducing Professor Horne, when I said that he has an absolutely incredibly diverse range of expertise, that answer alone should pretty much lay that bare.

So again, we were talking to Gerald Horn. Professor Horan, thank you for coming on and hope to speak with you in the future. Listeners will be right back with the wrap-up. We're back on guerrilla history. We just finished our conversation with Professor Gerald Horn. Boy, what a conversation. Talking to Professor Horn is like an avalanche of information coming at you.

Burling down every word that comes out of his mouth is well thought through. A lot of it is things that you wouldn't have necessarily thought of before. And it's all very well historical. grounded. So unbelievable conversation with Professor Horn, and I just feel grateful for the opportunity to have had it. As I mentioned earlier, I really am a big fan of Professor Horn. But let's just wrap up this conversation with a little bit of a bow. I think that Professor Horn did a good job of that himself. So let's just give our brief thoughts on the conversation overall. And I'll start with just something that I wish that we would have had time to talk about, it'll be brief. But Brett, you know, I'll turn to you then on your thoughts on the conversation and then maybe then after Adnan gives his thoughts. We'll wrap up with some things that it either raised that we want to look into further, things that we didn't get the chance to talk about this time. But something that I wish that

I had gotten to ask, Professor Horn, is to have him explain what he would have, what he thinks would have happened had the American Revolution been unsuccessful. I think that there's a lot of interesting things that, as we heard in this conversation, there's a lot of aspects of the American Revolution that are not talked about in America particularly, but basically anywhere. And as Professor Horn said, and as we said in the introduction earlier, this in many ways was not this progressive movement that it's oftentimes portrayed as. this, you know, purely democratic, super positive force, there was a lot of negative aspects

associated with it. And even just beyond individual aspects, there was some pillars of the revolution that perhaps weren't as savory as we're typically exposed to in terms of how it's portrayed. So it would have been really interesting to talk to Professor Horn about what he thinks would have happened, how particularly slavery would have continued, or how the institution of slavery would have developed had the American Revolution been unsuccessful? Because, of course, looking back at that, at the revolution, there was a lot of instances where things of chance were really what separated victory from defeat and turning points of the war. You know, you're looking at miscommunication to Burgoyne coming down from Quebec. I mean, that was a

huge thing. And if the communications had been better, perhaps that wouldn't have happened. So it would have been really interesting to see what Professor Horne's perspective would have been on how all of this would have been different had that revolution failed. Because I think that inevitably, there would have been another revolution at some point. You know, this wouldn't have, even if the American Revolution of 1776 had failed, it's not as if the United States of America would have always been the colonial territory of Great Britain up until today. There would have been another revolution. But it's interesting to think if this revolution had been built on different pillars, how would history have unfolded differently? And that's something

that we didn't really get into. And it's kind of an unfair question, but something that's kind of in the back of my mind nonetheless. But Brett, why don't we turn to you and have you give you thoughts on the conversation that we just had with Professor Horn? Yeah, for sure. I mean, as you said, I think Professor Horn speaks for himself. And so there's not much I could add. One thing I just want to point out is that you know the phrase dialectical materialism it's a difficult phrase difficult concept people struggle and wrestle with it and it's totally understandable here's an example you know gerald horn is a dialectical materialist historian he has a materialist conception of history and he lays it out and that's part of the reason i think odd not in the episode talked about you constantly

have to go back further and further and further right because what's dialectics it's that everything is connected nothing is left out these are a series of interoperate related processes constantly in development and evolution that are inherently global and that spans centuries. You can't have a nice, clean cutoff point. And that speaks to his whole style of doing history, which is fascinating. So if you still struggle with that concept and defining it, understandable, it can really help to have an example of that sort of thinking. And I think Gerald Horn is a beautiful example of that. And then at the end, I think we all sort of smiled to each other as we just see just how prolific of a thinker and historian he is as he goes over

his projects he's currently working on there's all over the map his interests are so varied he speaks eloquently and extemporaneously on any topic you throw his direction and as a historian you know we can often get sort of locked in the you know what happened in the past sort of thing and that's why i wanted to sort of end that conversation with what are your political thoughts right now going forward and as always you know he didn't fail to deliver He sketched out the importance, the crucible of any revolutionary movement being organized labor. And as he described in the rivulets, you know, forming a giant river with the different liberation struggles, black liberation, indigenous liberation, feminism, et cetera, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism.

These are all things that coming together with that kernel of an organized labor movement giving us actual power and connecting us sort of across identities and a common struggle is really important for left-wing people, organizers, thinkers today to take seriously. I think that is precisely the way forward. And so I really appreciated that. And then, of course, he is a debunker of these absurd white supremacist myths. And, you know, in order to clear the way for the construction of a new world, we must ruthlessly dismantle the lies and the myths that underpin and uphold the old one. And I think Gerald Horn does that almost better than anyone. Adnan, why don't we finish with you then?

And, yeah, then I'll close us out. Well, I mean, what a wonderful conversation we could have gone on. There's so much more to talk about in this histories. And, of course, he's such a font of historical knowledge. It was an ambitious episode to really think about these three books together in some ways, although we focused mostly on 1776 and the counter-revolution. But it's an interesting question, Henry, if you'd asked that question about if it had failed, if the counter-revolution had failed, what would have happened?

And obviously, Canada represents one trajectory within the British Empire of a settler colonial, you know, nation. And, of course, we can see places like Australia and New Zealand. Very often we think of the United States as very much. a part and exceptional, and in some ways it is, partly because it did come to being as a settler, colonial republic that was successful in its counter-revolutionary revolution, you know, or breakaway. So that's a really fascinating sort of subject. There's so many lines of inquiry that would have been interesting to pursue even further, and I hope we'll have him on again at some point. You know, things like labor and how this kind of racial regime of slavery comes to displace either attempts of African slavery comes to displace and replace, you know, indenture, which was sort of, you know, important in the early stages as well.

and, of course, enslavement of indigenous peoples. So that's kind of a very interesting process, how and why that happens. And also thinking about all these Republican revolutions, we had a great conversation with historian Alex Avina and mentioned a little bit about the Bolivarian revolutions. These are all Republican revolutions by settlers. And it seems that there is something actually quite specific. specifically relevant to settler colonial societies, that they, you know, the vocabulary and

idiom of politics is this Republican language, even as it is in some ways instituting a regime of control in a settler colonial context. So it's very interesting. In terms of the future, I'm so glad Brett had asked that. And, you know, if we'd had more time, I would have been interested in talking a little bit more about reparations and what he thinks about that. Because his whole, you know, the whole force of what he's writing and discussing about in his historical work here in these origins is how involved all of American society, all of what comes to be the U.S. is in the enslavement of Africans. And so there's no way to think about isolating this historically as a period that's over or that it isn't a general kind of condition

or problem. It's so constitutive. That's what we were talking about. How important it is to the foundation of this country. So that would have been interesting to talk about because I know other Marxist scholars who also deal with race and class together. Some of them are not as keen on the issue of reparations. But a historian like Gerald Horn, it would be very important to hear what his view is on this. So hopefully we'll have him back, basically, is what I'm saying, is that there's a lot more to talk about, even in this very substantial and wonderful episode. So when he produces the, you know, books for each of those four projects that he just mentioned, you know, we'll have him back to talk about one of them,

at least, and perhaps get some answers on these other things. But it was a fantastic conversation. I couldn't agree more. It was one of the best conversations I've had in any context recently. It really was enlightening. And as I said, he's like an avalanche of information. It's like drinking information from a fire hose when he talks. But yeah, listeners, just one other note then. Adnan mentioned that we had interviewed Alexander Avina recently. We had already recorded that episode, but it'll come out after this episode. We're releasing this one earlier. to have it come out during Black History Month. So the next episode that we release after this

will be with Alexander Avina talking about Latin America during the Cold War. So you can look forward to that. And guys, it was a pleasure. I am going to push for us to do an intelligence briefing on the unratified 1793 French Constitution, which I find one of the most radical and interesting documents of all time. So I'm going to keep pushing for that until eventually you relent and let us do that.

But Adnan, Brett, thanks again for doing this. It's always a pleasure doing this with you. I learn a lot from both of you and, of course, from the guests that we always bring on. So this is really a fulfilling project for me. And I just want to thank you for allowing me to be part of it with you. So Adnan, why don't we start with you? How can our listeners follow you on social media and keep up with your other projects? Well, firstly, right back at you, Henry, this has been so much fun this project. So everybody brings such wonderful things to it. It's always a delight. But people who want to follow me can find me on Twitter at Adnan A-Husain, 1-S-A-I-N. And you can also check out my other podcasts that I host, co-host, called The M-A-J-L-L-S. And you can also check out my other podcast that I host, co-host, called The M-J-L-L-L-S.

And that's about the Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diaspras, a lot of interesting content if you're interested in that region and in those issues. So do check it out. Excellent. And Brett, how can our listeners follow you and your work? For everything I do, you can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Find all three of the podcast I participate in, patrons, Twitter feeds, etc. And I, of course, echo the sentiment back to both of you.

It's always a blast to do this. I learned something new every time and it actually improves the other shows that I do because I take knowledge from this episode or from these episodes and they carry over and inform my work and everything else that I do. So absolutely wonderful. And I'm just going to pitch one of the things that you and your co-host, Allison, on the Red Menace did recently, Brett, because it was really excellent that you had an episode on the fundamentals of Marxian political economy, introductory episode meant for everyone, whether you're a

veteran in terms of Marxist study or somebody who is just starting to dip the toe into the waters of Marxism. Really an excellent resource for people. So go to the Red Menace's feed. He also released it on Revolutionary Left Speed and just look for that episode, The Fundamentals of Marxism, intro to political economy. And then last plug, and I apologize to the listeners for having so many plugs here at the end. But Brett, you recently did weekly Marx with Adnan and Roricki Hutchinson of the daily marks and weekly marks groups for people that are interested in that. I'm just going to plug it here at the end because I know that we have a lot of Marxists that

listen to this podcast. They read four pages of marks per day, and that of course equals 28 pages of marks per week. And Roriki does his summary of the day's reading of marks, and then Adnan does the weekly summary of Marx and occasionally brings on guests to do the summaries. So Richard Wolfe is going to be doing the next one, I believe, along with Dr. Harriet

Fraud. And the last one, Brett O'Shea, our friend. And did Allison take part in that as well, or was it just Brett? Just Brad. Okay. So listeners, if you're interested in joining that Marxist study group, they're almost done with Capital Volume 1, and then

they're going to be diving into the Communist Manifesto. So it's a good time to get into that if you're interested, go to David Feldman show.com, click on office hours. You'll get a link to the Discord. And in the Discord, you'll have all of the information about that Marxist study group. So just figured I'd plug that since my two wonderful co-host recently collaborated for that as well. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take part because I've been a bit swamped recently. But anyway, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995.

You can support me on Patreon. I do analysis of scientific literature with a focus on immunology and especially focus on COVID-19. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck1995. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-Square-Pod, and support us on Patreon. We really do appreciate it, and it does help the show run. patreon.com forward slash gorilla history again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A. Until next time, listeners, take care, stay safe, and solidarity.

Thank you.