Upstream - Radical History: The Roots of Race & Class in the U.S. with Dr. Gerald Horne

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Much of what we learn about U.S. history — from middle school to high school to, well, most of adulthood, is a myth. Oftentimes these tales leave out important information, sometimes they draw misleading conclusions, and a lot of the time they’re simply just made-up stories without any basis in actual history.  This recognition is also true for much of what we’re taught about the American Revolution of 1776. The standard tale is that a handful of so-called “founding fathers” discovered a so-called New World and set forth to establish a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all. But this is a tale that begins to fall apart pretty quickly once you start to examine it from a materialist perspective — one that starts with actual material conditions and contradictions instead of simply focusing on the ideas of certain thinkers that happen to have made their way onto paper.  Understanding the true history behind the stories we’ve been told not only helps to give context to and explain why we are where we are right now, but it also helps us in understanding the roots of our problems, and as we’ll see in this Conversation, to understand how deep they run — so that perhaps we can finally cast the false solutionary strategies of incrementalism and mere reform into the dust bin.  Dr. Gerald Horne is the author of many books, including most recently The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery, Jim Crow and the Roots of U. S. Fascism, as well as, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America — which we’ll be focusing on in this Conversation.  We spoke with Dr. Horne about what traditional versions of the American Revolution of 1776 get wrong — particularly when it comes to enslaved populations and their relationship to colonists at the time. We also explore how the unique phenomenon of the United States’ racial capitalist system manifested in the 20th century, and developed into the 21st century — tying the fascist movements and white supremacy of today to the founding of this nation 250 years ago. Thank you to Bad Brains for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, In the United States, there is an understandable desire to see all of us on the same page, so to speak.

As the slogan from the 1930s and oftentimes repeated today, black and white unite and fight. But the problem is that it's difficult to unite oil and water. There were sharp class contradictions between the enslaved population, not only the slave masters, but to a certain extent the settler class as a whole, since the latter oftentimes were incentivized to repel revolts of the enslaved, to patrol the enslaved, etc. So it's a very complicated and messy history that I understand people want to sort of gloss over

so that we can have a usable past, so that we can show we were united in the 18th century and we should be united now. I understand that. But the problem is, as we see the right wing on the march, as we see the Trumpistas gain 74, 75 million votes amongst descendants of the settler, European settler population across class lines. Given the fact that as I see it, people like me will be the initial victims of fascism. It's incumbent on people like me to try to get the story straight. You're listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Most of what we learn about U.S. history, from middle school to high school to, well, most of adulthood, is a myth. Oftentimes these tales leave out important information. Sometimes they draw misleading conclusions.

And a lot of the time, they're simply just made-up stories without any basis in actual history. This recognition is also true for much of what we're taught about the American Revolution of 1776. The standard tale is that a handful of so-called founding fathers discovered a so-called new world and set forth to establish a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all. But this is a tale that begins to fall apart pretty quickly once you start to examine it from a materialist perspective, one that starts with

actual material conditions and contradictions, instead of simply focusing on the ideas of certain thinkers that happen to have made their way onto paper. Understanding the true history behind the stories we've been told not only helps to give context to and explain why we are where we are right now, but it also helps in understanding the roots of our problems, and as we'll see in this conversation, to understand how deep they run, so that perhaps we can finally cast the false solutionary strategies of incrementalism and mere reform into the dustbin. Dr. Gerald Horne is the author of many books, including most recently The Counter-Revolution of 1836, Texas Slavery, Jim Crow, and the Roots of U.S. Fascism, as well as The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America,

which we'll be focusing on in this conversation. We spoke with Dr. Horn about what mainstream versions of the American Revolution of 1776 get wrong, particularly when it comes to enslaved populations and their relationship to colonists at the time. We also explore how the unique phenomenon of the United States' racial capitalist system manifested in the 20th century and developed into the 21st century, tying the fascist movements and white supremacy of today to the founding of this nation 250 years ago. Here's Robert in conversation with Dr. Gerald Horn. Dr. Horn, it's great to have you on. And yeah, I'd love to spend the bulk of the time here talking about your books and particularly the book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, which I think is just

really groundbreaking in a lot of myth busting around American history, specifically what a lot of us learn in high school and, you know, on after high school as well. So yeah, I'd love it if maybe you could just outline your main thesis in that book and just give us an idea of what you were hoping to accomplish with the book. Well, the book suggests as the indicates, that the formation of the United States of America in the late 18th century, contrary to widespread opinion, was not necessarily a step forward for humanity. Certainly, it was a gigantic leap backward for the indigenous population and for the population of African descent. and for the population of African descent. With regard to the latter, what I find striking is that in this country, you have a critical mass of people who consider themselves to be class warriors and always railing against identity politics. And yet, when it comes to the class of unpaid workers, meaning slaves, enslaved Africans, the way they make the story of the

United States seem progressive is to impute to them a kind of class collaboration. That is to say that they would unite with slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, et al., so that the population of the enslaved would increase exponentially, which is what happened after 1776, despite all this propaganda, including by Governor DeSantis of Florida, that actually 1776 inaugurated an era of abolition, which is a strange case of abolition when the population of the enslaved increases exponentially. And I think that once again, with regard to the so-called class warriors, one could perhaps make a case that with regard to the settler population, that it made sense

for there to be class collaboration, that is to say the Euro-American poor working class, middle class, and 1% to unite because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow included the land of the indigenous, some of which was parceled out to those below the 1% on the pecking order. Now, speaking of the land, that brings us to the other point, which is that if you look at what triggered the settlers to basically break the law, because that's what you do when you revolt against British rule, it has to be something profound. And part of the

profundity was the so-called Royal Proclamation of 1762-1763, wherein London expressed displeasure at continually moving west, routing the indigenous population so that land speculators like George Washington could profit. Likewise, there was Somerset's case in 1772, which sought or seemed to suggest, I should say, that slavery was on the path to extinction in England. And as an investor in North America, you might well suspect that that decision would leapfrog the Atlantic and thereby jeopardize the fortunes of slave owners. It's also interesting to compare the revolt against British rule in North America, where there was not such a revolt. rule in North America where there was not such a revolt. For example, Canada, the claiming of which was high on the agenda of the settlers. And despite this so-called grand revolution south of the Canadian border, it's Canada that has the, today, the single-payer health care system, which many in the United States see as something they can only dream about.

And it's also interesting to compare the revolt against colonialism in North America with its counterparts in the Americas. For example, in a good deal of the Americas, the struggle against colonialism was coupled with the struggle against slavery. I mean, that's the import of the life of Simone Bolivar and to a certain extent, San Martin. African descent, speaking of Vincente Guerrero, who abolished slavery 200 plus years before Barack Obama was elected president. A decision that I suggest in my latest book, The Counter-Revolution of 1836, that led once again to a revolt of settlers who were determined to see slavery not end. Speaking of the so-called Republic of Texas that then becomes a U.S. state in 1845 and now is a bulwark of the right wing,

as the example of Senator Ted Cruz well suggests. And then we should look at other settler revolts, such as Rhodesia, 1965, revolting against the British crown. Algeria, culminating in Algerian independence in 1962 after a bloody struggle against France, which thought that Algeria was actually French territory. And so we know much more today from history than we did when many forces began to analyze the history of the United States. And I should also add that you cannot separate the kind of history that I've been doing from the political climate, the political environment, which is not unusual. If you look at the analysis of Reconstruction, the period following the U.S. Civil War, 1865 roughly to 1876, 1877, approximately 90 years ago, the Black American

intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois published this book, Black Reconstruction, which overturned the Scottsboro case of the 1930s, an early attempt to erode, if not overturn, Jim Crow, the rise of the New Deal, the rise of left-leaning unions, et cetera. And likewise, with regard to the work that I'm doing, you can't separate it from the rise of Trump. It becomes difficult to see the United States as being this shining city on the hill. When Donald Trump is elected, gets 74 million votes in November 2020, bids fair to come back to the White House in 2024, these nostrums about a shining city on the hill seem almost obscene. So in a nutshell, that's how my 1776 book came to be. Yeah, thank you so much for going through that and all of those really rich threads that you

sort of put out there in your response, any of which I could pull on and I'm sure we could go down a really interesting path of work that you've done and explored around this history. And as you said, the connections to current politics. And I mean, I think you're absolutely right in that. I guess what I appreciate about your sort of counter narrative here is that it makes sense to me when I think about where we are now as a country and a lot of the white supremacist politics that are pretty popular, this stuff is not even really hidden in the background. And so yeah, going back to sort of the thesis of your book, so I'm going to just try to encapsulate it again here. So really, you're demonstrating that traditional narratives and popular culture, which leaves us to believe that the so-called founding fathers fought a revolutionary war against the British to

uphold the values of liberty and equality and justice, which is a very idealist sort of way of thinking about it. And I appreciate you bringing in a materialist analysis. And you're saying this is bullshit, and that the very significant reason for the 1776 revolution was to uphold slavery. And I'm wondering if you can outline what this looked like historically and some of the examples maybe that you drawn in addition to what you've already outlined to conclude your thesis, including what I think is really a significant point that there were more enslaved Africans and African descendants fighting on the side of the British than the colonists during the revolution?

Well, not only that, but I wrote a companion volume, Negro Comrades of the Crown, which is a book that among other things, details how post 1776, post the formation of the United States, you had Black people who, for example, during the War of 1812, joined the Redcoats and the torching of the White House, sending James Madison and his girlish spouse, Dolly, fleeing into the streets one step ahead of the posse and then being transported on British ships to Trinidad and Tobago, where their descendants continue to reside. In fact, I recall when I introduced this book in New York, some of the Black people who were there were actually descendants of those rebels from 200 years ago who had roots. These folks had roots in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean island, archipelago, I should say.

And I should also say that it's not just a matter of Somerset's case, because oftentimes you hear folks say, well, you really can't speak of an abolitionist movement in London, Somerset's case notwithstanding. However, if you look at my book, I'm talking about slave revolts. The enslaved are the ultimate abolitionists, and the enslaved in South Carolina, the bloodiest revolt of the enslaved during the colonial period where the enslaved were directly collaborating with the Spanish from Spanish Florida. Recall that Florida was under the dominion at that time of Spain. And so London had to make some calculations. And one of the calculations that the settlers in North America thought London was arriving at was that, and this is particularly true in the South, that as the settlers and the colonizers began to revolt and to express distaste and displeasure for London, there was a real fear that London would align with the enslaved and freeing them in order to squash the settlers, quite frankly. And if you look at the wars that led to the overthrow of Spanish rule in the Americas. Fundamentally, that's what you oftentimes saw. That is to say, the enslaved population, at times, they would align with the rebels against Spanish rules. At times, they would side with the Spanish, the royalist forces. And in a sense, it makes sense because why should the enslaved align with their slave masters, no matter how many promises the slave masters make?

I think, quite frankly, that in the United States, there is an understandable desire to see all of us on the same page, so to speak. As the slogan from the 1930s and oftentimes repeated today, black and white unite and fight. But the problem is that it's difficult to unite oil and water. There were sharp class contradictions between the enslaved population, not only the slave masters, but to a certain extent, the settler class as a whole, since the latter oftentimes were incentivized to repel revolts of the enslaved, to patrol the

enslaved, et cetera. So it's a very complicated and messy history that I understand people want to sort of gloss over so that we can have a usable past, so that we can show we were united in the 18th century and we should be united now. I understand that. But the problem is, as we see the right wing on the march, as we see the Trumpistas gain 74, 75 million votes amongst descendants of the settler, European settler population across class lines. When you have the late Madeleine Albright writing in one of her final works, I guess in some ways her last will and testament, a book entitled Fascism, a Warning. I mean, you can't get more blunt than that. fascism a warning. I mean, you can't get more blunt than that. And so given the fact that as I see it, people like me will be the initial victims of fascism. It's incumbent on people like me to

try to get the story straight. And not only that, but if you look at my 1776 book, and if you look at books that some suggest have sprung from my 1776 book, like the 1619 Project, for example, there are differences between the two. But what is common is that at the end of my 1776 book, unlike most histories written by scholars, I tried to connect the past to the present. I mean, the last few pages of my book are all about the present and how this history I've just recounted sheds light upon the present. Historians in the United States usually don't do that for whatever reason. And if you look at the 1619 Project, it does the same thing. It tries to suggest that these police killings, which are just off the charts nowadays, and just continuing to skyrocket and spiral, it demands an explanation beyond just saying racism,

because you have racism, once again, in a number of Latin American countries, but you didn't have the sort of gothic lynchings, bizarre lynchings that you had in the United States where thousands of Euro-Americans would gather as if it were a carnival or pre-radio, pre-television cultural extravaganza, and then dismember the person systematically, the black person systematically, taking pictures reproduced on postcards, which you can still find in perfusion. I mean, I recall when I was living in Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia, in the 1990s, and I wrote a book on Zimbabwe. And in Zimbabwe, the settler population before the war, which commences in 1965, was about 250,000, and the African population was about, I don't know, maybe 7, 8 million. And the settlers in Rhodesia, perhaps to make themselves feel better for whatever reason, they used to just shake their heads in wonder at the phenomenon of lynching

in the United States. They found it remarkable. And I think that they were very perceptive. And so before it's too late, we really need to get a handle on the history of this country. And particularly, I would say this to many of our friends on the left, because I started off by talking about how many of them consider themselves to be class warriors. But when it comes to the 18th century history of the United States, they bury the question of class, quite frankly. There's no class analysis. There's no examination of the class status of the unpaid working class, which is basically the enslaved population. And just as today, there's no explanation that they can provide as to why so many in the Euro-American working class and middle class would be supportive of the Trumpistas, except that they're subject to

propaganda and are confused and misplay and misunderstand their class interests. And then you say, well, Black people are part of the working class. They vote against the right nine to one. So how do you explain that difference? And of course, they begin to stammer and stutter. And I think that part of the explanation for the latter is that this Black population, which routinely some of these folks in the Euro-American left castigate as being captives of identity politics, are actually expressing the legacy of class solidarity that was quite helpful to us during the bad old days of slavery. And there's still a legacy of that class solidarity, which causes us

to vote and stand against the right nine to one. And of course, given this rise in police killings and given the fact that a person like myself, and by the way, I'm a tall, dark-skinned man, feel I'm taking my life in my hands whenever I, I was about to say whenever I leave where I stay, but given the fact that police can burst into your apartment unannounced and slay you, perhaps that's probably a misreading as well. So those are some of the points that I would raise at this juncture. Again, thank you so much. So many really rich threads, again, in your response. So I really appreciate you outlining so many different points. And particularly, it's very interesting hearing you sort of, I guess, respond to a lot of your critics. I was going to ask you

this later, and I'm maybe just I'm going to bring it up here. But you've already sort of responded to it in many ways. But one of the ways that I did actually come across your work was because there were some fights on Twitter about your work. And particularly, I think that a lot of the critics of your work, some of the most vociferous ones may fall into a category that we actually haven't brought this up at all in any of our shows, because I just don't have the energy for it, honestly. But this, this idea of patriotic socialism, a lot of these folks have whined that your arguments are race reductionist, and that you're counter revolutionary in many ways. And I don't want to give too much weight to these Twitter fights. But I'm glad that you brought it up and that you, not specifically the fights,

but the critiques and some of the vitriol that has been hurled your way, completely unfounded. And so, yeah, let's acknowledge that that is, you know, that's a reaction that some folks have and that reading of your entire body of work and a real understanding of the intersection of race with class in capitalism will dispel any of the arguments made against your work, I think. And but yeah, so just to, I guess, move on from that part of the. Well, I could make a point that I haven't made thus far. Absolutely.

Yes. I didn't want to belabor it. But if you do want to make more points, absolutely, go for it. Well, I wish some of these folks would be introduced to Dr. Google, and then they could put my name in a search engine and ascertain that I've written this much about labor history, including the book Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930 to 1950s, labor history in the Caribbean. Few people have written as prolifically about the U.S. working class as myself. And if they put my name in a search engine, they would find out that I've written more books besides this one on 1776. They would find out that I've written more books besides this War of 1776. But speaking of which, some of these folks have said that, as you suggested, that I'm a, quote, race essentialist. Now, since I'm black and I'm defending black people, I guess that means I'm a race essentialist.

I guess if you're black, if you defend black people against racism, that means you're essentialist. I guess we should only have non-black people defend Black people, and then people would be satisfied. I've been called a traitor, for example, and we know what happens to traitors in this country. I mean, the vitriol and the venom directed. And I think that's why Black Twitter leaped into the debate on my behalf, which I was quite heartened by. And once again, it elides the point that I'm making for the third time, which is that the Black population in North America in the late 18th century was by and large an unpaid working class. Now, if you want to ignore that and just describe them as a so-called racial group, a so-called racial minority, even though these same folks would tell us race is a construction with hardly any scientific validity, well, you know, go right ahead. But you should ask

yourself, why are you abandoning the concept of class when it comes to the unpaid working class, even though we know, to go back to my studies of the US working class in the 20th century, that the descendants of the enslaved population tended to be more pro-union than other members of the working class, for example. And as I said, tended to be more pro-union than other members of the working class, for example. And as I said, tended to be more readily anti-fascist than other members of the U.S. working class. So I just wish that some of these folks would, A, become more acquainted with some of the work that I've done, which has going all around the world looking at these questions, not just in North America. I think that's part of the problem as well.

The provincialism that does not allow one to A, look beyond the United States for insight, and B, to be trapped in archaic discourses about the United States. And the podcast that we mentioned before we began to tape. Decolonized Buffalo. That was the podcast. One of the points that I mentioned, and a kind of defense of these critics, is that the repression of the left in the United States has been so ferocious that it has hampered the ideological evolution and development of the left to the point where, once again, there are reliances upon musty arguments and no acknowledgement of a lot of the scholarship that folks have been churning out for a number of years now. I mean, there's a rich literature on the construction of whiteness, which I'm happy to say that I've contributed to. And if you look at my book on the 16th century, for example, what you'll find is an excavation of the roots of this racial construction, seeing it as a kind of class

collaborationist pan-Europeanism. I mean, for example, in the 1580s, when London establishes what it thought would be its first colony of what it called North Carolina, it was a multi-class formation sponsored by the 1% in London. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, of course, would be plundering the Native Americans for their land, which is basically what happened post-1607. once again, the Spanish, I wish people once again would look beyond the shores of the United States for insight, because in the Spanish settlements, oftentimes there was a religious qualifier for settlement. This is post-1492 when the Iberians sponsor Columbus and then have first movers advantage as a result, which is one of the reasons why so many people in this hemisphere speak either Spanish or Portuguese. London, in a sense, has a second movers advantage. That is to say that it is an early adopter of the Protestant sect, which defects from Catholicism, as we know,

under Martin Luther, and with London adopting that particular sectarianism, if I can use that term, it unleashes a wave of bloody religious wars, not least between the Spanish and the English. The English are scrappy underdogs. There are far more Catholics to begin with than there are Protestants. And so in an improvisational manner, in terms of its settler colonial project, you see London opening the door to not having the Protestant faith be a qualifier for settlement. And instead, there's a kind of reconciliation, if you like, between those they had been battling for centuries, including the Scots, for example, the Irish to a degree, certainly Irish Protestants and ultimately Irish Catholics. And that opens the door for the construction of whiteness,

because those who had been warring on the shores of Europe, English versus Irish, English versus Welsh, English versus Scots, British versus Germans, Swedes versus Russians, English versus Scots, British versus Germans, Swedes versus Russians, Poles versus Germans, Serbs versus Croats. All of a sudden, when they cross the Atlantic, there's this magical metamorphosis. They adopt a new identity politics, what I call a militarized identity politics of whiteness. And I think that this also sheds light upon the kind of idealized way that certain folks, even on the left, look at the bourgeois rights. Because oftentimes, oftentimes the United States, by people who really should know better, and its constitution, its founded constitution, it's seen as the culmination of a so-called bourgeois democratic revolution. Now I won't go into the details of what they mean by that, but certainly those rights did not extend to the

indigenous population. It certainly didn't extend to the enslaved population. There was no fourth amendment right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure in a slave cabin. I mean, free of unreasonable search and seizure in a slave cabin. I mean, those rights hardly apply to Black people today in 2023, let alone in the late 18th century. This is the kind of nonsense that passes for analysis, which helps to explain why we may be staring down the barrel of neofascism. why we may be staring down the barrel of neo-fascism. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Dr. Gerald Horn, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.

We'll be right back. Yeah! You can't hurt me Why? I'm found in D.C. D.C. Wait We can't help you Don't you go Let me go What can I say? Now where do I go? What do I do?

I'm fine I got my stuff Don't I get it anyway? Yeah You can't hurt me Why? I'm found in these days These days, these days

And it's your battling for your own world It's the right time, the right mind And if you think we're really there You won't find in my mind Whoa, whoa, whoa Stand up tall, you know the Lord I'll do no more Tonight, all night, I'll let you down

I'll fall around, so do no more Tonight, all night I'll let you down I'll fall around I'll do no more That was Banned in D.C. by Bad Brains. Now back to our conversation with Dr. Gerald Horn, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. The part of the story of the creation of whiteness that I'm familiar with, and I'm pretty sure I read this pretty early on in my life when I was reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States was how whiteness was weaponized in the colonies as a way to make sure that enslaved populations, enslaved people

did not create some form of class solidarity with poor white colonists, even though the poor white colonists were oftentimes immiserated, and they were debt pe peons and they had very little rights compared to the wealthier white population. And you would think that they had all sorts of reasons to join in with the enslaved population and revolt, but that didn't happen. And one of the reasons that didn't really happen, I mean, there are instances of it happening, but on a large scale is because of this idea of whiteness, which was created a category which those immiserated white settlers could sort of cloak onto themselves and feel separation with people that you would have, you know, shared interests in revolting against an overlord. But that's kind of the version that I know about. But it's fascinating to hear about how the more like

international dimensions of that, which you mentioned in the first part of your response. Well, yes, this brings us once again to the international equation. You may know, and once again, this is easy to find. I mean, you put my name in a search engine and it'll come up. I wrote this book a few years ago, White Supremacy Confronted. It's over 800 pages. It's about the struggle against apartheid and colonialism in Southern Africa and the role of U.S. imperialism and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And in the context of that book, I deal with the origins of apartheid.

Now, we know that racism arrives in South Africa circa 1652 with the arrival of the first Dutch settlers, and who then are supplemented subsequently by the arrival of expelled French Protestants. But apartheid, which comes into existence in 1948, and as I point out in painstaking detail, that the Carnegie Corporation of New York, along with their comrades in South Africa, they devised the system of apartheid, which is, white, unquote, not least, as your comment suggested, to prevent any sort of class alliance with the African population. And to an extent, that, quote, worked, unquote, insofar as it did uplift the population of the working class defined as white, and many of whom identified with the ruling class. Now, of course, it was not 100%, but certainly it was a considerable population.

All you got to do is look at the voting in South Africa today. I mean, despite the problems and difficulties, to put it mildly, of the ruling African National Congress, the fact of the matter is that they still win the preponderance and the bulk of the black vote. And their opposition, such as it is, the Democratic Alliance, tends to win a substantial percentage of the the vote defined as white, unquote. Now, that's another gloss on this question of, quote, whiteness, unquote. The other point that I would make that I alluded to a moment or two ago is that you mentioned materialist analysis. And just as I think some of our friends on the left who consider themselves to be class warriors, they abandon the class angle when it comes to looking at 1776, when it comes to looking at slavery. They abandon materialism, the point that you mentioned, when it comes to looking at the United States.

I mean, for example, you would think that the so-called democratic rights, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, trial by jury, that these brilliant men, Jefferson, Madison, et cetera, it sort of all came out of their churning brains. Without looking at the material conditions on the ground, that is to say, how could these settlers in North America attract a population that could be defined as, quote, white, unquote, from Europe when they were coming into a battle zone, fighting indigenous, fighting Africans? Not to mention competition from other settlements, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. And one of my books, I think it's maybe it's my 17th century book, or maybe it's the book, the 1776 book. I describe the so-called rights, which of course, in the sense of bourgeois rights, because just as today, you have more rights if you have more money. But having said that, you can still

see these rights as being a kind of combat pay. Once again, part of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, along with the looted land of the indigenous and the ability to exploit the free labor of the Africans. And you notice that when I went through that litany of constitutional rights, I did not mention the Second Amendment, examination of which is quite revealing. And you would think with all of these shootings that take place on a daily basis in this country, you feel you're playing Russian roulette if you go to a shopping mall, for example, or anywhere where there are more than five people, well, the Second Amendment, the question of arms and militia, it's obviously tied to organizing the settlers to repress revolts of the indigenous and revolts of the enslaved. In any event, I'll halt there. No, I think that's a really important point that you are making right now. And I think that

the constitution, the American constitution, like many constitutions looks pretty good on paper, but when you actually look at the on the ground, the material reality in which it was written and the specific lives of the people who wrote it and signed it and all of that, you very quickly realize that it's all just a bunch of bullshit. And a lot of it falls apart immediately when you look at the material reality. And I think the same thing can be applied in a certain way to the Civil War and post-Civil War United States, right? Like we learned that the Civil War was fought over slavery and it ended slavery. And then like, oh, fast forward to now. And, you know, there was a period of Jim Crow that was bad, but, you know, we fixed that and we're great now.

No racism really in America, right? But actually, if you could talk a little bit about how and I think you've said that the black population in the United States went from being an enslaved labor class, which you mentioned, to what you've referred to as a cheap labor class or a disguised slave labor class. And yeah, I'd love it if you could unpack what you mean by that a little bit more. Well, first of all, with regard to the US Civil War, my interpretation, which is reflected in a number of books that I will not cite, but once again, that's why we have search engines, is that the Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1804, a revolt of unpaid workers of African descent, ignited a general crisis of the entire slave system that could only be resolved with its collapse, helping to spur

not only revolts of the enslaved throughout the Americas. In fact, it's no coincidence that slavery in most of the nations of Latin America began to fall like tenpins post-1804 with the creation of Haiti, because not only is Haiti like revolutionaries anywhere, are seeking to spread their revolutionary gospel, not to mention the example that they provide, for example, which is cited by Gabriel in his revolt in Richmond circa 1800. And so then that also gives another arrow in the quiver of London, which develops a de facto diplomatic alliance with the Haitian revolutionaries pressing the United States. I go into this in excruciating detail in a number of books. And this creates so much pressure

that it ultimately contributes to the combustibility of the US Civil War, 1861 to 1865. Now, what's striking is despite the abolitionist pretensions that so many have instructed us about that supposedly inherits in the United States, took about 600,000 to 700,000 deaths on this soil to abolish slavery. In the preceding decade in the 1850s, you had the abolition of slavery in a good deal of South America, including Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, without the kind of bloodshed, the just gruesome, ghoulish, ghastly bloodshed that you had in the United States. Not to say that it was peaceful, but it doesn't hold a candle to the kind of bloodshed that occurred in this country, the Black population post-1865, post-abolition, with the convict lease system, whereby Black men in particular are arrested on flimsy or no basis,

and then leased out back to agribusiness. I'm speaking to you from Houston, Texas, and one of the suburbs is called Sugar Land, which used to be the site of a sugar plantation. And because of construction, they were uncovering the bones of these black men who had been obviously treated so horribly and treated so shabbily. And so Jim Crow becomes a kind of internal exile for the Black population in an attempt to underscore their supposed expulsion, not only from the U.S. body politic, but from humanity in general. Therefore, made to work for less, live in dilapidated neighborhoods, not because of the material conditions of capitalism and what it needed in terms of profit and super profit, but because these people obviously are inferior. are perceived by some in the Euro-American working class as being competitors who should not be embraced. And once again, it's international pressure that begins to expose that system

of oppression with the Cold War, which is taking place as African and Caribbean nations are coming to independence, the United States is in an ideological struggle with the then-Soviet Union. The United States finds it difficult to win hearts and minds in resource-rich Africa and its so-called security perimeter in the Caribbean, as long as Black people were being treated so horribly. That creates pressure for what I call the Compromise of 1954, Brown versus Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision to say, oh, guess what? Jim Crow is unconstitutional, which unleashes this decades-long struggle to try to uproot Jim Crow. But with lessening international pressure, you're seeing the recrudescence of Jim Crow in form, which inevitably will undergird a kind of neo-fascism, which helps to explain the disproportionate percentage of Black people found on death row or killed by the police,

the spectacularly soaring infant mortality rates visited upon Black women, for example, in this country, the list is long. Needless to say, the system is most insidious and pernicious in the places where slavery was most prominent. Speaking of the states of the old Confederacy from Virginia to Texas, it's no accident that this is also the headquarters of the right wing, if you look at Texas, for example, which in some ways, as I suggest in my book, The Counter-Revolution of 1836, in some ways is the head and shoulders above all leader of these negative trends. You see this most directly in terms of the records, the inglorious records of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Governor Greg Abbott. You see it in the battering of the population trying to cross the border in search of a better life. You see it in terms of the black faces you espy in Huntsville prison or in death row

in Huntsville prison. With regard to this phenomenon generally, I think your audience should be made to understand that it will be quite difficult to extirpate the kind of bigotry that one aspires being visited upon the population of Mexican origin or the Latino population generally, not to mention the population of Asian descent and the indigenous population, as long as there's not some sort of understanding of the question of slavery and unpaid labor and its foundational role in the construction of capitalism, something that Karl Marx himself has written about, its foundational role in terms of white supremacy, and its foundational role in terms of, once again, the neo-fascism that we now aspire rising along the horizon.

I appreciate you bringing in all the other populations and groups and communities that not just black communities and black people in the United States. And I appreciate also, yeah, I think that this conversation is focused more on race than class, perhaps. But I think that there is not enough of focus on racial capitalism. And I guess what I'm trying to say here is if we are talking more about the racial elements of capitalism and the racism within the United States in this conversation predominantly, it doesn't mean that we don't have a class analysis that goes along with it. And I think that's very obvious with what we've been talking about. So once again, race is a sort of

shorthand, because when you're talking about the decision that the ruling classes made to disproportionately and overwhelmingly say that the unpaid labor class would be of African descent, they linked race and class. And so when you're talking about race, it's not as if our ancestors were brought to these shores because people didn't like us, because they despised us. They were brought to these shores for profit, to be an unpaid working class. And so I find this question about, well, are you talking about race? Are you talking about class? It's sort of oversimplified because when you're talking about race, you're fundamentally talking about class. I mean, as I said, once again, that's the problem with analyzing 1776 without seeing that when you're talking about race, you're fundamentally talking about class. And if you're talking about class, you're either talking about class struggle or you're talking about class collaboration.

And so some of our friends on the left, they want to impute class collaboration to the folks who are involved in class struggle. class collaboration to the folks who were involved in class struggle. And then they hope for class struggle on the part of a segment of the working class, which is obviously swimming in class collaboration. So just to close out, I would love to hear a little bit about what you think real sort of accountability or healing or any reparative frameworks and movements could or do look like what inspires you sort of what you're seeing going on? Yeah, any words on like how we can move forward or continue to move forward and fight against the legacies of what you've been talking about of the history of the United States and many other places and what we can do to materially but also in other ways heal and bring reparations to the harms that were committed over the

hundreds of years of the United States' history? The correlation of forces domestically are problematic, that is to say, in the United States of America right now. One only needs to look at the 74 to 75 million who voted for for Agent Orange in 2020 or the poll in The Hill, the Capitol Hill publication just published on January 24th, 2023, that suggested that Mr. Trump might be in the poll position for winning the White House in November 2024. Okay, we could argue, oh, the 74th, they're all deluded. Okay, well, whatever. If he comes back into office, we're going to have to deal with the consequences irrespective of what one's analysis is of the reason those consequences arise. But on the positive side, once again, the implication of my body of work is internationalism. And I know people don't like to quote racialize these matters,

but this is not necessarily coming from black people. Let's make that clear. It's coming from those who resemble the original settlers, the European settlers, and they should ask themselves why that is the case. But if you look once again, to reiterate points I made a few moments ago, Haitian revolution, the rise of socialism, the rise of independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean, all of those profound forces helped to change the United States of America in various ways. And one of the deficits in our movement today is a dearth of internationalism, a dearth of international solidarity. And we cannot begin to turn around this ship of state that's now headed for an iceberg, speaking of the country now known as the United States of America, until the progressive movement in particular grasps the nettle and embraces in a full-blooded,

full-throated manner the promise of internationalism. you've been listening to an upstream conversation with dr gerald horn author of the counter revolution of 1776 slave resistance and the origins of the united states of america thank you to bad brains for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. And just a quick note, we're planning on having Dr. Horn back soon for a conversation on his book, Jazz and Justice, Racism and the Political Economy of the Music.

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