The whole “Lenin’s chosen successor” discourse imports a bourgeois model of political succession onto a party that, at least in theory, wasn’t supposed to function through personal inheritance of leadership. Leadership was formally a matter of the party’s collective organs. 🧵
I think this is exactly right. Great demolition of the no Kings nonsense. Political economy aside, the constitution sought to instal a limited elective monarchy hedged in by an oligarchic Congress as a barrier to popular sovereignty.
What makes this effortless move possible from 1776 to 1945 (by which is really meant 1995, as Tooze puts it)?
Clearly, the no kings revolt of the colonies can hardly magically act at a distance like Newtonian gravity.
For the first century, the US was peripheralized. Slavery wasn’t incidental or idiosyncratic. It was one part of a much larger movement whereby the labor hunger of the new world on account of the genocide of the natives had to be satiated by imported African slaves.
It was a mark of peripheral status. And it intensified after the Revolution. The US was resubordinated to Britain through the Liverpool cotton textile trade.
There were booms. But these were settler boomtowns were sites of primitive accumulation and extensive growth. Modern dynamism had to wait until the second founding.
That transition was also not unique. It was part of what Geyer and Bright described as ‘the midcentury passage.’ The end of serfdom in Russia, the Italian and German wars of unification, the Meiji restoration, the Indian Mutiny etc.
The US takes the lead in the modern period, which only begins c. 1870. It articulates, along with others, Modern Economic Growth, the real Industrial Revolution, mass politics, the rationalization and complexification of social structure that Gramsci described as the fortifications of civil society.
The Revolution and the Enlightenment in general cannot act at a distance to explain the arrival of modernity and the drama of the American century which is now at a close.
Happy Fourth.
@policytensor Sorry but this quotation (from I know not whom) is a misrepresentation of Marx’s views. He is quite clear that money and commercial capital are, as their names suggest, forms of capital. The difference with productive capital is that the latter organises the creation … 1/