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The concepts of freedom, liberty, and equality were developed by enslaved people and women, not the elite [1]
['Elías Villoro']
Date: 2023-02-07
The USian political revolution against the British monarchy's attempt to limit the movement of American settler colonialism — as the monarchy had no intention of not being an empire, was never a social revolution. As Gerald Horne argues, 1776 may have marked the beginning of a counter-revolution.
Elites capture ideas as much as they do labor, the earth, and other fetish-commodified resources. Beginning in the 15th Century, contrary to inherited enlightenment history, the revolutionary ideas about freedom, liberty, and equality were not emerging from elite colonists, merchants, slave-holders, and other portends of global capitalism.
Revolutionary ideas were emerging from people who were in the process of being colonized, dominated, indentured, and enslaved to provide the bodies, labor, and, most importantly, the political imagination to resist maintaining the fetish of commodity production. It is from enslaved people, bonded laborers, women in the marketplace, captive sea workers, and the places they lived, worked, ate, frolicked, and created joy amid elite capitalist politicians claiming freedom in their name.
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, invites us into the worlds of life, living, love, and labor of the people and communities whose stories made freedom real through resisting the violent land occupations of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, plantation, and urban slavery, and patriarchal labor relations, on the land and the seas.
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