Finally someone who agrees with me on an issue few of either side do.

[mmonk]

Last edited Sun Jul 5, 2015, 12:12 PM - Edit history (1)

Reading Hamilton from the Left.


-snip-

In the American political imagination, Jefferson is rural, idealistic, and democratic, while Hamilton is urban, pessimistic, and authoritarian. So, too, on the US left, where Jefferson gets the better billing. Michael Hardt recently edited a sheaf of Jefferson’s writings for the left publisher Verso.

Reading “Jefferson beyond Jefferson,” Hardt casts him as a theorist of “revolutionary transition.” We like Jefferson’s stirring words about “the tree of liberty” occasionally needing “the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and his worldview fits comfortably with a “small is beautiful” style localism. We recall Jefferson as a great democrat. When Tea Partiers echo his rhetoric, we dismiss it as a lamentable misunderstanding.

But in reality, Jefferson represented the most backward and fundamentally reactionary sector of the economy: large, patrimonial, slave-owning, agrarian elites who exported primary commodities and imported finished manufactured goods from Europe. He was a fabulously wealthy planter who lived in luxury paid for by slave labor. Worse yet, he raised slaves specifically for sale.

-snip

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/reading-hamilton-from-the-left/

[HassleCat]

1. Nice thing about Jefferson

You can quote him to support almost anything. He was a prolific writer, and free with his opinions, which seem to have varied a lot.

[Fred Sanders]

2. The lucrative American slave trade of the mid-1700's needed to be protected in the face of changing laws and attitudes in

Mother England.

[unc70]

7. The slave trade was based in New England, not the South

The slave trade was centered in NYC, Boston, and Newport, RI. Let me suggest http://www.slavenorth.com, "Inheriting the Trade", and "Traces of the Trade".

It was those from the North who sought to prolong the slave trade.

[Fred Sanders]

8. We are talking 1776. Colonies versus England. What North and South?

[Octafish]

3. Thanks, mmonk! A most interesting read...

...is there more? A link, perhaps?

[mmonk]

4. I can't believe I left that off!

Thanks,

[mmonk]

5. An important part:

In most of the world, the real story of capitalism is not the story of laissez-faire — a doctrine the strong impose upon the weak — nor a quaint story about egalitarian local economies, but the story of the state presiding over a mixed economy. Hamiltonian developmentalism — the unnamed ideology — is amoral, pragmatic, instrumentalist, and flexible.

[TBF]

6. Great article -

I read Jacobin regularly - a lot of good articles from this new left publication.