American bourgeois revolution fused advanced ideology with retrograde slaveholder leadership

Evidence

For the American intellectual formation had been different in significant ways. There was no working-class culture of the kind England had had since at least the Chartists. The chief characteristics of the bourgeois revolution in the United States had been that (a) it was carried out by a section of the settler population against the colonial regime which had constituted that population in the first place; and (b) bourgeois hegemony was established before the full consolidation of the classes of industrial capitalism, and under a leadership ideologically as advanced as in revolutionary France but drawn, in its class composition, substantially from the plantation economy of slaveowners, with the predominantly commercial and petty capitals of New England occupying a subordinate position. The contradictory consequence was that the American Revolution was, simultaneously, in some fundamental ways even more advanced than the French, while it retained some aspects so retrograde that its full elaboration spanned virtually a whole century and was completed only in 1864 with the destruction of the plantation economy and the assimilation of the slave population first into sharecropping and then increasingly into wage-labour circuits. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Ahmad’s materialist class analysis of the American revolution parallels his broader argument (pursued in this book) that postcolonial discourse theory obscures material/class structure — here he grounds literary formation differences in actual class composition rather than discourse alone. — connects to: The American bourgeois revolution featured slaveholding leaders and lagged France by a century; An ideology of reaction rooted in slavery persists in modern American politics — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 649

Broader Connections

• The American bourgeois revolution featured slaveholding leaders and lagged France by a century #expands (0.90)
• An ideology of reaction rooted in slavery persists in modern American politics #expands (0.80) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 649