AmericanInsurgents

Richard Seymour

Haymarket BooksChicago, Illinois

Contents

Preface

1. Revolution and Anti-Imperialism: The Internal Foes of Empire

2. Cuba Libre, the Anti-Imperialist League, and Beyond

3. From Wilsonianism to Bolshevism

4. The Cold War and Decolonization

5. After Vietnam

6. From the End of History to the “War on Terror”

Epilogue: Revolution in the Middle East

Notes

Acknowledgments [TK?]

Index

I would not care if, tomorrow, I should hear of the death ofevery man who engaged in that bloody war in Mexico, andthat every man had met the fate he went there to perpetrateupon unoffending Mexicans.

—Frederick Douglass, 1849

A Republic or an Empire?The American Revolution began as a crisis in the British Empire—a crisis, first, of administration, then of legitimacy, and at last ofauthority. It was a crisis in an era in which capitalism was alreadythe dominant mode of production in the Anglophone world, andin which nation-states were becoming the dominant form of ter-ritorial organization. The British Empire was the vector throughwhich capitalism and its philosophical justifications had been im-planted in the New World, and it was as capitalists—southernslavers, northern merchants and producers—influenced by its at-tendant liberal ideology that the colonists embarked on a processof revolution and nation-building.1

At first blush, it seems astonishing that they did so. In the mid-eighteenth century, America was still a colonial backwater. The

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Chapter One

Anti-Imperialism:,The Internal Foes of Empire

metropole, Great Britain, was ascending to world dominance, butcolonial America lacked the urban centers, riches, cultural devel-opment, and elaborate political system that characterized its mas-ter. Yet, by the 1770s, many of the colonists were ready to believethat they had unique virtues that endowed them with the meansto create a radical, republican future.2

This undertaking was prompted when the British Empirebegan a period of internal reorganization following the Seven-YearWar ending in 1763, in which Britain had defeated Bourbon Franceand gained territories in North America as a result. The impositionof various direct taxes was of significance less because of the rev-enue being extracted than because, as Robin Blackburn puts it, “itwas based on unilateral metropolitan fiat.”3 The wealth of colonialAmerica had grown stupendously, and many of its denizens wereaggravated by the arbitrary power of the crown, which held upcommerce and sacrificed efficiency to royal prerogative. Lackingrepresentation in Parliament, by 1772 they began to form commit-tees of correspondence, which were the seeds of later forms of self-government known as Provisional Conferences. The continuedarrogant assertions of the crown, known as the Intolerable Acts,radicalized the colonists. By 1775, the crown was at war with thecolonies and the following year they had formally declared theirindependence with a strident assertion of their natural and legalrights, drawing on the political philosophy of the liberal Enlight-enment. This remarkable self-assurance included, however, a pow-erful dose of imperial pretension.

The literature of dissident colonists considering the questionof independence from Britain spoke of, in the phrase of the revo-lutionary James Wilson, “an independent Empire” or, in the wordsof George Washington, a “fledgling,” “rising empire,” which wouldsoon “have some weight in the scale of Empires.” Ebenezer Baldwinsermonized that “these Colonies” could be “the Foundation of agreat and mighty Empire.”4 When Baldwin spoke, he contrasted the

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“Empire forming in British America” to those “other great Empires”forged by “uniting different nations under one government by Con-quest.” America was different, comprising a “single People used tothe Enjoyment of both Civil and religious Liberty.” It was a nation,one that would grow up under the “friendly Auspices of Liberty.”5

It was, as Gordon Wood phrased it, an “Empire of Liberty.”6

Yet the “Auspices of Liberty” could acquire a decidedly threat-ening hue for those obstructing their expansion. And expansion,necessarily entailing constant military aggression, was a constitu-tive component of the American project of nationhood. The west-ward drive that followed the revolution—the Louisiana Purchase,the War of 1812, the “Indian removals,” the Mexican-AmericanWar, the filibustering to the south, the early military adventurismin East Asia, and the bid after 1898 for a global empire—all harkback to this early expansionism. The source of this expansionismcan be located in the social formations making up the postrevolu-tionary American polity. Specifically, as mentioned, there werethree dominant groups: Southern slaveholding plantation farmers;Northern industry; and Northern mercantile capital. It is a matterof some contention whether antebellum slavery in the UnitedStates was actually capitalist, but less so that its method of growthrequired the continual expansion of the number of slave laborers,and the concurrent expansion of territory allotted to plantations—tendencies intensified by soil exhaustion. This is chiefly why theSouth was the most aggressively expansionist component of theUnion. The existence of a large and expanding slave bloc inhibitedindustrialization and posed challenges to the dominance of indus-trial capital in the North, thus leading to competition between therespective sectors for territory, a logic that persisted through theCivil War. At the same time, between these blocs was a large massof petty commodity producers, who sought freedom in the land tothe west and thus constituted another drive to expansion.7

This is not to claim that each of these territorial aggrandize-

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ments was inevitable. As this book aims to show, empire was con-tested at every step, and each episode of imperial metastasis wasembedded in distinct political, cultural, geographical, and eco-nomic logics. But the motors to expansion were structural. More-over, the legitimizing discourses of expansion and empire deriveddirectly from America’s ambiguous revolutionary legacy and thenational mythologies that arose from it.

It was upon this ambiguity that the future of America as botha republic and an empire turned. Both imperialists and anti-impe-rialists in the future would appeal to the revolutionary legacy tovalidate their perspective.8 At the center of that ambiguity was thequestion of slavery and racist oppression. If, for some, the revolu-tion was a quest to begin a wholly new kind of society founded onrepublican principles, its success would have been impossible with-out the support of the slaveholding South, which saw revolutionas a preemptive strike in defense of slavery against the antislaverymovement taking root in the English working class. In the new re-public, the slave South dominated the national state, the military,and the judiciary. It was in the South that Jeffersonian republican-ism flourished. And the South was in general the most expansion-ist, aggressive component of the new nation, the site of the mostviolent waves of ethnic cleansing, and the source of much filibus-tering south of the border.9

Aside from slavery, American nationalism was founded in parton the principle of “clearing” so-called Indian Country and annex-ing it. Benjamin Franklin, who used terms like “nation” and “empire”as synonyms, had warned the British as early as 1751 that a “prince”who “acquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Na-tives to give his own People Room,” should be considered the fatherof his own nation. During the revolution itself, Native Americans,black slaves, and many poor workers sided with the British—not forlove of king and country, but often from hatred of the “patriot”landowners, or out of fear of what an “independent empire” would

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mean for them. Native Americans, who had already suffered the rav-ages of war and disease as a result of colonization, had been attempt-ing to form independent nations to defend themselves against theEuropean interlopers. As a result, their initial attitude to revolution-ary war was one of studied neutrality, resistant to being drawn intoa war that did not concern their interests. By the end of the war,however, the majority of Native Americans had been enlisted to fighton the English side in a series of ad hoc treaties promising the pro-tection of their territorial rights. The British crown had, for the sakeof stability in the colonies, long attempted to restrict the westwardmovement of European colonists, and was now using these “savages”to impede the freedom of the colonists. This grievance was dulycited in the Declaration of Independence.10

Though rebelling against an empire, the revolutionaries werenot necessarily in rebellion against the principles of empire. Theaim in deposing British rule was to build markets and develop theemerging economy—to create an independent center of capital ac-cumulation. But this required the ongoing exploitation of slavesand the continued extermination of Native Americans. The aus-pices of liberty were not for everyone. Yet, the point was, and is,that they could be. The same Enlightenment ideology that had beenformative of many of the revolutionaries was also the originalsource of anti-imperialism and antiracism. The tension betweenthe officially democratic ideology of the United States, and the re-ality of racial tyranny—which some have called “Herrenvolkdemocracy”—would play a key role in future American wars.11

The War of 1812, Indian Revolts, and Slave RebellionsWas the War of 1812 an imperialist war? The war between theUnited States and the British Empire was ostensibly caused by theBritish imposing blockades on American trade with France, with

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