Mythology of the White Proletariat - San Francisco Bay Area ...

11. STRUGGLES &
ALLIANCES
The popular political struggles of settler noted, 'great encouragers and assisters', and it was one in
Amerika-the most important being the 1775-83 War of which demands for ~olitical reform along democratic lines
Independence-gave us the first experience of alliances formed a central feature of the movem&t."(l)
between Euro-Amerikan dissenters and oppressed peoples.
What was most basic in these alliances was their purely tactical
nature. Not unity, but the momentary convergence of
the fundamentally differing interests of some oppressors
and some of the oppressed. After all, the national division
between settler citizens of emerging Amerika and their colonial
Afrikan subjects was enormous-while the distance
between the interests of Indian nations and that of the settler
nation built on their destruction was hardly any less.
While tactical alliances would bridge this chasm, it is important
to recognize how calculated and temporary these
joint efforts were.
We emphasize this because it it necessary to refute
the settler propaganda that Colonial Amerika was built out
of a history of struggles "for representative government",
"democratic struggles" or "class struggles", in which
common whites and Afrikans joined together. No one, we
note, has yet summoned up the audacity to maintain that
the Indians too wished to fight and die for settler
"democracy". Yet that same claim is advanced for
Afrikan prisoners (slaves), as though they either had more
common interests with their slavemasters, or were more
brainwashed. To examine the actual conflicts and conditions
under which alliances were reached totally rips apart
these lies.
A clear case is Bacon's Rebellion, one of the two
major settler uprisings prior to the War of Independence.
In this rebellion an insurgent army literally seized state
power in the Virginia Colony in 1676. They defeated the
loyalist forces of the Crown, set the capital city on fire,
and forced the Governor to flee. Euro-Amerikans of all
classes as well as Afrikan slaves took part in the fighting,
the latter making up much of the hard core of the
rebellion's forces at the war's end.
Herbert Aptheker, the Communist Party USA's
expert on Afrikans, has no hesitation in pointing to this
rebellion as a wonderful. heroic exam~le for all of us. He
clearly loves this case of an early, anti-capitalist uprising Bacon challenges Qov. Berkeley
where "whites and Blacks" joined hands:
It makes you wonder how a planter came to be
"...But, the outstanding example of popular leading such an advanced political movement? Aptheker is
uprising, prior to the American Revolution itself, is not the only Euro-Amerikan radical to point out the im-
Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 ... a harbinger of the greater portant example in this uprising. To use one other case: In
rebellion that was to follow it by exactly a century. The 1974 a paper dealing with this was presented at a New
Virginia uprising was directed against the economic subor- Haven meeting of the "New Left" Union of Radical
dination and exploitation of the colony by the English Political Economists (U.R.P.E.). It was considered irnporrulers,
and against the tyrannical and corrupt ad- tant enough to be published in the Cambridge journal
ministrative practices in the colony which were instituted Radical America, and then to be reprinted as a pamphlet
for the purpose of enforcing that subordination. Hence, by the New England Free Press. In this paper Theodore W.
the effort, led by the young planter, Nathaniel Bacon, was Allen says of early Virginia politics:
multi-class, encompassing in its ranks slaves, indentured ,
servants, free farmers and many planters; it was one in "...The decisive encounter of the people against
which women were, as an anti-Baconite contemporary 12 the bourgeoisie occurred during Bacon's Rebellion, which