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