Frederick Douglass

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them..." Frederick Douglass

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, By Bertell Ollman

In the last year or two I've been on an American Revolution kick. In the last few decades there has been a revisionist strain of historiography on the topic and I've read a dozen or so such books. It has been, as they say, a real education. Real American history, like all history, is quite different from what we have been led to believe. They don't teach American history in our school system, they teach American mythology, bourgeois ideology.

Even if you are not an American, and even if your are not a Marxist (as I am not). I strongly recommend that you read Ollman's article. Its theme has a relevance beyond its subject. (It has relevance for the people currently fighting for freedom in Syntagma and Tahrir Squares.)

And I promise you that the piece is better than its depressing title, much better. I once joked that I seldom read anything that begins with the word "toward(s)", and never when penned by a Marxist. And I still regard this proscription as an effective prophylactic. Ollman has provided an exception worthy of note.

http://www.iefd.org/articles/marxist_us_constitution.php