File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 941


Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 15:54:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Tyranny of the Majority (Charles Brown)



I got your post about the BoR. Btw, I don't seem to be able to fetch your
messages, so its hard to reply unless someone else reposts them. My system
gives an: Error, encoded in unknown format message. Can you use a
different formating, Charles?

I did post a reply, although you may have missed in in the flurry of
messages that has passed lately. I don't see how who fought the revolution
is revolution; the soldiers are always the working people. The British
soldiers too were poor peasants from England, Ireland, and Germany. 

I agreed that pressure from below played a role in producing the BoR. But
I called attention to other factors as well, including elite support,
including from Madison, Mason, et al. And I insisted that the meaning of
the BoR for the framers was not protection of what we call democracy but
of what we call federalism, that is, states rights against a strong
central government. I also think you have tobear in mind that the American
elite was a revolutionary elite; sure, it was also a gang of exploiters
and enslavers, but it was a small-R-republican group of bourgeois
revolutionaries at the crest of the period of the revolutionary era of the
bourgeoisie. The constitution and the BoR belong to the same conceptual
territory as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. 

--jks





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