December 28, 2006: Two Modes of Political Liberation
I believe that it is worth distinguishing two conceptually distinct, but often historically intertwined, ways in which political liberation has occurred. Let's call these two modes ESCAPE and UPRISING.
The classical instance of escape, of course, was the Israelite exodus--actual or imagined, it doesn't matter for my purposes here--from Egyptian domination. (It should be noted that those who escaped are referred to in the Bible as a "mixed multitude," which implies either that ancient Israel was from the beginning ethnically diverse or else that other oppressed peoples participated in the same flight(s) out of Egypt.) Another important historical moment of escape was the revolt led by Spartacus, which was indeed a slave rebellion but, it would appear, not aiming so much at an egalitarian transformation of Roman society as at enabling Roman slaves--and probably other oppressed groups--to flee the Italian peninsula.
Human history is replete with such (actual or imagined) forms of release from bondage. Indeed, the current fascination in U.S. popular culture with pirates reflects the extent to which (as historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have amply documented) laboring men (and occasionally women) in the early modern world could experience full-fledged political, cultural, and economic freedom only by engaging in piracy and "sailing the high seas." The riskiness of this venture was compensated for through the excitement of living a life without masters.
By contrast, the mode of political liberation I am calling uprising can seen most clearly in the French Revolution--although there are undoubtedly elements to be found in the earlier English Revolution, too. For us Marxists, of course, the Russian Revolution has provided the "standard model" of political insurrection and social transformation. (I even suspect that we have tended to privilege uprising and to neglect escape as a mode of political liberation.)
But now we come to the messy case of the American Revolution. There are, I would argue, powerful elements of both modes of political liberation present here.
From the start, the motif of escape has played an important role in the "founding" of the United States through immigration and western expansion. However, there have been terrible contradictions at work: the price paid for liberation of some Europeans has been the displacement, removal, conquest, or extermination of other indigneous peoples. The institution of slavery obviously was the antithesis of liberation as escape. Finally, immigration has always been a contested matter--available to some and closed off to others throughout U.S. history.
Yet there has always been another dimension to escape. For example, a seldom-acknowledeged form of escape took place during and especially in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution when slaves fled their masters and moved north and then on to Canada, England, Africa, and even Australia (see Cassandra Pybus's new book Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty [Boston: Beacon Press, 2006].) The subsequent history of the "underground railroad" also figures prominently in our important national narrative of fleeing oppression.
But how should we understand political liberation as uprising in the history--and future--of the United States? I leave that question for another blog entry.
