> Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
Is this surprising? The standard marxist account of nationalist revolution is that they are an attempt by local elites (the national bourgeois) to outmaneuver foreign elites. You see the same thing all over the place (even, perhaps, Ukraine).
I guess there's a traditional division between 'really existing socialism', which is often messy, and marxism as a body of work for understanding society.
One observation I would make is that, for a social revolution to occur, you actually need a lot of people from basically every corner of society to want it to happen: even elites. So when they have occurred, it has generally been because the preceding situation was so awful that basically nobody, even the relatively privileged in it, felt it was tolerable. China and Russia both clearly qualify, but also countries like Haiti, or France. People tend to forget the mess preceding the revolution, and focus on the mess during and after.
The October-Revolution in Russia was more like a coup.
Germany had a revolution that ushered in the Weimar Republic. Both countries had essentially just lost a war at that time.
> I guess there's a traditional division between 'really existing socialism', which is often messy, and marxism as a body of work for understanding society.
Marxisms is pretty useless for that. Useless in the technical sense that knowing just mainstream economics is as effective as knowing mainstream economics plus Marxism.
(Not useless in the more absolute sense of knowing nothing vs knowing Marxism. Basically, wherever Marxism deviates from modern mainstream economics, it's useless.)
Well, the october revolution, even if it was a coup, was a coup against mostly other marxists (actually, the mensheviks were more orthodox).
I think there are two dimensions in which marxism, whatever your politics, will never be useless. First, a lot of it is a body of work authored by people in the midst of extremely bitter social struggles, civil wars, and revolutions. So you tend to get a pretty clear idea of how these things work, from the inside. Second, I think Marx is just a phenomenally clever and insightful thinker. I'm not particularly wedded to the economics (actually, neither was Lenin), but his thoughts on how economic and physical forces shape us as political actors are really good.
> Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
From https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html
> Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.