Author’s Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
This introduction frames the book as an extended corrective to the widespread prejudice that the United States has no revolutionary tradition of interest to socialists. The author explains that what began as a draft preface to an American edition of Reason in Revolt grew into a separate work once he recognised the richness of the subject. The core argument is that the USA, far from being barren ground for Marxism, possesses a powerful revolutionary heritage stretching back to the War of Independence and the Civil War, and that the American working class is destined to rediscover this tradition and stand once more in the front line of world revolution. The author draws a pointed historical parallel: before 1917, tsarist Russia was the bastion of world reaction, yet the idea of socialist revolution there was dismissed as a delusion — a dismissal that proved catastrophically wrong.
The text is explicitly polemical. It attacks two related targets. The first is the “senseless anti-Americanism” common in left circles, which the author condemns as a failure of Marxist internationalism. He insists that Marxists oppose not the American people but American capitalism and imperialism. The second target is the isolationist fantasy that the USA can cut itself off from the world. The author argues that globalisation, predicted by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, has made such withdrawal impossible. The USA has inherited Britain’s role as world policeman, but at a time when capitalism is in irreversible decline, producing violent convulsions of which 9/11 was merely one manifestation.
The chapter draws on a range of evidence to substantiate its claims about the destructive impact of US imperialism. It cites the Bhopal disaster of 1984, in which 40,000 people were killed by a Union Carbide plant, and notes that the area remains dangerously polluted. It points to The Economist’s finding that raw material prices were at a 150-year low, and contrasts the earnings of Tiger Woods with those of Nike’s Indonesian workforce. The relationship between Europe and America is characterised through the figure of Tony Blair as a lackey to George W. Bush, and European cultural snobbery is dismissed as the posturing of a declining power, akin to penniless aristocrats marrying into bourgeois wealth.
The author’s stance is dialectical: he is a “fervent admirer of the real America” and an “implacable opponent” of the America of the banks and monopolies. The future, he insists, depends on the American working class rediscovering its revolutionary tradition, as it did in 1776 and 1860.