The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
"Now we know that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was not the second Russian revolution." Brandenburg Gate on December 1, 1989. Public domain.In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, we would do well to recall Hegel’s maxim that sameness-in-difference moves history. Even poor mad Max Weber used a similar argument to moderate the polarised Methodenstreit (Battle over Methods) between Berlin and Vienna about economics in the late nineteenth century. We would not be interested in the Greeks if they were the same as us, he wrote, and we couldn't understand them, if they were completely different.
In this context, I am reminded of my reaction to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, the movie about two boys who shot up kids in their school. Moore grew up in Flint, Michigan, a city that is plagued by the worst racism in the state and maybe for some distance beyond. Moore asks, why is it that Canadians have as many guns as Americans (this may have changed lately), but kill people with them hardly at all. He takes a historical perspective, but it is literally a cartoon version. He says that Americans kill so many as a direct result of the racist origins of the country, rooted in slavery and fear of Negro revolts.
Two books were published in 1938 by the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary, C.L.R. James: The Black Jacobins, about the Haitian revolution, and A History of Negro (now Pan-African) Revolt, which takes the story forward on both sides of the Atlantic via the US in the early nineteenth century and the civil war up to the imminent prospects for Africans to overthrow colonial empire. James, who had been the most prominent Trotskyist in Britain but later repudiated the idea of the party altogether, told Trotsky in Mexico that he had got racism in the US all wrong and hated the duplicitous attitude to race and class there of the Stalinists (whose assassins were shooting at him in 1930s Paris when he was researching the Haitian revolution).
