fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Today, on the anniversary of the Oct. 16, 1859, raid on Harper’s Ferry by a band of Black and white abolitionist guerrillas led by John Brown, read Vince Copeland’s important essay on the U.S. Civil War and the Black liberation struggle, “The Unfinished Revolution”:

“How could twenty Black and white revolutionaries have created so much hysteria, while the organized invasion of massed Northern troops was met by a fervor of militant, self-confident, and even temporarily victorious defensism?

“The difference between the John Brown raid and the long-fought Civil War was not just in the massive character of the latter as opposed to the allegedly individualist character of the former. It wasn‘t just that the Northern army had conventional organization into companies, regiments, brigades, and so on, as opposed to the general guerrilla insurrection almost begun by Brown and Anderson.

“The real difference lay in the fact that one conceived of a slave uprising and took the first steps in that direction — while the other, although forced to free the slaves in the long run, and forced to enlist nearly 200,000 Black men in its ranks, did not at first contemplate an actual slave uprising, and, in fact, opposed it.”