The industrial revolution is one key... as its progression amplified the generation of wealth outside the control of state sovereigns, which began as "trade" organized among the merchant classes in the middle ages, the wealthy families of the Italian city states showing how wealth and political power became paired in that age, with modern banking, its legacy, being essentially the same thing today.
The American Revolution long post dated the European settlement that was the origin of modern American, while that long period of incubation resulted in Europeans integrating with and adopting many the Native Americans ideas about liberty. The event of the Revolution marked a beginning of the end of the mostly unbroken history of the world before that... in which tribalism and its aggregate in monarchy were the only order the world knew. That Americans also created their own local currency and managed it well, greatly expanded the local economy independent of externally applied limits on capital, and made them wealthy, as well as independent, not just from the Old World's sovereigns, but from the Old World's monied class.
Most of the rest of American history is dominated by the same issue, with global efforts to try to regain control of that exception that America made of itself... or to align with it in ways that modified its impact.
That the American Revolution succeeded, and the French failed, well prior to the peak pace of change enabled by the Industrial Revolution... matters a lot. The idea of individual liberty that motivated the Americans also influenced Europe, as an American export, but it failed to gain the same traction in Europe's less fertile soil. Without the same strong cultural attachment to the ideas, the French Revolution devolved into riot and mob rule in a particularly bloody fashion. That enabled a revulsion leading to a restoration, but also to a very different form of expression in resistance to the social changes ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, that failed in attaching itself to demands for substantive change vs. the cosmetic. Ignoring the American innovation and its European parallels, Marx addressed the problems the Industrial Revolution made unavoidable without seeing a need for more fundamental change. The American Revolution declared that we don't need Kings... that people own themselves and are their own sovereigns. Marx ignores America's innovation to argue, instead, that we need to reformulate the institution of monarchy to change who wields the power of the king... without ever altering that power or liberating people from being subject to it as others property, as the property of the state, at all, while simply re-organizing the distribution of that power to have it wielded by a committee rather than a man... at least for a time. |
