No More Peace: Abolition War and Counterrevolution (1)

By: Oliver Baker

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Synopsis: Racial capitalism is and was not inevitable. At every point in US history, the exploited and dispossessed rebelled for an alternative future. In No More Peace, Oliver Baker highlights how numerous insurrections, revolts, and armed campaigns of enslaved and colonized people advanced abolition war as the movement to win collective life over class society in North America. From this aim, abolition war became the motor force for constant white counterrevolution. This puts America's history of class struggles in a revealing new light. Through historical analysis, literary critique, and theory, Baker shows how Black and Indigenous rebels developed insights about counterrevolution precisely through their militant confrontation with it. Unearthing these critical insights, Baker shows how US capitalism was reproduced and expanded through the long history of white counterrevolution. Whiteness and settler colonialism developed as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous alliances formed across class difference to organize people to police or soldier for capitalism. In No More Peace, we relive moments of radical abolition and anticolonialism—particularly those of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and the Seminoles—that also ruptured counterrevolution. Slavery and settler colonialism were always uncertain projects—vulnerable to defeat, collapse, and ruin by those who resisted. Racial capitalism was always contingent.