Class Struggle and the American Revolution

In the recent period, the so-called
Tea Party movement has laid claim to the legacy of the American
Revolution. With their tri-corner hats and abstract appeals to
patriotism and freedom, they have seized headlines, aided by generous
coverage by the corporate media. This has led to tremendous confusion
when it comes to the real class roots of this world-shaking event.
Unfortunately, for many Americans, the Revolution has been reduced to a
summer barbecue on the 4th of July, flag-waving, fireworks, and images
of George Washington heroically crossing the Delaware River.

In
school we learn about the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Stamp
Act, Paul Revere’s ride, the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, the
Battle of Bunker Hill, the Declaration of Independence, the hard winter
at Valley Forge, the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and about Ben Franklin’s inventions
and adventures with the ladies in London and Paris. This is all well and
good, but it is a superficial understanding of what happened and misses
the real essence of the question.

Unfortunately, most historians, and even some so-called Marxists,
present a caricatured version of the American Revolution. Some even deny
that it was a “real” revolution at all. It is often presented as little
more than a power struggle between two groups of white property owners,
with the eventual victory of the colonial upstarts, who then merely
took over the reins of political and economic power, and with this or
that cosmetic adjustment, established themselves as the new ruling
class. Now, there is an element of truth to this—but only on the
surface. Our task as historical materialists is to delve beneath the
surface, to unravel and understand the inner contradictions, the
fundamental forces, processes, and class struggles that motivated and
drove the revolution.

In actual fact, the American Revolution was a far more dialectically
complex, far-reaching, and fundamental social movement and
transformation than most give it credit. It was not a mere colonial
rebellion. It was a profound political and social revolution, which
rooted out most of the remaining traces of monarchic rule and feudalism
inherited from the only partially complete English bourgeois revolution.
The Americans carried through the bourgeois democratic revolution on a
scale never before seen in history.

As Marxists, we are not economic determinists; but we understand that
in the final analysis, the mode of production is the foundation, the
infrastructure, upon which rests the superstructure of society:
ideology, religion, philosophy, intellectual life, political parties and
currents, legal statutes, societal and cultural norms, aesthetics, etc.
These all interact with and condition one another, and at nodal turning
points in history, quantity is transformed into quality, and vice
versa.

As Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of
society come into conflict with the existing relations of production
or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes
in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation
of the whole immense superstructure. No social order is ever destroyed
before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been
developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older
ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured
within the framework of the old society.”

This must be our starting point in analyzing the dynamics of the
American—or any other revolution—including those we are living through
and preparing for today.

Feudalism vs. capitalism

The American Revolution was a prelude to the Great French Revolution,
anticipating what was to come soon thereafter across Europe. At the
heart of the revolution was the antagonism between the remnants of
feudalism, planted artificially on the shores of the Americas, and
incipient bourgeois society. In a way, one could say that feudalism
broke at one of its weakest links, in a place where capitalist relations
had developed to the point where they could challenge the feeble
remains of the old society and actually supplant it. Because, although
feudalism did not develop organically in the Americas, and although
there were not centuries of the rule of lords and kings and the colossal
entrenched power of the church to smash, there were many aspects of
that system that were alive and well in Britain’s American colonies.

For example, there was the system of entail and primogeniture,
designed to keep property within a single family line. There were also
huge landed estates, many on a scale surpassing the great feudal estates
in Europe, with some as large as 6 million acres, or around one-fifth
the current state of Virginia. In areas such as New York’s Hudson
Valley, huge manorial properties existed, with those who worked the land
mere tenants farmers, not individual property holders. Enormous tracts
of land in the west were reserved exclusively for the Crown, with the
tallest and straightest trees reserved for the King and his Navy. And in
some cases, quit rents and other feudal dues were imposed and collected
from those who worked the land.

In addition, there was an established and state-financed church in
nine of the thirteen colonies. The big landholders and large merchants
on the coast aspired to live as a kind of pseudo-nobility, with the airs
and manners of the aristocrats in Europe’s royal courts. It was very
much a society based on social obligations and a clearly defined social
stratification and hierarchy.

And talk about uneven and combined development! You had chattel
slavery and indentured servitude on a mass scale, a combination of
pre-feudal, semi-feudal and semi-capitalist relations, all plopped on
top of a vast, unplowed continent teeming with natural resources,
inhabited by millions of primitive communists speaking thousands of
different languages.

A new society develops

By the late 17th century, the English had established a fairly firm
grip on North America, having edged out the Dutch, Swedes, Finns,
Germans, and others who had tried to gain a foothold in this part of the
New World. Up until the Revolution, Americans generally considered
themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown. They may have had this
or that disagreement with the mother country over the years, but they
came to see themselves above all as Englishmen, especially in relation
to the French, who still occupied a significant portion of the
continent.

Nonetheless, though mostly English, the part of the continent that
was to become the United States was an ethnic and cultural—not to
mention class—melting pot from the beginning: with Dutch, French,
English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Native Americans, Africans, and
more. People of all classes and of all backgrounds came to make a new
life: soldiers, artisans, farmers, millers, bakers, machinists,
criminals, lawyers, skilled and unskilled craftsmen, traders, trappers,
merchants, bankers, preachers, fishermen, smugglers, rich, poor,
religious outcasts and on and on, 35% of whom were indentured servants
or slaves.

All of this was grafted onto a very different, and as yet
unregulated, wild and often hostile environment with a diverse climate,
flora, fauna, and geography, not to mention millions of Native
Americans. This inevitably led from early on to the creation of unique
social, cultural, political, religious, and legal institutions, which
over time diverged further and further from the institutions of the
mother country. In addition to being Englishmen, the future Americans
increasingly identified themselves as being a Massachusetts man or a
Virginian.

Over time, the peculiar institutions developed to adapt to this new
world put their stamp on the character of the country and its people.
The “rugged individualism” and “frontier spirit” typical of many
Americans has its roots in this period. As there was so much land
available, it became increasingly difficult to keep free laborers
working for you when they could move further west and set themselves up
with their own property, despite the hardships this entailed. This led
to an increased dependence on slave labor and indentured servants, and
to even greater tensions between the classes.

Bacon RebellionIncidents
such as Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, in which black and white indentured
servants united to fight against their common exploiters, and even
burned down the Virginia state capital of Jamestown, also had an effect
on the course of the country’s development. Fearing this class unity
across racial lines, and as blacks would be more easily identifiable
than whites, different standards were applied when punishing the rebels,
and preference toward the importation of African slaves grew.

But through all this there was a growing national identity, a common
history, a diverging language, and eventually and inexorably, the need
for greater political and economic independence. Over a period of
centuries and decades, almost imperceptible to those living through it, a
new society “matured within the womb of the old.” And once the
material, objective conditions had ripened sufficiently, the subjective
factor—the revolutionary consciousness and radicalism of the nascent
U.S. bourgeoisie, and above all, the willingness of the laboring masses
to fight to change society—accelerated dramatically.

Historian Charles Andrews succinctly explains that (quoted in Aptheker):

“On the one side was the immutable, stereotyped system of the mother
country, based on precedent and tradition and designed to keep things
comfortably as they were; on the other, a vital dynamic organism,
containing the seed of a great nation, its forces untried, still to be
proved. It is inconceivable that such a connection should have continued
long between two such yoke-fellows, one static, the other dynamic,
separated by an ocean and bound only by the ties of a legal
relationship.”

So you had a young, fresh bourgeoisie sitting on enormous economic
potential just waiting to be unleashed. But in order to unleash that
potential—for the benefit and enrichment of the American capitalists and
not the British—they required the more efficient and stable confines of
their own nation state. For their part, the British—still headed by a
monarch despite having already had their own bourgeois revolution—wanted
to maintain the traditions, stability, and profitability of their
robust and growing empire. They ensured this by exerting strict control
over their colonial satellites when it came to access to markets,
credit, manufacturing, ship building, trade, etc.

However, this was not the only antagonism brewing. In addition to the
growing tension between the colonies and their master, the struggle
between the producing and exploiting classes was alive and well from the
earliest days in American history.

Many of the first colonists were political or religious exiles, with
strong revolutionary democratic traditions. They established
institutions such as the Town Hall community meetings, armed people’s
militias, and a relative degree of religious tolerance. But a ruling
class lording it over the majority also existed from the beginning, and
conflicts periodically erupted. Slave rebellions and other uprisings of
the oppressed, such as Bacon’s Rebellion, erupted periodically. In the
struggle between the classes within the colonies themselves, the British
were always on the side of reaction, defending the propertied interests
and the status quo.

Revolution vs. reaction

In short, the British Empire was a historically regressive power,
while the emerging American colonies were a historically progressive
force, fighting for national self-determination, greater political
democracy, and a wider scope for their economic activities.
Increasingly, they saw themselves as a new and separate nation, a
sentiment that cut across class and colonial state lines. The
up-and-coming American capitalists were laying the foundations for the
eventual unprecedented explosion of the productive forces that followed.
From the Marxist perspective, this was an historically progressive
development, as it has laid the economic foundations upon which we can
now build socialism.

To be sure, the British would continue to dominate the planet for
another 100 years or more. But the seeds of its eventual fall from
worldwide preeminence were contained in the separation of its American
colonies. These became a new rival power, eventually outshining their
former master.

By the middle of the 18th century, America was no longer a peripheral
backwater. By 1776, one in every four Englishmen lived in the American
colonies, which had a population of 2.5 million people. It was an
important economic component of the vast British Empire, especially when
it came to trade and shipping. The Americans had long enjoyed the
privileges and protections of being part of the Empire. But at a certain
stage, they outgrew their baby clothes and wanted to stand on their own
two feet. The colossal potential to become a mighty commercial and
maritime power—like the British—was increasingly hemmed in by the
restrictions imposed by the mother country.

The colonies were to forced to buy and sell only to British
merchants, instead of being able trade freely with whomever offered them
the best opportunities. They were forced to import expensive British
goods, instead of producing them at home, where natural resources
abounded and the ability to do produce quality goods was growing. They
were forced to borrow from British banks, and many were deeply in debt
with no possibility of ever getting out. The many tariffs, duties, and
taxes, led to a growing boom in smuggling, and many new fortunes were
made by skirting the laws. But eventually, even this was not enough.
Taxes imposed from 3,000 miles away by a Parliament in which the
colonists had no voice became intolerable.

As has already ben mentioned, for most of their existence, the
relatively weak and defenseless colonies had relied upon the protection
of the British Crown, both on the high seas and on land, especially
against the French and the Native Americans. But after the end of the
French and Indian War in 1763 (also known as the “Seven Years’ War”),
that threat was more or less removed. At precisely that same time, the
American colonies’ economy was starting to come into its own. And also
precisely at that time, the British Parliament decided that the
Americans should pay more for the protection they afforded them, and to
re-fill the coffers drained by their war with the French.

It is interesting to note the well-calculated role played by France
during the American Revolution. It had nothing to do with “freedom” and
“democracy,” and everything to do with strengthening the monarchy and
weakening its British nemesis. They saw in the colonial revolt an
opportunity to strike a blow at their rival across the channel. They
also wished to strenghen their own foothold in the Americas, and would
not have not at all minded making the Americans subordinate to
themselves. However, in one of the wonderful dialectical twists of
history, the expenses incurred in backing the Americans accelerated the
bankruptcy and eventual demise of the French monarchy in its own
revolution just a few years later.

Diverse interests converge

By the 1760s, broad layers of Colonial society were gradually uniting
against the British—but for different class reasons. Although Americans
paid just 1/25th of the taxes paid by subjects of the Crown living in
England, the wealthy merchants and indebted plantation owners bristled
at every infringement on their ability to profit without restriction.
Why should they take all the risks and face economic ruin just to enrich
the elites living safely and comfortably in London? Of course, many of
the wealthy Tories remained loyal to the Crown, especially in New
England and the Mid-Atlantic states. After all, they were doing very
well for themselves as representatives of the Empire, richly rewarded
with land and power for governing the colonies on its behalf.

But the majority of those living in the 13 American colonies were clearly in favor of change. However, the question was: what kind of change and in whose interests?
The rich, feeling claustrophobic within the strait jacket of the
Empire, wanted the freedom to make even greater profits on their own
terms. The working masses, discontented with their lot in life, found an
enemy in what was increasingly seen as foreign occupation of their country.
So for a time, the interests of the rich and of the poor coincided, and
the anger was aimed at the external enemy. This was the case during the
movement against the Stamp Act in 1765.

But as the fundamental interests of these two groups were not at all
the same, splits were inevitable, and this temporary unity was
eventually torn apart by the growing class polarization in society. It
was a classic example of reformism vs. revolution, of cosmetic changes
vs. a thorough-going social transformation, of Jacobins vs. Girondins,
Bolsheviks vs. Mensheviks.

In addition, the ways the different layers in society expressed their
frustrations were very different indeed. Whereas the rich wanted merely
to negotiate better terms for themselves vis a vis the
British, the masses of urban workmen and rural farmers increasingly took
things into their own hands. While the rich at first wanted to
cynically incite the masses to use them as leverage against the Crown,
the protests took on a life of their own, and often turned violent. As
Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. put it (quoted in Braverman): “It became
apparent that their agitation for commercial redress was unloosing
social forces more destructive to business interests than the misguided
acts of Parliament.”

Boycotts led to riots and the destruction of commercial property, the
burning down of tax and other government offices, and the tarring and
feathering of Tories and government officials by mobs. As in all
revolutionary processes, the masses’ consciousness was rapidly
transformed. From reformism to revolution, the demands grew clearer, and
the political programs and representatives thrown up by the movement
were tested by events, as the masses continued to orient to ever-further
to the left. As the historian J. Franklin Jameson explains (quoted in
H.B.):

“Allowance has to be made for one important fact in the natural
history of revolutions, and that is that, as they progress, they tend to
fall into the hands of men holding more and more advanced or extreme
view, less and less restrained by traditional attachment to the old
order of things. Therefore the social consequences of a revolution are
not necessarily shaped by the conscious or unconscious desires of those
who started it, but more likely by the desires of those who come into
control of it at later stages of its development.”

Layer after layer of society was drawn into the growing movement,
expressing pent-up frustrations against British rule and against society
generally Not only the urban masses—the artisans, mechanics, laborers,
craftsmen and shopkeepers—but also the Husbandsmen, the farmers, the
western frontiersmen, who were less bridled by the class stratification
of the East Coast. Many Southern plantation owners, facing economic ruin
due to their debts, also threw their weight into the struggle. Since
they tended to live far away from the aroused urban masses, many slave
owners were surprisingly bold in their agitation against the British.

The masses begin to organize

Thomas PaineTaverns,
coffeehouses, and Town Hall meetings, particularly in New England,
became hotbeds of revolutionary agitation. Although only 1,500 citizens
of Boston were entitled by property qualifications to attend and vote,
the radicals had a gallery installed and thousands crowded the meetings
to hear people like Samuel Adams speak. There were clear elements of
dual power in these and similar meetings throughout the colonies, as the
masses expressed themselves directly and took decisions in open
defiance of the British-installed governors and legislatures. The
printing and circulation of radical papers and pamphlets such as Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense, also increased dramatically, as the
masses’ thirst for ideas grew exponentially. This is a clear example of
the need for and role of the revolutionary press, to spread
revolutionary ideas and unify the struggle nationally.

Faced with this radicalization, which threatened to get “out of
control,” more and more big merchants who had flirted with the
revolution, lost their nerve and passed to the side of reaction,
notwithstanding the fact that they would be the eventual beneficiaries
of the revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers.

Of course, the main participants were not always consciously aware of
all of the underlying factors that motivated them. The fundamental
interests were expressed as a battle of ideas, presented in terms of
“freedom” and “democracy” vs. “tyranny,” etc. Independence was not
necessarily the intent of many of the leaders or of the masses
themselves, right up to the summer of 1776, and even beyond. But
necessity tends to find a way of expressing itself, and events soon
snowballed and took on a life of their own.

Above all, it was the decisive entry of the masses onto the stage of
history that stamped this process as a revolution. Whether they were
entirely clear about what they were doing or not, the formerly passive
and even “apathetic” masses awoke to political and social consciousness,
seized their destiny in their hands, and embarked upon a heroic
struggle against both British impositions and their own native ruling
class.

The aspirations of the poor masses and of the “middling types”—as the
rising petty bourgeoisie was called—were expressed in the increasingly
radical and revolutionary ideas, words and deeds of people like
British-born Thomas Paine; Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson;
renaissance man Benjamin Franklin; and the unrivaled revolutionary
agitator, organizer, and brewer from Boston, Samuel Adams. Their
piercing logic, eloquence, and clarity represents some of the best
revolutionary writing ever put to paper. They were part of the worldwide
ideological offensive of the then-historically progressive capitalist
class, against decaying feudalism and the Church. Despite efforts at
censorship, there was more scope for expressing these ideas in America,
as the authors and printing presses were thousands of miles from the
state authorities in Europe.

Sam AdamsOver
time, the demands and actions of the masses became increasingly
coherent, and began to coalesce around an increasingly radical program
and organization. As explained by Harry Braverman, it was Sam Adams who
staged the Boston Tea Party, coordinated the mass boycott of British
goods and of American merchants selling those goods, who called for the
convening of the Continental Congress, and was a key “mover and shaker”
behind the scenes at those meetings. Sam Adams had spent his entire life
as a consistent revolutionary democrat, preparing for just such a
moment. He also organized the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of
Correspondence, a network of radicals that spread from New England,
helping to unify and coordinate the rebellion throughout the colonies.
In Massachusetts alone, there were some 300 Committees of
Correspondence, in a state that had only 450,000 inhabitants at that
time.

This was as close to a revolutionary vanguard or party that we can
find in that epoch of revolution. Sam Adams understood the need for a
bold, far-sighted leadership, for a revolutionary program, and for
discipline and organization. He also understood better than anyone the
need to connect revolutionary ideas with the movement of the masses, and
he was sublimely skilled at it. As Adams put it, “Our business is not
to make events, but to wisely improve them.”

It is no surprise then, that Sam Adams was the most hated man in Tory
America. In fact, the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord began because
the Redcoats were on their way to arrest Adams to prevent him from
attending the Continental Congress, which eventually issued the
Declaration of Independence and raised an army in defiance of British
rule.

In the final analysis, it was the development of the productive
forces in the Colonies, especially in New England and the Mid-Atlantic,
that made revolution not only possible but necessary. Out of the
developing economic base rose the human forces that could throw off the
Colonial yoke. For example, mass bocotts of British goods would not have
been possible without the ability to produce the necessities of life
without importing them. It is therefore no accident that Boston was the
initial nerve center for the revolution. It was one of the largest
cities, the most important port, and had a proto-working class and petty
bourgeois composition, with strong revolutionary democratic traditions.

The revolutionary masses and the “armed people”

Boston Tea PartyAs
has been explained already, from the perspective of historical
materialism, the American Revolution was far more than the War of
Independence. It contained within it both external and internal
components: the anti-colonial, national struggle against the British
Empire; and a struggle within the colonies between the classes for a
more democratic and egalitarian order. It was a long, protracted
process, with decades of building contradictions, small rebellions, a
war between England and France, trade and tariff disputes, protests,
threats, and sabotage, eventually leading to an 8-year war, with the
first battles taking place in 1775, before the actual Declaration of
Independence in 1776. There were many defeats but also some important
victories for the colonists, with the war finally ending in 1783 with
the aid of the French and the surrender of British general Cornwallis at
Yorktown. Then it was 6 more years before the Constitution and then the
Bill of Rights were adopted. And then a further period of consolidation
through the terms of the first few presidents, Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, and Madison.

Bourgeois history tends to focus on the “great men” of the world, and
the American Revolution is no exception. These individuals certainly
played important and often contradictory roles, and we do not deny the
role of the individual in history. But as we will see, in the American
Revolution, as in all bourgeois revolutions, it was not the bourgeois
themselves who did the bulk of the fighting and dying for the ideals of
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It was the ordinary masses
who were the backbone, the driving force of the revolution, although in
the end they did not reap all the rewards they thought they would.

Although the full aspirations of the masses for greater political and
economic democracy were betrayed, for the first time in history, a
colony of a European power not only rebelled, but won its freedom from
the most powerful military and economic force on the planet. All other
such rebellions had been put down by force. The American Revolution,
inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, in turn served as an
inspiration for the European bourgeois revolutions. These were
revolutionary wars against the domination of feudalism and its
derivatives, the most classical example being the Great French
Revolution that began in 1789. But the ripple effect of the American
Revolution went much further, influencing and inspiring the masses in
their struggle against Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese rule in
Latin America and the Caribbean.

These days in the U.S., the word “militiaman” conjures up images of
right wing, neo-fascist gun nuts dressed in camouflage, patrolling the
U.S. border for undocumented immigrants. But in the American Revolution,
the militiamen—also known as Minutemen, as they were ready to go fight
at a moment’s notice—were a true example of “the armed people,” a
volunteer army of the masses, organized to fight against oppression.

The British Army was the most professional fighting machine on the
planet, an intimidating and deadly force. And yet, a rag-tag bunch of
poorly trained irregulars did far more than just harass the Redcoats
with guerrilla, Native American-style tactics; they actually defeated
them on a handful of occasions in set battles. Most importantly, they
won key victories at crucial moments in the war, which even though they
did not represent a strategic threat to the British occupation, were
tremendous morale boosters for the rebel cause.

After the first skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, as many as
20,000 armed men from as far away as Vermont and New Hampshire flooded
the Boston area and besieged the city. These were ordinary workingmen,
farmers, the poor, and small artisans. This was a true, mass armed
uprising, in open defiance of the state, an anticipation of the early
armies of the French Republic.

The formation of the Continental Army under George Washington was an
attempt to bring some systematic order—and hierarchical control—into the
colonial forces’ ranks. But it was always a far less professional
fighting force than was fielded by the British. However, the colonists
in revolt—the poorest and most disenfranchised layers of that
society—were inspired by the ideals of genuine freedom and the promise
of a better life for all. They contributed more than just soldiers for
the field, but in provisioning and supplying the army, manufacturing
muskets, cannons and ammunition, smuggling goods through the British
lines, and buying bonds from the Continental Congress with their meager
savings to fund the resistance effort.

Revolutionary war and civil war

However, like all revolutionary wars, this was not simple, linear
affair, with the “good colonists” on one side, the “bad British” on the
other. It was a living struggle of forces, with many ebbs and flows, and
the result was not a foregone conclusion. See Canada for example: they
still have the British Queen on their money! Many were indifferent to
the struggle either way, and simply wanted peace, quiet, and stability,
no matter who was in charge. It has been estimated that roughly
one-third of the colonists were for independence; one-third for the
Crown; and one third vacilating between the two poles.

Diverse
and diverging class interests were at stake, so it is not surprise that
the war was not only against the British; it was also a civil war
between the Americans themselves. It is estimated that around 400,000
Americans served in the armed forces during the course of the conflict.
But as many as 50,000 of these served on the British side, supplementing
the British regulars. This is a significant number, given that
Washington’s forces never exceeded 90,000 at any one time, and were
often as low as 12,000 or 15,000.

Washingtons’ forces were also plagued by disease, starvation,
desertions, poor leadership, corruption, and a squabbling Continental
Congress that deprived them of funds and supplies. The soldiers were
also mutinous on many occasions, given the harsh treatment and
conditions they endured while Washington and co. wintered in relatively
luxurious comfort like the warrior kings of old. Nevertheless, the
pro-independence colonists soldiered on, eventually receiveing support
from thousands of French troops and the French navy.

It is true that U.S. forces were greatly outmatched against the
British regulars, the Americans trained by and fighting for the British,
and the Hessian mercenaries brought in by the British Crown. The
colonists lost most of their battles and were usually forced to “fight
like Indians”—a guerrilla war. George Washington was a conceited,
pompous, bastard, and he was certainly no Napoleon. But he understood
the need to play to public opinion and the role of morale in war. For
their part, the British generals were exceptionally incompetent, often
far more concerned with preparations for the next society ball in
Philadelphia or New York than the next battle with the rebels.

Key victories by the Continental Army, such as the Battle of Trenton,
had tremendous moral value, and showed that regular British and
mercenary forces could be defeated. Many believe that the hundreds of
Hessian troops involved in that battle on the day after Christmas were
either drunk or hungover, but there is evidence to the contrary. Either
way, just one week before Washington’s gamble in crossing the Delaware
and attacking the garrison at Trenton, the Continental Army seemed on
the verge of collapse and the rebel cause snuffed out. But the victory
re-energized the colonial resistance, and the rest, as they say, is
history.
It should also be noted that especially toward the end of
the war, there was much fighting in the Southern colonies, some of it
quite brutal, although the most famous battles took place in
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada.

Ultimately, the side of right and of history were on the side of the
Americans. The colonial rebels were fighting for a revolutionary ideal
and for material improvements in their lives, whereas the British
conscripts and mercenaries were fighting to preserve the wealth and
privileges of the American Tories and the Crown. With England engaged in
wars in Europe and preoccupied with protecting the rest of its empire,
it was eventually worn down, especially after the French threw their
weight behind the rebel cause and forced the surrender of a significant
part of the British army at Yorktown.

Say what you will about the pretentious, aristocratic Washington and
the rest of the so-called Founding Fathers, but it took no small amount
of calculated courage to rebel on that scale and to aim for total
separation, facing execution for treason if the effort failed.

But far more important was the role played by the ordinary masses,
or, as Sam Adams described them: “the two venerable orders of men styled
Mechanicks and Husbandmen [farmers], the strength of every community.”
After all, a general without an army is not likely to win many battles.

The revolution prevails

The social transformations that resulted from the revolutionary war
and its aftermath were significant. It was in this sense, a true social,
and not merely a political revolution. In fact, in relation to the size
of the economy and population, the American Revolution resulted in one
of the biggest expropriations of private property in world history.

Entail and primogeniture were done away with within a few years. In
the state of New York, all lands and rents of the Crown and over 2.5
million acres of manorial estates were expropriated, including the Van
Rennsalaer manor, which was two-thirds the size of the entire state of
Rhode Island, and the Phillipse estate, which stretched over 300 square
miles. In North Carolina, the estate of Lord Granville, comprising ⅓ of
the entire colony was also expropriated. The situation was similar in
states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, where the Fairfax estate of 6
million acres was taken over, although Lord Fairfax was not a Tory
loyalist.

These estates were then broken up into thousands of small plots, a
far-reaching land reform, one of the cornerstones of the
national-democratic revolution. Thi resulted in the rise of a large
class of small, independent farmers. Millions of dollars of other forms
of property were also expropriated—without compensation. Many of those
who had their property confiscated and who did not flee the country
altogether, were thrown back into the heap of “regular” folks who had to
work for a living.

In addition, the property requirements for suffrage were loosened up,
with property in land no longer required in order to be able to vote.
The official churches that existed in some of the colonies were also cut
off from state funding as separation of church and state eventually
became the law throughout the colonies. And although slavery got a new
lease on life after the invention of the cotton gin early in the next
century, it was abolished in six of the colonies immediately, and
thousands of slaves were granted their freedom, also in the south. In
addition, the slave trade was legally prohibited—though in practice it
continued for decades to come.

A nouveau riche and new ruling class sprung up almost
overnight, as lawyers, skilled craftsmen, merchants, and bankers rose up
to fill the vacuum left by the fleeing Tories and British colonial
officials. It has been estimated that at least 100,000, and perhaps as
many as 200,000 Tories fled the country, mainly to Canada, some to
Britain. In relation to the population of the country, it was perhaps
the most massive political and economic emigration in modern history; 10
times as many per capita as fled France during the “Reign of Terror” in
1790s. These emigres represented the cream of the colonial crop, with
as many as half of the most educated and wealthy property owners in New
England and New York hotfooting it away from the revolution.

Capitalist property relations find fertile soil

Shay’s RebellionBut
it wasn’t all milk and honey for the new ruling class. Economic crisis
and a period of adjustment followed the war, as wartime speculation and
smuggling came to an end. In addition, the preferred credit and trading
status of being a part of the British Empire meant less access to
foreign banks and ports. Shays’ Rebellion, a mass uprising of
discontented Massachusetts farmers and ex-Revolutionary War soldiers,
contained within it echoes of the “Levellers” of the English Revolution,
demanding that those who had fought for freedom and equality should
also have economic equality. This scared the living daylights out of the
new leaders of the at-that-time deeply dis-united states, and led to
the adoption of a new Constitution.

The new Constitution, adopted in 1789 and still in force to this day,
featured a much more centralized federal structure than the previous
Articles of Confederation. Other uprisings, such as the Whisky Rebellion
in Western Pennsylvania, were thereafter handily put down in a show of
force by the new national state.

The young American bourgeoisie now had power firmly in its hands, and
it proceeded to establish structures, laws, and institutions to enrich
itself and defend its interests. It used the state power to root out the
remnants of the old system and to build solid foundations for its
eventual rise to world preeminence. Previously, the merchant
capitalists, who bought cheap on the world market and sold dear at home,
predominated. Now, the groundwork was laid for the development of the
means of production and manufacture on a larger scale in the former
colonies themselves, and the eventual rise of industrial and later
finance capitalism.

The first national bank and a system of national credit and debt were
established. Alexander Hamilton was the first Secretary of Treasury.
This was like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Hamilton was
exemplary, albeit amoral, political-animal-battering-ram of early
American capitalist property relations. He relentlessly laid the
foundations for the system we still live under today. Great fortunes
were made when he convinced the new U.S. Congress to pay in full the war
bonds issued by the old Continental Congress during the war—but only
after his speculator pals had bought the formerly near-worthless bits of
paper up from the original owners for pennies on the dollar.

In short, the basic elements of the national-democratic revolution
were carried out, establishing the conditions for the flourishing of
capitalism on the American continent: a united territory, language,
currency, legal system, a military to defend from foreign invders and to
put down internal rebellions, etc. With an entire continent to occupy
and exploit, there was plenty of room to extend the country and the
capitalist system it was based upon.

Aspirations of the masses betrayed

The potential outcome for the revolution was necessarily limited and
conditioned by the stage of development of the productive forces and of
the classes in society at that time. It could not have been anything
more than a bourgeois revolution, and as far as bourgeois revolutions
go, it was well ahead of its time.

Nonetheless, in many other ways, the revolution was only partially
completed. Even the political democracy side of it remains incomplete to
this day. The institution of the Electoral College means that the
highest office in national government, the presidency, is not directly
elected by the people. Thousands of other officials are appointed, and
are not elected or accountable to the electorate. The Senate is a kind
of “House of Lords” with more political power per capita for the
less-populated, more rural, and politically retrograde states. To this
day, women do not have the same rights as men. And the continued
existence of slavery necessitated a second social revolution—the
American Civil War—to end slavery and establish a system of free labor
throughout the country, finally allowing for the untrammelled domination
of capitalism across the entire continent.

Given the objective conditions of the time, many of the ideals
expressed by the Founding Fathers and radical pamphleteers who spurred
the masses on to fight and die for the revolution were ultimately
unrealizable and Utopian. Nonetheless, a body of marvelous revolutionary
literature was produced, which put into eloquent words the aspirations
of the masses, words which continue to receive a powerful echo to this
day. How can we forget the stirring lines of the Declaration of
Independence, with its premise that “all men are created equal” (except
of course for slaves, Native Americans and women)? Or its assertion of
the “inalienable rights of man,” and the right to Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness?

Now, the original draft referred to Life, Liberty, and the right to property.
But Benjamin Franklin and others opposed including “defense of
property” as one of the virtues of government in the Declaration.
Franklin was a thinker and political economist ahead of his time. He
believed property to be a “creature of society,” and that it therefore
should be taxed as a way of financing civil society. So the more poetic
“Pursuit of Happiness” made the final cut.

And of course there is the Declaration of Independence’s bold statement that

“whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends
[Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness.”

Thomas JeffersonThomas
Jefferson also believed that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its
natural manure.” He was also in favor of regularly revisiting, revising
and redrafting the Constitution, every 20 years or so, if necessary.
These were bold ideas, especially in a world dominated by Kings, the
Church, and centuries-old feudal obligations and hierarchies.

But economic reality and the needs of the system asserted themselves
and the U.S. Constitution became the supreme guarantor of private
property rights. Its is a remarkable model of bourgeois democracy—of
democracy for the rich. It is cleverly balanced and designed to give the
impression of genuine democracy, without ever letting the rabble have a
real say in anything. Most of the Founding Fathers were fans of the old
Roman Republic, and saw themselves as modern versions of the noble
patricians, wisely ruling over a mass of ordinary plebeians. We all know
how that ended: with the consolidation of power in fewer and fewer
hands and the rise of the Roman Empire.

Third American Revolution needed

Like all bourgeois revolutions, what began as a highly progressive
development was eventually transformed into its opposite. The U.S. is
now the most reactionary power on the planet, not to mention one of the
most undemocratic and economically unequal societies on earth. In one of
history’s many ironies, the Americans are now engaged in occupying
foreign countries and fighting against guerrilla insurgencies and
enemies that “don’t fight fair.” They have even hired the modern version
of the Hessian mercenaries—corporations like Blackwater—to do their
dirty work for them. But that too will be dialectically transformed into
its opposite in the coming period. Of this we can be absolutely
confident.

The
real revolutionary roots of these earth-shaking events should inspire
us, just as they once inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary
American men and women to fight and die to change society. As Lenin put
it in his Letter to American Workers:

“The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those
great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have
been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like
the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings,
landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or
ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the
British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery,
in the same way as these ‘civilized’ bloodsuckers are still oppressing
and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India,
Egypt, and all parts of the world.”

And this is precisely why the historians of the ruling class have
stripped the American Revolution of its real class content. They do not
want us to remember that, as in all social revolutions, it was the
masses who pushed the process forward at every stage. Nor do they want
us to remember the significant infringements on the private property,
power, and privileges of the then-ruling class that were unleashed by
the revolution. The American Revolution was the first “clearing of the
decks for capitalism,” a process further completed and consolidated by
the Civil War.

Now the ground is being prepared for the third American
Revolution—the socialist revolution, which will liberate the whole of
humanity and transform human history forever.

Minneapolis, October 31, 2011

Sources used:

• Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution (1763-1783)
• Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation
• Harry Braverman, Sam Adams and the American Revolution
• Grant S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
• Alan Woods, Marxism and the USA
• Leo Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods
• Harry Braverman, America Also Had A Revolution, a Review of J. Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered As A Social Movement
• V.I. Lenin, Letter to American Workers
• Wikipedia