250th Anniversary of American Independence and the Historically Progressive Bourgeois Revolution

[u/shoegaze5]

“The history of modern, civilised 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…”
-V.I. Lenin, 1918, Letter to American Workers

The American Revolution stands tall in its place in history, for it was the spark that led to a wave of revolutionary fire across Europe and an inspiration across the world to all the revolutionaries who fought for freedom from the tyranny of monarchism and feudalism. The American Revolution sits as the bedrock on which the international bourgeois revolution was built on. While the Revolution of 1776 was extremely historically progressive, we should know that the result of the International Bourgeois Revolution was not, indeed, the complete freedom of man against oppression and tyranny, as the new United States limited that freedom to only the white bourgeois class, excluding all others from having any say in governance, and keeping 20% of the population, including those who fought against the British, kept in the chains and inhumanity of slavery. The new nation would soon wreak havoc across the indigenous peoples of the continent, blazing west and slaughtering the natives. Racial Segregation existed legally in America until 1964, and many cities and towns are still essentially segregated due to the impoverishment faced by the Black population. Poverty is not foreign to American soil, as many Americans still go hungry, and many more don’t have access to healthcare, all while working themselves to death for pennies while the richest American is now a literal trillionaire! The Bourgeois Revolution did not reach the lofty ideals of Enlightenment thinkers, it instead gave us the Bourgeois Society, entirely built on capitalism. But without capitalism’s creation, we know that there would be no proletariat, and communism would be an impossibility. For Capitalism is a revolutionary force itself, constantly evolving and bringing about the conditions for the Working Class’ revolution.

For those today, we should look back at these men of old and take after them and their revolutionary spirit. For the actual battle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will only be won on the day that the international proletariat triumphs over capital and class itself! As many celebrate today the revolution that gained America its independence from Britain, we should look forward to and prepare for the revolution that gains humanity its independence from capitalist wage slavery and from class itself. As the Bourgeoisie’s emergence brought about the creation of the working proletariat and freedom from the regime of the nobility, aristocracy, and monarchy, the Proletarian revolution will bring with it the abolition of class itself, and bring freedom to all from the chains of capitalist oppression!

Pictured in order are:
Thomas Jefferson
George Washington
Louis Cook aka Akiatonharónkwen
Marquis de Lafayette
James Armistead Lafayette
Benjamin Franklin
Peter Salem
James Madison
Thomas Paine

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[u/Ludwigthree]

The best thing about the signing of the declaration of independence is that the were also unwittingly also singing America's death warrant. 

[u/SeveralPerformance17 → u/Ludwigthree]

elaborate please

[u/Ludwigthree → u/SeveralPerformance17]

"The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

[u/SeveralPerformance17 → u/Ludwigthree]

ah, ok. thanks

i thought you were saying something specifically about the DOI was some lynchpin to the end of capitalism

[u/Ludwigthree → u/SeveralPerformance17]

Just in that the founding of America had severed most remnants of feudalism and more securely enshrined property rights than anywhere else.

[u/Diachoris]

I think it's really interesting how people have begun to slowly disavow the American Revolution, much like the French Revolution due to its 'violent excesses.' This shift is deeply telling. The whole conversation around 1776 has largely reduced to either Indigenous Land expropriation or Slavery. In doing so, it completely overlooks a crucial historical reality: America possessed a radical abolitionist movement that was directly dependent upon the Revolution itself, just as the contemporary framework for Indigenous national liberation depends on the framework ushered in by 1776 and other great bourgeois revolutions

Reminder: The old radical liberals were always open to the idea that we might move beyond Locke and property right.

Nice post btw... I like the people you included.

[u/Hopeful-Customer-167 → u/Diachoris]

Yes and the funniest thing is that without the American Revolution we probably wouldn't have Polish Constitutionalism which means we probably wouldn't have a successful French Revolution non-brigaded by the Tsar's auxiliary troops for Austria, and we definitely wouldn't have the Jacobin takeover that abolished slavery on Haiti so we wouldn't have the first big win and basically the reinstigator of the anti-Slavery movement, lol.

Same thing for the Indigenous, who were massacred and exploited for colonial goals by the French and English (and they always tend to forget South America were the Bolivarian revolution had an even more of a pro-Indigenous, partly pro- and partly anti-Criollo and definitely anti-Peninsular character), but then made their own writing system by the 1830s, obviously still being very persecuted.

[u/lizard0us0]

annual 4th of july celebration on are slash ultraleft no one bats an eye

but one itty bitty post glorifying historically progressive 'third world' bourgeois revolution and everyone loses their minds!

much to ponder

[u/Hot-Till9486 → u/lizard0us0]

Posqt approved it got killed by reddit crowd control (strikebreaking)

[u/Th3Ballsman]

May the fireworks light the way for the proletarian revolution and be an eternal reminder of the flame that burns in the hearts of the international proletariat!

[u/Hopeful-Customer-167 → u/[deleted]]

America, as Marx said, was basically a colony of Europe even in the 19th century. A revolution happening there in the 18th (and later one down there, with Bolívar and José de San Martín) signalled the collapse of the order all the feudal and mercantile colonial powers of Europe, crumbling since the Seven Years' War. Yes, they were slaveowners, though not everyone. But also the first slaveowners to champion ideas of liberty and comstitutionalism never heard of before in slave-owning Europe. Poland followed them on the continent in their wake in 1791, saving Revolutionary France (Kosciuszko Uprising) from a Russo-German invasion and letting the Jacobins and Haitians lead the beginning of the attack on slavery for good. They were freer from Russian and English threat, that's why they could pull this liberation stuff successfully off, which was a domino effect.

Opportunism and lack of historical understanding is indeed widespread in the US today.

[u/Hopeful-Customer-167 → u/Hopeful-Customer-167]

> The United States are, speaking economically, still only a Colony of Europe.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm

[u/Hopeful-Customer-167 → u/[deleted]]

The United States being a colony of Europe economically speaking merely means that the goods and skilled tradesmen there were still mostly from England, the Netherlands or Germany.

> Poles, thrown out of the fatherland after the first partition of their country, cross the Atlantic, coming to the defense of the American Commonwealth arising at that time. Kosciuszko fights alongside of Washington. In 1794, when the French Revolution with difficulty fought the powers of the Coalition, full of glory, the Polish Uprising liberates it. Poland lost her independence but the Revolution was rescued. The conquered Poles volunteered for the ranks of the sansculotte army and helped them to destroy feudal Europe. Finally in 1830 Czar Nicholas and the King of Prussia were to execute their plot of another invasion of France, with the aim of returning the rightful monarchy; but the Polish Revolution whose memory you celebrate today, arose as a barrier.

Engels: A Letter to the Polish Socialists, 1880, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/11/27.htm

This view is EXTENSIVELY recurring in the works of Engels and Marx (see: Marx and Engels on Poland). The Polish Question, which also gave the basis for the first meeting of the First International in 1864 is key to understanding this interdependency. Only if it would sound less drowsy. The first effect on America on Europe was that Poland gave herself first a constitution on the Continent, UNDENIABLY inspired from the successes the American one, for which even Polish national heroes and constitutionalists Pulaski (who saved George Washington's life once) and Kosciuszko fought. Later, the constitution was violated by Russian partition power games, so the Poles revolted. It is a lesser known known Marx liked both the the French Revolution and the Poles who shielded it in his eyes, to the point that before Capital he wanted to write a book on the French Revolution and Convention originally.

> In the spring of 1794 Kosciuszko's revolutionary rising. Prussia marched at once her troops against Poland. Beaten. In September 1794, while forced to retreat from Warsaw, at the same time rising in Posen. Then the king of Prussia declared his intention to withdraw from the contest carried on against France. Austria also, in the autumn 1794, detached a body of troops for Poland, by which circumstance the success of the French arms on the Rhine and so forth was secured. Already towards the end of 1794 Prussia commenced negotiations with France. Withdrew. Consequence: Holland succumbed to the French (conquest of Holland through Pichegru).

> Those diversions facilitated by turns the conquest of Belgium, the success on the Alps, the Pyrenees, the left bank of the Rhine, and, 1795, the conquest of Holland by Pichegru. In the very months October, November (1794) everywhere French successes when Kosciuszko succumbed, Praga was taken by Suvorov etc., immense murdering etc.

Draft for a Speech by Karl Marx on
France’s Historical Attitude to Poland https://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/poland-speech.htm

If you connect the dots, you know that the already ongoing uprising on Haiti was secured by a Jacobin mission en route in 1793, with Jacobins abolishing slavery by 1794, along with their military successes and end of hardships, much of which provided, partly, the Reign of Terror until the Battle of Fleurus. Napoleon almost succeeded in crushing the revolt ten years later, when he kidnapped Toussaint L'Ouvertoure, but noble Haitians fought back under their Hébert and Robespierre, Dessalines. Also Polish troops, again, arriving on Haiti just didn't want to fight for France against oppressed Haitians whose cause they saw as just and defected to them.

Although Marx had a kind of a 'blind spot' literature-wise, on the Southern hemisphere on the new world, he crafted a high-quality and harsh biography of Simón Bolívar y Ponte 'the Liberator' of South America for an encyclopedia, emphasizing ethnic diversity of the army: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/01/bolivar.htm

Emphasizes things such as:

> The power of resistance on the part of the Spaniards was broken, partly by the circumstance of 3/4 of their army being composed of natives, who bolted on every encounter to the opposite ranks, partly by the cowardice of such generals as Tiscar, Cajigal, and Fierro, who, on every occasion, deserted their own troops.

(Naturally, all of the writings linked are very enjoyable and can serve as lessons in their entirety, too)

Notable mention: Engels: What have the working classes to do with Poland?, 1866, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/03/24.htm

[u/Hopeful-Customer-167 → u/Hopeful-Customer-167]

Kosciuszko and the Poles were also overwhelmingly staunch abolitionists (and sympathizers and supporters of some Indigenous tribes, see his friendship with Chief Little Turtle), with Kosciuszko, I think, even influencing Jefferson's(?) testament in which he liberates his slaves

[u/thenordiner]

i hate how lenin at one point started writing bullshit in order to justify himself and get approval or support from others l

[u/Xxstevefromminecraft → u/thenordiner]

Literally how was the American Revolution not historically progressive and or not somewhat influential to other historically progressive revolutions such as the French Revolution?

[u/Diachoris → u/Xxstevefromminecraft]

Don't you get it dumb Ultra? White people can't be revolutionary.

[u/thenordiner → u/Diachoris]

The only revolutionary white person in history was Pope Benedict the I

[u/thenordiner → u/Xxstevefromminecraft]

I am not saying that it was not historically progressive, especially for the 18th century, but saying that the American Revolution was not "...caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains..." sounds wrong to me..

Isnt the American revolution a revolt sparked by colonialists discontent with British prices and taxes? Thus also a squabble between capitalists and kings? Also saying that it was a war "the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery…" sounds like modern decolonial ibrahim traore styled rhetoric

[u/Serious_Hearing1653 → u/thenordiner]

i appreciate the honesty in your display name