Our Heritage from 1776/Whose Revolution Is It?
Whose Revolution Is It?
By Bertram D. Wolfe
WHEN a child comes of age, he has the right to claim his inheritance. And it is a test of the maturity of the working class when it begins to claim its inheritance from past revolutions.
One of the earliest articles of Lenin, written in 1897, concerns itself with this very question. It is entitled: "What Inheritance Do We Reject." It disputes step by step with the Populists the inheritance from past bourgeois revolutionaries. "We are definitely more consistent and truer guardians of the inheritance than the Narodniki (Populists)," he declares, and he then adds… "to keep the inheritance by no means signifies that one must limit himself to what he has inherited." This article by the youthful Lenin was a definite declaration that the Russian working class was coming of age and claiming the inheritance that the Decembrists, the "enlighteners" and the earlier generation of Populists had left to it.
We Claim Our Inheritance.
Judged by this test, the American working class is still immature—still infantile leftist. It does not claim its heritage. It does not dispute with the bourgeoisie, and particularly the pettybourgeoisie (the "back to 1776-ers") for its share in the inheritance of the first American revolution. This year, the Workers (Communist) Party intends to claim this inheritance on behalf of the American working class. It intends to proclaim that our class has come of age and demands its heritage.
This year is the 150th anniversary of the American revolution of 1776, If the average conscious worker is asked whether the American working class should commemorate the anniversary, his answer is an indignant "NO!"
"It was a bourgeois revolution," he will declare. "It created our present capitalist government. The constitution is a capitalist constitution. The Declaration of Independence is bunk. The revolutionary fathers represented the interests of landowners, merchants and capitalists. It's not our revolution. It gave the working class nothing but exploitation. We have nothing to commemorate."
Last year the Russian working class celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. The same workers who would condemn the celebration of 1776 by the American workers thought the celebration of the Decembrist uprising right and proper and to a limited extent joined in the celebration. Yet the Decembrist uprising of 1825 in Russia was an uprising of a few nobles and generals. If it had succeeded it would have developed a capitalist government or, more properly speaking, a liberalized feudal government where capitalism could develop more freely.
Again there is the French revolution. It also was a bourgeois revolution. Its leaders outlawed the labor unions, It created the government that rules France to-day in the interest of capitalism and imperialism. Yet not only do the conscious French workers commemorate the revolution of 1789, but even the workers of other countries commemorate it, build upon its achievements and draw revolutionary inspiration and lessons from it.
"We are trying to bring up our youth in the spirit of the deepest respect for the outstanding representatives of the great French revolution," declared Zinoviev in his lectures on the "History of the Russian Communist Party." "We understand their class character. We know that while the revolution sent a monarch to the guillotine, it also enforced laws against labor unions. Nevertheless, these representatives of the great bourgeois revolution were the first shock troops of struggling humanity; they broke thru the dams of feudalism and thereby opened the way to the spring floods of the proletarian revolutions."
The rejection of the heritage of the first American revolution is one of the signs of what Lenin named "infantile leftism." There is a tendency on the part of an immature left wing to "throw out the baby with the bath." To throw out the dirty water of parliamentary opportunism, it dumps out the baby as well—the participation in parliamentary campaigns. Reacting against opportunist platforms, it rejects partial demands altogether. Rejecting the bunk with which the American revolution of 1776 has been surrounded and the uses to which it is put in breeding chauvinism, rejecting also the reactionary slogan of the petty bourgeois liberals—"Back to 1776"—it renounces its revolutionary inheritance as well and declares that there is nothing in 1776 which can be carried forward toward 1927 and beyond. Such purely negative reactions to incorrect tactics and programs is a natural and wholesome first reaction of an undeveloped working class. But it must outgrow these reactions if it is to grow up. Hence, in the year 1926, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the first American revolution, it is appropriate that the American working class should "grow up" sufficiently to debunk the history of 1776, throw away the chaff of chauvinism, mystification and reaction and keep and use the wheat of revolutionary traditions and methods and lessons.
"Debunking" the Revolution
And there is much debunking to be done. The average Fourth of July "celebration" would be better named a "silly-bray-tion." The official orators of the Sesquicentennial will portray the revolutionary fathers as demigods, the revolution as a glorious vindication of the eternal rights of man, the institutions created as classless and eternal and unimprovable.
A first examination of the revolutionary "fathers" reveals them to be for the most part smuggling merchants fighting against the restrictions on trade set by the British government, "bootleg" manufacturers illicitly fabricating and selling articles that the British law forbade them to make or sell, land speculators trying to lay their hands on land which belonged to the British Crown or which had been awarded to Canada by the Quebec acts, men of wealth and affluence who continued to own slaves after "all men were created free and equal." The eternal rights of man prove to be the class interests of certain classes struggling for dominance as against another set of dominant classes. The glorious phrases of the Declaration of Independence to the effect that "all government rests upon the consent of the governed" did not prevent the rulers of the newly freed land from continuing the property and other qualifications for suffrage and putting over a constitution illegally and secretly drafted by the consent only of a small minority of those who were to be governed under it. If the right of the "pursuit of happiness" which the Declaration declares inalienable still stands, it is because "pursuing" does not necessarily mean catching up. If, in the pursuit of your happiness, you find that you have to picket a shop, you may find that your "inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness" may be taken away from you also.
But in this the revolution of 1776 is no exception to other bourgeois revolutions of which Engels wrote: "We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this Eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason. … came into being and could only come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could not. … go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch."
But as soon as we have said that the Revolution of 1776 was a class revolution which produced certain class institutions and which made many promises which it did not and could not fulfill, then we have cleared the ground for a closer examination of the real nature of the revolution, the things it achieved and the things it represents.
Causes of the Revolution.
The dominant class in England at the time of the Revolution of 1776 held to the mercantilist economic theory that colonies exist to produce raw materials for the mother country and to provide markets for its manufactured goods. During the latter part of the colonial period a whole series of laws were adopted by Parliament regulating the shipping trade and manufactures of the colonies in such a way as to foster the commercial and business interests of England. The Navigation Acts, framed for the purpose of building up the British merchant marine and navy, gave a monopoly of colonial commerce to British ships. The Factory Acts forbade the manufacture of hats, woolens and iron, and the exportation of such manufactured articles. The Trade Laws compelled the colonists to export certain goods to England only, and to purchase certain other things only in England. Prohibitive taxes were placed upon other articles when not imported from England. Thus the revolution was in the first place a revolt against a whole series of laws which limited the productivity of the colonies, denied them the right to manufacture what they pleased, to buy where they could buy most cheaply, to sell where they could sell most profitably, and to produce, ship and trade without restriction. As in all revolutions the existing framework of government and social structure in the interest of.certain British classes had become a fetter upon further development of the productive forces of the new world and the fetters had to be broken if social progress was to continue.
James Oneal in his "Workers in American History" dismisses the leaders in the struggle against these laws as "smugglers." That they were smugglers there is no doubt. Lalor's "Encyclopedia of Political and Social Science" rightly declares: "Nine-tenths of their merchants were smugglers. One quarter of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were bred to. … the contraband trade. … Hancock was the prince of the contraband traders, and with John Adams as his counsel was appointed for trial before the admiralty court of Boston at the exact hour of the shedding of blood at Lexington." Yet it must not be overlooked that this smuggling was a violation of laws which hindered the further development of production in America and that by their secret and open struggle against these laws they were fighting for social progress.
A second cause of the American revolution was the limitation on western land sales. The thin strip of coastal settlements that made up the thirteen colonies was destined to spread over a whole continent. But the British king, backed by certain interests in America, was for limiting the settlements to the coast where they could be more easily controlled, more easily taxed and regulated, and whereby a cheap supply of labor would be assured (since laborers could not leave for unoccupied lands) and whereby the price of coast lands would go up in value since the supply of land was limited. Laws were passed forbidding purchase of land from the Indians (in the name of protection of the Indians) and granting the Western lands to Canada.
James Oneal dismisses the opponents of these acts as "land speculators." He points out, and rightly, that Washington, Hamilton and Morris were interested in land speculation and that "Washington had good reasons for being a rebel, as he surveyed lands outside of the royal grant and in exceeding the powers of his commission was liable to prosecution as a law breaker." But he does not point out at the same time that the poor frontiersmen, the pioneers who occupied small farms on the Western frontier and who made up the bulk of the army of the revolution, were also interested in fighting these laws. And as "squatters" who had occupied land in defiance of the laws, they were also "land thieves." These land thieves and speculators were also fighting the battle of progress against laws that put fetters upon the development of the productive forces of the colonies.
A third cause of the revolution was the paper money question. During the French and Indian wars British merchants had sent over large quantities of goods on credit and rich planters, importers and merchants in America were all debtors to British merchants. These classes had been fighting against the issue of cheap paper money as a means of settling on easy terms the debts of the colonial poor but now that they were debtors they united to issue large quantities of paper currency. The British merchants succeeded in passing a law limiting and prohibiting this practice. This cause, generally ignored by orthodox historians because it shows the revolutionary fathers trying to escape paying their debts, was one of the prime causes of the American revolution and, like the land issue, united rich and poor alike in a common cause.
A fourth cause of the revolution was objection to British taxation. "Taxation without representation" was undoubtedly a fraudulent slogan. It was not the intention of those who raised it to give representation to everybody who paid taxes. What they objected to was the size of the taxes, the articles on which they were levied, the objectives of the taxes in placing restrictions on trade in "niggers," rum, molasses, indentured servants (stamp tax) and other commodities, and the purpose of the taxes—to make the royal governors independent of the colonial legislatures by paying their salaries out of royal taxes in place of legislative grants. In one case, they even objected to the lowering of a tax—the tax on tea—because it enabled the British East India Company to undersell the tea smugglers. The Boston Tea party was nothing but the dumping overboard of the tea in question.
Taken all together the British laws for the governing of the colonies and their exploitation in the interest of certain British wealthy and ruling classes hampered the industrial life of the colonies and fettered the further development of the productive forces of America, Further industrial evolution was impossible without revolution. So revolution had to come—and it came. This disposes of all the current bunk about America being "unrevolutionary," of the American method being "not revolution but evolution," of the natural unnaturalness of revolutionary methods to the Anglo-Saxon and all the other master-class twaddle that masquerades as sociology and history.
A Minority Revolution.
All the available evidence tends to prove that the revolutionaries were a minority of the population. Most of the "aristocracy," the large land-owners of the coast with the exception of the plantation owners of the South, almost all office-holders, the clergy of the Church of England, the more eminent lawyers and physicians, and the "legitimate" merchants—large merchants who did no smuggling—these were the active Tories or royalists. The Tory party included, in the words of the historian Jameson, "more than half of the most educated, wealthy and hitherto respected classes." With them was a great indifferent mass having no great interest in change. They provided over 25,000 colonial troops to the British army. The active revolutionists were the smuggling merchants, manufacturers and speculators in western land, backed by the small farmers, frontiersmen and artisans, who were won to their cause by such issues as paper money and thru the glittering and vague promises of the Declaration of Independence.
How could the minority of the population which made up the revolutionary army fight against the combined forces of a more or less equal number of active counter-reyolutionaries and the British regular troops more numerous and better equipped and supplemented by hired Hessian soldiers?
Dr. Ramsay, a contemporary of the revolution, writing of North Carolina, says: "There was an ardor and an enthusiasm in the friends of Congress that was generally wanting in the advocates of royal government." A rising social class whose victory means social progress always has "an ardor and enthusiasm" generally lacking in the counter-revolutionists.
This in part explains the victory of the rebels.
If the American colonists were divided, the inhabitants of the mother country were also. The Whigs (party of the new merchant-manufacturer class) in England were fighting against King George and his system of government. Pitt and Burke and Fox and a host of other major statesmen opposed the colonial policy and supported the revolutionists. Lord Howe, who commanded the British troops in America during the first critical years of the revolution, was an avowed Whig and when it was too late was recalled and tried for treason because he abandoned Boston to George Washington, made no effort to come in time to the relief of Bourgoyne at Saratoga, and did not try to crush Washington's miserable, ill-equipped little army after repeatedly defeating it in New York and New Jersey, "Thruout the revolution the favorite toast at banquets of American officers was 'General Howe'."
During the latter years of the revolution, France, Spain and Holland came to the aid of the American forces, the revolutionists having managed to utilize not only differences in the British ruling classes but also conflicts of interest between England and other countries as well in the strategy of the revolting colonials. There is a little "Leninist" lesson in winning alliances for a revolution. {{dhr}]
A Revolutionary Revolution.
Finally, the revolution succeeded above all because it was truly "revolutionary" in its methods. "The people who write histories," says S. G. Fisher in his "True History of the American Revolution," "are usually of the class who take the side of the government in a revolution; and as Americans, they are anxious to believe that our revolution was different from others, more decorous, and altogether free from the atrocities, mistakes, and absurdities which characterize even the patriot party in a revolution. They have accordingly tried to describe a revolution in which all scholarly, refined and conservative persons might have unhesitatingly taken part; but such revolutions have never been known to happen."
The truth of the matter is that our revolution of 1776 was carried out as a class dictatorship with all the accompaniments of force and revolutionary terror that the ruling class historians of today attack in the case of Soviet Russia and that the polite liberals deplore.
Dictatorship
All revolutions create alongside of the regularly constituted government their own unconstitutional, extra-legal revolutionary authority that unites the revolutionists, mobilizes their forces for resistance to the legal authority and forms the germ of the future government if the revolution succeeds. In the bourgeois revolutions of the continent these "dual authorities," as Lenin called them, were the clubs of Girondins and Jacobins in the French revolution and the clubs of workers in the revolutions of 1848. In the Russian revolution the revolutionary authority that challenged the legally constituted government is to be found in the Workers' and Peasants' Councils or Soviets.
In the American Revolution of 1776 the dual or revolutionary authority was to be found first in the Committees of Correspondence and then in their national delegate bodies called Congresses. The Committees of Correspondence were small, local, unofficial groups of revolutionaries, formed to develop and unite resistance on an all-colonial scale against objectionable British measures. They held meetings, sent out emissaries, carried on correspondence, supervised the boycott of British goods, tarred and feathered and otherwise punished those who broke the boycott or who informed on smugglers or other violators of British law, carried on a constant propaganda and in the later period mobilized and drilled volunteers and secretly gathered supplies of ammunition and developed a spy system to reveal the movements of British troops. They are analogous to the provincial clubs of the French Revolution or to the local Soviets of the Russian Revolution. From another standpoint, they correspond to locals or sections of a revolutionary political party. They acted as the unifying vanguard of the revolutionary forces.
As the revolutionary movement developed and the day of open revolt approached, they chose delegates to national "congresses." The first of these was the Stamp Act Congress called to plan resistance to the tax known as the Stamp Act. Of this Congress the historian Beard rightly says:
"The Stamp Act Congress was more than an assembly of protest, it marked the rise of a new agency of Government to express the will of America. It was THE GERM OF A GOVERNMENT WHICH IN TIME WAS TO SUPERSEDE THE GOVERNMENT OF GEORGE III. IN THE COLONIES."
This is reminiscent of the words of Marx:
"And the clubs, what were they but o coalition of the entire working class against the entire bourgeois class, the formation of a workers' state against the bourgeois state. . . . . so many constituent assemblies of the proletariat and as many detachments of an army of revolt ready for action?"
As to suffrage, there was no pretense of letting anybody vote for these committees of correspondence and congresses except revolutionaries, just as exploiters and counter-revolutionaries were not permitted to vote for delegates to the Soviet congresses. On this Beard says:
"Such agencies were duly formed by the choice of men favoring the scheme, all opponents being excluded from the elections."
The committees of correspondence and Congresses also "passed laws" and the committees executed them by a sort of summary or revolutionary justice which is technically known as "revolutionary terror."
Every one of the "horrors" of the Russian revolution were repeated, including some of which the Russian revolution was innocent. The land and property of the loyalists was confiscated without indemnity. As to freedom of the press:
"Loyalists or Tories who were bold enough to speak and write against the Revolution were suppressed and their pamphlets burned. … A few Tories were hanged without trial, and others were tarred and feathered (this is a peculiar American sport.—B. D. W.). One was placed upon @ cake of ice and held there "until his loyalty to King George might cool." Whole families were driven out of their homes. … Thousands were blacklisted and subjected to espionage. … Those who refused (to support the revolution.—B. D. W.) were promptly branded as outlaws, while some of the more dangerous were thrown into jail. …" (Beard.)
All loyalists were driven out of the State Legislatures much as Cromwell "purged" the Long Parliament, as the Jacobins drove out the delegates of the Girondins or as the Bolsheviks expelled the counter-revolutionaries from the Constituent Assembly. It seems that the methods of all revolutions are alike—revolutionary.
In this connection it is interesting to hear the testimony of a very conservative historian, Dr. James Sullivan, Assistant Commissioner of Education of the State of New York. Speaking at Columbia University recently, he said:
"Just as at present we are wont to speak with a kind of horror of the Soviets of Russia without realizing that our own committees of correspondence during the Revolution were almost counterparts of the present Russian system. … outside of the executions, for practically two-thirds of the revolutionary period our Soviets ruled with much the same cruelty, rigor and summary justice that modern Russian Soviet has practiced."
We can pardon Dr. Sullivan his little weakness as to executions (in Russia they are called executions, in the United States "lists of the slain in battle") in view of his unusual clarity in political analysis. In spite of his proviso as to executions, he was roundly hissed by his respectable audience, as the New York Times reported.
The Results of the Revolution.
It is false to pretend, as many working class writers do, that the American revolution of 1776, since it did not live up to the glowing promises of the Declaration of Independence, did not accomplish anything. I can only briefly list a few of the results in an article that is already too long. The revolution freed the colonies from England, freed the western land for settlement and thereby raised the standard of living of the colonials, broke the fetters upon the expansion of production and released the gigantic productive forces that are now at hand for social use when the workers take them, lessened to a limited extent the area of slavery, made the first weak steps in lightening the laws against debtors, disestablished the Church and introduced greater religious toleration in many of the colonies, effected a much wider and more democratic distribution of the land than had existed previously, extended the suffrage slightly altho the property qualification for voting was not finally abolished in all states until after 1840, forced the Bill of Rights into the American Constitution, set up a republican form of government which for its day was the most advanced, and served as a revolutionary inspiration to the European bourgeoisie in the French revolution.
What it did not do, it is needless to recount, except by way of debunking the nonsense of the capitalist apologists who pretend that it did everything that any "sane" man can desire. It did not do what a bourgeois revolution can not be expected to do. It did not free the wage slaves. It did not even free the chattel slaves. It did not keep all its fine promises. It did not introduce even "complete" bourgeois democracy (there is no such thing as complete bourgeois democracy). It did not abolish classes. It did not introduce socialism. It was only the first American revolution.
Whose Revolution Is It?
Whose revolution is it? The master class of today rejects it. They shudder at its revolutionary methods and conceal them. They reject its revolutionary traditions. They violate the Bill of Rights, calumniate or falsify its most advanced leadership, distort and disfigure its men and its acts. They are ashamed of its methods and its traditions.
A socialist speaker in New York was arrested in 1918 for publicly reading the provisions of the Constitution which guarantee freedom of speech and press. A Communist speaker in Pittsburgh who tried to read the Declaration of Independence was pulled in. "I didn't write that," he protested to the policeman, "Thomas Jefferson wrote it."
"Well, I'll pull you in first," answered the cop, "and then I'll go back and get this here guy Thomas Jefferson."
The bourgeoisie is arresting the revolutionists of 1776 and rejecting its heritage!
Whose revolution is it? I maintain that it is our revolution. The working class of today is the inheritor of all past ages. It does not reject the past. It takes what is good from the past and upon it builds the future. We need not go abroad for all of our revolutionary traditions, Some of them at least we can find in a body of American tradition. We are the inheritors and defenders of the Bill of Rights today. The bourgeoisie does not need, does not desire freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage. We as a revolutionary class struggling for power become defenders of those freedoms. We are the inheritors and defenders of the right of revolution to change a government that has become obnoxious and tyrannical. In a single sentence that is all that is declared in the Declaration of Independence. We should salvage and utilize the traditions of dictatorship and revolutionary struggle that the revolution has bequeathed and that the bourgeoisie rightly rejects. There is a tradition of struggle against "tyrannical" laws, there is a tradition of struggle against a system that fetters the further development of the forces of production and the further progress of society.
The Left Wing in the American Revolution.
And finally there is the left wing. As in the French Revolution, as in every revolution, not all of the revolutionaries are the same. The leaders of 1776 range all the way from the aristocratic Washington and the monarchical Hamilton (the Mellon of his day), thru the democratic Franklin and Jefferson and the free-thinker, Tom Paine, to the champion of the poor farmers and imprisoned debtors, Daniel Shays, who started a new revolution against the newly formed government as soon as he had helped complete the old against King George. We can say with Zinoviev:
"We understand their class character. … Nevertheless these representatives of the great bourgeois revolution were the first shock troops of struggling humanity; they broke thru the dams of feudalism (imperialist-feudalism In this case) and thereby opened the way to the spring floods of the proletarian revolution."
Discover America.
This year, on the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American revolution of 1776 it is time that the American working-class began to "discover America" and its body of native revolutionary traditions. It is time that we "grew up" and like the youthful Lenin disputed with the bourgeoisie for our heritage. We are the revolutionaries of our day and they the counter-revolutionists. In the words of Lenin we can say: "We are definitely more consistent and truer guardians of the inheritance than you." And to the "back to 1776-ers," the Norman Thomases and LaFollettes, we can add in the words of Lenin: "To keep the inheritance by no means signifies that one must limit himself to what he has inherited."
"Back to nothing", we can answer. "We use the past to build the future, not to block the present. Forward to Communism…"
After all it is only the first American Revolution. …