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."
