The way in which Marxists in the US understand our own history, especially the period of the American Revolution and early republic, has been underdeveloped in comparison to communist movements in other countries, particularly those of France and Britain. In England, the CPGB had an official group of eminent historians to dig up the history of their bourgeois revolutions, providing a usable history to steep into the political movement of the working class. Maybe an explanation of the relative lack of attention in the US is that McCarthyism prevented Marxist historians from access to the academy. The only person who could be considered an “official” Communist historian in the US is Herbert Aptheker, who, although producing troves of excellent histories of slave revolts, was so tied to the CPUSA’s popular front policy that his explanation of the revolution and early republic ended up criticizing Charles Beard’s anti-constitutionalism from the right.
There were other historians associated with the Communist Party, such as Eugene Genovese (who turned into a romantic reactionary via a developing sympathy with the planter ‘agrarians’) and Philip S. Foner (whose work seems more usable for developing a genuine Marxist narrative), though nobody other than Aptheker could be taken as ‘party line.’ The result is that the Marxist historiography, though there’s a decently wide selection, has been rather eclectic, and the socialist political movement in the US has never agreed upon a coherent narrative. This problem is especially glaring in light of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the subsequent rapid popularization on the Left of Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Horne, like Aptheker, is a prolific historian with a Communist Party background and dozens of impressive works under his belt, but comes up short on analyzing the American Revolution. Horne’s Counter-Revolution, like Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism before him, is more an attack on historical materialism itself from the revolutionary nationalist side of the New Left than it is a work of Marxism. Unlike Horne, Daniel Lazare’s recent article on the American Revolution doesn’t go so far as to call the British Empire a progressive force, but it does fall short of a usable Marxist narrative by declaring that “America never had a proper revolution.”
Lazare’s thesis that the American 1776 was conservative and backwards-looking, while the French 1789 “revolutionized the concept of revolution itself,” as a forward-looking real revolution, simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Looking back on “ancient liberties’” was a staple of all bourgeois revolutions, including and especially the French, in which “dead generations” imposed their politics via the symbol of the Phrygian cap, among a long list of other things. Writing off the history of the rising capitalist class prior to 1789 dates bourgeois society far too late, and thus obscures the macro-historical and international process of class struggle culminating in the social revolution of 1789 that indicated the capitalist class, as a ruling class, was here to stay. It’s true the French and American revolutions differed in serious ways. American settlement, a continuation of the English Revolution itself, never brought feudal relations like primogeniture to American soil. But this means that it was a bourgeois political revolution rather than a social revolution, and it contributed, both ideologically and practically, to the growing wave of Atlantic bourgeois revolutions, including the English, French, Haitian, and Bolivarian, as detailed in Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many Headed Hydra. While it’s true that many planters energetically sided with the revolution, the counter-revolution narrative ignores that the biggest pockets of loyalism were in the planter-dominated South. And the ousting of the British Empire from the 13 colonies did result in a change of social relations by initiating the abolition of slavery in the North and setting the stage for the final confrontation between the Planter slaveocracy and capitalists in the Second Revolution of the 1860s and 70s.
The American Revolution was tied up with the USA’s status as a settler colony, with its continuing genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of black people. This resulted in the development of the contradictory herrenvolk republican ideology, symbolized today by Alex Jones’ “1776 will commence again!” slogan. For the left, this is an attractive basis for rejecting the entire affair as a bourgeois revolution altogether (though Lazare’s argument that the second revolution was not a bourgeois revolution either seems new). This however misunderstands the nature and process of bourgeois revolution. While Daniel Gaido, in his The Development of Capitalism in America, makes the case that the first American bourgeois revolution was exceptional in its genocidal side, this neglects to mention Ataturk’s Turkish revolution and its genocide of Armenians and Greeks, along with probably other historic examples.
The truth is all bourgeois revolutions, and even proletarian revolutions up to this point in history, have resulted eventually in a counteroffensive shutting out the democratic classes from political power. As Lazare himself has shown, the Constitutional Convention was a charter for plutocracy that symbolized the class alliance of the capitalists and planter slaveocracy to shut out the radical levelling tendencies of the revolution (though not without the concession of the Bill of Rights). These American Levellers were a real driving force in the revolution, as can be seen by Tom Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet selling over 100,000 copies, and the radical democratic-republican militia movements of North Carolina’s Regulators, Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion, and Massachusetts’ minutemen and Daniel Shays, to the 1776 and 1777 constitutions of Pennsylvania and Vermont, to the Rhode Island Country Party and the radical left antifederalists and left wing Democratic-Republican clubs that were an immediate reference point for French Jacobinism. These constitutions had, unlike the 1787-9 counterrevolution, established radical democratic political orders, and directly inspired not only the Jacobin Constitution of Year 1, but also the system of government established by the Bolsheviks in the SovNarKom. Unfortunately, the result of the 1789 counterrevolution was the first party system with the political independence of the democratic classes subsumed, in the case of the subsistence farmers under the planter slaveocracy, and in the case of the early urban wage workers of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore (or ‘mechanics’ in the terminology of the time) under the hegemony of the capitalists. This resulted in these respective classes adapting to the ideology of herrenvolk republicanism in the case of the former, and liberalism in the case of the latter.
However, a small seed of the universalized democratic-republican theory and program survived beyond the biological warfare of Yellow Fever brought to Philadelphia by counterrevolutionary refugees of the Haitian Revolution that killed off the radical 29 year-old editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache. The radical republicans fashioning themselves as Painites, while withdrawn from the scene of national politics, continued on as an underground oral tradition until reemerging as the world’s first proletarian parties in the Jacksonian era Philadelphia and New York, and later in the revolutionary political philosophy of John Brown, Reconstruction-era Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, and Benjamin Butler (who travelled the country on a speaking tour to defend the Paris Commune!), and the “Yankee” elements that made up the non-German parts of the American section of the First International. This radical republican political theory and program was inherited by Marx and Engels, as a growing body of recent scholarship has asserted. Lazare’s brilliant work on the US Constitution should be counted among this new school. However, this history is still a major gap in how Marxists understand our past. There is need for much further investigation and systematization, especially in uncovering how the legacy of slave revolts and indigenous resistance developed their own radical democratic ideologies, and how both the trends of radical republicanism and insurgent resistance from those excluded from the body politic were drawn on by the black intelligentsia of the second revolution period and beyond. While there are somewhat obscure usable precursors in the historiography, like Louis Boudin’s Government by Judiciary and Staughton Lynd’s work, recovering the lost universalized radical democratic-republican seed of Marxism, present as a driving force of the First American Revolution, is essential for reformulating it as a fighting force in the 21st Century in order to prepare the working class for the Third.
-Parker McQueeney
