Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the RCA is publishing John Peterson’s Revolution and Counterrevolution in America, the first-ever single volume Marxist account of the revolutionary upheavals that forged the United States. We publish the introduction to the book below. Pre-order your copy today!

The history of the United States is a history of violence, oppression, speculation, theft, enslavement, and war. Over several centuries, the continent’s population was progressively subjected to the coercive pressures of the world capitalist market.

By hook or by crook, the primary producers were deprived of their means of production and compelled to produce commodities for exchange rather than for their own use. Over time, the vast majority of the population was transformed into propertyless wage laborers, while unfathomable riches accumulated in the hands of a tiny minority.

This isn’t to say that this was the conscious policy of an omnipotent and omniscient ruling class. There were plenty of booms, busts, and unintended consequences flowing from their actions. This was simply the logic capitalism carried to its inevitable conclusion; once it grabs a gear, it takes on a life of its own.

But there is far more to American history than this. It is also a history of mass resistance, sacrifice, and revolutionary expropriation. Indigenous peoples, slaves, indentured servants, and others forced here by economic necessity didn’t accept the imposition of chattel or wage slavery without a fight.

As the country’s productive forces developed, so did the class struggle. This dialectical contest between progress and reaction is evident throughout history and will persist until the socialist revolution lays the basis for the end of class distinctions and ushers in stateless, moneyless communism.

Revolutionary promise

The US was quite literally born in revolution, with the Declaration of Independence serving as its birth certificate:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;

 

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, 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.

Penned by Thomas Jefferson—a slave-owning child of the Enlightenment—the Declaration is riddled with inconsistencies, especially when it comes to the rights of slaves, Native peoples, and women. Nonetheless, in its essence, it is a bold defense of a people’s self-evident and unalienable right to revolution—a right communists defend and embrace with both arms.

By directly challenging the legitimacy of monarchical rule and establishing popular sovereignty as the foundation of legitimate government, the Declaration gave idealized expression to the political, economic, and social aspirations of the American nation—even if a significant minority of the population still identified with Britain and the monarchy.

However, the First Revolution was bookended by another, very different document: the US Constitution. Whereas the Declaration spoke to the “Safety and Happiness” of all people, the Constitution, by contrast, was concerned with achieving this for the emerging bourgeoisie and Southern slaveocracy. It enshrined bourgeois property relations while simultaneously acquiescing to the continuation of chattel slavery.

Compromise was the only way to assure the creation of a semi-centralized federal state with the power to levy the taxes and troops needed to put down popular uprisings and slave rebellions, and to bring the Native peoples to heel.

But the blurred lines required to secure the Constitution’s adoption ultimately necessitated a Second Revolution. Likewise, the messy outcome of the Civil War made the tragedy of Reconstruction all but inevitable. And the unfinished business of that epoch is what makes the socialist revolution indispensable today.

Why we need dialectical materialism

Revolutionary periods of open class and civil war arise from converging economic, political, social, and often, military crises. Like earthquakes and volcanoes, the accumulated contradictions and pressures eventually reach a tipping point, unleash the colossal pent-up energy, and burst through the status quo’s limits of tolerance.

The power of the masses is like floodwaters behind a dam; as pressure builds, even small cracks can rupture the entire structure. Likewise, shifts in the masses’ outlook can be dramatic, as their understanding suddenly aligns with reality.

Instead of submitting to the political institutions and armed bodies of men of their erstwhile masters, the masses create their own. From reformism to revolution, from class collaboration to class independence, sudden shifts in mass consciousness can take even the most committed revolutionaries by surprise.

Revolutions are untidy, nonlinear processes accompanied inevitably by counterrevolution. In the heat of revolutionary battle, these poles of the class struggle can overlap and bleed into each other. It’s not always a simple question of “good guys” versus “bad guys.” Simplistic, ahistorical moralism is not only insufficient, but can lead to reactionary conclusions. To cut through the confusion, we must always keep the long view of history in mind and identify the fundamental class interests expressed by the warring factions—even when those on the right side of history commit questionable acts in the abstract.

As Trotsky explained in “Their Morals and Ours”:

From the Marxist point of view … the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.

All three revolutionary episodes examined in this book facilitated the development of the productive forces, or had the potential to do so before being cut across by counterrevolution.

Marxists are not crude economic determinists. However, we understand that, in the final analysis, the economy is the foundation upon which the superstructure of society—ideology, religion, philosophy, intellectual life, political parties and currents, legal statutes, societal and cultural norms, aesthetics, and so on—rests. These all interact with and condition one another, and at nodal turning points in history, quantity is converted into quality, and vice versa.

In a remarkable letter to Joseph Blöch, Engels elucidated his and Marx’s thinking on the dialectics of history, determinism, the role of the individual, and more, which is worth quoting at length:

According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this, neither Marx nor I ever claimed. If now someone distorts the meaning so that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase that says nothing.

 

The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure—the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems—all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form.

 

It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible to prove that we regard it as absent and can neglect it), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise, the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation.

 

We ourselves make our history, but primarily under presuppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one …

 

In the second place, history forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant—the historical event—which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way, history runs its course like a natural process and has substantially the same laws of motion.

 

But, because of the fact that the individual wills—each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)—do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.

In other words, if we are to understand the inner essence of the most complex and unpredictable of social phenomena, we must consciously and actively apply the dialectical materialist method. Only in this way can we recognize the essential patterns and follow the inner logic and lawfulness of revolutions and their counterrevolutionary counterparts.

The importance of such an approach was further developed by Trotsky in his magnificent autobiography, My Life:

Later, the feeling of the supremacy of the general over the particular became an integral part of my literary and political work. The dull empiricism, the unashamed, cringing worship of the fact which is so often only imaginary, and falsely interpreted at that, were odious to me.

 

Beyond the facts, I looked for laws. Naturally, this led me more than once into hasty and incorrect generalizations, especially in my younger years when my knowledge, book-acquired, and my experience in life were still inadequate.

 

But in every sphere, barring none, I felt that I could move and act only when I held in my hand the thread of the general.

If we fail to do this, we risk drowning in an ocean of disconnected facts and figures.

What is a revolution?

In the final analysis, social revolutions are driven by changes in society’s economic foundations. As Marx elucidated 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.

As the leader of the greatest event in human history, let’s see what Lenin has to add:

The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term (“Letter on Tactics”).

And in his incomparably vivid way, Trotsky described revolution as “the inspired frenzy of history.”

These basic definitions provide us with an excellent starting point for our analysis. Time and again throughout history, we’ve seen that when deep divisions emerge at the summit of society, the masses sense an opportunity and rise up from below to seize their destinies. They forcefully put their stamp on the course of history, even if they don’t have a clearly worked out plan or a leadership up to the tasks posed by events.

As Trotsky eloquently puts it in the prologue to his History of the Russian Revolution:

The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times, the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business—kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists.

 

But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new régime …

 

The history of a revolution is, for us, first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

Revolutions are fought collectively by flesh-and-blood individuals in a battle of living forces, with different layers of the population confronting each other and the arrayed forces of the status quo. In 1915, Lenin identified the key components that make up a revolutionary situation:

What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms:

 

1. When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change, when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes,” a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way.

 

2. When the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual;

 

3. When, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peacetime,” but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action (“The Collapse of the Second International”).

To be sure, when push comes to shove, even the most bitter ruling-class rivals will close ranks if they are threatened with overthrow by the exploited and oppressed. However, classes are not homogeneous, and different layers within them can be at odds with each other at different times.

Marxists, therefore, distinguish between political revolutions, which result in a transfer of power from one layer of the ruling class to another, while maintaining the old property forms, and social revolutions, which result in a fundamental change in property relations and a new ruling class.

We must also take into account the inter- and intra-class dynamics, contradictions, and tensions as we trace the changing balance of class and property relations in a given society.

A review of the historical record reveals that revolutions are not as infrequent as the ruling class would have us believe. However, successful revolutions have been extremely rare. In fact, just as most strikes end in failure, most revolutions have gone down in defeat. A fortuitous alignment of objective and subjective factors—above all, the presence of a farsighted leadership ready and willing to push beyond the limits imposed by capitalism—is required to ensure success.

Even in defeat, however, profound lessons can be learned by the direct participants, as well as by the Marxists. By synthesizing the working class’s efforts to change society into theory, we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

It is with all of this in mind that the historical periods discussed in this book qualify as revolutionary. As we will see, the interests of different classes coincided then diverged, with economic and political struggles spilling over into open armed conflict and civil war.

Why this book?

Over 100,000 books have been published on the First American Revolution, with over 10,000 focusing just on George Washington. Over 16,000 biographies have been dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, second only to Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare. And although Reconstruction has received far less attention, there are several excellent tomes on the period by the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Eric Foner.

In short, many quality histories are available on all three of these periods, including some that examine the economic and class dynamics from a more or less consistently Marxist framework. So why the need for another?

For starters, there is no single work that brings together these interrelated periods and generalizes their many lessons from an active, revolutionary communist standpoint. We are not academic Marxists; we are American Bolsheviks. In our ideas and actions, we aim to embody the spirit and practice, not only of Sam Adams and John Brown, but also of Lenin and Trotsky.

The only real purpose of this modest volume, therefore, is to raise our collective political level and concentrate our minds on the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution that have shaped this country. And the point of this is to build the RCA more rapidly and efficiently ahead of the approaching socialist revolution.

Like any other science, history does not stand above or aloof from the class contradictions suffusing society. The same basic material can be interpreted in a dizzying variety of ways. In the words of the great historical novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal:

All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead, and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require.

This book approaches American history from an unapologetically Marxist perspective. Despite our class bias, however, we strive to take an all-sided approach as we work through the data. We don’t cherry-pick facts, figures, and quotes to prove an a priori schema. Rather, we present those that best illuminate the conclusions drawn through a thoroughgoing analysis of these contradictory processes. In Trotsky’s words:

Marxist thought is concrete, that is, it looks upon all the decisive or important factors in any given question, not only from the point of view of their reciprocal relations, but also from that of their development.

 

It never dissolves the momentary situation within the general perspective, but by means of the general perspective makes possible an analysis of the momentary situation in all its peculiarities.

 

Politics has its point of departure in precisely this sort of concrete analysis (“Ultralefts in General and Incurable Ultralefts in Particular (A Few Theoretical Considerations)”).

Through a series of successive approximations, we arrive at an ever more nuanced understanding—all in preparation for intervening in similar processes as they unfold around us today.

A Marxist historian must, at a minimum, make skillful use of dialectical materialism to analyze how class and property relations evolve within a given society, paying particular attention to the nodal tipping points. But the most compelling histories do more than this: they bring revolutionary history to life by providing both concrete examples and illuminating anecdotes. All this while demonstrating how the struggles of the past shed light on the class battles of today.

Revolution and Counterrevolution in America comprises three main parts, coinciding with the defining chapters of the class war that preceded the momentous battles of the 20th and 21st centuries. These experiences helped forge the American nation-state, character, and identity, laying the foundations for the class struggles we are engaged in today.

It unfolds roughly in chronological order, jumping forward and backward as appropriate to elaborate on particular themes. Due to its big-picture focus on the reciprocal relationship between revolution and counterrevolution, it necessarily omits many episodes and individuals. In the future, we aim to produce a multi-volume revolutionary history of the United States that will go into far greater detail and cover an even wider array of episodes, individuals, and struggles by the oppressed and exploited masses.

In the meantime, it is our sincere hope that this compact work will help attune the new generation of communists to the rhythms, inner contradictions, and tensions of a revolutionary epoch. We also hope it will encourage them to dig deep into the rich history that lies just beneath the surface of the mythologized America we were taught about in school.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is the perfect occasion to explore the inspiring class-struggle traditions, not only of the American Revolution, but also of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Every country has its own history and traditions, and as we approach the Third American Revolution, communists must be well versed in the priceless revolutionary heritage of this uniquely contradictory country.

As this volume shows, and as is detailed in Colossus: The Rise and Decline of US Imperialism, the US ruling class’s modus operandi from the beginning has been to exterminate, subjugate, expand, and humiliate in the pursuit of land, loot, natural resources, labor, profit, and power. First in the Americas and then worldwide, it has indiscriminately laid waste to one country after another in a calculated frenzy of racist mass murder and mayhem.

No wonder the modern United States is seen as a bastion of reaction and counterrevolution. But everything eventually turns into its opposite. For this reason, we are firmly convinced that its most glorious revolutionary moments lie, not in the past, but in the not-too-distant future.