250 years after the Thirteen Colonies declared independence from Britain, the American ruling class would like nothing more than for workers to think that revolution is alien to the US. But Ken Burns’ new docuseries, ​​The American Revolution, is a powerful refutation of this prejudice. It paints, in vivid colors, the role of the unnamed masses and the contradictory nature of the class forces involved in the Revolution.

A real revolution

Textbooks often portray the so-called Founding Fathers as mythic figures, enlightened geniuses who inspired an underdog army to triumph over the wicked redcoats and built the world’s greatest “democracy.”

Other historians—including some so-called “Marxists”—react against this fairytale with another, equally one-sided view. They claim that since the revolution was a struggle between two groups of property owners, including many slaveholders, it was no revolution at all. There is an element of truth in this, but only on the surface.

In actual fact, the Revolution was a profound social and political transformation. It overthrew monarchic and colonial rule, and swept away the elements of feudalism that had been artificially imported from Europe. However, given the material conditions of 18th-century America and the class forces involved, the Revolution could go no further than to create the legal and political forms necessary to accelerate the development of American capitalism.

In fact, many of the “Founding Fathers” were not originally interested in independence—and certainly not “democracy.” They only wanted a better deal with King George III. But in the course of the struggle, they were forced to carry through a bourgeois democratic revolution on a scale never before seen in history.

The plebeian masses, who rarely appear in schoolbooks, played the outstanding part. While the “great men” used the revolution to advance their own interests, it was the masses who propelled the process forward, fighting the battles and putting their stamp on history.

Without using explicit Marxist terminology, Burns explores how the nascent American bourgeoisie needed to win over the working masses—farmers, small artisans, sailors, slaves, and Native Americans—in order to wrench independence from Britain. Mobilizing these forces required cadre organizations, like the Committees of Safety, and a powerful propaganda network, the Committees of Correspondence, to disseminate radical ideas through the revolutionary press.

From empire to empire

In contrast to typical American parochialism, Burns puts the Revolution in the context of great-power rivalry for colonial possessions. The series shows how the clash between Britain and France over North American colonies during the Seven Years War set the stage for the War of Independence.

The series also explains that France supported American independence not out of concern for liberty or democracy, but as a proxy war against the British. Yet, despite Louis XVI’s intentions, the American Revolution led directly to the French Revolution, which deprived him of his crown and, eventually, his head.

The Revolution was just one part of a decades-long process which shattered the dominance of the old powers over the Americas through stunning events like the Haitian Revolution and the Wars of Independence across Latin America.

Ultimately, it freed the American capitalists to dominate “their own” continent—as a springboard to building an empire of their own. It’s a terrific example of the dialectical process which transforms things into their opposite: a colony gains independence from the planet’s largest empire, then grows to replace it as the world’s leading imperialist power.

This came at the expense of many nations and peoples, particularly the Native Americans, thousands of whom fought with the Americans against the British. Far more than many popular histories, Burns’s series highlights the role of Native Americans in the Revolution and the genocide perpetrated against them by the American ruling class.

Civil war

Perhaps the most nuanced aspect of the series is its depiction of the American Revolution not only as a war of Americans against the British, but also as a civil war between patriots and loyalists.

Throughout the Revolution, loyalists were killed on the battlefield, expropriated, and forced to flee. The documentary highlights the particularly bloody fighting in the Carolinas and Georgia. Intense battles in South Carolina in 1780–81 accounted for one-fifth of total battlefield deaths of the entire war—and almost all of them resulted from American colonists fighting each other.

All told, in the course of the revolution, millions of acres of royal and loyalist lands were expropriated—without compensation—and redistributed to small farmers, while around 100,000 loyalists permanently fled the new country.

It’s like Lenin said …

Nevertheless, the documentary suffers from notable weaknesses. For example, it glosses over Shays’s Rebellion, which saw thousands of small farmers and veterans take up arms against the new government over war debts and taxes. The plebeian uprising forced the American bourgeoisie to draft a federal Constitution with a stronger central government capable of crushing future rebellions, including the Whiskey Rebellion—also barely mentioned by Burns.

Bacon’s Rebellion, the great 17th-century uprising in which indentured servants and slaves united across racial lines against their colonial masters, is not mentioned at all. Herman Husband and the Regulator movement of the 1760–70s also manage to escape Burns’s attention.

But the docuseries’s main weakness is its method. While it shows the revolutionary processes in ways that most Americans won’t be used to, it fails to explain the underlying cause of the struggle.

Many viewers will be left with questions. If the Revolution led to today’s America, with its poverty, police violence, imperialist wars, Trumps, Bidens, etc., was it all worth it? Why did the American Revolution end in the American Empire?

Indeed, many of those interviewed refer to leaders like Jefferson and Washington as “deeply flawed,” or “imperfect.” While the series shows these individuals’ dual roles as both revolutionaries and conservative property owners, it resorts to the classic empty explanations of liberalism: morality. Yet personal judgements get us nowhere in understanding history and preparing for the future.

The truth is that contradiction is a part of all revolutions. It’s not a question of individual moral flaws, it’s that the revolution could only replace one propertied ruling class with another. It was, nonetheless, progressive because it laid the basis for the system that could create the productive powers capable of liberating all of humanity, and the class that can wield them—the working class.

It is the working class that inherits the Revolution’s legacy—and has plenty of lessons to learn from it. Despite its flaws, Burns’s docuseries conveys the truth of what Lenin said to American workers in 1918:

The history of modern, civilized 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, in the same way as these “civilized” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.