The two American Revolutions in world history

[wsws.org]

{Various changes were made in the course of the editing process. The most substantial change was the removal of Jefferson’s indictment of Great Britain for having imposed slavery on the colonies.}

{“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” ---- This assertion exploded the essential justification, sanctified by religion, for monarchy, aristocracy, i.e., of all forms of political power based on obscurantist veneration of bloodlines. What was created by man could be changed by man.}

{In a strictly empirical sense, there was nothing “self-evident”—that is, so obviously true that it hardly required further argument—about any of these “truths.” Reality, as it was to be observed in every part of the world, including the colonies, contradicted what the Declaration claimed to be “self-evident.”}

{Where in the world did existing conditions substantiate the claim that all of humanity had been “created equal”? The monarchies and aristocracies were based on the unchallengeable legitimacy of inherent inequality.}

{The great mass of people lived in wretched poverty, enforced by strict relations of feudal and semi-feudal hierarchy.}

{It was science, not the irrational and unsubstantiated invocations of a divine order, that determined what must be. It was in this profound sense that the equality of man and the “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were “self-evident.”}

{The incomplete character of the first stage of the American bourgeois democratic revolution was determined by the existing objective conditions—and not simply those that existed in North America. Mankind, as Marx was later to explain, “always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”}

{The capitalist development of the North became increasingly incompatible with the political domination of the United States by the Slave Power. This objective incompatibility found its ideological expression in the ever more intense awareness that the ideals of human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence could not be reconciled with the horrifying reality of slavery.}

{In this new class struggle, the northern bourgeoisie saw the benefit of an alliance with the remnants of the old slave-owning class. Reconstruction was brought to an end. Racism was incited and utilized as a potent weapon against the unity of the working class.}

David North is the national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States (SEP), formerly the Workers League.

"Out Of The Illusion " Group