This short article was produced for the July/August issue of Socialist Alternative’s newspaper from a longer, more in-depth article on the history of the First American Revolution, which will be published in the coming weeks.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the American colonists waged a War of Independence against British tyranny and economic domination—one in a series of earth-shaking revolutions that swept Europe and the Americas. For Donald Trump, this is cause to launch a nationalist frenzy, throwing America the “biggest birthday party ever,” complete with a $68 million UFC cage match.

Trump’s reactionary spectacle is part of the growing nationalism on the part of the ruling class. Old views are coming to the fore again that attribute the triumph of the revolution and the ascendancy of the US to Anglo-Saxon genius. Many Democrats echo these ideas. 

Hearing these interpretations, many have come to see the American Revolution as a squabble among “dead white men” or even, as historian Gerald Horne argues, a “counter-revolution,” intended to preserve slavery.

But for Marxists who aim to change the world by transforming the class structure of society, all revolutions contain important lessons.

Rather than a counter-revolution, the First American Revolution was what Marxists call a “bourgeois revolution.” It was a genuinely revolutionary event, one that replaced one ruling class with another. It spurred the creation of the working class—the vast majority of the population today and the only force that can lead the socialist revolution we need, overthrowing all exploitative ruling classes and eradicating oppression.

The Road To Revolution 

For over a century, the British mercantile system maintained a monopoly over its colonies. In addition to enriching the semi-feudal British ruling class on the backs of the masses, this served as an economic barrier to the rising bourgeoisie (the emerging capitalist class) in the colonies. By the mid-18th century, the continental colonies had outgrown the British mercantilist system. 

The revolution was led by a coalition of two classes: the budding northern bourgeoisie and the southern slave-owning aristocracy, who were stifled in their own way by the British monopoly. But crucially, there was a third group: the plebeian masses, or the “rabble”—shopkeepers, artisans, and the forerunners of the modern working class.

To quote A People’s History of the American Revolution by Ray Raphael, “Common people functioned as key operatives at all stages of the revolution; they started the war, they ran the committees, they fought the battles. Laborers and seamen dumped tea into the Boston harbor. Thousands of nameless farmers closed the courts in Massachusetts, terminating British rule. Crowds gathered anywhere and everywhere, armed with buckets of tar and baskets of feathers to enforce revolutionary standards.”

The people of Boston engaged in street battles with Royal Navy officers as early as 1741 against attempts to force them into naval service. But when Britain ramped up taxation in 1765, unruly demonstrations marked the first concerted intervention of the plebeian masses as an independent force. Finally, the antagonisms within the colonial system blew up into armed insurrection at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

In the North, the rising bourgeoisie led the revolution, but it was the urban plebeians who pressured this leadership into action. After Lexington and Concord, it became inevitable that colonial independence from the crown would be declared. The Declaration of Independence was only a formal recognition of what had already been declared in blood. The founders weren’t leading the revolution—the revolution was leading the founders.

What Is A Bourgeois Revolution?

Marxists categorize the American Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, along with the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. The world before these revolutions wasn’t capitalist, but was still dominated by oppressive pre-capitalist class relations like feudalism and slavery, which ultimately became a fetter on economic growth. Bourgeois revolutions “cleared the deck” for capitalist development, by creating a unified national market, establishing a democratic republic, and uprooting pre-capitalist features.

The American Revolution was a genuine revolution that achieved much of this. However, it also established the very capitalist system we struggle to overthrow.

The bourgeoisie leaned on support from the plebeian masses in making their revolutions, and those masses pushed the revolution farther than the bourgeoisie wanted. As the bourgeoisie consolidated their rule, they came increasingly into conflict with those masses. This distinction between the progressive and reactionary features of the revolution is more useful than the dismissal of the revolution as the work of “dead white men.”

A further contradiction in the revolution was the pre-capitalist slave-owning planter class it left in power in the South. It wouldn’t be until the US Civil War that the unfinished bourgeois task of toppling slavery was completed. For this reason it’s more accurate to call it the First American Revolution. In this sense, the Civil War was the Second American Revolution, completing the bourgeois revolution. And with the overthrow of the capitalists by the working class, we must make a Third.

Slavery & Indigenous People

If the revolution was so propelled by liberty, why was slavery left intact? It’s not primarily ideas, but class interests that make revolutions.

The planter and merchant alliance was critical in overthrowing the British, but post-revolution, the merchant bourgeoisie was still too weak and underdeveloped to liquidate the slavocracy. However, the revolution did set the institution of slavery back, particularly in the North, where abolitionist sentiment gained ground. 

Another reactionary feature of the revolution was the decimation of the indigenous peoples. To assert their rule, the bourgeoisie had to uproot three pre-capitalist forces: the semi-feudal mercantilist system maintained by British colonialism, the slaveholding southern planters, and the proto-communist indigenous tribes.

The first two of these were reactionary and the victories over them were progressive achievements. The genocide of indigenous people, on the other hand, is one of the most barbaric legacies of US history.

Free Black people and some indigenous people did join the revolutionary army. However, many more Black people—and many indigenous tribes—fought for the British. For figures like Gerald Horne, this is the smoking gun that shows that the American Revolution was actually a “counter-revolution” fought against a supposedly abolitionist Britain.

But the British army wasn’t some great “emancipator of slavery.” The overtures to slaves and indigenous people were an opportunistic strategy to defend the British colonial system, which had rested on slavery and genocide for centuries and would continue to profit from its Caribbean slave plantations for decades. However, the treatment of slaves and indigenous people, which Trump would like to gloss over, illuminates the bourgeois character of this revolution.

An Unfinished Revolution

After the war, the planters and merchants moved to consolidate the gains of the revolution in their image. The two classes did have shared interests: above all, containing unrest among the urban and rural poor, most notably Shays’ rebellion in 1786.

By 1787, the leading merchants and planters signed the new Constitution, establishing their central authority. But by no means did it create a society that rendered any future rebellions and uprisings unnecessary. The Constitution also codified slavery—a rotten compromise securing the rule of the slave-owning planters in the South—and it excluded women from political equality, reflecting the continuation of women’s oppression in the new bourgeois order. 

What should we make of the First American Revolution 250 years later? Despite the limitations,  the US has a genuine revolutionary history.

In V.I. Lenin’s “Letter to American Workers” in 1918, he said that the American War for Independence was “one of those great, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few.” Socialists like Lenin take a very different inspiration from the First American Revolution than Donald Trump and his ilk. We take inspiration from the radicalism of any revolution to overthrow the then-existing ruling order by revolutionary masses with radical methods of struggle. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to make the world over again.” That is just as appropriate of a slogan for revolutionaries today as it was then.