American Revolution

FROM A LEFT POINT of view, the outcome of the American Revolution is ambiguous, although leftists tend to see revolutions and revolutionary process per se as progress. From a Marxist view, the American Revolution symbolizes the transfer of power from the feudal era (with a mercantilistic economy) to the bourgeois (with a capitalist economic system).

The revolutionaries of 1776 therefore were mainly bourgeois traders in cities and owners of larger plantations in rural areas. Their aim was not in the first place to establish a democracy, but to change the economic conditions from the restrictions set by the English colonial authority to the demands of an emerging capitalist system in the New World. In France in 1789, despite all the economic interest of the French bourgeoisie, there was a real clash between monarchists and republicans.

The main representatives of the American Revolution (starting with George Washington) were nearly identical with the ruling class in Britain—with the sole exception that the ruling class in Britain, via taxes and control of export/import licenses, wanted to exploit the colonies, including the ruling class of the colonies. Thereby, some of the most important American revolutionaries became revolutionary not by democratic conviction but by chance. In fact, Washington himself had fought for the British just a few years before 1776.

When the delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1776, they were unlikely revolutionaries in a social sense. They represented the ruling class of the colonies and would have been much less successful and inspiring without a small number of bourgeois intelligentsia within and outside of the Continental Congress (for example, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine). That many of the revolutionaries took the revolutionary side by chance may be demonstrated by the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold, who first served the revolutionary forces well, but then helped the British; better financial compensation was one of the reasons for this change of heart. For many revolutionaries, the economic deal they could make with the Revolution was personally much more decisive and convincing than any idealistic goals like “no taxation without representation” or self-determination in a democratic way.

Many of the foreign sympathizers of the American Revolution (for example, the French Marquis de Lafayette) came for idealistic reasons to help the emerging American republic fight against the British military might. France, however, as the major and decisive foreign ally of the new American entity, came for strategic interests within the contest of colonialist competition, not to support any ideals of some Americans assembled at Philadelphia. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 is seen as the most important achievement of the revolutionary republic. But this Constitution did not create a democracy, not even one for all the white males in the population. It excluded women, African Americans, Native Americans, and gave any essential power only to white people with a certain amount of property. It took the American republic nearly 200 years to give and to guarantee at least the right to vote to all adult inhabitants of the country.

A leftist could argue that democracy in Britain at the time was at least as equally developed as that in the emerging U.S. system, only the people involved in the decision-making process shifted from rich Englishmen to rich Americans. The majority of the population in the former colonies was left out of any power before and after the revolutionary period from 1776 to 1787. The most ill treated victims of the new American republic were the African Americans who were brought by force to the Americas to serve as slave labor.

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