{"id":1066021,"date":"2026-07-03T14:06:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T14:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1066021\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T14:06:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T14:06:24","slug":"usa-at-250-the-revolution-were-still-fighting-for-peoples-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1066021\/","title":{"rendered":"USA at 250: The revolution we\u2019re still fighting for \u2013 People’s World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"USA\t<\/p>\n

May Day in D.C., 2026. | AP<\/p>\n

Two hundred and fifty years ago this July 4th, a group of colonial merchants, lawyers, and planters put their names to a piece of parchment that shook the world. They declared, in the most radical language their age could imagine, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed\u2014and that when any government becomes destructive of that end, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration, busy spending tens of millions on \u201cFreedom 250<\/a>\u201d galas, demonstrations of military power, and AI-animated portraits of George Washington, would prefer we didn\u2019t dwell too long on that last part.<\/p>\n

\"\"Trump kisses the American flag at the CPAC conference in Feb. 2024. Every advance of genuine democracy in American history has come from below, over the objections of those at the top.| AP<\/p>\n

Historian Herbert Aptheker<\/a> spent a career insisting that the American Revolution was no mere tax dispute\u2014it was, as he wrote in his 1960 classic<\/a> book on the subject, a \u201ccontinuation of the pro-democratic struggles\u201d of the colonial era, a genuine popular uprising. It was imperfect, constrained by the class interests of those who led it, and shot through with the original sin of slavery and built upon the ruins of the Indigenous nations whose lands were seized and lives sacrificed on the altar of expansionism.<\/p>\n

The hunt for land and resources that drove European settlement and fueled the new republic\u2019s growth was never incidental to American capitalism; it was the engine of it, and the genocide it required was not a side effect but a deliberate policy carried forward by every administration from Washington to the reservation era and beyond.<\/p>\n

The American Revolution was all of those things, but not only.<\/p>\n

The artisans of Philadelphia, the farmers of Massachusetts, the sailors and dockworkers (including the Black and Indigenous ones<\/a>) who enforced non-importation agreements with their fists weren\u2019t just extras in a merchant\u2019s drama. They were key players, fighting for something that mattered to them. That\u2019s the revolution worth commemorating\u2014not the version of it being sold to us by the heirs of the ruling class who hijacked it.<\/p>\n

Because hijacked it they did\u2014from the very beginning. The Constitution that followed the Declaration locked slavery into place. Women still had no political existence. The masses who did not own property could not vote. The promise of 1776 was written in the language of universal freedom, but the \u201cliberty\u201d the founders wrote about was intended only for their own class.<\/p>\n

The Marxist tradition has always understood this dynamic: Every bourgeois revolution advances the cause of human freedom while simultaneously establishing new forms of domination. The American Revolution was no exception. It was, in the words used across generations of socialist analysis, an unfinished revolution\u2014a revolution that created the terrain on which future struggles would be fought but that could not complete itself within the limits of the class that led it.<\/p>\n

The next great step forward came drenched in blood. The Civil War and the brief experiment of Radical Reconstruction\u2014that \u201csplendid failure<\/a>,\u201d as W.E.B. Du Bois called it\u2014represent the Second American Revolution, the one that smashed slaveholder power and briefly extended citizenship, voting rights, and political power to formerly enslaved Black men across the South. Freedmen served in legislatures, schools were built, and land redistribution was on the agenda. The ruling class called it chaos, but it was one of democracy\u2019s finest hours on American soil. They violently crushed it, and a century of white supremacist terror followed.<\/p>\n

\"\"No Kings, March 2026. | AP<\/p>\n

Between those upheavals came another hard-won advance. The Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 was won from a resistant ruling class by generations of women who organized, marched, went to jail, and refused to be silent. Yet even that victory was incomplete from the start\u2014Black women across the South remained locked out of the voting booth by Jim Crow.<\/p>\n

Then another wave came with the Civil Rights Movement, which forced democracy to mean something again\u2014with the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and more. Millions of Black Americans, joined by labor, by the left, by people of conscience, bent the arc of history against Dixiecrat reaction.<\/p>\n

This all shows the lesson that no amount of \u201cFreedom 250\u201d MAGA rallies or White House cage matches can obscure: Every advance of genuine democracy in American history has come from below, over the objections of those at the top. And every advance has been partial, contested, and vulnerable to rollback.<\/p>\n

We are living in one of those rollback moments now. The Trump administration, the billionaire-funded demolition of regulatory government, the Musk-and-Thiel faction of the ruling class\u2014none of these are aberrations in the story of American capitalism. They represent the system trying to shed the democratic pretenses it no longer finds useful.<\/p>\n

They want an image of the revolution frozen at 1776\u2014a founding mythology stripped of its radical content, useful for legitimizing power rather than challenging it.<\/p>\n

\"\"Martin and Coretta Scott King march in the rain across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in March 1955. | Bob Adelman \/ SNCC-CORE<\/p>\n

But the American working class has its own history worth celebrating on this 250th anniversary: The great railroad strikes of 1877, when workers fought back with a fury that instilled fear in the ruling class. The triumph at Flint in 1936-37, when autoworkers sat down and would not move until they had a union. The March on Washington. The Memphis sanitation strike. The mass movement to end the war on Vietnam. Dolores Huerta and the farmworkers. Stonewall 1969. Standing Rock. The teachers\u2019 rebellions of 2018 and 2019. The women\u2019s marches against Trumpism. The UAW\u2019s Stand-Up Strike. The Minneapolis General Strike against ICE.<\/p>\n

All of these are episodes in the long, imperfect, incomplete march of the American people toward what the Declaration of Independence actually promised. It is a journey that points, however haltingly, toward socialism\u2014toward a society where the people who do the work make the decisions, where the wealth produced by labor does not vanish upward into the pockets of those who own but do not work.<\/p>\n

\"\"Original art by Sue Coe, for Political Affairs, 1986.<\/p>\n

The revolution of 1776 is unfinished. The work of perfecting democracy\u2014and ultimately transcending the class society that keeps sabotaging it\u2014must still be completed.<\/p>\n

On this July 4th, while the administration lights fireworks over a republic it is actively dismantling, let\u2019s remember that the real American tradition isn\u2019t the one being staged for the cameras. It\u2019s the one being carried forward by everyone fighting, right now, to make the words of the Declaration of Independence fully mean something for all of us.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the birthday worth celebrating.<\/p>\n

\n

The revolutionary tradition that birthed the Declaration of Independence also produced a free press as a democratic necessity\u2014from the radical pamphlets of Thomas Paine to the abolitionist papers of Frederick Douglass to the labor press of the 20th century. People\u2019s World, as heir to that tradition, carries the fight forward today against a ruling class that would rather the working class have no press of its own. The free press is the guarantor of moving toward a more perfect democracy, not the \u201cenemy of the people\u201d as the White House says. Please donate to help expand the reach of People\u2019s World.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCONTRIBUTOR<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"People\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May Day in D.C., 2026. | AP Two hundred and fifty years ago this July 4th, a group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1066022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5311],"tags":[93165,292433,292434,37862,139801,31,9407,92831,292435,1017,292436,49,978,659,288900,292437],"class_list":["post-1066021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-american-revolution","tag-bourgeois-democracy","tag-bourgeoisie","tag-class","tag-class-struggle","tag-democracy","tag-editorial","tag-independence-day","tag-marxism","tag-u-s","tag-u-s-history","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-usa-250","tag-usa250"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1066021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1066022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1066021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1066021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1066021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}