Bertram David Wolfe

“ The official orators of the Sesquicentennial will portray the revolutionary fathers as demigods, the revolution as a glorious vindication of the eternal rights of man, the institutions created as classless and eternal and unimprovable. ”

“ All revolutions create alongside of the regularly constituted government their own unconstitutional, extra-legal revolutionary authority that unites the revolutionists, mobilizes their forces for resistance to the legal authority and forms the germ of the future government if the revolution succeeds. ”

“ Taken all together the British laws for the governing of the colonies and their exploitation in the interest of certain British wealthy and ruling classes hampered the industrial life of the colonies and fettered the further development of the productive forces of America, Further industrial evolution was impossible without revolution. ”

“ But as soon as we have said that the Revolution of 1776 was a class revolution which produced certain class institutions and which made many promises which it did not and could not fulfill, then we have cleared the ground for a closer examination of the real nature of the revolution, the things it achieved and the things it represents. ”

“ The truth of the matter is that our revolution of 1776 was carried out as a class dictatorship with all the accompaniments of force and revolutionary terror that the ruling class historians of today attack in the case of Soviet Russia and that the polite liberals deplore. ”

“ During the latter years of the revolution, France, Spain and Holland came to the aid of the American forces, the revolutionists having managed to utilize not only differences in the British ruling classes but also conflicts of interest between England and other countries as well in the strategy of the revolting colonials. There is a little "Leninist" lesson in winning alliances for a revolution. ”

“ The dominant class in England at the time of the Revolution of 1776 held to the mercantilist economic theory that colonies exist to produce raw materials for the mother country and to provide markets for its manufactured goods. ”

“ Nevertheless, these representatives of the great bourgeois revolution were the first shock troops of struggling humanity; they broke thru the dams of feudalism and thereby opened the way to the spring floods of the proletarian revolutions. ”

“ The rejection of the heritage of the first American revolution is one of the signs of what Lenin named "infantile leftism." There is a tendency on the part of an immature left wing to "throw out the baby with the bath." ”

“ The Tory party included, in the words of the historian Jameson, "more than half of the most educated, wealthy and hitherto respected classes." With them was a great indifferent mass having no great interest in change. They provided over 25,000 colonial troops to the British army. The active revolutionists were the smuggling merchants, manufacturers and speculators in western land, backed by the small farmers, frontiersmen and artisans, who were won to their cause by such issues as paper money and thru the glittering and vague promises of the Declaration of Independence. ”

“ If the right of the "pursuit of happiness" which the Declaration declares inalienable still stands, it is because "pursuing" does not necessarily mean catching up. If, in the pursuit of your happiness, you find that you have to picket a shop, you may find that your "inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness" may be taken away from you also. ”

“ In the bourgeois revolutions of the continent these "dual authorities," as Lenin called them, were the clubs of Girondins and Jacobins in the French revolution and the clubs of workers in the revolutions of 1848. In the Russian revolution the revolutionary authority that challenged the legally constituted government is to be found in the Workers' and Peasants' Councils or Soviets. ”

“ How could the minority of the population which made up the revolutionary army fight against the combined forces of a more or less equal number of active counter-reyolutionaries and the British regular troops more numerous and better equipped and supplemented by hired Hessian soldiers? ”

“ Most of the "aristocracy," the large land-owners of the coast with the exception of the plantation owners of the South, almost all office-holders, the clergy of the Church of England, the more eminent lawyers and physicians, and the "legitimate" merchants—large merchants who did no smuggling—these were the active Tories or royalists. ”

“ They have accordingly tried to describe a revolution in which all scholarly, refined and conservative persons might have unhesitatingly taken part; but such revolutions have never been known to happen. ”

“ These land thieves and speculators were also fighting the battle of progress against laws that put fetters upon the development of the productive forces of the colonies.
A third cause of the revolution was the paper money question. During the French and Indian wars British merchants had sent over large quantities of goods on credit and rich planters, importers and merchants in America were all debtors to British merchants. ”