Something my fellow Americans must be made aware of is that around the globe, the revolutionary ideas behind 1776 are still being actively put into practice. Our government doesn’t want us to know this; it’s created an encyclopedia’s worth of lies to demonize the popular movements and countries that are fighting against U.S. imperialism. And this propaganda has been effective, but only to an extent. The future of America’s people is tied in with the success of these global resistance forces, because we’re all up against the system of monopoly finance capitalism. And by connecting Americans to these anti-imperialist movements, we’ll enable the American people to complete the constitution of their own nation—which is itself a critical prerequisite to the rest of the world’s development.
I do not say this because I share any form of American exceptionalist ideology, where the historical rules that apply to the rest of the globe are seen as not applying to the USA. I say this because of how much I’m opposed to American exceptionalism; because I see that America’s role in liberating humanity is as significant as that of any other country. Recently, the American Communist Party’s chairman Haz Al-Din concluded that if America fails to become a complete and unified nation, the rest of the globe will feel the consequences from this failure as well. As under such circumstances, the world would be missing a piece in the puzzle of humanity’s collective evolution.
For this reason, when I emphasize the patriotic struggles of the peoples who are resisting imperialism, I do so with the intent of rousing my fellow Americans towards following in the example of these movements. Just because the revolutionary forces in the USA are weak compared to the ones abroad, doesn’t mean this won’t change; and it’s by drawing upon the lessons from these global struggles that we in America will gain the insights necessary for completing our own revolution.
Part of why this revolution wasn’t completed is that when it began, the most progressive forces within it weren’t able to prevail. The slave owners, with their ties to the British capitalist network, could keep a strong hold over the new republic. But as capitalism advanced to its next phase, the socialist movement gained the historical experience to be able to evolve beyond utopianism, and thereby offer something practical. This, observed Eugene Debs, was an essential factor in producing what Debs called “The American movement”:
As the inventive genius of man asserted itself in the industrial world; as the use of steam as motive power expanded and machinery was introduced and its application to industry became more general, with its inevitable effects upon artisans, laborers and small tradesmen, the movement was accelerated in varying forms, chiefly utopian, until many years afterward, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was crystallized by the genius of Marx, Engels, Lassalle and others, who caught the revolutionary current, clarified it and sent it circling around the globe on its mission of freedom and fraternity.
The earliest traces of socialism in the United States had their origin in the stream of immigration that flowed from the old world to the new and bore upon its bosom the germs of discontent warmed into life in the effete feudalism of European civilization…The times were fruitful of industrial and social unrest and the many schemes and plans that were proposed, utopian, impractical, impossible though they undoubtedly were, were at the same time the signs and symptoms of social gestation, the fore-runners of the mighty change that was laying hold of governments and institutions and destined to revolutionize them all and level the human race upward to the plane of an all-embracing civilization.
Even after all of the measures our ruling class has taken to crush this movement in the United States, it continues on across the world. And within the Marxist-Leninist parties in particular, the participants in these global liberation struggles still draw inspiration from a specifically American achievement: 1776. History’s biggest communist thinkers and leaders, from Marx to Lenin to Ho Chi Minh, have recognized 1776 as a revolutionary event from which communists must take example.
This doesn’t mean that communism itself came from America; when I point to “the American movement,” I’m referring to the socialist movement within the United States itself. It’s undeniable, though, that the American revolution has had an ongoing influence on the world’s Marxist-Leninist parties. Ho Chi Minh believed that America’s accomplishment of breaking free from the monarchy is still relevant to today’s liberation movements, so much so that he quoted the Declaration of Independence at the beginning of his own founding statement for the Republic of Vietnam.
Marxist-Leninists are the first ones to be aware of the larger historical context behind the founding of the United States, namely that it precipitated a project to expand the country through multiple genocides. Yet MLs know that America has made unique contributions to the class struggle, ones that can’t be discounted. And it’s only when we account for these positive parts of our history that we can bring balance to the imbalance which the anti-indigenous exterminations created.
The shape of this story is one where, over the course of centuries, the different participants in the class struggle help each other see the route towards final victory over the enemies of liberty. America did something that future freedom fighters would take inspiration from; and though America then became captured by monopoly finance capital, the forces which produced its original revolution lay dormant, and ready to liberate America a second time. The spirit of 1776 lives on within the movements that are resisting U.S. imperialism, and it’s through these efforts to continue 1776’s legacy that this spirit will find its way back into America.
When troops from socialist Korea fight against Washington’s fascist Ukrainian proxy regime, they’re carrying forth a patriotic struggle that Americans are fundamentally connected to. So is the case for the Palestinians, Yemenis, Venezuelans, and others who are resisting the U.S. government’s aggressions. Our ruling class has done all it can over the generations to convince us that patriotism is synonymous with support for imperialism. And this Big Lie has been effective in many ways, but like with the other lies, its success is limited.
It’s doubtful that the present effort to rally support for invading Venezuela will work, like the Iraq invasion narrative worked; in only a generation, the consciousness of the American people has become much less conducive to imperialist propaganda, because the system of imperialism is inherently unstable. The country’s masses have experienced the economic destruction that comes from living under capitalism, so our government keeps finding it difficult to sell them the next big war.
In response to the Venezuela war drive, American communists have been making the comparison between America’s anti-British struggle, and the self-defense struggle of the Venezuelan people. This is the right tactic to use, and it’s likely to have a real impact on the discourse; how big this impact will be, that depends on the size of our movement’s platforms. We must work to make this latest war provocation backfire on our government, to the effect that a new American revolution gets brought tangibly closer.
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