Response to Tom Mackaman on The American Revolution:

The decision of Mackaman to debate the historians of the 1619 Project takes the debate away from the central principles of Marxism and moves the debate into the sterile quarters of historical scholarship.  It allows the capitalist media to frame the debate about the revolutionary foundations of the government and the revolutionary history of the people. The bourgeois leadership's ideology represented either progressivism or racism. The revolutionary population, the poor masses, however, simply accepted racism. Their main concerns did not reach the same high levels as their bourgeois leaders and they remained lowly materialists, concerned only with the interests of their own group. 

Instead of taking up this slight against the general population, Mackaman argues that the bourgeois leadership's ideology represented a progressive advance rather than an attempt to saddle the revolutionary population with a new ruling class, essentially robbing them of the freedoms they had won through struggle. To put the struggle into historical context, we had the slavery of Africans and the extermination of Native Americans, guilty only of communal property relations, combined with a policy against poor Europeans they would call half-breeds for association with other races. The French-Indian war cost the British Empire a fortune and forced them to raise taxes. Opposition to the taxes met with massacres and torture, instead of debate and representation. In this context, the masses had to rise up to defend their very lives: from starvation and slavery in exchange for peaceful acceptance, to political and racial genocide and massacre as punishment for resistance, however intellectual.  When the masses rose up, the natural question became, what do we do with bourgeois captives?  What would they offer in exchange for their lives and freedom?

The particular conditions of the American Revolution allowed the masses to surround and train the bourgeoisie from an early age to respect the power of the revolutionary movement, which started decades before the Declaration of Independence. Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, who associated with Oliver Cromwell in England before coming to America, published an influential revolutionary book called the Bloudy Tenent as far back as 1644. He wrote the book in response to John Cotton, grandfather of Cotton Mathers, leader of the Salem Witch Trials. The book influenced Thomas Jefferson's ideas. Denied their careers, and in exchange for their lives, these rich merchants and businessmen or British military, church, or university officials, offered revolutionary documents squeezed out of them by a revolutionary population demanding a new state to overturn the old, self-destructive economic system and social order. The failure of the revolution to produce such a change had less to do with insufficiently revolutionary documents from bourgeois converts than a revolution led by the poor peasantry in place of the proletariat. 

With promises of land in the West and a legal political role in the new Jeffersonian Democracy, based on the town hall, the peasantry accepted the terms of their own enslavement by accepting private ownership of the factories, plantations, mines, banks, and railroads. This private ownership of capital, although beneficial to the small landholders, allowed the ruling class to concentrate capital in private hands and use this to maintain slavery in place in both hidden and open forms. The biggest slave owners, perhaps with the exception of a few oligarchs, were the railroad companies and the banks. Only a revolution led by the proletariat would take the accumulated wealth of society, of production, from the ruling classes, the aristocracy, the slave-owners, and the mine, factory, and railroad owners and use it to benefit the masses, whether proletarian or peasant or legal slave. A peasant-led revolution would only bring a temporary redistribution of the land followed by military conquest and domestic repression.

Marxism does not, as Mackaman gladly does, hand over leadership of the revolution to the capitalist class, which itself seeks to continue the subjugation of the masses. This has particular relevance for the revolutionary socialist movement, since the capitalist class seeks to overturn the socialist revolution through the creation of a privileged bureaucracy with interests that set it apart from and against the majority of the revolutionary population. The experiences of Russia and China have proven that a party bureaucracy followed by a state bureaucracy can overcome the popular will, smash the uprising with political genocide, and restore relations with imperialism. The bureaucracy functions as a mechanism by which the ruling class frustrates the lower classes' revolutionary ambitions. An analysis of the workings of the bureaucracy will allow the revolutionary class to frustrate the aims of the bureaucracy until it elevates the principle of mass participation and protections for the general population, especially their right to political independence, i.e. factional democracy. In order to establish socialism as a means of ending wage slavery, class division, and class oppression, the proletariat must take away the means of production and the means of political oppression in the service of privilege. It must establish the Democratic Power Faction in order to protect itself as the real source of revolutionary change.

Bourgeois ideology, however immersed in revolutionary ideals, cannot break from its economic roots and its purpose as an ideology of the ruling classes in general. The objective conditions of the proletariat within capitalist society make the proletariat the revolutionary class, which must root out all class division and establish a society based on material equality. The Marxist movement, then, must concern itself mainly with reinforcing the confidence of the proletariat in its own leadership and its resistance to domination by bureaucracy and representative ideologues of the upper class, the Norman Thomases as Trotsky called them, of the socialist movement. In the lead-up to the October Revolution, for instance, about 40 nominal editors of the Bolsheviks' Pravda newspaper went to prison. The nominal editors and writers of revolutionary documents, although significant historically, cannot take the place of the actual awakening and mass participation of the oppressed classes who through their actions produce a capable leadership within their own class for the revolution. Without these, an inevitable Thermidor reaction will make a mockery of the revolution for their blind trust in the upper class.