2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. With poverty rising and white supremacist violence increasing, some people are asking whether the whole thing was a failure. Understanding the Revolution’s complicated history helps people figure out where to go from here. Misunderstanding our history keeps people divided by color, gender, and immigration status, pushing us toward 21st century fascism.
“Did the Revolution fail?” sounds dramatic, but the real question is: What did various classes and groups win or lose?
WHO WON?
The Revolution was a victory for colonial capitalists whose wealth depended on enslaved labor and global trade. Plantations produced fortunes for owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Northern merchants, shippers, and financiers also got rich even if they never personally owned enslaved people – financing, insuring, and marketing products made by enslaved people.
Some farmers and workers improved their lives once they were free of British taxes and control. But the Revolution disrupted local economies badly enough that many ended up poorer than before. It was mainly a victory for colonial elites, who became the new nation’s ruling class.
The Revolution did nothing to free enslaved Black Americans, though the 1776 Declaration of Independence begins by saying “all men are created equal.” In fact, the colonists’ victory over Britain locked enslaved African Americans even tighter into the rapidly expanding Southern plantations.
Nor did the Revolution return lands stolen from Indigenous people. Instead, the new American states accelerated their theft and genocide once they were free of British restrictions on settler takeovers of Indigenous land. Those were imposed not to protect them but to hold back the threat posed by the colonists’ growing wealth and power. The Declaration of Independence fought back with vicious white supremacy, accusing King George III of favoring “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”
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MIXED RESULTS FOR LABORING MASSES
For small farmers, workers, and merchants, the Revolution was only a partial success, producing some gains but less than they hoped for. In the South, the strengthened plantation class kept grinding them down economically. In the North, wealthier merchants got favorable treatment from state governments while poorer people struggled under new taxes.
Veterans faced delayed back pay, financially ruining those unemployed or disabled in the Revolution. Daniel Shays quit the army in 1780 unable to pay his debts. He became one of the leaders of the 1786 rebellion in Massachusetts – now called Shays’ Rebellion – that reflected widespread working-class anger. A People’s History of the United States quoted one rebellious farmer “obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates, and all rates … been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables, and collectors.”
These protests terrified some elites. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, supported crushing rebellious lower classes. In a 1787 letter, he wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” He knew a lot about manure (i.e., bullshit), writing “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence yet also selling enslaved children.
Though each uprising was crushed, they weren’t meaningless. They gave working classes experience in fighting for themselves, which pushed ruling elites to allow limited democratic rights that Britain had denied. Progress came in small steps. Still, the same Revolution that cracked open doors for workers also handed more power to the class that profited from their labor.
BETRAYAL OF ENSLAVED AMERICANS
For enslaved people, the Revolution wasn’t a partial victory. It was a betrayal. They remained trapped as Southern plantations expanded and grew more brutally in the decades that followed. Plantation agricultural wasn’t practical for Northern climates and soils, so capitalists there were willing to abolish slavery. In 1783 Massachusetts ended slavery after courts upheld the new state constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal.” From 1784 to 1804, gradual abolition laws passed in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey.
The Revolution also cut off another possible path to freedom. When Britain passed partial abolition of slavery in 1833, enslaved people in the United States were left out entirely. They had to depend on themselves – building underground networks and organizing rebellions – to eventually launch the national movement that abolished slavery after the Civil War ended in 1865.
CAPITALIST SLAVERY AND WHITE WORKERS
The growth of chattel slavery – the system that treated people as property – also damaged free white workers, even if less obviously. Karl Marx used the new analytical method of historical materialism to explain the connection between slavery and the capitalist system. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), he wrote: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of modern industry as machinery and credit. Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry.”
Poverty of Philosophy – Go to: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/index.htm
Marx worked to connect English factory workers with American abolitionists, explaining how their struggles were linked. After the plantation class was defeated in the Civil War, he wrote in Capital (1867) that “the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its foundation.” In other words: the brutal exploitation of enslaved people in America helped make possible the exploitation of workers in Europe. The two systems fed each other.
Capital, Volume 1 – Go to: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm
Understanding who won and who lost in 1776 helps us see the revolutionary potential existing today. The capitalists controlling the economy and its powerful new technologies no longer need plantation slavery or factory workers and won’t guarantee displaced workers their basic needs. Instead, the fascist methods used against formerly enslaved people and indigenous communities are being unleashed against the dispossessed masses of all colors.
The defining struggle of our time is the fight against 21st century fascism and for a cooperative society that distributes society’s abundance according to human need. The revolutionary ideals that sparked the overthrow of kings and the abolition of slavery in the past inspire today’s class struggle for the abolition of private capitalist property.
Published on July 4, 2026.
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