Photo – Collagery
By Lew Rosenbaum
We are witnessing the opening salvos of a propaganda war to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. Let’s not waste time worrying each other about how the revolution betrayed its aspirations, nor singing hymns to the glory of the Declaration of Independence. Let’s instead learn from the 250 year abolitionist fight that took various historical forms and now presents us with something qualitatively different.
In January, 1776 Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense. Paine was a craftsman and recent immigrant from England. His pamphlet quickly became a sensation. About 100,000 copies were distributed among two million colonists within a year. Many more people heard it read aloud, since copies were shared and discussed in groups. It spoke to a frustrated and angry population. Whatever their complaints, people could now blame a distant monarch who didn’t care about them. Whether the issue was taxation without representation, forced housing of British soldiers, or limits to colonial expansion west into indigenous territory, English colonists now had a clear enemy against whom they could organize.
REVOLUTION TO ABOLISH MONARCHY
At the time, monarchy was the dominant form of government in Europe and much of the world, and Britain was the most powerful among Western monarchies. There were no united states in North America, only contentious settlements along the Eastern coast developed by individual groups of colonists. Some were “crown colonies,” land grants by the British monarch to replicate what they left in Europe. Others were established by political or religious refugees. But all of them accepted the dominion of the British monarch as a divine right. Who could question it?
British attempts to impose feudal-style relations on the colonies had failed as that agricultural system ground to a halt. Mercantile capitalism was on the rise. Throughout the history of class societies, each system of private property was abolished and replaced by the revolutionary creation of a new one. In that sense, the American Revolution, declared six months after Paine’s pamphlet, on July 4, 1776, was an abolitionist revolution, and Common Sense can be seen as an abolitionist manifesto. The American Revolution struck at monarchy itself. Across Europe, leaders saw it as a serious threat. While it challenged feudal property and its political power, it did not go further. Many of the social trappings of feudalism continued, grafted onto the new capitalist society, so women, Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and the propertyless working class still faced injustice.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass referred to this time and the makers of this revolution in this way: “They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory” (From Douglass’ July 4, 1852 speech). https://daily.jstor.org/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-annotated/
After the revolutionists defeated the British, Paine returned to England, sensing possibilities to foment a revolution in England itself. Under threat of death, he fled England to revolutionary France, where he was at first welcomed as an apostle of the anti-monarchist ideas.
After independence, the country divided economically. The North produced manufactured goods and food using wage labor. The South relied on enslaved labor to grow cotton for export. Politically, the slaveholding South held greater power from the 1789 Constitutional Congress up to the 1860 Civil War. To maintain its dominance, Southern leaders pushed to expand slavery westward. But as the North’s population grew, it gained power in the House of Representatives. The South tried to maintain its advantage in the Senate by adding new slave states. Meanwhile, a small but growing abolitionist movement emerged. Over decades, it became stronger, as each expansion raised the question: would slavery spread or be stopped?
REVOLUTION TO ABOLISH SLAVERY
A turning point came with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857. The ruling allowed slaves to be held in bondage in any state and that Black Americans had no rights. The intense reaction to that decision further split the Democrats and drove independents and disgruntled Whigs into the newly formed Republican Party. The Republican Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election sealed the fate of the pro-slavery political movement. The South seceded and, with a pre-emptive strike at Fort Sumter, began the Civil War.
If the American Revolution can be seen as a war to abolish monarchy and monarch-protected private property, the Civil War was a struggle to abolish private property in human beings. The Union’s victory in 1865 produced a mixed vision of what abolition would look like. Ten years of Reconstruction broke the back of Southern resistance to the supremacy of Wall Street. Then, the political compromise of 1877 restored local control to the former slaveholders. Washington removed federal forces which had provided some guarantee of the civil rights of the formerly enslaved. The terror of the KKK drove the freedmen back into peonage.
Abolition of the monarchy was the fruit of the American Revolution. Abolition of the system of chattel slavery was the fruit of the second American revolution. In each revolution, a new form of private property was enthroned to replace the last. The new form of private property enthroned in 1877 was as vicious as any seen before.
Before the Civil War, when Frederick Douglass gave his 1852 Fourth of July speech, he spoke about how important the Revolution against England had been. Mainly, however, he denounced the abuses of slavery. His words could also apply to what happened with the end of Reconstruction: “Go where you may, search where you will . . .search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a new section of the capitalist class came to the fore. The deindustrialization of the Rust Belt by offshoring and automating industrial production became accelerated at the end of the century as first robotics and then artificial intelligence began replacing jobs and workers. Struggling to find a place to invest productive capital and hence to employ workers and create value, capital began moving investments into ventures such as real estate or data mining, producing a new speculative section of capitalists. The slaveocracy in the 1850s was defeated by Wall Street and a new class of free farmers and laborers. This was a working class intimately connected to their capitalists.
Today’s new section of the capitalist class confronts a new section of the working class, a rising new class created by technology which does not need labor. Contrasted with the old industrial working class whose condition of existence is the factory where it obtains its subsistence, this new class has no place to go without abolishing the structures that keep it in thrall.
Alongside the growing job replacement, the ruling class embarked on a project to stop any effort to oppose their control. Starting in 1956 a group of intellectuals assembled at the University of Virginia following the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. James McGill Buchanan founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy. There and later at George Mason University, they began the difficult task of persuading the American people that “individual freedom” depended on their friends, the wealthy, that freedom is slavery, that government intervention (under which Social Security and MediCare laws had been enacted) is inherently evil.
They saw the foundations of their society changing and fought tooth and nail to retain power first by persuasion, then by warfare when persuasion failed. In their effort to retain power as new classes are being born, they resemble the planters prior to the Civil War.
They knew that their opinions were highly unpopular. In the words of scholar Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, “the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.” A constellation of other organizations, like the Federalist Society (1982) and the Heritage Foundation (1973), with a similar outlook – privatize all public programs and restrict or end government intervention in social welfare – arose and took advantage of a rapidly changing economic environment. Project 2025 was their roadmap.
That theoretical principle has been articulated by the movement that has concentrated on the evil that is the prison system. They also call themselves abolitionists, people such as scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore who clearly states that the abolition of the prison-industrial complex can only be accomplished by the reconstruction of society. You cannot have a society without prisons, courts and police until you build a society in which everyone has what is needed to survive and thrive. And because of new technologies this is possible today.
REVOLUTION TO ABOLISH CAPITALIST PROPERTY
This anniversary we are compelled to reread Frederick Douglass 174 years after he wrote and delivered his important oration. We are compelled because of the hope he expresses and because of the fire he breathes, and because we face the greatest challenge and most supreme possibility of emancipation ever. The abolition of our time is substantially different from getting rid of monarchies and getting rid of chattel slavery. We can now get rid of the chains that bind us to the vampirish private property that controls all wealth.
At a time like this we need audacity, not beggary. Returning to Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine, we need a moral vision, not just a recitation of facts and horrors. As Douglass said in 1852:
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
Speaking to a group of revolutionaries in Chicago in 1977, Nelson Peery (a founder of today’s League of Revolutionaries for a New America) spoke of the influence of Thomas Paine in this way:
“I had always dreamed of belonging to an organization of talented, articulate people, who would flood this country with pamphlets about socialism, about the working class, and explain to the workers the significance of all the problems they face. I would like to see everybody … read that wonderful book … Citizen Tom Paine; [the novel by Howard Fast]. It’s a book that played a tremendous role in making me a communist.”
“I always wondered what it would be like if we had two, three, four hundred Tom Paines, people who write what they think, people who have enough confidence in the next [person], in [their] intelligence, to set down on paper their thoughts and hand them out to the people. I think that until we flood this country with propaganda about socialism and about the revolution, to talk about revolution is nonsense. Because you’re talking about a revolution without a class.”
The books cited here can be purchased or ordered at independent bookstores anywhere, or on line. Common Sense is available in a number of paperback editions; Citizen Tom Paine is available in an edition published by Grove/Atlantic ($14 paperback).
Published on April, 9, 2026.
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