We republish the following editorial, originally published on our website in July 2023, for the 4th of July.
by the Editorial Board
Behind all the hot dogs, fireworks and a barrage of red white and blue pageantry, the meaning of US Independence Day is almost forgotten; even the capitalist bombast and rhetoric sees less effort than it used to. This cultural shift indicates a general state of decomposition and hopeless crisis for US imperialism. The word revolution fails to cross the lips of most capitalist swindlers. The talk about “liberty and justice” just adds a flavor of insult to the masses of working people who spend more waking time at work than living.
What should we make of this capitalist “liberty?” The liberty to work yourself to death for less than you need to feel comfortable and secure. Liberty for Black workers to live in fear of police terror and face early deaths. Liberty for women workers to be paid less than their class siblings. Liberty for professionals to be crammed into coffin box offices and nurses to be overworked in unsafe conditions. Liberty for renters to live with roaches, to roast in the heat and freeze in the winters because the utility system they pay for never meets their needs but instead raises their prices. Liberty that sees creeping poverty and no future at all. In short, capitalist liberty is liberty for the capitalist class to manage and control wage slaves, and it is wage slavery for the rest!
The US revolution against England, like all bourgeois revolutions, could not accomplish democracy for the slaves and wage slaves of the country. Due to this, the US became the classic land of the swindle of democracy, propped up and defended by a complex delusion called the American Dream, a dream from which many are waking up in cold sweats.
While the capitalist and his hired stooges attempt to spread jingoism, the darkest form of nationalist reaction, the reality of the American revolution is quite different. Its modest democratic and republican conquests were based only on the fact that the US capitalist class could mobilize the poor and laboring people against the English; a band of capitalists and slave owners who were fast to turn around and stab the backs of all those lower classes who fought alongside them. They waged revolutionary violence against the Crown of England while relying on money and troops from the Crown of France, seeking to become kings of industry whose sensibility is to live without the pomp of crowns. They lied to the poor while defaming and committing genocide against the natives. This is what they still do.
The documents of this early capitalist ruling class contained certain revolutionary principles that condemn their inheritors today. Here we speak plainly of the violent and forceful overthrow of oppressive government, a principle included in the Declaration of Independence. The hypocritical representatives of capitalism in government still toy with and wholly distort this principle against their electoral rivals in an attempt to swindle the masses and workers with electoral illusions. In this manner, all sorts of workers can be drawn into the continued service of the capitalist, be they “Constitutionalist” militia-types or apologists and agents for the Democratic Party. The absolute right to overthrow oppressors must never be given up for siding with their rival oppressor.
While these principles have been thoroughly abandoned by the bourgeoisie today, they also remain insufficient for the working class. It is not enough to overthrow an oppressive government, but to overthrow the capitalist mode of production underpinning whatever manifestation of government there is—that is, regardless of whatever face or structure the bourgeoisie chooses to represent their interests at a given time.
Revolution is a violent act in which one class overthrows another. To talk of revolution today in the US means to talk of the workers carrying it out against the capitalists. In the past, when the capitalist class was new, the capitalists represented economic and social progress against the old and outdated feudal system. Upon the defeat of the old feudalism they turned on the workers and have kept us in chains, living only off our labor; this is their class interest. Today no capitalist can represent social or economic progress. Their time is finished; ours has begun. This gives independence, revolution and liberty a new meaning. In the US, revolution means working class socialist revolution, a revolution that cannot develop exclusively within the law and order of the exploiting and oppressing class, but which must begin uniting the people behind working class leadership in the interests of the majority against the exploiting minority. After all, it is now the working class whose repeated petitions have only been answered by repeated injury. It is the working class who can overcome all the horrid divisions inflicted upon them by the capitalist class, and overcome the very myth and torment with which this country was founded.
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