Why Marxists Loved the American Revolution

Hegel is usually understood to have found the final form of human society in the constitutional monarchy of Prussia, but he made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as the “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime was improved in the American constitutional republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the presidency counterbalancing democracy so as to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic, and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early twentieth century that in America “freedom was most complete.” For their part, Marxist-informed socialists in the United States such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs claimed both the American Revolution and the Civil War and their political leaders as historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to their cause and as their rightful legacy, as against the capitalist political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, falsely wearing their mantles. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin greatly esteemed Debs, especially for his denunciation of US imperialism and involvement in World War I, which landed the five-time presidential candidate in jail. Debs returned the praise, calling himself, during the counterrevolutionary reactionary panic after the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids and repression of the Socialist Party, “from head to foot a Bolshevik and proud of it.” Later, Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazis to the United States, along with his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, wrote endearingly about his experience of American society, and upheld the American republic’s constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances as the model for “critique”—the free interplay of theory and practice and subject and object—in maintaining and promoting the freedom of society. “Marxists regarded the American Revolution as a ‘bourgeois’ revolution.” So powerful was the influence of the American Revolution that the Communist Party in the United States named its party night school for workers after Thomas Jefferson. Its leader in the 1930s, Earl Browder, famously stated that “communism is as American as apple pie.” What was the substance of this evaluation by such prominent Marxists of the United States and the American Revolution and its legacy? Marxism understood capitalism as a phenomenon based on bourgeois society, and Marxists regarded the American Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution. What did this mean?