The American Revolution and the Left
Matei Alexandriu, Tom Canel, Daniel Lazare, Benjamin Studebaker
Platypus Review 177 | June 2025
On October 12, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel at Boston College on the American Revolution as part of the organization’s 2024 East Coast Conference. The speakers were Matei Alexandriu (Congress of Workers’ Organizations, New Hampshire),[1] Tom Canel (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; formerly of the Democratic Socialists of America), Daniel Lazare (author of The Frozen Republic[2]; he has written for Democratic Constitution[3] and Weekly Worker[4]), and Benjamin Studebaker (author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy[5]; formerly of the podcast What’s Left?). The panel was moderated by D.L. Jacobs. An edited transcript follows.[6]
Introduction
How was the American Revolution revolutionary? Does the Left today inherit any of the revolutionary tasks of 1776? Should the Left break with or build on the legacy of the American Revolution? How should the Left make sense of recent attempts to reject, reinterpret, or reclaim the revolutionary tradition of 1776?
Opening remarks
Benjamin Studebaker: The central concept in the American Revolution is tyranny. Tyrants arise when polities become thoroughly barbarized, when citizens cease to understand their connection to one another. They become uninterested in developing higher capacities except insofar as those capacities can be put in service of bodily desires. This instrumentalization of the virtues has de-socializing effects over time; it worsens the conditions for cooperation. This produces a political and social breakdown in which it becomes impossible for the city to rule itself. In its barbarized condition it can only function under a master, but because the subjects in a tyranny are barbaric, they cannot be relied upon to serve the master. Fear of the subjects forces the master to become a tyrant, to use fear and terror to intimidate them. Even the tyrant is enslaved by the fear that permeates every part of society, dissolves social ties, and isolates subjects from one another. In naming King George III a tyrant, the American revolutionaries did not just accuse him of corruption and criminality; they accused the entire British system of having devolved into something inhospitable.
To oppose tyranny is to demand freedom, but more importantly, it is to demand the social and political conditions that make freedom possible. Tyranny happens because some non-tyrannical regime allows society to degrade to the point at which tyranny becomes necessary. Tyranny ends because there remains some part of society that, in spite of everything, organizes not just against the tyrant but against tyranny as a condition.
The American Revolution did not kill King George, but it did overcome the tyranny that he personified. It created a new kind of polity that made a certain kind of freedom possible. This freedom was more ambitious than ancient freedom insofar as it was more inclusive. It sought to extend freedom not just to a landed aristocracy but to laborers. But to extend freedom to laborers necessarily involves circumscribing it.
John Adams understood this problem. As Adams put it, he studied politics and war so that his descendants could study, among other things, commerce and agriculture. But that, in turn, was to create a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.[7] To enjoy the highest freedom, it is necessary to pursue activities for their own sake, out of love rather than fear of poverty or violent death. Politics protects against violence, so that commerce can protect against poverty.
But real freedom is freedom from fear and freedom to love, freedom from the activities that are about managing fear — war and commerce. It requires overcoming labor and the necessity for servicing bodily desires. A freedom that identifies with the desires that arise from embodiment and with the labor that is undertaken to satisfy those desires is a regression. It was a regression for John Adams just as much as it was for Plato. But Adams and Plato recognized the necessity of regression. To get real freedom you have to go through tyranny, through politics.
Today, in the United States, there is no recognized right to pursue anything for its own sake. We have become stuck in an inferior kind of freedom. This is not purely because people have misunderstood freedom. We have become stuck for historical reasons: the American Revolution overcame one kind of tyranny, but it has become bound by a commercial logic that comes out of the structure of the world system.
Since World War II, the American state has worked tirelessly to expand capital mobility. This has been done in the name of freedom, the freedom to engage in trade. But over time the effect of this is to strip both governments and workers of their freedom. They are forced to do whatever commerce demands of them, to study whatever will get you a job. People are more limited in what they can study than someone in the 1960s or 70s was, and in that sense less free. Because people are less free, they become estranged from the love that resides dormant within them, the high kind of love that points beyond transactionality or sexuality, beyond pragmatism and eros,[8] what the Greeks called agape.[9]
This process of stultification is beginning to make tyranny appear necessary. Perhaps it is. Perhaps we have lost the ability to pursue the better kinds of freedom and must rediscover it. But John Adams offered us another possibility: federalism. Through a federal republic, it becomes possible to qualify commercial competition, to set rules that limit the degree to which that competition determines our form of life. The purpose of federalism is not to subject everyone to a Bonapartist state; it is to use the political to qualify the commercial so as to make space for the romantic and the spiritual. This is not to negate commerce. Commerce is necessary to reach a stage in which the romantic and spiritual are universally available. Prior to commerce, there was war and politics alone.
The British empire, through its mercantilism, put commerce at the service of war. Adams understood that it was necessary to put politics at the service of commerce, to make the world safe for trade, but that was a beginning rather than an end. Ultimately, politics must come back out from underneath commerce, not to restore the supremacy of war but to allow us to move beyond fear itself.
What we need is a new federalism that can qualify commerce and make capital mobility a servant rather than a master. This is a project of overcoming the tyranny of the commercial itself. What is needed is a serious commitment on the part of young people to theorizing and constructing a new polity. This requires us to qualify our own freedom, to step away from the highest kinds of human activity and think in a practical, instrumental way that engages with our conditions, with necessity.
The American revolutionaries did not just have ideas. They built things and put themselves in mortal peril. We need their courage, not just to fight for freedom but to fight for love. It is not enough to demand freedom for all. We must build a world in which the highest kind of freedom is possible for all, the freedom to love un-pragmatically. It is only when animated by this kind of love that we can say with Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”[10]
Tom Canel: The interest in resurrecting the American Revolution as a source of inspiration for Marxists has predecessors on the American Left. My first example of this is the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the Popular Front era. In the early 1930s, the international communist movement came to the conclusion that its previous “class against class” politics had enabled the accession to power of Nazism in Germany and the continuation of these politics would not help fight fascism globally. As a result, national communist parties were instructed to build broad progressive coalitions — popular fronts — in their own countries. As an aid to this, the national communist parties were to celebrate the progressive traditions of their respective countries. In the U.S. this took the form of the CPUSA claiming that “communism is 20th century Americanism,”[11] and on one occasion its youth wing, the Young Communist League, boasted that it celebrated 1776 much more assiduously than organizations of the Right such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. However, particularly since the Cold War and the New Left engendered by it, anti-imperialism has been seen as opposition to American imperialism in particular. Any celebration, therefore, of the American heritage, including the Revolution of 1776, has become anathema to much of the Left.
My second example of American Leftists celebrating 1776 would be Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. Like the CPUSA during their Popular Front period, he saw an emancipatory content to the American Revolution. For whatever reasons — and historians can be cynical about this — the Declaration of Independence substituted for property rights references to the pursuit of happiness.[12] For Harrington and others, the Declaration thereby opens up space for arguing that if particular property relations become a fetter upon the general pursuit of happiness, it is right to challenge those relations. It is through buttressing challenges to predominant property relations in this way that the legacy of 1776 could potentially be a resource for the Left today.
There is also the argument that socialism must take the form of a reaffirmation of the bourgeois right over one’s own labor. This is a right for which the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke famously argued. However, rather than having a socialist potential, Locke’s discourse can become a justification for capitalism, if only before-the-fact. In the Second Treatise of Government (1689), in which Locke affirms the right to one’s own labor, he argues that it violates nobody’s rights for someone to hire someone else as an employee. Locke also explicitly endorses the right of an employer to appropriate the fruits of, and therefore to make a profit from, their employees’ labor. The unlimited accumulation of nonperishable wealth is also endorsed by Locke.
I claim there were two souls driving the creation of the American republic: one a soul committed to enabling the general pursuit of happiness which is embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and a soul committed to the affirmation of Lockean property rights which is embodied most explicitly in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I admit that most of the American revolutionaries of the late 18th century would have seen this as a distinction without a difference, but from our viewpoint within advanced capitalism, we should make a point of this distinction.
My third example of socialists lionizing 1776 is when American socialist icon Eugene Debs, made a similar kind of argument in his Independence Day Address of 1901.[13] He argued that the framers of the Constitution saw equality as being just for themselves, the rich property owners, and thereby felt able to legitimize slavery for example, while the Declaration of Independence was imbued with the genius of free institutions.
Daniel Lazare: America is a complicated and mysterious place. It seems simple on the surface, but when you penetrate beneath the surface, it gets a lot more complicated. I want to explore some of the paradoxes and contradictions of the American Revolution. I want to begin by discussing three revolutions: one which broke out in 1787 in Belgium, another in France in 1789, and the third, the American Revolution, which broke out in 1775–76.
The Belgian Revolution is the least known but, in some ways, it is extremely relevant to the American Revolution. Belgium was a federation ruled by the Austrian Hapsburgs and it had a constitution dating back to the late Middle Ages. When I say a constitution, I mean an accepted way of running society. Society was run through myriad interlocking institutions — monasteries, guilds, bishoprics,[14] tariffs — a whole late-medieval maze. In 1787, the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II, the model of an enlightened despot, sought to modernize Belgium, sweeping away the ancient medieval structure and imposing an egalitarian and efficient form of government. The result was a revolution. Belgians rose up in arms in defense of their ancient institutions and were ultimately crushed in 1790. This was a revolution against the Enlightenment; it was the model of a conservative revolution that was fought in defense of the ancien régime, which the Belgians saw as the freest form of government possible.
We go forward two years to the events in Paris, preceded by a similar conservative revolt by the nobility against the attempts of Charles Calonne, the finance minister of Louis XVI, to solve the taxation problem in 1787. That revolt was crushed, but two years later a different revolt arose, one made by the Third Estate. Whereas the Belgian and French nobles had arisen in defense of the ancien régime, the French Revolution in 1789 went to war against the ancien régime. The French Revolution was a great modernizing revolution because its aim was to sweep away all the medieval appurtenances and replace it with something that was streamlined, efficient, and modern.
We have two revolutions, one anti-ancien régime and the other pro-ancien régime. To which category does the American Revolution belong? It clearly follows the Belgian model much more closely. America in the 18th century was the freest, wealthiest, and most democratic place — for white American males — on Earth. Americans had a high degree of democratic self-governance extending back to the 17th century. As far as they were concerned, that was a heritage worth defending.
The British were also modernizers trying to put the empire on a more modern footing. After the Seven Years’ War they decided to reorganize finances and to try to impose taxes on the Americans the same way Calonne had tried to impose new taxes on the French. The Americans’ objection to the Stamp Tax was not merely that it had been imposed by Parliament without consulting them but that it was new; it broke with tradition; they saw it as an attack on their ancient liberties. So, the American Revolution was much closer to the conservative Belgian Revolution and to the conservative 1787 revolt of the nobles in France than it was to what followed in France in 1789.
That suggests that the American Revolution was a reactionary revolt, however, this is where it gets complicated. Because America was the freest, most democratic place on Earth prior to 1775 it was a conservative revolt in defense of the highest level of democracy existing to date. So it was both conservative and democratic, but its concept of democracy was thoroughly conservative in that it saw liberty as ancient and primordial, something that Americans had gained merely by virtue of moving to the New World. It believed that change was almost always tyrannical and injurious to liberty and the result, among other things, was the U.S. Constitution, which made great concessions to the need for a quasi-centralized modern nation state but which still tried to codify liberties that existed since time immemorial. The Second Amendment is the perfect example of that, where the right to bear arms is seen as an essential pillar of liberty and therefore must not be disturbed.
When we deal with America, we are dealing with a country whose revolutionary heritage paradoxically is a conservative one — which explains a great deal of our society today — and which cannot imagine a modern socialist concept of democracy that flows from the French revolutionary concept. America eventually did have its second Jacobin stage but that happened in 1861, when Lincoln essentially carried out a Jacobin program in which he crushed states’ rights, centralized power, and imposed an industrial program. That, to a certain extent, did bring America into the modern age, although it did not get rid of that conservative heritage altogether.
The French Revolution is a starting point for any kind of modern socialist politics. The American Revolution has to be approached cautiously and critically and seen as a product of the pre-modern era. The question is whether America is the last ancien régime left in the modern, advanced capitalist world.
Matei Alexandriu: I will be discussing how I approach the American Revolution and its legacy from a Marxist perspective. I disagree that it was a reactionary revolt. I agree that the demands of the American revolutionaries constituted the preservation of an existing system, but they were comparatively more democratic and represented a more open level of public participation in politics than a monarchy would have allowed.
In terms of the enduring revolutionary legacy of the American Revolution, I am constantly faced with the task of contending with it as a Marxist while keeping my Marxism intact. I have to square the circle that the American Revolution and its ideas eventually produced the French Revolution; from that French revolutionary tradition, we got French socialism, and out of French socialism we got Marxism. I can draw a continuous line from the American revolutionary tradition to the Marxist revolutionary tradition that I am operating on today.
It is at this point in the conversation that a lot of American socialists start to lose themselves in the legacy of that Revolution. It is easy for us to look at the Revolutionary period as one whose actors were thoroughly committed to freedom, and then we lost that spirit somewhere along the way, giving way to a corporate takeover that now dominates our country. This isn’t a correct interpretation of American history.
I only have to go as far as the Federalist Papers (1787–88) to understand that what we would describe as a corporate government mentality existed just as explicitly in the first generations of this country. There we find James Madison talking about how the source of political factions is inequality of property, but rather than address the need to equalize people’s access to property he takes the perspective that the state plays the role of mediating whatever conflicts arise as a result of that inequality. Then we have Alexander Hamilton describing his contemporary project as a commercial republic. From the outset, the American Revolution had a scope that saw beyond the rights of monarchy, but it channeled its new rights directly into the hands of its capitalist elements; it did that from the start and explicitly.
What should socialists learn from 1776? We should appreciate that there is no Marxism that does not draw its lineage back to that Revolution. But we should also understand that for however revolutionary it was at the time, it is incompatible with a working-class revolution. The Constitution paid credence to someone’s right to life but it had no such respect for the material basis of life: food, shelter, transportation, communication, healthcare –– all of these things are not provided for.
If there were a movement today that arose in defense of the Constitution as opposed to a more extensive and universal set of rights, it would be reactionary. There was a point in time when this evolution from monarchy to commercial republic did increase the amount of people who could freely take part in the political process, but capitalism and the capitalist republic has maxed out on the number of people it is willing to include in that process.
In 1776, the American Revolution and the constitutional order it produced were comparatively revolutionary. Nowadays they represent the rights of capital. They have nothing to do with universal rights or true democracy. Today we have to look at this revolutionary legacy as something to overcome. If we are going to build a revolutionary movement, we have to understand that it is going to be opposed to the existing constitutional order. We cannot work with them; they do not want to work with us. We must build our own new world.
Responses
BS: I noticed a lot of focus on the internal mechanisms of the United States — its constitution, its internal political rule. The biggest problem with the U.S. is that it is not large enough. It is federalism in one country, so it cannot govern capital mobility. You can putz around with the constitutional rules in all kinds of ways, but it does not solve the central problem that we face: money goes all over the world when you try to confront it in any way.
That is something that has not come up at all: the global character of all of this. It is not something that can be done with good national institutions. It is a problem of the structure of the entire supranational system. To change that, we would need a kind of federalism that can expand and which people in other parts of the world want to be part of. The kind of federalism that we currently have — in part because of the legacy of the 20th century — does not have the legitimacy to expand. It can’t just be an expansion of this federal system nor just replacing one kind of national democracy with another kind. We need to construct something supranational that people all around the world would be able to join us in doing.
TC: Matei articulated clearly the exact position I was taught in Britain as a teenager; it is what I take to be the Marxist position. The question then becomes: why would a Marxist organization be interested in the American Revolution? It is presumably because Marxism is seen as being, if not dead, in a very fundamental crisis. What is the basis of that crisis?
In Domenico Losurdo’s screed on Western Marxism,[15] he makes the distinction between “Western” and “Eastern” Marxism. It seems that, as they are defined by Losurdo, both are a result of the conscious refusal of the working class in the West to aspire to proletarian subjectivity. I would argue that is why people are supposed to look back to previous revolutions, like the American and the French, and we cannot just carry on with the old Marxist discourse.
DL: Yes, the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution to a degree, but the French Revolution rapidly eclipsed the American Revolution. The Americanists in France during the French Revolution were quickly shut out of the political process; the radical elements were dismissive of America, and they left the American example far behind. The Declaration of Independence got a lot of play in Europe; the U.S. Constitution was almost completely ignored, and it had little influence there. The Americans were more democratic than George III but more conservative. They were more backward looking, less modern. That made them diametrically opposed to the French Revolution, so there is no continuous line. The French Revolution breaks off history. Everything before the French Revolution is pre-modern; everything after is modern.
It was the planter elements in the U.S. who benefitted from the American Revolution. I was taken aback by hearing John Adams being quoted on the necessity of freedom for laborers; how about the slaves? The American Revolution strengthened slavery. The Constitution, this document of freedom, actually served the opposite purpose.
An international federation? The international project is called revolutionary socialism. The aim is a revolutionary socialist republic. American federalism is terrible, and the idea of extending it to the world fills me with utter horror.
MA: I agree; the idea of expanding the American republic into other parts of the world horrifies me. The other thing that stuck out is this alleged death of Marxism, which I struggle to see in the world. Marxism breathes life every day that there are American socialists contending together about how to build revolution. Corpses do not enter battle, so Marxism must still be alive.
What is the metric for reaction? Is it time or is it policy? If we were to use the metric of time, then democracy itself is a reaction. Were not the Athenians first to the punch on this one? I would argue that it is the nature of the policy, the fraction of people that are introduced into political participation, that makes a movement reactionary or revolutionary.
The American Revolution certainly swept away monarchy — Marx describes a new environment of antagonisms. Once we got through the struggle between the monarchists and the republicans, the remaining struggle was the struggle between capital and slavery, which developed and culminated with the Civil War. The new struggle is the working class and the capitalist class. At the end of the day, a democratic movement cannot possibly be more reactionary than a monarchist movement.
Q&A
While we have been talking about 1776, we have focused more on the political side of the Revolution; the emphasis has been on the democratic credentials of the American Revolution. How do you see the American Revolution living on in civil society?
TC: One way in which the American Revolution has been invoked is in populist resistance to what is seen as an encroaching administrative state. Trumpism is very much connected to that. It is complicated because the administrative state can enhance the pursuit of happiness. There are real problems with the administrative state, and one needs to democratize and humanize it, but it needs to be seen as an instrument for the pursuit of happiness.
The disavowal of the American Revolution on the panel seems to be a fringe opinion of the anti-liberal Left. How do you get from that view of history to organizing a mass workers’ movement when most American workers would be offended by this idea and shut off from being organized in a mass sense?
DL: American democracy is in ruins. The country is in a state of extreme crisis. The Senate is a marvel of anti-democracy; the House is gerrymandered; the Electoral College gives lily-white Wyomingites nearly four times as much clout in presidential elections as Californians. This is an atrocity. America is flamboyantly undemocratic, and any mass workers’ movement must contend with that. It has to be anti-Constitutional.
MA: We have been contending for the past 50 years with how to bring socialist ideas to the working class. We have tried to be progressive democrats. We have tried to be socialists who do not talk about socialism. My thought at this point is that we are not being as full-throated about our socialism as we ought to be; nobody follows timidity.
Benjamin Constant differentiated between ancient liberty and freedom of the moderns to criticize the French Revolution for being overly invested in the ancient rather than modern idea of freedom, which would be concerned with the freedom of society rather than the modernization of the state.[16] Have you considered this differentiation?
DL: The classical models were important but there is no doubt that the French Revolution conceived of democracy very differently. The French Revolution took this ancient idea and rapidly broke through it and created something far more radical and modern. Whereas the U.S. Constitution strengthened state rights, one of the first acts of the National Assembly was to break up provinces and turn them into uniform départments.
BS: There is a tendency to essentialize the French and American Revolutions. When we describe a “French” Revolution as opposed to an “American” Revolution and set up a binary between these two things, it is a stylized argument to try to shift people to a particular view that you have but it has nothing really to do with history. There are immanent reasons in each of these contexts for why these different views came up, the discussion of which requires a historically rooted approach. We should keep our focus on the American Revolution rather than make binary comparisons.
DL: With the partial exception of Alexander Hamilton, there was no one in America who understood democracy as a forward-moving revolutionary movement. That idea was invented by the French.
BS: Democracy is not the central concept in the French Revolution.
DL: Of course it is.
What if we just say, “the Bourgeois Revolution”? I tend to see the American and French Revolutions together. What is the legacy of the Bourgeois Revolution for the Left?
DL: France is a classic bourgeois revolution. The Jacobins had a bourgeois program based on the government taking charge of industrialization. Capitalism was a small element in America in the 1770s — it was underdeveloped. American industrialization only followed the Revolution by 20–40 years. You can say the American Revolution lay the basis for that capitalist explosion, but it really was not a bourgeois revolution in the same sense that the French Revolution was.
Something that radical Republicans pointed out at the time of the Civil War is that you could enfranchise all the enslaved people of South Carolina, and they would be re-enslaved by the majority of South Carolinians. Clearly there is something more going on than democracy.
DL: Democracy has to be redefined and revolutionized. If we conceive of democracy as a national democratic dictatorship, then of course it would not tolerate any attempt to resurrect slavery.
But what if people democratically wanted that?
DL: It would not happen because the democratic revolution would have to be made against all those forces. A revolutionary dictatorship in the 1860s would have prevented any racist resurgence. Liberals talk about democracy taking an illiberal turn. That is called Donald Trump. Trump is not a part of democracy; he is a part of democratic breakdown. The answer to Trump is true democracy, which can only be brought about by a revolutionary proletariat.
What are the stakes of these differing interpretations of the American Revolution? Are we having an arid, historical dispute? Are we disputing advertising or recruiting tactics for various political parties? Are we attempting to discipline and understand our sentiments? Or is there something that we are learning theoretically in our appraisal of the American Revolution?
MA: From a Leftist perspective, no one should just be defending the American Revolution. If these conversations about the legacy of the American Revolution are not parlayed into a conversation about how to build a workers’ republic, we are neck deep in sophistry; we are not doing anything useful.
DL: This debate is relevant to programmatic implications. Any workers’ revolution must be internationalist, and internationalism means breaking free of narrow, national traditions. If you somehow see the American Revolution as a framework for socialism in any respect, that implies that you are operating within an American ideological framework. An internationalist framework is critical of all national traditions, especially one’s own. It means dissecting the American Revolution in the most unsparing manner and pointing out all aspects of it that were reactionary.
Trotsky, in his work on the permanent revolution,[17] discussed all those aspects of Russian development that were peculiar to Russia, which, he argued, had great implications for revolutionary struggle. He went way back in Russian history and tried to show the problems that were posed by Russian history and to deal with them in as objective — scientific, but ruthless — a manner as possible. American revolutionaries must do the same thing; they must grapple head on with this so-called revolutionary past, discuss what was revolutionary about it, and demand a complete revamp, root-and-branch of American politics and institutions.
BS: I am not here to affirm or negate the American Revolution; I am here to tarry with it. The American Revolution is not to be liked or disliked. We are in it; it is here. We have to do something in it, and the question is what is possible within it. |P
Transcribed by Andrew Tan
[1] See also Noah Rogers, “‘The right enemies’: An interview with Matei Alexandriu,” in this issue of the Platypus Review.
[2] Daniel Lazare, The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996).
[3] See, e.g., Daniel Lazare, “Is the Constitution Unconstitutional?,” Democratic Constitution (August 9, 2024), <https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/is-the-constitution-unconstitutional?>.
[4] See, e.g., Daniel Lazare, “Ditch the constitution,” Weekly Worker 1489 (May 2, 2024), <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1489/ditch-the-constitution/>.
[5] Benjamin Studebaker, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
[6] Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/Jm03YkksjN4>.
[7] See John Adams to Abigail Adams (May 12, 1780), <https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond>: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” On this, see Benjamin Studebaker, “Beyond Bonapartism: Breaking statephobic thought taboos,” Platypus Review 166 (May 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/beyond-bonapartism-breaking-statephobic-thought-taboos/>.
[8] [Ancient Greek] Sensual or passionate love, etc.
[9] [Ancient Greek] (1) The love of God for man and of man for God; (2) alms, charity, etc.
[10] This phrase was included in the initial design for the seal of the United States that was submitted by Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.
[11] See Earl Browder, “What is Communism? 8: Americanism––Who are the Americans?,” New Masses, June 25, 1935, 13–15, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/browder/what-is-8.pdf>.
[12] The inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” articulated in the Declaration of Independence (1776), were a revision of John Locke’s earlier formulation of “life, liberty, and property.”
[13] Eugene Debs, “Eugene Debs’s Independence Day Address” (July 4, 1901), Jacobin (July 4, 2020), <https://jacobin.com/2020/07/eugene-debs-independence-day-address-fourth-july>.
[14] A district under a bishop’s control; a diocese.
[15] Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, ed. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024). See Tom Canel, “Go East, young Marxist? A review of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism,” Platypus Review 172 (December 2024 – January 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/12/05/go-east-young-marxist-a-review-of-domenico-losurdos-western-marxism/>.
[16] See Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns” (1819), in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28.
[17] See Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906), especially “The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development.” See also Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1930).
