Pip: July Fourth, and somewhere a pseudo-left is writing a pros-and-cons list about the Declaration of Independence — which, to be fair, is one way to spend a holiday.
Mara: freerein61 has a sharply argued case for why that approach fails, and it goes straight to the question of how the left should read 1776 — not as mythology, not as indictment, but as a world-historical turning point whose democratic stakes are very much alive in 2026.
Pip: Let's start with the Revolution itself, and what a Marxist defence of it actually looks like.
The American Revolution and the Stakes of 1776
Mara: The post opens a debate that is not really about history at all — it is about whether the left has the analytical tools to defend democratic ideals at a moment when those ideals are under direct authoritarian pressure.
Pip: The argument against the pseudo-left rests on a specific methodological charge, and the post quotes David North to crystallise it: "Calling the founders hypocrites does not explain why a revolution happened, why the Declaration gained significance beyond their intentions, or why its words resonated with abolitionists, enslaved people, workers, socialists, and civil rights activists."
Mara: What that means in practice is that listing the Revolution's exclusions — enslaved people, women, Indigenous peoples, the propertyless — while accurate, does not constitute analysis. It substitutes moral inventory for the question of historical causation and consequence.
Pip: The post traces what the Revolution actually was: a break in the global system of absolutist monarchy, one that preceded and helped ignite the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American independence movements. Tom Paine's claim that the cause of America was the cause of all mankind was not rhetoric — it was a description of an ideological rupture of world-historical scale.
Mara: The post also takes on the Socialist Worker article directly, describing its method as swinging between praise for the Revolution's radical aspects and criticism of its shortcomings, then landing on a vague moral call to make its promises true — without naming which social forces would do that work. The post calls this, pointedly, "political tourism through the past."
Pip: And the stakes are not abstract. With democratic institutions under pressure and the executive branch openly entertaining authoritarian governance in 2026, the post argues that abandoning 1776 as an enslaver's conspiracy effectively surrenders the language of popular sovereignty to the right.
Mara: The post's conclusion is direct: the democratic principles of 1776 cannot be fully realised under capitalism, and the working class must defend that legacy not as myth but as the unfinished business of universal emancipation.
Pip: Which is, at minimum, a more useful July Fourth position than a pros-and-cons list.
Mara: The core argument is that historical materialism and democratic principle are not in tension — the Revolution's contradictions are the reason the struggle continues, not the reason to dismiss it.
Pip: More of that argument next time, presumably.
A Trumpet of Sedition 