In Defense of 1776: Towards a Concrete Position on the American Class Struggle
Noah Khrachvik
Abstract
This article, In Defense of 1776: Towards a Concrete Position on the American Class Struggle, offers a Marxist-Leninist rejoinder to Paul Cockshott’s The American Oligarchy, arguing for a dialectical rather than metaphysical understanding of the American Revolution and its enduring relevance to class struggle in the United States. Noah Khrachvik contends that the Revolution of 1776 was not a conservative or merely bourgeois event but a historically necessary and progressive anti-colonial revolution that broke the fetters of British imperialism and established the first bourgeois republic — laying the material groundwork for future proletarian struggle. Drawing on Lenin’s overlooked 1918 “Letter to American Workers,” the writings of William Z. Foster, Herbert Aptheker, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the article situates 1776 within the broader, world-historical process of revolutionary development rather than judging it through abstract comparisons to later revolutions. Khrachvik critiques the “counting of characteristics” approach in Western Marxist analysis, emphasizing instead the Marxist method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete. By applying Mao’s On Contradiction, the paper demonstrates that the American Revolution resolved the principal contradiction between the emerging U.S. bourgeoisie and the British Empire, creating the conditions for subsequent contradictions — the slave question, Reconstruction, and the modern re-proletarianization of the American middle class — to emerge. In reaffirming Lenin’s call for democracy for the working class, Khrachvik concludes that the revolutionary task today is to actualize the unfulfilled promises of 1776 within a socialist framework.
Keywords
American Revolution, anti-colonialism, Marxism–Leninism, class struggle, dialectical materialism, Noah Khrachvik
