Lenin on the American Revolutions

"The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars," Lenin wrote in his letter to the American Workers in 1918.

Lenin saw the American Revolution of the 18th Century as anti-colonialist: "That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these 'civilised' bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world."

At the same time, however, the American Revolution was a capitalist revolution. Over the course of a century, as Lenin remarks, American capitalism had matured into an imperialist power. It was occupying the Philippines and sending troops to Russia to overthrow socialism.

The American Civil War of the 1860's was also a revolutionary war in Lenin's opinion: "The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the 'destruction' of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!"

The American Civil War was revolutionary because it put an end to slavery: "for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war."

In his letter, Lenin predicts that American workers will side with the Russian workers rather than with the American capitalists. He calls attention to the great American socialist Eugene Victor Debs, who ran for President of the United States while sitting in prison for opposing World War I (he received a million votes). Lenin quotes Debs that he would rather be shot than vote credits for the "present criminal and reactionary war" and that he knows of "only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery."

In declaring their own Declaration of Independence from French colonialism in 1945, the revolutionaries of Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh, began by quoting from the American Declaration of Independence, written in 1776. The Declaration is one of the great revolutionary documents of all time, emphasizing the permanent Right of the People to overthrow unjust governments: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles ... when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

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