• On the 250th Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, We Examine the Contradictions of the American Revolution 

• July 2, 2026, Ad hoc group of North Carolina and Florida Greens 

July 4, 1776 is accepted as the date of the independence of the American colonies from the rule of Great Britain. Ever since that date, the United States has celebrated the announcement of that separation, which was laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

Particular anniversaries of that date, 25 years, 50 years, 100 years and so forth, have added layers of significance to the observation of the date. With each passing year, decade, and quarter-century, the continued existence of the republic is held up as proof that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the following years of institutional rule under the stated principles of those documents (and subsequent law) have fulfilled the intentions of that first Continental Congress. The holiday celebrates the United States as the exhibition of the absolute highest peak that humanity can reach in human life, for liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

On this 250th anniversary of that event, the evidence for such a positive outcome is disappearing in all but empty rhetoric. Many of us are not surprised by this, but for much of the population, the 250th anniversary is a celebration of forgetting. The distance between us and the actions of the colonial rebels–two and half centuries–has dimmed the history of that revolutionary event, and of many intervening events as well. Nor do we collectively remember the colonial history of a pre-rebellion America. We do not recall that slavery accompanied English colonists almost 160 years earlier, and that other would-be conquerors brought slaves to the North American continent, and to the Caribbean and other Atlantic island nations even earlier. 

An essential part of this colonial history, also not considered by today’s celebrants, revolves around treatment of the Indigenous of the Americas. Lost in the commercial consumerist drive that marks all US holidays, indigenous peoples exist mostly in the abstract in the American consciousness. They appear as mascots for sports teams, or the operators of casinos and parks. Our military names their weaponry after tribal nations and their artifacts, and refers to opposing forces in war as the “Indians”. They are mostly present in the American mind as warlike and threatening. The genocide, the forced displacement from settler colonialism, the broken treaties, the cruel reality of the reservations, even to this day, are not acknowledged by the crowds watching the fireworks, shopping, and consuming non-nutritous, highly processed food in countless backyard parties. 

Social gains made by women, black, and queer people in the US are being erased daily in state legislatures and courts across the nation. Progress made in the recognition of Nature as an essential component of continued life for all humanity, and in protecting the natural environment from overexploitation and abuse is following a similar path. Education is underfunded, under attack, unaffordable, and is rapidly losing value in its present state. Why is this so? 

What Did the Signers of the Declaration Believe, and What Did They Intend? 

The men that sat in the Continental Congress and debated the contents of the Declaration and its ramifications were not superhuman. They represented the educated and moneyed class of their time. They would have been familiar with European history and politics. Many would have read Greek and Latin, and been educated in what is now referred to as a classical environment. They were entirely representatives of the white race, had experienced or lived through times of conflict with indigenous peoples, were male in a time when men were presumed to be superior to women, and also to both black slaves and indigenous people. Many were slave-owners, and some quite vicious in their management. Some had inherited the religious fanaticism of early forebears, others religious sceptics who were appalled by the Inquisition and tales of religious persecution. 

These men would be influenced to an extent by the writing of the pre-Enlightment scientists and philosophers, including early materialists. Ideas of the organization of critical thought, forms of government, and human social relations from writers such as Bacon, Hume, Locke, and of course the Greek and Roman philosophers would have been familiar to them. They would have recognized the idea of democracy, and compared it to the politics of the European continent, which was riven by war, sectarian religious violence, and the remains of oppressive feudal rule coming to its end, but still an integral part of European economic relations. They would have understood war, how it was conducted under traditional standards, what was required to conduct it, and, most importantly, the consequences for the losers. 

If there was any genius, any greatness in this group of white, wealthy, and propertied collection of speculators, planters, businessmen, and clergy, it was to resurrect the governing concept of some of the Greek city-states of antiquity, the idea of shared debate, discussion and agreement on conducting the affairs of a state, and then applying them to the creation of a state, or a nation, in a way that had not been used for centuries. There would not be a named individual, or small group of individuals, who would decide the course of affairs for the new nation. Nor would there be the establishment of dynastic families that inherited the right to rule as if inheriting property. Surely not.

In a supreme irony, some of this group, which by convention are often referred to as the founders, professed to admire the principles of governance of the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy. A democratic system of handling tribal and confederate affairs, elements of Iroquois governmental administration were said to have influenced the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This view has been disputed among historians and anthropologists, but in 1988, 

The US Congress passed a resolution acknowledging the influence of the Haudenosaunee League upon those documents. The irony of course is that after British defeat, and with the concession of Haudenosaunee lands (without consulting the Haudenosaunee) to the victorious Americans, the Americans would embark on a program of driving the various Iroquois tribes off their land as they pushed west across the continent. 

The founders brought into the documents of independence and government the concepts described above, but they brought with them as well their biases. Slaves and the Indigenous of North America did not qualify as rightful participants in the newly forming government, nor its decisions. As Roger Taney was to declare later about the native inhabitants, in the landmark Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v Sandford, they “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States". Taney would go on to state that “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro [sic] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” The founders beliefs about black people, and especially black slaves, were consistent with this attitude displayed eighty-one years later. This belief was not limited to black people. It was held to apply to Indigenous people. White men without property were not included in the invitation either. 

White women had more personal freedom than black people, and after the American Revolution many of the laws passed in the states undid the patently unfair discriminatory practices around inheritance and ownership of property. However, one state, New Jersey, gave the vote to white women. In 1807, the legislature of New Jersey withdrew this right. Women across the country would have to wait for the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920, to be able to vote in elections again. 

This meant that the Declaration of Independence, and the subsequent Constitution and the Bill of Rights, while containing lofty language, had been created with contradictory intent. 250 years later, the contradictions of those documents and the intent of the founders are still playing out on the political and social stage, not just of the US, but of the world. Our celebrations on the Fourth of July take place against the still present biases of the founders, which have hindered the lives of millions in the US, and made “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the privilege of a continually diminishing group of people, less than 10% of our population.

What is the Effective Legacy of the Declaration and Other Founding Documents 

When the colonial settlers of the United States treated indigenous tribes and black African and Caribbean peoples as subhumans, when women and workers without property were excluded, when native lands were stolen and the forests pillaged, they created a legacy of dispossession and destruction. This legacy appears throughout US history as public policy, enshrining our 

worst tendencies in law. It crosses seamlessly between domestic and foreign policy, where the contempt for black people and indigenous people, women, and the working poor still appears in civil and criminal law. Most citizens are uninformed and systematically misinformed, about much of this history, holding fast to the patriotic myths long drummed into our collective consciousness. 

Death, Destruction and Theft as Policy 

From the start, denying humanity to black Africans and Indigenous North Americans, the First Nations of Turtle Island, emboldened land theft and justified slavery. Indigenous stolen lands provided more than 50% of the wealth of the country, with almost 25% more being the enslaved themselves. (Red Scare, “What Indigenous People Think of the 250th.) In the process of slaughtering the American Indians, land speculators, (among whom Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were prime examples) who seized Indigenous lands by force, needed legal justification for their financial schemes. Hence, the institutions of government and jurisprudence were built to allow settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, unjust property rights law, and denial of rights—including those unenumerated in the Ninth Amendment. 

Americans today regard these histories as long past, but the structures and the tendencies have not, in large part, been corrected. The flaws built into the system remain and grow, as the darker history underlying them remains not only obscured, but is actively erased in an escalating assault on education and revision of the historical record. While this erasure is not complete, we can still point to the manifold consequences of this history, and to its influence on policy decisions. As Ned Blackhawk points out, “If we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.” (First America, “Merciless Indian Savages”.) We cannot find solutions to the problems we face today without first acknowledging our history, creating reparations, and instituting safeguards. 

Authoritarianism, legalized theft, and the view of the world as a place to be dominated and exploited remain government policy as necessary conditions for the continuation of capitalist exploitation and extraction. These authoritarian tendencies—power over people and land— institutionalized during the founding of the government of the United States have persisted through two and a half centuries. They are the backdrop for what we are experiencing today, class war, denial of rights, theft of property, defunding of social services, disenfranchisement, and the subhuman treatment of Indigenous peoples to the extreme of genocide, such as what the US government is abetting in Palestine. Reparations, land back, and right of return seem like distant dreams, as does that noble society which upholds the inalienable equality of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

The Three Fifths Compromise in the US Constitution: Dealing with Slavery as Policy 

A contradiction between the language of the founding documents and the intent of the founders appeared at the time of the inaugural Constitution. At the time, slave-holding states in the southern part of the US wanted more power in terms of the number of representatives in the forming bicameral legislature. The proportion of free persons in the north outweighed the free population in the south. Recognizing that the economic and political interests of the northern states were not aligned with those of the south, southern states wanted greater representation in Congress. They did not want to have the slave population recognized as individuals on a par with white people. 

At the time there was no organized abolitionist movement in the US, and contrary to today’s false understanding, the northern states had little to no interest in seeing slaves as humans. A compromise was reached to include in the US Constitution, in which only three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for the purposes of taxation and representation. To this day, conservative interpreters of the Constitution insist, however wrongly, that this was a loss for the slave states. (American Spectator, Feb 5, 2025.) It is clear that whatever disadvantages may have accrued in the form of increased taxation and the partial retreat on the assignment of political significance to slaves as people, southern states did gain greater representation in national affairs. They used this representation to further their political and economic goals, including the preservation of slavery, for the next seventy-three years. 

Genocide of Indigenous 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, documents how European immigrants to the Americas brought with them an ingrained, vicious contempt for the native population of the New World. From long before the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, English religious dissidents, themselves deeply conservative and reactionary, saw the Indians as an impediment to their primitive acquisition of land and resources. Unable to survive by their own efforts, they used the Indians when it was convenient, even befriending them. But as soon as their own survival was assured, they turned on the indigenous inhabitants in ways so brutal that to read of them even today, in the face of centuries of great wars and incomprehensible genocide, still shocks the mind. The habit of collecting scalps and other body parts as a means of counting the dead in war is attributed to indigenous peoples, but research shows that it was the early English settlers who started this practice. 

So, long before the Indigenous of Turtle Island became the “merciless savages” of the Declaration, the settler-colonialists emigrating from England and Europe pre-figured the behavior later attributed to native people. Their attitudes and their influence on the founders of the United States of America never waned. 

We know from the early history of the US, before and after the Constitution was written, that the Indian tribes were seen mostly as impediments to the acquisition of land. Hundreds of battles later, dozens of so-called treaties later, and after long years of forced displacement, that are still real threats to Indigenous populations unfortunate enough to stand atop desirable resources such as water and mineral deposits, the relationship of white capitalists to the Indigenous of the US is not much changed. The Revolution of 1776 was not theirs, nor for black Africans, and was never meant to benefit anybody except white, propertied and wealthy men. Today, Americans, to a great extent, celebrate a Revolution they are mostly not included in. In an affront to all that have fought, died, and organized over these 250 years to create a more just, free, inclusive, and healthy society with reciprocal relations throughout the world, the original intents of the Revolution, and its founding documents, remain as embedded in our politics and lives as ever: that white, propertied, wealthy men, without undue interference from government, may for purpose and gain, extort and exploit the entire planet, its people, lands, flora, fauna, waters, and atmosphere—and astoundingly be lauded for it. 

The Indigenous of North America are more cognizant of this disconnect than the flag-waving, military enthusiasts that will line the streets at parades across the country. Leonard Peltier, speaking from his continued house arrest after his sentence was commuted, saw nothing to celebrate on the occasion. Peltier said Native people should use America 250 to tell the truth. “We’re no longer going to celebrate a false government until the truth comes out and they apologize to everybody for what they did,” he said. “Maybe we can start all over and build a real government of freedom and equal justice for everybody.” 

The Place of Women in US Society, 250 Years On 

The topic of gender relations within different socioeconomic systems is exceedingly complex, and a short statement or summarization of the subject cannot be made without omitting critical analysis and events. Understanding the history of social interactions between genders, which invariably crosses over into understanding the place of LGBTQ+ people in our society, is the work of lifetimes. But as we trace the history of women’s roles in society, and especially from 1776, we see the rise of more contradictions, and misguided intentions, that are directly relevant to the role of women in society today. 

Engels wrote in the late 19th century of the origins of patriarchy in late antiquity in Hellenic societies. In July of 2019, Christa Mercer wrote in The Nation magazine of the contributions of Greek philosophers to the creation of social order that placed women at best in second place relative to men. We are all familiar with the centuries long relegation of women to positions of subservience in the Abrahamic religions. Millions in America flock every Sunday to pews and meeting places across the nation to hear the so-called divine interpreters of God reinforce this message in domestic relations, which then spills over into work relations, pay scales, and the expectation of unpaid labor. 

The founders would have been subject to all of these influences. It would be the height of absurdity to claim that the Declaration, the Constitution, and decades of federal and state law were not made with the idea of the inherited inferiority of women circulating in the minds of the men determining the course of American society. The great Benjamin Franklin, lauded by today’s liberals as a forward thinking contributor to modern liberal society, believed in the restriction of education of women to subjects reproducing these conditions. 

Relegating women to a second-class status was also profitable for the owning class in the newly emerging system of industrial capitalism. Women and children could perform the same labor as men, but could be said to be less productive by virtue of physical and mental inferiority. The depressed wages meant more profit for the owners of capital, and since profit is the driving force in unregulated capitalism, women’s (and children’s) second class status was now woven into the economic system. This further reinforced discriminatory social attitudes in a destructive feedback loop driving social tensions that would erupt periodically in suffrage movements and other social challenges. 

This battle was also waged by control of women’s bodies. Religion, and centuries of custom decided upon and dictated by men, placed women firmly under the control of men in social reproduction, education, and unpaid domestic labor. The contradiction and tension between the Enlightenment concept of equality, incompletely represented in the Declaration would continue to play out in US history. In the political turn of events under which we live today, there is a powerful political movement, inseparable from capitalism and reinforced by repressive religious forces, to turn the clock on the social relations of women and children in modern society back to the 17th century. These conditions could not exist without the continued, slavish subservience of the bulk of the population to the ideals and thoughts of the founders. 

Trans, Queer and Gender Fluid Persons in Modern Society 

If women and children suffer in modern society from patriarchy, capitalist use of patriarchal norms, and regimented religious repression, people in LGBTQ communities suffer more. Different societies throughout history have had different degrees of tolerance for people who do not accept or fit within the lines of heterosexual relations. In Western capitalist societies, especially in the late 20th century, there was some hope that LGBTQ people would achieve wide social acceptance and legal rights previously denied them (e.g., legal marriage, healthcare, and inheritance).

But as we have seen, on this July 4th of 2026, those gains are disappearing at a rapid pace in states whose legislatures are controlled by social conservatives (a polite way of describing religious fanatics). These attacks are carried out by first targeting one of the least represented and most vulnerable communities in the US, people that do not identify socially or culturally with the sex assigned to them at birth, and seek to transition to the opposite sex (trans persons). 

Trans people in the US have benefitted from the gains made by the LGBTQ community in general, but they are easy targets and scapegoats for religious fanatics, sociopaths, and fascists. Already struggling for acceptance in society, they are labeled as the source of moral decay in social relations and as abusers of children and unwary women. A vanishingly small proportion of the population, in conservative circles they are the perpetrators of crime and social collapse, and examples of the excesses of liberal political rule. The US is currently among the worst countries in the world in this regard. In 2026, sixty-three bills were passed in this regard, with another 804 pending. The federal government now throws its weight behind these efforts, and Christian Nationalists export this effort to other countries. 

LGBTQ people in the US are targets as well. Early victims of the weaponization of diversity, equity and inclusion used to attack any community not conforming to social conservative values, capitalism has shown its adaptability to the ruling class’s decisions by rolling back support for queer pride events in conservative states, while still pandering to consumerist behavior by queer persons. Children are unable to read books with LGBTQ themes or characters in public schools and public libraries. Conservative university boards cancel courses that might refer to the existence of LGBTQ persons in social analysis, history and politics. Conservative organizations funded by billionaires divorced from reality, whose primary concern is to reduce government scrutiny of their sources of income, promote the elimination of public education based on claims of indoctrination by LGBTQ tolerant teachers and school boards. 

All of this repressive behavior is based on concepts of equality, who deserves it and who doesn’t, that would be quite familiar to the founders. Trans, queer, and gender-fluid persons do not fall into our inherited concepts of equity, and as such are not deserving of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness in the United States. 

Class, Wealth, and Ecology at the Semiquincentennial 

From the point of view of any population, and increasingly from the point of view of the continued ability of Earth to support life, changes in our system of government and our relationship to Nature (an ecosocialist or Red Green Revolution) must be universal. For the large mass of the people who labor to support themselves, and in the process create the wealth that (unjustly) today's would-be kings rely upon, any revolution that does not put them, and all, on equal footing in terms of political and economic power does not deserve the title.

In the struggle to spread political power equitably among humanity and the living communities we are interdependent with, the principles of justice and equality—meaning real change in the conditions for living beings—have applied to numerous struggles throughout the ages. In the US, oppression is enabled by the same psychological influences and institutionalized mechanisms that oversaw the genocide of the Indigenous population and the implementation of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction US. In the white population of the US, these tendencies are reinforced through a number of paths. 

White supremacy as national policy still holds sway among too much of the population, and is easily invoked by the ruling classes as a means of sowing division among the working class. While some politicians, and people in positions of power, are quite open about their use of race (and religion) as a means to an end, the stirring of white resentment is usually accomplished through attacks on social safety nets, employment opportunities, and now the pernicious idea of reverse discrimination. Underlying all of this are two other psychological influences that have no basis in reality but nonetheless exert great influences on the American mind: American exceptionalism and the exaltation of the individual over the group. 

American exceptionalism, on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, sees its fruition in the idea that anything that America does on the world stage is justifiable simply because it is done by America, a country which by virtue of its mythical historical origins can do no wrong. Combined with a misleading anti-government, pro-individual view of one’s existence in the US—a view exploited by the ruling classes—the government itself makes foreign and domestic policy that has elements of decision making similar to what might be made by American individualists, such as “might makes right”, US policy at least since the Monroe Doctrine. This has meant that for the bulk of the people in the US, certainly the bottom 90% of the population, it would take a change of monumental proportions to address the problem of seeking equal political and economic footing with the ruling class. 

Reforms that might have been cited by some as progress towards a soft revolution promising to achieve political and economic equality on a broad basis are now relics of early and mid-twentieth century hopes. The rate at which inequality, and hence oppression, is expanding in the US and the world surpasses the Gilded Age of late 19th and early 20th century America. Reports by Oxfam, the World Inequality Institute, and numerous independent and academic researchers show that the political changes resulting from our tolerance of these economic and social conditions have reached a point where all but the most minor reforms are impossible. 

In a sort of sad karma, our acceptance of inequality has seen the legal and economic systems put in place to justify genocide and slavery become modified to produce horrendous outcomes for labor of all races and including the “exceptional and virtuously, ruggedly, independent Americans” not born into the ruling classes. All of this happens with proponents of repression using the language of equality and inclusion in very specific and fine-tuned rhetoric that intends the opposite of what it claims. 

We can add to the list of needed changes for a lasting revolution in how we perceive our relations with Nature. Despite decades of warnings, overwhelming scientific evidence,

Indigenous wisdom, and the now omnipresent signs of widespread global environmental collapse, the empire’s managers have been able to derail opposition to the use of fossil fuels, deadly chemicals, and attempts by the nations across Earth to address the consequences of global warming. Just as there appeared no perceived downside for settler colonialists to genocide native peoples, nor for corporations to bust unions to maintain CEO pay and shareholder profits, similarly the oligarchs ignore the polycrisis in favor of short term profits, while misleading the populace about the severity of the threat and their ability to manage it. 

Revolution 250 Years On and the Revolution Ahead 

An incomplete revolution has led us to our current conditions. Leaving aside the semantic and emotional issues raised by discussions of our nation’s founding, the American Revolution left in its wake too many contradictions to survive its promise For many, perhaps most Americans, the Revolution is understood as limited to the benefit of only certain “deserving” members of the population. For the undeserving members we have prisons, sub-standard healthcare and empty benches in the local park, (although municipal laws have removed even that small measure of life supporting comfort.) If the undeserving people happen to live in another country, the US will shoot, bomb, starve, or poison them in myriad ways, until they adopt the necessary attitudes of submission to the will of the extractive empire to be classed as deserving of a shadow of life. 

Let us wind back 250 years and imagine how we would start a new American Revolution today. All the elements faced by the founders are in place. We have a plethora of kings, all ready to kill each other and us at a moment’s notice. We have no representation in our legislative bodies, as the ruling classes’ money commands more political allegiance than we can muster from our limited choice of elected representatives. We are told we are overtaxed, stirring revolutionary sentiments, but not offered any real positive change for the bottom 90% of the population. In  addition to adolescent, contextless historical concepts, we now have 250 years of racial, gender, and economic inequality to address. 

If the Declaration promised humanity anything, it was the radical idea that humanity could conceive of a better way to live than with portions of the population constantly in thrall to people with money, guns, and land. Instead, it delivered those same conditions, cloaking them in soaring, emotional language that was not in line with advertised intent. A new constitution, a new declaration of independence, this time independence from want and need, independence from despoiled lands, polluted air and waters, existential threats of nuclear war and climate burning, a new truly democratic form of government, one not controlled by capital–which is our right enshrined in the existing founding documents—can be imagined free from the contradictions built into the unjust socioeconomic concepts of the founders. Everybody in, nobody out. 

We know how to do this. The way forward has been marked for us by philosophers, scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and keepers of Indigenous knowledge. It has been illuminated by environmental activists, protestors, students of political economy, and labor organizers. The scope of what is needed is not beyond us, provided that we work together in a new democratic

society, one that sets aside the inadequate institutions bequeathed to us in 1776. This new form of organizing human production and human relations will be socialist and environmentally aware, a Red-Green revolution that will not reject action for the welfare, nor eschew knowledge. The tiny minority, who now control governments over much of the planet, have no place in a world order that actually embodies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the masses of the people and living beings of Earth. 

Because of the nature of the world bequeathed to us, this new government will be rooted in class struggle. It will abolish the twin pillars of capitalism, private property, and wage labor without worker control.. It will also fundamentally change our relations with Nature and with each other. It will change how we view and react to the conditions under which we labor today, with an emphasis on informed action that produces broad and lasting benefits for the bulk of the population. Everybody matters. 

In this process, we must not overlook the evils of the past in creating this new world—entire nations and cultures paid and are paying a heavy price due to the contradictions of the incomplete American Revolution. The demands of Land Back, reparations, and equal rights, reveal a new revolution, socially and environmentally just, much wider and far more robust than the original. And we have an example, the 250 year old Declaration of Independence. 

We the People will replace the intentions and social biases under which it was crafted with a new, non-contradictory structure for social relations and institutions that will not bear the rotten fruit of inequality, racism, slavery, genocide, lust for property, and environmental degradation. These new, vastly more robust creations, carrying the gene of widespread democratic participation and decision making–true popular sovereignty–will form an impenetrable hedge against authoritarianism, militarism, and capitalism with its insatiable imperialist threats the world over. Wherever you are, it is always the season to plant seeds of this new revolution for abundant, thriving life. This year’s July Fourth holiday is an opportune moment.