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Americas Revolutionary Heritage

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There are a lot of writers of history who claim to be Marxist. Most of them are academics that simply see Marxism as an angle for them to hold onto cushy university jobs.
This is the most important work of American history by a real Marxist. George Novack was a real Marxist, a fighter to build the real struggles for workers, Blacks, women, Latinos, and other oppressed in the world. Like a real Marxist, like Marx, he worked not on gaining a university chair, but in fighting to build an international revolutionary movement of Socialist Workers. He fought to free the Scottsboro Boys, he worked directly with Leon Trotsky, to expose the crimes of Stalin's Moscow trials, he defended worker militants who would not succumb to FDR's war drive, he worked to publicize the ideas of Che Guevera, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and he was a key figure in the struggle to expose the FBI's Cointelpro. He fought this capitalism for 50 years!!!
This is real Marxist history because as a fighter, Novack understood the real lives, the real struggles, the real history of all the American revolutionary fighters in this history and many besides. That is why this book is not just a nice look at our past, but a tool workers, youth, intellectuals, not just in the USA, but around the world can use to fight for a future where the world is ruled by working people and farmers, not by the filthy rich.

I first read this book while taking U.S. history in high school. A friend recommended it as an antidote to the required text. I am not exaggerating when I say this book saved me from emerging from that course muddled in confusion about this country's past. Now that I have become a teacher I rely on it.

Recently a colleague criticized the U.S. history textbook currently used in our school for giving too much prominence to Crispus Attucks. This African American sailor escaped from slavery and later became the first to fall under a hail of British bullets in the Boston Massacre of 1770. She complained the four paragraph biography and picture of him in the school textbook was "multiculturalism run amuck." Thanks to what I learned in America's Revolutionary Heritage I was able to answer her by explaining that, on the contrary, it was Attucks and thousands of ordinary people like him -- too often dismissed as "the rabble" -- who were decisive in the making of the first American revolution. Novack shows how when the well-to-do colonialists, the merchants and plantation owners -- the ones most often featured in the writing of U.S. history -- waffled on independence from Britain, it was the servants, sailors, small farmers, carpenters, day laborers and mechanics who stood fast and pushed the movement forward.

Malcolm X once said, "Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research." An understanding of our history can be a great weapon in the fight for social justice. This book was written as such a tool for the "rabble," the modern-day Crispus Attuckses, to arm them with an awareness of their power as the unsung heroes, the true shapers of history.

Do you know why the capitalist rulers broke virtually every promise to Native Americans as they waged genocidal wars against them? Who made the American Revolution? How did this great liberation struggle give way to the solidification of slavery? How did the slavocracy rise to become a world power, only to meet defeat at the hands of the industrial capitalist class, which proceeded to enforce brutal apartheid-like conditions on freed Blacks? How did the U.S. monopolists rise to their position as the world's mightiest-and last-empire? This book gives the scientific answers workers need to know.If not available from Amazon, booksfrompathfinder will have it--click on "new and used" near the top of the page.

A lively and very informative collection of writings on U.S. history-- scientific, factual explanation of how and why things happened as they did. George Novack was a leading Marxist political activist and writer on philosophy, history and politics. These articles aim to help us understand events so as to learn from the past to organize to change society today.

The book takes up the fight for independence and the 1776 revolution, slavery and the genocidal wars against Native Americans and their role in the development of U.S. capitalism, the rise of Big Business monopolies, the capitalist two-party system, and the emergence of the United States as an empire-building world power. I found particularly useful the explanation of political and social forms that are often presented almost as divine wonders (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the so-called "system of checks and balances," etc.) and their actual roots in the particular development of a class divided society on the North American continent. And particularly inspiring the stories of the revolutionary fighters who struggled against the misery, oppression and barbarity of this rising capitalist society, including Tom Paine, Mercy Otis Warren, John Brown and Martin R. Delaney.

I'd recommend reading this along with the two-volume series Revolutionary Continuity by Farrell Dobbs that traces the complicated and persistent efforts to forge a revolutionary working class movement in the United States from 1848 through 1922.