Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/15

 Rh obnoxious and tyrannical. In a single sentence that is all that is declared in the Declaration of Independence. We should salvage and utilize the traditions of dictatorship and revolutionary struggle that the revolution has bequeathed and that the bourgeoisie rightly rejects. There is a tradition of struggle against "tyrannical" laws, there is a tradition of struggle against a system that fetters the further development of the forces of production and the further progress of society.

And finally there is the left wing. As in the French Revolution, as in every revolution, not all of the revolutionaries are the same. The leaders of 1776 range all the way from the aristocratic Washington and the monarchical Hamilton (the Mellon of his day), thru the democratic Franklin and Jefferson and the free-thinker, Tom Paine, to the champion of the poor farmers and imprisoned debtors, Daniel Shays, who started a new revolution against the newly formed government as soon as he had helped complete the old against King George. We can say with Zinoviev:

This year, on the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American revolution of 1776 it is time that the American working-class began to "discover America" and its body of native revolutionary traditions. It is time that we "grew up" and like the youthful Lenin disputed with the bourgeoisie for our heritage. We are the revolutionaries of our day and they the counter-revolutionists. In the words of Lenin we can say: "We are definitely more consistent and truer guardians of the inheritance than you." And to the "back to 1776-ers," the Norman Thomases and LaFollettes, we can add in the words of Lenin: "To keep the inheritance by no means signifies that one must limit himself to what he has inherited."

"Back to nothing", we can answer. "We use the past to build the future, not to block the present. Forward to Communism…"

After all it is only the first American Revolution. …