The declaration of hypocrisy tradition of exploitation

July 4 marked the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, celebrated with the classic pomp and circumstance. The celebration was partly disrupted by the oppressive heat and the even more oppressive late-night, jingoist ranting of #47 in Washington. 

Surrounding this semiquincentennial is the false claim of 250 years of “democracy” built on the corpses of millions of oppressed people in the Global South and here in the U.S. Many might claim that the atrocities being committed by the ruling class today would even horrify the so-called “Founding Fathers.” 

This claim is ironic, however, because those same “Founding Fathers” laid the cornerstone of the very playbook the imperialist ruling class uses today.

To understand how this happened over the last 250 years, one has to look at the history, starting with the hypocrisy of both the “Founding Fathers” and the Declaration of Independence (DoI) itself. 

The roots reach back beyond any “Founding Father.” Back to the 1600s when investment in the colonies first began, settler colonists came to places like Virginia and Massachusetts, where through violence, the genocide of Indigenous people and exploitation of indentured servants from Europe and enslaved and kidnapped African people, they planted the seeds that the founders would later cultivate into the machinery of state terror we know today. 

The settlers, aided by the emerging capitalist class through companies like the Royal African Company, brought countless kidnapped Black people to the colonies, either seized directly from Africa or already kidnapped by the Spanish crown and enslaved in the West Indies before being sold elsewhere.

Settlers also brought indentured servants, who due to the material conditions imposed by the propertied class, signed contracts binding them into forced labor until the term expired. Contrary to the false narratives pushed by reactionaries and the establishment alike, these poor white workers were not enslaved in the way Africans were, nor did they face the same brutality. Still, Indigenous peoples’ societies were destroyed, and they along with enslaved people and indentured servants together formed the basis of the proletariat here in what would become the United States. 

Nearly all the “Founding Fathers,” by contrast, were property owners, both of land and enslaved people. They opposed liberation for any of these exploited people. They promoted the theft of Indigenous land, with many backing westward expansion as one of the underlying motives for “Revolution.”

In his book “The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America,” historian Dr. Gerald Horne makes the case that George Washington and other “Founding Fathers” hoped to profit from theft of Indigenous land, but they were blocked by the British crown, which pursued other diplomatic strategies.

Horne argues that the enslavers in the U.S. feared that England was drifting toward abolition. These enslavers included Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Patrick Henry and others. Even John Adams, who with his son John Quincy Adams were the only two presidents of the first 12 not to have owned enslaved people, worked as a lawyer defending the rights of slaveholders in Massachusetts.

When the “Revolution” began in 1776, the DoI was signed in Philadelphia by so-called revolutionaries who borrowed the language of British philosopher John Locke to lodge their grievances against King George III and declare independence. What matters here is that Locke himself was both a supporter of and investor in the Royal African Company, one of the largest institutions responsible for kidnapping Black people. 

Locke defended slavery directly in his “Second Treatise of Government,” writing that captives “taken in a Just War” were “by the Right of Nature subjected to the absolute dominion and Arbitrary Power of their Masters.” Locke also helped draft South Carolina’s slave codes, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669, which declared that “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” Beyond this, he supported the genocide of Indigenous people and held open disdain for the workers.

This same chauvinist language was written into the DoI, the cornerstone of the U.S. Empire we live under today.

If Locke showed us the ideological rot at the foundation, Thomas Paine showed how the revolutionaries treated even their own when it became inconvenient. Paine’s magazine, “Common Sense,” did more than perhaps any other single text to galvanize popular support for independence. His writings on equality and the rights of the people began to stir the masses more than most of his fellow revolutionaries were comfortable with. 

Even before his fallout with the ruling class, Paine’s colleagues were already uneasy, as his rhetoric of liberty and equality was landing among the most oppressed people in the colonies, the very enslaved and dispossessed masses that men like Washington and Jefferson were profiting from owning. Revolutionary language was useful for rallying colonists against the crown, but at the same time, it was dangerous the moment it threatened to be taken at face value by those the founders had no intention of liberating.

It didn’t matter that Paine had done more than almost anyone to popularize the cause of independence. Questioning the emerging Washington myth was treated as betrayal, while the man himself faced no such reckoning for his role in enslavement and land theft. 

Class oppression breeds revolutionary struggle

Bourgeois historians would have us believe that after a revolution, the class antagonisms were resolved, and these “ benevolent” men simply governed. In reality, the founders continued the same tradition of exploitation, genocide, enslavement and robbery against the working class, leading to the Shays’s Rebellion of 1786 (an anti-rich uprising against high taxes in Massachusetts). 

In its aftermath, the establishment only tightened its grip, laying the groundwork for the modern military apparatus that would go on to enforce the ongoing kidnapping of Black people and the suppression of popular uprisings.

So how does this connect to us today? What the billionaire class is doing in 2026 is an extension of what was done in 1776, in 1789 [U.S. Constitution ratified], in 1968 [suppression of Black rebellions after Dr. King’s assassination]: the continued exploitation of the proletariat, carried out with open pride even as they commit crime after crime against humanity.

This same kind of brazenness was seen in Trump’s own words when asked if he was worried about inflation: “Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when talking about Iran, they can’t have nuclear weapons. I don’t think about America’s financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think one thing, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” (cbs.news, May 12)

This is the same type of rhetoric the founders themselves used. George Washington, responding to Shays’s Rebellion, wrote: “You talk, my good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. … Influence is not government. Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.” 

In other words, Washington wanted a state apparatus that could use force to protect and expand the property of the owners of land and enslaved people.

So, what do we do while the capitalist class unleashes terror against the people, not only here in this decadent country but against our comrades in the Global South, who pay the price for fighting for liberation and self-determination ? We organize. 

We educate ourselves and each other on the true nature of this fascist state, built on the backs of our oppressed siblings. Instead of arguing over who leads the struggle, we must show solidarity with our siblings in the Global South waging real revolutionary struggles, not hollow ones like those in 1776.

Only through this action can we defeat a class with hundreds of years of tradition of exploitation and terror, because we hold the tradition of revolutionary struggle and solidarity, which will triumph over the billionaire ruling class.