“Liberals” and “conservatives” both tell us that the U.S. Constitution is there to protect the working class and middle class from oppression. As Jerry Fresia’s Toward an American Revolution — Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In a word, the Constitution was intended to be and always has been an instrument of the capitalist class to protect its wealth from former slaves and the rest of the working class. It ensures power over the propertyless. Initially it protected the slaveowners from the northern bankers and manufacturers. The book is now almost a quarter century old, but is still very relevant and an easy read.  

Today, there are numerous executive orders and laws, that pretend to protect us from terrorism. They permit increased wiretapping and electronic surveillance. They allow anyone the government chooses to be held in extended arbitrary detention without trial. They carry out military tribunals with no rights of appeal, and many other forms of governmental oppression.  

Constitution’s Purpose: Protect Profits 

But workers cannot appeal to the Constitution for protection from these orders and laws, since, as Fresia shows, they are all completely consistent with it. He shows that the very intentions of the men who wrote the Constitution were to protect owners of profit-making property from the working class.

Furthermore the Constitution was sneaked through by the slavocracy over the anticipated objections of certain state legislatures whose populations, fresh from a war of liberation against the British aristocracy in 1787, were up in arms over the even greater oppression that they faced at the hands of domestic property owners.  

The first 10 amendments of the Constitution adopted in 1791, the Bill of Rights, is often touted as a guarantee of freedom from oppression by the government. The Bill of Rights, however, does not even address the right of participation in government, only protection from it, and only for capitalists at that. And there is nothing that protects us from our bosses.  This “afterthought” to the Constitution took four years of arguments in Congress before it was even passed. Lincoln’s famous claim that this is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” was then, and continues to be, a bald-faced lie.

Fresia gives detailed proof that supports Marx’s and Lenin’s demonstration that all states (governments) serve only the interests of the class that rules. Meanwhile they drown the interests of the oppressed and exploited (literally, in the case of New Orleans Hurricane Katrina). For example, the authors of the Constitution, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison (first, third, and fourth U.S. presidents), owned vast amounts of property, including hundreds of enslaved Africans. He shows how they designed the Constitution to protect themselves from rebellion by those workers who slave to generate the profits — whether through chattel or wage slavery. 

Racism: Bosses’ Insurance Policy vs. Rebellion 

Each U.S. President, including Obama, belongs to a long and dishonorable line of accumulators  of wealth who display total contempt for workers — most particularly, black and Latino workers — generated by a fear of losing this profit-making property. Murderous racism is no accident. It was and is designed as an insurance policy against united rebellion by the oppressed and exploited.  

In order for the ruling capitalist class to avoid having to resort to armed force on a daily basis to maintain this oppression, as they have done on many occasions in the past, they inserted a deceptive Preamble to the Constitution, that all U.S. school children are forced to memorize. It starts with “We the people,” a term that lacks class consciousness and links workers to their oppressors. 

Fresia brings it all up to date with the secret operations of the CIA and private mercenaries who assassinate, train in torture techniques, and otherwise blaze a trail throughout the world to secure profits for U.S. corporations. He shows how the Constitution encourages and protects the rights of these secret operators to carry out this world-wide terrorism, and protects the rights of the government to wage war for oil and gas in the Middle East and kill millions in the process.

Pacifism: An Achilles’ Heel for Protest Movement 

He also shows, significantly, how the non-violent and peace-directed approach of most modern protest movements prevents effective opposition to the ruling class. 

In summary, the book helps destroy the illusion that somehow things have gone drastically wrong in the last 200 or so years. The fact is that things have been drastically wrong for the great majority of us right from the start. The major weakness in the book is that Fresia never addresses the fact that the only solution to this problem is a revolution of the working class for an egalitarian communist system all over the world. But for the alert reader this conclusion is all but inescapable. PLP is organizing just such a movement of workers worldwide. Join the fight!