No. 16
July 18, 2026
250th Anniversary of U.S. Declaration of Independence 1776
Conversations
Counter-revolution in a Period of Transition
Part 6
Counter-revolution and Peoples' Resistance Against Obliteration of History's Peoples
In this issue, TML is publishing the last part in the series of Conversations held by the Ideological Studies Centre from December 2025 to May 2026 titled Counter-revolution and Peoples' Resistance Against Obliteration of History's Peoples. Integral to the work of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) on modern definitions, this six-part series is published under the title Counter-revolution in a Period of Transition. Part 1, published July 13, was entitled Aim of Counter-revolution Is to Block Transition to Classless Society and Part 2, July 14 was Counter-revolution Is Integral to Transition. Part 3, July 15 was entitled Counter-revolution and Utilizing the Logic of History; Part 4, July 16 was The Source and Target of Counter-revolution; and Part 5, July 17 was Counter-revolution and Blocking the Peoples' Creativity as Makers of History.
People make history and because people make history they can learn from that history. It is through their struggles, experiences and resistance that people become a people, with a definite history. There is a dialectic that puts history at the centre. Trump and all the counter-revolutionary forces are attempting to obliterate that history. They are not only ahistorical, but anti-history. As part of our argument, we emphasize that the people are makers of history and that history has peoples -- history's peoples.
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. President Trump, presenting himself as a historiographer of Covenant Thesis, said that the U.S. revolution is continuing today, that he is the leader of this U.S. revolution and that, on July 4, 2026, there would be a great celebration of this current revolution.
Some people say he is the face of fascism, racism and blackest reaction. Others, presenting what they call a "peoples' history," say that 1776 was a counter-revolution. While there is evidence of counter-revolutionary actions among those opposing the British and, certainly, the U.S. Constitution is counter-revolutionary, the emphasis is flawed as it misses the aim of this counter-revolution which was to block the peoples' struggles at that time for democratic revolution.
In March, the New York Times published an op-ed and a similar commentary was published elsewhere, both talking about the U.S. empire. These items provided content pro and con empires. They said that people should read about empires, how they fall, the decline of the U.S. empire and so forth. References are often made to civil wars in ancient Rome. Analogies are made comparing what is happening today with what occurred in Rome centuries ago. Similar content was popularized at the time of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, such as by British historian and Member of Parliament, Edward Gibbon through his six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations had similar arguments, also published in 1776.
In typical U.S. chauvinist fashion, promoting what people call American exceptionalism, what is overlooked is that the counter-revolutionary Compromise of 1787 which informed the U.S. Constitution ten years after the Declaration of Independence did not prevent the U.S. Civil War following the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860.
The Compromise of 1787 put in place a bicameral Congress. This
established the House of Representatives, with state
representation based on population, and the Senate, where each
state got two representatives. People enslaved were considered
property, not human beings, and counted as "three-fifths" of a person for
representation purposes. The compromise temporarily resolved
conflict among the states in terms of how representation would be
decided and paved the way for the Constitution to be adopted.
However, it did not eliminate the threat of civil war, both in
terms of conflicts among the states and because the
constitutional compromise with the system of slave labour was left
intact. The legacy of slavery and the conflict between large
and small states, which was part of the 1787 compromise, also
persist. This is evident with Trump targeting larger states,
like California, Illinois and New York to impose presidential
authority. It is also the case that for elections, these larger
states, including Texas, dominate selections for president and
the electoral college.
The issue of representation -- who is being represented, how
voting districts are designed, what is needed for the people
themselves to be represented -- remains a key problem. Clearly for
Trump and the counter-revolutionary forces, compromise and
diplomacy for these and other matters, are also being
eliminated, further intensifying today's civil war conditions.
Lincoln's Republican Party, formed in 1854, was new. It was considered a party representing republican ideals and opposing not the institution of slavery, but its expansion. Lincoln was the first Republican elected president. He won in part because, due to the intense factionalism which prevailed at the time, the opposition was split three ways, with John C. Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas all also running for the U.S. presidency. United under one candidate, they might have won but civil war conditions, including increasing battles about keeping and extending the system of slave labour to new territories, prevented that.
What is forgotten or misrepresented in the history commonly given is that a counter-revolution was unleashed, by the Confederacy -- a war of aggression against the Republic launched by coup d'etat in various southern states, often counter to the stand of state legislatures. This was the case in Texas, for example, where there were a lot of abolitionists opposing slavery in the legislature. South Carolina seceded in December 1860 and additional southern states did so in April 1861, just a month after Lincoln was inaugurated in March. The Confederate states advanced their counter-revolution by launching their open war at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.
There are two features of the Civil War that often get ignored. One is what Marx brought out, which is that, for the first time, the right to revolution was claimed by the slave masters, not those resisting enslavement. This is what Trump is presenting when he says he is the leader of the U.S. revolution today. It is the modern slave masters proclaiming their revolt against existing state structures, institutions and boundaries.
The second feature is tearing asunder the rulers' conception of Covenant, smashing covenant arguments that the U.S. was founded on and the basis for its Constitution. The Civil War involved an attempt to eliminate the Covenant established by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, which did not prevent the war. But the effort by the Confederacy failed. The rulers north and south were able to reunite and sustain the Union, using the counter-revolution against the great upheavals of the people both during the war and Reconstruction after the war.
In addition to the Compromise of 1787, further compromises after the Civil War were also used. These included that Confederate Generals would not be charged with treason, former slave-owners would remain landowners and Black people would be terrorized, dispossessed of land and forced into becoming sharecroppers.
The smashing of the Covenants on which modern European nation-states were constituted and founded, and the very conceptions of Thomas Hobbes' Covenant Thesis is on full display today. This is seen in the kidnapping of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores and threats against others in Venezuela if they do not comply with the demands the U.S. is making on Venezuela. The kidnappings and assassinations of people at their posts, in their homes, in their schools, the aggression against Iran, the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon and more, are announcing to the world that the Covenants at the base of the European nation-state and everything it was supposed to be and do, such as prevent wars -- both civil and foreign -- are finished.
Initially, Make America Great Again (MAGA) was an effort to uphold the Covenant but that is no longer the case, as the effort failed to both mitigate the conditions for civil war at home and the execution of foreign wars using force to settle conflicts, not diplomacy or adherence to institutions created to preserve international rule of law. The U.S. Executive is brutally smashing any Covenant. It is doing so by using and expanding its police powers and obliterating domestic and international law, with Trump openly proclaiming that he only pays attention to his own morals.
It is also the case that experts in the field of international law often miss the influence of the Roman Digest, a compilation of laws that was the basis for Roman institutions and codification of laws. The Digest starts off with identifying that there are laws about persons and things. The content was incorporated into English Common Law.
One of the concepts taken verbatim from the Roman Digest is how to define a free person. A free person is defined as a person belonging to a free state. A free person contrasts with a slave person who, as a conquered being, was not considered or defined under domestic law which involves owning property, property relations, institutions upholding them, and such matters. In the Digest, an enslaved person is, in Latin, domino alieno: under the will or power of an alien force, a power alienated from the enslaved person.
The term domino was translated either as wealth or power. It took Marx to draw the distinction between wealth and power. In the Roman Digest, alien power, domino alieno, fell under the law of nations, international law, and not domestic law. The relation to other nations is international and always one of conquest or alliance.
A slave person is not part of domestic society but part of conquest. This concept is clearly behind what Trump today calls obliteration. In his vocabulary, all persons are slave persons unless he says otherwise. One could say Trump represents a cult of personality which claims to decide what is domestic and what and who is a slave and, as such, comes under domination by alien powers and wealth. It is also the case that the extreme violence and broad use of executive powers he is putting in place will also be utilized by any future president.
A second feature from the Digest is the Latin, contra naturam, against nature. This is significant in that according to the education received in public and private institutions, one is taught to repeat that Aristotle said that there are natural persons who are rational, and natural slaves. That is not the definition that was entered into law. What entered Roman law was their conception that a slave person is against nature, not natural. It is natural to have domestic society and laws and free persons in a free state. It is not natural if one is conquered; it is against nature.
A third point contained in the Digest is that these enslaved persons are subjects of that alien domination. It does not speak about the dominance of those who hold wealth and power. It is not about the status of powers. It is about the subjugation of slaves who are non-persons, without rights.
Knowledge, Outlook and Obligation
As we look at the problem of people being deprived of an outlook, one form this takes involves the arguments claiming that a body of knowledge or a given doctrine, like liberalism, are the same as an outlook. They are not. Knowledge and thinking are different from looking, observing, perceptions using the five senses.
The arguments made about liberalism after the collapse of the USSR, especially by scholars in the U.S., were End of History arguments. Everything is given as a question of doctrines, like realism, liberalism and socialism. Arguments about pluralism involving the three are given, and other "isms" beyond these three can be added. They are often called outlooks or world views. Based on this, the argument follows that people who have these definite outlooks will follow certain types of behaviours, or be compelled to do so, and thus become certain types of personalities.
This is the false argument that a doctrine, an "ism," is the same as an outlook. It is given by people active in the UN such as, for example, Michael Doyle. Doyle is considered a distinguished international relations scholar and professor at Columbia University who served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan from 2001 to 2003. He is best known within the UN for leading strategic planning, including the Millennium Development Goals and the Global Compact. He is known for providing arguments which attempt to give a definition to the intellectual development of peoples, what is behind their thinking and actions, to decide on issues of war and peace, crime and punishment. But, in the typical fashion of states formed based on a civil society with individual members, a body of knowledge that can be studied and one can learn from is then said to be an outlook. But knowledge and outlook are not the same.
Once it is accepted that a body of knowledge is the same as an outlook, there is the problem of pluralism in any type of collectivity. Not everyone shares the same opinions, especially when classes and class struggle are considerations.
The problem that presents itself with arguments based on Covenant Thesis, and its greatest weakness, including in End of History arguments, is that the terms, the words we use, serve to present evidence and the types of reasoning being used. What makes an argument reasonable is the evidence, witnesses and testimony presented. This is reflected in demands to "make your case," for example.
We are discussing types of reasoning here and the problem that both terms and types of reasoning get mixed up on purpose. Then it is argued that terms and types of reasoning can be open to interpretation. This means that an institution and laws are needed to sort out these questions.
We can say that what it means to be going through a turning point, a period of transition, is that, today, terms and types of reasoning must be questioned. You want to open a path to progress. How do you end up with arguments of obliteration and people who are representatives who do not even know who they represent? The rulers are overthrowing themselves, eliminating any basis for being held to account, which is what the peoples are demanding. They are ahistorical and anti-historical but, more importantly, they are agents of destruction and obliteration. This creates huge problems for the peoples, as there is so much destruction on the agenda by people who are pathological, like U.S. President Trump, Israel's Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of War Hegseth and U.S. Secretary of State Rubio.
Arguments are made as to whether words speak and that words speak through deeds. A question raised is, do thoughts think? Thought, and thought material of a people, takes place with the help of a brain engaged in the act of thinking. But there is no such thing as a single brain, which is what the bourgeoisie puts forward. Having civil society with its individual members is called the high point of enlightenment. Within that, people talk about the endless tragedies of bourgeois democracy. But the development of thought and thought material involves the whole -- the whole body, the peoples. It is the act of the ensemble.
A serious point to look at here is the Arabic concept asabiyyah from the 1300s. Arab scholar, historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a leader of Islamic enlightenment, wrote about asabiyyah during his travels from Spain to Syria. Asabiyyah is often falsely translated as fanaticism, tribalism and sometimes as group solidarity. But it refers to outlook, going beyond individual beliefs to how people recognize themselves as a people. Yemen's Ansarullah conducts itself on the basis of asabiyyah when standing with Gaza. It is a concept not tied to territory or a nation-state but to a conception of a people with obligations. There is an obligation to stand with Gaza. The strengthening of this conception among the peoples today is another example of Covenant Thesis unravelling.
Contending with Conceptions of "We the People"
Going back to the issue of counter-revolution in U.S. history, particularly the Civil War, we recognize that the war is often falsely presented as a division between north and south, Black against white. Whatever the characterization, what is missed is counter-revolution, by both the Confederacy and the Union, as a specific tool of the rulers when people's democratic revolution clashes with the established Constitution.
The Republican Party, headed by Lincoln, was a new party with republican conceptions like "free soil, free labor, free speech, free men." It was established not so much to oppose the system of slave labour, but rather its expansion. These conceptions of free men and free labour were rooted in Roman law. They included the republican concept that "free men" could, as the majority, also lay claim to political power -- something the Constitution was designed to prevent. The prominent politician, preacher and political scientist Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801) gave rise to arguments about what it was to be republican, including in a lengthy 1791 sermon about the "Injustice of Slavery."
In a certain sense, these republican conceptions clashed with existing English Common Law, which allows rulings to be made by judges based on precedent. For example, it is use of precedent that leads various congresspeople today to accept Trump going to war and to justify lack of Congressional action by saying, "This is just how things are done." The precedent for the President to go to war without Congressional consent has been established since World War II.
As a Republican and corporate lawyer, Lincoln had problems with the republican conceptions that he was supposed to uphold, like free labour and free men. He wanted to see the actions of Jefferson Davis, head of the Confederacy, not as war but as a criminal conspiracy. This is like the situation today where the claim is made that imperialist aggression and war are police actions, not war; a claim made about Iran and Venezuela and the hundreds killed in the Caribbean. Using terms like police actions for such use of force and extreme violence show that the rulers make significant efforts to eliminate conceptions of what is war, what is peace, what are crimes and who is to be held accountable and punished. These are the questions that Covenant arguments were meant to deal with and which led to a crisis for Lincoln.
The Constitution had to be written in the terms of a Republic as there had just been a struggle for independence against a monarchy. The Declaration of Independence itself put forward the "Right of the People to alter or to abolish" a government harmful to their interests and "to institute new Government." Constitutional arguments then and now must deal with who has this right, who is "We the people." They must deal with who has membership, their functions, the functions of the state, the political process -- in a situation where private property ownership of the minority existed against the largest faction, the people, defined as the propertyless. This was a dilemma for them, resolved both with the compromise with slavery and with the oligarchy against democracy, including providing the Office of the President with broad police powers.
Lincoln's argument was that the U.S. Constitution, because of its content on the institution of slavery, meant that he could not touch the system of slave labour. According to him, it was protected under the Constitution and was at the heart of the compromise that brought the Union, the U.S. itself, into being. This is what legal scholars today call the Republican Dilemma. The Republican Dilemma involves not only the compromise with the system of slave labour, but also the compromise with the oligarchy against democracy, against the republican concept of rule by the majority.
Lincoln hoped to deal with the dilemma by calling the counter-revolution and war of the Confederacy a criminal conspiracy. Slavery was said to be a matter involving the sovereignty of each state. The southern states were also republican states so how could Lincoln remove their property? How to justify it? To do so he had to say it was a war, which he eventually did in 1863, three years into the war. He did so by characterizing it as an international war, a foreign invasion by the Confederacy.
Under international law, the property of the foreign enemy can be confiscated. Using laws of war, he could seize enslaved peoples as enemy property. This is the content of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863) involving the seizure of "property," not the emancipation of human beings. This is also why it was limited to the states in rebellion against the Union. The hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the border states were left out of this "emancipation." These states included Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia.
For the Confederacy, if the slave masters could not conquer first and foremost Mexico and Cuba, they were facing elimination. This would be the end of this new world civilization based on the institution of slavery, based on conquest of other fully developed peoples and nations. This was on its way out, in decline. Therefore, they put forward that the issue was that the presidency and Congress could no longer peacefully co-exist. There was no longer a single federal legitimacy with a single constitution.
Lincoln gives his Gettysburg Address in 1863, where he refers to the civil war and sets the agenda to uphold Covenant -- the covenants of the states with the Union and of the multitude with the person of state and his representative, Lincoln at that time. Lincoln opens by dating his remarks not to the 1787 Constitution, but to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, with its proposition of a nation conceived in liberty with all men created equal. Then he speaks to the basis of a nation with its civil society and individual members.
For the framers of both the Declaration and the Constitution, conceived in liberty refers to independence, establishing the U.S. state independent from Britain. A state conceived in liberty has sovereignty, can make decisions, is separate and equal to other nation-states. Today the conception of liberty also involves non-interference; one is free if one's liberty is not physically blocked. The second conception, or proposition, involves the oft-repeated phrase that "all men are created equal."
There are two premises. One: to solve the problem of sovereignty it was necessary to take up the issue of liberty and independence, being separate and equal. The second deals with membership, equal members of society. According to Covenant Thesis, without these two premises whatever government is formed will fail the test of preventing civil war. If you can deal with these two issues of independence and equality, then, in the course of human events as the Declaration states, it will be the proof of democracy. As Lincoln put it, proof that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish.
Covenant was the instrument given by Hobbes in hundreds of pages, following the regicide of Charles I. Hobbes gave himself the task of giving a scientific and geometric argument against absolute monarchy and divine right, but especially against the problems raised by republican thought, including keeping the people from power while invoking the name of "we the people." The terms Hobbes used and the types of arguments he elaborated for more than one-third of his opus Leviathan were from the Hebrew Bible. Specific arguments included what we now call liberal arguments, directed toward keeping the people from power and preventing the state from entering the fire of civil war.
The U.S. Civil War was to decide if the nation was to be for the people. The general strike of the peoples enslaved, alongside all those fighting to advance the democratic revolution during the war, continued during Reconstruction. This was evident in the nationwide 1877 railroad workers' strike, followed that same year by the general strike in St. Louis. Resistance was such that headlines read that the Paris Commune (1871) was reaching U.S. shores.
The task remains today to advance this democratic revolution. Achieving this government which is of, by and for the people has not yet occurred.
Marx also spoke about these issues involving of, by and for the people. In the First International (1864), he brought out two social functions: of the people -- coming from the people, having membership; and by the people, meaning the people write their own constitution, it is done by them, they establish how society is constituted, so that it has an order that is for the people. For whom is a fundamental question addressed by the First International.
People are familiar with the quip that the U.S. is "out-Putining Putin," as the New York Times puts it. They mean that when it comes to world domination, Putin is losing. Terms like domination, elites and oligarchs are interchangeable. There is nothing wrong with talking or writing in that way. Doing so, however, should not stop one from looking at the specific terms and types of reasoning used which are important now for arguing for modern definitions and writing modern constitutions.
It is common to talk about Zionism as Jewish nationalism of some sort. But in giving the chronology, the struggle of Palestinians for freedom is put within that history created by the big powers, like the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), the Balfour Declaration, etc. Agency is always given to the big powers while the ones who are subjugated are spoken of only in relation to being dominated.
In looking in detail at the Balfour Declaration, left out are the war aims at the time. War aims were not formulated at the start of WWI; it took the war to establish them. Woodrow Wilson fought France and Britain against the self-determination of peoples, the definition given by Lenin. This is the context of the Balfour Declaration which is written by a war cabinet.
When Trump talks about obliteration, of Iran for example, it is significant that there is no war aim, just destruction, just obliteration. The executive cannot give coherent arguments for the wars. Outlook is tied to history and history's peoples. Trump and all the counter-revolutionaries want to obliterate everything. Obliteration is the face of counter-revolution today. It wears the mask of Anglo-American Covenant which it seeks to smash. The lack of aims and meaningless justifications are directed at obliterating outlook, with the aim of blocking the working class from capturing political power and vesting sovereignty in the people.
(Conversations, May 10, 2026)
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