1. July 4th celebrates the Declaration of Independence in the United States. Marxists view the Declaration as:
a. A fake document written by a slaveholder;
b. A decisive moment in history declaring and advancing a bourgeois (capitalist) democratic and anti-colonial revolution;
c. A call to abolish the monarchy and establish a peoples government;
d. An attempt to compromise with the British empire.
2. July 14 celebrates the fall of the Bastille and the beginnings of the French Revolution in France. For Marxists July 14 was:
a. The beginning of the French New Wave;
b. The beginning of the anarchist movement;
c. The beginning of a bourgeois (capitalist) political revolution against an absolutist monarchy and a feudal aristocratic landlord class;
d. The result of U.S. spies plotting revolution in France.
3. In Cuba, July 26th, celebrates:
a. The opening of the Havana Hilton;
b. The Cuban government’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA);
c. The removal of U.S. Marines from Cuba;
d. The failed 1953 uprising against the Batista dictatorship which was a harbinger of the later successful Cuban revolution.
4. Those who see revolutions in terms of straight line victories should remember the month of July also saw:
a. the defeat in revolutionary Russia (1917) of the Bolshevik led rising against the provisional government;
b. the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile in 1973;
c. the overthrow of the Communist led government of Afghanistan in 1992;
d. the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship after the Reichstag fire in 1933.
5. Tom Paine’s writings were an influential force in both the American and French revolutions, serving to mobilize masses to support the former and to defend the latter from its international enemies. In these writings Paine:
a. Challenged the religious and secular rationales for monarchy and aristocracy;
b. Defined as universal rights what rulers then called privileges and today “entitlements;”
c. Defended the revolutions from external and internal enemies while opposing slavery in the U.S., the terror in France, and other destructive institutions and practices of revolutionary states and societies;
d. All of the above.
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