After 1917, the global meaning of “REVOLUTION” was successfully seized by Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and their descendants.
CIVIC REPUBLICANISM did not disappear because it was defeated in open ideological combat. It was crowded out by a louder, better-funded, more institutionally disciplined international movement that claimed the entire moral and linguistic territory of “revolution,” “liberation,” and “anti-imperialism” for Marxism-Leninism and its offshoots. Black Americans did not organically choose SOCIALISM over REPUBLICANISM; it was pushed, pulled, and finally boxed in by forces that made the socialist vocabulary appear to be the only revolutionary game in town.
In the period of 1917-1930s, there is the Bolshevik Revolution leading to Comintern (1919), which declares itself the world headquarters of all revolution. It funded, trained, and disciplined national Communist parties, declaring that only the Marxist road represents scientific and legitimate revolution. Black veterans of World War I such as Cyril Briggs, Hubert Harrison, the African Blood Brotherhood began as civic republican nationalists. By the late 1920s most of them are pulled into the Communist Party of USA, because the Comintern offered money, printing presses, legal defense, and international legitimacy.
During the Popular Front era of the 1930s-1945, Communists become the most militant anti-racist force in the U.S. with the Scottsboro, Sharecroppers Union and anti-lynching campaigns. They win the reputation as the only White people willing to die alongside Black people. While civic-republican language (e.g., “armed self-reliance,” “producer republic,” “no domination”) was still being used by people like Robert F. Williams or the Deacons for Defense, it is by this time increasingly seen as old-fashioned or “petit-bourgeois” by the campus-trained New Left.
The era of the Cold War and decolonization comes into play 1945-1970, and almost every successful Third-World revolution, e.g., China 1949, Cuba 1959, Vietnam, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola fly the red flag, learned in the literature and statements of Marx, Lenin and Mao. The CIA and State Department reinforced the binary, by dividing Americans into those that are either with liberal democracy (or with “freedom”), or you are a Communist. When young Black radicals looked for models of successful anti-colonial revolution, the only ones that seem to have won are Marxist. Haiti is 150 years old and punished with isolation; the Garvey movement collapsed; John Brown is taught as a madman. So “the Revolution” begins to mean Havana, Hanoi, or Lumumba, not Port-au-Prince or Harpers Ferry.
By the 1960s-1980s, the New Left and Black Power generation is educated in universities where the entire canon of revolutionary theory is Marxist with Gramsci, Fanon (misread as Marxist), Marcuse, etc. The handful of surviving civic-republican militants such as Robert Williams, Queen Mother Moore in her later political phase and the Deacons are respected as elders but considered pre-scientific. Stokely Carmichael could quote Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence in 1966, but by 1968 he is reading Mao and calling for “scientific socialism.” The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point program is a civic-republican document at its basis emphasizing community control, armed self-defense, and plebiscite, but the rhetoric and the reading list are overwhelmingly Marxist-Leninist because that is what gives international credibility.
Then comes the collapse of the Soviet bloc from 1989 to the present, where Marxism loses its state sponsors, but keeps its cultural hegemony in the academy and activist training spaces. “Intersectionality,” “decolonization,” and “abolition” discourses are all downstream of critical theory, which is downstream of Western Marxism. The fate of Civic Republicanism is left to the fact, that now it is extinct with fragments of this heritage dispersed in a thousand directions. Civic Republicanism has no NGOs, no foundations or associations, no university departments, no well-known intellectuals of its school, and extremely few to any political and social philosophers. When today’s young activists say “revolution,” the great majority of them mean some version of democratic socialism, communal ownership, or anarchist abolition. The older tradition of the armed citizen defending the republic against domination has almost no institutional home, except a handful of libertarian-leaning or Black-helicopter right-wing spaces, which instantly makes it toxic to most Black leftists.
So, the problem here is that Marxism offered a theory of history that predicted victory. Camille Desmoulins explains in his 1789 Speech, that the history of Rome and the republic is tragic and cyclical; and corruption comes, leading to loss of virtue and the fall of the republic. MARXISM is teleological and optimistic with the proletariat seizing power and leading to utopian Communism. Young radicals prefer the story that ends with them winning. Ironically, many Marxists told Black people that race was secondary to class yet simultaneously gave Black revolutionaries more respect and agency than liberal America ever did. U.S. Civic Republicanism insisted “race-blind” civic equality and armed citizenship were possible within the American frame; and after three centuries of evidence to the contrary, that sounded naïve.
Also, because Haiti’s revolution was republican, not socialist, and it terrified the entire Anglosphere including Jefferson and both American parties, it was deliberately erased from the curriculum. When the only successful Black revolution you are allowed to talk about is erased, the civic-republican tradition loses its most powerful living example. By the 1970s every major foundation, university, and government grant for “Black liberation” work required the language of Marxism or liberal multiculturalism. There was simply no money or platform for someone saying, “We want a Black yeomanry of armed smallholders who rotate office and keep the central state weak.”
Black America did not reject civic republicanism because it was tried and found wanting; it was never given the chance to compete on equal footing after 1917. The International Left annexed the word “revolution” the way the GOP annexed the word “republican” in domestic U.S. politics. Both traditions: civic-republican and Marxist were once present in Black radicalism. Today only one has universities, publishing houses, and influencer spokespeople. The republican tradition has almost none. That is why, when a young person today says, “the Revolution,” they picture something closer to Havana or Rojava than to Port-au-Prince in 1804 or Monroe, North Carolina in 1959.
It is a historical accident of funding, propaganda, and institutional capture, and not necessarily an inevitable intellectual triumph of Socialism over Republicanism. This issue goes to the heart of the disagreement between Giuseppi Mazzini with Engels and Marx, and leftist understanding of why Garveyism failed; with the latter two viewing the Risorgimento as reactionary “bourgeois revolution” incomplete without class struggle. By the 1850s, historian Gaetano Salvemini explains in The Jacobin article “The Fight for Italian Reunification Inspired the International Left” (Nov 2021) by Anne Colamosca, socialism evolved “from the idea of a simple, cooperative form of democracy…to…class struggle” under Louis Auguste Blanqui and Karl Marx, rendering Mazzini’s vision obsolete.
The article illustrated how civic republicanism’s anti-imperial fire from republican revolutionaries like Mazzini and Garvey inspired the international Left but was crowded out precisely because it lacked Socialism’s teleological optimism and institutional muscle. Mazzini’s “ferocious hatred of the up-and-coming Marxist socialists” reflected Garvey’s clashes with CPUSA infiltrators, yet Socialists won by framing Republicanism as static, trapped in cycles of virtue and corruption versus their “class struggle” path to utopia. Post-1917 Comintern funding turned “revolution” into Leninist shorthand, sidelining Garvey’s armed republic as “reactionary.” Like Mazzini’s post-1849 irrelevance amid Europe’s labor federations, Garvey was buried by Cold War binaries with non-violent integration in M.L.K Jr. or Marxist Black Power (e.g., Carmichael), leaving no room for his yeoman republic.
Garvey’s ideas survived underground, but Black “revolution” now conjures communal ownership over civic non-domination. The Jacobin piece is a microcosm of why Garvey’s civic republicanism, like Mazzini’s held attention for a time, but couldn’t hold against Socialism’s class-infused ideology. Both proved Republicanism could mobilize millions against empire, but without addressing social misery through conflict, they were doomed to be romanticized footnotes in the march toward Marxist horizons. If Garvey had won Liberia as a true republic, “the Revolution” might still mean Port-au-Prince 1804, and not Havana 1959.
The American Minervan 
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