1. THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS Under the dominion of the Roman Empire the economy had developed in Italy almost to the threshold of capitalism. But the military and political collapse of this world power meant at the same time -- as result and cause in one -- the end of the economic development. What followed was reversion to earlier primitive economic forms and centuries-long stagnation. Only the crusades brought back the impulse to new development. Conceived as raids which were to open up the orient with its treasures to the conquering pressure and avarice of western freebooters and adventurers, they introduced for the following period a chain of very successful trade connections, of which the North Italian states became the bases. Via Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, the merchandise found its way on ancient army and trade routes to Nuremburg, Augsburg, Ulm, round from there out to the north and north-west, especially to be transported towards Flanders and Brabant. In connection with this grew up, in Italy first, an indigenous production of goods, which provided for exchange of commodities ; the sudden impetus given to the money economy, led to the foundation of banks of exchange and to the concentration of finance capital in the hands of a few families. The springtime of modern capitalism set in. Its full development was however interrupted and disturbed by the advance of the Turks in the Near East and the discovery of the sea route to the East Indies. The traffic with the orient was cut off ; a total displacement of the trade routes occurred. The bulk of the commodity exchange between east and west shifted from Italy to Portugal. The Italian states became poor and declined ; their Renaissance culture perished ; the attempts to attain national unification on the basis of economic unity, through the chaos of the struggles between patrician families and state republics, stopped in the early stages. As no real bourgeoisie, which had learned to recognise itself as a class in the modern sense, existed, it also stopped short of a centralised assertion of capitalist interests on a large scale, short of any independent economic and state establishment over the surrounding dependencies of aristocratic dynasties and city guilds, short of a bourgeois revolution, which would have brought about a fundamental break with the old order of things and set up a new economic and social system. In Portugal and Spain capitalism shot up like a hot-house plant from the same soil, which was abundantly fertilised with the riches of newly discovered continents opened up to boundless exploitation. But the favourable economic situation found for itself no state power which would have developed from its political task and would have grasped the essence of the capitalist element. The Court, schooled and directed towards territorial internationalisation as a result of marriage, inheritance and conquest, saw itself, if it wished to safeguard its interests, bound to the sole international power of its time, the Catholic Church. This in turn perceived in the state power the surest defender of the faith, which was basically only the ideological armoured shield for its economic interests, anchored in feudalism. Thus Emperor and Pope, state power and church, were present in the Inquisition, which raged against the heretics whose unbelief only formed the pretext for the method of confiscation of goods, high fines, legalised robbery and systematic combat of the awakening bourgeois class, bearer of a new economic principle. The movement of the Comuneros, in which the self-consciousness of Castilian towns had risen up, was smothered in blood ; the hopeful blossoming of the textile industry ended in the chaos of a crisis from which it never recovered ; as representatives of the early-capitalist epoch there remained behind only crowds of lumpen-proletariat, who populated an impoverished country, ruined towns and desolate wastelands. The strength of the bourgeois class, loaded suddenly with riches which it dissipated, but just as suddenly pushed into the abyss of poverty, had not found expression in a bourgeois revolution. The maritime commerce which formed numerous bonds between south and north had established in Bruges and later in Antwerp large depots for the North and Baltic Sea shipping. Soon the Netherlands were interpenetrated with capitalism, central to the entirety of European trade and the great reference point of all nations. The bourgeoisie, grown prosperous and conscious of its worth, held on to what it acquired and was determined to defend property and the right of property under all circumstances and against every danger. This danger came from Spain when Philip sent the dreaded Alba to the Netherlands in order to secure the continuation of the Spanish crown by plundering the capitalist riches. Under pressure of the danger, the Netherlands bourgeoisie welded itself into the compact unity of a class capable of resistance. The bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands had no aggressive character. It is much more a heroic resistance struggle against an enemy power invading from outside, more a national defence than a social confrontation. But precisely in the awareness of common economic interests, in the alliance for national action occasioned by it, consisted an important factor for the consolidation of the forces whose sum total was capitalism. The bourgeois class of the Netherlands triumphed over the might of the Spaniards because it stood on the ground of a more developed and more viable economy -- that's understood. But as it triumphed, the combination into a new national community was accomplished, and political freedom was proclaimed. The strong economic potency lived and developed with national and political vigour. The shower of sparks from the Netherlands revolution had set fire to the decaying structure of the English feudal economy. The change to the capitalist economic method proceeded very swiftly ; trade spread its net over the seas ; domestic industry took up all the liberated energies of the impoverished peasantry ; big trading and industrial centres with depots, warehouses and counting-houses, mills and banks, wharves and overseas companies were already growing up. And in the parliament of estates, the bourgeois class won an important position -- after the other classes. For the first time in world history the Parliament in England became the arena for the fighting out of bourgeois-capitalist interests. Crown and money-bag, royal power and burghers' will, exploded at each other in the fiercest and most embittered quarrels. The king clung to prerogative and privileges, monopolies and tax-raising, highest power of command and Divine Right ; the bourgeoisie with total energy and obstinacy stood up for freedom of trade and competition, security of property and fruit of enterprise, free play in energies, markets, profit. In order to break the reactionary power of the crown, the Parliament under Cromwell organised an army which, after it had destroyed the monarchy, at once set about securing private property through suppression of the Levellers, and winning in Ireland and Scotland a greater Britain for capital's need to expand. Even when the bourgeoisie, dependent on the support of the military, could not prevent the return of the monarchy, it divested it of all real power in affairs and questions of economic life and reduced its existence to the luxury of a decorative accessory, which it could accomplish nolens volens. [1] In the English revolution was demonstrated the entire strength and determination of the bourgeois class, already grown economically firmly rooted and politically independent, which smashes old traditions as soon as they become a hindrance to it, recognises no sentimentality, knows exactly what it wants and shrinks back from no step which its interests order it to take. The most spectacular of all bourgeois revolutions -- the "Great Revolution" -- took place in France. It is without equal in its élan, its class character and its historical import. The historiographers see in it the landmark for the beginning of the modern period, of the bourgeois epoch proper. A general-staff of the most outstanding minds had ideologically prepared the revolution, which had become inevitable through the catastrophic breakdown of the feudal system under Louis XIV and his successors. Montesquieu's "L'Esprit des Lois" provided the building-stone for the foundation of the later revolutionary constitutions ; Rousseau in his "Social Contract" sketched the picture of a new condition of society ; the Encyclopaedists advocated with much wit and fervour the "transformation of the general mode of thinking" ; Voltaire destroyed the prestige of traditional authorities and propagated the new precepts of a natural morality ; Sièyes established with cogent logic and stirring eloquence the political claims of the 'Third Estate'. And while the mass of petty bourgeois and workers did the rough work, while they stormed the Bastille, marched to Versailles, seized the Tuileries and dragged the king to the scaffold, the bourgeoisie, according to the intentions of their political leaders and intellectual mentors, built up the edifice of a new state, which was to become for them a comfortable residential palace ; for the proletariat a hated militarily-secured fortress. All attempts to obtain for those cheated of the fruits of the revolution a voice within the new order were bloodily repulsed : Marat, the Hebertists, Danton and finally Robespierre -- the head of the Republic of Virtue having become inconvenient -- fell by the wayside. "The thieves have won !" cried Robespierre on being arrested -- in fact, the bourgeoisie, greedy for booty, came into power. The petty bourgeoisie were burdened with taxation beyond their means, the proletariat was refused the right of coalition. Freedom and equality of franchise disappeared under the brutal fraud of the Two-Chamber system. Baboeuf's desperate attempt to rescue the betrayed communism, even at the eleventh hour, ended on the scaffold. Instead Napoleon sprang from the bourgeoisie as the hero who was to bring them the garland of glory and material success from the heavens. They were going to produce, sell, earn, conquer the world market, rake in wealth. Capitalism was to triumph. Thus the Emperor Bonaparte became the latest and essential executor of the will to power, economically based and politically established, of the bourgeoisie. The line of the bourgeois revolutions, which reached its high point in France, took a sudden downward turn in the German Revolution of 1848. The capitalist development begun in the Middle Ages, which had received impetus and nourishment from the Eastern and Levantine trade of the North Italian towns and had radiated its ideological reflections in the Reformation, had slowly died away with the shifting of the trade routes and finally expired completely. Feudalism had struck roots again ; with the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years' War the people had been so thoroughly bled that they bore the yoke of blackest reaction for years with dumb submission. Around 1800 the dominant form of manufacturing was still petty handicrafts. Where capitalism had gone over to production, it prolonged a miserable existence in domestic industry or in state manufactures under the police baton of mercantile regimentation. Not until Napoleon opened the eastern markets by force of arms to the acquisitiveness of his capitalist bosses, but especially when he decreed the continental blockade, did a current of fresh air enter the dull and narrow Prussian-German servants' hall. Soon machines were clattering, factories grew up, and in Rhineland, Saxony and Thuringia a great industry developed. The bourgeoisie began to awaken as a class and to announce its political demands. But seemingly everywhere crown and nobility as representatives of the feudal system stood obstructing its path. The call for a constitution which would suit the claims of the bourgeois class was answered by the Hohenzollerns with persecution, treachery and provocative scorn. Finally, the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 produced as a weak echo the German Revolution. The circumstance that the definitive impulse for a rising against obsolete conditions and privileges came from outside and found a bourgeoisie which, timid and politically innocent, had not acquired the determination of a revolutionary class, had as a consequence that the movement was not adequate to smashing the existing bases of the state and creating a unified state with republican forms in accordance with the interests of the ascending capitalist economy. The German bourgeoisie, achieving meagre success, showed itself content with half freedoms, lame concessions and rotten compromises. It abandoned the leadership of the revolution to a clique of confused and rival ideologists, while the pillars of the industrial development, frightened by the class goals vigorously placed on the agenda by the French proletariat, quickly fled back into the wide-open arms of the princely reaction. Indeed, when the June battle in Paris had shot down the fighting proletariat and the reaction breathed freely again, to raise its head more boldly than ever, in Germany even these meagre gains were again lost by the bourgeoisie. Political ambitions were renounced, people contented themselves with the business of profit-making and went on living in the old servility. In the end it was Bismarck who helped the bourgeoisie towards its historic role by means of Prussian domestic power politics. On the way to a German unified state under Prussian hegemony, which offered the rapidly growing capitalism a large market and opened up new possibilities of development, he knocked Austria out of the running as a political competitor in 1866 ; in 1870-71, France as an economic one. With the right to vote in the Reichstag, he granted the bourgeoisie a political voice. At the head of the state he set a half-absolute empire, a symbol for the compromise arrived at between feudal power and bourgeoisie, crown and moneybag. When Germany collapsed after four years of world war, the bourgeoisie, massively strengthened in the meantime, in desperation found the strength to make an abrupt end of the compromise which had become a danger to its dominance and existence. In the choice between throne and bank-vaults, it shortly decided with revolution for the latter ; threw the Kaisers and Kings overboard, set up the republic, gave itself a new constitution and completed -- with the active assistance of the working class organised in parties and trade unions -- the bourgeois revolution of 1848. As the last in the line of the great bourgeois revolutions of Europe, the Russian Revolution followed. Russian feudalism, an economic colossus of bearlike primitiveness and strength of resistance to which the tyranny of tsarism lent the political form, had experienced through the war with Japan a shock that immediately set free energies in which the need for political liberties and innovations of the classes committed to the capitalist economic mode found its expression. The desire of the bourgeoisie for a constitution was however at once extended and strengthened through the demand of the industrial proletariat for minimum wages, 8-hour day, protection of labour ; until now never recorded in the bourgeois revolutions : the Russian Revolution had from the beginning a strong proletarian-socialist strand. Certainly in earlier uprisings greater and smaller sections of the working class had also joined in the struggle and shed blood : but they had always been only appendages and following-troops of the bourgeois class. Even in the German revolution of 1848 the March fighters in Berlin had fallen as plain, mostly unknown workers, not as conscious proletarians and class combatants. In Russia on the other hand the proletarians among the social-democrats, cut off for the first time from the political part played by the bourgeoisie, came on to the stage of history with their own revolutionary demands and aims. Certainly the first phase, starting from the march of the petitioning masses to the Winter Palace under the leadership of the priest Gapon, until the decreeing of the October Manifesto, still took the typical course of all bourgeois revolutions, which are concerned with liberal goals. But already in the next phase the bourgeois-liberal voices -- thin and timorous enough given the Russian reaction's hardness of hearing -- got lost in the roaring gale of the mass demands of proletarian deprived of rights, and bloodily tortured, impoverished and neglected peasants. Even if the strongly rooted counter-revolution might succeed in snatching away again from the bourgeois element the first parliamentary and legal concessions, and stifling the revolutionary outcry of the masses with bloody executions and behind prison walls, it still gained by that only a respite, but no rescue. Indeed, on the contrary, the forcibly dammed-up strength of the revolution erupted, after three years of world war loosened the chains, in an explosion of such power that the whole system of tsarism was scattered like dust and left no more trace behind. The thin voice of the Russian bourgeoisie was certainly aptly accompanied by a weak energy : it was not capable of fulfilling its historical task. Then the proletariat put its shoulder to the wheel and seized government power for itself. It concluded peace, proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat and set about causing the dancing star of socialism to rise out of the chaos of the sinking world of tsarism. If in 1917 the imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie had conquered, taken Constantinople and achieved all its war-aims, a bourgeois liberal epoch on the English, French and German model would have been instituted in Russia. But as it was, the world war had cut the ground from under the feet not only of the old feudal despotism but also of every capitalist bourgeois government that was at all on the cards. For foreign capital was chased out : domestic capital, anyway only moderately developed, was destroyed. The fiasco of Miliukov, Gutschkov, Kerensky [2] was therefore inevitable. In the end there remained, to last out through everything to the conclusion of the war, only the proletariat as bearer of the state power and executor of the people's will. But the proletariat stood under the political leadership of intellectuals who had been schooled in the spirit of west-European social democracy. They were socialists and wanted socialism. Now the seizure of state power in Russia seemed to them to offer the chance for the realisation of the socialist idea. The surrounding world was faced with a sensation : the Russian Revolution, recently still an overdue, feeble bourgeois revolution, turned in an instant into a proletarian revolution. Beginning and end of the bourgeois revolution came together in one. Was that reality or illusion? Footnotes [1] willy-nilly [2] Bourgeois politicians involved in the unsuccesful attempt to establish effective governments prior to the October revolution of 1917. |