Reason and Science in Danger.
- This topic has 335 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Frederick Engels himself indicated on Scientific Socialism that the bourgeoise class was an uneducated class and they need the intelligentsia. The book The Development of capitalism in Russia written by Lenin shows the real economic reality of Russia in that historical period, and it debunked the claim of the populists that the agrarian production was a step toward socialism, but his books based on statistic shows that feudalism was dying in Russia and it was being replaced by the capitalist mode of production and capitalist market. The bolshevik hammered the last nail in the coffin thru a national bourgeoisie revolution, and Lenin himself said that state capitalism was a step forward to socialism
The central concept of the message published by Alan Johnston is: Â A bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie. It covers everything that we have been talking about the class character of all revolutions, the bourgeoisie has used in several case intellectuals in order to carry their own revolts
Lenin and Trotsky were “put up to it” by bourgeois puppet masters, are you saying? Now who is the one who is saying leaders determine economic and social transformation? Sounds like conspiracy theory flirting to me. Aren’t the bourgeoisie clever masterminds! 🙂
Shouting it out, as you request:-
Charles Stuart was not a bourgeois but a descendant of Scottish feudal lords who was attempting to hold on against all odds to the royal monopoly of capital in a mercantile capitalist England that was in the process of a lengthy capitalist revolution in social and economic relations. He had been robbed of government already at the start of civil war, which his rebellious proclamation of defiance against that government initiated in 1642.
How’s that?
No one is denying the class character of revolutions, but humans have hitherto made history largely blindfolded.
According to you, the bourgeoisie must be brilliant social scientists who understand all about feudalism, capitalism and socialism too – and are sniggering like Dick Dastardly behind their champagne glasses.
Just watch “Chelsea” or whatever it’s called to see how clued up they are!
Conspiracism?
Never denied, Marcos, that the civil war was bourgeois in nature. How about the aristocrats who sided with parliament?
So why were the Bolsheviks opposed by the bourgeois parties in the Duma?
Can i refer to the German Peasant War and what Engels said about premature revolutions
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost. “
If this observation by Engels is correct, i think we can say it applied to the Bolsheviks in 1917.
As for the question “So why were the Bolsheviks opposed by the bourgeois parties in the Duma?” we can also ask why the wealthy classes also opposed the Mensheviks such as Martov who were supportive of the democratic bourgeois republic.
I think it was because there was a price to pay for failing to mount an effective opposition to the Tsar and his nobles. If you weren’t with the Bolsheviks, you were against them, and that also included any revolutionary ideas from the workers or peasants.
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp01493/robert-devereux-3rd-earl-of-essex
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp01522/thomas-fairfax-3rd-lord-fairfax-of-cameron
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp89987/basil-feilding-2nd-earl-of-denbigh
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp88832/thomas-grey-baron-grey-of-groby
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Montagu,_2nd_Earl_of_Manchester
Numerous other aristocrats with the parliamentary forces. …
Interesting aside (lumenlearning.com) on American colonies:
Charles’s execution in 1649 altered that neutrality. Six colonies, including Virginia and Barbados, declared open allegiance to the dead monarch’s son, Charles II. Parliament responded with an Act in 1650 that leveled an economic embargo on the rebelling colonies, forcing them to accept Parliament’s authority. Parliament argued in the Act that America had been “planted at the Cost, and settled” by the English nation, and that it, as the embodiment of that commonwealth, possessed ultimate jurisdiction over the colonies. It followed up the embargo with the Navigation Act of 1651, which compelled merchants in every colony to ship goods directly to England in English ships. Parliament sought to bind the colonies more closely to England, and deny other European nations, especially the Dutch, from interfering with its American possessions.
Over the next few years colonists’ unease about Parliament’s actions reinforced their own sense of English identity, one that was predicated on notions of rights and liberties. When the colonists declared allegiance to Charles II after the Parliamentarian state collapsed in 1659 and England became a monarchy the following year, however, the new king dashed any hopes that he would reverse Parliament’s consolidation efforts. The revolution that had killed his father enabled Charles II to begin the next phase of empire building in English America.
The Bolshevik themselves long thought that the coming revolution in Russia could only be a “bourgeois revolution” (they described both 1905 and March 1917 as that) in the sense of establishing a democratic republic within which capitalism and the working class could develop further and that it would be this even if the worker-peasant alliance they advocated came to power.
In fact this position is the origin of the theory, developed by later leftwing critics of the Bolsheviks, that the whole of 1917 was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie and even against the bourgeoisie. For instance, the Dutch Left Commuists who published a pamphlet under the title of The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism.Â
I know we have taken this up but calling 1917 a “bourgeois revolution” still seems odd. A revolution carried out on behalf of the bourgeoisie from which they came to benefit is one thing and a revolution which annihilated them as such is another.
At the end of  the 1920s with the Bolshevik government in difficulties many thought that the private capitalists who had grown up under the NEP would overthrow the Bolshevik regime and that this meant that a reconstituted bourgeoisie would be the beneficiaries of the revolution. Kautsky did. And so did Stalin who took drastic steps to stamp out this possibility. People also talked about the leaders of the Bolshevik party becoming a “red bourgeoisie” but that would be stretching things a bit even if this group were the beneficiaries of 1917. And of course 70 or so years later a new bourgeoisie did benefit from it.
A “state capitalist revolution”, leading to the rule of a new state capitalist class,  might be a better way of putting it. In any event, it was a political revolution (fundamental change of who controlled political power) that paved the way for the easier development of capitalism — just like what happened in England in the middle of the 17th century.
By the way some capitalists did in fact support the 1905 uprising by letting their workers go on strike and by financing the revolutionaries.
No intellectuals either can control social and economic forces.
The Bolsheviks were originally sincere and thought they could have socialism by taking over from the bourgeois Duma (which had ousted the Tsar) and establishing their wrong definition of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which the Communist Manifesto appeared to hint at.
Lenin was not about to share his rule with capitalists – which is not to say he would not invite any industrial expertise they could help the Bolshevik state with. Those who helped the Bolsheviks could join the party and have good positions; those who opposed would be eliminated. The same for intellectuals.
Lenin was no puppet.
The bourgeoisie who stayed would have to yield to and assist the state-capitalist state.
Bolsheviks themselves would become capitalists by means of the wealth the state stole from the workers.We see the same obsession Mao had in China, with constant hysteria about “revisionism” and “social imperialist tendencies” hogwash. Mao became more and more power-obsessed and fearful.
Revolution in France could have followed a similar slower path as England, had Louis XI “achieved a Henry VII.” But he was frustrated. Even so, a struggle would ensue here and there over the next two hundred years between monarch and nobles over issues of centralised autocracy vs noble independence, with the bourgeoisie split – local town authorities siding with lords against king: as in the case of Loudun, and Richelieu’s royal centralisation schemes to strengthen the monarchy at the expense of the regional authorities.
‘Charles Stuart was not a bourgeois but a descendant of Scottish feudal lords ‘
So far, so good. But then you go on to say the source of his wealth was mercantile capitalism which makes him ‘bourgeois’ does it not? Can you tell me the source of this assertion – which historians would you recommend? It flatly refutes Christopher Hill’s version which has hitherto been my main source. It’s important to me because if the Marxist theory of class struggle does not adequately describe events in England at that time then, since it was the origin of global capitalism, it undermines the theory of historical materialism. At the moment I only have your assertions – I would like to read the historians that provided your perspective.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.