Bourgeois revolutionaries (1998)

Book Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The French Revolution. Edited by Gary Kates. Routledge, 1998

“Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

On the night of 4 August 1789 the newly triumphant French National Assembly issued a decree formally abolishing feudalism. The process of building a bourgeois (capitalist) society in France has been documented by the influential French academic historians Albert Mathiez (1874-1932), George Lefebvre (1874-1959) and Albert Soboul (1914-1982). They were also very public members of the French Communist Party, and in due course this provoked a “revisionist” challenge from liberal and conservative ideologists. This collection of essays provides further proof, if it were needed, that the study of history is not just about interpreting the past but part of a struggle for the sort of future people want.

For liberals, Alfred Cobban (1901-1968) argued that the revolution had an early constructive phase, but efforts to create a liberal capitalist constitution were overcome by violence. The conservative François Furet (1927-1997) emphasised the role of political ideas, especially those of Rousseau, upsetting the natural order of things. A central concern of these “revisionist” challenges has been what they saw as the dominance of Marxism in interpreting the French revolution and its relevance for the modern world. Marx drew attention (see quote above) to the way the French revolutionaries referred to ancient Rome, as a mask for their tawdry bourgeois objectives. It provided the revolutionaries with: “…the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy”.

The French Stalinist historians, following Lenin and the Bolsheviks, drew an explicit parallel between the French Jacobins and the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Russia. In 1920 Albert Mathiez wrote:

“Jacobinism and Bolshevism are two dictatorships born of civil war and of war, two class dictatorships operating through the same means: terror, requisitioning and taxes; and having, in the last resort, the same goal: the transformation of society and not only of the Russian or French society, but of the universal society.”

The Jacobins under Robespierre’s leadership, and the Bolsheviks with Lenin’s leadership, acted in the belief that their small elites represented the real will of the people, even though they were not accountable to them. The French revolution, of course, was the classic bourgeois revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins employed the means and objectives appropriate for such a revolution. The Russian revolution, as Matthiez unwittingly revealed, used the same methods for the same goal: a capitalist revolution. The Bolsheviks abolished feudalism and constructed a society based on wage labour and capital, but under state control. This, historically, is the bourgeois role of Bolshevism.

Lew Higgins

Three new plays (1998)

Theatre Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kevin Elyot had a huge success four years ago with My Night With Reg (Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards etc, filmed by the BBC, and already 17 productions world-wide). His new play The Day I Stood Still at the National Theatre (Cottlesloe) makes for a marvellous evening. By turns funny, sharp and revealing, it tells of Horace, a bumbling curator at a London museum, for whom life stood still on a never-to-be-forgotten day more than 30 years ago when he fell in love with Jimi. Elyot, together with his peerless cast and director Ian Rickson, catch the mood the swinging 60s with great conviction, and manage Horace’s chance meeting with Jimi’s son 30 years later as a sustained climax which is both elegiac and liberating.

Writing in the programme Elyot discusses the power of theatre—of seeing a live event in an age when our lives are so much dominated by screens. He writes, “There should be a moment, at least a moment, during the course of the play, when an audience thinks, ‘I couldn’t have got that anywhere else’, that the hassle of going to the theatre that night has been worth it.”

There are many such moments in Elyot’s latest play, and even more in Conor McPherson’s The Weir at the Royal Court (Theatre Downstairs). On a routinely dull night in rural Ireland the regulars settle to drink their ale in a Sligo snug, only to be disturbed by the arrival of Valerie, an attractive woman from Dublin. Released from the tedium of wasteful chat, they tell a series of unlikely stories full of Irish folklore, and blind unreasonable superstition. But as they strut their stuff and tell their tales they also reveal themselves, and the loneliness and wasteful poverty of their lives. Valerie moved by the alcohol and the revealing openness of her hosts has a rather different tale to tell: a real tale of personal tragedy, such as “to melt a heart of stone”. The effect of Valerie’s story is almost cataclysmic. Pomposity and pretence are replaced by sympathy and concern, and one of the characters—liberated by the honest truth-telling of Valerie and wishing to comfort and sustain—tells us of his own wasteful, unhappy life, and of one never-to-be-forgotten moment when in the pits of utter despair a total stranger offered him an unsolicited kindness.

This is theatre at its most sublime. The atmospheric set, and the superb playing of the cast and imaginative direction, conspire to produce a powerful, poetic and realistic drama. You can smell the turf burning in the stove, see the dust lying thick on untended shelves, hear the wind whistling wildly outside; as before the arrival of Valerie the characters reveal a conversational emptiness in tune with the emptiness of their whole lives. Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore this emptiness and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner. Were it that the people who decide what should appear on the screens which “so dominate our lives”, were prepared to offer the same opportunities for drama which is both enlightened and potentially enlightening. But an enlightened population is anathema to those who collectively manage the mass media, even if it can be tolerated in the theatre. The Weir might be seen by 30,000 people in its six-week run at the Royal Court. As against this one episode of crude, dishonest EastEnders, is seen by 15 million people.

Stanisława Przybyszewska

Thoughts of enlightenment are also prompted by a new play by Pam Gems, called The Snow Palace (touring widely). Gems has taken a script written by Stanisława Przybyszewska about the French Revolution, and adapted it so that we see some of the major elements in Stanislawa’s play as well as something of her own life. Stanislawa was the illegitimate daughter of an “avant-garde writer, wild man, drinker, reputed Satanist”, who conceived such a passion for Robespierre that she lived alone, writing, almost demonically, her 600-page drama. She died of malnutrition and hypothermia, in an unheated hut partially buried in snow, in 1935.

Pam Gems has fashioned an elegant drama. She is helped by an imaginative set and subtle lighting (which signals a shift of action from Stanislawa’s story to the French Revolution and vice versa) and by a splendid cast. She manages the discussions between Danton and Robespierre with great conviction, contrasting Robespierre’s passionate commitment to “a virtuous life” with Danton’s pleasure-seeking pragmatism.

Socialists will sympathise with many of Robespierre’s sentiments. “A life shaped only by commerce and self-interest,” he says, “leads to bestiality and the rape of children.” But the revolutionaries were undone because, like leaders before and since, they tried to lead people to what they saw as a more desirable future. The essence of the socialist case is that it is only an enlightened working class, conscious of the nature of the world in which we all live, that can transcend vile, unjust capitalism, and build a new world founded on freedom, equality and justice. We have to do it for ourselves.

Michael Gill

The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. A Criticism. (1921)

Book Review from the January 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

Mr. Wells misses completely the transition of society in Greece and Rome from the tribal or kinship form to the political or territorial and class form of organisation. The striking social achievements associated with the names of Draco, Solon, and Cleisthenes are, for instance, passed over in silence. This is a serious omission and one that is difficult to explain. How Mr. Wells can sum up Athenian history without even mentioning the so-called "reforms of Solon" passes comprehension. The student who seeks information as to the social revolution from the tribal to the political phase as it occurred In the concrete both in Attica and in Rome cannot do better than consult Morgan's "Ancient Society" or the "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" by Engels. These works may be supplemented by that instructive but less scientific account— "The City-State of the Greeks and Romans," by W. Warde Fowler.

Mr. Wells' history of Rome contains some of the finest work in the whole book, much of it showing real historical penetration. The following except from his account of the later years of the Roman Republic is typical of the best passages:

  The rich grew richer and the poor poorer. It was impossible to stifle the consequences of that for ever by political trickery. The Italian people were still unenfranchised. Two extreme democratic leaders, Saturninus and Glaucia, were assassinated, but that familiar senatorial remedy failed to assuage the populace on this occasion. . . . In 91 B.C. Livius Drusus, a recently elected tribunal of the people, . . . was assassinated. He had proposed a general enfranchisement of the Italians, and he had foreshadowed not only another land law, but a general abolition of debts. Yet for all this vigour on the part of the senatorial usurers, landgrabbers and forestallers, the hungry and the anxious were still insurgent. The murder of Drusus was the last drop in the popular cup ; Italy blazed into a desperate insurrection.  (Chap. XXVIII. S. 3.)

In the next chapter the author treats of the Empire, of its miseries, corruptions, and debaucheries, and gives the real reason for the easy success of the "barbarian invaders" against the one-time "impregnable."

  It is manifest that to the bulk of its inhabitants the Roman Empire did not seem a thing worth fighting for. To the slaves and common people the barbarian probably seemed to promise more freedom and less indignity than the pompous rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional massacre did not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it shocked the wealthy and cultured people to whom we owe such accounts as we have of the breaking down of the imperial system. Great numbers of slaves and of the common people probably joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic prejudices and were open-handed to any promising recruit. No doubt in many cases the population found that the barbarian was a worse infliction even than the tax-gatherer and the slave-driver. But that discovery came too late for resistance or the restoration of the old order. Chap. XXIX., s. 2.)

Mr. Wells lays great stress, and rightly so, upon the fact that settled, cultured, and prosperous communities are apt to be overrun by warlike, nomadic peoples. The process and its effects are well described by Prof. Myres in his "Dawn of History." The conquerors first subdue and plunder the conquered but are eventually absorbed in or by them and their culture. This process, as Mr. Wells puts it, "in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in history for the last seventy centuries or more." But the recognition of this fact leads the author to amazing conclusions. In his chapter on the "Renascence of Western Civilization" he introduces to our notice his third type of community, which turns out to be a compound of or hybrid between his first two.

  Essentially this modern state, as we see it growing under our eyes to-day, is a tentative combination of two apparently contradictory ideas, the idea of a community of faith and obedience, such as the earliest civilizations undoubtedly were, and the idea of a community of will, such as were the primitive political groupings of the Nordic and Hunnish peoples. For thousands of years the settled civilized peoples, . . . seem to have developed their ideas and habits along the line of worship and personal subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs along the line of personal self-reliance and self assertion. . . . It was only after thousands of years of cyclic changes between refreshment by nomadic conquest, civilization, decadence, and fresh conquest that the present process of a mutual blending of 'civilized' and 'free' tendencies into a new type of community, that now demands our attention and which is the substance of contemporary history, began. (Chap. XXXV s. 1)

Now for the result of this "blending."

   . . . constantly recurring nomadic injections have steadily altered the primordial civilization both in blood and spirit; . . . the world religion of today, and what we now call democracy, the boldness of modern scientific enquiry, and a universal restlessness are due to this ''nomadization" of civilization. The old civilization created tradition, and lived by tradition. To-day the power of tradition is destroyed. The body of our state is civilization still, but its spirit is the spirit of the nomadic world. It is the spirit of the great plains and the high seas." (Chap. XLI. s. 4.)

Surely no more fantastic theory as an explanation of modern society and its mental reflex was ever conceived. To show all its absurd implications would take more space than we can spare on such ridiculous nonsense. The confusion of Mr. Wells is shown by the way he brackets as effects of a common cause the "world religions," all of which are over a thousand years old, with modern scientific "enquiry" and "democracy," the achievements so to speak of the day before yesterday. The old civilization did not create tradition. Tradition as a social force existed ten thousand years before any civilisation was dreamt of. It is in fact more potent by far among barbaric peoples than in any form of civilization. The old civilization used tradition and modified it for class purposes. It is so used to day, and is far from being "destroyed."

If Mr. Wells can find no adequate explanation other than the above of the modern developments he mentions we can provide him with one. The economic conditions of the primitive civilizations preserved in a modified form, and in fact were built upon, the old-established institutions of the patriarchal stage—the village community and the guilds—the very embodiments of tradition. Such indeed is the condition to-day in China and India, and such was largely the case in the manorial system of mediaeval Europe.

But economic developments undermined the manorial system. Commerce and money payment freed the serf, destroyed the "village" and put in its place the free peasant and the capitalist farmer, produced eventually the propertyless wage working class on the one hand and the capitalist "manufacturer" on the other. Then the machine revolution in industry and transport brought us to the fully fledged capitalist system of to-day. These broadly were the factors, real concrete factors, not the Wellsian myth of "Nomadization," which smashed the fetters of feudal tradition and created modern science and "democracy." As a matter of fact in other parts of his book Mr. Wells to a certain extent actually shows the part which these economic developments played in bringing about the above ideological effects. Throughout the book the narrative of history is very much superior to the author's generalizations about it.

There have been no incursions of nomadic invaders into Western Europe for well over a thousand years. Would Mr. Wells then have us believe that this "spirit of Nomadism" has persisted through hereditary transmission and in an adverse environment during all these centuries and has actually increased beyond measure in the past hundred years !

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Mr. Wells's account of the French Revolution makes good dramatic reading, here and there getting down to realities, but for the most part it is superficial. He gives a sympathetic account of the Jacobins and a fairly rational account of the "Terror." He is particularly to be commended upon his repudiation of the malicious lies with which most "historians" have slandered the fine personality of Marat. But nowhere does he tell us that the paramount factor which determined the nature, course and outcome of the revolution was the class interests of the bourgeoisie. The present writer strongly recommends to the student what is easily the best recent and popular contribution to this subject — "The French Revolution," by H. Packwood Adams, a book with a viewpoint almost Marxist. In it we read—

  the only clear and ruthless purpose existed in the brains of the middle class. . . . The removal of seigneurial oppressions and of administrative chaos were a necessary part of the economic plans of the men of commerce ; . . . the main advantage of the Revolution went to those long-headed capitalists whose destiny it has since been to make the nineteenth-century Europe the factory of the world, and indirectly and unwillingly forge what may well become the iron cradle of a more gigantic democracy than the world has known. These people knew what they wanted and got what they wanted, but the getting was harder than they knew. (P. 27-27.)

Those who have read that remarkable little book "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," will remember how Marx states in his opening paragraphs that all great historic personages occur twice—once as tragedy and once as farce—and that when men are engaged in revolutionising things and themselves they conjure up the spirits of the past, assume their names and costumes to enact a new historic scene in a time-honoured disguise and with borrowed language.

No better illustration of Marx's generalisation could be forthcoming than that Mr. Wells gives when dealing with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  His coronation was the most extraordinary revival of stale history it |is possible to imagine; Caesar was no longer the model; Napoleon was playing now at being Charlemagne. . . . the Pope had been brought from Rome to perform the ceremony ; and at the climax Napoleon I. seized the crown, waved the Pope aside, and crowned himself. The attentive reader of this Outline will know that a thousand years before this would have had considerable significance ; in 1804 it was just a ridiculous scene. In 1806 Napoleon revived another venerable antiquity, and, following still the footsteps of Charlemagne, crowned himself with the iron crown of Lombardy. (Chap. XXXX1II. s. 4.)

Mr. Wells gives two useful quotations from Napoleon's writings on the political use of religion : 

  "How can you have order in a State without religion ? Society cannot exist without inequality o£ fortunes, which cannot endure apart from religion. When one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference, unless there is an authority which declares—'God wills it thus : there must be rich and poor in the world ; but hereafter and during all eternity the division of things will take place differently.’"
  "It is my wish to re establish the institution for foreign missions ; for the religious missionaries may be very useful to me in Asia, Africa, and America, as I shall make them reconnoitre all the lands they visit. The sanctity of their dress will not only protect them, but serve to conceal their political and commercial investigations." (Ibid, s. 3.)

Napoleon, like all intelligent rulers and politicians, knew the value of superstition as an instrument of class subjection, but few of his kind have stated it so clearly. For this very reason, as Mr. Wells points out, he had opposed religion as a freethinker when he was a youthful revolutionary Jacobin.

R. W. Housley. 

To be continued.

Kropotkin on the French Revolution. (1910)

Book Review from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kropotkin’s work on the French Revolution, just issued in its English edition, professes to be written from the point of view of the “common people”. The author says: “The Parliamentary history of the Revolution, its wars, its policy and its diplomacy, has been studied and set forth in all its details. But the popular history of the Revolution remains still to be told. The part played by the people of the country places and towns in the Revolution has never been . . . narrated in its entirety.” (Page 4.) Kropotkin claims that his work, to a certain extent, fills the gap which previously existed. “the people,” he says, “long before the Assembly, were making the Revolution on the spot; they gave themselves, by revolutionary means, a new municipal administration.” (Page 108). Further: “The Assembly only sanctioned in principle and extended to France altogether what the people had accomplished themselves in certain localities. It went no further.” (Page 125.) Again, the middle-class Brissot said: “It is the galleries of the Convention, the people of Paris, and the Commune, who dominate the position and force the hand of the Convention every time some revolutionary measure is taken.” (Page 357.)

We know to-day that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, that from the assembling of the States General to the days of the Directory there was a succession of bourgeois assemblies, and that, above all, fear drove the Royalist party to cede first one point and then another, and further, that the bourgeoisie, once in unstable control of the State, was compelled, in order to keep the allegiance of its own lower ranks and the help of the incipient proletariat, to grant measures of relief, of political and legal reform. And, of course, a plentiful crop of promises. As Meredith puts it: “The rich will not move without a goad – I have and hold – you shall hunger and covet – until you are strong enough to force by hand.”

The French revolution was, then, a bourgeois revolution, made by a wealthy class, a class which, having gradually attained a position of economic advantage, determined on the grasping of political power as the proper safeguard of its interests. There can be little doubt that the English Revolution of 1640 and the great French Revolution were enacted by such.

But Kropotkin does not adopt the Marxian view that the root of historic change is to be found chiefly in economic development. He says that “It is always ideas that govern the world”, and he contends that two currents made the French Revolution. “One of them, the current of ideas, concerning the political reorganisation of States, came from the middle classes; the other, the current of action, came from the people,  . . . who wanted to obtain immediate and definite improvements in their economic condition.” (Page 1.)

There have been many attempts to explain the French Revolution in other than economic terms. Kropotkin thus largely attributes it to the work of the philosophers and teachers who preceded the Revolution, but after all his concept differs but little from that of Louis the Sixteenth, who, when he encountered the works of Voltaire and Rousseau in the library of the Order of Malta, referred to them as the source of all his misfortunes. Other historians have spoken of the whimsical and unbalanced character of the French people as the cause of the great Revolution, and this is surely as plausible as an explanation as the “idea” hypothesis of Kropotkin. Frederic Harrison, in his essays on the Meaning of History, gives a long and remarkable list of economic changes which the Revolution made, and Kropotkin himself recognises this when he says: “Before all this (i.e., the Revolution) could be realised they (the bourgeoisie) knew the ties that bound the peasant to his village must be broken. It was necessary that he should be free to leave his hut, and even that he should be forced to leave it, so that he might be impelled towards the towns in search of work.” (Page 8.) “As to the real authority, that was to be vested in a Parliament, in which an educated middle class, which would represent the active and thinking part of the nation, should predominate.” (Page 7.)

I remember once seeing an advertisement in an American magazine puffing up a well-known brand of revolvers. It was illustrated with a picture full of meaning. A paymaster stood behind a wire screen doling out wages. A few dozen piles of coins were laid in a row, and behind the screen were a few dozen rough looking men waiting for their wages. Within easy reach of the paymasters’ hand lay a revolver; one, as the advertisement grimly said, reputed for quick, accurate work at short notice. The revolver was emblematic of force, but here is the rub – what was there to prevent the men themselves likewise possessing these weapons celebrated for quick and accurate work? I think we can safely say that in the majority of cases it was the “idea” deeply imprinted on the minds of the men that the paymaster had a right to his piles of gold. Not that the illustration stops here, or we should be idealists; but this servile idea that property is sacred, a test of virtue and ability, had been sedulously instilled into the minds of those men by the paid orators and quibblers of the capitalist class. It is our work, we who are conscious of the working of class society, to combat that idea, and in this work we are aided by economic conditions; whilst the economic environment existing at the time of the great French Revolution was not adapted to the social ownership of the means of production and distribution. We Socialists, just as much as the hired hacks of the capitalist class, are products of our time. We move along the line of the law of things; to-day insecurity of existence for the many, production concentrating into monopoly, our vigorous propaganda, these are the elements which make for Socialism.

Kropotkin, however, gives us some acute criticism. He deals with the Communistic conception of Babeuf in a manner which is capable of application to our would-be sociologists of the I.L.P. Altogether Babeuf’s conception was so narrow, so unreal, that he thought it possible to reach Communism by the action of a few individuals who were to get the Government into their hands by means of a conspiracy of a secret society. He went so far as to put his faith in one single person, provided this person had a will strong enough to introduce Communism and thus save the world! (Page 491.) And so to the “Socialists” previously named it seems possible to reach Socialism by anticipating the workers’ class-consciousness, by “giving” the proletariat something; promising them amelioration with their enemies in power, and being so near sighted as to imagine that the crux of the problem lies in getting the suffix M.P. at the end of their leaders’ names, whilst the Socialist democracy is still in the making.

Kropotkin, on page 391 says: “Either there will be in the revolution (of the future) a day when the proletarians will separate themselves from the middle-class  . . . or this separation will not take place, and then there will be no revolution.” Now Kropotkin gives a detailed account of the position of Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was the tool of the third estate, the instrument of the newly wealthy, who were satisfied with the position they had obtained. He was not their hypocritical, conscious tool, for he was noted fir his rectitude and sincerity. But he was doing their work, nevertheless, when he was annihilating the Herbertists and Montagnards; for during the Terror, Louis Blanc tells us, out of 2,759 executions only 650 were wealthy people. Robespierre guillotined his “more advanced” co-workers. Then the “more conservative” of the bourgeoisie soon despatched Robespierre.

Liebknecht, in his short treatise No Compromise, says that the German Social Democrats have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed their opponents to use them. Whether that be true or not, Kropotkin shows how during the French Revolution the proletariat were used by the bourgeoisie. At critical moments the poor were brought into the streets to fight and terrify the royalists. But when the terrifying was done they were sent back to their hovels to be patient and starve, and when the royalists had been beaten, the bourgeoisie did all that was possible to destroy the proletarian organisation in the sections. When the armies returned from the frontiers the men of the Faubourgs were surrounded and disarmed.

Kropotkin also brings out beautifully the work of the unknown toilers in the Revolution, the unknown organisers in the sections, of the type of the Communard of eighty years later, who died fighting at the barricades shouting, “For the solidarity of Humanity”. The Positivists set aside a day for the worship of “All the Dead”, of all those heroes by whose efforts and sacrifices, hopes and ideals, a better world has been made possible. Is it too sentimental to suggest that we also, amidst times of hoper and gloom, should give more than a stray thought to all those unknown comrades whose individual minute but collectively massive efforts have made Socialism something more than a Utopian dream?

John A. Dawson

Letter From Europe: Dictatorship of the proletariat (1979)

A Letter From Europe from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

As expected, the French Communist Party voted at its XXIII Congress in Paris in May to remove the reference to ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ from its rule-book. This was a foregone conclusion, since the Party leader, Georges Marchais, had announced two years ago that this would be happening. The only opposition came from a small group around the overrated philosopher Louis Althusser and from die-hard Stalinists like Jeannette Vermeesch, widow of former Party leader, Maurice Thorez.

‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ was indeed a phrase used by Marx, but never with the meaning the PCF has given it. Marx always insisted that socialism could only be established by political action; in other words, that in order to establish socialism, the working class should gain control of the machinery of government and use it to force the capitalist class to give up its ownership of the means of production. In his private letters and notes he sometimes referred to this use of political power by the working class to abolish capitalism as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Both words are obscure and derive from Ancient Rome. Under the constitution of the Roman Republic there was provision for one of the magistrates in times of crisis to be nominated dictator, which meant that he was invested with plenary powers to deal with the situation. Proletarii was the word used to describe the poor Roman citizens who were regarded as contributing nothing to the State but children (in Latin proles means ‘offspring’).

POLITICAL TERMINOLOGY

These two words were introduced into modern political terminology at the time of the French Revolution, the leaders and thinkers of which modelled themselves on the Ancient Roman Republic. The Jacobins were in favour of a ‘dictatorship’ by a minority of revolutionaries to crush the resistance of the nobility. The term proletaire came into use to describe ordinary, poor people. Both terms were inherited by the political descendants of the extreme French revolutionaries in the nineteenth century, including the utopian communists from whom Marx learned part of his socialism.

Marx, however, used the word proletariat in a more precise fashion, not to mean just poor people generally but only those who worked for wages: the working class. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was thus, for him, the exercise of political power by the working class in their own interest. This Marx equated with a complete political democracy in which the working class — the majority in capitalist society — would rule. His references to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ all show that he understood it to be the exercise of political power by the working class within a democratic framework.

We ourselves have never used the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in our everyday propaganda. This is not because we do not agree with Marx that the working class should take democratic political action to establish socialism, but because the phrase is obscure and misleading. We have always preferred to express the same concept by the use of phrases like ‘the capture of political power’ and ‘the conquest of the powers of government’ which are more easily understandable.

In speaking of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ rather than simply of a ‘revolutionary dictatorship’, Marx made a decisive break with the Jacobin tradition. The idea of ‘dictatorship’ was given a democratic content, since the plenary political power it implied was to be exercised by the majority class in society and not by some revolutionary minority.

By the turn of the nineteenth century Jacobin ideas has almost died out in France but were enjoying a revival in Russia, a country whose political and social system had many of the features of France’s ancien regime. Here the idea of a minority revolutionary dictatorship had an attraction for the anti- Tsarist revolutionaries, including some of those who considered themselves Marxists. Among the latter was Lenin, who carried this idea over into the Social Democratic movement.

WORKING CLASS DEMOCRACY

Lenin was in favour of the Russian Social Democrats being organised as a ‘vanguard party’ whose task would be to lead the workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities of Russia against the Tsarist regime. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was carried out in just this way — and it resulted in the establishment not of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a working class democracy, but in the revolutionary dictatorship of the Bolshevik minority. Since the economic and political conditions of Russia did not permit the establishment of socialism the Bolsheviks had no choice but to develop capitalism in Russia (largely in the form of ‘state capitalism’, as Lenin himself described it). But since capitalism cannot be run in the interests of the working class, the Bolshevik dictatorship soon became a dictatorship not just against the nobility, the capitalists and richer peasants but also a dictatorship over the working class: the trade unions were taken over by the government, strikes were banned, protests were suppressed and protestors sent to labour camps.

Unfortunately, this was not evident to a section of the war-weary and discontented working class of Western Europe. To them Russia was what it proclaimed itself to be: a 'workers' republic’ which showed the way for the workers of other countries. The Bolshevik government exploited this sympathy to split the Social Democratic parties in the West and set up ‘Communist’ parties based on Bolshevik ideology.

In France in 1920 a majority of the delegates to the Social Democrats’ Congress at Tours voted to go over to Bolshevism and set up the Parti Communiste Francais. The new PCF was committed to Bolshevik ideology, including the idea that it as the self-styled ‘vanguard of the working class' would exercise a revolutionary dictatorship. By a strange irony of history, the Jacobin idea of minority dictatorship, which had been rejected by Marx and which had almost died out in France, was reintroduced there by way of backward Russia. This time, however, it was called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was with this Jacobin, Leninist sense that the phrase was introduced into the rule-book of the PCF.

Now it has been removed. Which is not such a bad thing, since, first, it had no right to be there in the first place, and second, its being there added to the already great enough confusion surrounding the phrase.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)

The Bourgeois role of Bolshevism (1970)

Book Review from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Insurrectionists, by W. J. Fishman. Methuen. 55s.

The theme of this book is one we ourselves have often advanced: that, as we put it in the April Socialist Standard, Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party can be traced back through Russian revolutionaries like Ogarev and Tkachev to French revolutionaries like Babeuf and Buonarroti.

Fishman writes as an obvious opponent of what he thinks is Socialism and so does not really know what Marxism is all about. Nevertheless he does describe well enough the evolution of insurrectionist ideas as they spread from 18th century France to 20th century Russia and he does make some useful points.

The original Jacobins under Robespierre ruled France for a brief period in 1793-4. Though not against private property, they were on the side of the poor against the rich and believed in the ruthless use of violence to crush any opposition to Equality, one of the supposed aims of the French Revolution.

The first to combine the idea of an armed uprising and then a temporary exercise of armed power with that of communism was Babeuf (1760-1797), who was executed for his part in an abortive such coup in 1796. One of his collaborators was Buonarroti, whose account of the uprising under the revealing title of Conspiration pour L'Égalité served as a handbook for the following generation of would-be insurrectionists. Buonarroti, who lived on as an active conspirator till his death in 1837. argued that, since the old order so degraded the masses that they were unable either to see where their interests lay or to act for themselves, it was only an active, conscious minority that could overthrow the old order. This minority should be organised as a secret society with the aim of seizing power in an insurrection.

Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). who spent most of his life in prison, was the man who more than any other personified this kind of insurrectionism. He, too, stood for a vague communist society and again argued that the masses were so ignorant as a result of the old order that its overthrow would have to be the work of a minority. Marx had a great respect for Blanqui as a man of action, but their ideas of the social revolution was quite different. For Marx it was not a question of a minority insurrection followed by a minority rule leading to communism, but rather a question of a majority capture of power (perhaps by peaceful means) followed by democratic majority rule leading to communism (or Socialism—he gave the two words the same meaning). The emancipation of the working class, proclaimed Marx in a famous slogan, was the task of the working class itself. Although Fishman quotes Engels’ well-known repudiation of minority insurrection in 1895, he does not bring out the important difference between the theories of Marx and those of previous communist revolutionaries like Babeuf, Buonarroti and Blanqui. He stood for majority revolution; they stood for minority insurrection. What he learned from them was the need to win and use political power ("dictatorship" as it was then called) to carry through the social revolution.

French revolutionary ideas spread all over Europe, including Tsarist Russia where an attempted coup was made as early as 1825. Here the secret society was the only possible form of revolutionary organisation and it was strongly advocated by Ogarev (1814-1877), a collaborator of Alexander Herzen. Ogarev was well acquainted with Buonarroti’s book and it was through him that French ideas on how to organise an insurrection — including the secret “vanguard” party — were transmitted to the Russian opponents of Tsarism.

The view that because of their oppression the masses were so ignorant that a minority organised as a secret society would have to act for them was held by many well-known Russian revolutionaries, including Nechaev (1847-1882) (the man who made a fool of Bakunin) and Tkachev (1844-1886) and even by Bakunin himself.

Tkachev, who associated with the Blanquists while in exile, is particularly important in that he anticipated some of Lenin's views on how to overthrow the Tsar. He realised that by themselves the revolutionaries could not overthrow the Tsarist bureaucracy; they needed a mass basis. He suggested the peasants as the weapon the revolutionary leaders should wield. He even realised the possibilities of using the then developing urban working class as the main element in the mass struggle. In the insurrection, said Tkachev, the Tsarist bureaucratic State should be completely smashed but the victorious leaders should set up another State in its place — an idea Lenin later tried to foist on Marx with regard to the modern bourgeois State.

By Lenin's time the use which a revolutionary minority might be able to make of the urban working class was even more obvious. Lenin, sticking to the by now well-established Russian revolutionary idea of a vanguard party and the ignorance of the masses, suggested a new tactic: the anti-Tsarist revolutionaries should concentrate on using the working class as their main weapon.

It is here that Fishman’s lack of understanding of Marxism leads him astray. He thinks that Lenin advocated this tactic as a means of establishing Socialism in Russia (in fact he mistakenly thinks there is now Socialism there, but that’s another matter). But until 1917 Lenin’s aim was the traditional one of the Russian revolutionaries: the establishment of a democratic republic. From his study of Marxism, he knew that this was the task of the bourgeoisie and one they had carried out in some West European countries. Lenin saw that in Russia the bourgeoisie was too weak to do this and applied Marx’s analysis of the period of Jacobin rule in France to the Russia of his day. By their drastic actions against the old feudal order. Marx pointed out, the Jacobins though not themselves of the bourgeoisie had furthered the bourgeois revolution by taking measures the bourgeoisie was afraid to take itself, Lenin’s suggestion was that this was more or less what would have to happen in Russia: Russia’s bourgeois revolution (the establishment of a democratic republic) would have to be accomplished without the bourgeoisie by the vanguard party leading the workers and peasants.

Trotsky argued that if the working class were to gain power in the course of Russia's bourgeois revolution they would, and should, go on to take "socialist” measures. Fishman does not seem to realise that Lenin did not come round to this view till 1917, nor that Trotsky did not accept the vanguard party idea till 1917 either. He has them as collaborators from 1902 on, an elementary mistake.

Lenin’s switch in 1917 from aiming at a democratic republic to a "socialist” one took him even further away from Marxism, but it did not invalidate his previous analysis of how Russia’s bourgeois revolution would come. The role of the Bolsheviks in Russia’s bourgeois revolution did indeed turn out to be the same as that of the Jacobins in France’s, that is, to carry through measures against the old order the bourgeoisie themselves were incapable of. The great difference was that while the Jacobins' rule did not last, the Bolsheviks’ rule did and the Bolshevik rulers gradually evolved into a new bourgeoisie (or capitalist class) themselves. Lenin and Trotsky confirmed their own earlier prognosis: their seizure of power in 1917 and subsequent short rule paved the way for the further development of capitalism in Russia.

Adam Buick

Lenin and the State (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In one of the many disputes between revolutionaries in Russia before 1917, Trotsky, before he himself became a Bolshevik, likened Lenin to Robespierre, a comparison which was to be borne out after the October Revolution. Trotsky, as leader of the Red Army, became the potential Bonaparte in the eyes of the Bolshevik Party bureaucrats.

The similarities between the French and Russian revolutions have not escaped anti-Marxist writers. For example, Carew Hunt in his book The Theory and Practice of Communism comments:

We find such men as Robespierre and St. Just using the same arguments to defend their actions as Lenin and Stalin were to employ a century and a quarter later.

In writing this, Carew Hunt thought he was making a profound criticism of Socialism. In actual fact, it is of no great surprise to Socialists that the ideologies of the two revolutions should be similar, since in both feudalism was swept away and political power was captured by a group determined to industrialize the country. The Bolsheviks, despite their socialist pretensions, could do no more than carry out the same function as the French bourgeoisie had done. in the absence of such a class in Russia.

There is, in fact, a striking resemblance between the ideas of Lenin and of the 18th century French philosopher, J. J. Rousseau. Rousseau's central idea was the "general will", that is the true interest of the entire people. The general will was not necessarily the will of the majority, but incorporated the will of the whole people, whether they recognised it or not, and was represented by an impersonal entity, the State, which was entitled to use violence if necessary in order to force the people to be free, if they refused to recognise the general will. Coercion was not really coercion, since it was carried out in the best interest of the coerced. 

The idea was taken up by the Jacobins, the extreme revolutionary group which seized power in 1792. Although previously they had urged popular violence, they now found it used against them and had to justify the use of repression. They decided that, although the people were naturally good, they were not dealing with the people in their natural state, but as they had been corrupted by the ancien régime.  The true interest of the people was represented by the Robespierrist Jacobins, if only the people were enlightened enough to recognise it.

For "the people", Lenin substituted "the proletariat", which was hardly appropriate since 90 per cent of Russians were peasants. However, this did not worry Lenin since he decided the working class was incapable of progressing beyond a trade-union consciousness and that the revolution would have to be carried out in its name by an élite of professional revolutionaries, the "vanguard party". Once this had been accepted, there was nothing left of Marx's statement that "the emancipation of the working class itself", as some of Lenin's opponents pointed out at the time.

It is, of course, quite legitimate to say that the socialist party represents the true interest of the working class; Marx had said the party represents "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class". Such a statement is a tautology as long as the mass of workers accept capitalism. But Lenin went much further than this. In his State and Revolution, written during 1917, he declared that the Party must seize power by force and hold on even in the face of resistance from the workers it claims to represent. In other words, "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant little more than the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party.

And so it was done. The Bolsheviks captured power in October 1917. When, in January 1918, an election was held for a Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority and reacted by using troops to disperse the Assembly. When workers showed their hostility to the régime, the Bolsheviks had no hesitation in using the utmost brutality to suppress them, as at Kronstadt in 1921.

It is perfectly clear that Lenin's ideas are of no more relevance for the task of achieving Socialism than are Rousseau's, Rousseau's "general will" meant little more than the will of the leaders. Lenin's "proletarian dictatorship" meant rule by a clique of Party members. Both were ideologies used for the triumph of capitalism in different historical circumstances.

Brendan Mee