First of all, consequentialism reduces these revolutions to the new order established by the new ruling strata afterwards. But in the midst of these events, a wide range of possibilities existed. A perspective that retrospectively emphasizes the outcome of complex, decades-long and country- if not continent-wide processes, thus seems to miss the alternative paths or scenarios that can be seen at each one of these revolutions’ turning points. Consequentialism therefore falls in the trap of a teleological view of history. This is why permanent revolution seems to me a more relevant concept to understand all revolutions since their character has always been a matter of struggle and debate even while they were ongoing.

To the question “how revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions?” we should unequivocally answer “so revolutionary that we have trouble to imagine it…” Men make their own history but under circumstances that are handed down to them by each generation… therefore the outcome of all revolutions is decided by the ongoing struggles.

Moreover, a flaw in the orthodox view of bourgeois revolutions, such as Kautsky’s or French historian A. Soboul, or in the consequentialist remaking of the concept (N. Davidson), is that it helps entertain a narrative of the modern world whose core is the triumph of the bourgeoisie and its culture. In this long drawn-out process, from the 12th to the 20th century, the “bourgeoisie” or the middle classes have suffered many defeats and even its “victories” – such as in the Italian merchant republics – have often degenerated into something else. Etienne Marcel’s revolt in Paris in 1358 offers another such example.

Such an account of modern revolutions has been initially thought of and written by moderate liberal historians during the Restauration period, such as A. Thiers, F. Guizot, A. Thierry and F. MIgnet, to provide a foundation to their political outlook and programme. Marxists afterwards used the term bourgeois revolution to point out the need to go beyond the bourgeois limits of these attemps to emancipate men, towards socialism.

Bourgeois revolutions of the past – especially the French revolution – offered a point of comparison as to better understand ongoing debates about revolutionary strategy and class struggle. Trotsky’s insistent references to the French revolution in his History of the Russian Revolution offers such an example of that type of use of the concept.

But, what we need most of all today, coming out of the 20th century and its ruins, is to learn anew what the politics of the oppressed and exploited can be through the study of revolutions in general. The politics from below that one sees in the downfall of the Bastille is much more useful for us today than knowing that this was a bourgeois revolution.

At last, a permanent revolution approach, from below, to these revolutions offers the possibility to explain the contradictory tendencies within these processes. Traditionnaly, we view capitalism and liberal democracy as two aspects of the same transition to some form of bourgeois society. In fact, liberal democracy has in the European continent been in most cases gained through mass class struggles by the popular layers, against the aristocracy and the upper middle classes whose political influence stopped conveying any pressure when property and the rule of law had been obtained. Thinking of 1789/1830/1848 as a cycle of bourgeois revolutions thus hinders one’s understanding more than it helps it develop.

In England there certainly was a bourgeois revolution, but it took the form of a process over 200 years punctuated with revolutionary moments. The Wars of the Roses in the latter 15th century were the death knell of feudalism. Bourgeois historians are reduced to saying the wars were merely a dynastic fight, but it was one that physically weakened the old aristocracy and led to a struggle between absolutism (which triumphed for a while in France) encapsulated in the Tudors and Stuarts and the bourgeoisie, underpinned by important shifts in economics . Then there was the civil war in the 1640s and the final culmination in the invasion and victory of King William and the bourgeoisie in the 1690s. This final phase introduced a stock exchange, the Bank of England, a constitutional monarchy and the supremacy of the City of London, institutions that still dominate today.

Along the way the final outcome was challenged by populist, mass politics, infused with religion, but nonetheless contention of the final goals all the same.

The ideology of how revolutions are expressed changes over the years but it seems that popular rebellions against the status quo today have a mass character and within them contending ideologies about modernity and the political and economic order of society, except with the existence of globalisation and a world capitalist order they are crammed within a few years – which should be no surprise.

Two Tactics is neglected. One sign of this neglect is the entirely false notion that it applied only until April 1917. Lenin argued correctly that his views throughout 1917 were guided by the basic precepts of Two Tactics. And the Comintern never adopted permanent revolution but a version of Two Tactics applied to colonial and semi-colonial countries.

Even worse, Davidson’s 5-point list excludes the living bourgeois-democratic revolutions known as the Arab Spring!

You’re right to point to the outcome/agency dilemma created by Davidson’s consequential approach. However, I think the root of the dilemma is not in the (anti-Marxist) theory of “state capitalism” of Cliff/Dunayevskaya but in the Cliff tradition’s attempt to cram the Chinese revolution of 1949 and Cuban revolution of 1959 into some variant of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” known as “deflected permanent revolution.” And that problem comes from Trotskyism’s general ignorance of the Bolshevik, Leninist (no quotation marks) strategy for Russia, something you are absolutely right to bring up.

There are a lot more issues to be untangled in this messy discussion but this is a solid start.

Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 03:10:42 +0000 To: jsharkey@sympatico.ca