Reason and Science in Danger.
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No, it does not invalidate the class struggle at all. The English Civil War was part of an ongoing revolution. The relations of production had, in their base, ceased to be feudal and had become capitalist, but the capitalist class was divided. The monarch had the lion’s share of the wealth generated by trade, and other capitalists wanted in. They already held the majority in parliament and wanted rid of the Stuarts, who returned as a pain in their necks with the Restoration.
I am objecting to the idea that James I and Charles I were feudal monarchs any more than Charles II and James II were. There may have remained articles of feudal law and tradition, for the new society had been born in the old, but England was not a feudal society in 1642, and any real remaining feudal relations had been in the process of dismantlement since 1485, and especially since 1535.
It is precisely in the economic and social conditions that this had been happening, and moving the monarchs accordingly in the direction they were taking.
I can see the problem with the term “bourgeois revolution” as it implies, and was original intended to mean, a political revolution led by the bourgeoisie as in France but also by their equivalents in England and the English colonies in North America. But this doesn’t cover how the obstacles to further capitalist development cane to be removed in Japan and Russia for instance.
But the term has come to have a wider meaning amongst Marxists even if , taken literally, it is misleading for non-Marxists who do take it literally or for anti-Marxists who want to use it to criticise Marxism.
I suppose the most appropriate alternative would be “pro-capitalism revolution” . That would cover the various other social groups that have carried out such political revolutions in other parts of the world.
Japan had a vibrant merchant class since 1603 but the daimyos had control of the state through the Shoguns who were all of the samurai class.
Western intervention in the 1850s and 60s frightened the western daimyos who were the ones who overthrew the Shogunate in 1868, in the name of reaction and xenophobia. But the effect was suicidal for the samurai and the restored Imperial Government turned to the bourgeoisie and foreign experts to build up a modern military and industry. Japan’s capitalists had the country gifted to them therefore. The samurai who had overthrown the feudal government rose in rebellion now against the new capitalist Japan and were blown to pieces. Their impoverishment and expropriation ensued.
Bijou, I am a member of the party.
‘The relations of production had, in their base, ceased to be feudal and had become capitalist, but the capitalist class was divided.’
So you’re saying that the revolution was the result of a conflict within one class – not competing different classes. I repeat: doesn’t that invalidate the Marxist concept of the struggle between different competing classes as the dynamic element creating historical change?
Bijou, I am a member of the party.
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Sorry TM, I just took it from the following contribution you made very early in ths thread, in response to L Bird that you were not a member of the party:
So humans decide, according to their class and time, how the planets move, whether a dropped fork will obey gravity, how suns are formed, and how far away they would like the sun to be?
The universe obeys mankind?
Did the universe exist before humans?And this is interesting, thank you.
I now know the view of the SPGB.
All best wishes.Apologies
I was being sarcastic, to get some allies against the avian, Bijou.
Wez, Marcos, the class origins of Bolshevik and capitalist-revolutionary leaders:
Stalin: cobbler and cleaner (parents).
Lenin: family of tailors.
Mao: rich peasant.
Chiang Kai-shek: poor peasant.
Trotsky: peasant.
Can Cuba even be called a revolution? Wasn’t it just a national seizure of a state that was already a capitalist state?
I was being sarcastic, to get some allies against the avian, Bijou.
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Well you soitenly fooled me, Stanley. BD plays with tie, straightens bowler hat and walks away into the distance
That is the key of the problem, like the term proletariat which only applied to industrial workers and now it applies to all wave slaves including intellectuals, or poor which applies to wage slaves, leftist which means reformism different to jacobins or Leninist left communists, social Democrats different to the original term described by Marx , international different to worldists , Marxists instead of Marxian, etc etc All reformist revolts are bourgeoise in character. It has been explained for decades including Leninists. Elite is also a term used by some sector of the capitalist class the proper term is ruling class. The euphemism of oligarchy instead of bourgeoise class like a separate class from the ruling class, crony capitalism
The sixteenth century is the truly powerful portion of England’s capitalist revolution, as what remained of the feudal relationships were shattered and demolished. If you want to reduce “English Revolution” to a lesser timescale, then it is 1500-1600 that should be called the revolution in socio-economic fact. Read Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia.
Socialists love the Civil War period because of its plethora of proto-socialist thinkers (Levellers etc.)
- I think you like the gumbo soup because you are mixing too many different into one. Socialists ideas are a product of the capitalist society within the working class , even more, Engels reaffirmed it on scientific socialism There is a period on Karl kautsky that I will not support and Thomas more was not a socialist either and its utopia is not socialist
Lenin: family of tailors.
Are you sure about that? According to this, his father’s father had been a tailor and former serf but his father was a government official who rose to the rank of noble (but not of the sword of course !):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ulyanov
Not that it matters all that much.
Oh dear TM you’re turning into another avian yourself by never answering a straight question. Say this out loud to hear how preposterous it sounds: ‘Charles Stuart was a Bourgeois.’
https://www.marxists.org/history/australia/1965/englishcw.htm. English bourgeoise civil war
Our position with Russia has been that the Russian bourgeoisie were politically impotent as a class force and that it required the intelligensia to carry out the overthrow of the aristocratic rulers of Russia – a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie, the capitalist revolution without the capitalist.
The Bolshevik leadership was composed of professional revolutionaries and members of the intelligensia ranging from the aristocratic, like Chicherin, to the bureaucratic, like Lenin and Kollontai, via the landed bourgeois (Smilga), the commercial bourgeois (Yoffe) and the higher industrial bourgeois (Pyatakov) or from academic families (Bukharin) These were the sort of people who were used to being a ruling class. The only real worker was Alexander Shlyapnikov and he was also a professional party member. Much the same can be said of the Mensheviks and the SRs.
We have never claimed their was no capitalism in Russia. There were the capitalist mercantile traders for centuries and there were Tsarist industries such as the Putilov works (with mostly French investment and expertise).
And isn’t one of our arguments is that we can achieve a revolution peacefully because the Meiji Revolution in Japan is an example of a change of social system, despite lingering ideological hang-overs such as the divinity of the Emperor, that was done through their constitutional process.
I think TM is merely pointing out is that all history is full of nuances, caveats and shades of grey. That perhaps we offer a simplistic view of human evolution with an overly stageist interpretation of history. It is not refuting it as such but qualifying it. We can generalise but there will always be exceptions and sometimes they can be frequent.
As for the origins of the capitalist class in the UK, there were two – the new industrialists of the mill owners who began to accumulate capital but also those from the landed gentry who already transformed land of the commons into commercial farms with the enclosures and so possessed existing capital to invest. And they were internally divided Whigs V Tories.
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