the American revolution, bourgeois?

[Lobotomy]

Often leftists call the American revolution a bourgeois revolution, but it occurred in 1776, decades before the Industrial revolution. Could the ruling class in America around that time really be considered bourgeois, then?

[ColonelCossack]

I would say that the industrial revolution really began with advances in agriculture, with things like seed drills akin to jethro tull's and the like, around 1750. Like the french revolution, I think, the American revolution was comprised of wealthy people with bourgeois enlightenment ideals, hence the bourgeois natures of things like the American constitution, and the declaration of the rights of man. Just my opinion.

[Robespierre Richard]

Bourgeoisie

the ruling class of capitalist society, which possesses property in the means of production and which exists by exploiting wage labor. The source of income of the bourgeoisie is surplus value, which is created by unpaid labor and is appropriated by the capitalists.

In the period of feudalism in the countries of Western Europe, the word “bourgeois” initially designated the inhabitants of the cities in general. The development of the trades and of commodity production led to the class stratification of the urban population, from which elements of the bourgeoisie began to emerge at the end of the 15th century. “From the serfs of the Middle Ages” wrote K. Marx and F. Engels in the Communist Manifesto, “sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed” (Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 425). The bourgeois class was made up of traders, usurers, the wealthiest guild masters, the leading elements of the countryside, and feudal lords. As industry, trade, and navigation developed, the bourgeoisie gradually concentrated in its hands ever-increasing masses of wealth and money capital. The formation of the bourgeoisie as a class was linked to the era of the so-called primary accumulation of capital, which mainly consisted in the expropriation of land and labor tools from the broad masses of people and which relied heavily on colonial pillage and seizure. During this era, the conditions were created for the birth and development of the capitalist mode of production—a mass of wage workers free of personal dependence and the means of production was created, and large sums of money capital were concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The discovery (1492) and colonization of America, the discovery of a sea route to India around Africa (1498), and the expansion of trade with the colonies created a new field of activity for the incipient bourgeoisie. Guild production could no longer satisfy the growing demand for goods. The manufactory came to replace the handicraft shops, as did large-scale machine industry later, as a result of the industrial revolution that began in England in the mid-18th century and spread to Europe and North America. A new class entered the historical arena—the proletariat, which is the antagonist and gravedigger of the bourgeois class.

The development of capitalist production made it essential for the bourgeoisie that the political domination of the feudal lords be eliminated. Striving to put an end to the feudal fragmentation that hindered the development of trade and industry, the bourgeoisie headed, in its own class interests, the movement of the masses of the people against feudalism. The bourgeoisie came to power as a result of the bourgeois and bourgeois democratic revolutions that occurred in the countries of Western Europe and North America during the 16th to 18th centuries and in a number of other countries later on.

In the struggle against feudalism, the bourgeoisie played a historically progressive role. Under its leadership the dominance of feudal relationships was liquidated by the dictates of the objective laws of the development of productive forces. The bourgeois revolutions proceeded under the banner of the ideas of the Enlightenment; they furthered the progress of science and technology. The age-old isolation of small-scale production was destroyed; there was collectivization of labor, which as a result increased in productivity. With the development of industry the bourgeoisie subordinated the countryside to the domination of the city. It created national markets and bound all the parts of the globe into one world market through economic ties. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured as if out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” (ibid., p. 429).

The rates of formation of the bourgeoisie and the degree of its influence were different in different countries: “While a rich and powerful bourgeoisie was forming in England from the 17th century and in France from the 18th century, in Germany it is possible to speak of the bourgeoisie only from the beginning of the 19th century” (F. Engels, ibid., p. 48).

V. I. Lenin distinguished three historical epochs in the development of the bourgeoisie as a class. The first (to 1871) was the epoch of the rise and formation of the bourgeoisie, “the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 26, p. 143). The second (1871-1914) was the epoch of the complete domination and the beginning of the decline of the bourgeoisie, “the epoch of transition from its progressive character toward reactionary and even ultrareactionary finance capital” (ibid.). The third (from 1914) was “the epoch of imperialism and imperialist upheavals as well as of upheavals stemming from the nature of imperialism, ” when the bourgeoisie, “from a rising and progressive class has turned into a declining, decadent, internally dead, and reactionary class” (ibid., pp. 143, 145-46).

During the period when capitalism was on the rise, the bourgeoisie of England—“the workshop of the world”—held the leading position. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the aggressive imperialist bourgeoisie of Germany began to move into first place in Europe. However, by this time the monopolistic bourgeoisie of the USA, the greatest international exploiter and chief bulwark of international reaction in the contemporary era, began to gain strength rapidly.

Competition leads to profound changes in the arrangement of forces within the bourgeois class; as a result, the highest strata of the bourgeoisie begin to play a decisive role in capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is subdivided into the industrial, commercial, banking, and rural bourgeoisies as a function of the sphere in which capital is applied. A struggle goes on between individual capitalists and layers of the bourgeoisie over the distribution of surplus value; however, the bourgeoisie acts as a single class of exploiters in opposition to the proletariat and toiling people in general.

With the development of capitalism, the contradiction between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation sharpened. The concentration of production and its growing scope was accompanied by the centralization of capital and the concentration of vast resources in the hands of, and under the control of, the ever-narrower upper strata of the bourgeois class. This process was accelerated by periodic crises of overproduction. By the early 20th century, on the basis of the processes of concentration and centralization of capital and production, free competition was becoming monopoly. The monopolistic bourgeoisie took shape as the ruling stratum of bourgeois society.

Concentration and centralization of capital ruined small, middle, and some upper capitalists. The proportion of the bourgeoisie in the gainfully employed population and the population at large of the capitalist countries decreased. In the USA, for example, in 1870 owners of enterprises and proprietors of firms (along with petit bourgeois, managers, and high officials) made up 30 percent of the employed population; by 1910 the figure was 23 percent; and in 1950 their proportion was 15.9 percent. In Great Britain, entrepreneurs made up 8.1 percent of the gainfully employed population in 1851; in 1951, they were only 2.04 percent. On the whole, the big bourgeoisie amounted to approximately 1-3 percent of the gainfully employed population in highly developed capitalist countries in the mid-20th century.

As capitalism developed, and particularly as it developed into imperialism, there was a fundamental change in the historical role of the bourgeoisie. It became the main obstacle to social progress. Imperialism carries with it profound changes in the structure and arrangement of forces within the bourgeois class. Finance capital, a qualitatively new form of capital, becomes dominant. Finance capital is personified in the financial oligarchy, which, relying on its combined economic power, seizes the key positions in the economy and takes possession of most of the national wealth of a country.

One of the most important features of the financial oligarchy is its control over a vast mass of other people’s capital and over the monetary means of the society through the development of the joint stock form of capital and credit institutions (banks, insurance companies, and savings banks). This control brings unprecedented monopoly superprofits. The domination of the financial oligarchy becomes still stronger as monopoly capitalism develops into state monopoly capitalism. It becomes capable of controlling not only the capital of other people, accumulated in the form of shares and other securities, but also a sizable portion of the means of the state budget, through which the fulfillment of state orders is financed.

Even within the bourgeoisie itself, a financial oligarchy is an extremely narrow circle of people, a small group of millionaires and billionaires who have seized for themselves the overwhelming portion of the national wealth of the capitalist countries. In the 1960’s, 1 percent of the property owners in the USA amassed 59 percent and 1 percent of the property owners in Britain amassed 56 percent of all capital. Directly affiliated with the financial oligarchy are the leadership of the ruling government machinery, the party political elite of the bourgeois parties and sometimes the reformist parties, and the upper military caste. This is the direct consequence of the interlacing and interlocking of the monopolies and the state.

Monopoly capital engenders the specific social layer of managers of capitalist enterprises. With the increasing importance of the function of production management and its growing scale, the reinforcement of processes of specialization and collectivization of production, the development of state monopoly capitalism, and the exacerbation of competition among the monopolies, the role of the technocracy grows. A distinctive social differentiation takes place within the technocracy. Its upper stratum merges with the financial oligarchy.

Monopolies cannot reorganize the entire capitalist economy. “Pure imperialism, without the fundamental basis of capitalism has never existed, does not exist anywhere, and never will exist” (Lenin, ibid., vol. 38, p. 151). Rushing into the most profitable branches of industry, monopoly capital leaves a relatively broad field of activity for the non-monopolistic bourgeoisie in the other branches. Many of these branches are not ripe for mass standardized production because of their technical economic characteristics, and in some the creation of large enterprises is not always economically justified (trade, everyday repairs and services, maintenance, and so forth). Moreover, some branches of production that service the large monopolies are the property of the state, local authorities, and municipalities. Through the system of monopoly prices, the financial oligarchy extracts a portion of the surplus value created in these enterprises without spending its own capital.

The bourgeoisie is a doomed class; it is becoming a thing of the past. The bourgeois class was liquidated in the USSR for the first time in history as a result of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the victory of socialism; it was then eliminated in the other socialist countries where the dictatorship of the proletariat came into being.

The reactionary role of the bourgeoisie is manifested with particular clarity under the conditions of state monopoly capitalism, which “joins the power of the monopolies with the power of the state in a single mechanism for the purpose of enriching the monopolies, suppressing the workers’ movement and national liberation struggle, saving the capitalist system, and unleashing aggressive wars” (Program of the CPSU, 1969, pp. 26-27). The most aggressive groupings of the bourgeoisie attempt to find an escape from the contradictions of imperialism in the militarization of the economy. They unleashed the first and second world wars and are now threatening to plunge the world into a new military catastrophe, using the means of mass annihilation and destruction. The monopolist bourgeoisie carries out an aggressive foreign policy directed against the socialist countries and the national liberation movement and a reactionary domestic policy that aims to suppress the struggle through strikes of the working class and the democratic movement of the broad masses. Neofascist parties are becoming active in some imperialist countries. The main ideological and political weapon of the monopolistic bourgeoisie is anticommunism.

In a number of countries where tribal relations and vestiges of slavery and feudalism persist, the national bourgeoisie can still play a progressive role to a certain extent. This was demonstrated by the experience of the historical development of the countries of Asia and Africa which, after World War II (1939-45), cast off their colonial fetters and embarked on the path of independent development, continuing the struggle for the consolidation of their state sovereignty and for economic self-dependence. In some of the developing countries, the national bourgeoisie became the ruling class, endowed with political power and the corresponding economic privileges. Basing itself on state power, it was able to counterpose national interests and its own class interests to international monopoly capital on the domestic market and within the world capitalist economy. But, while taking certain steps to frustrate the neocolonialist schemes of the imperialist monopolies, the national bourgeoisie simultaneously falls back on the aid of the imperialist monopolies in the area of economic development and in the struggle to strengthen its own class rule. The inconstant and contradictory nature of the class position of the national bourgeoisie is also linked to the intensifying processes of intraclass differentiation—that is, economic stratification and a change in its social aspect. The upper and middle national bourgeoisie, each in its own way, come to the use of foreign capital and to economic and social reforms and approach the problem of democratic transformations. As a result of the influence of the aggregate of external and internal conditions, the development of the bourgeoisie becomes ever more complex and contradictory. In some countries, the general weakening of imperialism results in the contraction of the economic and social base of bourgeois national enterprise; in other countries, where imperialism has managed to strengthen its positions, the national bourgeoisie joins ranks with the forces of reaction.

“Social differentiation develops in the countries that have liberated themselves. The conflict sharpens between the working class, peasantry, and other democratic forces, including patriotic-minded strata of the petit bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, imperialism and the forces of internal reaction, and those elements of the national bourgeoisie that are inclined more and more to make a deal with imperialism” (Mezhdunarodnoe Soveshchanie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii: Dokumenty i materialy, Moscow, 1969, pp. 311-12).

History has confirmed the prognosis of Marx regarding the inevitability of the degeneration and downfall of bourgeois civilization under the weight of the crimes it has committed. This follows from the economic essence of capitalism, the fundamental law of which is the production of surplus value. Marx pointed out that there is no crime capital would not commit in order to increase its profits. The most complete and villainous manifestation of the criminal nature of bourgeois rule was embodied in fascism and the system it created of the mass extermination of people, based on genocide and a revival of slavery. The most reactionary strata of monopoly capital urge the use of fascist methods. Through the creation of so-called military-industrial complexes, they strive for total militarization and the suppression of all democratic liberties. The maniacs of militarism threaten humanity with annihilation through rocket and nuclear war.

The class whose goal and calling in life is the production of profit for its own enrichment is doomed to decay. Amorality, corruption, and gangsterism flourish in the social life of the most developed capitalist countries. In the end, the material ideal of the “society of consumption” advanced by bourgeois economists and sociologists is reduced to the establishment of “satisfied slavery, ” which leads to spiritual impoverishment and the decay of morals. Contemporary bourgeois culture brings the disintegration of literature and art and the renunciation of the realistic depiction of reality; it is used to propagate hatred of mankind and immorality.

The working class and its communist vanguard emerge as the bearers of the ideas of social progress, which express the best hopes of humanity; they rally the peoples of the world in the struggle against imperialism.

“The struggle against imperialism, ” states the Document of the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties (June 1969), “is a long, stubborn, and difficult one. Sharp class battles are inevitable in the future. It is necessary to intensify the offensive against the positions of imperialism and domestic reaction. The victory of the revolutionary and progressive forces is inevitable” (ibid., p. 330).
REFERENCES
Marx, K., and F. Engels. “Manifest Kommunisticheskoi partii.” In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4.
Marx, K. “Kapital, ” vols. 1, 2, and 3. Ibid., vols. 23, 24, and 25.
Marx, K. “Naemnyi trud i kapital.” Ibid., vol. 6.
Marx, K. “Burzhuaziia i kontrrevoliutsiia.” Ibid., vol. 6.
Marx, K. “Klassovaia bor’ba vo Frantsii s 1848 po 1850 g.” Ibid., vol. 7.
Engels, F. “Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Anglii.” Ibid., vol. 2.
Engels, F. “Revoliutsiia i kontrrevoliutsiia v Germanii.” Ibid., vol. 8.
Lenin, V. I. “Po povodu tak nazyvaemogo voprosa o rynkakh.” In Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 1.
Lenin, V. I. “Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii.” Ibid., vol. 3.
Lenin, V. I. “Mezhdunarodnyi sotsialisticheskii kongress v Shtutgarte.” Ibid., vol. 16.
Lenin, V. I. “Voinstvuiushchii militarizm i antimilitaristskaia taktika sotsial-demokratii.” Ibid., vol. 17.
Lenin, V. I. “Imperializm, kak vysshaia stadiia kapitalizma.” Ibid., vol. 27.
Lenin, V. I. “Imperializm i raskol sotsializma.” Ibid., vol. 30.
Lenin, V. I. “O zadachakh proletariata v dannoi revoliutsii.” Ibid., vol. 31.
Lenin, V. I. “Detskaia bolezn’ ‘levizny’ v kommunizme.” Ibid., vol. 41.
Lenin, V. I. “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii.” Ibid., vol. 37. Ch. “Chto takoe internatsionalizm?” Pages 291-305.
Lenin, V. I. “ ‘levom’ rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti.” Ibid., vol. 36.
Programmnye dokumenty bor’by za mir, demokratiiu i sotsializm. Moscow, 1964.
Programma i Ustav KPSS. Moscow, 1964.
Brezhnev, L. I. Otchetnyi doklad TsK KPSS XXIII s” ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Moscow, 1966. Part 1, secs. 2 and 3.
Mezhdunarodnoe revoliuisionnoe dvizhenie rabochego klassa, 3rd ed. Moscow, 1966. Chs. 2, 5, 8.
Mezhdunarodnoe soveshchanie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii …, Moskva, 5-17 iiunia 1969 g. Moscow, 1969.
Gollan, J. Politicheskaia sistema Velikobritanii. Moscow, 1955. (Translated from English.)
Gorodskie srednie sloi sovremennogo kapitalisticheskogo obshchestva. Moscow, 1963.
Imperialisticheskoe gosudarstvo i kapitalisticheskoe khoziaistvo. Moscow, 1963.
Politicheskaia zhizn’ SShA. Moscow, 1966.
Stroitel’stvo kommunizma i mirovoi revoliutsionnyi protsess. Moscow, 1966.
Guttsman, W. L. The British Political Elite. London, 1963.
Sampson, A. Anatomy of Britain Today. London, 1965.
Baran, P. A., and P. M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York-London, 1966.
Millar, R. The New Classes: The New Pattern of British Life. London, 1966.
Galbraith, J. K. The New Industrial State. Boston, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Novoe industrial’noe obshchestvo. Moscow, 1970.

A. G. MILEIKOVSKII and N. N. KUCHINSKII

[ColonelCossack]

Bourgeoisie

the ruling class of capitalist society, which possesses property in the means of production and which exists by exploiting wage labor. The source of income of the bourgeoisie is surplus value, which is created by unpaid labor and is appropriated by the capitalists.

In the period of feudalism in the countries of Western Europe, the word “bourgeois” initially designated the inhabitants of the cities in general. The development of the trades and of commodity production led to the class stratification of the urban population, from which elements of the bourgeoisie began to emerge at the end of the 15th century. “From the serfs of the Middle Ages” wrote K. Marx and F. Engels in the Communist Manifesto, “sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed” (Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 425). The bourgeois class was made up of traders, usurers, the wealthiest guild masters, the leading elements of the countryside, and feudal lords. As industry, trade, and navigation developed, the bourgeoisie gradually concentrated in its hands ever-increasing masses of wealth and money capital. The formation of the bourgeoisie as a class was linked to the era of the so-called primary accumulation of capital, which mainly consisted in the expropriation of land and labor tools from the broad masses of people and which relied heavily on colonial pillage and seizure. During this era, the conditions were created for the birth and development of the capitalist mode of production—a mass of wage workers free of personal dependence and the means of production was created, and large sums of money capital were concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The discovery (1492) and colonization of America, the discovery of a sea route to India around Africa (1498), and the expansion of trade with the colonies created a new field of activity for the incipient bourgeoisie. Guild production could no longer satisfy the growing demand for goods. The manufactory came to replace the handicraft shops, as did large-scale machine industry later, as a result of the industrial revolution that began in England in the mid-18th century and spread to Europe and North America. A new class entered the historical arena—the proletariat, which is the antagonist and gravedigger of the bourgeois class.

The development of capitalist production made it essential for the bourgeoisie that the political domination of the feudal lords be eliminated. Striving to put an end to the feudal fragmentation that hindered the development of trade and industry, the bourgeoisie headed, in its own class interests, the movement of the masses of the people against feudalism. The bourgeoisie came to power as a result of the bourgeois and bourgeois democratic revolutions that occurred in the countries of Western Europe and North America during the 16th to 18th centuries and in a number of other countries later on.

In the struggle against feudalism, the bourgeoisie played a historically progressive role. Under its leadership the dominance of feudal relationships was liquidated by the dictates of the objective laws of the development of productive forces. The bourgeois revolutions proceeded under the banner of the ideas of the Enlightenment; they furthered the progress of science and technology. The age-old isolation of small-scale production was destroyed; there was collectivization of labor, which as a result increased in productivity. With the development of industry the bourgeoisie subordinated the countryside to the domination of the city. It created national markets and bound all the parts of the globe into one world market through economic ties. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured as if out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” (ibid., p. 429).

The rates of formation of the bourgeoisie and the degree of its influence were different in different countries: “While a rich and powerful bourgeoisie was forming in England from the 17th century and in France from the 18th century, in Germany it is possible to speak of the bourgeoisie only from the beginning of the 19th century” (F. Engels, ibid., p. 48).

V. I. Lenin distinguished three historical epochs in the development of the bourgeoisie as a class. The first (to 1871) was the epoch of the rise and formation of the bourgeoisie, “the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 26, p. 143). The second (1871-1914) was the epoch of the complete domination and the beginning of the decline of the bourgeoisie, “the epoch of transition from its progressive character toward reactionary and even ultrareactionary finance capital” (ibid.). The third (from 1914) was “the epoch of imperialism and imperialist upheavals as well as of upheavals stemming from the nature of imperialism, ” when the bourgeoisie, “from a rising and progressive class has turned into a declining, decadent, internally dead, and reactionary class” (ibid., pp. 143, 145-46).

During the period when capitalism was on the rise, the bourgeoisie of England—“the workshop of the world”—held the leading position. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the aggressive imperialist bourgeoisie of Germany began to move into first place in Europe. However, by this time the monopolistic bourgeoisie of the USA, the greatest international exploiter and chief bulwark of international reaction in the contemporary era, began to gain strength rapidly.

Competition leads to profound changes in the arrangement of forces within the bourgeois class; as a result, the highest strata of the bourgeoisie begin to play a decisive role in capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is subdivided into the industrial, commercial, banking, and rural bourgeoisies as a function of the sphere in which capital is applied. A struggle goes on between individual capitalists and layers of the bourgeoisie over the distribution of surplus value; however, the bourgeoisie acts as a single class of exploiters in opposition to the proletariat and toiling people in general.

With the development of capitalism, the contradiction between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation sharpened. The concentration of production and its growing scope was accompanied by the centralization of capital and the concentration of vast resources in the hands of, and under the control of, the ever-narrower upper strata of the bourgeois class. This process was accelerated by periodic crises of overproduction. By the early 20th century, on the basis of the processes of concentration and centralization of capital and production, free competition was becoming monopoly. The monopolistic bourgeoisie took shape as the ruling stratum of bourgeois society.

Concentration and centralization of capital ruined small, middle, and some upper capitalists. The proportion of the bourgeoisie in the gainfully employed population and the population at large of the capitalist countries decreased. In the USA, for example, in 1870 owners of enterprises and proprietors of firms (along with petit bourgeois, managers, and high officials) made up 30 percent of the employed population; by 1910 the figure was 23 percent; and in 1950 their proportion was 15.9 percent. In Great Britain, entrepreneurs made up 8.1 percent of the gainfully employed population in 1851; in 1951, they were only 2.04 percent. On the whole, the big bourgeoisie amounted to approximately 1-3 percent of the gainfully employed population in highly developed capitalist countries in the mid-20th century.

As capitalism developed, and particularly as it developed into imperialism, there was a fundamental change in the historical role of the bourgeoisie. It became the main obstacle to social progress. Imperialism carries with it profound changes in the structure and arrangement of forces within the bourgeois class. Finance capital, a qualitatively new form of capital, becomes dominant. Finance capital is personified in the financial oligarchy, which, relying on its combined economic power, seizes the key positions in the economy and takes possession of most of the national wealth of a country.

One of the most important features of the financial oligarchy is its control over a vast mass of other people’s capital and over the monetary means of the society through the development of the joint stock form of capital and credit institutions (banks, insurance companies, and savings banks). This control brings unprecedented monopoly superprofits. The domination of the financial oligarchy becomes still stronger as monopoly capitalism develops into state monopoly capitalism. It becomes capable of controlling not only the capital of other people, accumulated in the form of shares and other securities, but also a sizable portion of the means of the state budget, through which the fulfillment of state orders is financed.

Even within the bourgeoisie itself, a financial oligarchy is an extremely narrow circle of people, a small group of millionaires and billionaires who have seized for themselves the overwhelming portion of the national wealth of the capitalist countries. In the 1960’s, 1 percent of the property owners in the USA amassed 59 percent and 1 percent of the property owners in Britain amassed 56 percent of all capital. Directly affiliated with the financial oligarchy are the leadership of the ruling government machinery, the party political elite of the bourgeois parties and sometimes the reformist parties, and the upper military caste. This is the direct consequence of the interlacing and interlocking of the monopolies and the state.

Monopoly capital engenders the specific social layer of managers of capitalist enterprises. With the increasing importance of the function of production management and its growing scale, the reinforcement of processes of specialization and collectivization of production, the development of state monopoly capitalism, and the exacerbation of competition among the monopolies, the role of the technocracy grows. A distinctive social differentiation takes place within the technocracy. Its upper stratum merges with the financial oligarchy.

Monopolies cannot reorganize the entire capitalist economy. “Pure imperialism, without the fundamental basis of capitalism has never existed, does not exist anywhere, and never will exist” (Lenin, ibid., vol. 38, p. 151). Rushing into the most profitable branches of industry, monopoly capital leaves a relatively broad field of activity for the non-monopolistic bourgeoisie in the other branches. Many of these branches are not ripe for mass standardized production because of their technical economic characteristics, and in some the creation of large enterprises is not always economically justified (trade, everyday repairs and services, maintenance, and so forth). Moreover, some branches of production that service the large monopolies are the property of the state, local authorities, and municipalities. Through the system of monopoly prices, the financial oligarchy extracts a portion of the surplus value created in these enterprises without spending its own capital.

The bourgeoisie is a doomed class; it is becoming a thing of the past. The bourgeois class was liquidated in the USSR for the first time in history as a result of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the victory of socialism; it was then eliminated in the other socialist countries where the dictatorship of the proletariat came into being.

The reactionary role of the bourgeoisie is manifested with particular clarity under the conditions of state monopoly capitalism, which “joins the power of the monopolies with the power of the state in a single mechanism for the purpose of enriching the monopolies, suppressing the workers’ movement and national liberation struggle, saving the capitalist system, and unleashing aggressive wars” (Program of the CPSU, 1969, pp. 26-27). The most aggressive groupings of the bourgeoisie attempt to find an escape from the contradictions of imperialism in the militarization of the economy. They unleashed the first and second world wars and are now threatening to plunge the world into a new military catastrophe, using the means of mass annihilation and destruction. The monopolist bourgeoisie carries out an aggressive foreign policy directed against the socialist countries and the national liberation movement and a reactionary domestic policy that aims to suppress the struggle through strikes of the working class and the democratic movement of the broad masses. Neofascist parties are becoming active in some imperialist countries. The main ideological and political weapon of the monopolistic bourgeoisie is anticommunism.

In a number of countries where tribal relations and vestiges of slavery and feudalism persist, the national bourgeoisie can still play a progressive role to a certain extent. This was demonstrated by the experience of the historical development of the countries of Asia and Africa which, after World War II (1939-45), cast off their colonial fetters and embarked on the path of independent development, continuing the struggle for the consolidation of their state sovereignty and for economic self-dependence. In some of the developing countries, the national bourgeoisie became the ruling class, endowed with political power and the corresponding economic privileges. Basing itself on state power, it was able to counterpose national interests and its own class interests to international monopoly capital on the domestic market and within the world capitalist economy. But, while taking certain steps to frustrate the neocolonialist schemes of the imperialist monopolies, the national bourgeoisie simultaneously falls back on the aid of the imperialist monopolies in the area of economic development and in the struggle to strengthen its own class rule. The inconstant and contradictory nature of the class position of the national bourgeoisie is also linked to the intensifying processes of intraclass differentiation—that is, economic stratification and a change in its social aspect. The upper and middle national bourgeoisie, each in its own way, come to the use of foreign capital and to economic and social reforms and approach the problem of democratic transformations. As a result of the influence of the aggregate of external and internal conditions, the development of the bourgeoisie becomes ever more complex and contradictory. In some countries, the general weakening of imperialism results in the contraction of the economic and social base of bourgeois national enterprise; in other countries, where imperialism has managed to strengthen its positions, the national bourgeoisie joins ranks with the forces of reaction.

“Social differentiation develops in the countries that have liberated themselves. The conflict sharpens between the working class, peasantry, and other democratic forces, including patriotic-minded strata of the petit bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, imperialism and the forces of internal reaction, and those elements of the national bourgeoisie that are inclined more and more to make a deal with imperialism” (Mezhdunarodnoe Soveshchanie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii: Dokumenty i materialy, Moscow, 1969, pp. 311-12).

History has confirmed the prognosis of Marx regarding the inevitability of the degeneration and downfall of bourgeois civilization under the weight of the crimes it has committed. This follows from the economic essence of capitalism, the fundamental law of which is the production of surplus value. Marx pointed out that there is no crime capital would not commit in order to increase its profits. The most complete and villainous manifestation of the criminal nature of bourgeois rule was embodied in fascism and the system it created of the mass extermination of people, based on genocide and a revival of slavery. The most reactionary strata of monopoly capital urge the use of fascist methods. Through the creation of so-called military-industrial complexes, they strive for total militarization and the suppression of all democratic liberties. The maniacs of militarism threaten humanity with annihilation through rocket and nuclear war.

The class whose goal and calling in life is the production of profit for its own enrichment is doomed to decay. Amorality, corruption, and gangsterism flourish in the social life of the most developed capitalist countries. In the end, the material ideal of the “society of consumption” advanced by bourgeois economists and sociologists is reduced to the establishment of “satisfied slavery, ” which leads to spiritual impoverishment and the decay of morals. Contemporary bourgeois culture brings the disintegration of literature and art and the renunciation of the realistic depiction of reality; it is used to propagate hatred of mankind and immorality.

The working class and its communist vanguard emerge as the bearers of the ideas of social progress, which express the best hopes of humanity; they rally the peoples of the world in the struggle against imperialism.

“The struggle against imperialism, ” states the Document of the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties (June 1969), “is a long, stubborn, and difficult one. Sharp class battles are inevitable in the future. It is necessary to intensify the offensive against the positions of imperialism and domestic reaction. The victory of the revolutionary and progressive forces is inevitable” (ibid., p. 330).
REFERENCES
Marx, K., and F. Engels. “Manifest Kommunisticheskoi partii.” In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4.
Marx, K. “Kapital, ” vols. 1, 2, and 3. Ibid., vols. 23, 24, and 25.
Marx, K. “Naemnyi trud i kapital.” Ibid., vol. 6.
Marx, K. “Burzhuaziia i kontrrevoliutsiia.” Ibid., vol. 6.
Marx, K. “Klassovaia bor’ba vo Frantsii s 1848 po 1850 g.” Ibid., vol. 7.
Engels, F. “Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Anglii.” Ibid., vol. 2.
Engels, F. “Revoliutsiia i kontrrevoliutsiia v Germanii.” Ibid., vol. 8.
Lenin, V. I. “Po povodu tak nazyvaemogo voprosa o rynkakh.” In Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 1.
Lenin, V. I. “Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii.” Ibid., vol. 3.
Lenin, V. I. “Mezhdunarodnyi sotsialisticheskii kongress v Shtutgarte.” Ibid., vol. 16.
Lenin, V. I. “Voinstvuiushchii militarizm i antimilitaristskaia taktika sotsial-demokratii.” Ibid., vol. 17.
Lenin, V. I. “Imperializm, kak vysshaia stadiia kapitalizma.” Ibid., vol. 27.
Lenin, V. I. “Imperializm i raskol sotsializma.” Ibid., vol. 30.
Lenin, V. I. “O zadachakh proletariata v dannoi revoliutsii.” Ibid., vol. 31.
Lenin, V. I. “Detskaia bolezn’ ‘levizny’ v kommunizme.” Ibid., vol. 41.
Lenin, V. I. “Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii.” Ibid., vol. 37. Ch. “Chto takoe internatsionalizm?” Pages 291-305.
Lenin, V. I. “ ‘levom’ rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti.” Ibid., vol. 36.
Programmnye dokumenty bor’by za mir, demokratiiu i sotsializm. Moscow, 1964.
Programma i Ustav KPSS. Moscow, 1964.
Brezhnev, L. I. Otchetnyi doklad TsK KPSS XXIII s” ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Moscow, 1966. Part 1, secs. 2 and 3.
Mezhdunarodnoe revoliuisionnoe dvizhenie rabochego klassa, 3rd ed. Moscow, 1966. Chs. 2, 5, 8.
Mezhdunarodnoe soveshchanie kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii …, Moskva, 5-17 iiunia 1969 g. Moscow, 1969.
Gollan, J. Politicheskaia sistema Velikobritanii. Moscow, 1955. (Translated from English.)
Gorodskie srednie sloi sovremennogo kapitalisticheskogo obshchestva. Moscow, 1963.
Imperialisticheskoe gosudarstvo i kapitalisticheskoe khoziaistvo. Moscow, 1963.
Politicheskaia zhizn’ SShA. Moscow, 1966.
Stroitel’stvo kommunizma i mirovoi revoliutsionnyi protsess. Moscow, 1966.
Guttsman, W. L. The British Political Elite. London, 1963.
Sampson, A. Anatomy of Britain Today. London, 1965.
Baran, P. A., and P. M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York-London, 1966.
Millar, R. The New Classes: The New Pattern of British Life. London, 1966.
Galbraith, J. K. The New Industrial State. Boston, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Novoe industrial’noe obshchestvo. Moscow, 1970.

A. G. MILEIKOVSKII and N. N. KUCHINSKII

sorry to be offtopic, but why do you have to post that at 3:40 AM? :crying::crying::crying:

[RedGrunt]

I thought it was badass. Then again it isn't 3:40am here. :)

[Ocean Seal]

It wasn't bourgeois. It was composed of a series of different elements. From the most reactionary wings which we the slave owners in the South, and the expansionists along the frontiers. The yeoman farmer also played an important role in the revolution as well as national bourgeoisie traders and lumpenproletariat smugglers.

Overall the end result of the revolution was in my opinion reactionary. It took far longer for it to end slavery than it should have and westward expansionism displaced millions of natives in very brutal ways.

[Robespierre Richard]

It wasn't bourgeois. It was composed of a series of different elements. From the most reactionary wings which we the slave owners in the South, and the expansionists along the frontiers. The yeoman farmer also played an important role in the revolution as well as national bourgeoisie traders and lumpenproletariat smugglers.

Overall the end result of the revolution was in my opinion reactionary. It took far longer for it to end slavery than it should have and westward expansionism displaced millions of natives in very brutal ways.

American Revolution

(in Russian, War of Independence in North America of 1775-83), the revolutionary liberation war of the 13 British colonies in North America against British colonial domination, during which an independent state was established—the United States of America.

The American Revolution was prepared for by the entire preceding socioeconomic history of the colonies. The development of capitalism in the colonies and the formation of the North American nation contradicted the policy of the mother country, which considered the colonies a source of raw materials and a market. After the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) the British government intensified its pressure on the colonies, in many ways hindering the further development of industry and trade. The colonization of lands west of the Allegheny Mountains was prohibited (1763), and new taxes and customs duties were introduced, which were contrary to the interests of all the colonists. Separate, uncoordinated uprisings and disturbances, which later developed into war, began in 1767. There was no unity among the participants in the liberation movement. Farmers, artisans, workers, and the urban petite bourgeoisie, who made up the democratic wing of the liberation movement, linked their struggle against the colonial yoke with hopes for free access to land and political democratization. However, the leading position in the camp of the advocates of independence (Whigs) belonged to the representatives of the right wing. They expressed the interests of the upper strata of the bourgeoisie and plantation owners, who were seeking a compromise with the mother country. The opponents of the liberation movement in the colonies and the open supporters of the mother country were the Tories, or Loyalists. Among them were big land-owners as well as persons who were connected with British capital and administration.

The First Continental Congress of representatives from the colonies met in 1774 in Philadelphia and called for a boycott of British goods. At the same time, the congress attempted to reach a compromise with the mother country. During the winter of 1774-75 the first armed detachments of colonists arose spontaneously. In the first battles at Concord and Lexington on Apr. 19, 1775, the British troops suffered heavy losses. Soon 20,000 insurgents formed a so-called camp of liberty near Boston. In the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, the British again suffered serious losses.

On May 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress convened; the predominant influence in it was gained by the radical wing of the bourgeoisie. The congress proposed that all the colonies create new governments to replace the colonial regime. Regular armed forces were organized, and Washington was made commander in chief (June 15, 1775).

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the revolutionary Declaration of Independence, which was written by Jefferson. The declaration proclaimed the separation of the 13 colonies from the mother country and the formation of an independent state—the United States of America (USA). It was the first legal document in history that formally proclaimed the sovereignty of a people and the principles of bourgeois democratic liberties. The decrees on the confiscation of Loyalists’ property (1777) and lands belonging to the crown and the Anglican Church were very significant.

Military action during 1775-78 unfolded primarily in the northern part of the country. The British command endeavored to suppress resistance in New England, which was the center of the revolutionary movement. An American expedition to capture Canada did not achieve its intended goal. The Americans besieged Boston and captured it on Mar. 17, 1776. However, in August 1776 the British commander W. Howe inflicted a grave defeat on Washington’s troops in Brooklyn, and on September 15 he captured New York. In December the British Army inflicted another serious defeat on the Americans near Trenton. Although Washington soon succeeded in capturing Trenton and routing a British detachment at Princeton on Jan. 3, 1777, the position of the American army remained difficult.

The armies that were encountering each other in the American Revolution differed in their composition, equipment, and combat experience. The American insurgent army was initially an ill-trained and poorly organized people’s militia. However, the morale and political level of its soldiers, who were fighting for their own land and vital interests, was considerably higher than the British Army’s. By improving their tactics in waging war, the rebels were able to achieve important advantages. Avoiding major battles and cooperating with partisan detachments, the American army harassed the enemy with sudden thrusts. The American army was the first to use the tactics of an extended formation, against which the linear combat formation of the British proved powerless. At sea, where the British Navy prevailed, American ships also used the tactics of sudden raids, attacking British ships and carrying out campaigns near the shores of Great Britain.

The weakness of central authority in the republic played a considerable role in prolonging the war. The first constitution of the USA, the Articles of Confederation, which was adopted by the congress in 1777 and ratified by the states in 1781, preserved the sovereignty of the states on the most important questions. In addition, the War of Independence was a class struggle within the colonies themselves. Tens of thousands of Loyalists fought in the British Army. The bourgeoisie and plantation owners, who were leading the struggle for independence, were opposed to carrying out the democratic demands of the soldiers, farmers, and workers. The victory of the revolution was possible only because of the participation of the broad masses of the people. Among the poor of New England egalitarian demands ripened for a limit on property ownership and the introduction of ceiling prices on foodstuffs. The Negro people took an active part in the revolution, and Negro regiments were established.

The British plan of military action in 1777 was to cut New England off from the other states. On Sept. 26, 1777, Howe captured Philadelphia, the capital of the USA. However, a British army under the command of J. Burgoyne, which was proceeding from Canada to join Howe, was surrounded, and it surrendered on Oct. 17, 1777, at Saratoga. The victory at Saratoga, which was won by American troops under the command of General H. Gates, improved the international position of the young republic. The USA managed to take advantage of the contradictions between Great Britain and other European powers. Sent to Paris as the representative of the USA, B. Franklin concluded a military alliance in 1778 with France—Great Britain’s colonial rival. In 1779, Spain joined the war against Great Britain. Russia took a friendly position toward the USA, and in 1780 it headed the so-called League of Armed Neutrality, which brought together a number of European countries who were opposed to Great Britain’s attempt to prevent neutral countries from trading with Britain’s enemies.

In June 1778, General H. Clinton, who had replaced Howe, abandoned Philadelphia. During 1779-81 the British shifted their military activity to the southern states, counting on the support of the plantation aristocracy. In December 1778 they captured Savannah, and in May 1780 they took Charleston. The talented general and former blacksmith N. Greene was made head of the southern American army. In fighting against the British troops Greene successfully combined the action of the insurgent army and the partisans. The British were compelled to withdraw their troops to the port cities. After a naval battle of Sept. 5-13, 1781, the French Navy cut the main British forces off from the sea at Yorktown. Washington surrounded them on land, and on Oct. 19, 1781, he forced them to surrender. Under the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1783, Great Britain recognized the independence of the USA.

The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that led to the overthrow of the colonial yoke and the formation of an independent American national state. The former prohibitions by the British Parliament and royal authority, which had hampered the development of industry and trade, were abolished. Also eliminated were the large estates of the British aristocracy, as well as vestiges of feudalism (fixed rent, entail, and primogeniture). In the northern states Negro slavery was limited and gradually eliminated. The transformation of the western lands, which had been expropriated from the Indians, into national property by the Ordinance of 1787 and their subsequent distribution created a base for the accumulation of capital. Thus, the essential prerequisites for the development of capitalism in North America were created. However, not all the problems that confronted the American revolution were resolved. Slavery was not abolished in the South, and a high property qualification for voters was maintained in all the states. The estates of Loyalists and western lands were distributed in large pieces, and they fell into the hands of speculators.

The American Revolution, which in its own time was the model of a revolutionary war, exerted an influence on the struggle of the European bourgeoisie against feudal absolutist regimes. Approximately 7,000 European volunteers fought in the ranks of the American army, including the Frenchmen the Marquis de Lafayette and H. Saint-Simon and the Pole T. Kosciuszko. During the Great French Revolution the insurgents made use of the organizational experience and revolutionary military tactics of the Americans. The victory of the North Americans in the American Revolution promoted the development of the liberation movement of the peoples of Latin America against Spanish domination. The revolution was hailed by the progressive people of many countries, including Russia, where A. N. Radishchev celebrated it in the ode “Liberty.”
REFERENCES
Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 1, ch. 25. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 23.
Engels, F. “Rabochee dvizhenie v Amerike.” Ibid., vol. 21.
Engels, F. F. A. Zorge, 31 dek. 1892. (Letter.) Ibid., vol. 38.
Engels, F. N. F. Daniel’sonu, 17 okt. 1893. (Letter.) Ibid., vol. 39.
Lenin, V. I. Novye dannye o zakonakh razvitiia kapitalizma v zemledelii, part 1: “Kapitalizm i zemledelie v Soedinennykh Shtatakh Ameriki.” Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 27.
Lenin, V. I. “Pis’mo k amerikanskim rabochim.” Ibid., vol. 37.
Lenin, V. I. “Agrarnaia programma sotsial-demokratii v pervoi russkoi revoliutsii 1905-1907 godov.” Ibid., vol. 16.
Ocherki novoi i noveishei istorii SShA, vol. 1. Moscow, 1960.
Foner, P. Istoriia rabochego dvizheniia v SShA, vol. 1. Moscow, 1949. (Translated from English.)
Foster, W. Negritianskii narod v istorii Ameriki. Moscow, 1955. (Translated from English.)
Fursenko, A. A. Amerikanskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia XVIII v. Moscow-Leningrad, 1960.
Aptheker, H. Istoriia amerikanskogo naroda [vol. 2], Amerikanskaia revoliutsiia 1763-1783. Moscow, 1962. (Translated from English.)
The American Nation: A History, vols. 8-10. New York [1933].
Bemis, S. F. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. New York, 1935.
Hardy, J. The First American Revolution. New York, 1937.
Morais, H. The Struggle for American Freedom. New York, 1944.
Jensen, M. The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781-1789. New York, 1950.
Gipson, L. The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775. New York, 1954.

I. I. DEMENT’EV

[Jimmie Higgins]

It wasn't bourgeois. It was composed of a series of different elements. From the most reactionary wings which we the slave owners in the South, and the expansionists along the frontiers. The yeoman farmer also played an important role in the revolution as well as national bourgeoisie traders and lumpenproletariat smugglers.

Overall the end result of the revolution was in my opinion reactionary. It took far longer for it to end slavery than it should have and westward expansionism displaced millions of natives in very brutal ways.

All revolutions involve all the major classes in society in someway. So yes, there were many different groups involved and who were motivated for different reasons. But the class interests that dominated and guided the Revolution were bourgeois. This becomes more apparent as the government is formed (articles of confederation are rejected) and the rulers move towards a more united nation-state and a national bank and repress rebellious farmers who want reforms or a more equal deal. The main forces were large landowners and merchants and the main political leaders were landowners and professionals.

[Bronco]

The fact that it only occurred in 1776 doesn't mean it couldn't have been a bourgeois revolution; the English Revolution in the 17th century during and after the time of the Civil Wars was a bourgeois one as well. That's not to say it was intentional or that any of it's participants willed it to happen but out of the English Civil War grew far more favourable conditions for Capitalism and the Bourgeois to develop e.g. feudal tenures were abolished which meant land was effectively now a commodity and we saw the first state backed Imperialist conflicts headed by Cromwell. See the writings of Christopher Hill for this, a Marxist historian who wrote extensively on the Civil War. I know this doesn't really answer your question regarding the American Revolution, it was just to show the possibility of a bourgeois revolution before the age of mass industrialisation, although this was also something beginning to develop in this era.

[Blake's Baby]

When did capitalism begin to develop?

The factory system was being pioneered in Italy in the 1200s. The European banking system was pretty well developed by the 1500s. The move from a feudalistic obligation-economy to a capitalist cash-based economy was certainly accelerating in Western Europe during the 1300s. The chartered towns, merchant guilds like the Hanseatic League and international religious orders all helped capitalism develope in the late Middle Ages. The Hundred-Years War - itself importantly bound up in a trade-war between England and France over the economic integration of Flanders - was a major spur to the development of both England and France as nation-states (rather than the previous dynastic states), and the wars against the Moors in Iberia did the same for Spain and Portugal; all this was done by the time Columbus even reached Cuba. The settlement of the future USA by the English at least was conducted under conditions of state patronage, and mercantilism was a major motivating factor.

So capitalism was pretty highly developed even before the colonisation of America even began. Certainly there were elements of feudalism still extant in Europe and exported to America, but the colonies were bound to European trading systems, European states/empires, developing European capitalism in short.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I would add,to that most excellent series of posts, that you could say that the US bourgeois revolution was not completed until the end of the Civil War. With the liberation of the slaves, you basically ended the contradiction of a democratic republic with capitalist property forms existing side-by-side with a slave economy.

I don't agree that the American Revolution was reactionary. Incomplete? definitely.

[B0LSHEVIK]

Often leftists call the American revolution a bourgeois revolution, but it occurred in 1776, decades before the Industrial revolution. Could the ruling class in America around that time really be considered bourgeois, then?

Well, it was bourgeois in the sense that the non-royal landowners and industrialists (the industrial revolution really started much earlier than you apparently think) wanted a piece of the pie, so to say. Feudalistic laws and property rights made it hard for the newly emerging 'capitalist' class to actually grow. So, the feudal reigns had to be thrown off. Many of the 'founders' were middle men, capitalist in spirit, in Englands global commerce. If there had been a clear bourgeoisie, they were it. I would say the french/american revolutions were capitalist in nature, but that oversimplifies things too much.The US revolution, really was more of a fight for independence, not a awakening like the french rev. Also, the ruling class aka 'founders' really didnt want a democracy; they simply wanted a plutocracy. Thats why initially, landless whites had no legal voice, neither did women, and much less slaves and indians.

[A Marxist Historian]

Often leftists call the American revolution a bourgeois revolution, but it occurred in 1776, decades before the Industrial revolution. Could the ruling class in America around that time really be considered bourgeois, then?

Actually, that is exactly why it was a bourgeois revolution.

What happens in a bourgeois revolution vs. feudalism or aristocracy or what have you?

What happens is that in an "old order" society, organized around estates like in France rather than classes in the political sense, the different components of a future capitalist ruling class come together, transform themselves from a "class in itself," a merely economic category, into a "class for itself," a self-conscious ruling class. And take the power.

The French Revolution wasn't a bourgeois revolution either, in the sense of the revolution of a self-conscious capitalist class vs. the Old Order. The Third Estate, a vague concept which didn't really correspond well to the real social structure of France, *turned into* the ruling capitalist class of France *during and by means of* the French Revolution.

This goes double for the American Revolution, which was just about as thoroughly bourgeois as any revolution could possibly be.

Its basic slogan was "taxation without representation." That's about as purely bourgeois a slogan as anybody could possibly dream up.

-M.H.-

[Tim Finnegan]

Well, it was bourgeois in the sense that the non-royal landowners and industrialists (the industrial revolution really started much earlier than you apparently think) wanted a piece of the pie, so to say. Feudalistic laws and property rights made it hard for the newly emerging 'capitalist' class to actually grow. So, the feudal reigns had to be thrown off.
Which, if we're to take "feudal" to refer to the character of the state and not just to the existence of an hereditary nobility, had been achieved in England, and thus by extension in the colonies, during the 17th century, with the civil wars of 1639-1651, and confirmed by the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. The revolution conducted by the Americans was against the hegemony of a foreign capitalist class, not against a non-capitalist ruling class; their chains were colonial rather than feudal.

"Bourgeois revolution" just means any revolution which expresses a bourgeois character, it doesn't have to be a specific sort of revolution against a specific sort of regime. It's an abstraction, not something that exists in and of itself.

[Lucretia]

For the American Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, consult Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

[A Marxist Historian]

Which, if we're to take "feudal" to refer to the character of the state and not just to the existence of an hereditary nobility, had been achieved in England, and thus by extension in the colonies, during the 17th century, with the civil wars of 1639-1651, and confirmed by the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. The revolution conducted by the Americans was against the hegemony of a foreign capitalist class, not against a non-capitalist ruling class; their chains were colonial rather than feudal.

"Bourgeois revolution" just means any revolution which expresses a bourgeois character, it doesn't have to be a specific sort of revolution against a specific sort of regime. It's an abstraction, not something that exists in and of itself.

True, but it was to a considerable degree a revolt against the feudal-aristocratic remnants still extant in English society, the monarchy, the established church, and titled nobility/the House of Lords. One of the best and least-remembered clauses of the American Constitution is the one that bans any American citizen from holding or accepting a title of nobility.

So it wasn't a merely and purely colonial national-liberatory rebellion, though it certainly was that as well.

It was the first blow in an overall age of democratic revolution, sparking off the much more radical French Revolution.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

For the American Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, consult Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Actually, don't. A dreadful book, whose purpose is to claim that America is all about equality. Hopefully most folk on Revleft know better than that.

Despite all his errors, you'd even be better off consulting old Charles Beard, with his reductionist "economic interpretation" of the American Revolution. But just about any mainstream scholar will verify that the American Revolution is basically bourgeois, though they won't usually use that term. Arguing otherwise just makes you look silly, something historians do not enjoy.

Best contemporary book by a major mainstream scholar of the American Revolution and its bourgeois nature is probably Theodore Draper's book on the American Revolution, which has gotten little attention as it is so far away from the "ideological Republicanism" paradigm that has deformed analysis of the American Revolution recently so much, in which Wood is one of the worst offenders.

-M.H.-