Binh
12th August 2013, 21:16
In Marxist lexicon, there are two types of revolution: democratic and socialist, or more scientifically, bourgeois-democratic and proletarian-socialist. These two types of revolution involve different class alignments, have different tasks, and lead to different outcomes, although a two-stage uninterrupted (http://links.org.au/node/141) revolution that is initially democratic and becomes socialist is possible. The socialist revolution is a battle between the whole of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat for political supremacy and ends with the victory of either the capitalist or socialist social systems. The democratic revolution is a battle against autocratic rule that removes fetters on capitalist development between a great variety of classes – peasants, workers, students, landlords, capitalists, small business owners. In democratic revolutions, bourgeois forces can be found on both sides of the barricades (unlike in socialist revolutions) and their concrete outcomes can vary tremendously because of their class heterogeneity. Making accurate generalizations about democratic revolutions is difficult since they have occurred on every inhabited continent in one form or another beginning at least 300 years ago.
Part of the inability by Marxists to understand the Arab Spring as democratic rather than socialist revolutions is due to the experience of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ended feudalism in Europe centuries ago. Those transitions from feudal to capitalist social relations were accompanied by shifts from rule by lords and monarchs to rule by elected representatives and parliaments as a kind of “package deal.” Based on this limited experience, Marxists such as Neil Davidson (http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/neil-davidson-on-rethinking-bourgeois-revolution/) have erroneously concluded that bourgeois-democratic revolutions can only occur in countries with pre-capitalist social formations. One example of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that did not involve anti-feudal class content is Portugal in 1974-1975 when a fascist dictatorship was overthrown, paving the way for a transition to bourgeois democracy. After four decades of fascist repression, Portugal’s workers’ movement was simply not in a position to put proletarian rule on the agenda in the revolution; the same is true today of the proletarian (and non-proletarian toiling) classes of Libya (http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd8893d1b.html), Egypt (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7986), and Syria, all of whom are only beginning to create their own organizations. None of them have created their own parties much less acquired socialist awareness on a mass scale. The following remarks (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch02.htm) by Lenin about the Russian revolution of 1905 are surprisingly relevant on this issue:
“Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of socialism and about the methods of achieving it. And we are all convinced that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves; a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organized, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. In answer to the anarchist objections that we are putting off the socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but we are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct road, namely, the road of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach socialism by a different road, other than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the given moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum program, we shall answer by pointing out how far the masses of the democratically-minded people still are from socialism, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, how unorganized the proletarians still are.”
Marxists tend to fall prey to the very naïve optimism Lenin warned against by viewing (http://www.marxist.com/one-year-on-the-egyptian-revolution-continues.htm) the Arab Spring’s revolutions as incomplete or as failures so long as they fail to overturn capitalist social relations. This is a real failure on our part to evaluate these struggles on their own terms and properly appraise the human aspirations driving tens of millions of people to risk life and limb toppling tyrants from Tripoli to Damascus. Overwhelmingly, the revolutionary masses of the Middle East and North Africa desire democracy – capitalist democracy, democracy on the basis of generalized commodity production – not socialism, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and certainly not a horizontal society without rich and poor. We Marxists may not like this, but it is what it is. The masses are fighting for progress, not perfection, to end insufferable tyrannies, not to end capital’s tyranny over labor.
For the rest, see: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9425
Part of the inability by Marxists to understand the Arab Spring as democratic rather than socialist revolutions is due to the experience of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ended feudalism in Europe centuries ago. Those transitions from feudal to capitalist social relations were accompanied by shifts from rule by lords and monarchs to rule by elected representatives and parliaments as a kind of “package deal.” Based on this limited experience, Marxists such as Neil Davidson (http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/neil-davidson-on-rethinking-bourgeois-revolution/) have erroneously concluded that bourgeois-democratic revolutions can only occur in countries with pre-capitalist social formations. One example of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that did not involve anti-feudal class content is Portugal in 1974-1975 when a fascist dictatorship was overthrown, paving the way for a transition to bourgeois democracy. After four decades of fascist repression, Portugal’s workers’ movement was simply not in a position to put proletarian rule on the agenda in the revolution; the same is true today of the proletarian (and non-proletarian toiling) classes of Libya (http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd8893d1b.html), Egypt (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7986), and Syria, all of whom are only beginning to create their own organizations. None of them have created their own parties much less acquired socialist awareness on a mass scale. The following remarks (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch02.htm) by Lenin about the Russian revolution of 1905 are surprisingly relevant on this issue:
“Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of socialism and about the methods of achieving it. And we are all convinced that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves; a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organized, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. In answer to the anarchist objections that we are putting off the socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but we are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct road, namely, the road of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach socialism by a different road, other than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the given moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum program, we shall answer by pointing out how far the masses of the democratically-minded people still are from socialism, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, how unorganized the proletarians still are.”
Marxists tend to fall prey to the very naïve optimism Lenin warned against by viewing (http://www.marxist.com/one-year-on-the-egyptian-revolution-continues.htm) the Arab Spring’s revolutions as incomplete or as failures so long as they fail to overturn capitalist social relations. This is a real failure on our part to evaluate these struggles on their own terms and properly appraise the human aspirations driving tens of millions of people to risk life and limb toppling tyrants from Tripoli to Damascus. Overwhelmingly, the revolutionary masses of the Middle East and North Africa desire democracy – capitalist democracy, democracy on the basis of generalized commodity production – not socialism, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and certainly not a horizontal society without rich and poor. We Marxists may not like this, but it is what it is. The masses are fighting for progress, not perfection, to end insufferable tyrannies, not to end capital’s tyranny over labor.
For the rest, see: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9425