French Revolution

[condor]

Correct me if I'm wrong but do Marxists claim that the French Revolution could only ever be a bourgeois revolution?

But, what if the leaders of the revolution had tried to organize society into shifts so most things were used day and night. The resulting drop in demand and hence working hours would give enough off-work hours for a true democracy.

Sorry this is so abstract but I just have to get it off my chest.

[Comrade #138672]

Correct me if I'm wrong but do Marxists claim that the French Revolution could only ever be a bourgeois revolution?I cannot speak for other Marxists, but I certainly think so.


But, what if the leaders of the revolution had tried to organize society into shifts so most things were used day and night. The resulting drop in demand and hence working hours would give enough off-work hours for a true democracy.

Sorry this is so abstract but I just have to get it off my chest.Why would those leaders have done that, when their consciousness was determined by their material interests being of a bourgeois nature?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Correct me if I'm wrong but do Marxists claim that the French Revolution could only ever be a bourgeois revolution?

But, what if the leaders of the revolution had tried to organize society into shifts so most things were used day and night. The resulting drop in demand and hence working hours would give enough off-work hours for a true democracy.

Sorry this is so abstract but I just have to get it off my chest.

I can't follow your line of thought at all.

If things are used in shifts, they would be consumed either at the same rate as before (instead of Tweedle-Dee eating half of his bag of rice per day and Tweedle-Dum eating half of his, Tweedle-Dee eats half of one bag of rice by day and Tweelde-Dum by night) or sooner.

Working hours are not determined by demand. Supply and demand are always in disproportion in capitalism, for one thing, and the capitalist strives to maximise working hours as much as is biologically possible.

What is "true" democracy? France in 1793 was a democratic republic, one of the most perfect examples of that state form. So what? It was still a bourgeois dictatorship as bourgeois interest determined state policy structurally.

[reviscom1]

It was a bourgeois revolution because it represented the bourgeois classes asserting their latent dominance over the aristocracy. It was the political expression of economic and social changes that had seen the bourgeoisie grow in size,strength, education and awareness.

In Marxist terms it represented the switch between the "Feudal" and "Capitalist" eras of history.

No doubt, in 1815 with the utter defeat of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbons, the triumphant aristocracy would have laughed the ideals of the Revolution to scorn and declared that they had been "proven not to work". In fact the change represented by the revolution was irreversible.

Lessons there for people who similarly dismissed Communism in 1989.

[Ismail]

Correct me if I'm wrong but do Marxists claim that the French Revolution could only ever be a bourgeois revolution?Yes. The French proletariat, as with the proletarians in Britain, the United States, the German states and elsewhere, was still in its infancy in terms of how it worked (artisan and other types of labor not far removed from the petty-bourgeoisie), size and class consciousness. It couldn't assume a leadership role in the revolution against feudalism, but it did support the bourgeois revolutionaries who led it. The bourgeoisie, of course, "reciprocated" by turning on the most radical elements of the revolutionary forces and intensifying the process of industrial development, turning artisans into factory workers and thus laying the foundations for the proletariat to go from being a "class in itself" in the context of mass immiseration which led to recognition of the necessity for unions, the independent activity of workers in politics, etc.

Two books you may find helpful:
* https://archive.org/details/ModernHistory16401870
* https://archive.org/details/InternationalWorkingClassAndCommunistMovementHisto ricalRecord (the first two chapters)