Originally posted by ( R )
[email protected] 28, 2007 09:01 pm
Can someone explain to me why the French Revolution, Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are considered bourgeois revolutions? How do they specifically differ from a "peoples revolution"? Thanks, I am reading state and revolution and I need a lil help. Thanks!
You mean this?
If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a "people's" revolution, since in neither does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast, although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.
source (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm)
The French Revolution was both a bourgeois revolution and a "people's revolution". Since the mass of the "common people" - the poorer layers of the population - certainly did participate, and what's more as a force distinct from the bourgeoisie. The poorer layers of the population were much more radical and militant than the bourgeoisie. For a time, radical petty-bourgeois elements like Robespierre held power with the support of the city poor, and pushed things further than the timid big bourgeoisie wanted to.
Lenin's apparently saying neither the Portuguese or Turkish revolutions which occurred sometime between 1900 and 1917 had indepednet mass participation like that. The "Young Turk Revolution" of 1908 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Turk_Revolution) apparently was something of a coup by army officers.
As for why all three were bourgeois revolutions, other people have commented on that....partly this category's used to describe the changes a revolution's made. If they're limited to clearing out feudalism and so forth, and don't also go on to assault capitalism, a revolution's usually called bourgeois or bourgeois-democratic.
Lenin's describing the 1905-07 revolution as bourgeois although it was definitely the working class in the lead of the assault on tsarism - probably because the revolution was primarily an assault on tsarism. He later said "our" 1917 revolution was bourgeois until mid-1918, when committees of poor peasants were set up to begin the fight against the rural bourgeoisie (kulaks) - not just the feudal landlords.