Comments on
the Preface
Page xii
"To ask how revolutionary these revolutions were is therefore to
ask what type of revolutions they were". Yes; but I would honestly
phrase the question as "how bourgeois were the bourgeois
revolutions?"
Four
reasons why Bourgeois Revolutions should claim our attention:
1.
Inability of the left to distinguish between
proletarian and bourgeois revolutions. Never thought of it this way, and it is
a good point. Interesting that he sees the Chinese Revolution as a bourgeois revolution;
of course exactly the same point could be made about the Bolshevik revolution!
I would be inclined to make the point, but I doubt Davidson will.
2.
Political conclusions drawn from a successful
deployment of the bourgeois revolution thesis. The first amount to a propaganda
point to undercut the evolutionary and peaceful claims of the current bourgeois
order; the second to a justification of revolution as a socialist strategy
because of a prior bourgeois revolution.
The power of the first point of course would depend on the proponents of
the current bourgeois order being convinced that the bourgeois revolution
thesis does "illuminate the process" as Davidson puts it. And if
accepting that exposes them to such critique, why then would the accept it in the
first place? I question therefore the value of this argument. The second reason
is even more questionable. Why does socialist strategy need to be legitimated
by a bourgeois past anyway? Our opponents are always going to attack any
revolutionary strategy, so who cares about countering them anyway? Of course,
what Davidson does not spell out is that these political points arising from
the assumption that the bourgeois revolution thesis "illuminates" the
origins of our world are directed at the middle ground, the uncommitted masses
who can presumably be won for a socialist strategy of transformation if the
elements of the bourgeois intellectual and cultural hegemony (what Wallerstein
calls the 'geoculture') can be countered. And countering them requires a far
lesser burden of proof and argument than against 'experts'. So in a nutshell,
Davidson's argument here boils down to the political utility of the thesis, its
value as to be crude, 'agitprop'.
3.
The meaning of the events subsumed under the
concept of bourgeois revolution will remain contested until the world ushered
in by those events is transformed "by another revolution, which is
greater, more solemn, and final". In other words, the because the social
structure of the world in which we live is a product of history, that history
is still current and therefore contested. Hegel's owl of Minerva cannot fly and
past judgement on the era and its origins, until it comes to a decisive end. It
is difficult to know exactly what to make of this point. I think what Davidson is trying to say
here is that historical events pertinent to the birth of 'modernity' are not
cut and dried, all over, but remain contested - and that contestation is
essentially political - and that socialists thus have a duty to contest them. Davidson
also makes the point that even the minimal program of democracy - universal
suffrage and free contested elections - was not an initial component of
bourgeois liberalism and is NOT necessarily compatible with capitalism. Indeed
the contrary is the case - modern democracy is the outcome of class struggle
and revolutionary pressure applied from the working class, contrary to the
claims of neo liberal apologists. Indeed in reading this (and following up
Davidson's footnotes) it is worthwhile also looking into Harvey's A Brief
History of Neoliberalism, where he demonstrates how many neo liberal
"reforms" actually involve the circumvention of democratic
accountability and the transfer of decision making to unelected and non
accountable "experts". (Of course Wallerstein in his recent fourth
volume of The Modern World - System which discusses what he calls the
'geoculture' of the capitalist world-market, argues that this phenomenon was
present in centrist liberalism from the start). I like the way he deploys Benjamin
(my all time favourite "Marxist" thinker) here to support this!
4.
His final point, that apologists and
propagandists for 'neoliberalism' have grabbed hold of the concept of bourgeois
revolution and applied to their counter revolutionary strategy against social
democracy and the welfare state. This is really another version of the above
argument, that the meaning of the phrase of bourgeois revolution is politically
contested, that this contest is of immediate and current significance, and that
there is a political responsibility on the socialist movement to actively
participate in this contest. It is in other words, no mere academic exercise,
but a political task.
What I find very interesting in
Davidson's enumeration of reasons for (re)examining the bourgeois revolution
thesis is the ghostly presence of post modernist relativism that lurks behind
them. Note what is absent from the list. Davidson identifies two opponents in
the debate: neo liberal apologists who wish to appropriate the thesis for their
own ends and Marxist 'revisionists" (he means in particular George
Comninel though the latter is at this stage not named). But he does not say
that they are wrong, and that the argument is therefore about historical truth.
Rather the argument is about political utility; and the logical extension of
this is that the audience can choose to accept the argument or not. Now one of
the strengths of Marxism in the past was the sense that the movement was on the side of history and the future,
that as a social science it was able to discover social truth, freed from the
ideological blinkers of bourgeois ideology. And the most compelling reason for
an audience to adhere to a viewpoint is that it is true. A Marxism convinced of
its possession of truth has only to show how the dominant ideology is partial
and inaccurate and it has won over half the argument. But of course post
modernist relativism in the last thirty years has made it impossible to hold
this view. (And of course, this was in my view, the entire purpose of the post
modernist push. Despite its 'leftist' rhetoric post modernism, as James Holstun
shows in the first three chapters of Ehud's Dagger, was always primarily
aimed at countering and subverting Marxism.) So Davidson is reduced to a
language of implied individual choices in accepting or rejecting an argument,
and deprived of the strongest tool in the war of ideas.
I want to add some final observations on
Davidson's fourth point. He quotes from
one of the cabal of Thatcherite court historians, Norman Stone, in which the
latter argues that the bourgeois revolution was only happening under Thatcher,
because the British state and society retained many institutional blockages to
the proper and unfettered expansion of capital. Now Stone's target was of course
the welfare state and other social democratic (and also straight democratic)
means of limiting the exploitation of capital and delivering some modicum of
the total extracted surplus value back to the working class. But Stone is also
implying that there is a continuity between the residual feudal limitations on
capital in the early modern period (when the original bourgeois revolution
occurred) and the social democratic institutions of the post 1945 era. What
Davidson does not mention is that there is a Marxist element in the underlying
assumptions. In the mid 1960s Perry Anderson et al developed the
argument in the pages of New Left Review that England had never
experienced a "proper" bourgeois revolution as in France, which swept
away all the elements of feudalism. Anderson et al's target was the
British Labour movement, which they argued remained tied to the reformist and
class collaborationist ideas of the left liberal side of the unfinished
bourgeois revolution and this accounted for the British failure to develop a
proper continental style Marxist culture. But the thesis of the incomplete
bourgeois revolution was there, able to revived to different political purposes
by the bourgeois ideologists. (It is worth noting that EP Thompson savaged and
critiqued this argument extensively; and Ellen Wood refuted it thoroughly in
her book The Pristine Culture of Capitalism).
