The French Revolution (1789-1799) was not a revolt of the peasants against the
landed aristocracy. It was a violent process by which the bourgeoisie used the
disenchanted peasantry to gain control of the power levers of the state from
the aristocracy.
The rise of the bourgeoisie as the middlemen to carry out trade in an expanding
market economy forced the aristocracy to transform from its traditional role as
a benign, even benevolent, feudal ruling class to an increasingly exploitative
class to make up for the lost wealth, siphoned off by the trading bourgeoisie.
The accumulation of wealth by the bourgeoisie came from the backs of the
peasant
class through the escalating oppression by the aristocracy.
Had the French monarchy during the revolution sided with the bourgeoisie
against the aristocracy as its British counterpart had done, France could well
be a capitalist constitutional monarchy today. Louis XVI failed to understand
that the political raison d'etre for monarchism rests in its mandate of
exercising state power to maintain socio-economic equity in the nation by
protecting the peasants from the aristocracy.
As the French bourgeoisie gained control of state power after the French
Revolution, much of Europe adopted economic and political systems in which the
bourgeoisie lorded over the proletariat with a new exploitative regime to
replace the previous relatively benign, symbiotic arrangement between the
landed aristocracy and the tenant peasantry under agricultural feudalism. As a
result, the need for a universal class struggle emerged between workers and
capitalists in industrialized Europe.
But much of the world outside of Western Europe was still operating on
agricultural feudalism, which became a ripe target for Western imperialism born
of the rise of European capitalism. The landlord class of these feudal
agricultural countries, in order to resist the encroachment of Western
imperialism as an advance stage of industrial capitalism, was forced to shift
from the traditional symbiotic relationship with their landless peasants that
had produced prosperity, as it had been in China the Tang dynasty in the 8th
century, to a new relationship of ruthless exploitation to make up for the lost
wealth being siphoned off by Western imperialism, and to form alliance with an
emerging national bourgeoisie to oppress a small growing working class in newly
established national industries.
In China, as in many other Asian societies, including Japan, the disappearance
of a harmonious symbiotic socio-economic structure caused Confucian feudalism
to collapse from its cracked foundation, heralding two centuries of cultural
decline that pushed a once glorious civilization into temporary relative
backwardness in comparison to the advanced Western world. In Japan,
nationalists sought solution in fascist militarism in the first half of the
20th century. In China, liberation came in 1949 the form of socialist
revolution after a protracted six-decade long struggle.
Today, the leadership in the ruling Communist Party of China seeks to construct
a harmonious society out of a socialist market economy. It is a highly
problematic endeavor because market economies, socialist or not, are inherently
not harmonious, because markets operate with confrontational competition, not
harmonious cooperation.
Lenin's misplaced expectation
Lenin, up to his death in 1924, believed that the Russian Revolution was only a
local phase of a Europe-wide revolution, albeit he did not connect the
revolution with the underdeveloped non-European feudal societies which formed
the majority of the world’s population, except indirectly through the resultant
demise of Western imperialism after the eventual collapse of capitalism in the
core countries.
After the October Revolution, Lenin had expected follow-up proletariat
uprisings in Germany, Poland and the minor industrial states in the Danube
valley, from the ashes of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 that
inspired Karl Marx to write the Communist Manifesto, which was issued as
a propaganda pamphlet by the Communist League, renamed from the "League of the
Just" after Marx and Friedrich Engels joined it.
The internationalist communist movement was a European event until the founding
of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921, even though three years earlier
Chinese nationalism had been seminally influenced by Marxist ideology in the
May Fourth Student Movement of 1919, two years after of October Revolution of
1917.
Revolution and counter-revolution in Germany
The Communist League was created in London in June 1847 out of a merger of the
League of the Just and of the 15-man Communist Correspondence Committee of
Bruxelles, headed by Marx. Engels convinced the league to change its motto to
Marx's call for "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!". It had branches in
Paris, London, Geneva, Berlin and several other major European cities. In 1848,
the Communist League issued a set of "Demands of the Communist Party of
Germany", renamed from the Spartacist Party, urging a unified German Republic,
democratic suffrage, universal free education, arming of the people, a
progressive income tax, limitations on inheritance, state ownership of banks
and public utilities, transportation, mining and collectivization and
modernization of agriculture. But the program was too radical for the liberal
Frankfort Assembly.
Marx was asked in the summer of 1851 by Charles Anderson Dana, managing editor
of the New York Tribune, the most influential paper in the US at the time - it
had been founded in 1842 by Horace Greeley, later a founder of the Republican
Party in 1854 - to write a series of articles on the German Revolution of 1848.
These articles, written by Engels and edited by Marx, who had not yet attained
fluency in English, appeared under Marx's name with the title "Revolution and
Counter-revolution in Germany".
In these articles, Marx described how in April 1848, the revolutionary torrent
in Europe was suppressed by those classes of society that had profited by the
early victory and that then immediately formed counterrevolutionary alliances
with the vanquished reactionaries.
"In France, the petty trading class and the Republican faction of the
bourgeoisie had combined with the Monarchist bourgeoisie against the
proletarians; in Germany and Italy, the victorious bourgeoisie had eagerly
courted the support of the feudal nobility, the official bureaucracy, and the
army, against the mass of the people and the petty traders," Marx wrote. Yet
"every inch of ground lost by the Revolutionary parties in the different
countries only tended to close their ranks more and more for the decisive
action", which could be fought in France only.
Marx continued that as Germany remained not unified, France, by its national
independence, civilization, and centralization, was the only country to impart
the impulse of a mighty convulsion to the surrounding countries. Accordingly,
when, on the June 23, 1848, "the bloody struggle began in Paris between the
mass of the working people on the one hand, and all the other classes of the
Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other; when the fighting
went on for several days with an exasperation unequalled in the history of
modern civil warfare, but without any apparent advantage for either side - then
it became evident to everyone that this was the great decisive battle which
would, if the insurrection were victorious, deluge the whole continent with
renewed revolutions, or, if it was suppressed, bring about an at least
momentary restoration of counter-revolutionary rule."
Republican France was the fountainhead of early modern socialism. While not all
republicans were socialists, most socialists were republicans against
monarchism. The economic system of monarchism had degenerated into chaotic
aimlessness with systemic injustice brought about by the advent of the
aggressive bourgeoisie. All felt moral indignation against a system where
wealth was concentrated in the hands of an idle minority who enjoyed hereditary
privileges sustained by unrestricted socio-economic and political power.
Yet this wealth was being siphoned off to the pockets of the bourgeoisie, who
plied their luxury goods and services on the idle aristocrats. Entrepreneurs
and merchants began to gain power to give or deny work to workers and to set
wages and working hours in their private enterprises to maximize private profit
derived from aristocratic conspicuous consumption.
French socialists rejected the social value of private enterprise in a market
economy. They worked to organize society along principles of harmony,
coordination, cooperation and free association, believing that beyond the civil
and legal equality promoted by the French Revolution, a further step toward
socio-economic equality had yet to be taken. They were dissatisfied with the
human rights declared by the French Enlightenment for glaringly lacking in
economic rights. French citizens won the right to vote, but not the right to
employment with living wages.
As reactionary policies entrenched themselves all over Europe in the years
following the post-Napoleonic peace, socialism spread rapidly among the working
classes after 1830. In France, it blended with revolutionary republicanism.
There was a revival of revisionist interest in Robespierre, who was
rehabilitated as a new hero of the masses. Socialist Louis Blanc, published his Organization
of Work in 1839.
Marx reported that "the proletarians of Paris were defeated, decimated and
crushed with such an effect that even now [1851] they have not yet recovered
from the blow. And immediately, all over Europe, the new and old conservatives
and counter-revolutionists raised their heads with an effrontery that showed
how well they understood the importance of the event. The Press was everywhere
attacked, the rights of meeting and association
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