/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>407061
1776 Revolution.

Read this

>>407061
It's sort of like a changing of the guard. There are gradations to the elite. Typically, what you have is a ennobled and propertied upper class who grows complacent and unresponsive to the needs of the lower class, and a contingent of educated middle class status-seekers who are resentful of the upper classes for being left out. The middle class intelligentsia and managers use their verbal and organizational skills to rouse and agitate the lower classes to attack the upper class. The middle class agents then move in and replace the now dethroned upper class, becoming the new elites. Along the way they must solve some of the problems of the lower classes, who are already in an excited state and have already committed much violence. Or else the new elites get treated the same as the old elites or they become worse than the old elites in their counterrevolutionary repressiveness.

At no point does this middle class power play speak to the ideals it preaches or align with the interests of the lower classes, other than the fact that they share a mutual enemy in the upper class. Middle class revolutions always seek to preserve the status quo while enhancing the power of educated non-elites. The lower class is used like a tool to batter the upper class.

This, at least, is the exact pattern of the French Revolution, which in its quintessence represents something of an exemplar or paradigm of class-driven revolutionary action.

>>407154
>This, at least, is the exact pattern of the French Revolution, which in its quintessence represents something of an exemplar or paradigm of class-driven revolutionary action.

Let me clarify, comrades. It represents the paradigm of class-driven revolutionary action *within* a system that preserves the relations of class and private property. As one can see from the above description, the framework remains the same and the property relations remain stable, with only a power shift in which the lower class is static but the middle class shifts into the upper and the previous upper is removed. Theoretically this pattern would repeat until the final, communist, revolution which destroys and abolishes the entire class structure that drives the cycle.

>>407061
> The bourgeoisie had been growing on their own terms, self-reproducing, without any revolution required. The revolution wouldn't free anything but would be an expression of an already completed change.

That is implying they didn’t have enemies. The bourgeoisie were in political and economic conflict with the nobility at various points. The nobility harbored political and economic privilege DESPITE the changes happening in society. So when you had outbursts of violence, sometimes not directly related to bourgeois interests but often related to proletarian and peasant interests, the bourgeoisie would take the opportunity to push for social change to reflect THEIR power.

>Wouldn't your standard civil war throughout history just be a regime change between ruling classes?
Well yes, but actually, no.

What are good examples of a bourgeois revolution? The French revolution seems to be the golden standard among Marxists, but there must be others. Could one consider the Dutch revolt a bourgeois revolution? What about the Haitian revolution or even the American civil war?

>>407069
Damn straight. The entire thing was literally set up by the Colonial American bourgeoisie.

>>407074
Maybe next time you spout these >read a book memes you could give some reference and context about what the book is about and how it is relevant to OPs question.

Bourgeois/democratic revolutions just more or less marks a mass victory or controlled adoption of capitalistic relations. It is more progressive in terms of social development than feudalism.

To put this in a materialist perspective, productive relations aren't universal and I like to visualize them happening in patches around the world. From there, maybe you can see why they are redundant in some places, but in others they are revolutionary.

I don't have time to leave a detailed response so I'll just drop Neil Davidson's (RIP) magisterial book on the subject, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

TL;DR: bourgeois revolutions were never driven by the bourgeoisie proper, but rather the petite (small) bourgeoisie, at first in the traditional sense as small shopkeepers and farmers, then later after 1848 by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia carrying out "passive revolutions" from within the old state bureaucracy. As a devoted Cliffite / UK SWP member, Neil Davidson claims that 20th century socialist revolutions also fit into that latter category because they ultimately only led to "state capitalism". That last claim is questionable IMO, but overall the book is still well worth reading.

>>408087
I think it is fair (having not read that particular book) just because I think those revolutions tended to look like hijacked liberal/bourgeois revolutions. Bourgeois revolutions still often involved working class or peasant agitation, it’s just that the alternative power base to noble privilege was in commerce and property relations among “political equals” or “citizens”, in the terms of liberal ideology. Since a lot of the successful socialist revolutions were in either colonies or nations like Russia (still had a central monarchy), they often involved either explicit compromises or power disputes with petit-bourgeois elements that were effectively trying to have liberal revolutions. I think that context really skewed how a lot of those revolutions developed. They ended up being like aborted liberal revolutions, constantly struggling to not be liberal revolutions while being eaten alive by often having many features of them. I wouldn’t consider myself a “stageist” necessarily, but the socialist revolutions often looked like they were fighting a losing battle against some historical inertia that was pushing them from their more “backwards” context into liberalism.