07.05.1996
Bourgeois paradigm and democratic tasks
Continuing a discussion on the nature of revolution
On Sunday March 24 the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB hosted one of its regular weekly seminars in London. Under the general heading of ‘revolutionary moments’ the subject on this occasion was Chile 1970-73. Although the short descriptive introduction itself raised no theoretical matters of any serious interest, the long debate which ensued rapidly brought to the surface disagreements of the greatest importance.
Behind the heat haze of factional polemic and empirical points relating specifically to Chile were theoretical problems which go back at least to the days of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, and lay at the heart of the crisis which undermined and finally destroyed the ‘official’ world communist movement. Only by communists honestly, openly and fully expressing their views on all such matters can we begin to overcome our present-day divisions and shortcomings. Nothing and nobody is above criticism. No issue should be off limits.
There were five, closely related, zones of contention.
- Was the programme of the Communist Party of Chile an integral part of the general drift towards social democracy in the ‘official’ world communist movement, epitomised by the CPGB’s old British Road to Socialism programme and its reformist promise of revolution “without civil war”? What was the main organisational source of opportunism in the ‘official’ world communist movement?
- Is it wrong to criticise the CPC and communists in other countries?
- Must popular actions be curbed in order to secure the support of a ‘progressive’ section of the bourgeoisie and so as not to ‘provoke’ reaction?
- Must countries such as Chile have a bourgeois revolution before the struggle for socialism - ie, working class power - can be put onto the agenda?
- Does Britain still have feudal relics which mean it cannot yet be considered a fully capitalist country? Are the democratic and socialist revolutions necessarily two distinct phenomena?
Many comrades took part in the debate, which lasted almost four hours. However, I will focus on the contributions of myself and comrade Eddie Ford and, against us, Open Polemic’s Dave Norman (I will also quote a number of the other comrades who in effect intervened on either side). As the debate unfolded, along with its implications, comrade Norman was quick to indignantly claim that his original remarks were being deliberately misinterpreted or misrepresented. At the time I disputed that this was the case.
Fortunately we routinely tape all seminars. I have taken the time to carefully listen to the whole thing and transcribe the relevant material. The reason for doing this is not simply to pin down comrade Norman. It is because the views he clearly expressed are rooted in the theoretical tradition of ‘official communism’. Because of its ignominious collapse, ‘official communism’ today dares not speak its name. Yet in spite of that it still residually influences some good comrades, including not a few members of the CPGB.
Comrade Ford made the first contribution. He passionately maintained that the CPC, prior to, during, and after the military coup of September 11 1973, reflected the “complete corruption, degeneration, bankruptcy and hopelessness of the ‘official’ world communist movement”. He organisationally and theoretically traced back its opportunism to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and JV Stalin. Moreover, due to opportunism becoming reformism, the CPC did not simply make mistakes. It played a “counterrevolutionary role”.
The second interlocutor was myself, Jack Conrad. I concurred with comrade Ford and stressed, in the absence of any such conclusion on the part of the speaker, that Chile was in a “revolutionary situation” in the late 1960s and early 70s. Here is an edited summary of my remarks. Incidentally I considered them purely informational and uncontroversial at the time.
The ‘revolution in liberty’ emergency reforms of Christian Democrat president Frei stimulated, not dampened, discontent. Between 1967 and 1970 strikes and land occupations grew at an enormous pace. Frei was unceremoniously dumped by the bourgeoisie. The ruling class in Chile found itself “unable to rule in the old way”. Freelance rightwing terrorists assassinated army commander-in-chief general Rene Schneider. The CIA played a waiting game. Popular Unity therefore did not win the presidency in September 1970 simply through electoral arithmetic and support of the Christian Democrats in congress. There was, I said, “a crisis of the regime”.
What was the “content of the revolution in Chile”? Was it awaiting its ‘bourgeois’ revolution? Was there a distinct bourgeois-democratic, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist stage that had to be completed before working class state power and the tasks of socialism could be envisaged? That was the contention of Popular Unity and the CPC in particular. These ‘revolutionaries’, of course, eschewed in practice the use of arms to make even such a revolution. They were terrified by the threat of civil war from the right to the point of violently turning on their own supporters.
Revolution in a country like Chile undoubtedly has a democratic and an anti-imperialist content. But such a revolution could only be carried out under the leadership, or hegemony, of the working class. Hence, “from the very outset, it has an anti-capitalist content as well”. A programmatic Chinese Wall between the anti-imperialist and democratic tasks and the question of working class state power can only but help turn a living revolutionary situation into its opposite.
Clara Zetkin famously said, “Fascism is the price we pay for not making revolution.” I cited her telling observation and applied it to Chile. Prime responsibility for the 1973 coup must consequently be placed on the largest working class party, the CPC and its general secretary Luis Corvalan (nor should we excuse those who claimed to be further to the left).
Along with president Salvador Allende and its Socialist Party allies in Popular Unity, the CPC did its utmost to hold back the workers and peasants. Together they directed their fire against forces of the “ultra-left”, such as MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) which was supporting illegal land seizures by peasants.
Such radical actions “played into the hands of reaction” and alienated the liberal bourgeoisie and the middle strata (CPGB pamphlet, Chile: solidarity with popular unity, London 1973, p17). Together the misleaders of the working class fostered democratic illusions in the army, its “professional” and “neutral” character. Corvalan insisted that “change should not be imposed” on the army. Change must be “based on their awareness of its imperatives” (World Marxist Review, December 1970).
Popular Unity was presented by the revisionists in the CPGB as an “example of their BRS in practice”. That is, winning a left parliamentary majority in order to “break the economic and political power of the monopolies”. These claims are etched into my brain. Naturally, following Pinochet’s coup, which left between 30,000 and 50,000 workers, peasants and leftists dead, everything was thrown into reverse. Instead of prattling on about this “England of South America”, Chile was painted in altogether more foreign colours (the CPC had suffered illegality, for example, between 1947 and 1958). They had to forget what they had been saying. Communists must remember.
Norman wisdom?
Comrade Norman then entered the discussion and in effect began the controversy. Here are his words (I have edited them for written sense, but not altered the politics - the transcript is available in case of another semantic defence):
“One has to be very wary about drawing simplistic parallels.” The BRS was “an attempt” by the right revisionists to deal with “conditions” in an established bourgeois democracy. It would allow the “continued existence of bourgeois parties” - with the sole exception of fascist parties. “You can’t draw a direct comparison between the programme of the old CPGB and Chile.”
Chile has to be “looked at” in the context of “the whole question of revolutionary democracy”, or the national liberation movements. Such countries have “their landed gentry, peasants and so on”. Therefore “things proceed in terms of ... both a bourgeois revolution and a socialist revolution”. The “question always in these individual countries was how the revolutionary process would occur in terms of a bourgeois revolution being transformed into the socialist revolution”. That is why it “was generally referred to as revolutionary democracy”.
In the case of Chile, “although it was not directly a colony, it was generally recognised as a client state of the US”. The “important and substantial differences” between Britain and Chile have to be emphasised, rather than what the right revisionists said about it being the BRS in practice - which was not how “I recall the situation at the time”, anyhow.
Comrade Norman finally turned to the criticism of weapons. “In every revolutionary situation” “the revolutionary leadership is always faced with the problem of when to actually launch the insurrection, when to go on to the offensive”. “As anyone will know about any kind of warfare, if you have anybody going over the top” - presumably MIR - “before you give the order then they are doing the maximum damage to the possibility of victory. It is all a question of strategy and tactics.”
These implicitly rightist sentiments provoked an immediate, sharp and correct rebuke from comrade Ford. He considered what had been said little short of a “justification” of the criminal and suicidal line of the CPC and the ‘official’ communist movement. Comrade Ian Farrell came in on Ford’s side, equating the government of Allende with Kerensky’s in 1917. Both were the left wing of the bourgeois state.
Comrade Norman hit back. He dismissed criticisms of himself as unfair and for that matter totally unfounded. “What did I say?” he asked rhetorically. One “can’t draw a simple parallel between the BRS and those countries which still have a large peasant population and have to link the bourgeois revolution with the socialist revolution.” “That’s all I did. I did not come to any particular conclusions in respect to Chile” - a funny claim, given what had just come from his lips.
Comrade Norman pressed on with his no particular conclusions: “Is there a difference between” Chile and “the revolution which goes on here, where we have essentially completed the bourgeois revolution”? The “vestiges of feudalism that hang on in the constitution and so on” mean, according to comrade Norman, that “a kind of revolutionary democratic element” could possibly be entertained in Britain - “as the Revolutionary Democratic Group do”.
Britain, continued comrade Norman, cannot be “compared with those countries which never had in any real sense a bourgeois revolution, in which strong feudal elements still exist”. “You can’t draw a parallel between one and the other,” he repeated once more.
Comrade Norman concluded by roundly condemning comrade Ford’s remarks re the CPC, Stalin and the ‘official’ world communist movement. He “denigrates communists”. “They all,” said comrade Norman, “took their standpoint from the genuine revolutionary point of view as they understood it.”
Comrade Anne Murphy ridiculed the notion that Stalin, as bureaucratic dictator of the world communist movement, was any kind of proletarian revolutionary. Stalin personified ‘official communist’ opportunism.
I also considered the origin of the liquidationist impulse in the ‘official’ communist movement to be Stalin and the USSR - taking capitalist ideology as a given. As to the idea presented by comrade Norman that the ‘official communists’ in some sense took their “standpoint” from an “understanding” of Marxism - that is a misnomer.
In the absence of openness - guaranteed in the Party by democratic centralism and factional rights - there can be no Marxist thinking. Was there openness in the CPC? No, it had a typically bureaucratic centralist internal regime. What CPC cadres thought introspectively is one thing. What they actually did and said about what they were doing is another. It would be wrong to disregard the former. But it would be unscientific, nay unpardonable, to excuse the latter.
Drawing a “simplistic” parallel between Britain and Chile is the act of a simpleton. That does not mean there is no parallel. One can, for example, “directly” compare the BRS and the CPC’s 10th Congress in 1956. It committed the CPC to a “revolution” through “electoral or some similar means”, without “civil war”. The BRS too envisaged progress in Britain coming about via a left parliamentary majority that, as with the CPC, would rest on the support not only of the popular classes but a section of the bourgeoisie.
When Popular Unity was in government the comparison was drawn by the likes of the CPGB’s international secretary, Jack Woddis - he used it to vigorously promote the BRS. The similarities between the BRS and the programme of the CPC and Popular Unity are evidently more than textual. They are two manifestations of exactly the same branch of political evolution.
Both the British and Chilean parliamentary roads to “socialism” are instances of a historically specific form of programmatic ‘official communist’ opportunism, which found its first full-blown expression in the 1951 draft of the BRS - Stalin’s fingerprints are all over its evasive formulations. It was not, as contended by comrade Norman, “an attempt” to deal with “conditions” in an established bourgeois democracy. The BRS was an attempt to vindicate and systematise parliamentary cretinism and national socialism.
It is vital to emphasise the lessons of Chile, I said. The parliamentary road was the road to slaughter. Corvalan and the CPC did not arm the workers. Arming the workers is not merely a technical matter. Communists should under all conditions fight to arm the working class as a matter of principle. During a revolutionary situation timing is about insurrection. It is not about the advisability of getting hold of weapons.
Comrade Norman contends that in Chile there were those who “went over the top”. That is nothing but a sad echo of the ‘official communist’ slander, circa 1973. MIR and other “ultra-left” forces were actually said to have provoked the coupists. It was they - not the nature of the state machine - who supposedly “set the military against the people”. It was they who transformed “military men from being defenders of their country’s interests into tools upholding the narrow and selfish interests of a handful of exploiters” (V Borovsky, Soviet News August 21 1973).
The tragedy of Chile was that there was no Bolshevik Party, no Lenin, no call for all power to its soviets, the cordons, and a constituent assembly. What would comrade Norman say if a Chilean Bolshevism had appeared? Surely he would not accuse them of “going over the top” and “doing the maximum damage to the possibility of victory”. That was the counterrevolutionary line of Kerensky and the Mensheviks in 1917. And none of us are Mensheviks now, are we?
Historical evolution
During the course of our debate I criticised comrade Norman for the way his whole discourse implicitly excused the CPC’s reformist schema - dishonestly titled ‘democratic revolution’. I also probed what I believe are unfounded, vulgar evolutionist, assumptions behind his use of the term, ‘bourgeois revolution’. Not least the assumption I detected that all countries must have a bourgeois revolution which ought, by definition, to institute a definite set of socio-political-economic measures. As if bourgeois revolutions are predetermined and have a fixed agenda which must be completed before anything higher can be embarked upon.
Comrades John Bayliss and Peter Manson also suggested a similar paradigm. So it is well worth putting into context the bourgeois-democratic revolution as an object of communist theory and practice and try to move from apologetics to truth. Not least because, as will already have been gathered, I for one am convinced that the timidity, tailism and fatalism forced upon the working class by ‘official communism’ in the name of completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution, or some such formulation, has resulted in countless defeats, missed opportunities and massacres. (The limited space available for this article means I will have to present my more considered ideas on the bourgeois revolution itself at a later date.)
Comrade Norman seems to imagine that all societies, past, present and future, in all their rich diversity, can be, must be, classified under five ascending headings of social evolution - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism-communism. We all know the textbook system of a priori historiography. The idea is that society took successive and distinct steps up the evolutionary ladder “in conformity” with the productive forces (History of the CPSU (B), Moscow 1939, p123). Therefore feudalism is defined by this school of quackery as “the socio-economic formation that follows the slave-owning system and precedes capitalism” (I Frolov (ed) Dictionary of philosophy, Moscow 1984, p143).
Conveniently, as Stalin’s USSR was evidently not capitalist it could be nothing other than socialism-communism. Tony Cliff uses the same method except he reverses it. As Stalin’s USSR was evidently not socialist it could be nothing other than capitalism, albeit of a bureaucratic state capitalist variety. Till the likes of Stephen Jay Gould, natural history was dogged by similar presumptions. Homo sapiens were supposedly the highest rung on a teleological evolutionary ladder that began in the primeval slime.
What flows from this conceptual framework of history? Not thoughtful investigation, but narrow-mindedness and pseudo-scientific fatalism. Comrade Norman’s formal logic was perfect, but completely unhistorical. Trammelled by dogma, he reasoned that, as the CPC did not fight for a socialist revolution, therefore Chile must have significant or even dominant “feudal” socio-economic features.
It is, of course, highly questionable whether Chile, pre-or post-1540, could be classified as feudal. The Inca empire in what is now Peru and north-central Chile was a system of absolutist-communism. The Inca had personal control over two-thirds of the state’s income and his family provided all military commanders. Though there was an extensive state and temple bureaucracy, the land was cultivated collectively and there was no private property. Hardly a picture that matches the fragmented serf system of Western Europe - which had anyway by the time of Francisco Pizarro collapsed or gone into terminal decline. Incidentally Marx noted that feudalism in England had “practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century” (K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p788). The Spanish conquistadors did not bring with them the moral economy of feudalism as a dominant mode of production. The native population was enslaved under the crown in order to extract gold and silver.
Fernand Braudel, the outstanding French historian, praises the “truly wise” who reject both terms, ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’, to describe Latin America in the 15th-18th centuries (F Braudel Civilisation and capitalism, Los Angeles 1992, p425). Braudel says he is “willing to accept” that the Venezuelan llanos or parts of Brazil were subject to a “seigneurial regime” coinciding with Spain’s ‘refeudalisation’ in the 17th century. But neither the haciendas nor the encomienda can “be described as ‘feudal’ unless one simply means an autarkic or near-autarkic system” (Ibid pp426-7). Most Spanish activity in Latin America was in fact “a classic instance of bureaucracy and officialdom” which is “hard to reconcile with the standard image of feudalism” (Ibid p428).
What of Chile circa 1970? Chile then as now is best described as a medium developed capitalist country. Alongside the small factories, artisan manufacture and parochial peasant agriculture there is a dominant monopoly-capitalist sector. The population stands at something like 75% urban, with 25% of the workforce directly employed in industry. Mining, above all copper, accounts for 70% of the country’s exports - before 1971 controlled by US capital. Agriculture, until the late 1960s, was typically characterised by the latifundio (some of which could be described as pre-real capitalist, but, as argued above, not feudal). Under both presidents Frei and Allende there was widespread land redistribution - 1,200 farms were ‘expropriated’ between 1964 and 1970. Popular Unity considerably accelerated these reforms. Nevertheless, though many of the big estates used archaic methods, output was geared to the agro-industrial complex. The landed elite had become thoroughly bourgeoisified. Instead of dealing in loyalty, loot and faith, it trades in apples, wine and livestock. Its tournaments are confined to the market.
Chile has a large, modern working class employed in the industrial, mining and agricultural sectors. It was and is no semi-feudal backwater. Within the international pecking order Chile’s big bourgeoisie - industrial, financial and landed - operates as imperialism’s junior partner in the exploitation of its own people.
Politically Chile’s maturity was reflected in a relatively stable bourgeois democracy. It was not called the “England of South America” for nothing. Before 1860 the contradictions within the ruling military-landowning-liberal bloc overshadowed everything else. However, the emergence of the mining sector and the proletariat towards the end of the 19th century destabilised the old oligarchical system. During the 20th century the ruling class has, and not without internal conflict, maintained its dominance alternately via repression and concession. This cycle began in 1920 when the Alianza liberal leader, Arturo Alessandri, was elected president - from 1924 he ruled by decree with the support of the military, introducing a new constitution and other “democratic-bourgeois reforms” (C Furci The Chilean Communist Party, London 1984, p12). Subsequently Chile not only saw phases of dictatorial repression (1927-31, 1952-58) and bourgeois reformism (1964-70), but three popular frontist governments with working class parties playing a leading role (1938-41, 1946-7, 1970-73).
Surely then the main problem confronting working class politics in Chile has been reformism and the lack of an independent revolutionary programme. It has not been the need to complete comrade Norman’s bourgeois revolution, let alone completing this ‘revolution’ through a parliamentary majority, which would eventually “transform” the country into “socialism”. The CPC’s revolution without civil war, without overthrowing the state, was revolution in name only. Despite that it paved the way for a real revolutionary act. In casting aside legal pretence it was Pinochet’s junta which took “its stand” on a revolutionary basis, not Allende and Popular Unity.
What if circumstances had been favourable to the CPC? The form of its programme might have been reformist-utopian. Its real content could, despite that, be taken to full term. Such a scenario should not be ruled out merely because it did not happen. It was possible. Say the USSR had somehow managed to extend itself and become world hegemon, as the ‘official communists’ believed it was bound to do.
If the CPC had carried out its full programme under the circumstances it hoped and expected, Marxists should emphasise that Chile would not have arrived at socialism. Ends determine means and means determine ends. The CPC aimed for a bureaucratic socialism and that was to come about from above. A state socialism which had the USSR and Eastern Europe as its model could not be socialism (or for that matter a workers’ state). The same applies to the 1952-78 BRS. Socialism is neither nationalisation nor is it the rule of a party-state bureaucracy. It is the self-liberation and self-rule of the working class or it is nothing. To paraphrase Lenin - only those who proclaim such a necessity and selflessly do all in their power to achieve it are Marxists.
Lenin’s revolution
Being a subjective revolutionary who stubbornly refuses to break with ‘official communism’, comrade Norman puts a left gloss on its old, deeply dishonest, cryptic pronouncements. In point of fact to excuse (or rationalise) what ‘official communism’ in the 1970s called ‘revolutionary democracy’ he equates it with Lenin’s pre-April thesis theory of uninterrupted revolution and the democratic dictatorship (ie, state) of the workers and peasants.
There is in my opinion no valid basis for any such contention. We can easily prove it. I will briefly outline first Lenin’s views and second those of ‘official communism’. Whatever may be problematic in the former, the fundamental antithesis which exists between them will be obvious and incontrovertible as far as the unprejudiced reader is concerned.
In 1905 Lenin, along with virtually every other orthodox Marxist, reasoned that Russia was ripe for a democratic revolution. This revolution would be bourgeois or capitalist. But for Lenin only in terms of the objective social and economic limits existing at the time. Russia could not make an immediate leap to socialism: ie, the semi-state of the working class and the supersession of the law of value by the law of the plan.
It was in the interests of the working class and peasantry to give the democratic revolution the greatest sweep material conditions allowed in order to achieve the “fullest possible measure of political liberty” (VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p25). The Bolsheviks were out to ensure that a democratically elected government born of insurrection would carry out the “entire minimum programme of our Party”. That would “safeguard” and advance as far as possible the interests of the people against the bourgeoisie (Ibid). Under such favourable circumstances the working class would expand in numbers and culture below, all the while maintaining its state power from above.
Because of their preference for schematic abstractions, as opposed to concrete analysis, in essence the Mensheviks limited their sights to a regime of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois revolution had to produce a bourgeois democracy led by the bourgeoisie - supposedly by definition. The object fixed the subject. After the bourgeois revolution the workers would form the “party of extreme opposition” and pursue the economic, trade unionist struggle which alone could prepare them for their independent political role as vehicle for socialism. Which, needless to say, was located in the somewhat distant future.
Naturally the Mensheviks were opposed to anybody “going over the top”. “Adventurism” - eg, the strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks - would cause the bourgeoisie to “recoil” from its revolution. For the Mensheviks a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie was more than a contradiction in terms. It was to do the “maximum” wrecking. The bourgeoisie could be persuaded, pushed and even pulled. But at the end of the day only the bourgeoisie can “carry out the tasks” of the “bourgeois revolution”. History ordained it.
However, as Lenin forcefully pointed out, not least in his Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution, the world is made by people. Within the material limits handed down from the past we can do with it what we will. In other words history is not a closed system. It is open ended.
Hence Lenin proposed to take the anti-tsarist revolution to the furthest point obtainable. That was not the monarchist-liberal bourgeois democracy like Britain favoured by Russia’s Cadets. Nor was it even a republican-revolutionary bourgeois democracy like the USA. Russia could have a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Such a marcher state would ruthlessly smash the counterrevolutionary resistance of tsarism, landlords and the big bourgeoisie internally. It would moreover “carry the revolutionary conflagration into Europe” (Ibid p57). So for Lenin the democratic and socialist revolutions could become “interwoven”, the one, given sufficient determination and favourable international conditions, leading uninterruptedly to the other (Ibid p85).
Lenin was a dialectician and no dogmatist. Returning from exile, in the immediate aftermath of the February 1917 revolution, he castigated those old Bolsheviks who considered Russia had exhausted the democratic revolution. The bourgeois provisional government could and had to be shifted to the left. It had to be made into the real organ of worker and peasant democracy. So argued Lenin’s closest comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
Lenin’s theoretical categories were always imbued with movement and change. The bourgeois-democratic revolution turned out “more peculiar, more variegated, than anyone could have expected” (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p44). Tsarism had been overthrown. Russia was now the most free of all the belligerent countries. Nevertheless the revolution could be taken further through a second revolution, a revolution within the revolution. Alongside the provisional government there existed the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers. Here was a parallel or dual power, which “expresses a transitional phase in the revolution’s development, when it has gone further than the ordinary bourgeois-democratic revolution, but has not yet reached a ‘pure’ dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” (Ibid p61).
Under the baleful influence of Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks the soviets were surrendering power to the bourgeoisie in the form of the provisional government. The task of the Bolsheviks, Lenin single-mindedly hammered home at meeting after meeting, was to win a majority in the soviets and then lead the masses to power and a commune-like state. That would not yet be real socialism. It would, though, be the shortest, most direct route to it.
Now let us turn to ‘official communism’. Except under the most exceptional conditions it formally commits itself to various national programmes of reform. The idea is to achieve the widest alliances of forces, crucially in parliament, and that meant in Latin America forming a government that would be opposed to the USA in particular and those perceived or designated to be its local agents. Hence we find the following ‘official communist’ popular front recipe in a standard Progress Publishers textbook of the 1970s:
The broadest social forces in Latin America are involved in the liberation struggle and in forming national-democratic fronts in individual countries. These involve the working class, the peasantry, the petty and middle bourgeoisie, the patriotic military, and even sections of the bourgeoisie which, under certain conditions, find themselves in contradiction with monopoly capitalism and are objectively interested in opposing imperialist penetration. The inability of the Latin American bourgeoisie to head a broad anti-imperialist revolutionary [read reformist - JC] movement does not mean that all of its sections are unable to wage a struggle against imperialism’s rapacious politics (VV Zagladin [ed] The world communist movement, Moscow 1973, p340).
Not surprisingly then, throughout the Popular Unity period the CPC did its utmost to reassure the “patriotic military” chiefs and to court the Christian Democrats. Accordingly the CPC was determined to stay within the confines of the existing constitution. Its slogan was No a la guerra (no to civil war). To that end top military brass were given cabinet seats in October 1972. For the CPC an alliance with the Christian Democrat Party was “key” so as not to “force it into a position of hostility towards the government, and also as a means of isolating the reactionary forces” (C Furci The Chilean Communist Party, London 1984, p126).
Away with dogmatism
Over the last two years an ongoing theme in the seminars we have run has been revolution and revolutionary situations from Germany 1919 to Iran 1979. One thing I have learnt is that things could have turned out very differently. Religious, class and national ideas, political, philosophical and ideological programmes, courage, organisation and leadership all shape events and their outcome.
That does not mean anything is possible. There are definite material limits. However, not least when looking back at the past, it is clear that these limits are very broad indeed.
For example, within the slave system of ancient Hellas, there existed the peasant-citizen democracy of Athens and the militaristic-oligarchy of Sparta. There was no historical law determining which was to triumph. Nor was there something inevitable about the defeat of the 73-1 BC slave revolt in Italy. Spartacus could have won or at least not lost. The same can surely be argued for popular movements during the medieval period. For example, Wat Tyler and John Bull had the possibility of smashing feudalism through revolution and establishing their great society. Thomas Münzer in Germany and the Hussites in Bohemia were somewhat more successful. But they were certainly not pre-programmed for eventual defeat. Of course, I am not suggesting their utopias could have been realised. But medieval Europe had within it the potential for those below putting a far more radical and distinct democratic stamp on society and its institutions than they actually did. The same is true in more modern times. Physical force Chartism could have overthrown the aristocratic-bourgeois dictatorship. If it had, the British revolution would have had a distinct proletarian hue and have gone far beyond the Jacobin Year II.
It is with such thoughts in mind that I suggest we approach the bourgeois revolution. There have been revolutions led by social combinations that can in hindsight be identified as bourgeois. In 1648 the ‘middling sort’ in England might be said to have formed themselves into a bourgeois class in alliance with the modern aristocracy against the monarch, the established church and the reactionary aristocracy. In 1789 the French bourgeoisie - lawyers, doctors, lower-ranking officials, etc - headed the revolution against the aristocracy, the established church and the monarchy. The bourgeoisie stood for the people - who in the form of the Levellers and sans culottes put a plebeian mark on the revolution. But the salient point that should be remembered is that neither the English nor the French bourgeoisie were at this time capitalist. Neither did they overthrow feudalism nor create a capitalist society.
It also needs emphasising that more or less throughout the world capitalism came from above, from the state. Ellen Meiksins Wood writes that in response to the development of the first capitalist system in Britain “other capitalist economies thereafter evolved in relation to that already existing one, and under the compulsions of its new systemic logic” (E Meiksins Wood The pristine culture of capitalism, London 1991, p1). All the historic evidence shows this to be the case. Hence the dogma that capitalism comes and can only come as a result of the bourgeois revolution is completely off the mark. So is the associated theory that bourgeois revolutions have definite tasks which have not yet been carried out in ‘backward’ Britain. This view was incidentally variously expressed by comrades Norman, Bayliss and Manson. The unwritten constitution, the established church, the monarch are all supposedly ‘feudal’ relics according to these comrades (unconsciously echoing the Anderson-Nairn thesis).
My view on the contrary is that these ‘archaic’ features and institutions are capitalist and serve the interests of capitalism. They will be removed not by completing the paradigm of the bourgeois revolution, but by beginning the democratic-socialist revolution.
Jack Conrad