The bourgeois revolution in France 1789-1815 – Henry Heller; and, Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution: debates of the British communist historians, 1940-1956 – David Parker (ed)

Friday, June 4, 2010

Models of revolution.

Mike Macnair reviews Henry Heller’s ‘The bourgeois revolution in France 1789-1815′ Bergahn Books, 2006, pp172, £20.13; and, David Parker’s (ed) ‘Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution: debates of the British communist historians, 1940-1956′ Lawrence and Wishart, 2008, pp285, £18.99.

PART ONE.

These two books are – in different ways – approaches to the bourgeois character of two great revolutions: the British in the 17th century and the French in the late 18th and early 19th. These parts of history, thanks to the ‘national curriculum’, have not been commonly taught in schools for decades. So a very oversimplified summary of the political course of events may be helpful in grasping what the books are about.

It is also necessary to discuss, in an equally oversimplified way, the books’ intellectual contexts. The result will be rather seriously long for a book review, and will be in two parts: but will hopefully encourage readers to read the books. Henry Heller sees the French revolution as directly relevant to the present problem of proletarian revolution. This is in any direct sense false; but indirectly the theoretical historical problem of the character of the revolutions is sharply relevant to modern working class politics.

Britain

In 1637 the Stuart government’s attempt to impose an English-style prayer-book on the Scots kirk led to a riot in Edinburgh – often said to have been triggered when market trader Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the officiating minister at a service in St Giles’ cathedral. The protests against the new prayer-book snowballed into a Scots Presbyterian revolution against the regime, and a Scots invasion of northern England (secretly supported by some English ‘puritan’ oppositionists) – the ‘bishops’ wars’. The attempt to defeat the Scots by force broke king Charles I’s financial ability to rule without parliamentary taxation. Meanwhile, in the Battle of the Downs in 1639 the fleet of the Dutch Protestant republic smashed that of the Spanish Catholic monarchy in violation of English territorial waters, contemptuously shrugging off an English squadron that looked on helplessly. This was an English military humiliation, as well as a catastrophic defeat of the Spanish.

The ‘short parliament’ of April-May 1640 failed to solve the fiscal crisis, and neither did fresh elections: the ‘long parliament’, beginning in November 1640, demanded so much that in 1642 the king resorted to civil war.

The two civil wars of 1642-46 and 1648 ended with the defeat of the king’s armies, and in 1649 the trial and execution of the king, proclamation of the Commonwealth, or English Republic, and abolition of the House of Lords. To win the wars, however, the parliament and the ‘puritans’ had to call into action the lower orders: beginning with mass mobilisations in London from 1638 on, and sharply moved forward with the creation of the ‘New Model Army’ in 1645, which broke with gentry-raised and gentry-controlled units in favour of a more organised army, based directly on ideological commitment. The result was the beginning of the independent, politico-religious self-expression of these lower orders; Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and so on; and, in the later 1650s, Quakers.

The leftwards dynamic of the army was arrested by the forcible suppression of the Levellers in 1649, but the elites – gentry and merchant patricians in the towns – wanted more ‘restoration of order’. The 1650s saw a military coup by leading general Oliver Cromwell and his associates, who tried various methods to govern the country – and, after Cromwell’s death, a brief restoration of the republic.

The civil wars produced a new and more effective army and navy, backed by a new and more effective tax and finance regime. Both the republic and the Cromwellian regime displayed aggressive exploitation of these resources: the Commonwealth conquered Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1650-51) and fought a naval war with the Dutch Republic (1652-54), and the Cromwellian regime fought a war with Spain (1655-59) both in the Caribbean, where the English seized Jamaica, at sea, and (in alliance with France) in what is now Belgium.

In 1660 the monarchy was restored, but with two fundamental changes. First, the principal non-parliamentary sources of royal revenue – the king’s feudal rights over gentry landowners and the right of ‘purveyance’ or compulsory purchase of goods for royal use – had been abolished by the Commonwealth. They stayed abolished and were replaced by a parliamentary excise tax. Second, the ‘prerogative’ courts of star chamber and high commission and the ability of the privy council to act as a court within mainland Britain had been abolished in 1641 before the outbreak of civil war. They stayed abolished, and the remaining ‘courts of equity’ (the chancery and similar courts) became subject to appeals to the House of Lords. The effect was to take away the principle that the king, as ‘fountain of justice’, could set up new courts to overrule the existing courts.

Charles II’s brother, James II, set out to create toleration of Catholics and a right to appoint them to the army and the universities (this was the road to suppression of Protestantism, which had previously been taken in Poland, France and some other continental states). To do the job he was also driven to reassert the old idea that the king was above the law and could create new courts. When James’s queen became pregnant (and gave birth to a son in June 1688), James’s Protestant opponents called in the Stadtholder William of Orange and the Dutch army, and raised a new revolution against James to back the invasion.

James’s rapid capitulation and exile made 1688 appear – falsely – a ‘peaceful’ and ‘top-down’ revolution: besides substantial mass mobilisations in England, there was full-scale civil war in Scotland and a Catholic revolution in Ireland, requiring a full-scale Anglo-Dutch invasion to suppress it.

But, though there was no civil war in England in 1688, the consequences were profound. The state was restructured into constitutional forms which to a considerable extent it retains to this day. England now became a major player in a European war. And to fund this war the Bank of England and the London money markets were invented, imitating the Netherlands. The period after 1689 saw an explosive growth of capitalist enterprises of all sorts.

Britain now rapidly surpassed the Netherlands as a global power. Just over 100 years separate the revolutions of 1688 and 1789; for 40 of those years Britain and France were at war. Four times between 1689 and 1763 Britain and its allies fought and defeated absolutist France in global wars. In the 1763 treaty ending the Seven Years War, the French were finally driven to expel the Stuart exile government from France, completely abandoning the aim of restoring the Stuarts in England. Finally, in 1776 the outbreak of the American revolution or war of independence (1776-83) allowed a little more French success. The result, however, was the creation of another republic in the US – and by the late 1780s the effective bankruptcy of the French state.

France

book - heller With bankruptcy the only alternative, the government of the French Bourbon king, Louis XVI, in 1788 called for a meeting of the estates-general, which had not met since 1614, with the aim of obtaining agreement to a plan to impose taxes on the nobility and clergy, who were tax-exempt.

When the estates-general met in May 1789, the situation rapidly ran out of the royal government’s control. The Third Estate asserted its own character – as the only elected estate – as representative of France as a whole, calling itself successively the ‘Commons’ (imitating Britain), the ‘National Assembly’, and finally the ‘Constituent Assembly’. The king’s decision to form a new government hostile to this assembly triggered more action: a Paris prison, the Bastille, was seized by mass action; in the countryside, peasant uprisings began to drive out the nobility and overthrow their feudal claims. The assembly formally abolished feudal rights and adopted a ‘Declaration of the rights of man and citizen’. A mass demonstration, reinforced by the ‘National Guard’ militia forced the king and his family to move to Paris, crippling attempts to mount a military resistance. Church property was nationalised.

In June 1791 the king attempted to flee to army supporters at Varennes, but was caught and brought back to Paris. In response, the king of Prussia and emperor of Austria asserted their willingness to take action to “to place the king of France in a position to establish, with the most absolute freedom, the foundations of a monarchical form of government”. The Prussians invaded France in July 1792. The war began with French defeats. In response, a Paris insurrection purged the assembly of its right wing, and Louis XVI was arrested. On September 20 the Prussians were defeated at the battle of Valmy. The next day a newly elected convention declared the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a republic. Louis was put on trial in December and executed in January 1793.

The execution of the king triggered further wars of intervention, interval revolts in the west (the Vendée) and south, and a further radicalisation of the regime. The ‘extreme’ Jacobin party made a coup against the ‘moderate’ Girondins and proceeded to very extensive mass mobilisation, terrorism against internal opponents and war-centralisation of the economy. By the end of 1793, it became clear that the French revolutionary armies were able to stand off both external enemies and internal revolts, and in the first half of 1794 they had further successes. In July 1794 the Girondins made a counter-coup against the Jacobins – ‘Thermidor’ – and turned the weapon of terror against them.

The French armies were able from 1794 to go on the offensive, conquering the Netherlands and invading Spain in 1795; forcing Spain and Prussia out of the war; successfully invading both the Rhineland and Italy in 1796; and forcing Austria out of the war in 1797. Meanwhile, the convention constitution was replaced by the openly oligarchic directory (1795). This in turn gave way in 1799 to a coup by the successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who set himself up as ‘first consul’ and from 1804 emperor.

War with Britain in effect continued until 1813, with a brief interlude in 1802-03. The British constructed a series of European coalitions against the French, all of which were defeated, with Napoleon’s empire spreading further and further across Europe. Finally, Napoleon overreached by invading Russia in 1812, leading to the disastrous retreat from Moscow. The ‘sixth coalition’ was then able to defeat the French armies, and restore the Bourbon monarchy – twice, since in the ‘hundred days’ in 1815, Napoleon was restored until he was defeated at Waterloo.

But as with the English restoration in 1660, the French restoration left the king as a partially limited monarch: there was a constitution and a representative assembly with limited powers, and the revolution’s changes in government, armed forces, taxation and the legal system were left intact. In the revolution of 1830, the Bourbon monarchy was replaced by a more clearly constitutional regime, the Orléanist or ‘July’ monarchy of Louis Philippe. This in turn fell in 1848 to a short-lived Second Republic – overthrown in 1851 by a coup by its own president, Louis Bonaparte, who created the Second Empire (1851-71). In spite of Marx’s characterisations in The class struggles in France and The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, there is no real retrospective doubt that the Second Empire, though politically dictatorial, was a fully capitalist regime. Indeed, there is little real doubt that the Orléanist monarchy was already a bourgeois regime.

Marxism and the revolutions

There are striking similarities between the overall political patterns of the English and French revolutions.

The financial bankruptcy of the old regime leads to a government appeal to a representative institution to supply taxes. The representatives demand reform, initially starting with quite conservative ideas. The attempts of the monarchy to take back control result on the contrary in increasing radicalisation. The need of the opponents of the monarchy to fight a civil or international war produces broad mobilisation, extreme radicalisation and transformation both of the military and of the basis of taxation. There is a reaction of the possessing classes back from this radicalisation, issuing in oligarchy and military dictatorship. Military-fiscal transformation spills over into external aggressive war. There is internally or externally enforced restoration of the monarchy with more limited powers. Finally, this period of monarchist restoration is itself overthrown and followed by capitalist constitutionalism. Some of these similarities were already noticed at the time of the French Revolution.

Marx and Engels in 1850 reviewed a pamphlet, titled Why did the English revolution succeed?, by the former Orléanist prime minister, François Guizot, who drew the comparison from a bourgeois standpoint.

They comment: “M Guizot does not think it worth mentioning that the struggle against Louis XIV was simply a war of competition aimed at the destruction of French naval power and commerce; nor does he mention the rule of the finance bourgeoisie through the establishment of the Bank of England under William III, nor the introduction of the public debt, which then received its first sanction, nor that the manufacturing bourgeoisie received a new impetus by the consistent application of a system of protective tariffs.”

Marx and Engels further note: “M Guizot finds it superfluous to mention that the subjection of the crown to parliament meant subjection to the rule of a class. Nor does he think it necessary to deal with the fact that this class won the necessary power in order finally to make the crown its servant. According to him, the whole struggle between Charles I and parliament was merely over purely political privileges. Not a word is said about why the parliament, and the class represented in it, needed these privileges. Nor does Guizot talk about Charles I’s interference with free competition, which made England’s commerce and industry increasingly impossible; nor about the dependence on parliament into which Charles I, in his continuous need for money, fell the more deeply, the more he tried to defy it.”

And: “The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie – which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII – did not find itself in opposition, as did the French feudal landowners in 1789, but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact, their lands were not feudal, but bourgeois property. On the one hand, they were able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it.”^[1]

In this article is found the core of an understanding of the English revolutions of the 17th century, which was also present in Karl Kautsky’s ‘Revolutions, past and present’ (1906),^[2] in Trotsky’s Where is Britain going? (1926),^[3] and thence in AL Morton’s A people’s history of England (1938) (though, of course, neither Kautsky nor Trotsky is cited by Morton) and in the Communist Party historians, whose early internal discussions are collected by Parker.

There was another and simultaneous strand of Marxist interpretation, which looked to the early plebeian movements and utopian communists of the English revolutionary period as precursors of the modern socialist movement, beginning with Marx in 1847: “The first manifestation of a truly active communist party is contained within the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is eliminated. The most consistent republicans – in England the Levellers, in France Babeuf, Buonarroti, etc – were the first to proclaim these ‘social questions’.”^[4] Similar treatments can be found in Engels’ Socialism: utopian and scientific; in Eduard Bernstein’s Cromwell and communism (1895),^[5] in EB Pashukanis’s ‘Revolutionary elements in the history of the English state and law’ (1927)^[6] and in CLR James’ ‘Cromwell and the Levellers’ in 1949,^[7] and so on.

More generally, however, Marxists treated the French Revolution as the archetype of the bourgeois revolution – and, indeed, as the archetype of revolution in general. From Marx’s interpretation of the early stages of the French Revolution came the slogan of ‘permanent revolution’;^[8] and the Bolsheviks repeatedly compared themselves with the Jacobins and worried and argued about ‘Thermidor’ and ‘Bonapartism’ as affecting their own revolution.^[9]

The idea of the French Revolution as the archetype of the bourgeois revolution is the underlying ground of the concept of failed or imperfect bourgeois revolutions, as applied by Marx and Engels to Germany in 1848; and from there to the rival conceptions of ‘uninterrupted’ and ‘permanent’ revolution developed in Russia and applied to the world outside western Europe by Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists.

Finally these conceptions reacted back to the point at which Britain, extraordinarily, could be claimed to have had an ‘imperfect bourgeois revolution’: whether this idea was to justify pursuit of popular frontism in the form of hoping for the aid of ‘anti-monopoly capital’ to bring in ‘advanced democratic capitalism’ in the British road to socialism; or in the form of tailing the nationalists, of Tom Nairn’s ‘break-up of Britain’.

Bourgeois histories

‘Mainstream’ or academic history in the 19th century by and large shared the understanding of Marx and the Marxists that the English and French revolutions were bourgeois revolutions – or, to avoid the obnoxious language of class, that they were revolutions which ended feudalism and brought in economic, political and religious freedom. Opponents of this view were mainly opponents of the results of the revolutions: Catholic writers, and ‘legitimists’ nostalgic for the Bourbon monarchy, ‘Jacobites’ nostalgic for the Stuart regime.

The Paris Commune of 1870, and – more sharply – the Russian October revolution in 1917, changed this pattern fundamentally. On the one hand, the regimes of western Europe made major concessions to the proletariat, especially moves towards universal suffrage and steps towards welfarism. On the other, it was generally understood that under extended suffrage, the state had to intervene through the academy and the school to defend itself against the possibility of the emancipated lower orders not deferring to their ‘betters’.^[10]

There was extended, deliberate promotion of the ‘gradualism’ argued by Britain’s Fabians, Eduard Bernstein in Germany and similar trends. The idea of revolution as such became the object of furious polemics; but also of ‘denaturing’, so that, for example, Karl Kautsky’s The labour revolution (1925) – at least as translated in Allen and Unwin – proposes social transformation without any political revolution at all. In Britain, Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig interpretation of history (London 1931) became a ‘foundation book’,^[11] so that any British academic historian in the last 60 years is obliged to give at least token nods against the danger of ‘Whig history’. Going along with these general polemics went radical denial of the character of either the English or the French revolutions as really involving economic, social or class transformation.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of other transitions to capitalism: and at first sight not all of these involved political revolutions. Certainly, not all these revolutions took ‘English’ or ‘French’ forms. Take, for instance, late 19th century Germany: pretty probably to be interpreted as capitalist, unless we are to accept Arno Mayer’s Persistence of the old regime (New York 1981); but if there was a revolution, it was largely ‘from above’.

1989-91 has changed the terms of debate once again. On the one hand, the fall of the USSR has re-enabled liberal denunciation of socialism, communism and the idea of working class rule as merely and necessarily utopian. This polemic holds as strongly against Fabianism as against Marxism; and not even the great crash of 2008 has sufficed to dislodge it from mainstream political and economic thought. On the other hand the ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia in 1989 has rehabilitated the idea of revolution as a way to achieve … capitalism. There has been a succession of attempts to reproduce the phenomenon: ‘colour revolutions’.

In this context, the economic and social revolutionary character of the English and French revolutions has been reasserted. On the Marxist side, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The pristine culture of capitalism (London 1991) asserted that the English revolution was more bourgeois than the French. From academic history, Hilton L Root’s The fountain of privilege (Berkeley 1994) argued for a radical difference between 18th century England and France before the revolution from a neoclassical economic perspective; Tim Harris’s Revolution (London 2006) has asserted the revolutionary character of 1688, and Steve Pincus’s 1688: the first modern revolution (New Haven 2009) carries the argument to a more systematic level. Paul R Hanson’s Contesting the French revolution (Oxford 2009), while making the necessary token anathemas against Marxist “economic determinism”, agrees that the French revolution had social grounds (chapter 2) and that the social layer that gained most from it could be called a bourgeoisie (p196). The character of the events as social revolutions, not just political upheavals, is back on the historians’ agenda.

Heller

Heller’s book uses this opportunity, together with a mass of recent detailed academic research on French economic and social history down to and during the revolution, to try to place the ‘classic Marxist’ account of the revolution back on the agenda. It is not a detailed narrative history of the revolution. Nor is it a book which attempts to engage the issues which either the forms of the bourgeois revolutions themselves or the ‘mainstream’ critiques of the ‘classic Marxist’ account pose for Marxist theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, of the nature of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or of the state and revolution.

Rather what is on offer is an empirical polemic against the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the French revolution as not a bourgeois revolution. Heller’s summary in the introduction of the line he is arguing is simple. The pre-1789 ancien régime was feudal, but with capitalism growing up within its interstices (p3). 18th century France saw an expansion of capitalist trade and agriculture – upsetting the traditional life of the peasantry and also producing a significant proletariat. An economic crisis at the end of the 18th century “proved to be the spark that set off a revolution”. Then “The overall expansion of the role of profit in the economy and growth in the numbers, wealth and confidence of the bourgeoisie made it possible for this class to take political advantage of popular upheaval in order to wrest control of the state from the dominant classes of the ancien régime … The legal, cultural and institutional changes set in place during this period set the stage for the further development of a capitalist economy and society in the 19th century” (p1).

In chapter 1, ‘Questioning revisionism’, Heller points out that – as I have said above – the idea that the French revolution was a bourgeois revolution did not originate in Marx (pp10-11), but also that Marx saw the revolution as the prototype of the future proletarian revolution (p11). But first Anglo-Saxon, and more recently French, historians, have mounted a series of attacks on the theory: French capitalists lacked class-consciousness and were integrated with the nobility (pp13-15); the revolution was really a process of centralising state formation (p15); the liberal revolution was good, but the Jacobin phase totalitarian (pp15-16); the redistribution of the land blocked capitalist development (p16); the revolution was really the product of a rootless intelligentsia (pp16-18); there was no significant capitalism in 18th century France (pp21-22).

The main body of the book defends this general line against the objections and alternatives offered in the ‘revisionist’ accounts discussed in chapter 1. Heller spends two chapters (2 and 3) discussing what he identifies as a rise of capitalism and of wage labour in the 18th century French economy. The following chapters discuss (4) the revolutionary crisis, (5) the economy in the revolution down to 1799, (6) the directory and (7) the Napoleonic era.

By and large (though not completely) the empirical polemic works. The book is well worth reading as a lively critique of the various revisionist attempts to deny the class character of the French Revolution, and a summary of (some of) the relevant evidence.

However, there are two striking omissions in Heller’s account. The first is the absence of immediate state context – state insolvency – of the revolutionary crisis, which is explained rather by a deepening economic crisis, leading to a mass movement. Flowing from this absence of the crisis of the state as such is the absence also of the geopolitical context: that is, the repeated defeats of absolutist France at the hands of bourgeois-parliamentarist Britain and the European coalitions assembled by the Anglo-Dutch alliance in the 1690s-1700s and by the British in the 1740s and again in 1756-63; and the costs of the illusory French ‘victory’ of 1783, both as trigger for state insolvency and as providing in the US an immediate model of revolution not tied directly to Protestantism, as the Dutch and English revolutions had been.

The second omission is smaller: a single, but significant absence. David Parker, the editor of the second book under review, is also the author of a major Marxist treatment of the French ancien régime and its decline and fall, Class and state in ancien régime France (London 1996). Parker’s reading of the French economy in the 18th century is sharply different from Heller’s, since, where Heller sees interstitial capitalist development, Parker sees agricultural regression and sharply limited industrial and commercial growth, both resulting from the persistence of statised forms of feudal relations of exploitation. Also, unlike Heller, Parker does integrate into his account the financial strains imposed on the French monarchy by geopolitical confrontation with capitalist Britain.

Outside this book, Heller’s general political commitments – as far as they can be found from some superficial web-surfing – look broadly ‘official communist’. In 2006 he published a ‘popular history’ account of the cold war, with Monthly Review Press: from the blurb and reviews, the book largely charges the cold war to US imperialism’s strategy for containing other, national, revolutions.^[12] True enough, but representative, without more, of a political alignment. His 2009 review in Monthly Review of Vijay Prashad’s The darker nations: a people’s history of the third world (2008) charges Prashad with “failure to engage sufficiently with the two communist giants [the USSR and China]” and “dismissive treatment of revolutionary Cuba”.^[13]

Revisionist (in his own terms, ‘post-revisionist’) author William Doyle argues in a review of Heller’s book that, like the legitimist advocates of Bourbon restoration in 19th century France, Heller “has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”.^[14] In some respects this is wrong, but in two ‘official communist’ respects it is true. The first is that Heller’s interpretation of the French Revolution writes out the geopolitical confrontation with England, because Heller wants to suppose that the bourgeois revolution was a national process rather than an international one with national phases or aspects. After all, the French revolution is to be the prototype of the proletarian revolution (p11); and this, too, is to be a matter of national roads to socialism growing out of national contradictions.

The second respect in which Heller “has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” is related. It is, of course, true that Marx and Engels in the 1840s saw the French Revolution as the prototype of the proletarian revolution. By the period of the First International, and still more by the beginning of the Second, this line had shifted. It is notorious on the left that Engels’ 1895 introduction to The class struggles in France was toned down to make him appear to be a reformist. It is nonetheless true that even in the non-toned down version, Engels rejects explicitly the idea of making a principle out of the forms and figures of 1789 – barricade struggles and so on. And at the end of the introduction he offers a very different model of the future revolution: the sacking of the pagan Roman emperor’s palace by mutinous troops allegedly influenced by Christianity. Universal military training and service, in this model, is to work alongside universal suffrage to subvert the capitalists’ control of the armed forces.^[15] The army is to be infiltrated by socialist ideas and broken up by its internal contradictions: as, in the event, happened in Russia in the course of 1917.

Engels’ imagination of the proletarian revolution may, of course, be as problematic as the earlier image of the proletarian revolution as a better French Revolution. That is not the point. It is that clinging to the image of the French Revolution as a national revolution triggered by internal contradictions and economic crisis, and of the French Revolution as a model for the proletarian revolution, makes it harder for us to think proletarian revolution in the 21st century.

mike.macnair(at)weeklyworker.org.uk

Click on the image below to order David Parker’s (ed) ‘Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940 – 1956.’

Image of Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940-1956

Click on the image below to order Henry Heller’s ‘The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815.’

Image of The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815 (Berghahn Monographs in French Studies)

Notes

www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm
www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm
www.marxists.org/archive/trosky/britain/wibg/index.htm
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1895/cromwell/index.htm
www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm
www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1949/05/english-revolution.htm
RB Day, D Gaido (eds) Witnesses to permanent revolution Amsterdam 2009, pp1-2.
Analogies between Bolsheviks and Jacobins began from the Menshevik camp in 1903-04 and the analogy was embraced by Lenin in One step forward, two steps back: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/q.htm. A few other examples: JV Stalin, ‘The international character of the October revolution’ (1927): www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/11/06.htm; C Rakovsky The ‘professional dangers’ of power (1928): www.marxists.org/archive/rakovsky/1928/08/prodanger.htm; Trotsky, ‘The workers’ state, Thermidor and Bonapartism’ (1935): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm
Eg in relation to English literature, C Baldick The social mission of English criticism 1848-1932 Oxford 1983.
Though its own author effectively abandoned its arguments in his later career: see Oxford dictionary of national biography.
H Heller The cold war and the new imperialism: a global hisory, 1945-2005 New York 2006.
www.monthlyreview.org/090323heller.php
www.h-france.net/vol7reviews/doyle.html
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm

PART TWO.

Against the state, not just the ruling class

This is the second part of my review of Henry Heller’s The bourgeois revolution in France and David Parker’s Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution.^[1]

In the first part^[2] I gave schematic outline narratives of the political events of the English and French revolutions, of Marxist readings of these revolutions, of the way in which the Marxist claim that these were social revolutions became – especially after 1917 – the object of furious pro-bourgeois academic polemics; and of the fact that after 1989-91, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, revolution to bring in capitalism has once again become a positive for pro-bourgeois academics, so that the resistance to seeing the English and French revolutions as social revolutions has massively weakened.

This provided the context for my review of Henry Heller’s attempt to reassert a ‘traditional Marxist’ interpretation of the French Revolution. In spite of its strengths, I argued that Heller’s book remains trapped by the ‘official communist’ conception of national autonomy and purely ‘national roads’ to revolution; and also by an ‘early Marxist’ and Bolshevik use of the French Revolution as the essential model not only of a bourgeois revolution, but also of a proletarian revolution.

Communist Party historians

The same points are relevant to David Parker’s collection of the internal discussions of the British Communist Party Historians Group in the 1940s-50s: these, too, are texts framed by the deep assumptions of ‘national roads to socialism’ and other aspects of ‘official communism’.

Some of the texts, indeed, are considerably more self-consciously Stalinist than Heller’s arguments. Thus it is striking to read Christopher Hill polemicising against posthumously condemned Soviet historian, MN Pokrovsky, on the ground that “Pokrovsky, by ante-dating the bourgeois revolution, in fact played into the hands of Trotskyism” (p134);^[3] or Brian Pearce, later to become a Trotskyist, quoting Stalin’s History of the CPSU (Short Course) as an authority on the range of possible modes of production recognised by Marxism (p99).

But Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution is a very much more theoretical book than The bourgeois revolution in France and asks more interesting questions. It is, as already indicated, a collection of the internal discussion documents and stenographic minutes of meetings of the early modern section of the British Communist Party Historians Group in the 1940s-50s. The Historians Group was a remarkable constellation of people later to be stars of the British academic history profession. Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, VG Kiernan and George Rudé are only a selection of the best known names among them: Parker’s appendix 4 provides biographical information on many more, not all equally prominent, but often equally intellectually productive.^[4] The book provides a partial record of debates within the early modern section. As a result, we see this group of historians debating, in explicitly Marxist terms, issues most of them continued to grapple with – in less clearly Marxist terms – throughout their subsequent careers.

It would be a mistake to suppose that this is merely an accident of history – that the old CPGB, then at its height (with above 50,000 members in 1942-43^[5]) happened to collect a bunch of historical stars, who then ‘naturally’ rose to academic eminence. The point is the opposite. Contrary to modern far-left orthodoxy, a party does not exist to fight for a systematic theoretical position (‘Cliff state capitalism’, ‘permanent revolution’, etc) but to fight for a concrete political programme. But the existence of a real party, as opposed to a sect founded on a theoretical dogma, facilitates theoretical education and theoretical production, by bringing together people with common concerns and common basic ideas, but also substantial differences. Both theoretical education and theoretical production work by dialectic in its old sense: that is, through the confrontation of different positions, forcing the debaters to elaborate and defend their ideas, and those who participate to ‘raise their own game’ in order to intervene.

Stalinist theory was (and is) a corrupted form of Marxist theory. As theory it was mutilated by police interventions in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its satellite parties and in the Soviet and satellite-state universities in defence of the narrow sectional interests of the state and party bureaucracies. Both theoretical claims and simple facts were arbitrarily altered to suit the immediate political and ideological projects of the ruling clique. But Stalinised ‘Marxism’ nonetheless constantly made theoretical appeals to the writings of Marx and Engels. And, though the ‘classical Marxist’ authors of the Second International were off limits and Bolsheviks who had fallen into disfavour even more so, the ‘classical Marxist’ tradition could to some extent be accessed through Lenin’s contribution to these debates.

Hence, debating the application of Marxism (even in its Stalinised form) to British history forced the participants in the History Group’s discussions to ask real and fundamental questions, and to think and argue considerably more rigorously than their Liberal, Tory and Christian-socialist contemporaries. Parker quotes Hill as describing the discussions as “the most stimulating intellectual experience I have ever had” (p9). These debates thus stand at the root of the participants’ remarkable subsequent intellectual productivity.

They also provide a standing rebuke both to the banal dogmatism of much of the intellectual production of the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party (England and Wales), the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, and many smaller groups, and to the cacophony of occasionally valuable, but invariably talking past each other, character of the theoretical interventions of both individual members of groups outside their party framework, and various ‘independent’ Marxist theorists. We need a party not just for immediate political action, but also to do theoretical education and production effectively.

I do not mean by any of this to endorse in an unqualified way the actual arguments of the debates reported in Ideology, absolutism … ; nor those of the participants in their subsequent work. More on this below. Moreover, it would almost certainly have been more educational if the open debate in Labour Monthly in 1940-41 had continued or been restarted, rather than the participants debating purely internally in the Historians Group in 1946-50, with public debate re-emerging only in a non-party forum after the foundation of the left academic history journal Past and Present in 1952.

The starting point

Parker provides an extremely useful introduction to the documents. He reviews issues of methodology and the ‘empiricism’ of the group, making the point that their use of Marx was mainly dependent on the schematic outline of historical materialism in Marx’s Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy and on Engels’ correspondence in the 1890s which had been translated by Historians Group member Dona Torr; they were less concerned with working out the general theory of historical materialism as a framework than with confirming or correcting Marx’s and Engels’ specific historical claims.

In this context, he passes some comment on the later critics of the communist historians as a school (pp9-26). He also provides linking material in relation to the documents and comments on the subsequent evolution of the academic historiography of the issues they addressed (pp26-47), dealing separately with the question of the relations of production in agriculture (pp47-53) and concluding with a brief retrospect (pp53-60).

The immediate trigger of the discussions reported in Ideology, absolutism … was the question of a revision of Morton’s A people’s history of England (1938). But also involved was a brief public controversy, caused by the publication in 1940 of Hill’s The English revolution 1640. Hill argued up-front for an analysis of 1640 as a bourgeois revolution directly analogous to France 1789. This argument was the subject of a sharp critique by German exile communist Jurgen Kuchynski in the party’s journal Labour Monthly. Kuchynski argued that Tudor England was already capitalist – Parker quotes him as saying that Queen Elizabeth I was “the most prominent capitalist in capitalist bourgeois society” (p32) and 1640 a response to an attempted feudal counterrevolution. Kuchynski was then attacked as a reformist gradualist in Labour Monthly contributions by Torr and Douglas Garman. The party’s ‘leading intellectual’ R Palme Dutt drafted a fence-sitting summary of the debate, plainly intended for publication, which is the first document in the book – but did not, in the end, publish it (p33). Hill’s 1947 ‘Theses on absolutism’ (document 2) were markedly influenced by the earlier debate: in particular, characterising the Tudor and Stuart monarchy as ‘absolutist’ was in a sense a way of dodging Kuchynski’s objections to Hill’s earlier characterisation of 16th and early 17th century English state and society as still feudal.

Behind this debate lies – immediately – the Pokrovsky ‘debate’ in the Soviet historical profession in 1929-31, in which Pokrovsky was attacked for postulating a distinct period of ‘merchant capitalism’. Hill and Pearce produced a summary of the Pokrovsky ‘debate’ as an intervention in the discussion (document 3) and a translation of a report of a 1940 discussion of the issue in the Russian Academy of Sciences (document 4).

Behind the Pokrovsky debate in turn is the fact that Marx and Engels at various points gave very different dates for the appearance of capitalism. These range from the medieval Italian city-states to the 16th century reformation and the enclosures of Tudor England, to the revolutions (as in the 1850 review of Guizot, quoted in the first part of this review), to something closer to the ‘industrial revolution’ of later 18th to early 19th century Britain (or even, in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital Vol 1, to the revolutions of 1830 and the 1832 Reform Act). Indeed, they also wrote of 18th-19th century English politics as involving a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.

These variations, in turn, raise issues about how Marx’s and Engels’ specific historical comments relate to (a) the outline sketches of historical materialism in The German ideology and Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy, in the Anti-Dühring, and in Engels’ correspondence in the 1890s; and (b) the account of capitalism in Capital, Vols 1-3 (and perhaps Marx’s other economic manuscripts published after his death).

As to the first issue, the problem of dating the rise of capitalism requires either (i) a mode of production intermediate between feudalism and capitalism (‘petty commodity production’, or Pokrovsky’s ‘merchant capitalism’, or something else), or (ii) a very large degree of interpenetration of modes of production in historical social formations. The second option does not fit well with the broad schematic outlines of The German ideology, Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy and Anti-Dühring, unless the dialectical interpenetration of opposites is to be analysed as interpenetration of past and not-past on the largest possible scale. In this case, moreover, the result can quite properly be said to pose the question of ‘reformist gradualism’ versus ‘revolutionary politics’. I do not think it actually supports ‘reformist gradualism’, because of the role of the state (see below) but this political question is legitimately involved.

As to the second issue, the reason for the attack on Pokrovsky probably lies buried in the Kremlin archives – or perhaps irretrievably in Stalin’s head. Given the period – contemporaneous with the ‘left turn’ and forced collectivisation – it is reasonable in part to suppose that the explicit claim that Pokrovsky underestimated the progressive role of the state and the possibilities of ‘class struggle’ voluntarism (quoted in document 3, pp81-82) was a genuine element of the motive. In addition, though Pokrovsky was aligned with the Stalin faction, the logic of his theory was – as Boris Kagarlitsky has shown by developing it – radically inconsistent with the idea of socialism in a single country. By way of corroboration, the Nazi, Klaus Mehnert, had some evidence for his claim that Stalin wanted to get rid of Pokrovsky’s school textbook on Russian history because it was too classical-Marxist and hence insufficiently nationalist.^[6]

But the pretexts for the attack on Pokrovsky were primarily alleged inconsistencies with Marx’s discussion of the separation of the labourer from the land in Capital Vol 1, chapters 27-29, and of the history and role of ‘merchant capital’ in Capital Vol 3, chapter 20. As with historical materialism, this issue is again one of pure and impure forms. Marx was explicit in the Preface to the first German edition of Capital Vol 1 that he used English examples because:

“The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England … Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”^[7]

In reality, of course, this project of abstracting to the pure logic of capital broke down in the course of the writing of Capital Vol 1. The second half of the book is heavily historical and displays the historical development of capitalism. The drafts which became Capital Vol 2 and 3, which originally antedated the completion of Capital Vol 1, and are both (mainly) more abstractly addressed to ‘pure forms’, were left unfinished. Instead – after the period of intense political activity round the First International and the Paris Commune, and work on the French (1872) and second German (1873) editions of Capital Vol 1 – Marx turned his research attention to attempts to address dialectical logic through mathematical problems, to the ‘historical materialism’ problems of the ethnographical evidence for pre-class society and the historical evidence for pre-capitalist property relations.^[8]

More on these issues, too, below. For the present enough has been said to show that the debates reported in Ideology, absolutism … revolved around issues which were current before and remain live for Marxists today.

Ideology

Documents 18-26 concern ‘ideology’ – or more particularly the relationship of the bourgeois revolution to (a) religion, and in particular Protestantism and its Calvinist sub-form; and (b) the ‘scientific revolution’ and the secularisation of political thought after 1660, with contributions from Hill (documents 18, 21 and (with Clark) 22, Stephen Mason (documents 19 and 20), Kiernan (23), Roy Pascal (25), Mervyn James (26) and another set of minutes of oral discussion (24).

Parker presumably placed the issue of ideology first in the title of the book and in the introduction because, as he says, the section “endeavoured to deploy the base-superstructure model in a non-mechanistic non-reductive fashion” and “this aspiration was probably better fulfilled in the series of discussions on ideology than in the prior discussion of the state …” (p26).

I have followed him in discussing it first, but for the opposite reason. The concept of ideology is very often deeply muddled in Marxist arguments, primarily due to the assumption that there is a single ideology apt to a particular class, rather than – I think more likely – a mass of competing ideological fashions, thrown up as a sort of spume on the surface of the waves of class and political struggles, at the most superficial possible level.

On the other hand, it is also in my personal opinion quite severely problematic to treat religion simply as ‘ideology’ or as a variant of ideology. This is not only for the reason discussed in Jack Conrad’s Fantastic reality^[9] – that religion is more a way of interpreting the world than just a form of class apologetics – but also because religious redistributive institutions fail to be considered as part of the material division of labour – ie, the base – and clerisies in feudalism are direct extractors of the social surplus product in parallel with, not within, the military landlord class.

The papers and discussion on ideology in the book seem to me to be interesting but unfruitful precisely for these reasons. On the one hand, the participants themselves recognised in the course of the discussion that the immediate connections between classes and ideas they began by seeking were schematic. On the other, the failure to integrate the role of clerisies into the definitions of feudalism offered in the absolutism discussion (below) meant that the significance of the Protestant reformation as connected to the rise of capitalism by being a change in the mode of extraction of the social surplus product was missed. (In the French Revolution this job was done by secularisation, and by state seizure and sale of church property, and in the Japanese ‘Meiji restoration’ by seizing the lands of Buddhist monasteries and sects and creating directly state-controlled Shinto institutions.^[10])

Absolutism

Ideology may have been more interesting to Parker as a practising early modern historian; the state and absolutism are more politically interesting. The debate on absolutism is (largely) contained in documents 1-17.^[11] Parker observes (pp 33-47, 56-58) that this debate was quite seriously confused, starting with Hill’s initial claim that the Tudor and Stuart regime was properly to be called ‘absolutist’, which is utterly opposed to modern views of the Tudor regime. It is certainly true that it is a confused debate.

Kiernan offered counter-theses to Hill’s (document 5) on lines not far distant from Kuchynski. These are a brilliant and suggestive sketch of an interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, but were open to severe political attack on the grounds (1) that they violate the dogma that the state must be the state of a single class; (2) that they violated the condemnation of Pokrovsky; and (3) that by downplaying the historical significance of 1640 they opened the way to the Whig and Tory interpretations of a (uniquely English) prolonged, gradual, constitutional development.

Pearce and Hilton offered critiques of Kiernan’s definition of feudalism, which they argued failed to focus sufficiently on the mode of extraction of the surplus from the primary producers; a return to this focus would make visible feudal relations of exploitation continuing into the 16th and perhaps the 17th centuries (documents 6 and 7). Kiernan, presumably responding to the condemnation of Pokrovsky, defended an interpenetration of merchant capital and other forms of capital (document and this was criticised by Dobb on the basis of the line of his Studies in the development of capitalism (London 1946) – that merchant capital did not tend to overthrow feudalism. Document 9 is a restatement by Kiernan of his position on the Tudor state, and document 10 another attempt by Hilton to define feudalism.

Documents 12-14 are the protocols of the oral discussions. These largely repeated what was in the oral documents, but also showed a fairly strong majority for (broadly) Hill’s line. In his summing up in the third discussion Hill emphasised the deviationist modern political implications he saw in Kiernan’s argument: it was a stages theory which lost sight of the fact that there had to be a decisive moment of transfer of political power from one class to another; it was dependent on Pokrovsky, who ‘played into the hands of Trotskyism’; it promoted English exceptionalism and gradualism.

Under this battering, Kiernan at the end of the third meeting withdrew his theses – but afterwards wrote a ‘postscript’ (document 15) which maintained quite a lot of his specific points as caveats to Hill’s line. An ‘official line’ asserting the orthodoxy of Hill’s line, and condemning deviations, etc (without directly naming Kiernan or his supporters), was then published in July 1948 in Communist Review (document 16).

But Kiernan’s objections had not wholly disappeared from view. Document 17 is a text by Dobb on the early 17th century economy, which is quite cautious both about the persistence of feudal relations of production (largely eliminated) and about the role of merchant capital (composed of several distinct strata with different economic characteristics).

‘Merchant capital’

The questions of the role of ‘merchant capital’ and of agrarian relations in this discussion fed into the Dobb-Sweezy debate on the transition to capitalism, started by American communist economists’ criticisms of Dobb’s Studies, and which continues to this day in the form of the ‘Brenner debate’.^[12]

I have discussed the ‘merchant capital’ issue in the second part of my review of Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery,^[13] and will repeat here only two basic points in that discussion. The first is that Marx’s comments on merchant capital in Capital Vol 3, chapter 20 are in fact self-contradictory (not in a dialectical sense), with the result that the orthodox Stalinist critique of Pokrovsky was unsound, and that Kiernan’s notes on the point are preferable to Dobb’s response.

The second is that, once we recognise that late medieval shipping capital transformed use values by transporting goods in bulk, employing free labour in ship construction, as sailors and on the docks, the idea of isolated national transitions from feudalism to capitalism, or isolated national bourgeois revolutions, breaks down. The medieval Italian city-states, thrown up by small-scale bourgeois (in the old sense of urban) revolutions against feudal rule, created a capitalist bulk-goods transit trade as well as financial structures to back this trade and their states.

Their imitators elsewhere in Europe failed to achieve full sovereignty, and many of the Italian city-states degenerated back to feudalised state forms (signoria) through internal coups. The feudal monarchies intervened in the city organisations through state legal controls (and the occasional use of force) to subordinate them to the state, and intervened in shipping and manufacture by creating royal-sponsored monopoly organisations serving to ‘divide and rule’ and to make the relevant capitalists dependent on the king for their privileges.

But both the bulk-goods transit trade and Italian technical innovations in warfare tended to undermine feudalism as a system of production and exploitation, to monetise the European economy and to force (feudal) state centralisation for the effective conduct of war.

Protestantism, combined with resistance to feudal state centralisation, in the late 16th century produced the Dutch revolution. The Dutch republic rapidly became an imperialist capitalist state (centred on shipping) and operating on a world scale (with colonies in Java and South Africa and an attempt to take over Brazil, and ‘factories’ ranging from what is now New York, through India, to Japan). The Dutch republic then played an important part – as role-model, as rival and finally in 1688 as direct military intervenor – in the English Revolution.

1689-1714 saw the new English bourgeois state replace the Netherlands as the capitalist military ‘lead state’ and equally global imperialist operator, with the Netherlands afterwards (like Britain today) playing the role of a subordinated financial centre. The image of British parliamentarism, prosperity and so on, and Britain’s victories in global wars with France, finally wrecked the French monarchy and created the conditions for the French revolution.

The process is a prolonged transition from feudalism to capitalism, and an interrupted one; but overall it is an international process, not purely national. And the decisive steps in this international process involve revolutions: the forcible overthrow and reconstruction of states.

Absolutism revisited

Parker’s critique of the discussion centres on the issue of ‘Tudor absolutism’ as a misconceived starting point because Tudor England was not ‘absolutist’. This is not quite so clear. The problem is, at least in part, that the category of ‘absolutism’ is severely confused in Marx’s and Engels’ discussions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and in subsequent Marxist (and other) uses of the term. Under some readings, absolutism is an early stage of capitalism, or at least of capitalist impact on feudalism, and this is reflected in some of the arguments in Ideology, absolutism … But Parker himself debunks this view – at least for French absolutism – in his Class and state in early modern France (London 1996), arguing that the French absolutist state was, precisely, a state which endeavoured to preserve feudal aristocratic and clerical rights and dominance.

‘Absolutism’ is in origin – as ‘absolute monarchy’ is in its use by early modern writers – a legal-theoretical doctrine which holds that in any legal system there is a sovereign who is both the creator of the law and not bound by the law – princeps legibus solutus in the Latin tag. This doctrine is, in fact, medieval in origin, having been created between the 12th and the 14th century out of a combination of late Roman imperial legal sources with the Christian theology of miracles (god’s ‘absolute’ power overriding his ‘regulated’ power).^[14]

The doctrine was already present in 15th century England, when it was used to justify the creation by the king of new courts using new forms of procedure, the ‘equity’ and ‘prerogative’ courts, which had powers derived from the king’s ‘absolute power’ to override the decisions of the existing courts and their ‘due process’. It became much more used in heavy-duty legal and political argument towards the end of the 16th century and in the early 17th – which is also, in fact, the same period in which the French state was remodelled as ‘absolutist’ in its juridical theory and began to rely heavily on the creation of new courts and new offices.^[15]

These comments are at some distance from the conventional Marxist historical usage of ‘absolutism’. This refers not to the legal doctrine, but to the creation of professional military forces (at the expense of the individual military capabilities of the feudal nobility drawing on their followers), a centralised judicial system and salaried civil state bureaucracy. It was this model of ‘absolutism’ which was read by Pokrovsky as the political regime of ‘merchant capitalism’ – and by many Marxist and non-Marxist authors (including some comments from Marx and Engels) as the political regime under which capitalism developed.

The problem is that – as Parker, among others, demonstrates – very little of this model of ‘absolutism’ was present in the archetype absolutist state, ancien régime France. A professional army existed, but its officer corps remained dominated by the aristocracy, and the offices in the ‘bureaucracy’ were jurisdictions which the king sold to individuals, on which they expected to profit from fees – an arrangement which, though monetised, is far closer to the offices granted out by medieval kings than to a modern state bureaucracy. Jurisdiction, far from being centralised, became increasingly plural and complex, as new courts with overlapping jurisdictions were created and offices in them sold, while old courts remained in being. The litigant depended primarily on contacts close to the king to provide personal favours, making planning investment for long-term profit – except by buying offices – difficult.^[16] Though French royal taxation pressed enormously heavily on the lower classes, it actually realised a much lower share of the social surplus product than 17th century Dutch taxation or English taxation after 1689.^[17]

Once we see this French shape, the Tudor and early Stuart regime looks markedly less different from French absolutism, precisely because French absolutism looks less ‘modern’. There is a basic difference: no standing army in England. But no ability in Tudor England either of the great lords to win military victory against the crown by mobilising their retainers, unlike the 15th century. That is the lesson of the 1537 ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and the 1569 rebellion of the northern earls. The opposite was true in the late 16th century French wars of religion: the great nobles could defeat the central state. And, as Parker showed in his The making of French absolutism (London 1983) the Huguenot (Protestant) cause in France ultimately failed because of its dependence on the Protestant nobles, and the Protestant nobles’ commitment to the monarchical state. Conversely, the Dutch Republic did maintain a large standing army – but did not, in order to do so, create a centralised bureaucracy.^[18] The model of absolutism in terms of monopoly of violence has little descriptive and less analytical or predictive power.

In contrast, juridical absolutism – personal monarchy as the principle shaping the state order – had real effects on the economy. This is apparent both from Parker’s treatment and from the evidence discussed in Root’s Northite institutionalist The fountain of privilege (Los Angeles 1994). Conversely, the overthrow of personal absolutism and the creation of a ‘rule of law’ regime which could give ‘credible commitments’ that tax income was mortgaged in the first place to payment of state debt, facilitated an enormously rapid flowering of shipping, financial and manufacturing capital – successively in the Netherlands from the 1590s; in England first from the 1650s and more rapidly and completely from 1689; and in France from the 1790s.^[19]

State forms

It seems, then, that the theoretical mistake of the Historians Group in the debate on absolutism was to fail to see that the class nature of the state is given by the structural forms of organisation of the state – by the constitutional order. These forms subordinate it to a class.

It does not matter that that class and the social relations of production of which it is bearer are emergent rather than absolutely dominant when they create the new state, as was true of the bourgeoisie in the Netherlands in the late 16th century, Britain in the 17th or France in the late 18th. Nor does it matter if that class and the social relations of production of which it is the bearer has declined to the point that it is hard work to find evidence of them as anything more than parasites associated with the state – as was true of the feudal landlord class and the clerisy in the Netherlands in the late 16th century, or Britain in the 17th. France in the late 18th century is a little different, but still within the same framework: the state had successfully preserved both aristocracy and clerisy as very prominent features of French society, but they were so fragile that they were swept away in a few months.

The structural forms of the state tying it to a class can survive, for prolonged periods, the decline of the class that gave birth to this state. The state will then hold back economic and social development (and military capability) in order to preserve ornamental parasitic remnants of the class that gave it birth, and of the social relations of production of which this class was bearer. This is not just true of feudalism (European absolutism and Tokugawa Japan), but also of pre-feudal societies, as in the later Roman and Byzantine empires, and more spectacularly in the endless reconstructions in China of state forms originally constructed in the Ch’in dynasty as a system of exploitation through state penal slavery.

The result is that social revolution is revolution against state forms; not, primarily or in the first instance, against the old exploiting class and the classical forms of the social relations of production, of which this class was bearer. This class and these social relations of production have (usually) already been massively undermined by gradual decline, and turned into parasites on the state. Overthrowing the state forms therefore leads them (mostly; some relics usually remain) to fold up like a house of cards. And it opens the way for a quantum leap forward in the development of the new relations of production.

This is as true of capitalism today as it was of previous class societies. The corporation is a statised form of capitalism; capital is increasingly dependent on state subventions (not just bank bail-outs, but privatised monopolies, ‘private finance initiatives’ and all the rest of the crap). And the decline of the legitimacy of capitalism, and the desire to avoid tax (like senatorial aristocrats in late Rome or French nobles and clerics) results today in the capitalists calling themselves employees and their distributions of profits to themselves ‘executive compensation’, ‘salaries’ and ‘bonuses’.

Conversely, as the French Huguenots failed because of their dependence on friendly nobles who in turn were loyal to the monarchical state, so the workers’ movement is at present paralysed because it has adopted for its own organisations the model of the capitalist state: the independent executive (trade union, Labour, SWP, etc bureaucracy), state secrets and raison d’état (the ‘confidentiality’ of the bureaucracy); and ‘rule of law’ parliamentarism (that the ranks cannot directly sack their representatives, but only pass resolutions through increasingly stage-managed conferences).

At this point we can see that if the Historians Group had gone down the path of inquiry into the structural forms of the late-feudal absolutist state, they would have committed a heresy against Stalinism far more serious than Kiernan’s ‘Pokrovsky-ism’. Because if we see the state as tied to a class by structural forms, not by the social or economic dominance of that class, it at once becomes apparent that the USSR was neither socialist nor, after its very early years, a dictatorship of the proletariat or proletarian state.

We thus come back to the question of the influence of ‘official communist’ conceptions on the Historians Group, with which I began this second part of the review. We also return to the linkages between the theoretical historical question of the bourgeois revolutions and the question of the proletarian revolution. The points at issue are simple. First, the bourgeoisie acts and has always acted on an international scale. In order to take power away from the bourgeoisie it will be necessary to overthrow its international state system.

Second, the fact that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was prolonged, interrupted and in some respects ‘gradual’ does not in the least support ‘gradualism’ or Fabianism in politics. The state forms tie the state to the old ruling class. The state therefore intervenes in the economy to promote relics of the old ruling class and artificial forms of the old economic order. It intervenes in the organisations of the rising class to tie these organisations to the old state forms. By doing so it can paralyse them and prolong its own life and that of the ornamental-parasitic form of the old ruling class attached to it.

These state activities can lead to what Marx and Engels called “the mutual ruin of the contending classes” (Communist manifesto). Or they can hold back social change for extremely long periods. The overthrow of the state and creation of new state forms, in contrast, can “set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing … society itself is pregnant” (Civil war in France), leading to a rapid leap forward in social development.

The choice is clear.