Bourgeois revolution

“ The democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of France in 1789, has come about in different countries in the most different ways. The old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes. ”

“ The workers everywhere won representation in the Parliaments; the aristocracy of the working class earned good wages; and so the idea became a fixed one to them: the Revolution is a superseded phase in bourgeois development. The working class will force the bourgeosie to make more and more concessions, which will finally change the economic system of Capitalism into a system which shall exist for the advantage of the workers. ”

“ Here the Writer challenges all philosophers, both bourgeois and pseudo-socialist, by claiming that—now and hereafter—Wherever it is possible for the bourgeosie to rule the proletariat, it is possible for that proletariat to accomplish its industrial freedom by revolution. ”

“ The bourgeois society grew out of the corporative and feudal society and it grew out of it through struggle and revolution in order to take possession of the instruments and means of production which all culminate in the formation, the development and the multiplication of capital. ”

“ The various bodies of working men were not slow to perceive this, and gave it up. Next, it had taken for motto, 'Emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves.' It was intended, then, to do without the bourgeois-radicals, 'the palaverers,' 'the adventurers,' who when the revolution was made, would step into power and leave the working men as they were before. The majority of the delegates were nevertheless bourgeois ”

“ It despises the mental and economic accomplishments of the bourgeoisie and believes that the proletarians, without any special knowledge or any kind of training, are able to take over immediately all political and economic functions formerly exercised by the bourgeois authorities.
"Between these two extremes we find those (the Independents) who have studied the bourgeois world and comprehend it, who regard it objectively and critically, but who know how properly to value its accomplishments and realize the difficulties of replacing it with a better system. ”

“ The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution—particularly the Socialist idea—is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat"—or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party; ”

“ Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. ”

“ In the second place, when it had grown in power and importance, when hope and ambition were stirring in the hearts of the proletariat, when the different revolutionary factions of the bourgeoisie were exhausted or discredited by their internal dissensions, the working class tried to take possession of the revolution and turn it to its own uses, by a sort of coup de surprise. ”

“ The Manifesto tells next the manner of growth of the class struggle. "The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves." ”

“ It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself."
"In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. ”

“ Ever in France, for a century since, bourgeoisie revolutions have had at their head a Socialist glimmer. The bourgeoisie alone was prepared economically to reap the benefit of the Revolution. But the proletariat concentrated in the great towns played, in the period of combat, a decisive part. ”

“ The bourgeoisie, when they Page 123 recovered from their astonishment and found that the stone they had set rolling under the name of reform had dislodged their own Revolution of 1830, and the peasants of the provinces, when they found that all the praise and all the profits were solely for the working-men of the capital, were very far from satisfied. ”

“ The profound hostility of the bourgeoisie against the classes maintained above it by tradition was one of the great factors of the Revolution, and perfectly explains why, after its triumph, the first class despoiled the vanquished of their wealth. ”

“ But now that the bourgeoisie was raised to power it did not prove itself any more liberal than the aristocracy of birth and fortune in dealing with educational, fiscal and industrial questions. In spite of the increase of riches, the bourgeois régime maintained a fiscal and social legislation which, while it assured to the middle class certainty and permanence of benefits, left the labouring masses poor, ignorant, and in a state of incessant agitation. ”

“ A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; ”

“ But they commit a serious error who expect the letter of the prophecy to be fulfilled, who look for the sudden downfall of capitalism, and the sudden accession of the proletariat to power as the result either of a great political collapse of bourgeois society, or a great economic collapse of bourgeois production. ”

“ We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy, to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class ”

“ When the social revolution shall have dispossessed the bourgeoisie, in the interests of public utility, as the bourgeoisie dispossessed the nobles and the clergy, what will become of them?
“We cannot answer with positive certainty, but it is probable that the new order of things will give them, to borrow an expression from one of our friends, an infinitely more precious wealth, that of labor, well paid, at their discretion; so that they may be no longer obliged to live by the labor of others, as they have hitherto lived. ”

“ The central theme is the rise and evolution of the powerful middle class in society—the bourgeoisie—which has done more than all the other social classes put together to create the life and thought of the modern world. There are accordingly such excellent chapters as those on the Commercial revolution of the sixteenth century, Society in the eighteenth century, The industrial revolution, and Social factors, 1870-1914. ”

“ Just so much the more rapid the economic development, and therewith the proletarianization of the population proceeds, the more numerous the hordes that stream from the country to the city, from the East to the West, out of the ranks of the small possessors into the ranks of propertyless, just so much the more numerous within the ranks of the proletarians is the element that have not yet comprehended the significance of the social revolution, indeed that do not even understand the significance of the class antagonisms in our society. ”

“ Because there are bourgeois—or, to use the full, big term, republican Socialist bourgeois? Come, now, George, speaking seriously, is not the cause of the bourgeois that of the proletariat? Is there any doubt but that I, for instance, yesterday a proletarian, whom good luck has so far favored, might, through some stroke of bad luck, become again a proletarian to-morrow; and, if not I, my son? Am not I—and my case is that of all other small traders—at the mercy of the barons of high finance, of the strong iron safes, just as our forefathers were at the mercy of the barons of the strong forts? ”

“ Accordingly, the interests of the farmers are no longer, as under Napoleon, in harmony but in conflict with the interests of the bourgeoisie, i.e., with capital; they find their natural allies and leaders among the urban proletariat, whose mission is the overthrow of the bourgeois social order. ”

“ Revolution for the bourgeoisie, by reason of its class situation, has very definite limits, but the lower classes, the masses of workers and peasants, can only favor and demand a single indivisible republic, and complete freedom. ”

“ The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class -- as the bearer of large-scale industry -- relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. ”

“ The working class will, in the course of its evolution, replace the old middle-class society by an association [38] excluding classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be any real political power, [5] because it is just this political power which is the official expression of class antagonism within the community.
"Meanwhile the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which, when brought to its highest expression, means a complete revolution. ”

“ Seeing reflected in the life of the city the excesses, the injustice, and the unsoundness of laissez-faire capitalism, she spoke out fearlessly in The Revolution against its abuses, such as the fortunes made out of the low wages and long hours of labor, or the Wall Street speculation to corner the gold market, or the efforts to take over the public lands of the West through grants to the transcontinental railroads. ”

“ The new class that had come into existence, the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, supported by all those who favored progress, insisted upon the abolition of conditions that had become untenable. What had been shaken by the revolution from below during the movement of 1848 and 1849, was finally abolished by the revolution from above in 1866. ”

“ The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. ”

“ During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois interests. ”

“ In a parliamentarian State like ours, the economic cleavage, which divides the proprietors from the propertyless, ever growing wider and more clearly defined, must have its analogue in the world of politics. The revolution of the last century, which ended in the installation of the Grand Industry, was the last of the great unconscious world changes. ”

“ While the bourgeois world of capitalism continues and the bourgeoisie rules, so long are all states necessarily class states, and all governments class governments, serving the purposes and interests of the ruling class, and destined to lead the class struggle for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat,—for capitalism against socialism, for our enemies and against us. ”

“ As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau père, so the new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new aristocracy, the bourgeoisie. Factory owners and millionaires have taken the place of the noblesse of last century. And the sufferings of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires. ”

“ In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. -With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute. -The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. -What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own gravediggers. ”

“ Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,—the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. ”

“ As the bourgeoisie complained against the government being run by and for the nobles, so the proletariat complains against the government and industry being run by and for the bourgeoisie; and so, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the proletariat will possess itself of the government, apply democracy to industry, abolish wages, which are merely legalized robbery, and run the business of the country in its own interest. ”