were interfered with, every little event in every small provincial town was
taken profit of to disarm the people to declare a state of siege, to drill the
troops in the new maneuvers and artifices that [Louis-Eugene] Cavaignac, prime
minister of France (June 28-December 28, 1848) had taught them. Besides, for
the first time since February, the invincibility of a popular insurrection in a
large town had been proved to be a delusion; the honor of the armies had been
restored; the troops hitherto always defeated in street battles of importance
regained confidence in their efficiency even in this kind of struggle."
Later, under Napoleon III, whom historians saw as the prototype of the modern
dictator and who was labeled the bourgeois emperor by royalists, Baron
Haussmann's baroque city planning was also
dominated by the political purpose of clearing the rebel-infested urban
quartiers in the old city; of effectively and easily deploying troops on the
new, broad boulevards against much-feared popular uprisings; and of preventing
the easy erection of revolutionary barricades on narrow streets that had once
frustrated government authority in the "Bloody June Days" of the proletariat
uprisings of 1848.
Marx linked this defeat of the ouvriers of Paris to definite plans of
the old feudal bureaucratic party in Germany to get rid even of their momentary
allies, the middle classes, and to restore Germany to the state she was in
before the revolutionary events of March (Marzrevolution). The army,
loyal to its institutional mandate, again was the decisive power in the state.
The vanquished nobles and bureaucrats exploited the solidarity of an army fresh
from victories against Napoleonic France and jealous of the great success the
French soldiers (whom the German army had defeated in war) had just attained in
domestic civil conflict what it had failed to achieve in foreign war and by
brushing aside the presumptions of the bourgeois parliamentarians. Could the
glorious German army do less?
Marx reported that "by the beginning of autumn [1848] the relative position of
the different parties had become exasperated and critical enough to make a
decisive battle inevitable. The first engagements in this domestic war between
the democratic and revolutionary masses and the army took place at Frankfort.
Though a mere secondary engagement, it was the first advantage of any note the
troops acquired over the insurrection, and had a great moral effect. The fancy
government established by the Frankfort National Assembly had been allowed by
Prussia, for very obvious reasons, to conclude an armistice with Denmark, which
not only surrendered to Danish vengeance the Germans of Schleswig, but which
also entirely disclaimed the more or less revolutionary principles which were
generally supposed in the Danish war.
This armistice was, by a majority of two or three, rejected in the Frankfort
Assembly. A sham ministerial crisis followed this vote, but three days later
the assembly reconsidered its vote and was actually induced to cancel it and
acknowledge the armistice. This disgraceful proceeding roused the indignation
of the people. Barricades were erected, but already sufficient troops had been
drawn to Frankfort, and after six hours' fighting, the insurrection was
suppressed. Similar, but less important, movements connected with this event
took place in other parts of Germany (Baden, Cologne), but were equally
defeated.
Marx observed that "this preliminary engagement gave to the
Counterrevolutionary Party the one great advantage, that now the only
government which had entirely - at least in semblance - originated with popular
election, the Imperial Government of Frankfort, as well as the National
Assembly, was ruined in the eyes of the people. This Government and this
Assembly had been obliged to appeal to the bayonets of the troops against the
manifestation of the popular will. They were compromised, and what little
regard they might have been hitherto enabled to claim, this repudiation of
their origin, the dependency upon the anti-popular governments and their
troops, made both the Lieutenant of the Empire, his ministers and his deputies,
henceforth to be complete nullities. We shall soon see how first Austria, then
Prussia, and later on the smaller states too, treated with contempt every
order, every request, every deputation they received from this body of impotent
dreamers."
Marx reported that "we now come to the great counter-stroke in Germany of the
French battle of June, to that event which was as decisive for Germany as the
proletarian struggle of Paris had been for France; we mean the revolution and
subsequent storming of Vienna, October 1848. But the importance of this battle
is such, and the explanation of the different circumstances that more
immediately contributed to its issue will take up such a portion of The
Tribune's columns, as to necessitate its being treated in a separate letter."
Liberals, with middle-class backing, called for the many German states to send
representatives to the Frankfort Assembly for the purpose of uniting Germany.
The assembly decided to offer the crown of emperor to Frederick William IV of
Prussia. This was to be a limited constitutional monarchy. To their horror, he
turned it down saying that he would not "pick up a crown from the gutter". The
Prussian king thus undermined the liberal movement and caused it to fail. Like
Italy and Hungary, German unification failed. That was Marx analysis of the
1848 revolutions in Europe.
On September 30, 1862, Otto von Bismarck made his famous speech to the Budget
Committee of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies: "The great questions of the time
will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions - that was the great
mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood."
Still, notwithstanding the political failure of liberalism, 1848 liberal
proposals such as social insurance, public education, and expanded suffrage
were incorporated into Bismarck's social programs after German unification.
In Britain, socialist ideas gave new energy to further parliamentary reform.
The working-class anti-capitalist Chartists, deriving its name from the
People's Charter of 1838, circulated a petition signed by half of the adult
males in the population in Britain calling for electoral reform to allow
working class representation in parliament. It was rejected by the House of
Common by a vote of 287 to 49, fearing that political democracy would threaten
property rights. Liberal democracy was not considered a safe institution until
a property-owning middle class became the majority class in Europe. In America,
representative democracy has always been the political instrument of the
propertied class.
Lenin's dashed hope for European revolution
Lenin declared himself as not being a "socialist chauvinist". He and the
Bolsheviks sent all possible aid to the radical leftist fringes in Germany,
Sweden and Italy to combat reactionary obstacles. The Soviet Party even
considered sending troops to help Hungarian Bolshevik Bela Kun.
The Second International had failed to rally socialist parties in European
states to oppose participation in World War I. The Third International
(Comintern) after the war accepted the Bolshevik Revolution as the true
fruition of Marxism and declared itself as a weapon for world revolution - but
the revolution never came. Reaction in the advanced countries to the
international Bolshevik "menace" gave rise instead to fascism in post-war
Europe.
Lenin's neglect of non-European agricultural societies
The Russian Bolsheviks did not consider non-European agricultural societies
ripe targets for revolution. Lenin's anti-imperialism was administered by the
Comintern as a longevity drug for European imperialism, not directed at
national or personal liberation for the non-European peasant victims of
European imperialism. The revolutionary target was clearly and decisively
European capitalism, not non-European agricultural feudalism. The segment of
the population deemed ripe for liberation was the industrial factory worker,
not the farm peasants.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) under Li Lisan, who had joined the communist
party as a student in France before returning to China, followed this biased
line of organizing urban workers for armed uprisings in cities. This line was
met with repeated failures that almost destroyed the CPC until Mao Zedong
turned the party into a revolutionary political instrument of the Chinese
peasants.
The October Revolution
The October Revolution was an unexpected metamorphic anomaly in the metabolism
of revolution because geopolitical circumstances of World War I caused it to
take place in Russia, a pre-industrial country on the fringe of Europe, the
majority population of which was rural peasants rather than urban factory
workers, and the main socio-economic conflict was between the feudal landlord
class and the landless peasant class rather than between the capitalist class
and the worker class.
It was then a revolutionary task after the revolution to create a proletariat
class in Russia and the other Socialist Republics within the USSR as quickly as
possible through rapid industrialization, not merely to catch up with the more
industrialized West but to hasten revolutionary dialectics of transition from
feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Socialism was recast from an ideological
social movement to a venue for post-Word War I nationalism. After World War II,
socialism was transformed by Cold War superpower geopolitics as the nemesis of
capitalistic liberal democracy.
Thus the early modernization strategies of the Soviet revolutionary government
were fundamentally different from the imperialist Westernization strategies of
Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. It is wrong to see Soviet industrialization as
inter-imperialist rivalry, the way the Western anti-communist left does. Social
engineering had to be speeded up through revolution to accelerate historical
dialectics. This new post-revolution proletariat class, not having existed
before the revolution, had not had the experience of being oppressed by
capitalists. In fact, there was a shortage of capitalists against whom to mount
a triumphant class struggle that was supposed to be the victorious outcome of
the revolution.
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