The Drama of the Great Revolutions
The ‘great revolutions’ stand out because they projected themselves far into the future, unlike ‘ordinary revolutions’, which merely respond to the need for change on the immediate agenda.
In the modern era, only three major revolutions may be considered great in this sense—the French, the Russian and the Chinese; while comparable revolutions occurred on a smaller scale in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Vietnam and Cuba.
The French Revolution was not only a ‘bourgeois revolution’ that substituted the capitalist order for the ancien regime and bourgeois power for the power of the aristocracy; it was also a people’s (especially a peasants’) revolution, whose demands challenged the bourgeois order itself. The radical democratic and secular republic, which set itself the ideal of spreading small-scale property to all, did not stem from the mere logic of capital accumulation (based on inequality), but negated that logic and clearly said as much by declaring economic liberalism to be the enemy of democracy. In this sense, the French Revolution already contained the seeds of the socialist revolutions to come, whose ‘objective’ preconditions evidently did not exist in France at the time (as the fate of Babeuf and his followers showed). The Russian and Chinese revolutions, with which those of Vietnam and Cuba may also be associated, set themselves the goal of communism, although that too was ahead of the objective requirement to solve the immediate problems of the societies in question.Consequently, all the great revolutions suffered the effects of being ahead of their time and had great difficulty stabilizing themselves; their brief moments of radicalism were succeeded by retreats and reactionary restorations. By contrast, the other revolutions (such as those in England and the United States) heralded a calm and stable deployment of the system, merely registering the requirements of social and political relations already established within the framework of nascent capitalism. In fact, they do not really deserve the name ‘revolutions’, so striking were their compromises with the forces of the past and their lack of vision for a more distant future.
In spite of their ‘defeats’, the great revolutions made history—if we consider their long-term impact. By virtue of the avantgarde values defining their project, they enabled creative utopias to seek to win over people’s minds and, in the end, to achieve the highest goal of modernity: to make human beings the active subjects of their history. These values contrast with those of the bourgeois order established elsewhere, which, by fostering passive adaptation to the supposedly objective requirements of the deployment of capital, gave full force to the economistic alienation underlying such adaptation.
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