National Democratic Revolution, Part 1
Roots of the
NDR
With any course, one must decide where to begin. In the case
of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the course has to begin with an
understanding of class struggle and of class alliances in history.
Such a study could begin as long ago as the fifth century BC
in the Athenian Republic led by Pericles,
or with the Conflict of the Orders in
the Roman Republic at approximately the same time,
and it could proceed through the class struggles involving, for example, the
Gracchus brothers [Pictured: Gaius Gracchus, Tribune of the People], Julius
Caesar and others, that led in 27 BC to the stagnant class truce called
the Roman Empire, which then, during four
centuries, declined and fell (in its Western half) into a Dark Age, which was
also the genesis of feudalism. Class struggle is the engine of history. Without
it, there is very little movement.
We could alternatively begin in 1512 with Machiavelli, and the class struggles
of Renaissance (i.e. “born again”) Italy, where multiple city-states with
populations of 100,000 or more were embroiled in internal and external class
conflicts.
We could go to Thomas Hobbes, who published his
book Leviathan in 1651,
describing the politics of the bigger national states of Northern Europe (Like
Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands) which had by his time surpassed the
politics of Italy to become the main theatre of recorded historical process.
These European machinations could be our workbook and our
political sandpit, for the main reason that there is a record of them. There is
very little virtue to be found in this history and the examples are mostly bad
examples – examples of things to be avoided – but there is a literature.
French Revolution
But we might as well rather begin,
as Frederick Engels does in the first part of his “Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific” (attached),
with the Great French Revolution that
started in 1789. From this point on we can meet, in their developed form, the
class protagonists who allied and clashed, from that time until now, in all
possible permutations; alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical;
marriages of convenience and marriages made in heaven; and we can have, for the
most part, the benefit of Marx and Engels as eyewitnesses or near-eyewitnesses.
The contending classes were: the feudal aristocrats; the
peasants; the bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.
Using this work of Engels’ as a starting point has the
additional benefit of introducing the rudiments of political philosophy, and
leading our thoughts towards the “democratic bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the
highest form of political life before socialism, the prerequisite of concerted
proletarian action, and a form of the State that has to be transcended.
In other
words, our study of the NDR will bring us, as history has already brought us in
life, to the kind of crisis that Lenin outlined so sharply in “The
State and Revolution,”
when majority rule is no longer an adequate substitute for the free development
of each as the condition for the free development of all, social
self-management, the end of class struggle, the withering away of the state,
and the fully classless society called communism.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Socialism,
Utopian and Scientific, Part 1, Engels.
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