These are some observations made by Chris Thompson on
Alex Callinicos’s review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois
Revolutions? For some reason the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) did not post
these comments on their website.
Calinicos's review can be viewed at
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=869. In the near future I shall review
Davidson’s book for my own blog.
This review offers
a clear expression of the ever-widening gulf between modern academic research
and writing on the events of the 1640s in the British Isles and an approach
based on a Marxist, indeed Trotskyite, analysis.
The prolific use
of terms like ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘feudal’ and ‘modern’ aristocracy, ‘proletariat’
and ‘non-bourgeois strata of the middle class’ invites comparison with the
debates of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s historians’ group in the
late-1940s and early-1950s recently edited by David Parker. Antique concepts
like the claim that a class of urban capitalists were developing in the
sixteenth century with feudalism or that these people were held to be socially
inferior and were excluded from power by Absolute States are given vigorous
exercise.
‘Bourgeois’ revolutions inevitably occurred and, in their
outcomes, promoted capitalism. There is also an undertow of historiographical
controversy: Callinicos’s protest against the revisionist historians of the
1970s is linked to an attack on ‘Political Marxists’ like Robert Brenner and
Ellen Meiksins Wood for their assistance in undermining a more authentically
Socialist interpretation.
It is easy to see where the origins of this
interpretation can be found. Neil Davidson and Alex Callinicos have recognised
that, between 1500 and 1800, the basis for a new form of society was laid down.
As a matter of Marxist theology, they believe that the transition to capitalism
could not have been achieved peacefully but required a violent break-through,
in other words, a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was logical, therefore, to assume
that such ‘bourgeois revolutions’ could be identified in the revolt of the Low
Countries against Spanish rule in the latter part of the sixteenth-century and
in the violent Puritan Revolution of the 1640s in England.
The motive force
for these and later such revolutions was that of a productive bourgeoisie
hampered by the protective system of absolute monarchs and a feudal
aristocracy. Only in England, where the bourgeoisie was better developed and
represented in Parliament, was capitalism able to triumph. A new form of
economic organisation was established and industrial capitalism was
subsequently able to transform the world.
The profound problems with such arguments and assumptions
were obvious six or seven decades ago. It is straightforward enough to claim
that economic changes occurred in England in the course of the
seventeenth-century and that the country’s economy was more advanced in 1700
than in 1600. But is has never been shown that these changes precipitated the
English Revolution or that the economy of 1700 would have been more backward
had the English Revolution not occurred. The Revolution itself was undoubtedly
immensely costly in human and animal lives, in demographic terms and in the
destruction of property. That it forwarded the development of capitalism
remains unproven.
There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the
bourgeoisie headed the 1648 revolution despite Callinicos’s pleadings or that
the bourgeoisie was allied to the ‘modern aristocracy’ – who were they? –
against the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy and the established – in fact,
disestablished – Church at that time. The idea of the existence, real or
potential, of a non-bourgeois strata of the middle class or of an embryonic
proletariat is completely anachronistic.
There was no victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal
ownership, no evidence of the abandonment of primogeniture, of competition over
the guilds, etc.
The new economy, the new historiography, the new philosophy
and the new science of the post-Restoration period was as much the work of
former Royalists as of former Parliamentarians. None of this was stifled by the
return of the King, the House of Lords and the Church of England. Tories and
Whigs alike contributed to the defenestration of James II in 1688-89 and to the
emergence of Britain as a major military and naval power.
The political and
religious lessons of the Interregnum had been learnt: there was to be no return
to such chaos. In 1640, political and religious fissures could be found across
all ranks of English society but they were not based on class or on the rise of
a bourgeoisie or on the opposition of a reactionary monarchy or aristocracy or
church. After 1660, there was a deep-seated determination never to let such
divisions lead to Civil Wars again: slowly, the constitutional machinery to
accommodate political and religious differences was put in place.
But these changes have yet to be shown to have been due
to the rise of the bourgeoisie or of capitalism. It has, indeed, yet to be
shown that there was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ at all. That is why it cannot be
found in the works of early modern historians and why the assumptions of
Callinicos and Davidson are fallacious and unconvincing.
