The 1949 Revolution
The Theory of Permanent Revolution does not say that bourgeois national revolutions are, now, impossible, unless they are led by the revolutionary proletariat, and flow over into proletarian revolution. Marx, in relation to India, for example, had set out why it was the role of British colonialism that had brought about the only true social revolution, in the country. That social revolution, was a bourgeois social revolution, based upon the destruction of the Asiatic Mode of Production, and its replacement with bourgeois commodity production and exchange, which means, also, the development of bourgeois and proletarian classes.
“These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hand-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”
What Marx and Engels recognised, was that the bourgeois political revolutions, consequent upon such social revolutions, in the 18th, and early 19th centuries, occurred when the working-class, itself, was still a weak, and emerging class. It is the bourgeoisie, and petty-bourgeoisie that carried them through, be it the English Civil War, and Glorious Revolution, through to the 1832 Reform Act, or the American Revolution, or the Great French Revolution. As Engels was to write, later, even in 1848, it was only in Britain where it was large enough to have played the leading role, but, even, there, it acts as an ally of the industrial bourgeoisie.
What 1848 showed was not that bourgeois revolutions were impossible without the working-class playing a leading role, and so being subsumed within the proletarian revolution, but that proletarian revolution was impossible, under such conditions, without the working-class ensuring its own political and organisational independence. In the last 70 years, as the “Left” collapsed into becoming cheerleaders of petty-bourgeois nationalism, this fundamental aspect of Marxism that what we are concerned with is proletarian revolution, not bourgeois revolution, as the significance of permanent revolution, was forgotten.
In terms of the state, even where these bourgeois political revolutions were thrown back, by counter-revolution, as the bourgeoisie broke from its proletarian allies, it, necessarily, was driven down the road of becoming a capitalist state. Whether it was the Junker state in Germany, or that of Louis Bonaparte in France, or the Tsarist state in Russia, or that of the Mikado in Japan, all were forced to pursue the interests of capital, or fail. It was only the political physiognomy of these states that varied.
“the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common.”
(Marx – Critique of The Gotha Programme)
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