The Revolutionary Ethic

Here's Sir James Mackintosh’s riposte to Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

Has any moralist ever pretended that we were to decline the pursuit of a good which our duty prescribed to us because we foresaw that some partial and incidental evil would arise from it? (Vindiciae Gallicae, 1791)

Nicely put. It's an understanable ethic of the revolutionary, recognisable from the Jacobin, through the Bolshevik, to the Neo-Conservative. I certainly wouldn't demur on principle. It does, however, rather leave open accepting all kind of 'incidental evils', or collateral damage as we now might say.

How to Get a Free Book

If anyone is connected to a journal, and would like to review my book, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear, drop me a line and I can ask OUP to send you out a copy for free (except for the price of reading & reviewing it, obvs).*

Also, I could do this kind of thing, but I think I had better not. But if you would like to post up a warm Amazon review, I'd be far from complaining.


* This offer does not apply to anyone who hates me and wishes me excoriation and public humiliation.

First, Short Draft of my Book.

Well, today's 4 October 2012, and my book Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-Conservatism is officially published. Yay!!!

It's had a long gestation. In fact, the first inkling of a serious work emerged way back in 2006 when I delivered a professedly light-hearted talk to St Catherine's John Simopolous Dinner.

This is a bi-annual event designed to get students and tutors of the college chatting to each other across disciplinary boundaries. Over posh grub, students of all the subjects we teach are commingled - so a Historian sits beside a Chemist, a Lawyer beside a Physicist. You get the picture.

Someone gives a brief talk relevant to their specialism, but accessible to everyone. It was my turn to give this talk, and I came up with an ironic discussion of what George W. Bush owed to revolutionary Marxism.

Only gradually thereafter did I decide that, actually, I should write a book on this theme. It's much more of a survey of two centuries, and much less of a jokey riff. Still, I think the original talk can still be found therein.

Anyway, here's the VERY FIRST DRAFT of the book, if you like. It's some 175 times shorter than the final product.

(As a reminder, if you'd like the real thing for 20 percent off, drop me an e-mail, facebook message, of a comment in the blog, and I'll tell you how. It's very easy).

Simopoulos Talk – 16 November 2006

Traditionally, I’m told, the John Simopoulos address is an iridescent display of wit and learning lightly worn. It is supposed to be funny.

Such a higher form of stand-up is beyond my meagre abilities. I propose, therefore, to advance an absurd thesis so that, if you are not inclined to laugh with me, you may at any rate laugh at me.

I shall argue that our world is being run by zealous revolutionaries, a cadre of the insurgent middle class.

Now, the respectable middle classes, it was long remarked – from 1848 to our own time - had abandoned their heroic role as vanguard of the fight for liberalism. As Marx had noted as early as 1848, fear of Red Revolution inhibited the middle classes, led them to collude with reaction, and thus aborted the democratic revolution of that year and since.

For much of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, it is certainly the case that bourgeois commitment to democracy was markedly attenuated by their fear of the socialist, communist or simply turbulent masses. For a period and for some respectable burghers, even fascism seemed preferable to democracy as a bulwark against communist subversion. During the Cold War, the USA again and again preferred for its client states solidly anti-communist dictatorships to the perils of democratic self-determination.

John F. Kennedy's famous commitment to "support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty" was obviously an argument for supporting despotic regimes and opposing revolutionary movements if doing so furthered the cause of the ‘Free World’ in the global Cold War.

But the story has taken a new turn. The roll-back of popular socialism and the collapse of communism have restored many of the conditions of the French Revolutionary era. As the US Neocons have concluded, democratic revolution can be encouraged in the sure knowledge that socialist revolutionary movements will not be sparked amongst the mobilised working class. From the Philippines to Ukraine, it has been the Statue of Liberty rather than the Red Flag that inspires the masses. We live in a "climate of revolution".

There is something not only revolutionary but even really quite Marxist about Neo-Con language. It’s an almost self-consciously bourgeois Marxism.

On 6 November 2003, for example, George W. Bush, addressed the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on its twentieth anniversary. No doubt ventriloquising his speech-writer, Bush celebrated the 1982 ‘Westminster Speech’ of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. This speech, Bush said, conjoined US foreign policy in solidarity with ‘revolutionary’ forces subverting communist dictatorships. This is seen by Bush as epochal: the establishment of a kind of Bourgeois Comintern, funded by Washington, rather than by Moscow Gold.

As an aside, a Congressional audit only now being completed has found NED monies set aside for the anti-Castro struggle in Cuba being spent on leather coats and gameboys for the activists. Perhaps not so unreasonable if consumer goods are indeed the artillery of liberal free-market democracy.

The context of the NED’s establishment was a generalised revolutionary crisis (we might say, a bourgeois 1917 – 21): the ‘third wave’ of democratisation beginning with fall of Mediterranean dictatorships in the 1970s, spreading to East Asia, Latin America, the Communist bloc and in the 1990s, Africa. “In the early 1970s”, Bush remarked, “there were about 40 democracies in the world. … As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world … We've witnessed, in little over a generation, the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500 year story of democracy.”

Now, why did this happen? First, says Bush, there was the pre-eminent geo-political position of the US which “created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish”. (This is similar to the logic behind the at times universal solidarity on the left with the USSR against its bourgeois critics; it was objectively the ‘fatherland of international socialism’, its fall would hurl back the world’s socialist movement).

So the USA is the bourgeois Soviet Union. But Bush also identified a ‘revolutionary class’:

“Historians will note”, he argued, “that in many nations, the advance of markets and free enterprise helped to create a middle class that was confident enough to demand their own rights.”

Secondly, he pointed out that this class could act as the vanguard of the ‘nation’. It had been found that “the prosperity, and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations.”

So there is a revolutionary class, whose self-emancipation liberates all society. Non-market economies produce their own grave-digger. But it’s the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.

The process, Bush argues, is teleological. In China, for example, the Communist leadership had realised that “economic freedom leads to national wealth”. They must inevitably conclude that “freedom is indivisible”. There’s that Marxist notion of total revolution, not reform.

However, if democratisation since the 1970s had been the work of ‘national’ forces, inspired by the example of the US and protected by the over-arching stability of its global hegemony, now America has a “new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East”

This was most evident in the forced regime brought about in Iraq. “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East”, Bush insisted, “will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.” Indeed: it has been Leninist America’s Soviet-Polish War.

Doesn’t all this sound like a kind of bourgeois Marxism? Even Bush (meaning his speech writer) seemed to see the parallel. The President defined democratic revolution as ultimately the “plan of Heaven” rather than (carefully chosen words) “some dialectic of history”.

Others have been less circumspect: Stephen Schwartz of the US think-tank ‘Western Policy Centre’ has described the neo-conservative strategy in the Middle East as the promotion of “bourgeois revolution.”

Now, however, the United States may be rowing back from the Bush Doctrine of supporting democratic revolution in the Middle East.

President Bush these days is regularly advised by Henry Kissinger, the consummate realist and admirer of Metternich.

Just over a year ago, Condoleezza Rice gave a major speech in Cairo signalling the watershed in US foreign policy. Past US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had, she said, achieved neither. Rice added: "We are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all the people."

One year on, though, and back in the Middle East, the US secretary of state is talking less about democracy and more about the "forces of moderation". The forces of moderation, of course, are the pro-western authoritarians; perhaps now even Syria and Iran.

Bolshevik Neo-Conservatism may have run its course: it remains to be seen – to mix my revolutions – what form the Neo-Conservative Thermidor shall take.

To end: I heard at 6.25 this evening, by the way, that the eminent economist and apostle of audacious capitalism – Milton Friedman – has died aged 94. This talk is therefore, I suppose, dedicated to him – if a little ironically.

Marc Mulholland

16 November 2006

Above: Me talking, around 2006.

Which Side are you on, Boys?

Eric Hobsbawm's passing away the other day - I wrote at obit over at Jacobin magazine - reminds us of another age. There's plenty we'd do well to regret in Hobsbawm's adherence to the Communist cause. His Cold War politics has little relevance now. However, as Corey Robin wrote sometime back in the London Review of Books, there was a price to pay for its passing:

For all its violence and misery, the Cold War had the virtue of imposing on Western intellectuals, Communist and anti-Communist alike, the duty of historical intelligence. ...  But [with] the collapse of Communism and disappearance of Marxism, [and] with the market – and now religion – displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands that Communism once did, today’s intellectuals wave away all talk of ‘root causes’: history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the bar of political analysis – or not for the time being. Mimicking the theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer catchwords such as ‘evil’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’ to the vocabulary of secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is a product of the end of the Cold War. When Marxism was banished from the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language – save religion itself – to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the present and the past.

That's very well put. I'm not sure that serious work can avoid much of what made Hobsbawm's work so valuable. It's interesting that his putative successor - and I admire his work, particularly this - is Niall Ferguson. Here's what Ferguson has to say on class analysis:

[Hobsbawm] and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era. The fact that he sided with the workers and peasants, while I side with the bourgeoisie, was no obstacle to friendship.

 Here's Billy Bragg singing Which Side are You On? Also, have a look at this by Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin.

(I wrote my own book, so far as I was able, to avoid 'taking sides' as such. It was written in the History mode: " I [have not] written this book as an exercise in polemic or political advocacy. The models I employ I do so because I find them useful and interesting; they do not imply moral judgements one way or another. I am taking an argument and using it to make one kind of sense of a stretch of modern history.")

Eric Hobsbawm, and the 'Dramatic Dialectical Dance' of History

Eric J. Hobsbawm has died. I've been reading him as long as I was seriously interested in history. His 'Age of ...' series on nineteenth and twentieth century history was a towering achievement. I've read and re-read him countless times.

I quote him in my own book, just published. In his 1962, Age of Revolution, he presented a thesis, in typically pellucid poise. In many respects, my book is an extended commentary on this very passage. I often wondered what he might have made of it. I'll never know now.

Here is the passage:

The main shape of French and all subsequent bourgeois revolutionary politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dialectical dance was to dominate the future generations. Time and again we shall see moderate middle-class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolutions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them. And so on through repetitions and variations of the pattern of resistance - mass mobilization - shift to the left - split-among-moderates-and-shift-to-the-right - until either the bulk of the middle-class passed into the henceforth conservative camp, or was defeated by social revolution. In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth-century we increasingly find … that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.

No twentieth-century Communist lacks the burden of historical baggage. But Hobsbawm was a great, great historian. I fear we shall not see his like again.

Get in Touch for a Book Bargain!!!

Though official publication date is this Thursday, my book Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear is now available from the Oxford University Press website. If you'd like to buy it there for no less than 20 percent off, drop me an facebook message, email, or comment at my blog, and I'll tell you how. It's easy!

Then you can sit in cafes debating the book.