Mistakes of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

— Hegel, ([1821] 2001, 20)

Introduction

There are two broad senses of the word “progress” which compete today. In the Marxist sense, progress is associated with certain claims about the dialectical movement of history. In the liberal sense, progress is used more often as a synonym for social justice. To call a revolution historically progressive then leads to many confused discussions which rarely move beyond the level of semantics.

The liberal conception of progress fails because it fundamentally lacks a conception of history. It is a ‘tech-tree’ ontology where progress leads us from root to tip. Rational perhaps, but as materialists we do not rely on reason alone. Marxists look instead to history to discover the mechanisms by which it progresses. History is not linear, it is a web of contradictions, reversals, reemergences. What appears as revolutionary yesterday appears conservative today. By tomorrow, it is nothing but dead weight. An example of this is that the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century have been held as progressive throughout Marxist understanding. Marx (1864), Engels ([1887] 2010), Lenin ([1918] 1965), Debs ([1918] 1948), James (1943), Ho Chi Minh ([1945] 1960–62), Mao ([1949] 1961), Foster (1952, 16), and Nkrumah ([1965] 1966) all characterized the American Revolution as historically progressive.

And so, of what progress did they speak? Unlike the liberal notion of advancing social justice, these Marxists refer to progress as a transformation of the superstructure born from economic formations which had outgrown the old world. America is a nation born of that kind of transformation. We can all see that, today, America is regressive. No educated person could deny that America is the imperialist empire, the oft-called global hegemon. It is the mightiest capitalist power that has ever existed. America’s soft tentacles have strangled the globe for nearly a century. It stands as the greatest obstruction to all socialist movements: from its presence, repression and reaction; from its absence, exclusion and austerity. We look to the history of America and do not see freedom but rather slavery, genocide, colonialism.

We should not wonder, then, why so many refuse to apply the word progressive to the revolutions of the eighteenth century. These bourgeois revolutions have led directly to the tragedy and pain of the modern world. These bourgeois revolutions set the stage for the oppression you face today. And still these bourgeois revolutions played a concrete role in the movement of history, the history of class struggle.

The bourgeoisie grew within the womb of a monarchy hostile to them, and this germ sprang forth from its father's crowned forehead. Today, it is the socialist germ that now grows within imperialism, pressing against the skull. Marx writes:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

— Marx ([1859] 1970, 21)

Many today see progress differently. Progress is a movement which results in a kind of social justice. That which is progressive is that which creates a formal equality between people. This notion of progress is that of a series of linear steps of liberation. First we freed the nobles, then the middle class, then the slaves,… Confusion persists between this positive liberal sense, where that which is progressive is a moral category relating to the expansion of freedom for and equality between particular groups, and the Marxist sense, where progress is a series of struggles and failures: “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1976, 482). These competing and often conflated understandings have led to much grief in the contemporary discussion of historical materialism.

The Feudal Order

As Marxists, we do not glorify the progress of history. Instead, we study it, and look in it for weapons of our own. At one point in time, for example, it was considered a good and noble thing for kings to practice unification of fragmented people through conquest. The Rus called this form of consolidation “gathering”. Gathering could be based on conquest, but it was also performed through marriage and even voluntary subjugation.

Gathering had several advantages, for the nobility first and foremost but also for the people. Centralization of wealth and labor made it feasible to build walls, maintain standing armies, and extract wealth consistently from a sedentary tax base. These conditions served as the basis for a form of political and judicial structure we call feudalism. Feudalism is most broadly understood as a system of tiered fealty, where a King sits at the top wielding executive power. Under the king are his vassals, noble lords who rule over a fief or manor. Under those noble lords are serfs who would work the land in exchange for paying those rents on which the economy functioned. This system of seigneurialism was practiced in its classical form in France and England, while specific feudal relations varied and evolved across the time and space of the medieval world.

While the King occupied the highest position, his practical capacity to rule depended upon a network of relationships with his vassals, religious institutions, and other kingdoms. Vassal lords were given their fiefs by the King, but with this gift came the expectation that they would provide the state with troops when requested. The King was also expected to use these forces to protect his lands and gather the kingdom. It was accepted that the King must provide this for his vassals because his strength came from their prosperity.

In reality, court politics were always turbulent, and schemes of lords and Kings litter the histories. Kings dealt with uprisings, not only from unsatisfied nobles, but exasperated serfs as well. During the medieval period, these rebellions did not manage to challenge the political apparatus of monarchy itself. Lords might usurp, but they did not abolish. Serfs rioted and caused their rabble, and in many cases these peasant revolts posed significant threats to the crown. But the peasantry was not able to organize in a way that could oppose the state in any durable form.

The English Revolutions

As the medieval ages began to wane, these tensions became untenable. In England, a conflict between Charles I and Parliament over taxation, religion, and royal powers sparked a civil war. Charles finds himself executed in 1649, and a new Commonwealth is created under Oliver Cromwell–revolution had come. The result was an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the “modern aristocracy” against the feudal aristocracy, the church, and the now-deceased King: “power passed into the hands of a new class, and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible” (Hill [1940] 1979, 6).

Radical groups, such as the Levellers, had been demanding popular sovereignty, representing “increasing radicalization of opinion on the fringes of Independency, both against the Scots and against the king” (Foxley 2013, 36). These early liberals, scarred by the brutality of the civil war, were demanding the expansion of political equality. They were carrying many of the ideas that Cromwell himself fought for, and demanded they be made concrete. And, of course, they were repressed by Cromwell. It is this revolution which Marx called the “victory of the seventeenth century over the sixteenth century” (Marx [1848] 1977, 161).

It was not long before monarchy was restored in England, but the constitutional question remained. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution saw James II overthrown. William and Mary accepted a political settlement that strengthened Parliament and restricted royal power. The age of constitutional monarchy had finally arrived, and, following suit, the revolution itself remained in a largely constitutional form. The concrete political changes most affected the monarchy, Parliament, landowners, and the church. The life of a farmer or craftsman changed very little.

The reason why the crown was increasingly unable to put down dissent is that the economic basis of feudalism was already largely undermined by the growing number of merchants, financiers, manufacturers, commercial landowners, and chartered corporations. Money, and increasingly, capital, began to emerge as a way for people outside of the ruling class to wield power and influence. This is the historical emergence of the middle class, the bourgeois germ inherent to the higher stages of monarchy.

For England’s part, its capitalist enterprises were a particular hybrid model. While crown corporations like the Hudson’s Bay Company operated primarily as a massive capitalist enterprise—complete with the exploitation of surplus labor, and the extraction of resources from the new continent—it was not a business in a traditional sense. The Hudson’s Bay Company, in many cases, acted identically to a colonial power, up to and including relying on the use of the British colonial military to defend its territory, a massive colony known as Rupert’s Land. The use of violence and territorial expansion, so fundamental to the colonialist project, was done explicitly by the right of the King. The people running the company did so by right of the King’s charter. While the King always had the power to revoke these charters if abused or used to the detriment of the state, the power vested in them was immense. The company was provided an enormous degree of economic and political privilege that they leveraged with seemingly unbounded freedom, and they exercised these sweeping privileges over their territory with relatively little interference from the state.

The American Revolution

The 13 colonies of the American Revolution were also born from England’s economic ventures. These British colonies became increasingly powerful political entities with their own assemblies and political expectations. They were not the only British colonies on the continent. There was also Rupert’s Land, Newfoundland, East and West Florida, Jamaica, etc. These colonies were stocked by British citizens, many of whom (against the common US founding myth of men fleeing religious persecution) came to the New World seeking their fortunes. It was a tough journey, months at sea, and more in travel inland. Many, however, did win enormous fortunes. The colonies were rich in land and resources, and were propped up by a steady flow of money from British trade and a robust trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The Revolution of those 13 colonies was born out of grievances over taxation and governance. Its leaders drew upon radical traditions of popular sovereignty which echoed the Levellers and the Glorious Revolution. They rejected the monarchy and established a republic founded (in principle) upon the political equality of all citizens. Once again, the contradictions were visible from the start. Political participation remained heavily restricted, Indigenous peoples were subjected to displacement and genocide, and chattel slavery was left untouched. Washington himself was an exorbitantly wealthy planter who made his fortune off the exploitation of a brutalized slave class. On the period, historian Edmund Morgan writes:

Thus began the American paradox of slavery and freedom, intertwined and interdependent, the rights of Englishmen supported on the wrongs of Africans. The American Revolution only made the contradictions more glaring, as slaveholding colonists proclaimed to a candid world the rights not simply of Englishmen but of all men.

— Morgan (1972, 29)

The painful reality is that these bourgeois revolutions did not, and could not, achieve the liberal ideals which guided them. Washington was a revolutionary fighting for political equality while Black men and women toiled in his field under his driver’s whip.

The American Revolution establishes itself as historically progressive by breaking the political authority of the monarch. The English Revolution produced limits on the King’s power, now, in America, the King’s rule was rejected outright. In both of these cases, the contradictions of the previous social formation persist. We must recognize that the bourgeois revolutions were progressive in “the victory of a new social order” (Marx [1848] 1977, 161), that being capitalism, and not whatever limited concrete freedoms were earned by the common man. Capitalism is a productive and destructive force; it was no coincidence that these earliest pangs of liberal capitalism were marked by genocide, slavery, exploitation, and all the other evils that characterize primitive accumulation.

The French Revolution

These were the political principles America sent across the Atlantic. Marquis de Lafayette, a veteran of the American Revolution; Thomas Paine, whose writings shaped both the revolution and constitution. Both men went to France and became participants in this new republican revolution. In England they imposed limitations on royal power; in America they rejected royal power. In France, royal power was abolished by means of public execution. The King and his family were put to the guillotine, which was itself a liberal invention intended to make executions more humane. During the Terror, some seventeen thousand nobles, royalists, and suspected counter-revolutionaries were executed; thousands more died in prison and by vigilante means.

Here, too, the bourgeois revolution failed to live up to the principles that produced it. Both Paine and Lafayette recoiled from the Terror. Paine, for all his polemics against the monarchy, could not bring himself to support the execution of King Louis. He was lucky enough to find himself imprisoned through the Terror. Soon enough, the revolutionary republic itself gave way, first to political reaction, and finally to an Emperor. The bourgeois revolution, once again, is born among intractable contradictions. The death of the King and dismantling of the monarchy directly led to the rise of one of the most powerful Emperors Europe had ever seen, Napoleon. It is this revolution which Marx called the “victory of the eighteenth century over the seventeenth” (Marx [1848] 1977, 161).

We should make no mistake here: Napoleon was the greatest child of the Revolution. He did not emerge from outside the revolutionary process, and cannot be understood as a mere reactionary. Napoleon was “part of the Revolution, preserving its social gains, and consecrating the triumph of the bourgeoisie” (Lyons 1994, 2). His career, and moreover his reputation, was forged by his role in the destruction of the monarchy. He cut his teeth in the revolutionary army as an artillery officer, known for his ruthlessness in suppressing counterrevolution. He climbed the ranks through talent and determination, quickly becoming a celebrated general and influential revolutionary figure. His seizure of the state represented both a continuation and abolition of the bourgeois revolution. Napoleon preserved many of its decisive achievements: the abolition of feudal privilege, equality before the law, careers increasingly open to talent, and the protection of bourgeois property. At the same time, he suppressed republican political life, concentrated power under himself, crowned himself emperor, and transformed revolutionary France into an increasingly authoritarian and expansionist state. Napoleon picked up the revolution with his own hand.

The Haitian Revolution

Nowhere were the contradictions of this revolutionary universalism more violently exposed than in Haiti (known then as the French Colony of Saint-Domingue). The French Revolution had proclaimed that men were born free and equal, but France’s richest colony rested upon the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Africans. Social organization was based upon a strict and complex categorization of racial admixtures, and slaves in the colony were treated brutally. Describing the brutality of that organization, Marxist historian C. L. R. James writes:

Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.

— C. L. R. James ([1938] 2001, 25)

Beginning in 1791, the enslaved population rose up in revolution. They had taken the words of their masters too seriously: if liberty and equality were universal rights, by what right could the French deny it to slaves? Under pressure from the revolt, France did abolish slavery in its colonies, but this would not last. One of the revolutionary generals, a former slave named Toussaint Louverture, rose to power. Toussaint was a natural-born general, and proved himself a brilliant statesman. A true heir to the revolution, and an ardent republican just like Napoleon, he wrote a constitution giving the French colony a wide degree of autonomy.

In 1802, Napoleon restored slavery in the colonies and sent an expedition to Haiti under his brother-in-law Leclerc. Napoleon repudiated the idea that slavery would be restored in Haiti, but “He was lying” (James [1938] 2001, 234). Haiti was the jewel of the French economy (in 1789 it provided two-thirds of France’s overseas trade alone (James [1938] 2001, 17)), and it was now being ruled by that upstart slave Toussaint. But Toussaint did not want to resist France. He saw Haiti’s rightful place as being within the French republic. He never formally declared independence from France and continued to see Haiti as a fundamentally French nation. He could not understand why the French were turning against him for carrying out their own mission. He writes:

It is sufficient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.

— Toussaint Louverture, quoted in James ([1938] 2001, 160)

But Napoleon would not have this arrangement. He was operating on the same contradiction of racial hatred that the British and American revolutionaries were plagued with: “Bonaparte… cursed the ‘gilded Africans’, said that he would not leave an epaulette on the shoulders of a single nigger in the colony” (James [1938] 2001, 217). He would crush the new republic, return the white owners to their plantations, and continue to suck the blood of the Africans dry.

The counterrevolutionary campaign in Haiti was brutal. Mass executions took place on all sides. Through betrayals, shifting allies and enemies, and battles against forces far superior to his own, Toussaint proved himself no less a leader than Napoleon. The rebellious slaves fought and defeated their white slave masters, the French colonial army, the Spanish colonial army, the British colonial army, and even the troops of Napoleon himself. But Toussaint made a fatal mistake: he trusted French terms of surrender and was betrayed. His trust in republican justice went too far, even in the last moment. He was shipped off the island to die in a French prison cell.

To Napoleon’s great dismay, this did not stamp out the revolution. The energy Toussaint had organized was much greater than himself. By 1804, the slave rebellion had won. The Napoleonic troops beat a hasty retreat from Saint-Domingue. Toussaint’s former general Jean-Jacques Dessalines finally broke from France and declared the independence of the Republic of Haiti. And, as a good child of the republican revolution like Napoleon, he also declared himself emperor for life.

Unfortunately, neither military nor moral victory, no matter how decisive, was sufficient to free Haiti from the grip of private property. America, the country that had its own republican revolution just a few decades earlier, refused to recognize the new nation. Jefferson was terrified that the slaves in his own country might take those liberal principles seriously as well. It was Lincoln, some 60 years later, who finally recognized Haiti during the American Civil War. In 1825, long after Haiti’s victory, and Napoleon’s eventual defeat, France demanded that Haiti compensate former colonists for the property they had lost in the revolution. The former landowners of Saint-Domingue (or heirs in the place of the deceased) were to be compensated by decree of the royal ordinance of 17 April 1825 (Beauvois 2017, 109). Haiti only managed to pay off this debt and its interest payments in 1947 after nearly 125 years of debt slavery.

Is it conceivable that Haitians who have escaped torture and massacre at the hands of these men, Haitians who have conquered their own country by the force of their arms and at the cost of their blood, that these same free Haitians should now purchase their property and persons once again with money paid to their former oppressors?

— Henri Christophe, quoted in Beauvois (2017, 27)

Conceivable? By the precepts of liberalism, perhaps not. And yet, Haiti was forced to purchase recognition of a freedom it had already won by force of arms. The contradiction could scarcely be made clearer: the universal rights proclaimed by the bourgeois revolution could abolish the legal privileges of kings and nobles, but when the exploited working classes, in this case the slaves, claimed those same rights, property suddenly became a weapon which the long-deposed slaveholders wielded against the Haitians. In this particular incident, the contradiction of liberalism is best shown: that the liberal moment of equality and brotherhood was fundamentally plagued by an irrational racial hatred.

The failure of liberalism is that property relations prevented the resolution of class struggle and instead replaced them from noble and serf to owner and worker. Even in the time of bourgeois revolution, we see the contradictions in full swing. Neither England nor America freed the North American slaves as a result of their liberal revolutions. This is because the historical potential of bourgeois revolution is limited by the very form of bourgeois rule.

Today, we have seen the historical situation advance, and the reach and power of capitalism has become all but absolute. It is a mark of dialectical irony then that these bourgeois revolutions look to us today as unreasonably cruel. The actions of the English, Americans, and French, just in North America alone, show us definitive proof that these bourgeois revolutions were incapable of overcoming the contradictions inherent to the property rights and individualist freedoms the revolutions were based on. It shows that great harm and destruction can be imminent from moments of historical progress, and, in fact, historical progress often shows itself in the most brutal forms of violence imaginable. The new Haitian republic was a broken and bloodsoaked country. It had been robbed of its great liberal moderate by the schemes of Napoleon. Dessalines, a man shaped by the torture of his slavemasters and the brutalities of war, was only responding in kind when he ordered the death of every Frenchman left in the country.

Gray in Gray

History does not advance but by the dying away of previously progressive forms. The same institutions, classes, and ideas that once shattered an exhausted order eventually became themselves exhausted. It is only at a point where a historical form has become “grey in grey” that we can clearly see what it is in its final expression.

Each historical stage develops within itself the forces that will one day negate it. The development of the economy and material conditions opens the potential for social orders which could not have existed before. Bourgeois society itself emerged in this way. Long before the political destruction of the old monarchies and feudal estates, a bourgeois world was already forming within them: merchants, towns, markets, manufactures, private property, centralized administration, increasingly universal systems of law and exchange. These were initially subordinate elements of the old order; eventually, they became incompatible with it.

Capitalism produces its opposition and opens the potential for a new social order according to the same logic. The socialist germ does not descend upon bourgeois society from some abstract moral ideal; it develops through capitalism’s own highest forms. Monopoly socializes production on an enormous scale. Finance binds enterprises and continents into increasingly unified systems. The modern state acquires administrative capacities capable of coordinating whole sectors of economic life. Joint-stock ownership separates the management of production from the personal ownership of individual capitalists. Above all, capitalism creates the proletariat: a class whose existence depends upon collective, social production, while the fruits of that production remain privately appropriated.

Imperialism therefore contains a familiar contradiction. It represents capitalism at its most expansive and powerful, but, precisely for that reason, it also makes visible tendencies that point beyond capitalism. Production becomes social while appropriation remains private. Economic life becomes increasingly planned within corporations and states while remaining anarchic between competing capitals. Ownership becomes concentrated even as labor becomes more collective. The technical possibility of administering production according to conscious social priorities grows at the same moment that production remains subordinated to accumulation and profit.

These tendencies cannot be mistaken for socialism. State ownership under bourgeois rule remains bourgeois state ownership; there is nothing socialistic about it. Marx and Engels take Metternich, Bismarck, and Napoleon to task for just this reason, and mock those socialists who would see it as such. Engels writes:

a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen… that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.

— Engels ([1880] 1970, n. 4)

Under imperialist conditions the socialist germ can only remain as a negation, it exists only as a contradiction and not a concrete form. But these developments demonstrate that socialism moves along the same emergent path as capitalism. Capital itself performs much of the historical labor of destroying the isolated producer, concentrating productive forces, universalizing interdependence, and making economic coordination technically conceivable. It constructs the machinery of a social economy while remaining incapable of socializing control of that machinery.

Tomorrow’s Mistakes

The revolutionary transition to socialism therefore will appear as a rupture against imperialism. Socialist society must negate capitalist and imperialist society by means of appropriating the appropriators. There is no reason to imagine that such a transition would wear a white dress. The experiments of the twentieth century should cure us of any expectation that a new mode of social organization emerges without catastrophe, error, violence, regression, or failure. A revolution has no stage rehearsal. New institutions will necessarily arise carrying the habits, shortages, conflicts, and inherited structures of the world they are attempting to escape. Revolutions are concrete historical events. They are not a matter of externality. They pick up the old world using materials supplied by the old world.

While failure is inevitable, each mistake itself is contingent. Learning from the past of socialist revolution means learning from their failures as much as their successes. No honest revolutionary would see the repetition of past failures as something to strive for. Historical development is not a machine that sanctifies whatever occurs in its name; there is no more insidious ideological perversion than seeing necessity not in what is, but in what will be. Communism is, after all, not a state of affairs to be established (Marx and Engels [1846] 1976, 49). The historically progressive bourgeois revolutions unfolded across centuries of civil war, restoration, terror, reaction, compromise, and renewed upheaval. This implies, however, that civil war, restoration, terror, reaction, compromise, and renewed upheaval can never be a progressive goal. These are the mistakes of the old world; the right hand of progress which pulls at the left hand pushing history forward.

And so this is the burden we are left with. Doctrines do not remain revolutionary merely because they once were. Perhaps today it is no longer the eighteenth century which weighs on the revolutionary mind, but the twentieth. Its successes and failures have become gray. It was characterized by movements which emerged from a world which no longer exists for us.

Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the falling of dusk. Philosophy comprehends a historical form most fully when that form has already matured and begun to pass away. It is perhaps the twenty-first century which then needs to win a victory over the twentieth, and for that it will be up to us to make new mistakes. This is progress, this is the movement of history. Twilight is growing, and somewhere just over the horizon, an owl is spreading its wings.

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