History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism

274 Pages·2007·8.042 MB·English

by  Mike Haynes, Jim Wolfreys, Daniel Bensaid, Geoff Eley, Marc Ferro

HISTORY AND
REVOLUTION
Refuting Revisionism
Edited by
Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys
v
VERSO
London • New York
First published by Verso 2007
© in the collection, Verso 2007
© in the individual contributions, the contributors 2007
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors and editors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF 0EG
USA: 180 Varick Street, New York. NY 10014-4606
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-151-9 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-184467-150-2 (hbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Courier Stoughton Inc.
Contents
Introduction Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys 1
1. Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution 25
Geoff Kennedy
2. Twilight Revolution: Francois Furet and the Manufacturing
of Consensus 50
Jim Wolfreys
3. The French Revolution: Revolution of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen 71
Florence Gauthier
4. Liberals, Jacobins and Grey Masses in 1917 93
Mike Haynes
5. ‘Our Position is in the Highest Degree Tragic’:
Bolshevik ‘Euphoria’ in 1920 118
Lars T. Lih
6. The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century 138
Enzo Traverso
7. Communism, Nazism, Colonialism: What Value has the Analogy? 156
Marc Ferro
8. What Produces Democracy? Revolutionary Crises, Popular
Politics and Democratic Gains in Twentieth-Century Europe 172
Geoff Eley
9. Revolutions: Great and Still and Silent 202
Daniel Bensaid
Notes 217
Index 257

Introduction
History and Revolution
Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys
Revolutions happen. The Guinness Book of Records once recorded the
interesting fact that Bolivia had had more of them than any other country.
But in this instance the almanac, a source of useful information unduly
neglected by historians as well as other social scientists, was wrong. True
revolutions are shattering events; they help to turn the world upside down, if
only for a moment. The many ‘revolutions’ that Bolivia had recorded were
often merely changes at the top with little or no wider impact. Had they been
true revolutions society could not have survived there. There is a large
literature on what constitutes such revolutions. There are also a large number
of cases that might be considered, from the American War of Independence
in the eighteenth century, which gave rise to what is today the world’s most
powerful state, to the Chinese Revolution of 1949 which began to build a
new order in the world’s most populous state. But our focus here is different.
Important though such revolutions were in the history of those states, they
do not claim the same attention as greater revolutions whose story and
impact has reached out beyond the immediate events and the states in which
they occurred to set markers for historical change not only in the West but
the world over. And just because these revolutions and the arguments
surrounding them are so prominent in our sense of development so they
have also raised the biggest debates and become the batdegrounds of ideas
about the process of social and political change itself.
The first of these revolutions occurred in Britain in the mid-seventeenth
century. Feudalism was giving way to capitalism in many parts of Western
Europe but the process was uneven and tensions were widespread. States
were ill-formed, monarchs were trying to assert their authority against the
old power of the landed class and the Church, and increased trade,
manufacturing and urban life were slowly giving rise to new social groups
2 HISTORY AND REVOLUTION
with new demands. Britain, or rather England and Wales with Scotland and
Ireland still only partially integrated, saw two decades of turmoil to which
contemporaries could not give the name ‘revolution’ because the word had
not yet been invented in its modem sense. Yet the events of these years
constitute the first of the great revolutions, at the dawn of the development
of what would eventually become a global capitalist system.
In 1640 Charles I was forced to summon Parliament to deal with his tax
problems, themselves caused by war, after London merchants had refused to
give him more help. A ‘court’ party of large titled landowners formed against
a ‘country’ party of lesser gentry who widened the debate in order to gain
support. This quickly involved a mass of people who had hitherto been on
the margins of political life. This process changed alliances and allegiances. It
polarized argument and between 1642 and 1643 civil war broke out. In 1649
bridges were finally burned with the execution of Charles I. This led to the
Commonwealth or republic between 1649 and 1653 before politics was
stabilized in a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell between 1653 and 1658.
After Cromwell’s death the process of change eventually led to a restoration
of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660.
For contemporaries these events were traumatic. The physical destruction
was considerable. These years saw the undermining of old structures and
ways of doing things. Yet they were also constructive periods. Revolutions
concentrate change, they open new possibilities, some of which - perhaps
many of which - will not be taken but which nevertheless become markers
for the future. And this happened in England not just because of conflicts at
the top of society but because politics became the concern of a much wider
proportion of the population than had hitherto been imaginable.
In 1789 an even more spectacular revolution began in France, the
contemporary and future resonance of which was much greater than that
of the English Revolution before it. In the intervening years the uneven
development of capitalism had continued, to be seen less in a growth of
output than in social change. And with this change came new waves of
tension. Some even see the French Revolution as part of a wider Adantic
revolution stretching from the American colonies in their own revolutionary
War of Independence to Switzerland. But the revolution that began in
France in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and which saw the French
monarch lose his head in 1793 stood higher than any of them. France at this
point was probably the most powerful state in the world. In the West it was
the centre of ideas, culture and even fashion. Its language was the language of
respectable society. All this intensified the resonance of the French events.
But the revolution produced something else that made it stand out as a self-
conscious appeal to the world. The Declaration of the Rights of Man
INTRODUCTION 3
embodied part of this wider claim. It was, said Mirabeau, ‘applicable to all
times, all places and all climes’.
Such claims were extraordinary. They stretched across the known world
and beyond it. They stretched into the past and they stretched into the
future. They were not sincere. They did not apply to women, they did not
apply to slaves and they were meant to apply only with qualifications to the
poor of France. But great revolutions unleash the genie from the bottle and,
as in seventeenth-century England, in late eighteenth-century France we see
the emergence of pressure from below, people becoming more conscious,
making claims of their own, widening arguments and going beyond the
narrow confines of the language of political rights to look critically at the
social and economic basis of power.
It is not surprising then that the powers of Europe tried to crush the
revolution in France, not surprising either that they turned on their own
radicals to repress them lest the infection spread. By the late 1790s the French
Revolution had exhausted much of its power, allowing Napoleon to seize
part of the legacy even as he ditched another part. But in the wider sense the
French Revolution remained unconfined. Its spectre hovered over the minds
of conservatives and radicals alike in the nineteenth century. It was only
dethroned as a reference point, and then not completely, by the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
Russia in 1917 was Europe’s most populous state, its armies played a
central role in the war effort of the Entente led by Britain and France against
Germany and Austro-Hungary and their allies in the First World War. This
revolution made an even greater appeal to present and future, holding out
the prospect of going beyond a capitalist system that had failed to resolve so
many human problems and which had also brought the world to global war.
But Russia itself was a weaker part of that global system; many of the
elements of the old order survived so that its revolution looked two ways, as
Lenin and Trotsky, its two most prominent leaders, said. In the countryside
the mass of peasants wanted to gain land and achieve what French peasants
had more than a century before. In the towns the workers looked forward to
a new age of which socialists the world over had only dreamed.
Like France after 1789, Russia in 1917 presented a huge challenge, a
challenge made greater because the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries, who led the Russian Revolution through its most radical
phase in 1917-18, believed that it could only survive if it became interna­
tional. The Western powers again combined to support a bloody civil war,
with catastrophic economic, social and ultimately political consequences.
When the First World War ended, revolutionary crises emerged in several
countries but they did not lead to success and revolutionary Russia remained
4 HISTORY AND REVOLUTION
isolated. This encouraged a process of degeneration that led to the emergence
of Stalin’s bloody regime, which stood the hopes and aspirations of 1917 on
their head.
Why do these revolutions still lay claim on us? The answer is simple. They
changed the world and in so doing helped to make our world and to point
beyond it. This makes them profoundly uncomfortable events for those who
believe that, for better or worse, we live in the best of all possible worlds
where there exists only a limited space for some tinkering to bring im­
provement. Such views are not the monopoly of conservatives. Liberalism
emerged out of the English and French Revolutions as a radical doctrine but
became less radical over time, and more complacent liberals made their peace
with the established order. As they did so they became less inclined to speak
positively of the past actions that had helped them up on their way.
Sometimes, at particular times, the generalization of conservative self-
satisfaction and a fear of radical change became overwhelming. The great
historian Trevelyan once said that a historian who wished to understand a
period should read, read and read until he hears the voices of the age talking
to him. If future historians succeed in understanding the record of the recent
past through this process then the dominant voices from the last two decades
of the twentieth century will be those symbolized by the claim of Francis
Fukuyama that ‘history had ended’. There were no longer great alternatives
to be fought for, only events to come. And, irony of ironies, instead of
historians simply following where others have led, as they so often do, they
will also hear the loud voices of historians themselves diminishing the
revolutions of the past in order to enhance the negativities of the present.
But if history has a way of falsifying the optimistic hopes of generations of
revolutionaries so it has no less regularly falsified the hopes of those satisfied
with the status quo. At the turn of the twenty-first century the yearning sense
that beneath the complacency at the top of society there was something
fundamentally wrong with the world, fundamental inequalities to be
addressed, tasks still to be achieved, was given new voice by mass protests
across the globe. Suddenly ‘the lords of humankind’ who had once met
quietly at sessions of the G7, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank and the newly formed World Trade Organization found themselves
not only exposed to the light but the subject of bitter criticism. And the
debates about history that were pronounced over only a few years before
now began to be seen in a new light because they not only informed the
present but were informed by it, as they have always been.
The essays in this book reflect these concerns, but not with the intention
of producing a polemical new history to serve the immediate needs of a new
generation. Instead they confront the arguments that have been so dominant