The Long Bourgeois Revolution

A myth plaguing contemporary political activity is the impression created that capitalism is a choice and more so, that ‘non-capitalism’ is a choice replacement. The history of capitalism is not the history of an idea conceived and then implemented. It is a history of informed but uncoordinated developments and actions that have become labelled capitalism post facto.

These myths emanate as artefacts of the bourgeois system of governance. That system is underestimated, and the bourgeois revolution is much maligned and underestimated.

Marx recognised the potency of the bourgeois class as the most successful class in human history. In the Communist Manifesto he states, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising its instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”. Further on in the same publication he asserts “the bourgeoisie by this rapid improvement….draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”.

He is demonstrating not only this fact of dominance and success but also, de facto, he demonstrates the need to ground theory in observations of the real and not the ideal. His method is to explain the movement of history not to judge it. This does not mean he does not critique it but first he understands it.

Marx is not promoting the bourgeois or the capitalist mode of production. He is observing its evolution in human time and attempting to explain how and why it comes about. Marx developed the analytical system now labelled ‘historical materialism’. His goal was a model of analysis that explains the movement of history. He argues that continuity in evolution helps understanding but also tests any model’s effectiveness as a monitor.

Thus, one core attribute is that each mode of production gives birth to a new one. That this birthing occurs at ground level in the empirical world of human actions by people, adopting radical ways of doing production and exchange. Thus, slavery is replaced by the wage system. The bourgeois thus generated the end of the despotic and vicious world of monarchs, baronial and military systems with more accessible and civilian systems allowing greater participation by free citizens. These new systems were improvements, they were not perfect.

This fact is forgotten by both supporters and critics of the current western democracies.

The bourgeois is made up of all and any cadre accessing property and power associated with that ownership. What today is referred to as ’the left’ is one part of that bourgeois model. Thus, western democracies have a continuum of political agencies, normally called political parties and social movements. These agitate and combine in both thought and organisation to maintain the system of bourgeois leadership and hegemony. Waged labourers and their enslaved collaborators, the unwaged and marginalised, act in reaction within that system to drive contests over access to resources.

The bourgeois revolution was a change led by those with assets and knowledge / consciousness. Marx suggested it would be those without assets but with a new consciousness that would overthrow the bourgeois system. He also observed that many agitations are merely shifts within the system. Today in early 21st century many are agitating for the death of capitalism. This agitation is from within the bourgeois system of thought. That ontology accepts the basis of the capitalist system, namely private property, and wage labour. It argues for better settlements via distribution. A more radical agitation has occurred that has fractured the system of dominance, it is referred to as ‘populism’. Populism has tended to have at least two components. One is the mass energy of ‘mobs’ that are let loose upon civil society and its regime making strident attacks, physical and emotional, against established privilege. In part this is the voice of labour and in part it is the voice of individualism.

The second strand is the emergent bourgeois clique that agitates for an end to the established network of dominance and for a new dominance based on alternative economic and cultural artefacts. Thus, Brexit in UK and Trump in US are making a lot of noise about the ineffectiveness of established economic performance and the results in terms of freedoms and material benefits. This space is also populated with innovation within the production and finance systems. Emerging from that has been new models of production and finance that are both innovative and exploitative.  Like a lot of cycles of innovation there is a lot of speculative activity, often of poor and dubious value, that is carried along with any that succeed.

I suggest we are witnessing a new bourgeois revolution and not an anti-capitalist one. Those seeking ‘socialism’ are in fact bourgeois left agitations for a better settlement. Labour, for all its merit, is still arguing for a better bargain and settlement from capital with the help of benign government. It offers no revolutionary change. The neutrality of the state is now a tarnished concept. Thus, both left and right want the state to get out of the way as it at present cannot find a way to be of value. The only actor agitating for change is the bourgeois, and thus the long bourgeois revolution is unfinished.

We have yet to see or hear from a class that is without assets but has consciousness to allow anew ‘classless’ system to emerge that would throw off all our ‘shackles’. The bourgeoisie is not dead but lives. Long live the revolution.