Taking off on Moriarty naming 1789 a communist revolution
After I linked yesterday to actor Michael Moriarty's upending of France's table in the temple of nations, commenting that I was struck by his readiness to explicitly call the French Revolution of 1789 a communist revolution, Beck got on the matter in e-mail and then assembled it in a family-sized post at his joint. I can add to the mix this little tidbit from the rogue Marxist propagandist Noam Chomsky:
What are the major things today? There are some that are being addressed. The feminist movement is addressing some. The civil rights movement is addressing others. The major one that's not being seriously addressed is the one that's really at the core of the system of domination, private control over resources, production, and distribution. The eighteenth-century revolutions have not been consummated.That's from Chronicles of Dissent, Interviews with David Barsamian, p. 247, Common Courage Press, Monroe, ME, 1992. I assume that among the "eighteenth-century revolutions" Chomsky refers to is the French Revolution (I'm not sure what else he would include). To me "the eighteenth-century revolutions have not been consummated" could only come from the lips of a delusional fool who missed their "consummation" to the tune of 100 million dead last century. But I don't want to start in on the Chomsky thing today. Anyone know exactly what Marx himself said about the French Revolution?
Comments
"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" where he dialectically contrasts it with the coup that brought Louis Napoleon to power as Napoleon III:
"The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society's members themselves and made an object of government activity — from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.
But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, and under Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm#staterev
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/022.html