Ideology and Revolution (Part One)
During a series of discussions with friends of both leftist and liberal persuasions I recently encountered two classic objections to the Marxist perspective. Upon consideration I believe them to be derived from the same misunderstanding of the nature of a socialist revolution. The first objection was in the idealist tradition and centred on the connection between the Enlightenment and the Soviet gulags. I had heard of the terror of the French revolution being associated with Enlightenment ideals but not of its connection, via that incarnation of reason named Karl Marx, with the Bolshevik concentration camps. The other accusation was that it was naive to expect a socialist revolution to be any different than those that preceded it historically. In an attempt to deal with these closely associated criticisms we have to unravel the relationship between the ideologies proclaimed by those involved and the historical context of their actions. As Marx would say - we have to cut away the ideological overgrowth to get to the political reality. Socialists have long believed that to view history as primarily a progression of ideas (idealism) is very misleading and politically dangerous. However it is of significance why certain ideals were used during periods of political upheaval rather than others; not just in terms of propaganda but also culturally and linguistically. Why was the memory and traditions associated with an obscure Jewish prophet of some 2,000 years ago invoked by the Puritans of the English revolution; why did the emperor Napoleon defend his dictatorship with reference to the Enlightenment and why did the Bolsheviks believe they could claim Marxist credentials? These three revolutions were successful partly because of the motivation that these ideologies provided for those who did the fighting and dying; or rather, the specific interpretation of those ideologies at the time. It might be informative to analyse these ideologies in terms of their origins, their cultural and linguistic reinterpretation and their use as propaganda. All of this can be done in the context of the similarities and differences they represent with the proposed model of a socialist revolution. We begin with the English Revolution of 1642.
Europe had witnessed the persecution of Jan Huss and John Wycliffe for their opposition to the widespread corruption within the Catholic Church but it was not until the time of their protestant progeny Martin Luther that the Reformation became politically important. Many European potentates were tired of the political interference and high taxes that emanated from Rome. One of these, a German Prince Frederick III, saw in Luther’s protest a way to weaken the political power of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus Luther’s protection by the powerful, in contrast with Huss and Wycliffe, made it possible to promote the Reformation which in turn eventually enabled a political formulation of the nation state that was independent of Rome. All of this was accelerated by the new technology of the printing press which made possible the first dissemination of mass political/religious propaganda in the vernacular. One of the consequences of the importation of the Reformation in England was the dissolution of the monasteries. As a result great swathes of land were acquired by the nouveau riche of the merchant class who had become wealthy courtesy of international trade in wool, slaves and coal. They sought to achieve the same levels of profit from their new land by becoming capitalist farmers. This contrasted with the great aristocratic landowner’s approach which was still in the feudal tradition; consequently they became increasingly concerned about the wealth of their new neighbours and pressed the king to try to curtail their profits, or at the very least give them a share. To achieve this the King claimed monopoly rights on production which he then proceeded to give to aristocratic cronies at his court together with the infamous ‘ship tax’ which gave him a share of trading profits. The new ‘landed gentry’ (capitalist farmers) together with other progressive elements in society were outraged by this and campaigned through parliament for a ‘free market’. They saw the feudal lands as being unproductive and the aristocracy as a political barrier to their further enrichment. The scene was set for this class struggle to erupt into the English revolution. This is the Marxist or ‘materialist’ version of the events of the 1640’s. Now let us turn to the ideological explanation.
When Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion of Rome he attempted to make the diverse legends (gospels) into a coherent ideology that would serve his political needs. Although there continues to be some controversy the gospels we have now in the ‘New Testament’ date from that time. The religion has obvious attractions to an autocrat in that it represents the ultimate authoritarian social structure with God at the top and his representatives (the Pope, Emperor, Kings and the priesthood) in a descending coalition of oppression. It also, however, has revolutionary elements in terms of its original defiance of Roman hegemony and the Christ being a messiah or deliverer from tyranny. This is the element taken up by the Puritans who were profoundly dissatisfied with the English Reformation and perceived the Anglican church to be still very ‘Papist’ and politically reactionary. This together with the Protestant emphasis on ‘hard work’, obedience, thrift and the idea that worldly wealth and success was an indication of belonging to god’s ‘elect’ made them obvious allies for the emerging bourgeoisie. For hundreds of years the priest in the pulpit had been the major political propagandist for the ruling class so it is not surprising that the political debate in the 17th century centred on Christian doctrine and the perceived importance of controlling the church. As we have seen the pulpit now had a propaganda rival in the printing press and within this revolutionary environment an infinite variety of dissention was expressed. There were some who saw the revolution as a culmination of class antagonisms but the majority understood it in terms of Catholic (the Pope being the ‘anti-Christ’) oppression of their natural (political) rights with Charles I’s claim to Divine Right being an obvious expression of this. Once the revolutionary war started both sides believed that victory on the battlefield was the sign of divine approval. The central message of the gospels that you should love your fellow man as yourself never represented a serious disincentive to the years of carnage that followed.
We can be certain that Jesus of Nazareth (if he existed as an historical individual) would be more than a little surprised by the killing that has been done in his name. It is also next to impossible to find any justification for war in the gospels (with the possible exception of the book of revelation which, in contrast to the other texts, seems to be a diatribe of revenge). What Christianity does offer ruling elites, and would be ruling elites, is an authoritarian universe with everything and everyone in his place. Many, if not most, religions offer this reactionary supernatural scenario and it wouldn’t take much imagination to replace it with any other similar religion and, given the same political and historical context of England in 1642, the result would be the same – revolution. In other words the ideology that expressed the fears and ambitions of those who made the revolution were relatively unimportant compared with the economic and political forces that compelled them into violent opposition. It may be said that this represents an unprovable hypothesis because you can never impose retrospective ideological alternatives on to history; what we can do, however, is compare this revolution with others that have also transformed their society from monarchical absolutism to bourgeois rule without the aid of Christian ideology. In the second part of this article we attempt to do that with an analysis of the French revolution where not only was Christianity absent within the ideology of the victors it was replaced by a philosophy we call the Enlightenment which possessed an atheist trajectory.

Ideology & Revolution
Part 2 - The French Revolution
On the 4th April 1727 a leading French intellectual was present at the state funeral of Sir Isaac Newton in London. His name was Voltaire and what he found most impressive about the grand occasion was that although Newton was born a commoner his work had gained him such prestige as to warrant so high a national honour. Such a thing could never have happened in France at that time where only members of the nobility could hope to provoke such national recognition. This was testament to the complete political domination of the English bourgeoisie who, after their revolution in the 1640’s, had fought off an attempted counter revolution in 1688 and installed a constitutional monarch, an act of religious tolerance, free trade and even a ‘bill of rights’; something of which the French middle class could only dream of. The new English ruling class embraced the symbiotic relationship of science and technology which was soon, through the immanent ‘industrial revolution’, to make them far wealthier than many of the petty European feudal monarchies. Isaac Newton became one of the first icons of the intellectual movement that turned its focus from religious faith to scientific reason in which we now call ‘The Enlightenment’. Newton presented society with a universal natural mechanism that had the potential to explain everything – including, in the hands of philosophers and political radicals, the perceived intellectual and moral progression of human cultural activity through history. It was to be the French intellectuals who were to transform this radical philosophy into a political ideology with which to fuel their own bourgeois revolution.
We have seen that it was the protestant Reformation that enabled the English bourgeoisie to intellectually challenge the might of reactionary international Catholicism and which, in turn, informed the ideological propaganda used in their revolutionary struggle with their king. In France the Reformation was only ever partially successful and eventually almost entirely succumbed to the ‘counter reformation’. As a result the capitalist mode of production was continually handicapped by the very same feudal economic relationships that had so frustrated the English middle classes in the first part of the 17th century. This underlying class struggle was simmering and waiting to burst into revolution in France by the mid to late 18th century. As we have seen it was the French intellectual’s use of Enlightenment philosophy which was to reflect this remorseless economic and political tension. Foremost among these was Dennis Diderot’s Encyclopaedia which attempted the complete reformulation of knowledge through an enlightenment perspective. Together with writers such as Rousseau and Voltaire they began work on this monumental undertaking which was immediately recognised as a threat to the establishment by those who sought to defend the ‘Ancien Regime’. Another surprising element that served to weaken the paradigms of continental Catholicism came from a most unlikely source. Portugal had always been devout and, like its neighbour Spain, a bastion of reactionary autocracy. In 1755 a mighty earthquake hit its capital Lisbon destroying most of the city including many churches together with their congregations. A reciprocal tsunami augmented the devastation and death toll. Many believed this to be a breach of the covenant with the Christian god and served to seriously weaken belief in traditional religion and the social structures that went with it. All of these uncertainties, new intellectual paradigms and the manifest injustices of feudal autocracy were about to find their political expression as part of the explosion that was the French Revolution.
It all started, as almost an action replay of the English revolution, when the French king was forced to call a parliament (Estates General) to deal with a financial crisis. France was near bankruptcy as a result, ironically, of Louis XVI’s helping finance the American republican struggle against England. This parliament was composed of three ‘estates’: nobility, clergy and the commons. Although the deputies of the commons represented over 90% of the French people they only had a third of the votes, the other two thirds belonging to the nobility and clergy. This made it inevitable that they would be out-voted by the other two estates on most issues of contention. Upon being called to Versailles the members of the commons produced a book of grievances which addressed, together with many other problems, this profoundly anti-democratic arrangement. Unsurprisingly the other estates prevaricated and the commons lost patience and proclaimed itself as a National Assembly which represented the entire population of France and on its return to Versailles, some days later, to begin its work the delegates found themselves locked out of their former meeting place. Undeterred they proceeded to the nearest large interior space within the massive palace complex (a tennis court) where they took an oath not to separate until they had produced a political national constitution. Thus began the revolution on the 20th June 1789. Despite a provocative build up of reactionary military forces the Assembly quickly got to work abolishing feudalism and producing a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen ( again very reminiscent of the English parliament’s Petition of Right and then it’s revolutionary ‘Grand Remonstrance’ of some 150 years before). In Paris, meanwhile, the decades of oppression of the poor had exploded into violence which culminated in the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent arming of the ‘sans culottes’ (proto working class) who were to defend the revolution against both traitors within the country and then to fight the revolutionary wars against the other nations which sought to destroy the new regime. The French bourgeoisie originally, as had the English, wanted a constitutional monarchy rather than a Republic but when Louis, like Charles I, was proven a traitor he had to be executed. By now the Assembly had moved to Paris where it came under the influence of a radical republican group (the Jacobins) and their most prominent member Maximilien Robespierre who, arguably, took the revolution in a direction that the moderate members of the bourgeoisie had never intended and which certainly did not correspond with the values of the Enlightenment.
These radicals would have been unable to take control of the revolution without the connivance of a series of events; civil war, international war, inflation and sectarian rivalry all contributed to what we now call ‘The Terror’ and the reign of Madame La Guillotine. In some ways this goes to prove that the ideology of the enlightenment was, at best, only an idealistic aspiration and, at worst, merely empty propaganda to motivate those who did the fighting. Certainly when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power during a coup d’état in 1799 and subsequently ‘exported’ the revolution to most of continental Europe it was seen eventually for what it really was – an empire of exploitation and plunder. Oliver Cromwell had preceded Napoleon in this by his violent imperial activities in Ireland and both individuals represented the realities of bourgeois rule, stripped of its high minded rhetoric. Since the days of these capitalist revolutions many millions of workers have continued to kill and be killed in the name of high ideals such as liberty, fraternity and equality. This does not, of course, invalidate these ideals and the integrity of those like Rousseau and Diderot who believed in them but, like the radical Christian ideals of the puritans, they captured the ‘zeitgeist’ of their time, and as such, were open to the manipulation by the powerful; and that power, in the end, derived not from ideals but from economic and political forces which were little understood at that time. Both the French and English revolutions had the same result – the coming to power of the capitalist class despite the use of seemingly opposite ideologies (philosophical reason as opposed to religious faith); dialectically speaking such ideas are taken up because they seem to contain, however vaguely understood, antithetical elements with regard to the prevailing paradigms that rationalise the existing system. Such ideas always find an audience because of the oppression and exploitation necessary to sustain any private property system. These ideas are catapulted into the political spotlight when economic and historical circumstances make revolutionary change inevitable. Socialists, with the invaluable help of Karl Marx, have understood this for over 100 years now but, ironically, this political insight also fell victim to the manipulation of a new ruling class – namely the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Does this imply that Marxism/Socialism is merely just another form of idealism that can be manipulated and used as propaganda by power elites? In part three we investigate the relationship between the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917 and the political theory of socialism and what both owed, if anything, to the Enlightenment.

IDEOLOGY AND REVOLUTION Pt.3
Russia has always represented an enigma to historians. It is obviously connected to European culture but it is also recognisably very different. The reasons for this have pre-occupied many politicians, historians and economists in the west for centuries; Marx, famously, thought of it as a dangerous bastion of reaction that would confront and oppose the development of socialism. One element of consensus within the many theories that attempt to understand Russia’s relatively slow economic progress is with reference to the overwhelming scale of the country. Until the 19th century the population was not great enough to serve the needs of both agrarian feudalism and the developing capitalism of the cities and even then a series of military defeats seriously curtailed international trade and the internal market was enfeebled by the population’s lack of spending power. The retention of serfdom was a mechanism specifically devised by the feudal lords to chain workers to their estates and so prevent them from either drifting off into the vast wilderness to farm for themselves or to go in search of better wages in the cities. Although recognised as a handicap by some of the more progressive elements within the Russian hierarchy, including some of the Czars, economically they could not compete with the industrial might of Britain, America and Germany and so were trapped in the backward economic cycle described above. Many of the powerful aristocrats were well aware that industrialisation would need better educated workers together with a wealthy middle class and feared the potential political consequences of that (the French Revolution being their nightmare scenario). However the remorseless economic evolution was unstoppable and the incompatibility of the anachronistic Czarist autocracy with emerging capitalism became devastatingly obvious with the disaster of the First World War. Of all the great powers Russia was the least equipped to fight such an industrialised conflict and the stage was set for the Russians to make their revolution.
In 1905 the Russian bourgeoisie entered into a coalition of rebellion which petitioned the Czar for political change but it was ruthlessly crushed and many were killed. In a concession to the mood of the country together with the need to end a nation-wide strike a parliament (Dumas) was promised and then, when it did not do as it was told, promptly shut down by a Czar who, like Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France, could not countenance any challenge to his power of ‘divine right’. In the spring of 1917 the war was going so badly that the Czar was forced to abdicate and the Dumas was again reassembled. Among the political parties present within this parliament were the Russian Social Democratic Party who, like the other members of the ‘Second International’ gave lip service to Marxism/Socialism but were, in fact, bourgeois reformists. If they had not tried to continue the war in coalition with liberals and conservatives it is possible that Russia would have followed the traditional path to capitalism. When they made this tragic mistake and the country fell into chaos again the regional councils or ‘soviets’ formed during the struggles of 1905 filled the power vacuum. Not unlike the ‘communes’ of the sans-culottes during the French Revolution these organisations competed with central government for power. As has been already analysed in depth by this journal last month the Bolsheviks came to power by promising to stop the war and feed the people. They at least managed the former undertaking but at the cost of a military dictatorship together with the nationalisation of the means of production that was to give the state complete power over every aspect of Russian life. At first the new regime embraced the soviets but it was only a matter of time before their power was usurped by the Bolsheviks and they survived in name only. As with the English and French revolutions the result was capitalism, which in the case of Bolshevik Russia became something called state capitalism; from the perspective of the immense majority, it was identical to bourgeois capitalism with reference to their lives of exploitation by, and subjugation to, a small power elite.
If we look at the ideologies of those competing for power in Russia at that time what do we see? Certainly the liberals and conservatives believed in some of the enlightenment ideals that preceded the French revolution but, ironically, it was Lenin who really admired the Machiavellian tactics of the likes of Robespierre! Lenin’s obsession with power and leadership was essentially bourgeois as were, to the surprise of Rosa Luxemburg upon meeting him, most of his moral and cultural values. Why was it then that he so doggedly proclaimed himself and his regime as socialist? Perhaps he was so enamoured by the political insights and intellectual rigor of socialism, especially through the works of Karl Marx that he was reluctant to abandon them in the light of Russian political reality even after the non appearance of the anticipated European-wide socialist revolution. He identified himself with socialism to the extent that he was prepared to pervert the concept into its antithesis where Marx’s joke about ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (i.e. democracy) became the excuse for a totalitarian regime rather than admit to the impossibility of creating socialism in one country – and one that had yet to experience the political consequences of capitalism. The other possibility, of course, is that once he had tasted power he could not give it up and his ‘socialism’ served as a justification for this. There is little evidence that many understood slogans like ‘all power to the soviets’ as having anything to do with socialism and, as we have seen, many of those who did think of themselves as socialist were primarily reformists who did not believe in revolution. It would seem that yet again the ideologies used were primarily propaganda expedients to manipulate those who could enable the elite’s rise to power.
The failure of the Bolshevik regime, the Soviet Union or Communist Russia, call it what you will, to produce anything remotely resembling socialism is testament to the Marxist understanding of how history proceeds. Without the productivity and class consciousness created by industrial capitalism socialism is impossible. That so many of Europe’s intellectuals were seduced by Bolshevik propaganda underlines their idealism and the political danger inherent in the ignorance of historical materialism. To paraphrase Marx: ‘men create history but only within the limitations of their historical context’. To understand any political activity it is first necessary to comprehend the tectonics of economic evolution and the historical level of the class struggle it has enabled. The historical reality of the English, French and Russian revolutions was the political consolidation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism which no superficial ideological differences can conceal. The subsequent history of these countries is entirely due to the economic and political logic of capitalism and has nothing to do with the ideals of Puritan Christianity, The Enlightenment or Marxism. Socialism will not be ideological in so far as it will resolve the class struggle that has created the need for ideals with which class minorities struggle for intellectual and political supremacy. With its emphasis on reason and its rejection of faith Marxism has its roots within the European Enlightenment but it is the antithesis to the idealism of Voltaire and Rousseau which, in the hands of Robespierre and Napoleon, became excuses for political authoritarianism – the true essence of all bourgeois ideology. By being conscious of the nature of the class struggle socialists cannot be manipulated by ideology and once they become the immense majority the revolution becomes inevitable as is the dissolution of all political parties, including the socialist party, after its conclusion. Lenin did not live to see the nemesis (Stalin, the gulags, starvation etc.) that his hubris had helped to create for the Russian people, who still await their liberation – let’s hope that it’s not another hundred years before this is accomplished, with their help, by a real global socialist revolution.