quote:

---

Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé.

---

"On July 14, 1789, an outraged group of Parisians stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in France where prisoners of influence were held, in hopes of capturing ammunition....

For the peasant class, the Bastille stood as a symbol of the hypocrisy and corruption of the aristocratic government - controlled mostly by nobility and clergy. This important event marked the entry of the popular class into the French Revolution.

The French recognize Bastille Day as the end of the monarchy and beginning of the modern republic. The lasting significance of the event was in its recognition that power could be held by ordinary citizens, not in the King or in God."

Vive Le France!

[ 14 July 2006: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by N.Beltov:
The abolition of the monarchy is a task that still need to be carried out in Canada.

---

Are you suggesting that the Canadian bourgeoisie still has unfulfilled historical "tasks" to perform?

Or that the presence of a vestigial monarchy in Canada somehow demonstrates the failure of the bourgeoisie to completely displace feudalism?

[ 15 July 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

[ 15 July 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

M. Spector: Are you suggesting that the Canadian bourgeoisie still has unfulfilled historical "tasks" to perform?

---

Whatever Canadian authority finally breaks those fetters will be good enough for me. I understand the Australians have already made the change. The preservation of the unelected Senate is just one problem associated with keeping links to anti-democratic institutions like the monarchy.

I hasten to add that economic and social policy matter a lot more to most Canadians than the abolition of the monarchy. It's not an issue with a lot of "traction" right now.

quote:

---

Or that the presence of a vestigial monarchy in Canada somehow demonstrates the failure of the bourgeoisie to completely displace feudalism?

---

There's nothing particularly anti-democratic about the modern Anglo-Canadian monarchy. We would be no more democratic if we didn't have to have Michelle Jean rubber-stamp the crap that passes for legislation in the Parliament of Canada.

quote:

---

Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Whatever Canadian authority finally breaks those fetters will be good enough for me. I understand the Australians have already made the change.

---

If you mean the monarchy, Australia hasn't made the change yet. The 1999 referendum didn't pass, with around 54% voting "no."

quote:

---

Originally posted by M. Spector:

Anyway, JK Rowling is richer than the Queen.

---

I don't believe Forbes magazine on Liz' wealth. This is the same rag that claims Fidel is worth a fortune but can't produce any proof.

quote:

---

As 80,000 crowded into the square to watch the execution of Louis XVI, they cannot have been unaware that the guillotine sat where a statue of Louis XV had been. Here Sanson, the executioner, snatches the detached head of Louis XVI to show to the crowd. He leans forward with approving eagerness. If the head of the King was the most recognizable old regime symbol, then the demise of that symbolic system becomes now complete. Waving on a pike, facing the King, is a Phrygian cap, now no longer placed on his head, as in other prints. In this way the engraver indicates a final severance of a complicated compromise.

---

[ 14 July 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

quote:

---

Nanuq: Social progress is accomplished by evolution, not revolution.

---

Well, I'm glad you finally got that out. So that's the real point. You're antagonistic to all revolutions. I take that to mean that you support any version of capitalism - including a fascist dictatorship or an Apartheid state - as long as no revolution takes place. Furthermore, you would support a slave society as opposed to one that overthrew the institution of slavery, because inbetween the one society and the other was - and had to be - a revolution.

This rhetoric justifies forcibly taking resources, violating the persons (rape, torture etc), kangaroo courts, neighbours falsely accusing neighbours of sedition (a capital offence) and taking the life of those that are not politically engaged.

I reject all violence as a means for social change.

I do support dissent, silent revolution, defiance, disobedience, rejection of the law of the brute, and standing up to institutionalised racism and genocide using the media, influencing consumer choices..

quote:

---

Obedience to the law of bread labour will bring about a silent revolution in the structure of society...

---

Fuck capitalism, fuck violent revolution to bring about change, and fuck authoritative oligarchies, and authoritative governments on the left and the right.

[ 15 July 2007: Message edited by: TemporalHominid ]

The example of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a case in point. The old regime had access to all sorts of weapons of mass destruction and ... did nothing with them. The regime, and system, collapsed relatively peacefully. So there goes the thesis that all revolutions are violent right out the window.

Genuine revolutions are like snowfall. We can be ready for them, prepare for them, stick our heads in the ground about them, lie about them, etc., but they are a normal part of change in history just as they are a normal part of change in nature. As my hero Georgi Plekhanov once wrote, to some people, solar eclipses are unpredictable and shocking events. To other people, who have actually studied the motion of the planets and the moons, they are as predictable as ... well, as predictable as the rising of the sun every morning.

As for the breakup of the Soviet Union, well that's still unfolding isn't it? And I would be inclined to include what happened in Romania and Yugoslavia since they were related events so it was far from bloodless.

quote:

---

Nanuq:We seem to be in disagreement over the meaning of the terms "revolution" and "evolution".

---

I'm using evolution to mean slow, gradual, quantitative change and revolution to mean sudden, disruptive qualitative change. I hope that when I put it in these terms you would agree with me that revolution and evolution are both natural sorts of things, whether in nature, society or even thinking.

quote:

---

Nanuq: Don't get me started on the American Revolution which seems to have been romanticized beyond recognition.

---

I'm with you on that one. I would be inclined to call the events of the late 18th century in the US as a (revolutionary) war of independence. For example, slavery did not come to an end in 1776 although the fetters associated with the British connection ended and allowed capitalist development in the US to proceed much more quickly. The US, I think, was a lot more merciless in its treatment of the First Nations that the British had been (though perhaps only in degree) and this I would view as a step backwards from British rule.

quote:

---

Nanuq: There are no shortcuts to social progress.

---

My claim, which I'm sticking to, is that certain kinds of progress can't happen without a "break". That "break" I am calling a revolution. Such things ought to be expected and, in fact, understood as something that can be planned. Karl Marx was in the habit of using a birth metaphor; he wrote that the role of revolutionaries, and those who foresee such events, was to "lessen the birth pangs" in such predictable and (in his view) inevitable events. I'm objecting to the idea that all social progress takes place (only) as a result of gradual change.

quote:

---

Originally posted by N.Beltov:
The example of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a case in point. The old regime had access to all sorts of weapons of mass destruction and ... did nothing with them. The regime, and system, collapsed relatively peacefully. So there goes the thesis that all revolutions are violent right out the window.

---

After reading Holmstrom and Smith on gangster capitalism in Russia, and David Kotz and Canadian Fred Weir's "Revolution from Above", I believe the demise of the Soviet Union came about by a general lack of maintenance together with Soviet bureaucrats desire to confiscate valuable public enterprises and vast mineral and oil wealth in Russia and FSU. Jeffrey Sachs admitted there wasn't time available to create an investor class in Russia.

There was only one possible answer to instant capitalism with themselves on the receiving end: Russia's investor class oligarchy had to be hot-housed overnight. There were ruble millionaires in Russia, but rubles were not convertible on world currency markets. Russia's vast oil and mineral wealth could not be viewed to have fallen into bureaucrat's hands with a measly few million rubles - not when the market they would be integrating toward valued those state assets at hundreds billions of U.S. dollars by western market standards.

Where would the oligarchs beg borrow or steal enough U.S. dollars to make these round trip selloffs of state assets to themselves appear legitimate ?. How would they go about achieving primitive accumulation of state assets before legitimate bids could be offered from legitimate sources?.

It looks like some of the oligarchs were financed by CIA front agencies: USAID, Jeffrey Sachs and HIID, IMF "emergency loans", and Houston oil magnates who are still embroiled in complicated law suits against the oligarchs for investments turned sour. Russia's nomenklatura simply did not have enough U.S. dollar liquidity to purchase the rights to enormous oil, timber and mineral reserves at even the token sale prices demanded by the corrupted privatization schemes drafted by aspiring state-capitalists.

Boris Yeltsin's political campaigns, funded to the tune of several million dollars by the west, amounted to tainting of democratic reforms in Russia. Yeltsin and his pro-capitalist bureaucrats effectively dismantled the very Soviet institutions which could have made democratic reforms possible. Gorbachev believed they would be moving toward Swedish style social democracy and now says the Soviet Union should have and could have been preserved.

And Temporal Hominid, what happened to Gandhi in the end as well as a list of democratically-elected socialists throughout the cold war?.

[ 15 July 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

---

Fidel: I believe the demise of the Soviet Union came about by a general lack of maintenance together with Soviet bureaucrats desire to confiscate valuable public enterprises and vast mineral and oil wealth in Russia and FSU. [etc]

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by N.Beltov:

Fidel, Fidel, Fidel. I was making the point that all revolutions aren't violent and cited that country as an example ... etcetera

---

And which revolutions would they be ?.

Russia is soaked in blood, N. Beltov. Russia is blood-soaked whether you're talking about 1917, the "civil" war to reverse the revolution, the fascist war of annihilation against Soviet communism, or whether someone makes loose reference to the recent revolution from above resulting in perestroika and responsible for several million premature deaths and the tragedy of the 1990's. Believe it or no, Russians weren't weren't demanding price deregulation, their wages witholding or the corrupt privatizations that occurred in the 1990's. It would be absurd to suggest that was true.

That's all I am saying - there was no revolution from below in 1989-90's Russia, and it wasn't without loss of life on the order of several million lives.

[ 15 July 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

[ 15 July 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I might also point out that Bastille Day and The French Revolution were not end of the Bourbon monarchy. Louis XVI's brother was installed as monarch following the fall of Napoleon, and then reinstalled as monarch following the second fall of Napoleon. That was in 1814-15. The monarchy finally fell for good following the revolution of 1848, which brought France .... Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III. Cat chases tail, cat chases tail, cat chases tail ... I'm tired now.

I do think Nanuq has a point, though. Some bloody revolutions meant almost nothing in the end. The English Civil War of the 1640s may be one. Where did that get anyone? The King lost, Cromwell won, and after he won, he beheaded the King and crushed the Levellers, the only party truly willing to totally revamp England socially. Then Cromwell became every bit the autocrat Charles I was, and when he died, England reverted back into the reactionary control of Charles II! If they'd never had the revolution, England would've been more liberal in 1660 than it was when it DID have one.

quote:

---

Nor do I think you can criticize the Revolution by attacking the Reign of Terror. Again, one did not necessarily mean the other.

---

quote:

---

The fact that the revolutionaries allowed their revolution to be hijacked (not that they protested much at the time) makes it very much their responsibility.

---

Was it their mistake that they allowed every district's population to petition their grievances and get involved in politics, therefore helping the rise of Jacobins?
The revolution also replaced the people's loyalty to monarchs(of whatever attitude, religion and descent)to the nation. That was an important and in my view,mostly a positive development.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Nanuq:

When you start a revolution, you are very much responsible for what comes of it. You can't choose an action and then absolve yourself of its consequences. The fact that the revolutionaries allowed their revolution to be hijacked (not that they protested much at the time) makes it very much their responsibility.

---

No, that's totally not what happened. You can't use blanket terms like "revolutionaries". They weren't all the same. I cannot emphasize that enough. People always love to oversimplify things and tarring everybody with the same brush and using the principle of collective guilt are favorite ways of doing so.

quote:

---

And of course,the Declaration of Man and Citizen was quite fundamental and progressive, compared to the US.
Oh and BTW, slavery was banned and a man of African descent was elected into the French Legislative Assembly,in 1792 I think.

---

Not for long and only under pressure from the French colonies which had become powderkegs. It's not as if the Jacobins were thrilled by the slave revolts. In fact, they reacted by rescinding the rights of free blacks in 1791. They grudgingly reversed themselves in 1792 but that only lasted until Napoleon came to power. The slaves had to drive out the French themselves in 1804 to found Haiti.

quote:

---

The Jacobin Terror was the Jacobin Terror. And that's it. There were many who did not support the Jacobins but supported the revolution. They are not to be held responsible for the Jacobin Terror, especially as many died due to their resistance (or perceived resistance) to it.

---