National Democratic
Revolution, Part 1
Roots of the NDR
With any course, one must
decide where to begin. In the case of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR),
the course has to begin with an understanding of class struggle and of class
alliances in history.
Such a study could begin as
long ago as the fifth century BC in the Athenian Republic led by Pericles,
or with the Conflict of the Orders in
the Roman Republic at approximately the same time,
and it could proceed through the class struggles involving, for example, the
Gracchus brothers [Pictured: Gaius Gracchus, Tribune of the People], Julius
Caesar and others, that led in 27 BC to the stagnant class truce called
the Roman Empire, which then, during four
centuries, declined and fell (in its Western half) into a rural Dark Age, which
was also the genesis of feudalism. Class struggle is the engine of history.
Without it, there is very little movement.
We could alternatively begin
in 1512 with Machiavelli, and the class struggles
of Renaissance (i.e. “born again”) Italy, where multiple city-states with
populations of 100,000 or more were embroiled in internal and external class
conflicts.
We could go to Thomas Hobbes, who published his
book Leviathan in 1651,
describing the politics of the bigger national states of Northern Europe (Like
Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands) which had by his time surpassed the
politics of Italy to become the main theatre of recorded historical process.
These European machinations
could have been our workbook and our political sandpit, for the main reason
that there is a record of them. There is very little virtue to be found in this
history, and the examples are mostly bad examples – examples of things to be avoided
– but there is a literature.
French Revolution
But we might as well rather
begin, as Frederick Engels does in the first part of his “Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific” (attached),
with the Great French Revolution that
started in 1789. From this point on we can meet, in their developed form, the
class protagonists who allied and clashed, from that time until now, in all
possible permutations; alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical;
marriages of convenience and marriages made in heaven; and we can have, for the
most part, the benefit of Marx and Engels as eyewitnesses or near-to eyewitnesses.
The contending classes were:
the feudal aristocrats; the peasants; the bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.
Using this work of Engels’ as
a starting point has the additional benefit of introducing the rudiments of
political philosophy, and leading our thoughts towards the “democratic
bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the highest form of
political life before socialism; the prerequisite of concerted proletarian
action; and a form of the State that has to be transcended.
In other words, our study of the NDR will bring us, as history has
already brought us in life, to the kind of crisis that Lenin outlined so
sharply in “The
State and Revolution,”
when majority rule is no longer an adequate substitute for the free development
of each as the condition for the free development of all, social
self-management, the end of class struggle, the withering away of the state,
and the fully classless society called communism.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific, Part 1, Engels.
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