Volume 1, Preface

This book has been written because of a deepening concern I have felt over the past two decades: the ebbing of the revolutionary tradition. The era of the great revolutionary movements, from that of the English Revolution of the 1640s to that of the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39, is waning today from the consciousness of even radical young people, let alone the reasonably educated. Insofar as these revolutions are remembered at all, they are dismissed as irrelevant failures or as the incubators of authoritarian states and their rulers such as Oliver Cromwell, Maximilien Robespierre, and Joseph Stalin.

Yet while the names of the tyrants that the revolutions are said to have produced live on as historical villains, the names of the people who tried to rescue their liberatory potentialities are nearly lost, and so too are the exhilarating ideas they propounded. All but forgotten, in fact, are the littleknown popular spokespersons who articulated great visions of freedom and often coordinated great insurrectionary uprisings in towns and the countryside, like Thomas Mtinzer, Richard Overton, Daniel Shays, Jean Varlet, Jean Varlin, Louise Michel, and Nestor Makhno. Each of these individuals, among many others, earnestly tried to propel the great revolutions of past centuries toward a full realization of their emancipatory goals. Yet they and their endeavors are usually forgotten, often completely so, except among people who have a specialized knowledge of the revolutions in which they participated.

That the revolutionary era of the past four centuries continually widened the radical horizon of freedom is equally unknown to the present generation. Few people today are aware of the radical programs, achievements, and gains, as well as the errors that were made, especially at the popular base of revolutionary movements. Ordinary people—peasants, workers, artisans, radical intellectuals— made great attempts to take full control of society, establish fairly egalitarian forms of social organization, and defend important human rights as well as expound lofty goals of freedom. That such an era, with all its problems and ideals, may become lost to memory has been too chilling for me to contemplate.

It is this social and historical amnesia that has impelled me to write an account of the revolutionary era—to set down people, events, social factors, and political programs of popular revolutionary movements that began with the peasant wars before the modern era and reached remarkable fruition for a brief time in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Each of these revolutions was built ideologically on the historical memory of the revolutions that had preceded it. Americans were deeply conscious of the English Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s; the French were profoundly affected by the American Revolution, whose radicalism is usually woefully understated in the historical literature today; and the revolutions that followed were immensely influenced by the events of the French Revolution.

My principal orientation in this work has been toward the popular or “mass” movements and the so-called “grassroots” institutional structures and organizational frameworks of the groups that propelled the great revolutions forward. For each revolution, I have tried to provide the social, economic, cultural, and political background that gave rise to and sustained its radical movement.

I have avoided viewing the intentions of these movements as reflecting the emergence and consolidation of industrial capitalism; rather, I have taken the demands of various revolutionary tendencies at their word. I believe that the great mass of people who made the revolutions described in this work genuinely believed in the notions of liberty, equality, fraternity, and the pursuit of happiness that they articulated—not necessarily in free trade, a ruthless egotism, or class collaboration, contrary to the retrospective interpretations that have been given to their liberatory slogans.

Each revolution, moreover, advanced moral, political, and social alternatives to capitalism—although they lacked any clear idea of what capitalism would become and often even cleared the way for modern capitalism. The popular revolutionaries did present alternatives to the self-seeking, competitive, and acquisitive society that prevails today. The reasons that they failed should be a matter of the greatest interest to us, now that capitalism is often taken as a given in ordinary discourse or seen as the “end of history,” the outcome of humanity’s long and bitter struggle for the good society.

Hence I do not work with the teleological conviction that what now exists had to come into existence; rather, it was one of many other possibilities that were latent in the revolutionary potentialities that existed generations, indeed centuries, ago. Any prejudgments of the past in the light of the present represent the abdication of a moral interpretation of history—the abjuring of an emancipatory “should be” that critically opposes the prevalent “what is.” If a largely retrospective or even fatalistic perspective were to guide us, we would have to consider the high ideals that emerged in past revolutions as merely an ideological patina for uncontrollable economic forces that determined human behavior irrespective of human wishes and desires.

In fact, if cultural factors were merely reflexes of economic ones, capitalism would have emerged at almost any time in the past, as far back as antiquity. Capitalists in sizable numbers lived in ancient Greece and Rome as well as many parts of medieval Europe, and they were no less acquisitive or enterprising in their pursuit of wealth than our own bourgeoisie. But what prevented them from taking a commanding position in social life—assuming that they tried to do so—was precisely a host of cultural factors that favored the ownership of land over capital, denigrated material accumulation, and strongly emphasized social status in the form of noble titles rather than the ownership of fungible property.

The title of this book —The Third Revolution —has been chosen largely to show that capitalism as we know it today was not predestined to gain the supremacy it presently has; rather, that popular revolutionary movements offered, and fought for, more rational and democratic social alternatives to the present society and to so-called “bourgeois revolutions,” to use the label that has so often been given to the English, American, and French Revolutions. I have thus examined the classical revolutions internally, from within their own inner dynamics, rather than externally, from the standpoint of where we are today.

My emphasis on popular insurgencies places unavoidable limits on the extent to which I can describe these sweeping historical movements as a whole. Readers who want more detailed accounts of specific revolutions may consult the sources in my notes and the bibliographical essay at the end of this book. Fortunately, nearly every work I cite in the essay contains references to the abundant, increasingly specialized works that now exist in many languages. I have tried to use sources in the English language as much as possible to meet the needs of the general readership to which this book is addressed, and I have provided reference notes mainly for the quotations that appear in the narrative.

Let me make it clear from the outset that this book does not attempt to be a work of academic scholarship. Rather it has been written to chart out a memorable legacy for the reader unlikely to be concerned with esoteric sources or minor details. It is admittedly an account of the popular movements that propelled the great revolutions forward to their most radical and democratic extremes—and it is an interpretation of events as they might have been seen by a radical participant in them.

I do not regard such an approach by a twentieth-century lifelong student of the great revolutions as presumptuous. When circumstances afforded popular revolutionaries sufficient freedom of expression, they were often very eloquent in presenting their own interpretations of what they were doing and made their goals quite clear in pamphlets, speeches, manifestos, and actions. What I have done is to cite them, their ideas, and their actions with the attention they deserve, and free them from the historical dungeons to which many of them have been confined by conventional, often middle-class, and partisan historians.

I make no claim to be impartial in my own views—as though “impartiality” were possible in discussions of great revolutions—and I admit quite frankly that I would have stood side by side with Jean Varlet in the sans-culottes’ uprising of 1793 and with Jean Varlin during the embattled days of the Paris Commune of 1871.

This volume—the first of two, ranging from the peasant wars of the sixteenth century to the French Revolution—was read as the basis of a course on the revolutionary tradition to my students in Vermont in 1988–89. The extensive text that I prepared was supplemented by extemporaneous elaborations and discussions. I wish to thank my colleague and companion, Janet Biehl, for editing the text and giving it more of a book format for the general reader, filling in background material, and writing most of Chapter 13 on the basis of discussions between us and her own research. Both the style and content of the book remain entirely my own responsibility. I wish also to thank my editor, Steve Cook, of Cassell, for his encouragement and support for this book.

Volume Two of The Third Revolution will take the reader through the nineteenth century, focusing on the French uprisings of 1830, 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, and into the twentieth century, focusing on revolutions in Russia, Germany, and Spain. So acutely aware are we, these days, of the shortcomings of these revolutions—the elitism of the political factions and parties in France and Russia, for instance, and the extent to which the needs of women, native peoples, and persecuted minorities of all kinds were not fully encompassed by revolutionary movements—that we tend to overlook how sweeping the popular revolutionary movements in Europe and America were in so many respects.

The fact that I have not addressed in any great detail certain shortcomings of the great democratic revolutions, such as the limited role that women were permitted to play in them and the oppression that African-Americans suffered even as the American Revolution honored their “natural rights” in the breach, does not mean that I am oblivious to the rights and interests of women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. But any introductory account of the revolutionary era must necessarily be highly selective in its choice of events and facts. Fortunately, there are now many books available that deal in considerable detail with issues of gender and ethnicity in these revolutions and that adequately fill out my own gaps.

Murray Bookchin
Burlington, Vermont
June 14,1993