On Classification of Revolutions: An Attempt at a New Approach

Abstract

The article addresses one of the fundamental issues in the theory of revolutions – the problem of classification of revolutions. The existing approaches distinguish revolutions depending on their self-proclaimed mission-theory (formational, modernization, and civilizational) and peculiar features – alleged driving forces, ideological vector, etc. The author proposes to rely in systematization on the phenomenon itself, rather than on the theoretical basis that this phenomenon should correspond to. From our point of view, a comparative analysis of revolutions based on their algorithm allows determining their sort and type. We propose an approach to comparative analysis of revolutions which is based on two criteria related to the subject of research, namely: an algorithm of a revolution (stages, phases, and developmental vector) and the problems it resolves. Based on these principles, the author concludes that there are two sorts of revolutions, each of which is further subdivided into three types. From the very beginning revolutions manifested themselves as a civilization-scale phenomenon and attracted social thought and researchers across the world. With every revolutionary outbreak, the significance of revolutions would increase while the studies of revolutions became more and more relevant. The attempts to comprehend the differences and similarities between revolutions, i.e. to delineate a primary typology, appeared in the early eighteenth century and allowed making conclusions that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England was in no way similar to its predecessor of the years 1640−1653. Following the onset of the Great French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, it was observed that it fundamentally differed from the two British and the American revolutions, which, in turn, were strikingly dissimilar from each other (Burke 1852: 366; Burke 1869: 80–81; Guizot 1854: 114–116). Meanwhile, the 1789–1799 events in France started to be referred to as a ‘Great Revolution’ (Burke 1852: 125). Shults / On Classification of Revolutions: An Attempt at a New Approach 245 A classification requires repeated occurrences of the same events which can be and should be compared with each other. Since the Reformation seems to be the most similar event in terms of its significance and scale prior to the first revolutions the latter would inevitably be compared to it, with the Reformation referred to as a religious revolution, and the revolutions in England, America and France, as political revolutions (Comte 1896: 189–190; Guizot 1854: 3; Tocqueville 2011: 19–20). In the 1820–1830s, the ideas concerning political and social revolutions start to emerge in the European social thought, which considered the events related to state takeovers as political revolutions, while state reforms were regarded as social revolutions (Hörmann 2011: 62–65). These approaches were mostly associated with the desire to establish and demonstrate that political revolutions had a negative impact, while evolutionary progress by means of reforms is beneficial to countries and nations (Burke 1869: 80–81; Maistre 2003: 40; Tocqueville 2011: 13). However, this approach brought together revolutions, regular coup d'états, religious and civil wars, as well as state reforms. And it is only from the mid-nineteenth century that an in-depth examination of revolutions as an independent phenomenon became possible, since in addition to the first revolutions in England, the USA and France, a wave of revolutions swept through Europe: France in 1830 and 1848, Belgium in 1830, Switzerland in 1847– 1848, revolutions of 1808–1814 in Spain and Portugal, 1820–1834 in Portugal, 1820–1823, 1834–1843, 1854–1856, 1868–1874 in Spain, 1821–1829 in Greece, revolutionary events in Germany in 1848–1849 and the events in Italy from 1848 onwards, when the country unification process became intertwined with revolutionary actions. This volume provided for analysis not only a quantitative component, but also various manifestations of the same phenomenon, which allowed to speak with great reason about different types of revolutions (not in the context of similar but fundamentally different phenomena). The first reference to different types of revolutions was made by Karl Marx, who distinctly pointed out three of them, namely: bourgeois, proletarian (or communist) and a certain intermediate type, which later became known as bourgeois-democratic (i.e., 1848–1849 revolutions in Europe). For Marx, the shift in the mode of production (later denoted as social formation) became the key criterion for the classification of revolutions. The social class whose interests a revolution would serve was another characteristic of classification proposed by Marx, which allowed attributing all revolutions prior to 1848 to bourgeois revolutions, and the Paris Commune – to the proletarian one (Marx 1977a: 161; 1977b: 66–67; Marx and Engels 1910: 12–15, 29; 1977: 380–381). In the twentieth – twenty-first centuries the Marxist researchers tended to rely on this classification system, which was significantly revised by the Soviet school of Marxism. Social Evolution & History / September 2019 246 Vladimir Lenin attempted to modify the scheme proposed by Marx, introducing the ‘popular’ component to the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ (Lenin 1974: 421–422). It is the class composition that distinguishes ‘bourgeois’ from ‘popular bourgeois’ revolutions, the latter are characterized by an alliance between the poorest peasants and the proletarians (Lenin 1974: 421–422). According to Lenin, the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution of 1905–1907 may be attributed to this category (Lenin 1974: 421–422). ‘Popular bourgeois revolutions’ were now referred to as bourgeoisdemocratic. This became the major type of revolution during the imperialist period when socialist revolutions had neither occurred nor were successful, or when it appeared crucial to find a link to socialist revolution in the absence of a bourgeois revolution. The main features of this type of revolution are the following: participation of the majority of population, i.e. of workers and peasants, the existence of a revolutionary proletariat and of a powerful agrarian and peasant movement (see Konstantinov 1960: 203). The term ‘popular-democratic revolution’ was a compromise, like in the case of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The concept was introduced mainly to define the revolutions that occurred in the Eastern European and Third World countries in the twentieth century which did not conform to the then-existing classification system. This type of revolution, according to the more comprehensive Marxist definition, could be of a bourgeois democratic or socialist nature (see Konstantinov 1960: 203). The Soviet Marxist classification of the twentieth-century revolutions recognized bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic, popular-democratic, and socialist (proletarian, communist) revolutions, as well as national-libera-tion revolutions. Due to the fact that national-liberation revolutions do not adhere to the classification criterion, namely, the change in production mode and formation, the sixteenth-century revolution in the Netherlands was classified as a bourgeois revolution, and the national liberation struggle of colonized nations – as a type of bourgeois democratic movement (see Konstantinov 1960: 203). Thus, there is an apparent absence of a universal criterion of classification. This may result in incoherence and also contributes to a loss of meaning. If revolutions aim at changing the mode of production (or formation), there arises a question about the absence of revolutions during the transition from the primitive communal to the slave mode, and from slave to feudal (i.e., if we accept the definition of the historic process as consisting of five modes of production that follow each other consecutively – primitivecommunal, slave, feudal, capitalist and communist). If we choose to consider these transitions between formations, the bourgeois-democratic, popular-democratic and national-liberation revolutions remain unaccounted for. The second issue concerns proletarian revolutions, which never occurred in the history of humankind if one accepts Marx's position as a definitive one. Marx claimed that proletarian revolutions occur when the proleShults / On Classification of Revolutions: An Attempt at a New Approach 247 tariat becomes the largest class. That is, a proletarian revolution is ‘possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least a significant position among the mass of the people’ (Marx 2000: 607). The third issue similarly arises somewhat undeliberately: if bourgeois revolutions are a frequent occurrence in Europe, perhaps there is a pattern, and there are ‘goals and objectives’ (i.e., to actualize the issues which the previous revolution failed to resolve), and it is inaccurate to consider them anachronisms (as formulated by Marx [1977a: 161–162; 1919: 9, 134–135]) and downward revolutions (in Marx's term) merely due to the fact that they would not ‘attain the level’ of a socialist revolution, or to consider them simply a step towards a transition to a socialist revolution. But do they, in fact, belong to a different category of a revolution? The approach based on the definition of ‘a revolutionary class’ is even more questionable. There was no revolution in history purely ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian.’ This is because there has never been a revolution where one class constituted the quantitative majority of the participants in the revolution (Shults 2018, 2019). In the second half of the twentieth century there were made attempts to modernize the aforementioned classification system. One example is the proposition to expand it by introducing the concepts of ‘classic bourgeois revolutions’ that resolved ‘global issues’ of the appropriate century, and national revolutions, which ‘constitute specific mani