Bourgeois Revolution

One type of social revolution, a democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie, uniting the common masses to overthrow the feudal landlord class and conquer the political power, replace the feudal mode of production with the capitalist mode of production and aim at establishing the capitalist society and the state of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It has removed the obstacles to the development of capitalism primarily by opposing the feudal system and establishing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is an inevitable historical phenomenon in the transition of human society from feudalism to capitalism.

Bourgeois revolutions usually took place when the capitalist mode of production was already in place within feudal society. In the medieval Europe, the factors for the development of the capitalist economy were bred within the feudal society, while at the same time, the decay and decline of the feudal system, the feudal natural economy, feudal absolutism and separatism, feudal privileges and estates, the feudal system and religious theology became an obstacle to the development of the newborn capitalist mode of production, fetters to the development of the productive forces of society. On the other hand, the growing economic strength of the rising bourgeoisie required that the capitalists appropriate the means of production, employ the workers and engage in commodity production, required the replacement of feudal property with capitalist property, free trade, the expansion of domestic and foreign markets, free competition, and the establishment of a capitalist political order dominated by the bourgeoisie, which inevitably produced an intense contradiction with the feudalist relations of production. The development of the productive forces pushed forward by the bourgeoisie was incompatible with the privileges of the guild and the numerous other personal and local privileges (which were only so many fetters to the unprivileged estates) of the feudal order to society. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie was able to unite and lead the masses of the people, to set in motion their revolutionary demands and revolutionary forces, and to overthrow feudal rule and ascend to the political arena on a world-wide scale through revolutionary struggles. Bourgeois revolutions had become a historical necessity at that time.

The basic task of the bourgeois revolution is the seizure of feudal power and its adaptation to the requirements of capitalist development, generally in the main form of the conquest of political power. Lenin pointed out that the bourgeois revolution faced only one task—to sweep away, to cast aside, to destroy all the fetters of the preceding social order. By fulfilling this task every bourgeois revolution fulfils all that is required of it; it accelerates the growth of capitalism.

The revolutions resulted in the replacement of the feudalist system of exploitation by the capitalist system of exploitation, and their ultimate result was the creation of one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, it has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. Bourgeois revolutions have not abolished exploitation and oppression, but only changed the form of exploitation and oppression.

Bourgeois revolutions had different characteristics in different periods and countries. The Reformation and Peasant War in Germany in the early 16th century and the Revolution of the Netherlands in the second half of the 16th century belonged to early bourgeois revolutions. The victory of the English bourgeois revolution in 1640–1648 had opened the epoch of bourgeois world revolutions in the modern times. In 1789, the French bourgeois revolution was more radical and profound, which gave rise to a revolution in the character of the bourgeoisie in the whole European continent. Under the influence of the English and French bourgeois revolutions, by the middle of the 19th century, bourgeois revolutions were basically accomplished in all the major countries of Europe and America, including the American War of Independence in 1775, the Movement for the Unification of Germany in 1848, and the February Revolution of Russia in 1917. In China, the 1911 Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen also belonged to the category of bourgeois revolution. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution in China was a democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie, which overthrew the rule of the Qing Dynasty, put an end to more than 2,000 years of feudal imperialism feudal monarchy and established the Republic of China. However, owing to the weakness and compromise of the bourgeoisie and the lack of courage to radically overthrow the feudal system, the revolution failed; the failure of the revolution showed that neither the bourgeoisie nor the petty-bourgeoisie could lead the Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution to victory.

The bourgeois revolutions established capitalist property and opened up a broad avenue for the development of capitalism across the world. Since the steam engine and new tools transformed the old manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces created by the capitalist society have developed at an unprecedented speed and scale. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. The victory of the bourgeois revolution meant the victory of a new social system, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, the victory of nationalism over provincialism, and the victory of bourgeois law over medieval privileges. The history of human society has since entered the historical stage of capitalism. However, the bourgeois revolutions in modern times were only revolutions in which one exploiting class overthrew another exploiting class, rather than abolishing the exploiting class and emancipating the exploited class and the broad masses of the people. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without the class that opposes it and produces surplus-value for it, therefore, the bourgeois revolution simultaneously prepares the conditions for a new social revolution and a new social system that will replace itself.