Susan Du

Professor Derluguian

Revolutions and Social Change

October 14, 2010

Revolutions and the Ladder of Human Progress

Though the father of the most radical political and economic model of the modern era will maintain that all human history is the “history of class struggles”, the essential implication of Marx’s major premise is in fact that all great changes in the history of civilization have been made through incentives of economic disparity between people who—by the tenets of natural law—should be equals in any other sense. Throughout human history, society as a whole has evolved along a theoretical line toward ultimate perfection of its economic systems, touching upon such industrial models as primitive subsistence production, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism before even so much as conjecturing the possibility of communism, which in its ideal practice should coincide with the final realization of social utopia. At each of these great stages of economic evolution in the progressive model of the growth of civilization, however, the old incumbent order had to be toppled in favor of the new way of life. Hence, revolutions with all their pomp and zealotry were ever necessary to promote humanity’s next great leap of maturation upon the ladder of social progressivism. And revolutions, of course, arose as the product of not only dissatisfaction on the part of the “have-nots” at every stage of economic development, but the have-nots’ circumstantial ability to upset old regimes and instate new ones on the grounds of fresh ideology.  

Since the beginning of time, the most self-evident means of producing for survival was subsistence hunting, gathering, and farming, which involved individuals providing only which they needed to get by on a daily basis. With the innovation of large scale agriculture however, social stratification occurred alongside the need for specialized areas of the economy. While some people remained farmers, others rose through the ranks of miller, merchant, lawyer, doctor, etc, and thus the concept of social classes emerged. With social classes came inevitable economic contention. In order for the elite segments of society to prosper, the balance of wealth had to shift dramatically away from the mass populations of people who could be effectively exploited to that end. This concept was manifested in the adoption of the slavery and feudal systems (the latter was really a close evolution of the former, only exercised within the same racial demographics), which functioned alongside master and slave, aristocrat and serf relations. The injustices of this system of hereditary entitlement were self-evident: the plebeian riled for centuries on account of such privileges as collecting rents, imposing restrictive laws, practicing prima nocta, etc. which the nobility exploited by justification of birthright alone.

Thus the preconditions for peasants to rebel against the aristocracy existed for centuries before the great waves of revolution in the late 18^th century actually took place. What boosted the common plebian desire to overthrow their oppressors beyond pure vindictive motives—for the purpose of fashioning a new world order of equal opportunity for all—was in fact the emergence of strong ideologies which large masses of people could empathize with and rally behind. The onset of the American Revolution promulgated Enlightenment era philosophies dealing with the “natural right” of all peoples to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. The then-radical agenda of the Americans to incorporate a citizen-run government in which  every man was rewarded on the basis of his ability rather than the circumstance of his birth appealed especially to the French people on the onset of revolution in 1789. Already pushed to an inevitable breaking point after grievances aggregated from bad harvests, rapidly falling purchasing power, and aristocratic indifference to their plight, the French peasantry leapt at the chance of taking to arms and to the streets once presented with the incendiary publications of the leading revolutionary writers of the day—Marat and Danton. The revolutions across Europe which followed the French lead in the turbulent years of Napoleon’s campaigns further spread Enlightenment ideals of self-determination and liberty despite what the ulterior motives of the political leaders of the French empire were at the time. Everywhere, the oppressed revolted against their oppressors when given the possibility of making real social change. Ultimately, the most far-reaching and significant consequence of the French Revolution was to bring Europe out of the Middle Ages. With the introduction of Enlightenment ideologies—the precedent for modern-day capitalist economic theory—the old system of feudalism was effectively phased out of history.

Capitalism then, was just as much a product of revolutions against feudalism as a necessary development to accommodate the human ambition for wealth against a backdrop of the Industrial Revolution. Just as the Agricultural Revolution set the scene for feudalism by providing the opportunity for a small segment of the society at large to exploit the masses in an agriculturally-intensive economy, the Industrial Revolution saw the rise of a new world “aristocracy” which invested in the labor of a different “plebian” force in order to advocate its own interests. The new privileged classes of the early 19^th century were generally composed of bourgeois liberals. Their philosophical roots in the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality and science characterized in large part the economic culture of the day: nobody was entitled to tithes simply based on their social standing but rather their business savvy—their ability to make money from money. Idealistically, the capitalist system is a very existential one in that under it, the common man may choose the quality of his life. On the surface level, it was really a policy of the people.  Realistically however, the capitalist system—like any other economic system which allowed for the accumulation of private wealth—also provided for the inevitability of an “expendable” class. In order for capitalists to turn a profit, the costs of labor had to be minimized, and this social Darwinism essentially led to what seemed like a fatalist society in which the rich only got richer and the poor mired ever deeper in a vicious cycle of poverty which they could not escape from. It was then that social critics pointed out that while the capitalist system was ideal in theoretical emphasis on fairness and the merit system, in practice its success still depended on the exploitation of the working class.

The answer to this issue then arose in the philosophical discourse of Marx and Engels, whose radical new vision of a communist world order (which actually resembled that of ancient primitive collectivism yet in fact depended upon a sophisticated global complex of economic interaction) became the staple of the next stage in the ladder of human progressivism. Communism was promoted as the answer to the problem of capitalism’s inherent inequality. Its ultimate goal was the creation of a classless society in which wealth was not necessarily determined by ownership of the means of production, but instead shared within the community at large. Private property on the industrial front would be abolished, and thus so would the class tensions which followed capitalism so closely. In many ways communism was born of a desire to reform capitalism—certainly at the very least capitalism had to exist as a prerequisite for communism to take off, as neither the worker’s fierce resentment of their roles under the wage system nor the intricate industrial interactivity of economies which communism requires could have been present before it. Thus the working class revolutions of 1848 were founded mainly on grounds of dissatisfaction with the balance of wealth under the capitalist movement as well as ideas for a total revamping of society’s very comprehension of money and property which Marx and Engel’s groundbreaking Communist Manifesto presented. To this day, however, there has yet to be a state which functions perfectly along lines of ideal communist ideology. The rulers of states are oftentimes too corrupt to follow through with total implementation of Marx’s theories, or the people themselves may revile the thought of abolishing private property, or the very concept of Marxist economics in play on a global scale may be fated to failure on the very terms which are required of its survival. Some may argue that communism is essentially flawed because while it thrives on the idea of the elimination of the market, in order to retain global commerce a capitalist system must still be maintained in the relationships between individual states which may be communist domestically.

In the grand scheme of things, human history is a progressive ladder toward total perfection of its economic systems. The major steps in this ladder as of today are economic eras defined by primitive subsistence production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. For each industrial model which allowed for professional stratification and the possibility for one social group to gain wealth at the expense of another, class struggles aligned with motivational ideologies impelled a turnover of the status quo. Revolutions were what created changes of lasting significance in the general overview of human history. 

Works Consulted

Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.

            Print.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.