Revolution

Conflict and Containment

While many would no doubt consider Plato, author of The Republic, a revolutionary of sorts, it is clear that he was deeply preoccupied by political change, or the metabole that marked the shift between political systems or constitutions. In fact, the very notion of revolution—derived from astronomy but applied to radical social change—did not emerge until the seventeenth century. Instead, what concerned Plato and Aristotle was the stasis, or factional conflict, that led to metabole;, and whose etymological root makes it something of the opposite of our modern notion of revolution.

While Italian theorist Niccolò Machiavelli's emphasis in The Prince on regime preservation and stability and his advocacy of mixed government in The Discourses certainly have ancient overtones, his work lacks the determinism of Plato's (and Aristotle's) sixfold analysis of regimes and the linear path of their breakdown, and hence their pessimism toward metabole. Further, if Aristotle's stasis, or violent strife, was perceived as the fundamental cause of regime change, this same assumption did not hold for Machiavelli, as it was precisely the institutionalization of class conflict in the Roman Republic, albeit without factions, that led to its historic greatness.

States and Revolutions

If Machiavelli's radicalism was a result of his incorporation of class conflict within the bounds of institutionality, then Karl Marx's radicalism grows from his insistence that such conflict inevitably surpasses those same bounds, gaining the status of the motor of history itself. However, for Marx, the study of current and past revolutions plays a significant part in determining the direction of the class struggle. Hence, Marx's own experience of the 1848 June Days informed his understanding of the working-class seizure of the bourgeois state, while the 1871 Paris Commune inspired him to correct his earlier analyses in The Communist Manifesto, laying greater emphasis on the need to not only seize but also to fundamentally transform the state if revolution is to be more than mere restoration.

The question of the state remained at the center of the revolutionary Marxist tradition well into the twentieth century, but its importance was obscured by the vicissitudes of state power in the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Lenin is often credited as the supreme proponent of a vanguardist understanding of revolution—whereby an intellectual elite bestows on the masses the consciousness [Page 1196]necessary to overthrow the old order—such a view is too often mobilized as a retrospective explanation of the errors of Soviet Communism. Whereas Lenin had formulated his vanguardist thesis in What Is to Be Done? (1902), he too was compelled to modify his theory in response to popular rebellion and revolutionary ferment in both 1905 and 1917 Russia. Returning to Marx's own discussion of the commune in his 1917 State and Revolution, Lenin formulated the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional state prefacing the disintegration of the state entirely, thereby arriving at a more substantive view of revolution than the one with which he is generally credited.

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