Progress literally means an advance, a movement forward. The idea that human history is marked by progress originated in the seventeenth century and reflected the growth of rationalist and scientific thought. A belief in progress, the ‘forward march of history’, subsequently became one of the basic tenets of the Western intellectual tradition. Liberal thinkers, for instance, believed that humankind was progressively emancipating itself from the chains of poverty, ignorance and superstition. In the UK this was manifest in the emergence of the so-called ‘Whig interpretation of history’, which portrayed history as a process of intellectual and material development. In 1848, for instance, in the first chapter of his immensely successful History of England, Thomas Macaulay was able to write that ‘The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral and of intellectual improve-ment.’ The optimism implied by the idea of progress also influenced socialists who believed that a socialist society would emerge out of, or be built on, the foundations of liberal capitalism. Faith in progress has often amounted to a form of historicism, in that it portrays human history as an inevitable process leading humankind from lower levels of civilisation to higher ones. Not uncommonly, this is reflected in the use of biological metaphors like ‘growth’ and ‘evolution’ to describe the process of historical change. However, on what basis is it possible to portray history as remorseless and irresistible progress? Moreover, should progress be steady, evolutionary and reformist, or should it be dramatic, far-reaching and revolutionary?
The Forward March of History
The idea of progress was a product of the scientific revolution and has gone hand in hand with the growth of rationalism. Science provided a rational and reliable form of enquiry through which human beings could acquire objective knowledge of the world around them. As such, it emancipated human beings from the religious doctrines and dogmas that had previously shackled intellectual enquiry and promoted the seculariza-tion of Western thought. Armed with reason, human beings could for the first time not only explain the natural world but also start to understand the society in which they live and interpret the process of history itself. The power of reason gave human beings the capacity to take charge of their own lives and shape their own destinies. When problems exist, solutions can be found; when obstacles block human advance these can be overcome; when defects are identified, remedies are available. Rationalism therefore emancipates humankind from the grip of the past and the weight of custom and tradition. Instead, it is possible to learn from the past, its successes and failures, and move forward. The process of history is thus marked by the accumulation of human knowledge and the deepening of wisdom. Each new generation is able to advance beyond the last.
A belief in inevitable progress is reflected in the tendency to interpret economic, social and political change in terms of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’. The political and social upheavals through which advanced industrial societies came into existence have, for instance, often been described as a process of modernization. To be ‘modern’ means not only being contemporary, being ‘of the present’, but it also implies an advance in relation to the past, a movement away from the ‘old fashioned’ or ‘out of date’. Political modernization is usually thought to involve the emergence of constitutional government, the safeguarding of civil liberties and the extension of democratic rights. In short, a ‘modern’ political system is a liberal-democratic one. Social modernization, in turn, is closely linked to the spread of industrialization and urbanization. ‘Modern’ societies possess efficient industrialized economies and a high level of material affluence. In the same way, Western industrialized societies are often described as ‘developed’ by comparison with the ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ world. Such terminology clearly implies that the liberal-democratic political systems and industrialized economies typically found in the West mark a higher level of civilization compared with the more traditional structures found in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In such cases, ‘traditional’ implies backwardness. Moreover, to describe the process of modernization in the West as ‘development’ suggests that it is the likely, if not inevitable, path that non-Western societies will also tread. Human history is therefore portrayed as an onward march with Western societies in the vanguard. They map out a route which other societies are destined to follow.
Faith in the idea of progress is not, however, universal. Many in the developing world, for example, point out that to interpret political and social progress in exclusively Western terms both fails to appreciate the distinctive culture and traditions of non-Western societies and ignores the possibility that there may be other models of development. More funda-mentally, the very idea of progress has been called into question. Such a position, usually adopted by conservative theorists, suggests that faith in rationality is often misplaced. As Burke suggested, the world is simply too vast and too complicated for the human mind to comprehend fully. If this is true, ‘systems of thought’, typically devised by liberal and socialist theorists, will inevitably simplify or distort the reality they set out to explain. Quite simply, no reliable ‘blueprint’ exists which enables human beings to remodel or reform their world. Where attempts have been made to improve political and social circumstances, whether through reform or revolution, conservatives often warn, in Oakeshott’s words, that ‘the cure may be worse than the disease’. Wisdom therefore dictates that human beings should abandon the delusion of progress and base their actions instead upon the firmer ground of experience, history and tradition.
Progress Through Reform
The earliest meaning of ‘reform’ was literally to re-form, to form again, as when soldiers re-form their lines. This meaning of reform, ironically, has a reactionary character since it implies the recapturing of the past, the restoration of something to its original order. This backward-looking aspect of reform was evident in the use of the term ‘Reformation’ to describe the establishment of the Protestant churches in the sixteenth century, because its supporters saw it as a movement to restore an older and supposedly purer form of spiritual experience. However, in modern usage, reform is more commonly associated with innovation rather than restoration; it means to make anew, to create a new form, as opposed to returning to an older one. Reform is now inextricably linked to the ideas of progress. For example, to ‘reform your ways’ means to mend your ways; a ‘reformed character’ is a person who has abandoned his or her bad habits; and a ‘reformatory’ is a place which is meant to help correct anti-social behaviour. For this reason, the term ‘reform’ always carries positive overtones, implying betterment or improvement. Strictly speaking, there-fore, it is contradictory to condemn or criticize what is acknowledged to be a reform.
Nevertheless, reform denotes a particular kind of improvement. Reform indicates changes within a person, institution or system which may remove their undesirable qualities but which do not alter their fundamental character: in essence, they remain the same person, institution and system. For instance, to demand the reform of an institution is to call for a reorganization of its structure, an alteration of its powers or a change of its function, but it is not to propose that the institution itself be abolished or be replaced by a new one. In that sense, reform stands clearly in opposition to revolution: it represents change within continuity. Indeed, in order to advocate reform it is necessary to believe that the person, institution or system in question has within it the capacity to be saved or improved. Political reform therefore stands for changes like the extension of the franchise and institutional adjustments which take place within the existing constitutional structure; social reform, similarly, refers to im-provements in public health, housing or living conditions which help to improve the social structure rather than fundamentally alter it. Reform thus amounts to a qualified endorsement of the status quo; it suggests that, provided they are improved, existing institutions, structures and systems are preferable to the qualitatively new ones that could replace them. For this reason, reform stands for incremental improvement rather than a dramatic upheaval, gradual progress rather than a radical departure, evolution rather than revolution.
To advocate reform is to prefer evolutionary change to revolutionary change. In biology ‘evolution’ refers to a process of genetic mutation taking place within each species which either fits the species to survive and prosper within its environment or else fails to do so, in which case the species will die out. This is what Charles Darwin (1809–82) referred to as ‘natural selection’. In this way, higher and more complex species, such as humankind, have evolved from lower and more simple ones like the apes. This is, nevertheless, a very gradual process, taking perhaps thousands and maybe millions of years. However, it is precisely the gradual and incremental nature of evolutionary change that has encouraged both liberals and parliamentary socialists to advocate reform rather than revolution.
Liberal reformism is often associated with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. This provided the basis for what was called ‘philosophic radicalism’, which helped to shape many of the most prominent reforms in nineteenth-century Britain. Founded upon the utilitarian assumption that all individuals seek to maximise their own happiness, and applying the goal of general utility – ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ – the philosophic radicals advocated a wide range of legal, economic and political reforms. Bentham proposed that laws be thoroughly codified and the legal system be put on a soundly rational basis, with no place being found for traditionalist ideas like common law or metaphysical notions, such as ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rights’. In economic life, the philosophic radicals were keen supporters of the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772–1823), and were thus critical of any attempt to constrain the workings of the market through monopoly or protectionism. Their programme of political reform centred upon the demand for greater democracy, including a commitment to frequent elections, the secret ballot and universal suffrage. Indeed, the zeal of these liberal reformers ensured that during the nineteenth century Britain was transformed from a hierarchic and aristocratic society into a modern parliamentary democracy.
Socialist reformism, which emerged towards the end of the century, consciously built on these liberal foundations. The Fabian Society, for instance, founded in 1884 and named after the Roman general, Fabius Maximus, famous for the patient and delaying tactics with which he defeated Hannibal, emphasized its faith in ‘the inevitability of gradualism’. The Fabians openly rejected the ideas of revolutionary socialism, repre-sented by Marxism, and proposed instead that a socialist society would gradually emerge out of liberal capitalism through a process of incremental and deliberate reform. Such ideas were widely taken up by parliamentary socialists in Europe and elsewhere. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism ([1898] 1962) marked the first major critique of orthodox Marxism, and championed the idea of a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. This tradi-tion of socialist reformism constitutes the basis of modern Western social democracy. In The Future of Socialism (1956), Anthony Crosland defined socialism not as the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a system of common ownership, but as steady progress made towards the goal of equality, a more equitable distribution of rewards and privileges in society. This, he argued, would be brought about through a gradual process of social reform, involving in particular the expansion of the welfare state and the improvement and extension of educational provision.
Reform as a process of evolutionary change has a number of advantages over revolution. In the first place, by bringing about change within continuity, reform can be brought about peacefully and without disrupting social cohesion. Even when the cumulative affect of reform amounts to fundamental change, because it is brought about in a piecemeal fashion, bit by bit, and over an extended period, it is more likely to be acceptable, even to those who are at first unsympathetic. This was apparent in the establishment of political democracy in most Western societies through the gradual extension of the franchise, first to working-class men, and finally to women. By contrast, revolution reflects an attempt forcibly to impose change on society. As such, it dramatically polarizes opinions and deepens divisions, and is often accompanied by violence, which may be regarded as morally unacceptable. A second argument in favour of reform is that it is prepared to build upon what already exists, rather than simply discard it. In this way, reform appeals to a pragmatic style of politics in which policy is dictated more by practical circumstances than by abstract theory. To some extent, reform accepts what conservatives have tradi-tionally taught: all theories and systems of thought are liable to be defective. To break completely with the past by bringing about revolu-tionary change is, in effect, to enter unknown territory without a reliable map for guidance.
Third, reform appeals to the best empirical traditions of scientific enquiry. Reform is an incremental process: it advances by a series of relatively small steps. Modern welfare states, for example, have not been constructed overnight; they are developed over a period of time through reforms which progressively extend the social security system, expand health and education provision and so forth. In the USA, the welfare programme of the 1960s built upon foundations laid under F.D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Similarly, the Attlee reforms in the UK in the 1940s extended programmes which had been introduced by Asquith before the First World War. The virtue of incrementalism is that it proceeds through a process of ‘trial and error’. As reforms are introduced their impact can be assessed and adjustments can be made through a further set of reforms. If progress is founded upon a belief in rationalism, reform is simply a way of bringing about progress through on-going experimentation and observation. Evolu-tionary change is therefore a means of expanding and refining human knowledge. To rely upon reform rather than revolution is to ensure that our desire to change the world does not outstrip our knowledge about how it works.
Progress Through Revolution
Revolution represents the most dramatic and far-reaching form of change. In its most common sense, revolution refers to the overthrow and replacement of a system of government, quite distinct from reform or evolution where change takes place within an enduring constitutional framework. However, the earliest notions of revolution, developed in the fourteenth century, denoted not so much fundamental change as the restoration of proper political order, usually thought of as ‘natural’ order. This created the idea of revolution as cyclical change, evident in the verb ‘to revolve’. Thus, in the case of both the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688) in Britain, which established a constitutional monarchy, and the American Revolution, through which the American colonies gained independence, the revolutionaries themselves believed that they were re-establishing a lost moral order rather than creating a historically new one.
Nevertheless, the association between revolution and fundamental changes also has a long history. The English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, which culminated in the ‘Glorious Revolution’, involved the over-throw of the monarchy and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The American Revolution not only achieved indepen-dence but also led to the creation of a constitutional republic, the United States of America. The modern concept of revolution, however, was most clearly influenced by the French Revolution (1789), which set out, openly and deliberately, to destroy the ancien re´gime or old order. The French Revolution became the archetypal model for the European revolutions which broke out in the nineteenth century, like those of 1830 and 1848, and decisively influenced the revolutionary theories of thinkers such as Marx. In the same way, the Russian Revolution (1917), the first ‘socialist’ revolution, dominated revolutionary theory and practice for much of the twentieth century, providing an example which inspired among others the Chinese Revolution (1949), the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Vietnamese Revolution (1972) and the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979).
Competing theories of revolution tend to lean heavily upon particular revolutions to bear out the characteristic features of their model. Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), for example, focused heavily upon the English and American Revolutions in developing the essentially liberal view that revolutions reflect a quest for freedom and so highlight the failings of the existing political system. Marx, on the other hand, looking to the example of the French Revolution, regarded revolution as a stage in the inevitable march of history, reflecting the contradictions which exist in all class society. In reality, however, no two revolutions are alike; each is a highly complex historical phenomenon, containing a mix of political, social and cultural features that is, perhaps, unique. The ‘Islamic Revolution’ (1979) in Iran, for instance, represented a backward-looking movement attempting to establish theocratic absolutism, quite at odds with the Western idea of revolution as progressive change. The East European revolutions (1989–91), which saw the overthrow or collapse of orthodox communist regimes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, created the spectacle of a socialist revolution being itself overthrown by a revolution which, to some extent, sought to resurrect pre-socialist principles. Among other things, this cast grave doubt on the conventional notion of historical progress.
Revolution may indeed be another example of an ‘essentially contested’ concept. It may be impossible to decide objectively whether a revolution has taken place since there is no settled definition of ‘revolution’. Never-theless, it is possible to identify a number of features which are character-istic of most, if not all, revolutions. First, revolutions are periods of dramatic and sudden change. Revolutions involve a major upheaval which takes place within a limited time span. When the term ‘revolution’ is used to describe profound change brought about gradually over a long period of time, as with the Industrial Revolution, it is being used metaphorically. In some cases, however, an initial and sudden upheaval may give way to a longer and more evolutionary process of change. In that sense, the Russian Revolution started in 1917 but continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, its goal of ‘building communism’ still not having been completed. Secondly, revolutions are usually violent. By challenging the existing regime, revolutionaries are forced to operate outside the existing constitutional framework, which means resorting to an armed struggle or even civil war. There are nevertheless many examples of revolutions brought about with little bloodshed. For example, only three people died in August 1991 as tanks attacked the barricades around the White House, the Russian parliament building, during the failed military coup d’e´tat which, by the December, had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Third, revolutions are popular uprisings, usually involving demonstra-tions, strikes, marches, riots or some other form of mass participation. David Beetham (1991) has suggested that the defining characteristic of revolution is extra-legal mass action, brought about, in effect, by the loss of legitimacy. The level of popular involvement is, however, often difficult to calculate. From one point of view, for example, the Russian Revolution of November 1917 had more the character of a coup d’e´tat than a popular revolution, in that power was seized by a tightly knit band of Bolshevik revolutionaries. Nevertheless, this misses the point that the Bolshevik seizure of power was the final act in a process that had started the previous March with the collapse of the Tsarist regime amidst a wave of popular demonstrations. Finally, revolutions bring about fundamental change, not merely the replacement of one governing elite or ruling class by another. A revolution therefore consists of a change in the political system, in the very foundations of a society.
A preference for revolution over reform is based on the belief that reform is little more than a sham. In effect, reform serves to perpetuate that which it appears to condemn. This has been the analysis of generations of revolutionary socialists, who have seen reformism not so much as a means of achieving social progress but as a prop of the capitalist system. In Social Reform or Revolution ([1899] 1937), for instance, Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) attacked the reformist drift of German socialism by portraying parliamentary democracy as a form of ‘bourgeois democ-racy’. She castigated electoral politics as a form of ‘parliamentary cretinism’, which betrayed rather than served the proletariat. Perhaps the most outspoken critic of reformism, V.I. Lenin argued in The State and Revolution ([1917] 1973) that parliamentary elections amounted to nothing more than deciding ‘every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament’.
In the view of revolutionaries such as Luxemburg and Lenin, reformism should be condemned on two counts. First, it misses the target: it addresses superficial problems but never fundamental ones. Revolutionary socialists argue that exploitation and oppression are rooted in the institution of private property and thus in the capitalist system. Reformists, on the other hand, have turned their attention to other issues, such as economic security, broader welfare rights and the struggle for political democracy. Even when such reforms have improved living and working conditions, they have failed to bring about root-and-branch change because the capitalist class system is left intact. Second, reform may not only fail to address fundamental problems, it may be part of the problem itself. Revolutionaries have alleged that reform may actually strengthen capital-ism, indeed that capitalism’s susceptibility to reform has been the secret of survival. From this perspective, the development of political democracy and the introduction of a welfare state have served to reconcile the working masses to their exploitation, persuading them that their society is just and fair. In that sense, perhaps all reform has a conservative character: it serves to bring about change but within an established constitutional or socio-economic framework. Such a line of thought clearly has an appeal that extends well beyond socialism, and has led to the emergence of revolutionary forms of doctrines such as anarchism, nation-alism, feminism and religious fundamentalism.
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