/lit/ - Literature

>>13889108
The bourgeois revolution sought to organize politics to fashion a civilized society where social conflict would be mediated into civil conflict by society itself - but instead the mediating power that is supposed to express the will of society ends up standing above society in the form of the modern state. Legislation proves insufficient to resolve social conflict, and as bourgeois society enters deeper into contradiction through industrialization, the resolution of social conflict being subsumed by the state occurs not through a formal process of law but through the violent imposition of a power over the people. This appears to us moderns as a return to pre-modern barbarism in the face of modern civil government, an apparent return to the dominion of absolute rule of one over the many. Dictatorship is the logical conclusion of democracy as society becomes subsumed by the state.

The bourgeois revolution was supposed to end the dominion of the few over the many, replacing oppression with equality. The notion of the bourgeoisie as the oppressor in Marxism is a legacy of the unfinished bourgeois revolution, where exploitation is just another expression of a theory of rent, so that the industrial bourgeoisie become just another form of rentier aristocracy. The reason why this conception of class relations becomes the dominant one is because the Marxists historically in the 20th century politically continue where the old radical bourgeoisie of the late 18th century left off - as modernizing bringers of civilization - rather than, as Marx intended, an immanent critique of modernity that seeks to go beyond modern civilization from within the conditions modernity sets out for itself. Rather than a movement for revolution, Marxism ends up becoming a movement for reform, reconstituting the contradictions of bourgeois civilization in a different form, which is why the question of reformism a la revisionism contra the political idealism of the dictatorial cult of personality becomes such a heated opposition in the middle of the 20th century, because both sides express the process of the accommodation of the bourgeois state to society in contradiction, through the state subsuming and obscuring the underlying problem - which was the failure of the Revolt of the Third Estate to establish a self-governing society.