New hash for old beans

I think Nicholas Copernicus' revolution in astronomy illustrates a common moment in the development of science and humanities. People see the new and original overwhelmingly in the context of the old. As more and more was discovered about the motion of the planets the more astronomers had to develop increasingly convoluted and fanciful ways to explain this motion within the ptolemaic system. By assuming something very simple (and to us now very obvious), that the Earth went round the Sun, he was able to cut a swathe through old ideas to reach the truth.

I am currently re-reading Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky. It is excellent literature. In particular it shows how the revolution, or two simultaneous revolutions as Trotsky correctly predicted, pulled in opposite directions. Therein lay the tremendous drama of the revolution. In the absence of an international development the Bolsheviks, who rose to power because they were the only group to recognise the dual nature of the revolution and act accordingly, were forced to suppress this contradiction. The longer Russia's isolation went on the further they were compelled subdue all independent forces, and in the end themselves.

They killed the goose that laid the golden egg. How you deal with this fact is actually fairly indicative of who you are, politically and philosophically. Deutscher's biography is friendly to Trotsky. He certainly seemed to wish the revolution had gained a stronger basis by becoming international. It is an honest account but gets caught in the web that trapped the real-life opposition in Russia.

It is like a discussion I had recently about the notional aims of the French revolution. The revolution, especially the long revolution of 1789-1871, did indeed centralise the French state, which in turn gave room to French capitalist development. But it was not the 'aim' of the revolution, far from it. Centralisation is not a marker of a bourgeois revolution. The are powerful capitalist countries that did not centralise but federate, example the USA, Germany. The marker of a bourgeois revolution is the replacement of feudal and/or colonial rights with bourgeois rights.

Just the same as a socialist revolution is not completed because private property is replaced by public/state property. It is a funny point when the Russian Opposition can critically support Stalin's “left turn” of 1928 because it attacked small-scale private farming in favour of state-led industrialisation but did not allow working class democracy. If the state owns the means of production but the working class does not own the state in what sense is this “left turn” socialism in action? Of course, if we leave the matter at "private property" aren't we guilty of the same abstraction Marx accused Proudhon of making. What kind of private property are we talking about? In British history the destruction of small-scale private farming is associated with the rise of capitalism.

This is not to knock Deutscher or his subject, that would be very silly, but just to point out how lucky we are, in a sense, to be able to have a clearer perspective.