royal wedding highlights societies patriachy

Ooh we had Wills and Kate colouring in today. Fun.

Yes, I am sure all children need to learn about the dangers of becoming a monarch or a posh rich bastard. It is a viable life choice for all of them.

Real proletarian teachers single out the children of the petit-bourgeoisie and make them submit to self-criticism sessions in front of the working class kids.

But yeah, the princess stuff is bullshit. I had a friend who went to a disability rights training. She was told to imagine being something that made her feel empowered, the suggestion being that she imagine being a princess (not a queen, mind, a princess). She asked if she could be an anarchist instead, which was allowed by the instructor on the condition that 'you don't throw any bombs'.

I was a schoolkid in France just before the 200th anniversary of the Great Revolution. Nationalistic French crap for children involving guillotines and the mob and stuff is much more fun than tedious English nationalistic crap involving aristos with their heads still on.

why was the English revolution so shit :'(

Our bourgeois revolution had the Levelers. They were pretty bad ass till Cromwell started killing them.

oh yeah,I'm not saying everything about the English revolution was shit, but the French was a lot better...

nah the Levellers were almost the labour party of the english rev.
the Diggers & Ranters were the real proto-communist dudes who formed communes etc

Levellers weren't the Labour party. That was Cromwell if anyone, and even he was more a factor of progress than Labour ever was.

Not sure this thread really has much of a topic...

But...

At the republican street party today (yes, it was shite), although I find the idea of kids at protests at best odd, I did have a chuckle at the little girl with her face painted as a zombie holding the sign "princesses suck"!

C'mon, you'd smile.

Harrison Myers

nah the Levellers were almost the labour party of the english rev.
the Diggers & Ranters were the real proto-communist dudes who formed communes etc

Diggers and Ranters were lifestylist drop-outs. I bet they all had trust funds.

RedEd

Diggers and Ranters were lifestylist drop-outs. I bet they all had trust funds.

did they all wear black hoodies and crass patches?

Arbeiten:

I'm not saying everything about the English revolution was shit, but the French was a lot better...

Only 8 percent of those guillotined during the French revolution were from the aristocracy: over 30 percent were peasants. According to The History Channel (admittedly not the most accurate of sources):

72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported minimal crimes.

And a tiny percentage were monarchs - unlike during the English revolution, when I'd guess that monarchs accounted for 100% of those beheaded (well, at least in the winter of 1649).

Samotnaf....did you not see the shit storm that was the royal wedding last week? Something definitely went wrong somewhere.....

Arbeiten - you were comparing bourgeois revolutions, and though the French revolution eventually (after several decades of restoration) abolished the monarchy, whilst the English one involved a compromise between the monarchy, the aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie, the choice between the 2 different forms of capitalism doesn't really make one better than the other, though it certainly makes them very different: in fact, it'd be an interesting discussion to compare the two and assess whether the archaisms of the English system are more of a brake on the development of a subversive class consciousness than the more modern French system...One difference is that it'd be very unlikely for Sarkozy and Carla Bruni to think they could casually make their way to the theatre close to a riotous demonstration against their government believing that people were so deferential as to make them incapable of expressing class anger, unlike what happened in London on December 9th. But that's another forum.

there is no such thing as a "bourgeois revolution" ffs.

Boris Badenov

there is no such thing as a "bourgeois revolution" ffs.

I agree, but what do you mean by this? In my opinion all the big revolutions were fundamentally proletarian/peasant ones hijacked by the bourgeoisie.

I disagree. If revolution is the replacement of the dominance of the power of one class with the dominance of the power of another class, there have been bourgeois revolutions. Just cos they were made alongside other class elements, doesn't detract from the actual shift in class power that occurred. After all, proletarian revolutions have been helped along by elements of the petite-bourgeoisie, peasants and radical intellectuals. Revolutions are always made by cross class alliances to some extent, but their objective character, to sound stalinist for a moment, is determined by who comes out on top. Which is why the French revolution was a bourgeois revolution.

Of course, if something else is meant by revolution, then what I just said may be nonsense.

I don't think that definition of revolution is useful.

888

Boris Badenov

there is no such thing as a "bourgeois revolution" ffs.

I agree, but what do you mean by this? In my opinion all the big revolutions were fundamentally proletarian/peasant ones hijacked by the bourgeoisie.

What you say is partially true, but it is also very reductionist, and that is precisely what makes the "bourgeois revolution" so problematic. Class war is a structural reality, but class consciousness, on a mass scale, is something that is as much created by, as it is responsible for, social-political revolutions. A revolution, in my opinion, is a dialectical clusterfuck of direct action, high politics scheming, empty rhetoric, passionate idealism, etc. This is why it usually forces a class-against-class dynamic, because it starts like a big bang, not a calculated board-game-like battle of wits.
Historically the working classes have obviously had much more of an incentive to overthrow the existing social order, but that doesn't mean that all revolutions are spontaneous social revolts that get "recuperated" by the evil bourgeois. As much as I sympathize with the "anti-political" stance of classical anarchism, the fact is that politics and political language makes all the difference. Who is the bourgeoisie and what constitutes "bourgeois demands"? In 1789 the bourgeoisie included everyone from the lowliest artisan to the wealthiest merchant, and they all had political as well as social demands. It was the dynamics of the revolution that drove a wedge between them, and so the sans-culottes and the Jacobins emerge as expressions of two opposed class consciousnesses. The same goes for 1917; the "spontaneously revolutionary" workers of Petrograd (and even the peasantry) demanded a free small "p" parliament of socialist parties, before the Bolsheviks decided that democracy was bourgeois. But isn't democracy bourgeois? And if it is, how can the purest expression of proletarian revolt be in favor of bourgeois politics? "False consciousness" doesn't cut it for me.
My ultimate point is that a jumbled mass of conflicting tendencies and interests go into a revolution; what comes out is usually a class war in the fullest sense of the word, and the winner is decided in battle, not because they happened to be the right class at the right "stage" of capitalism.
But let's go back to talking about the royal wedding; I kind of miss the whole grotesque spectacle of it tbh.

black hoodies are becoming old fashion. Patch your self with new styles.
Mehndi Dresses

Harrison

RedEd

Diggers and Ranters were lifestylist drop-outs. I bet they all had trust funds.

did they all wear black hoodies and crass patches?

I’m out digging the vegetable patch right now, as usual I’m ranting whilst doing so and of course, I have the obligatory Crass symbol tattoo. On this basis I would say that Red Ed’s, and Harrison’s depictions are pretty accurate.
Ok then, back to being a cliche.