Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution

Abstract

What meaning can we give to the notion of socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries today? It is appropriate to raise this question in the year of the bi-centenary of the French Revolution. 1789 is usually taken as marking the historical moment when the concept of revolution, as we understand it today, emerged; when the idea of revolution passed from its ancient connotation - cyclical, revolving movements in the political order - to its modern connotation: the creation of an entirely new social and political order. With 1789 we can date '... the revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is, the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, [which] is unprecedented and unequalled in all prior history'. Few would dispute that this eagerness for fundamental social transformation was carried into the world of the twentieth century by socialism, with its aspiration for liberation from the paradoxical freedom of the bourgeois revolution, that is, from the competition and exploitation upon which capitalist social relations are founded; and with its aspiration to build a fully democratic, cooperative and classless society where freedom and equality might realize rather than negate the sociability of humankind.