My second debt to Deutscher is more specific and directly relates to my theme: his comments on the nature of the bourgeois revolutions. Deutscher was not alone in thinking creatively about bourgeois revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century, of course, but as I hope to demonstrate, he was the first person to properly articulate the scattered insights on this subject by thinkers in what he called the classical Marxist tradition.² I am conscious of the difficulties I face, not only in seeking to defend the scientific validity of bourgeois revolution as a theory but also in attempting to add a hitherto unknown case (and potentially others) to the existing roster. Since Scotland never featured on the lists of great bourgeois revolutions, even in the days when the theory was part of the common sense of the left, arguments for adding the Scottish Revolution to a list whose very existence has been called into question might seem quixotic, to say the least. Therefore, although I will occasionally refer to the specifics of the Scottish experience, my task is the more general one of persuading comrades—particularly those who think me engaged in an outmoded form of knight errantry—of the necessity for a theory of bourgeois revolution.

Bourgeois revolutions are supposed to have two main characteristics. Beforehand, an urban class of capitalists is in conflict with a rural class of feudal lords, whose interests are represented by the absolutist state. Afterward, the former have taken control of the state from the latter and, in some versions at least, reconstructed it on the basis of representative democracy. Socialists have found this model of bourgeois revolution ideologically useful in two ways. On the one hand, the examples of decisive historical change associated with it allow us to argue that, having happened before, revolutions can happen again, albeit on a different class basis. (This aspect is particularly important in countries like Britain and, to a still greater extent, the US, where the dominant national myths have been constructed to exclude or minimize the impact of class struggle on national history.) On the other hand, it allows us to expose the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie that itself came to power by revolutionary means but now seeks to deny the same means to the working class.

Whether this model actually corresponds to the historical record is, however, another matter. For it is doubtful whether any countries have undergone an experience of the sort that the model describes, even England and France, the cases from which it was generalized in the first place. This point has been made, with increasing self-confidence, by a group of self-consciously “revisionist” writers from the 1950s and, particularly, from the early 1970s onward, in virtually every country where a bourgeois revolution had previously been identified. Their arguments are broadly similar, irrespective of national origin: prior to the revolution, the bourgeoisie was not “rising” and may even have been indistinguishable from the feudal lords; during the revolution, the bourgeoisie was not in the vanguard of the movement and may even have been found on the opposing side; after the revolution, the bourgeoisie was not in power and may even have been further removed from control of the state than previously. In short, these conflicts were just what they appeared to be on the surface: expressions of inter-elite competition, religious difference, or regional autonomy.

Even though the high tide of revisionism has now receded, many on the left have effectively accepted the case for the irrelevance of the bourgeois revolutions—perhaps I should call them the Events Formerly Known as Bourgeois Revolutions—to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There are, of course, different and conflicting schools of thought concerning why they are irrelevant, four of which have been particularly influential.

But if the concept can be extended in this way, why confine it to the aftermath of the Second World War, when direct bourgeois rule had still to be achieved across most of the world? In The Enchanted Glass (1988), Anderson’s old colleague Tom Nairn also drew on Mayer’s work to date the triumph of capitalism still later in the twentieth century, “to allow for France’s last fling with the quasi-Monarchy of General de Gaulle, and the end of military dictatorship in Spain, Portugal and Greece.”⁵ If the definitive “triumph” of capitalism requires the internationalization of a particular set of political institutions, then it had still not been achieved at the time these words were written. By the time the second edition was published in 1994, however, the Eastern European Stalinist states had either collapsed or been overthrown by their own populations, events that had clear parallels with the end of the Mediterranean dictatorships during the 1970s.

These revisions mean that the theory no longer applies only to those decisive sociopolitical turning points that removed obstacles to capitalist development. Instead, it now extends to any subsequent changes to existing capitalist states that bring them into more perfect alignment with the requirements of capital accumulation. But there can be no end to these realignments this side of the socialist revolution, which suggests that bourgeois revolutions are a permanent feature of capitalism, rather than a feature associated with its consolidation and extension. On this basis we would have to categorize events like the Indonesian Revolution or the revolutions now opening up in the former Soviet Republics as bourgeois revolutions, when in fact they seem to me far better understood as examples of the broader category of political revolution—political because they start and finish within the confines of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, I am suggesting that the bourgeois revolutions are, like socialist revolutions, examples of that very rare occurrence, a social or societal revolution. These are epochal events involving change from one type of society into another—not merely changes of government, however violently achieved.⁶ But there are political as well as theoretical problems involved. If we accept that the US could bring about the—or “a”—bourgeois revolution in Germany or Japan during the Second World War, there is no logical reason why they cannot bring one about “from above” in Iraq (or Iran, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia) today. Christopher Hitchens used precisely this argument to justify his support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.⁷ Here, “bourgeois revolution” simply means conforming to the political arrangements acceptable to the dominant imperialist powers.

On this basis bourgeois revolutions are no longer even political transformations that bring the state into line with the needs of capital, but can be detected in every restructuring of the system, including the prior process of economic change itself. Some writers on the left have even begun to speak of capitalist globalization as “a second bourgeois revolution.”¹⁰ But by now enumeration is clearly meaningless, since “bourgeois revolution” has simply become a metaphor for an ongoing process of capitalist restructuring that will continue as long as the system exists. Aside from trivializing the analytic value of the concept, such a redefinition is—once again—open to appropriation by ex-revolutionaries seeking a “progressive” justification for supporting the system. Nigel Harris, one ex-Marxist convert to neoliberalism, writes that the “original” bourgeois revolutions were “far from establishing business control of the state”: “Thus, it is only now that we can see the real ‘bourgeois revolution,’ the establishment of the power of world markets and of businessmen over the states of the world.”¹¹

Two aspects of this account are notable. One is that the key social actors are the very class of feudal lords regarded as the enemy to be overthrown in the conventional model of bourgeois revolution. Although Wallerstein and his school do not deny the existence of a bourgeoisie proper, it is the self-transformation of the lords that is decisive, not the actions of the preexisting bourgeoisie. The other is that the nature of the capitalist world system, which the lords are responsible for bringing into being, is defined by the dominance of commercial relationships. Indeed, Wallerstein defines “the essential feature of the capitalist world economy” as “production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit.”¹² Although wage labor certainly exists at the core, it is insertion into the world market that defines the system as a whole as capitalist, since productive relations in the periphery continue to include modified forms of slavery and serfdom, in addition to wage labor. Anyone who produces for the market can therefore be described as a capitalist.

The strengths of this position should not be underestimated. It treats the question—so important for Mayer and those influenced by him—of whether the ruling classes possessed land and title or not as less significant than whether income from these sources was derived from feudal or capitalist methods of exploitation. It also gives due weight to the fact that the advanced nature of the “core” of the system is at least partly dependent on the enforced backwardness of the “periphery.”

But there are problems too. World-systems theory certainly does not see episodes of bourgeois revolution in every political upheaval that changes the relationship of the state to capital, but it equally wants to dissociate them from the ascendancy of capitalism. Wallerstein himself continues to use the term, but it has lost all relation to the creation of a capitalist world economy. Theoretical pluralists, for whom there are no necessary connections between aspects of human existence, might find this acceptable, but Marxists surely cannot. However, there are also difficulties with the theory that must be equally evident to non-Marxists. One is the voluntarism that underlies it. Capitalism apparently arose because the existing class of lords made a conscious decision to transform the basis on which they exploited their tenants and laborers. But, if they were already in such a commanding position, why did they feel the need to change? The most fundamental issue, however, is whether the system described by Wallerstein is actually capitalist at all. It is not only in relation to the periphery but also to the metropolitan centers themselves that a definition of capitalism based on the realization of profit through trade is problematic. The key issue, which Robert Brenner more than anyone else has placed on the agenda, is whether the formation of a world market is equivalent to the establishment of capitalism. As Brenner has pointed out, the argument that expansion of trade is the prime mover in generating capitalist development is often assumed to be that of Marx himself, but it is in fact derived from Adam Smith. Hence, despite their differences, Brenner can legitimately describe Paul Sweezy, Gunder Frank, and Wallerstein as “neo-Smithian” Marxists. Brenner’s own definition of capitalism, to which we will turn next, is also deeply unsatisfactory, but his negative critique is well founded in this respect.

I regard the Brenner thesis as the most serious of the four theoretical tendencies under review here. No serious attempt to construct a defensible version of the theory of bourgeois revolutions can avoid meeting the challenge it poses. I should perhaps begin by saying that the comments that follow are not offered, as it were, in self-defense of my own views. In fact, my position on Scottish capitalist development is—and I choose my words carefully here—not incompatible with the Brenner thesis. Nevertheless, I think the thesis is wrong, although wrong in a stimulating and productive way that has forced those of us who disagree with it to think rather more seriously than we might otherwise have done about, for example, the very nature of capitalism. Discussion of the thesis is complicated by the fact that there is far from complete unanimity among Political Marxists, by which I mean those hard-core supporters—Ellen Meiksins Wood, George Comninel, and my fellow Deutscher Memorial Prize winner Benno Teschke—who in many respects have taken up more extreme positions than Brenner himself. We cannot hold Brenner directly responsible for every interpretation they have made of his original thesis, or even assume that he is necessarily in agreement with all of them. In what follows, I will therefore try to distinguish between Brenner’s own positions, those that are common to the entire school, and those that are held by individual members.

Elements of the Brenner ...