Admittedly, then everything was founded upon faith in predestination and upon a strict religious morality; now with us militant atheism reigns supreme. But running beneath the religious form of puritanism there was the preaching of the historical mission of a new class, and the teaching on predestination was a religious approach to an historical pattern.
Cromwell’s fighters felt themselves to be in the first place puritans and only in the second place soldiers, just as our fighters acknowledge themselves to be above all revolutionaries and conununists and only then soldiers. But the points of divergence are even greater than the points of similarity.
The Red Army formed by the party of the proletariat remains its armed organ. Cromwell’s army, which also embodied his party, became itself the decisive force. We can see how the puritan army began to adapt parliament to itself and to revolution. The army obtained the expulsion of the eleven Presbyterians, that is, the representatives of the right-wing, from parliament. The Presbyterians, the Girondists [10] of the English revolution, attempted to raise a rebellion against parliament.
A truncated parliament sought salvation in the army and thus all the more subordinated itself to it. Under the pressure of the army, and particularly of its left and more resolute wing, Cromwell was compelled to execute Charles I. The axe of revolution was bizarrely intertwined with psalms. But the axe was more persuasive.
Then Cromwell’s Colonel Pride surrounded parliament and ejected eighty-one Presbyterian members. Of parliament there remained but a rump. It consisted of Independents, that is, of supporters of Cromwell and his army; but for just this reason Parliament, which had waged a colossal struggle against the monarchy, at the moment of victory ceased to be a source of any independent thinking and force whatsoever.
Cromwell was the focal point of both the former and the latter and he rested directly upon the army, but in the final analysis drew his strength from his bold solution of the fundamental tasks of the revolution.
A fool, an ignoramus or a Fabian can see in Cromwell only a personal dictatorship. But in fact here, in the conditions of a deep social rupture, a personal dictatorship was the form taken on by the dictatorship of a class which was, moreover, the only one capable of liberating the kernel of the nation from the old shells and husks.
The British social crisis of the seventeenth-century combined in itself features of the German Reformation of the sixteenth century with features of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century. In Cromwell Luther [11] joins hands with Robespierre.
The Puritans did not mind calling their enemies philistines but the matter was nonetheless one of class struggle. Cromwell’s task consisted of inflicting as shattering a blow as possible upon the absolutist monarchy, the court nobility and the semi-Catholic Church which had been adjusted to the needs of the monarchy and the nobility.
For such a blow, Cromwell, the true representative of the new class, needed the forces and passions of the masses of people. Under Cromwell’s leadership the revolution acquired all the breadth vital for it.
In such cases as that of the Levellers, where it exceeded the bounds of the requirements of the regenerate bourgeois society, Cromwell ruthlessly put down the “Lunaticks.” Once victorious, Cromwell began to construct a new state law that coupled biblical texts with the lances of the “holy” soldiers, under which the deciding word always belonged to the pikes.
On 19th April 1653 Cromwell broke up the rump of the Long Parliament. In recognition of his historical mission the Puritan dictator saw dispersed members on the way with biblical denunciations: “Thou drunkard!” he cried to one; “Thou adulterer!” he reminded another.
After this Cromwell forms a parliament out of representatives of God-fearing people, that is, an essentially class parliament; the God-fearers were the middle class who completed the work of accumulation with the aid of a strict morality and set about the plunder of the whole world with the Holy Scriptures on their lips.
But this cumbersome Barebone’s Parliament [12] also hampered the dictator by depriving him of the necessary freedom of manoeuvre in a difficult domestic and international situation. At the end of 1653 Cromwell once again purged the House of Commons with the aid of soldiers.
If the rump of the Long Parliament dispersed in April had been guilty of deviating to the right, towards deals with the Presbyterians – then Barebone’s Parliament was on a number of questions inclined to follow too closely along the straight road of Puritan virtue and thus made it difficult for Cromwell to establish a new social equilibrium.
The revolutionary realist, Cromwell, was building a new society. Parliament does not form an end in itself, law does not form an end in itself, and although Cromwell himself and his “holy” men regarded the fulfillment of divine behests to be ends in themselves these latter were merely the ideological material for the building of a bourgeois society.
In dispersing parliament after parliament Cromwell displayed as little reverence towards the fetish of “national” representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God.
Nonetheless it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse up on the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration.
The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the Restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen. This, the converse of the proverb, is far truer, at least so far as the sword of revolution is concerned.
As an illustration of the inter-relations between “law” and “force” in an era of social overturns the Long Parliament will always retain an especial interest, undergoing as it did for twenty years all the vicissitudes of the course of events, reflecting in itself the shocks of class forces, truncated from the right and the left, first rising up against the King, then receiving a slap in the eye from its own armed servants, twice dispersed and twice recalled, now commanding and now demeaning itself, before finally obtaining the opportunity of passing the act of its own dissolution.
Whether the proletarian revolution will have its own “long” parliament we do not know. It is highly likely that it will confine itself to a short parliament. However it will the more surely achieve this the better it masters the lessons of Cromwell’s era.
On the second and genuinely proletarian revolutionary tradition we shall here say but a few words.
The era of Chartism is immortal in that over the course of a decade it gives us in condensed and diagrammatic form the whole gamut of proletarian struggle – from petitions in parliament to armed insurrection.
All the fundamental problems of the class movement of the proletariat – the inter-relation between parliamentary and extraparliamentary activity, the role of universal suffrage, trade unions and co-operation, the significance of the general strike and its relation to armed insurrection, even the inter-relation between the proletariat and the peasantry – were not only crystallised out of the progress of the Chartist mass movement but found out their principled answer.
Theoretically this answer was far from always irreproachable in its basis, the conclusions were not always fully drawn and in the movement as a whole and in its theoretical expression there was much that was immature and unfinished.
Nonetheless the revolutionary slogans and methods of Chartism are even today, if critically dissected, infinitely higher than the sickly sweet eclecticism of the MacDdnalds and the economic obtuseness of the Webbs.
To use a hazardous comparison then, it can be said that the Chartist movement resembles a prelude which contains in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera. In this sense the British working class can and must see in Chartism not only its past but also its future.
As the Chartists tossed the sentimental preachers of “moral force” aside and gathered the masses behind the banner of revolution, so the British proletariat is faced with ejecting reformists, democrats and pacifists from its midst and rallying to the banner of a revolutionary overturn.
Chartism did not win a victory not because its methods were incorrect but because it appeared too soon. It was only an historical anticipation. The 1905 revolution also suffered defeat. But its tradition lived on for twelve years and its methods were victorious in October 1917.
Chartism is not at all liquidated. History is liquidating Liberalism and prepares to liquidate the pseudo-Labour pacifism precisely so as to give a second birth to Chartism on new, immeasurably broader historical foundations. That is where you have the real national tradition of the British labour movement!
Footnotes
1*. It is curious that, two centuries later, in 1842 in fact, the historian Macaulay as an MP protested against universal suffrage for the very same reasons as Cromwell. – L.D.T.
2*. Macaulay means revolutionary agitators. – L.D.T.
Notes
- Leader of the left wing of the Jacobin coalition in the French Revolution. Called for the king’s execution. Became head of government in the second period of the revolution from 1793 to 1794 characterized by the dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie supported by the working masses of the capital. He organized the Reign of Terror but was overthrown on the 9th Thermidor (27th July, 1794) by a counter-revolutionary coup and was executed.
- Alexei Arakcheev was Russian
