The 4th of July, The Russian October Revolution, and Dr. Guillotin's Efficient Economic Reform

An essay briefly considering elements of the U.S. revolution in comparison to others past and contemporary including speculation about the future has quite a substantial quantity of political history to consider. As this is a brief essay it will in no way attempt a comprehensive review.

Dr. Guillotin invented an expeditious technology for chopping off the heads of the old regime in the aftermath of the French revolution, and the 150 or whatever that piled compiled in peach baskets latter perhaps was not an inspiration for the inventor of basketball (originally fruit baskets nailed up high for boys to toss a pumpkin sized ball in), yet the effort of the inventors was considerable inn each instance.

The French decimated their ranks of nobility though not well enough to preclude their survival as a class, yet the French had more bourgeois that mitigated the social exclusivity of royalty such as existed in Russian during the period following Peter the Great until the October revolution of 1917. In the west, in the United States in particular, our tradition of egalitarianism may not have grown from a stunted condition in the hierarchical churches-a priesthood of believers never formed and the clergy largely reflect the exclusive values set by concentrated wealth globally, yet it did dampen and politically enfeeble the existence of the British nobility in early history of the United States. Americans thus regard revolution abroad from the position of the bourgeois, and have been trained Pavolianishly to support the rich politically whom are considered not as nobility but instead as something like themselves in origin, and whom they can reasonably aspire to be like.

The antinomy of bourgeois egalitarianism is, in the United States of America--communism as espoused by Marx and Lenin. Americans celebrate their own 4th of July in commemoration of social revolution; yet hate the Marxist-Leninist revolution of Russia. All right-fair enough, yet lets consider the social background of Russian during its final 200 years before the 1917 revolution.

Nobles owed a lifetime of service to the Tsar. They were thus granted the right to possess serfs-white slaves generally of Slavic origin (not all were white) to work the land and serve as military troops. The nobility eventually emancipated themselves, yet they increased their power over the serfs who were basically enslaved, bought and sold--they also had to pay taxes. That condition persisted until about 1862 when the serfs were technically emancipated, yet the royal advantage continued for the nobility.

Ninety-Five percent of Russians had been enslaved as serfs. Consider what the United States would have been like in 1862 if ninety-five percent of white people as well as black had been slaves. Though the Tsar technically liberated them the nobility retained nearly complete economic power until 1917. The wonder is that a larger Jacobean reaction did not follow the October Revolution.

Yet Russia did purge it's nobility murdering the royal family so far as possible and removing vestiges of the class social and economic supremacy. Americans today with their prosperous history and natural, national freedom outside of the former slaves and an institution largely inherited from the British that was defended by the powers of concentrated wealth owning slaves, have little comprehension of class oppression by powers of concentrated wealth that comprise a de facto nobility.

Networks of a global nature supporting concentration of wealth and the oppression of U.S. citizens economically and ecologically are today’s American nobility. This 4th of July Americans continue letting their ecology, economy and political liberty slip away into the powers of concentrated wealth and they have no theory about how to change that.

Today the U.S.A. requires an ecological economic renewable policy of egalitarian democracy with limited power to concentrate wealth--with no citizens excluded from at least a reasonable minimum income, in order that a vicious natural selection of the rich and narcissistic value class--from sports to fashion and finance, does not simply reproduce itself and sanction others to extermination in the expansive family economic labyrinth of the United States today. The United States needs a revolution to purge itself of social economic iniquity, and has virtually no prospect for attaining that. Its recent history is not revolutionary at all, but an evolutionary one of Toynbean historical cycles.

The Soviet Union continued the policy of denying freedom to its citizens. Yet it had at least the virtue of purging the nobility from its society effectively. When such powers persist the insider-trading sort of social advantages corrupt social progress inevitably. Yet the political methods required for the change toward a secure egalitarian society for all were bloody and of the less than optimal menu of political evolutionary possibilities.

This 4th of July we may be mostly, or preponderantly thankful that a modern automatic guillotine has not been deployed in Washington D.C. and Boston to deplete the rich in America--even those just visiting, for being nobility of a sort.

We should be cautious about extending out failure to comprehend the nature of reasons for revolution abroad in foreign policy errors. Will we make of Afghanistan another Iran with a Shah as a dictator oppressing fundamentalists eventually? Will the popular Egyptian, Saudi and Yemeni movements to end themselves of royalty or neo-authoritarian leadership bring them to attack America further for supporting the corrupting powers of concentrated wealth and neo-nobility actualized through corporatism?

Our political choices should be laden with intelligence and understanding as well as rhetoric if we are to prosper through legitimate and ecological renewable means rather than through exploitation.