“To the Bastille!”

On being informed of the events that had taken place by the grand master of the wardrobe the king exclaimed “It is a revolt.” “No, Sire!” replied the grand master, “it is a revolution.”

On July 14, the French Revolution broke out when the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, that gruesome prison symbol of the rotten system of  terror and oppression. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – these were the watchwords of the history-making masses who helped shape the  future development of mankind. Shortly after the takeover of La Bastille on July 14, one of the first action of the Constituent Assembly was to proclaim the official abolition of feudalism.

The feudal system of the Middle Ages was the social and economic exploitation of peasants by the nobility. Typically a feudal system can be defined as a society with inherited social rank. In the Middle Ages, wealth came exclusively from agriculture: the aristocracy owned the land while the serfs provided the work. This led to an economy always marked by exploitation and wide gaps between rich and poor.

Ironically, feudalism is making a comeback.  It is hard to ignore the present similarity. The concept of dynasties rules For example, attendance at Ivy-League schools in the US is principally an inherited privilege. The same can be said for elected positions in Congress. The feudal era relation of a serf to his lord is essentially identical to the relation of a so-called WalMart shelf-stacker to a heir of the Walton family wealth. Robber Barons sit in the board rooms in the citadel of Wall St. and journalists talk of the oligachs and plutocrats as dark lords of finance. The Chinese describe their elite as the Princelings. The well-oiled wheels of the global corporate machine is breaking our backs by grinding and crushing the accomplishments of more than 250 years to return us to the servitude of feudalism.

The great lesson of history is that the working class must be organised independent of, and in uncompromising opposition to the capitalist class and to forger will  only at the cost of continued and greater defeats. The Revolution’s origins were so profoundly capitalist  (the idea of socialism had not yet been born) that a few weeks after July 14 when the National Assembly, freed by the people from the aristocrat attacks, set up the electoral regime and excluded millions of the working poor from the vote, not a single deputy, not even the most democratic of them, remembered that at the Bastille the workers of Paris conquered in the name of the poor of France. Thanks to these valiant men and women there is nothing that belongs wholly to the bourgeoisie, not even its Revolution.

It appeared for a moment as if the entire poor, workers and peasants, was going to rise against the old feudal regime and the new bourgeois regime and that a profound and formidable class struggle, a struggle of all the have-nots against the haves was going to substitute itself for the superficial revolution of bourgeois and peasant property against the privileges of the nobles. The time wasn’t right. Under the fear of the unknown and before the uprising of the have-nots the well-to-do  elected men of whom they were sure, established a militia, and, having thus guaranteed the order of property within the revolution, fell on the feudal system.

 French workers, with revolutionary traditions second to none, have shown great recuperative powers in the past. They will once again arise in the struggle for  liberty, equality and fraternity. They will in united action with the workers of other lands establish World Socialism that alone can give true meaning to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and realise the whole idea of human justice. According to socialism, every person has henceforth a right to the means of development which society has created. Every human being has a right to complete growth. And as the community can only ensure the rights of the individual by putting the means of production at his or her disposal, the community itself must have the collective right of ownership over all the means of production.