It is precisely this kind of break which the bourgeoisie since 1848 bas refused to make. This in turn has prevented the completion of the democratic revolution or stalled it altogether.
Today, we would add a few more. demands to the democratic programme, particularly democratic: demands relating to the liberation of women.
Small wonder today's bourgeoisie for the most part prefers to cling on to existing regimes rather than risk the outcome of a thoroughgoing, democratic revolution!
The fact is that while some bourgeois may support some or even all of those demands - and thus find themselves in a degree of conflict with the old regimethe democratic bourgeoisie is, like the aristocracy, a propertied class, and one whose wealth and position derives more obviously from the exploitation of workers, This common bond of property always proves stronger chan any emotional attachment or moral commitment thcy may have to democracy.
The only consistently revolutionary class, the only propertyless class with no interests in preserving the old order, is the working class, the industrial proletariat.
While it: must make common cause in the struggle for democ racy, and while it must make alliances with the poorest peasants and petry bourgeois, the central factor for the working class must remain its political and organisational independence.
Marx and Engels emphasised this as one of the most basic lessons of the 1848 revolutions.
"The workers' party must go into battle with the maximum degree of organisational unity and independence, so that it is not exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie as in 1848.° Against those who think revolutionaries should plunge uncritically into alliances and unified organisations with radical-sounding bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaders and parties in the less developed countries (recent examples include Mexico and the Philippines), an analysis of the German situation led Marx and Engels to draw out an apt warning: "The petty bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful. It not only embraces the great majority of the urban middle class, the small industrial merchants and master craftsmen; it also includes among its followlook to the consolidation of power by petty bourgeois regimes in Angola, Mozambique or other examples going back to the Algerian Revolution and including Yassir Arafat's reactionary regime in the West Bank statelet, The general lesson for the working class was summed up by Marx and Engels:
"Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property. but to abolish it, not to bush up class antagonisms . DUt to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a real one."
Such was the richness of the revolutionary experience they were examining 150 years ag0 hat Marz and Bagels were able to detail the methods of entrapment cmployed by the "democratic petty bourgeois", - the equivalent of today's reformist wing of the workers' movement and the need to resist. an "They the petty bourgeois democrats| extend the hand of friendship and seck to found a great opposition party which will embrace all democratic opinion; that is they seck to ensnare workcrs in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases prevail, while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace the specific demands of the proletarat may not be presented.
"Such unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy."
Marx and Engels called instead for an independent organisation of a workers' party "alongside the official democrats": "During and after the struggle the workers must at every oppor tunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government..
"They must check in every way the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follows every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new povernment." • Quotations are from Marx The Class Struggles in France 1848-50, and from the Penguin edition Marx, The Revolutions of 1848.
Dave Bangs The recent success of two big trespass walks on the South Downs, organised in support of the government s freedom to roam proposals, proves that we can break through the passivity of the left on this issue. The government proposes a freedom to roam on heath, down, mountain, moor and common, which together constitute around 10% of the area of England and Wales.
Led jointly by a socialist and 2 Earth Firstl activists the first walk attracted 100 people (despite drenching rain) and the second, 200.
Participants included a strong showing from Justice(the local campaign set up against the Criminal Justice Act) and Earthfirst, with walkers from the Trades Council, unemployed movement, and a number of left groups.
Both walks took place on the Brighton Downs, and brought people from Portsmouth, Hastings, London, and even Brussels!
Vacuum on the left Both walks took advantage of the political vacuum on this issue to attract national publicity, with interviews and debates on national and regional TV and radio. Whilst landowners organisations conduct a raucous campaign of misinformation in the Tory and farming press, the Ramblers Association fails to create the necessary opportunities to demonstrate its case. The politics of respectability means simply that our case is not being heard. Trespass organisers made clear that they see the matter of access freedoms as closely tied up with the struggle to defend bio-diversity, as well as our cultural heritage of historic and prehistoric landscapes.
The second walk ended with a celebratory camp-over on the Offham Marshes SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), near Lewes, where many of the walkers had participated the previous summer in two successful campaigns to prevent a farmer from ploughing out both ancient flower-rich chalk grassland and wet grazing marsh rich in amphibians.
Productivism
Until only 60 years ago walkers on the Downs had enjoyed a customary freedom to wander at will. But the lack of legal status for this freedom left no obstacle to the postwar productivist drive to eliminate semi-natural habitats in the interests of agricultural profits.
Clearly there is Two further now a limited trespass walks revival of the are planned on great pre-war Sundays August 2 access movement and its and famous Pennine along! mass trespasses, but we must ask ourselves why the left and ordinary countryside users have been so slow to respond to one of the few government proposals with any serious progressive content. Several factors are at work. The slow building up of a "conservation estate" of open. spaces, country parks, nature reserves, heritage sites, and so on, has done much to contain people's growing recreational and cultural aspirations. And the massive destruction of nature and historic rural landscapes has seemed to have a finality which cannot be contested. "Once it's gone it's gone", is the common refrain.
Jane Austen at work!
Yet a third major factor operates more subtly. The rural land-owning class has managed only too successfully to reconstruct itself ideologically in the last half century, so as to reinforce their rights to own and to exclude.
Televised Jane Austen, the cult of the stately home, and the marginalisation of the rurai working class by inward migrating well-off folk have all helped to sanitise and relegitimise ruling class control of our countryside.
The average car-borne rural visitor can easily ignore a sea of corporate prairie fields in their drive to the preserved landscape of historic country house or picturesque village. And the conversion of so much of our ordinary" countryside to intensive productivist systems has always been accompanied by the exclusion of 23. Come ordinary country lovers; children, local ramblers, picnickers, courting couples, and wildlifers.
'Stewardship'
To this we must counterpose our demand that the public be recognised as the true 'stewards' of the countryside. Guaranteed rights of access and enjoyment provide the best safeguard for its protection and sound management.
Two further trespass walks across forbidden Downland are planned on Sundays August 2 and 23. Come along and join in, they're real fun. For further details contact Dave Bangs at 4 Hamilton Road, Brighton, BN1 5DL, Tel: 01273-388392.