In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky writes "The greatest event in modern history after the Reformation and the Great Rebellion (English civil war).. was the French Revolution".
I am aware several other Marxist thinkers also wrote quite a lot about this period of England's history. Why do they attach so much significance to it, when there were plenty of other, better known uprisings for them to analyse?
Was the English civil war & Restoration of the monarchy as well known in the 20th century as e.g. the French and American Revolutions are today?
I suppose it seems particularly strange to me because, as a history student in England, this period was never once taught in school! As such I find it strange that it was presented as an example to Russian readers, who I can only imagine would have less knowledge of the period than I do.
Thanks very much!
It's not intrinsically an innvovation of Trostsky, rather Marx had seen the 1640s as the first bourgeois revolution (I often wondered what the Dutch of the 1570s might have to say about that, though elsewhere Marx writes of England "following the Dutch example") through which the destruction of feudal power would pave the way for capitalist transformation and the rise of the industrial proletariat whose political action would in turn deliver socialist revolution - if indeed the bourgeois revolution didn't lead to an immediate proletarian one as Marx envisaged for Germany in the Communist manifesto:
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
You can see here the inspiration for Lenin's strategy of making the Lvov-Kerensky provisional government's spell in power a very brief one, though it's at least arguable that neither Germany in 1848 nor Russia in 1917 was significantly more developed than England in 1642 except in the existence among a minority of a cohesive body of revolutionary doctrine. Trotsky and his followers went further, dropping Marx's proviso of suitable socio-economic conditions and arguing that bourgeois revolution could be transformed into proletarian revolution as a general rule, the theory of "permanent revolution" which might more properly be labelled uninterrupted revolution, i.e. without an interim of bourgeois rule.
The profile of England's civil war and Commonwealth period gained a marked boost from the 1940s through the work of the English historian Christopher Hill, who emphasised not only the challenge to royal and noble prerogative from the parliamentarist mainstream but the agitation of more radical republican movements like the Levellers and Diggers for more thorough transformation of the political and social order. For Hill, the episode was not juts a successful bourgeois overhaul of state power but potentially a popular democratic revolution frustrated by the resistance of the propertied classes: in effect, this was extending at least the potential for Marx's prescription for 1848 back to England two centuries earlier.
Such a take was a boon to trotskyism: if 17th-century England - 85% rural and 60% agricultural and without even a modern revolutionary party (let alone a marxist one) - might be a serious contender for a revolution to sweep away not just feudal political relics but bourgeois power too, then the theory could surely apply anywhere. The debate will doubtless continue over whether the 1640s represent a proletarian revolution manqué or whether it was necessarily a bourgeois revolution because neither the working class nor the doctrinal weaponry for its attainment of power was sufficiently developed.