http://wolfshadow713.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] wolfshadow713.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] revolution_fr 2008-09-12 09:58 pm (UTC)

The disconnect you mention between the bourgois deputies and the working class parisians is extremely important. Lenin said something to the effect of "the people need bread and justice, but there cannot be justice without bread" (sorry for my terrible paraphrase!) and I think the mistake many revolutionaries and radical reformers(Lenin included)have made is that they somehow combined the two in their rhetoric in a way that resulted in the political classes considering bread an abstraction and the poor expecting justice to bring bread. It's well discribed in Buchner's "Danton's Death" when one of the sans-culottes says something about how the politicians convinced us that killing the King would end our poverity, and then that death of the Girondins would do so, so now maybe killing Danton will do it. It's an over-simplification, of course, but it does illustrate the problem of letting political agendas be confused with basic needs, etc.

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