Hi Jim:
>According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S
>THEORY OF REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the
>Jacobins were petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute
>bourgeois. He sided instead with the plebeian _sans culottes_, and
>if memory serves me well, with the Hebertistes (sorry but I don't
>remember the what kind of accents there are on this term) and to
>some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not like the
>latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them.
>There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris
>(the locus of most revolutionary activity).
>
>The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin
>side of the 1789 revolution.
>
>This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L & M probably
>were using "Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary.
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Draper's is a possible interpretation of the Jacobins (as real
historical actors, not as strawmen of Laclau & Mouffe's making).
However, Gramsci provides an alternative interpretation. He argues
that "The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between
town and country" (_Prison Notebooks_ 63) & "made the demands of the
popular masses one's own" (66). Of course, the Jacobins did so
within the limits of the bourgeois revolution & enlightenment
philosophy (e.g., they maintained the Le Chapelier law, which denied
the workers the right of combination), but Gramsci says that the
absence of the Jacobins in Italy created many problems: the Southern
Question (oppression of peasants in the South by landlordism &
underdevelopment); the lack of religious reform through
anti-clericalism; the failure to forge progressive & republican
national culture; and so forth. In contrast to France, Italy only
experienced what he calls "passive revolution,": "restoration becomes
the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic
frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic
upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal
classes are demoted from their dominant position to a 'governing'
one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate
them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste'
with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no
longer with predominant economic functions" (115). The absence of
Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material & cultural conditions
vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of passive
revolution).
In other words, Gramsci took strong exception to conservative
historians' one-sided interpretation of Jacobinism: "If the
conservative historicists, theorists of the old, are well placed to
criticise the utopian character of the mummified Jacobin ideologies,
philosophers of praxis are better placed to appreciate the real and
not abstract value that Jacobinism had as an element in the creation
of the new French nation (that is to say as a fact of circumscribed
activity in specific circumstances and not as something ideolgised)
and are better placed also to appreciate the historical role of the
conservatives themselves, who were in reality the shame-faced
children of the Jacobins, who damned their excesses while carefully
administering their heritage" (399).
Hailing from Japan (itself a country with no Jacobin tradition,
modernized through passive revolution & militarism), I am inclined to
agree with Gramsci. Japan would have been a better country now if it
had been led by the Japanese Jacobins into modernity. At least, we
would have had a song like La Marseillaise for "national anthem,"
instead of Kimigayo (a praise song for the imperial dynasty!):
***** Kimi ga yo wa
Chiyo ni yachiyo ni
Sazare ishi no iwao to narite
Koko no musu made.
Thousands of years of happy reign be time;
Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now
By age united to mighty rocks shall grow
Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.
Translated by Basil H. Chamberlain *****
Here's the JCP's view of Kimigayo & Hinomaru:
<http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/e-990315-flag_song.html>
Yoshie
