On Revolution

Abstract

Maggie Thatcher, George Bush, Helmut Kohl and similar sans-culottes will join Francois Mitterrand in Paris, where I live, on the 14th of July, two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille. They will not be there to dance the Carmagnole, but to bury the French Revolution with faint rather than fulsome praise. The anniversary is celebrated as a funeral to proclaim, with the help of the media and of fashionable historians, that the age of revolution is over. There was history but it has no future. The reign of capital is eternal.

This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.

Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.