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Republicanism is a political philosophy and system of government built on the state deriving its legitimacy from the res publica (the citizenry) as opposed to the hereditary authority of a monarch or the divine sanction of a theocracy. Republicanism views that sovereignty resides in the people or their representatives, that government must be bound by law, and that public power should be exercised for the common good. Republicanism is characterized by elected legislatures, written constitutions, separation of powers, the rule of law, and formal guarantees of civil liberties. [1]
It was revolutionary during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as it destroyed the feudal monarch’s absolutism, dismantled the privileges of the hereditary nobility, and established a limited and contradictory formal equality of all citizens before the law, but at the same time though these bourgeois revolutions overthrew the old feudal order, it is a system for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie while ensuring the subjugation of the working class and maintenance of the current system which is the ownership of the means of production by a minority and the compulsion of the majority to sell their labor for a wage.[1]
The republic is a specific and historically limited form of class rule and cannot be preserved, let alone extended, within the framework of capitalism, as we’ve seen that the stability of bourgeois republics in the developed capitalist countries rested on the specific conditions of the long boom, high growth, rising living standards. As those conditions have eroded since the 1970s, and catastrophically since the 2008 financial crisis we’ve seen the treats and concessions given to the working class gradually removed. [1]
History[edit | edit source]
The word ‘’republic’’ comes from the Latin ‘’res publica’’, and the Roman Republic serves as the influence though the Roman Republic was a slave society in which political participation was determined by property ownership and birth but those who fit the bill discussed concepts such as Cicero’s civitas (citizenship), the rule of law, and the ideal of civic virtue. Eventually the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire as it was dependent on occupation, plunder, and the mass enslavement of people which created social contradictions that were too much for the republican system and so the property-owning class established the Roman Empire. [1]
Thinkers like Marsilius of Padua and Niccolò Machiavelli used the Roman Republic to argue for popular government, civic participation, and the superiority of republics, Machiavelli notably noticed the role of class conflict in republican life, recognizing the struggle between the grandi (the elite) and the popolo (the people) as the driving force of every political shift, revolution, and constitutional change in Florence.[1]
The English Revolution was the first of the great bourgeois revolutions though there have been previous republic revolutions, the English Revolution is called great as the nation legally tried, convicted, and publicly beheaded King Charles I, in 1649 and spread the republican model whereas the other republic revolutions were self-contained. It was an a conflict in which the rising commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie used the language of Puritan Protestantism to, overthrew the monarchy and established a temporary republic, in this revolution the Levellers demanded universal manhood suffrage, equality before the law, and the abolition of church-mandated taxes going far beyond the bourgeoisie's aim while the Diggers demanded for the common ownership of land, both of these movements were suppressed and the temporary republic lasted for 11 years which then led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which established a constitutional monarchy that served the English bourgeoisie's interests.[1]
The American Revolution and the French Revolution emerged in the late eighteenth century which were historical events that shattered the feudal aristocratic order ideologically by claiming the equality and natural rights of all human beings despite both revolutions exposing the limits of bourgeois republicanism with America, the promise of universal equality being immediately broken with the chattel slavery of Africans and in France, with the highest peak The "Conspiracy of the Equals" led by Gracchus Babeuf in 1795 called for the abolition of private property and the common ownership of the means of subsistence, all of this were crushed in favor of an bourgeoisie republic. [1]
Though as these revolutions sprawled across France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, the bourgeoisie terrified by the independence of the proletariat reacted, such as in the France with the Second Republic which established universal male suffrage which was used against the Parisian working class by the bourgeoisie as they rallied the reactionary peasantry to liquidate the National Workshops which led to the June Days uprising of 1848, the proletarian growing in power competing with the bourgeoisie drove towards Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851, resetting the republic back into a dictatorship, as the bourgeoisie feared the workers more than the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon and so chose it.[1]
The Paris Commune of 1871 born out of the Parisian working class reaction to the republican government of Thiers capitulating to Prussia and then turning its troops against revolutionary Paris, the Parisian workers seized power and established, for 72 days an proletarian government that dismantled the standing army, make public officials recallable and paid workers' wages and it was immediately suppressed with the massacre of between 10,000 and 30,000 Communards during the Semaine Sanglante.[1]
The twentieth century cemented this suppression of the European revolutionary wave of 1918–1923 with Social Democracy which defended bourgeois republican institutions at the cost of the revolutions across Europe. Though social democracy is dependent on high growth, rising living standards, and the absorption of social conflict through welfare-state concessions, these concessions have eroded since the 1970s and accelerated since 2008 alongside the surveillance state, rule by executive decree, the criminalization of dissent and the persecution of journalists. [1]