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The article is weird. Cafés did great things for classic liberalism. Just consider Café Pilvax in Pest (now part of Budapest) in Hungary, which was basically

by Svip 8y ago

The article is weird. Cafés did great things for classic liberalism. Just consider Café Pilvax in Pest (now part of Budapest) in Hungary, which was basically the epicentre of the Hungarian revolution in 1848 and where the people who wrote the 12 Points regularly met. But those were classic liberals and nationalists. Their 12 Points dealt with political questions, not social questions. The revolutions from the 1770s to around 1850 were political revolutions, and dealt with the political question, usually lead by classic liberal thinkers. The social question lingered in the shadows, like 1796's Conspiracy of Equals, but it wasn't until the Paris Commune that this problem really sprung out into the open as a question the needed to be answered. The Russian Revolution is a social revolution moreso than a political one. And definitely conducted by socialists, not liberals. So the choice of 'liberalism' in the article is weird.

irishcoffee 8y ago
> conducted by socialists, not liberals A~=B
- Svip 8y ago
  If you think the instigators of the Russian Revolution were also liberals, you are surely mistaken. They didn't care about the political question. Issues like representative government, suffrage and free speech were secondary issues to the real issues: How to protect the workers. The design of the Soviet Union was a regime that would be owned and run by the workers (that's not how it ended up in practice, but that was the theory). They were not liberals, and scuffed at the idea of liberalism, blaming the liberal revolutions of the past century merely for handing the power from aristocrats to capitalists, but the worker remained oppressed.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    The Russian Revolution is complicated. There was a "February" revolution in Feb 1917 that was loosely classical liberal, then an "October" socialist/communist coup d'etat that effectively subverted, or 'disrupted', the dynamic that had been going on for much of the previous year.
pmalynin 8y ago
The Russian Revolution is certainly not a social revolution but an economic one. They went from have a dictator to having a dictator just under a slightly different economic system. They continue to have a Tsar to this day.
- Svip 8y ago
  All revolutions are economical. The American one is about taxes, and the French is about well... taxes. But the answer to the question is what defines them from being political or social. The Americans and French revolutionaries of the 1700s thought the answer to this was more political freedom. The Russian revolutionaries of the 1910s thought the answer was a social regime. The fact that it did not end up as they hoped it would be, does not change the fact that it was a social revolution. I considering the motivations here for the revolutions, not so much the outcome.

by Svip 8y ago

irishcoffee 8y ago

> conducted by socialists, not liberals A~=B

Svip 8y ago
If you think the instigators of the Russian Revolution were also liberals, you are surely mistaken. They didn't care about the political question. Issues like representative government, suffrage and free speech were secondary issues to the real issues: How to protect the workers. The design of the Soviet Union was a regime that would be owned and run by the workers (that's not how it ended up in practice, but that was the theory). They were not liberals, and scuffed at the idea of liberalism, blaming the liberal revolutions of the past century merely for handing the power from aristocrats to capitalists, but the worker remained oppressed.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  The Russian Revolution is complicated. There was a "February" revolution in Feb 1917 that was loosely classical liberal, then an "October" socialist/communist coup d'etat that effectively subverted, or 'disrupted', the dynamic that had been going on for much of the previous year.

pmalynin 8y ago

The Russian Revolution is certainly not a social revolution but an economic one. They went from have a dictator to having a dictator just under a slightly different economic system. They continue to have a Tsar to this day.

Svip 8y ago
All revolutions are economical. The American one is about taxes, and the French is about well... taxes. But the answer to the question is what defines them from being political or social. The Americans and French revolutionaries of the 1700s thought the answer to this was more political freedom. The Russian revolutionaries of the 1910s thought the answer was a social regime. The fact that it did not end up as they hoped it would be, does not change the fact that it was a social revolution. I considering the motivations here for the revolutions, not so much the outcome.