请将“If we approach the contradiction between the justification of bourgeois rev-olutions and their political results with the instruments for analysing societies of the ancien-régime type, the differentiation between citizens and others appears as the establishment of a collective privilege, the privilege of partici-pation in debates and decisions over public matters. Just like privileges under the ancien régime, this privilege was also, in many respects, secured by law - in electoral legislation, in the rule of husbands over their wives, in the legal fixing of slave status and in the rule over ‘natives' that was taken for granted. Looked at in this way, bourgeois revolutions abolished the many different privileges of ancien-régime societies only to put in their place the collective privilege of citizens.
All those who enjoyed this privilege were male. Though this sufficiently shows how marriage and family law continued the traditions of patriarchal rule, at the same time as this was delegitimised,36 the exclusion of women from the society of citizens did not just mean the perpetuation of an earlier form of rule. For only with the above-mentioned emancipation of ‘interest' from the earlier world of privileges and thus families, did the historical possibility arise of a systematic sex-specific individualisation. In so far as men claimed the public mode of existence of individuality as a sex-specific privilege, in this way bringing the mental structures of a hereditary nobility into the new world, they shunted female individuality into the private sphere.
To the extent that revolutionary publics temporarily defined the ‘nation' in a more comprehensive way, the political privileging of men had to be conquered anew, whilst elsewhere the social and sex-specific limitation of the ‘political nation' was successfully defended for a long period. But, since bour- 
geois revolutions were conducted everywhere under the banner of equality, freedom, and the natural rights of all, the subsequent establishment of exclu-sion strategies did not appear in a good light. The historical constitution of bourgeois state power thus became the point of departure for all those who have since demanded that its principles should become reality.
Bourgeois revolutions, the capitalist mode of production, and class relations
All constitutions of bourgeois states guarantee the protection of private prop-erty. Wherever workers have had to take their labour-power to market in large numbers and offer it for sale as a commodity, this protection of private property has also been made into a constitutional guarantee for the legal preconditions of a capitalist mode of production. In capitalistically producing societies, workers - not all, but as a general rule the majority of them - enjoy the personal freedom to make labour contracts. Those who market their labour-power in this way do not sell it for life, but voluntarily contract that for a certain time they will put it at the disposal of an owner of means of pro-duction (of whatever kind). During this working time, the labour-power, and thus the person to whom it pertains, is then under the command of the other contracting party. To put it another way: the everyday life of the worker is regulated by power. Yet this relationship, even if it regulates the expressions of life of many thousands in the smallest detail, is seen in capitalist society not as a form of rule, but as the use of private law in the free disposal of property. Because the state equally protects the free disposal of any kind of private property, it sanctions the fundamental difference in the conditions of life between those who possess capital goods and those who have only their labour-power to take to market.
It is the acknowledged result of a discussion conducted internationally among Marxists in the 1960s and 70s about the social form of capitalist state power, that the ‘class character' of this does not consist - or at least, not princi-pally - in the use of state force against (protesting) workers, in overt class jus-tice and other direct forms of oppression and disadvantage, but rather in the neutrality of state power vis-à-vis any kind of private property. In this way, the characterisation of bourgeois state power as the ‘executive of the bourgeois class as a whole', as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, while very enlightening historically, was theoretically criticised as insufficient.
That the protection of every kind of private property was already made a constitutional principle in bourgeois states before capitalist labour relations had become dominant in the majority of these, does not prove for example that the groups who struggled to establish this form of state already had capitalism in mind. The explanation is, rather, that the principle that the state should respect property, and that encroachments on the private power of disposal over property should only be decided by the legitimised instances of ‘the people', was a consequence of the critique of generalised ruling power under the ancien régime.
Social relations in which the labour of many was exploited by lords who were in a position to exert material and direct power existed from time imme-morial. Class societies, however, were created only by bourgeois revolutions. When bourgeois revolutions abolished the direct securing by power of estate differences, class relations were set free. This was also acknowledged in the discourse of the time. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the term ‘class' came into frequent use in such tropes as ‘the middle class(es)' in England, or the ‘dangerous classes' in many societies that had experienced bourgeois revolutions. This discourse arose on the one hand from the manner of clas-sification that had been taken over from the natural sciences in the nineteenth century and applied to society, but also from the critique of the significance of classing people by birth that had previously been sanctioned by power.





It was only with the development of workers' organisations that a new meaning of ‘classes' arose, along with a new social basis. For, only to the extent that workers became conscious that their material position across the country was determined by their working conditions, only when they raised common demands directed at the state, did classes rise at least temporarily above competition and difference of interest and become political unities of action. This was possible only through the factory organisation which brought together a large number of workers, through the formation of national markets, the improvement of transport and better access to information - in other words, a public discourse about the commonality of different conditions of life that rose above regional barriers. Only in the context of such public discourse could local struggles with entrepreneurs be conceived as the expression of general class antagonisms. But, even in these struggles, the historical preconditions of bourgeois societies often found expression. Everywhere the breakthrough of capitalist relations was linked with processes of individualisation. When workers joined together to demand rights, they certainly devel-oped conceptions of a new commonality, yet these conceptions also shared the emotion that had inspired the bearing groups of bourgeois revolutions. For the struggle against the ancien régime was waged not just against private possession of power competences, not just against privileges and inherited forms of exploitation; it was also a question of contesting the priority of the nobility in terms of honour, upholding one's pride before princely thrones, and generalising the privilege of personal dignity. In societies that arose out of the theoretical and practical criticism of the ancien régime, class consciousness developed not only as a struggle with the material conditions of life. The workers' organisations demanded political participation not just - and sometimes not even mainly - in order to restrict private power of disposal over labour. This was also designed to help break the new social monopoly on individual dignity that had been appropriated after the revolution by those who were deemed to be citizens.
From the 'citizen state' to the national capitalist intervention state
Bourgeois revolutions were fought out in territorial states in which political unity had been established by force and law. In the struggle against personal power, the demand was raised that society should be able to make its own decisions and determine its own goals. By the transformation of the instruments of personal rule into instruments of a public power, society also obtained the right to decide on the employment of these: in public debate and in the specific institutions where the will of the people was represented and confirmed. In principle this was a completely open programme. Scarcely any-one formulated it more clearly than Thomas Jefferson, when he maintained that every generation should have the right to revise the constitution. ‘I hold', he wrote on 30 January 1787, ‘that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical'.37 As president, however, Jefferson himself followed the general programme of successful revolutionaries: the stabilisation of what had been achieved.
The history of the state power established by bourgeois revolutions can be depicted as the history of the various methods and metaphors by which the contradiction between democracy and capitalism has been elaborated. This means the history of political practice, but also the development of theoretical conceptions that guide such practice. Neither of these can be discussed in any detail here. We will however just refer to Auguste Comte who, seeing himself as the founder of sociology, wrote into the programme of the new science that its task had to be that of bringing into harmony progress and order.38 For there was something else that all bourgeois societies had to achieve: to restrain not only the potential openness of the political decision-making process, but also the potential political explosive force that resulted from a rapid change in social relations.”翻译为中文