English Revolution

The English Civil War, typically known among Marxists as the English Revolution, was a wide-reaching series of civil wars fought from 1642 to 1652 between two main factions, the Parlimentarians ("Roundheads") and the Royalists ("Cavaliers"), as well as dissenting groups like the True Levellers. On its face, the conflict presented itself only as a political struggle between Parlimentarianism and absolutism, and a religious struggle between hierarchy and radical church democracy. However, Karl Marx, based on his materialist analysis of history, argued that these conflicts were merely secondary effects of a deeper shift in English society whose ultimate cause was the steady growth of the bourgeoisie. After several conflicts spanning the island of Great Britain, the Parlimentarian faction won out in 1647. The radical faction of the victorious Parliamentarians forced moderate MPs out of Parliament in 1649 and had King Charles I tried, convicted, and executed for treason. The monarchy was abolished, and Parlimentarian officer Oliver Cromwell became the first Lord Protector of the new republican Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.

In Marx's view, the events of the English Civil War followed a pattern he termed bourgeois revolution, in which the productive forces of an old, typically absolutist-feudal, society come into conflict with emerging capitalist social relations, and thus considered it akin to the Dutch Revolt, the American Revolution, and the type species in France. The wars were part of a broader conflict involving Scotland and Ireland, a series of events known collectively as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.