Proceeding from the conventional identification of bourgeois with capitalist (always problematic), a group of Marxist historians, led especially by Neil Davidson, have thus put forward the idea that what makes a revolution bourgeois, whatever its causes and agencies, is that it has the effect of contributing to the advancement of capitalism. In other words, it is outcomes or consequences, not particular class agents, that identify revolutions as bourgeois.
This “consequentialist” version of bourgeois revolution applies the concept to any kind of transformation that somehow can be said to promote the development of capitalism or sweep away obstacles to its advance, whatever the class composition or intentions of revolutionary agents. Indeed, agency may even disappear in accounting for the capitalist advances of bourgeois revolution, replaced instead by some transhistorical mechanism of “bourgeois” progress, such as the inevitable advancement of technological forces.
These Marxist consequentialists may try to take into account, up to a point, historical evidence that challenges old orthodoxies; and it would be perfectly reasonable if all they were saying is that capitalism first emerged not as a deliberate class project but as an unintended consequence (as, by the way, Political Marxism actually argues). It might even be — just about — understandable if they simply accepted the (problematic) identification of “bourgeois” with capitalist and redefined the “bourgeois revolution” as any revolutionary process which, irrespective of agencies or intentions, advanced the development of capitalism.
But as it is, their argument runs into insurmountable obstacles. This is because they feel compelled, for largely ideological reasons, to give the concept of bourgeois revolution an unsustainable universality, which in the end deprives it of all meaning.
Bourgeois revolution has to subsume not only revolutionary upheavals but also very long, gradual historical processes. It is also obliged, quite explicitly, to cover a curiously broad and diverse historical spectrum. The bourgeois revolution becomes ever more improbably bendable when forced to cover a wide range of historical patterns on various continents.