On revolution.
ON REVOLUTIONMaggie Thatcher, George Bush, Helmut Kohl and similar sans-culottes will join Francois Mitterrand in Paris, where I live, on the 14th of July, two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille. They will not be there to dance the Carmagnole, but to bury the French Revolution with faint rather than fulsome praise. The anniversary is celebrated as a funeral to proclaim, with the help of the media and of fashionable historians, that the age of revolution is over. There was history but it has no future. The reign of capital is eternal.
The great upheaval that is only beginning to reshape Russia and the countries in its sphere of influence is now being used to carry the same message. To begin with, our scribblers and our pundits were at a loss. They could no longer describe the empire of evil as frozen forever, as a hell from which there is no exit. But they recovered rapidly. They have drawn from the fast evolving events another convenient conclusion: Planning is bankrupt, the market is a guarantee of prosperity and freedom, capitalism washes whiter. And some of the things stated in Budapest, in Warsaw, and in Moscow too help them to make their case.
This is not the occasion to enter into a long discussion about the nature of the transformation carried out by Mikhail Gorbachev. Those who once confused Stalin's bloody collectivization, his breakneck industrialization, his dictatorship over the proletariat with socialism, or even those who perceived Leonid Brezhnev as a champion of proletarian internationalism, can now talk of betrayal or of the dismantling of socialism. The answer is obvious: You cannot dismantle something that hasn't been built.
So far so good, but this isn't quite sufficient. At least not for people like myself for whom 1917, whatever may have happened afterwards, is a crucial date to remember. Like 1789, it is one of the milestones on humankind's road toward mastery over its own fate. Therefore we must come to terms with what happened, with this strange encounter between Marxism and backward Mother Russia, with the failure of the revolution to spread westward, with the resulting tragic contradiction in terms--a "primitive socialist accumulation." Though it never was our model, we cannot deny part of the heritage. We must draw a balance sheet, study what went wrong, learn bitter lessons from the experience. And this is still an unfinished story. We are simply watching the beginning of a vast upheaval in Eastern Europe: A bourgeois revolution in institutions combined with a still uncertain economic reform, in countries where the bulk of private property had been eliminated. Where will it lead? All that can be said is that, far from dismantling socialism (the really inexisting socialism), it will provide opportunities to begin there too a struggle for socialism. A socialism, incidentally, which will not be a gift from Gorbachev (however grateful we may be for his reawakening Russia from its slumber). Because socialism isn't a present from heaven, but a conquest from below.
Forgive me this long digression. My purpose was to ask why our pundits and politicians are so keen on burying the revolution. They are trying to prove, to paraphrase their own expression, that, hell or not, capitalism is a system from which there is no exit. It may starve the people of Africa, strangle those of Latin America, it may spread exploitation and alienation throughout the world, debase everything it touches--art, literature, culture--into merchandise, it may turn our inventive genius into a source of unemployment, it may in search of profit bring poison, pollution, and putrefaction. And yet you must accept it because there is no alternative, no way out unless you are foolish enough to take the risk of a revolution, which may once have been fine but is a calamity.
So let me try, briefly, to rehabilitate this dirty word. Revolution, they say, means bloodshed, terror. But is it not counter-violence that reflects the oppression of the existing regime? Indeed the degree of violence very much depends on the resistance of the oppressors. Have you noticed, by the way, how much we hear about the terror of the French Revolution, about the guillotine, and how little, say, about the much bloodier massacre of the Communards? (Let there be no mistake, the revolution devouring its children--and not only its children--is obviously for us more than a problem, a major preoccupation. I just want to warn you against the color-blind moralists who preach peace and abnegation but fail to see blood on their own hands.)
Revolution is the work of a vanguard, a minority? Who said so? If so it would be a coup, a putsch, not a revolution which by definition means the entry of the masses on the historical stage.
And, on top of it, there is no general pattern, no recipe. Each revolution has its own features. In 1789 in France the bourgeoisie was gaining the upper hand within the feudal system. In the peasant Russia of 1917 the revolutionary proletariat was not at all in the same position. Obviously there is no question of us storming the Bastille or seizing the Winter Palace. But can the Socialists prepare the ground for a political and cultural hegemony after the revolution? Can they undermine capitalist power at all levels before conquering power at the top? These are some of the questions we should be debating instead of answering the phony accusations of our right-wing censors. Because they are not worried by the violence or the absence of democracy in revolution but by its very nature. Because revolution is the world upside-down, it is a frontal attack against the system, and its rules of property, its social relations, its division of labor, and its other alienations. They are simply pleading for the survival of their system.
And quite successfully for the moment, on the ideological front. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear faint echoes of that success even in our own debates. Have you noticed that the fashion is now for people who are ex-something to proclaim that we are in a state of post-something? Ex-Maoists, ex-Trotskyists, ex-Communists, ex-rebels of the 1960s telling us that we are living in a post-industrial society, enjoying a post-modern culture, and so on. We are post- everything, but capitalist forever.
Its true that the ghost of revolution is no longer haunting Western Europe for the time being. But the phony sans-culottes coming to Paris for the funeral of the revolution may be rejoicing too soon. History has not come to a stop in Russia nor will it stand still forever in the West.
And this is why I would like to end once again with the words of somebody for whom I have the greatest admiration, a figure dreaded by all the establishments. Imagine: a revolutionary, a Marxist, a Pole, a Jew, and a woman. I mean Rosa Luxemburg, writing in times even more contemptuous than ours; in the hour of defeat, on the very eve of her assassination, in the last words of her last article ringing with a historical confidence that we badly need in our own struggle against the current.
Order reigns in Berlin, she wrote. And we could echo: Order reigns in New York and Tokyo, in London or Rome, in Paris where Maggie and George, Helmut and Francois are rejoicing over it.
You stupid lackeys, your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will raise its head again and proclaim to your sorrow amid a brass of trumpets: I was ... I am ... I shall always be....
Daniel Singer is The Nation's European correspondent and author, most recently, of Is Socialism Doomed?: The Meaning of Mitterand. This article is adapted from a talk given at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York in April.
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Title Annotation: | influence of the French Revolution |
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Author: | Singer, Daniel |
Publication: | Monthly Review |
Date: | Jun 1, 1989 |
Words: | 1300 |
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