Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
THE MYSTIQUE OF REVOLUTION
Recently I reviewed for the New Zealand Listener Viet Thahn Nyuyen’s novel The Committed. In many ways I think it is a very muddled novel, but it isn’t my purpose to write a review of it here. Instead I was fired by some of the things said by his disillusioned, almost nihilistic, narrator, a Vietnamese in Paris who has abandoned Communism and has come to distrust ideologies of any stripe. Two things said by this narrator especially caught my attention. Speaking of his Communist aunt, he says “For her and for most self-proclaimed revolutionaries like me, ‘revolution’ was a magic word, like God, that foreclosed certain avenues of thinking.” (p.53) Later he comments “Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.” (p.123)
These comments set me thinking about the whole concept of revolution, and the very glib way the term is now used by ideologues.
To brush away the irrelevant things: I’m fully aware that the word “revolution” has multiple meanings. It can, of course, be used in the most literal sense, as in RPM or the revolution of a disc or wheel, meaning one full turn of a disc or wheel through 360 degrees. Indeed, it was from this literal meaning that other metaphorical uses of the term “revolution” developed to mean something like a radical change in society, as if society was being turned upside-down and then righted again in a new form. Thus “the agricultural revolution”, “the industrial revolution” and claims that new systems or inventions are “revolutionary” as in “a revolution in IT” or even “a revolution in the way you shop”. So loose is the use of the word, and so useful in promoting new gadgets and fads, that a painfully unfunny comedian like Russell Brand can write a book called Revolution about how his “spiritual” insights are going to change the world.
But, as used in the political sense by ideologues, “revolution” means the overthrow of a regime or government by organised violence, and this is the use of the word that has gathered about it an unearned mystique. Consider, for example, middle-class college students in democracies calling for revolution or waving pictures of Lenin or Trotsky or Che Guevara when they themselves are far from anything even vaguely resembling a revolutionary situation. For naïve young adults, a revolution is conceived as a mass demonstration of force which automatically rights all the wrongs in the world – indeed some seem to think of it as a massive street party. Consider members of the Old Left, still seen in May Day demonstrations in Paris and still carrying icons of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao as if they have learnt nothing from recent history and do not know what genocide is. Consider the students at Berkeley and in other US universities, who wanted, in 2017, to celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution (i.e. Bolshevik coup) of October 1917, and got angry with any students who called them out. As Viet Thahn Nyuyen’s narrator says “Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.”
All this is not by way of saying that real revolutions – real organised violence overthrowing regimes – come out of nowhere. There really were things grossly wrong with the Ancien Regime in France, tsarist autocracy in Russia and pre-revolutionary situations on other countries. Among revolutionaries there really were idealists who thought they were changing the world for the better and ushering in a new, more equitable and better way of life. But in no historical case has the outcome of a revolution really led to the promsed land. Indeed, outcomes are always quite different from the intended ones. But this is never considered by those who regard “‘revolution’ as a magic word… that forecloses certain avenues of thinking.”
Let me lay out some obvious reasons not to regard revolutions as panaceas.
The most obvious one is, of course, violence itself.
Very, very rarely have there been revolutions carried out with minimal violence. One could cite such things as the bloodless “Carnation” Revolution in Portugal which overthrew an authoritarian regime – but this was in the service of restoring a liberal democracy which had existed prior to the authoritarian regime. In most revolutions, there are many factions – including the many who oppose the revolution – and there is much bloodshed. If theorists regard this as a trivial thing, they have long since lost any credible, humane morality. Indeed most true revolutionaries think that much bloodshed is a cleansing or purging of the old, and therefore both necessary and commendable. It is notable in all the most momentous revolutions, leading revolutionaries soon come to regard their opponents as non-human, disposable and to be despatched by special squads. Hello Reign of Terror. Hello Cheka. Hello Cultural Revolution. If you fetishise revolution, you are consciously choosing a path that will lead to thousands – possibly tens or hundreds of thousands – of deaths.
“But,” an astute listener might ask, “what of the repression and violence that was practised by pre-revolutionary regimes? Surely violence was the only way to remove them.” Possibly so, but in the world’s major revolutions (French, Russian Chinese etc.) the revolutionary regimes that ensued ended up being more violent and coercive than what had preceded them.
Add to this the historical fact of how prolonged revolutions are. One foolish myth about revolution is that it will take one concerted push to overthrow a regime and usher in Utopia. Thus images of the storming of the Bastille and the Tennis Court Oath. Thus the myth of the “storming” of the Winter Pace in 1917 – according to Eisenstein’s heavily fictionalised film October, the Bolsheviks rushed in and took over. Job done and now let’s celebrate. The reality was the ensuing six years of civil war and (again negating the propaganda version) it was not simply a matter of Reds (Bolsheviks) versus Whites (tsarist forces). Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and the “Green” peasant forces also opposed Bolsheviks. The death toll – including a major famine caused by the disruption of revolution – took away millions of lives, and in the end what was produced was a regime more repressive, and certainly more genocidal, than what had preceded it. As Sheila Fitzpatrick notes in her authoritative book Everyday Stalinism, it was common for working-class Soviet citizens in the 1930s, facing terror, rationing and suppression of all dissent to say “It was better under the tsars” – a statement which could, if reported, have them packed off to the Gulag. Consider the prolonged violence of the French Revolution, escalating between 1789 and 1794 before three successive authoritarian regimes (Directory, Consulate, Napoleon) set up their own forms of violence and repression. I could elaborate on this, but my point is clear – major revolutions involve not only much violence and death, but much violence and death over a long period. This, too, is what you are signing on for if you fetishise revolution. And even after that long period, nothing substantial may have emerged – consider the long and largely fruitless convulsion that was the Mexican Revolution.
As implied in all the above, there is also the fact that revolutions rarely produce the outcomes intended by the revolutionaries. You want an equitable world where people are no longer oppressed, there is plenty for all, class distinctions are either abolished or levelled out, there is true democracy and the gap between very rich and very poor disappears. But to get this, you have a violent revolution which relies on militaristic leaders who act in a regimented way, and tightly organised groups who regard themselves as the real law in the land. The regime that emerges is a tight, authoritarian one, certainly hierarchical and with a closed inner circle in control. Napoleon. Lenin. Stalin. Mao. Castro. And have you not noticed how one dominant revolutionary figure tends to get deified? Is this what the revolutionaries thought they were getting?
Though the term causes Marxists to go apoplectic, there is also that Utopian impulse in revolutions – the unrealistic hope that revolution will create a perfect society. Such perfection always implies massive coercion. Perfect societies have to have perfect citizens, which means enforced conformity by means of mass coercion, censorship, suppression of all dissent and continual surveillance. In short, Utopia always leads to totalitarianism.
One final consideration. In his handbook What Is To be Done?, Lenin set out his plan for revolution – but his plan consisted of little more than criticising his political enemies and then saying that a revolution could only be won by a tightly disciplined and organised corps of committed supporters, meaning Bolshevik cadres. Lenin set out no plan for what would happen after the revolution. The only inference one can take from this is that his Utopianism was such that he thought the revolution itself would solve all problems. Result? After the Bolsheviks seized power, they pushed through such imbecilities as the abolition of money and the seizure of peasant harvests to feed the proletarians, they having no idea how a government could be run, even a revolutionary one. Even allowing for the ongoing civil war, the economy collapsed, chaos descended and they had to rapidly back-pedal and bring in the so-called “New Economic Policy” which allowed for personal entrepreneurship and an open market in the sale of produce. A form of capitalism had to save the Communist revolution. My point here is that the concept of revolution itself, fetishised, achieves nothing. If your goal is simply to overthrow a governmennt, you have to ask what will follow.
So my case against revolution is the inevitable death toll, always extended through a long period; the (unadmitted) Utopianism of revolutionaries; the fact that few revolutions actually achieve the outcomes fervent revolutionaries intended; and the dismal tendency of revolutionary movements, once they achieve power, to become totalitarian.
But here is a final caution to my polemic. Living comfortably in a liberal democracy, and facing no real material hardships, it is relatively easy for me to dismiss revolutionism. I would probably feel very differently about it if I were a starving beggar or peon in a South American or African country, or an exploited factory worker toiling in a country ruled by a military junta. It is understandable that such people would long for a revolution. My target is the nitwits in democracies, usually the naïve and the gullible, who really believe a revolution would create a better society. I have far more respect for genuine revolutionaries in genuinely oppressed countries than I have for middle-class American college students wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.
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