Revolution xxi

People are rebelling in numerous places, and have done so in the past and throughout history. But rebellion is not revolution. The two are worlds apart. Rebellion is against injustice, oppression, poverty, corruption and general bad governance. Revolution is about taking control of the state. Rebellions demand equality and justice, and believe they have the power of numbers. But they never really threaten the state that knows how to deal with them. Revolution aims at overthrowing the state and building a different one in its place. So far in modern times, revolutions have ended tyrannical monarchies and replaced them by class rule. This had happened before in Antiquity, in Athens and Rome. In both cases the republic evolved into empire, and that evolution has repeated itself. 

Taking over the state without changing its class foundations occurs quite frequently, usually by generals, colonels or by military backed civilians. If perchance there is any change, it will be authoritarian and repressive, and may include some subtle modification of class alliances. These palace revolutions do not revolve anything fundamental. The more ancient republics have two or more party systems that can give the illusion of change with each electoral cycle. However, though both sides support the system they are not quite identical. To some extent they reflect the ruling class’s own divisions. These are land ownership, finance, trade and industry, which bring in rent, interest and profit. Political struggles are all about the sharing out of the value added by labour. They oppose capital and labour, and they oppose the conflicting sectors of capital, and the prize is the state’s power of arbitration. 

Controlling the state gives control of the military, the police and other security agencies, all the elements of violent persuasion. It also gives discretionary power over taxation and debt. Taxes weigh on wages and capital incomes, whereas debt favours the financial sector. Reducing taxes on labour and capital – especially the latter – has been a political leitmotiv for the past four decades. This has bloated banking beyond measure, as the accompanying engagements on cutting state expenditures down to size has never been realised, or even attempted. Social and infrastructure spending have been the victims, along with the countless state employees who were cast out of career security into the jungle of privatisations. Instead of taxing those that can pay, the burden has been on those less and least able to, with borrowing to make up the shortfall. And states have rid themselves of a cumbersome labour force that was well organised and demanding, and set a standard for working conditions and pay, by selling it off to private profit seeking investors. The state has been reduced to its belligerent, oppressive and surveillant functions, with shrinking participations in education, health and incarceration, and it is spending more than ever. 

If the state is concerned by the common good, it contradicts capital’s exclusive promotion of private interests. Either a society has shared goals and aspirations, or it is goaded on by violence in a direction decided by its rulers. Either a society governs itself for the wellbeing of all its members, or it is governed by a few obsessed by power and wealth. Does a state have a duty to care for everyone, or is it subservient to a minority? Whatever may have been, it is clear which one is today’s reality. Governments pander for the richest and let other citizens live in tents and cardboard boxes, go hungry and die from lack of care. At present, states are governed by the few, for the few, while the people are propagandised to fight among themselves over ethnicity, religion, gender or some even more futile reasons. These divisions put the ruling class in a position where it can claim that there is no alternative to its power.

Bourgeois revolutions have been violent and bloody. Kings and courts have often lost their lives, and the lucky ones forced into exile. Changing the structures of power and the ownership of wealth cannot be a peaceful process. Those who possess wealth and wield power are often born to it. They must believe it is their birthright, and for upstarts it is perceived as the just outcome of their personal merit at playing the game. Neither the hereditary nor the self-made are likely to abandon their positions without a fight. Replacing absolute monarchy by a bourgeois dictatorship has always been a long and brutal endeavour. Replacing a bourgeois dictatorship by a proletarian one cannot be less so. But before that, before the actual confrontation, the vague desire for something different must be replaced by its apparent possibility among a wide majority of people. The dream must begin to materialise. The ideal would be an example, where the new society takes shape and gives hope to others. But the existing system is careful to crush all such experiments in the bud. The only other path is information and organisation. But there again rulers are vigilant. They flood out reality with fiction, spectacles and lies, and they undermine solidarity with infiltration, criminalisation, intimidation, corruption and assassination. The power of the ruling class in this new millennium is more absolute than that of its monarchic predecessors. But it has the inherent weakness of hereditary systems. Who will succeed the Robber Barons? Will their offspring be up to the task?  

Rebellions occur when the people’s anger reaches boiling point. They are spontaneous and ephemeral. Revolutions need particular circumstances and effective leadership. They do not happen overnight like a military coup, with tanks surrounding the presidential palace. The new form of state has to take shape and has to fight to impose itself. Such has been the common scenario for bourgeois revolutions and the end of monarchic rule. The script for a worker’s revolution has yet to be written, though an outline can be drawn from the early days in Russia and Cuba, before foreign military interventions and blockades turned the tide and imposed centralised autocracies. A nation at war must have commanders, but perpetual war turns the chain of command into tyranny. The Russian soviets got rid of unwanted officers, bosses and landlords. There is no way of knowing what would have happened if they had not been attacked on their Eastern and Southern flanks by Japan, Poland, France, the USA and Britain, who also supplied arms and money to the renegades Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel. However the example of soldiers, sailors, peasants and workers taking control of their destinies should not be ignored, even if it was short lived. The lesson, often repeated since, is that revolution at the periphery is opposed, repressed and extinguished by the centre. The bourgeois dictatorship prefers tyranny to people power. Dictators do not threaten its hold on power. They are in fact useful, as they make class rule seem more liberal and social. If tyrants are the only alternative, there is no hope for change. 

Revolution aims at seizing power and distributing it differently. That means taking on the power of might and the probability of armed conflict. It also means taking over the power of wealth. The power of might is mostly about weapons, though motivation and indoctrination are important. The power of wealth is more complicated. It can buy weapons and pay mercenaries, but it also owns the means of production and controls exchanges through its mastery of money and credit. The power of might can maim, kill and incarcerate. The power of wealth can deprive and starve. The power of might can only be vanquished by superior force and determination. The power of wealth comes from property, and can only be defeated by abolishing property. However, there are two kinds of property. One is for personal usage and the other owns the means of production. A mansion and a limousine are symbols of power, but their ownership does not give power. Property is power when it employs labour and appropriates part of the value produced. Agriculture, industry, commerce and banking are privately owned. And those proprietors decide what, when and how goods and services are produced, while the rest of society is hired and fired according to their will. That property must be repealed and redistributed among those who actually produce something, either manually or intellectually. 

Revolution confronts might and wealth, and the first must be overcome before the second can be dissolved. Should this be achieved, revolution still faces the limits of national boundaries and the reactions of neighbouring nations. Does revolution stop at the border or does it go beyond? If it stops, it denies its universality and is doomed. If it goes beyond, it must defeat might and wealth again and again, and these successive conquests turn into imperial tyranny. Revolution becomes foreign oppression.  As revolution threatens neighbouring states and exploitation in general, there is a coalition to contain and repress it, or to transform it into something more amenable, or to use it as a bogeyman. Bourgeois revolutions were successful because the bourgeoisie as a class possessed a large share of the nation’s wealth and could fund their fight against monarchy and its aristocratic landlords. The working classes are deprived of this advantage. By definition they only possess the capacity to work with their minds and muscles. Their strength is their overwhelming numbers. Their weakness is their incapacity to unite as a class with a common destiny. The divisions of labour split them into separate functions, and the dominant ideology sets them against each other with a graduation of servitude. And, just as the bourgeoisie is constantly competing among its members on the national and international stages, so must labour that is regularly drawn or pushed into fights that do not concern it. Executives feel they are superior to other employees. White collar workers are condescending towards blue collar workers. And all of them look down on agricultural labourers. The attitude to foreigners, whether visiting, immigrant or in their homelands, is encouraged to be suspicious. They are depicted as different and potentially dangerous. So that cross-border working class solidarity is seldom expressed and has on occasion been criminalised. 

The bourgeoisie is a competitive hierarchy that is conscious of its class interests and unites to defend them. Class rule relies on wealth and might, and on ideology. Wealth and might can be projected globally to form an empire, whereas ideology is linked to language and cultural heritage. It is difficult to translate unless its message is reduced to some minimal form. A national ideology must claim it represents the best of possible worlds.  But for other nations the “we” becomes “them”. This proclaimed superiority is more acceptable if it is tied to a system rather than a people, capitalism instead of Americans. But such an abstraction neglects the primary object of ideology in bringing a nation together. The people feel left out, until a demagogue rouses them. The success of populism is a reaction to the global ideology of markets, where the planet is up for grabs, and where the price of labour is reduced to its lowest denominator. The revival of nationalism is a rejection of empire and its ideology of a uniform world ruled by capital. What had started as a beacon became a life or death obligation, either submission and conformity or extinction. And this denial of particularities affects the centre as well as the peripheries. The impulsion of empire by a nation sure of itself and of its rights is diluted in the vast extensions of imperial dominion. And the nationalist comeback shows how insignificant nations have become in the global order of things, provoking strong resentment. 

Revolution is a prodigious undertaking that takes political power and economic power from those who hold them, and redistributes them differently. At present, economic power is in the hands of landlords, fund managers, merchants, bankers and industrial magnates, and their wealth competes to shape the actions of political power. But they all depend on political power for protection, subsidies, infrastructure, bailouts and concessions on public lands. Hence the revolving doors between the administration of the state and that of the private sector. The same class controls both domains. And a revolution’s objective is to target that class and sweep it away. For this to be possible, or even conceivable, the working classes need to acquire a common perspective and be convinced they have a shared destiny. They must unite and find leaders able to direct that unity. All this is common knowledge, and the ruling class does its utmost to stop it from happening. Differences are accentuated and leaders are corrupted, jailed or assassinated. Ethnic and cultural otherness is stigmatised, and skin pigmentation is made to weigh in the balance. The propaganda machine is closely controlled and security forces are heavily armed. The power structure seems unassailable, but it has internal weaknesses that come to the fore at intervals. The colossus has frail foundations. Capitalism needs growth to absorb its necessary debts, and when growth goes into reverse those debts overwhelm it. That is presently the case globally. World finance has been tottering along, propped up by central banks since 2009. Now that the pandemic is ravaging industry, commerce and real estate, governments are trying to keep things going with cash hand-outs, which are also supplied by central banks that are buying government debts on the market at premium prices. The production of value has slumped with a direct effect on solvency. In a world where a large proportion of payments are made with future incomes by credit and debt, if those future incomes fail to materialise there is a problem. So far the solution has been fiat money, rolled out by central banks and distributed by governments. But the missing incomes of the past six months are definitively lost, and can only be compensated by more debt, dependant on more monetary creation. Capitalism is in trouble and so are governments that depend on it running smoothly. The power of wealth is beginning to crumble, but the power of might still stands firm. As it becomes absolute, which way will it turn? 

Revolution in the 21^st century cannot copy those of the past. The Jacobins in Paris, the Bolsheviks in Saint Petersburg, George Washington, Toussaint-Louverture, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and all the others belong to history. Their worlds are not today’s world. Armed rebellion and civil war would be futile endeavours because of the balance of fire power. But the actual taking of power cannot be an abstraction. The levers of power exist, and changing the hands that hold them does not make them disappear. They still have to be grasped by people who are able to wield them. There are the levers of government and its armed forces, and those of industry, trade and finance. However, if the economy is in free fall and governments can only fund themselves by monetary creations, many of those levers are lost. Ultimately the military structure stands alone, and when mercenary armies are not paid they revolt and place their generals on the throne. Armed force is the last resort of failing governments, but sometimes that force defaults. Either it takes over government, or it stands with the people to bring government to account. 

Revolution changes the political structures of society, and must also change the shape of property. Both institutions are complex and tend to intermingle. Top-down modifications are long and arduous as each level of the hierarchy has to be converted or replaced. Those reformers usually abandon their original fervour at the second or third obstacle. Bottom-up transformations set about building a different structure from nothing. Decision making, direction and leadership are reconceived in terms of a common advantage. The class structure of hierarchy is abandoned and replaced by merit, trust, equality, justice and companionship. The Russian soviets attempted this process, but they were side-tracked by foreign armed interventions and civil war. On a much smaller clandestine scale, resistance to the German occupation of Europe during WW2 was a bottom-up construction. The ruling classes were disqualified by their collaboration with the occupier, so a wide range of people, from immigrant workers and farm labourers to university professors and retired officers, came together and slowly organised a parallel society. Unfortunately they were split by the two camps that were fighting Nazi Germany, the USSR on one side and the UK/US on the other. And when their armies pushed back the Germans and overran Europe, the corresponding resistance parties dominated and repressed the others. 

A bottom-up revolution has yet to be realised, but countless examples show that people are quite able to organise themselves and choose delegates to represent them at a higher level. It is at the level of the state and its armed forces that new strategies have to be invented. As for industry, real estate, trade and finance, they are so debt ridden that they may stop functioning altogether if workers do not take them over soon. Capitalism and its servants are drowning, and those still above water are being kept afloat by the state. The means of production are being subsidised and their private ownership can no longer be justified. If the nation is paying the piper, the nation must call the tune. But it must also be decided whether the nation is the common wealth of working people, or the plaything of a power structure resting on might and wealth, whether the people are able to govern themselves by representation, or must they always be subjected to the nepotism of a ruling class. Is voluntary servitude a fatality, a habit acquired in early childhood that cannot be broken, or do people aspire to the freedom of choosing their destinies?