I mistrust the notion of revolution. Far too many people put stock in it as an effective way to change society, but even a brief gloss-over of history tells me that it is not particularly effective. Take Russia for example. They have had several revolutions in the past 200 years both violent and peaceful, yet they still have an authoritarian government, it may be composed of different people, but it is still essentially the same as the Tsar monarchy or the Soviet-style government. China too, several revolutions, still authoritarian. Then there are countless third world countries that have had revolutions galore, and we can see how well that has worked out for them. We could take the French revolution as the archetype of revolution. They overthrew an absolute monarch and large, powerful factions such as the Sansculottes pushed for direct democracy. The core of the intellectual support for the French revolution supported more democracy, and indeed has inspired the rest of the world with its idealism. Yet they ended up empowering Napoleon in the near absolute power of an Emperor. If there were to be a revolution in the typical sense in America, I do not believe it would achieve the ends we desire.
I am reminded of the analysis provided in 1984 about before Oceania's type of government: there were always revolutions that would overthrow one group of oligarchs and replace them with another group. Indeed, a republic is designed to institutionalize this process, stabilizing the switching of control and reducing disruption. It also stabilizes the groups who maintain power, allowing them to entrench themselves more effectively and simply change places with each other every few years. Kind of scary to think that a republic, what we have now in America, is an institutionalization of the cycle of revolution. I am not particularly interesting in changing who has the reigns of power, which may be why I am never had a particular interest in working to elect politicians or bothering rich people to do things.
True to its definition, revolution is just the spinning of the wheel, you always end up where you started. Myself, I am not interested in spinning my wheels... what I want to do is change the wheel itself. History, again, can aid in understanding this. There have been numerous wheel-changing events in history, among the most prominent are the industrial revolution and the enlightenment. They both defined the lenses that the world has been seen through since they came about. What is phenomenal about them is that they were not specifically directed at the power structures themselves, they were simple shifts in our view of the world and how one acts in it.
I have come across the idea of wheel changing events before; something that happens that changes everything. For indigenous populations, exposure to western civilization has been wheel-changing, their cultures are disrupted, and they are often forced to abandon their way of life. Forced in the military sense, or in the generational shift-sense when the next generation has to stop living the way they did to survive. But, the best description of a wheel-changing event that I have come across yet comes from literature. The Riverworld series describes how an ancient society accidentally developed an artificial soul generator that automatically bound souls to new sentient beings. So, this society changed its newborns without even knowing it, and in the space of only a couple generations, all the beings without these souls were gone because of old age. This is a great metaphor for generational change. One generation develops something, the next generation is imbued with it and it becomes an indestructible part of our society.
This seems to be the main wheel-changing method that humanity has at its disposal, and it can be boiled down to mass education, motivation, and changes in each of our ways of life. To change society, you really have to change the way people think and act, because what else is society but the aggregate of all of our thoughts and actions.
The industrial revolution was a revolution of mind, it shifted the priorities in life more directly toward profit, productivity and self-interest away from the typical human priority of social networking and the reciprocal economy. It manifested itself in the day to day behavior of people and in their way of life. It was compelling enough to spread like a plague across the earth, infecting all those it touched.
I also think that the 60s was a wheel-changing event in opposition to the industrial revolution's, as it prompted people to change their priorities away from profit. In fact, I believe that the old sds's long-haul strategy of radicalizing (educating) young people was key in the effectiveness of this specific event. Without a de-centralized yet organized education and motivation effort, wheel-changing events are much harder to produce.
Without this hard work of changing minds, we will not see success in our movement. In the eternal words of Monty Python: "Power is derived from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony." Too often people on the left focus on the power structures in a society, when we should be focusing on the real power in human society - each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment