You say you want a revolution ...

Introduction

What follows is the first part of a longer publication. The whole is entitled - 'You say you want a revolution ...' (A line from an old and famous Beatles song). This larger piece is not a polemic against the present social order. Our capitalist dominated, anti-human society is taken as a given. The goal is to analyse the modern potential for successful revolutions.

Many revolutions in modern history (since 1776) have taken decades to reveal their full nature. But all of them are dramatic engines of change. Change and upheaval is at the heart of the matter and it is not technology, nor ideology nor 'great men' who form the centre of these historical whirlwinds, it is the social collisions (including sometimes military collisions) created by mass politics - where politics is understood as the pursuit of power. Political power and who holds it, who seizes it and who controls it becomes the essence of all genuinely revolutionary moments - even given the quick, huge, deep and wide overturn of all aspects of daily life and virtually all the previous 'common sense', in the lives of millions of people who experience these events.

Political leaders who seek change and progress have, over earlier modern times, speculated about and sometimes developed plans for revolutions - but latterly they have mostly tried to guard against them as the results of revolutions rarely ended with their triumph. The 'Founding Fathers' of the United States led a successful revolutionary war against the super-power of the day because the change they wanted could not be achieved without it. Those same 'Fathers' were revolted by the revolution's outcome. The revolution effectively destroyed their would-be 'enlightened aristocracy' and filled the vacuum with a virtually universal race, mainly by white men, to use commerce to build capitalist enterprise across the new continent. In the 30 years after 1776 the domestic US was yanked into a populist, commercial, direction as its continental market exploded and its population expanded exponentially through the decades. (See 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution' Gordon S. Wood., 1991, Vintage Books.)

In China since 1948, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has, at different times, taken both 'revolutionary' and conservative and roads to 'progress'. Mao acted to achieve drastic social advance twice - by revolutionary means - with the Great Leap Forward and then with his last initiative, the Cultural Revolution, in a China, as he saw it, otherwise hogtied by an imperialist world order. Both failed to reach his goals and latterly narrowed to factional war inside the Chinese Communist Party's bureaucracy. His antecedents reversed Mao's 'revolutionary' policy, seeing dangers for themselves in Mao's approach they therefore organised an opposite, mass (and brutal, as in the suppression of Tienanmen Square) de-politicisation of the Chinese population. It is now presented to the country as a key to the foundation of further progress. (See 'The End of the Revolution', Wang Hui, 2009, Verso.)

While the endless social and political violence of the US and the desperation of vast parts of the semi and under-developed world would imply the relevance and requirement for revolution, Western and Northern Europe are surely in some senses beyond any revolutionary future?  Even Marx in 1871 after the Paris Commune said -
'In England, for instance the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more softly and surely do the work.'
However, in his interview with a New York reporter for 'World' he went on -
'The English middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions we shall see here a new slave-owners war'. (This was a reference to the US civil war.)

Despite their immense complexity and uneven character, there is still no sign that modern history has given up on revolutions even, as we shall see - including in the northern and western corners of Europe! Revolution still becomes the key question when mass politics takes to the field. It remains the only mechanism that can really work - when mass politics, politics deciding the big questions of power, politics that, most decisively of all, break the power of the previous order, is needed. It is the foundational argument of this pamphlet - that revolution is at the kernel of all major social progress in modern times, and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.        

Part one

May '68, what was all that about?

May 68's 50th birthday is now long over! But the French 'eventements' of half a century ago still stir speculation among the left, especially in Western Europe, about what a modern revolution should look like, at least in the fully developed countries. In today's mainstream-media discussions about 1968, the prevailing view seemed to be that as 1968 dwindled away, those who participated - even at a distance (and who are now near enough 68-plus years old themselves) - did not really end up changing much.

Yet, unlike WW1 or 2, or the 1917 Russian Revolution, or the Chinese, the Cuban and the Vietnamese revolutions, there yet seems to be no settled sense of the meaning of '68. Arguments still clash as to whether it was a social and political pinprick in history, whether it opened out a new global wave of women's liberation, whether it marked a new stage in the development of modern youth; created a new culture; initiated a new stage of morality and politics in the West? All these ideas and many others have been thrown into the '68 pot. All this tells us, if it tells us anything at all, is that whatever else '68 was, it was unfinished.

Before laying out yet another overall characterisation of '68 it is worth remembering some of the concrete results of '68 that remain indisputable.

What moved; what changed?

1. De Gaulle fell, albeit in slow motion, but never to return. He had survived and defeated the violent, military-led coup that was aimed at maintaining the French Algerian (and Vietnamese) Empire in the early 1960s, to the point where the Parachutist's Regiment landed at Orly airport and the ministry of War was handing out machine guns to members of the French Communist Party. May '68 was powerful enough to send De Gaulle scuttling away to the French conscript Army stationed on the Rhine. There he read the signals. Big and fast reform was going to be necessary and he would have to leave the stage (hopefully still with the appropriate pomp and ceremony.) France was re-opened, politically.

2. The French rebellion in '68 also shifted the course of the Vietnamese war against the American military machine. The huge western youth movement, in Europe, most aroused in France, opposing the Vietnamese war, started its campaign with two faces. In the US the youth and the black movement called for the American troops to be 'bought home.' And that remained the main slogan of the fight in America - and it was hugely successful. In Europe, headed initially by the large Communist Parties of France and Italy, the slogan was 'Peace in Vietnam.' The Vietnamese leadership were careful in their relations with the European CPs and with the Soviet Union - as Russia provided their weapons, albeit through an eye dropper. But they had no intention of accepting a Korean type peace deal, 'along the 59th parallel', as their military initiatives in the country showed, most determinedly, in a big military move against the US in the South (the Tet offensive) in 1968.

Following the (more political than military) success of the North Vietnamese offensive, after May '68 and the 'hot June' that followed in Italy, the slogan in Europe became 'Victory to - the NLF!' The mass Communist Parties of Europe were no longer able to sustain the peace slogan in Europe (or their leadership of the movement.) The impact of the West's mobilisation now found its most effective combination. In the US the anti-war movement put direct pressure on to the US government - the main protagonist. In Europe the pressure was on the Soviet Union now forced to increase military support, which was decisive through to the end (as was proved in the clear statements made at the time by the Vietnamese leadership themselves).

(In the US, the anti-war sentiment began to coalesce with black resistance and even class identification expressed more and more by leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The US state prepared its counter-revolution to the new radicalism with huge state violence and a tsunami of drugs aimed at the 'Projects' - the US's version of public housing - which is still being fought out today.)

3. In January 1968 Alexander Dubcek was made the First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party. In August the same year Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and destroyed 'the Prague Spring.' The 1956 Soviet occupation of Hungary, years of 'cold war' and successful social democratic social reforms had already shattered the remains of the post '45 popular sympathy across the Western European working class with the 'Soviet model.' But Dubcek's attempted reform and democratisation of the Communist regime and its destruction in August helped to create an entirely new political current in the rest of Europe based on the rise of the youth rebellion in '68. The young radicals in France who fought the police in the Left Bank, the Vietnam protesters, the student rebellions across Europe - reoriented the socialist left, identifying it closely with Trotsky, anarchism, Luxembourg and other critics of the Soviet and particularly the Stalinist legacy. This current remained a small but significant factor in the shape of Western European politics, particularly with regard to anti-racism, women's liberation and social movements, to this day.  

4. Both before (and even after) the upsurge in France, including the critical factory occupations and the great strike waves in Italy, leading 'thinkers' on both the left and the right, most especially in the Anglo West, had to re-define their previous versions of the working class and labour movement. The most famous of these was the US radical Marcuse, who explained how the traditional worker, even in trade unions, was no longer the radical agent of change under modern conditions. This fell to the alienated and excluded layers in society. A wave of sociologists (see John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood 1963) had 'studied' the 'new' worker and discovered, through 'social scientific' means, that workers were now on a spectrum of an 'instrumental' approach to unions, to political change and to industrial action. Their deeper class attitudes and principles were lost. They aspired to be middle class.

In 1968/9 workers en mass in Northern France and Italy changed all that. 68' turned out to be the beginning of a massive rebellion involving millions of European workers that lasted into the mid 1980s.

But Western Europe's ruling class response to '68 ultimately defined '68.

1. Momentous changes across Western Europe closely followed 'Les Eventements' in '68. And in order to prevent '68 setting the scene for the acute crises in Spain and Portugal and ongoing disorder in Italy, a through and rapid reorganisation of European wide ruling class forces took place. In 1973 the UK, Ireland and Denmark were allowed to join the European Economic Community. The first collective tariff arrangements had already been established; as had the Common Agricultural Policy subsidies for small farmers (deliberately designed to encourage a social counterweight to working class, city based revolt.)

Although both Portugal and Spain applied successfully for EEC membership only in 1977, the nascent European Union developed its first (and perhaps for now its most significant) political/economic interventions in response to the overthrow of the fascist dictator Salasar in Portugal and the collapse of the Franco regime Spain in 1975. In both countries the EEC virtually created the leadership and provided the resources required for mass Social Democratic Parties, designed to dissipate revolutionary fervour in the Hispanic peninsular, with a clear and attractive aim of providing fully developed standards of living in a rapid process of integration into the northern European economy. Huge numbers of small farmers were meanwhile encouraged and then consolidated into the EU project, behind CAP, in Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The initial European revolutionary rectangle in 1974, between Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Oporto gradually imploded in the context created by a new vision of European leadership and better living conditions. (And the epic piles of cash judiciously allocated - creating the beginnings of the monstrous layers of corruption that are now the 'normality of all EU to EU members' operations.)

2. Many of the first socialist revolutionaries in the Russia of the 1920s - 30s, especially those who had been most active in the defence of the Soviet CP in the Leninist period, tried to analyse the class and political character of the Stalinist regime with a view to its overthrow. By the late '30s Trotsky and his followers called for a 'Political Revolution' against the bureaucracy. This 'caste' had to be destroyed and replaced - but this was not in essence to be a social revolution. Much of the Stalinist led society, politics and economy had to be thoroughly reformed, but the fundamental domination by the state over property and capital should remain.

The characterisation of the 1968/9 uprisings, their extensions and consequences throughout Western Europe are also best understood as a political revolution. That is to say revolutionary actions and organisations were built by workers and students but they were not able to overthrow the social system that they sought to defeat. Nevertheless, those revolutionary actions and the classes that led them were used by a new part of the ruling, capitalist class, the first internationalist and globalist elements of that class, to break the prevailing political system. The would-be revolutionaries were not able to substitute the ruling class as a whole by a government and a state which represented the revolutionary classes. As the struggles evolved, so new political forces, still attached to the old ruling class, were able to use the popular revolt as leverage to create new state systems, economic models and 'reform' - even including the creation of whole new mass political parties in some cases. And this was only sporadically and spottily contended by the practical alternative political and social vehicles that were created by the revolt itself.

The political revolutions in 1968 in France, to an extent in 1969 in Northern Italy, profoundly in 1974/5 in Portugal and 1975/7 in Spain are, in that sense, unfinished. Not because the working class and its allies did not rise up, but because they was not able to create their own alternative to the state and economy recreated by the new 'European' ruling class. The capitalist class had not run out of steam. They were able to take hold of the ferment and rebuild their social bases in a different direction.

The next sections of 'You say you want a revolution' will examine:
Syria and the Arab Spring,
Russia in the past and China today and tomorrow,
The US now,
Europe's radical right fringes,
France (again) and Britain, now and soon.