You say you want a revolution (updated)

Hmm, it seems that over the last 20 years or so its been the reactionary right that has developed a taste for revolution and now the job for the Left is to be counter revolutionary if they want to maintain free education, the welfare state and environmentalism.

Only 250 years or so into this Industrial Revolution thingie, and you write the effort off in a matter of three short paragraphs? It’s really too early to tell, John.

I see two problems here: the successes of moderate within-the-system reforms seem to come when there is a great deal of scary outside-the-system pressure. Specifically, the Cold War put pressure on Capitalism to tame its excesses, and, at least in the American context, most of the progress of the 20th century was made in the two periods most associated with unrest: the 30’s and the 60’s. The two great exceptions I see to this are granting women the vote, and the early civil rights period. But civil rights had elite support (e.g., James Conant) because Jim Crow was a great rhetorical weapon for the Soviets. Granting women the vote, well, I don’t know that much about the politics of that. Nonetheless, working within the system only seems to work when there is a credible threat of working outside of it in a seriously disruptive manner.

There is also the matter of how should revolutionary success be judged. The French Revolution “failed”. It led to a bloody mess, and, shortly thereafter, Napoleon. But was it not a necessary element of the modernization of Europe nonetheless? Did the parts of Europe not transformed by the Revolution and Napoleon ultimately turn out better? You could call that 20/20 hindsight, but so is invoking the great terror and Napoleon. Regardless of whether it works out better in the short term, and perhaps whether it works out better at all, it seems sometimes necessary that regimes fall, and the most defensible way is for them to fall to their own people. Not to discount what a dangerous crap shoot any revolution is, but I don’t see how they can be ruled out categorically.

I’ve been struggling for a while with the idea of historical materialism—and this is probably off-topic—I really don’t know—but this almost seems to imply that it is impossible for culture or beliefs to change even in the slightest, short of a revolution that replaces the previously dominant class with a new dominant class.

Not even the most orthodox possible* materialist would believe something like this, because there’s no such thing as capitalism simpliciter under such a scheme, but every social formation is riven by internal contradictions and the capitalist ones feature the “constant revolutionizing of the means of production” and blah blah blah. So a theoretical absolute historical materialist who believed all aspects of a society were epiphenomena of the class struggle could still point to the relative power of haute vs petit bourgeois, financial vs industrial vs commercial capital (and different sectors within those,) household vs market labor, uneven regional development and imperialism, various strata among the working class, the decline or health of pre-capitalist elites, the power of the state to secure monopolies, changing technology, and so on ad nauseam as reasons for changes within capitalism. And of course actually existing historical materialists (who don’t believe that everything is just the epiphenomena of economics and class struggle, merely that economics and class struggle are super duper important) actually do point to these things as important, materialist causes of change within history.

Of course, there certainly is the trend to that there are a number of features which we can associate with capitalism simpliciter despite not being part of its definition – which is just common sense, I should think.

*I was about to write “most orthodox,” but you don’t really see ideas taken to their most absolute possible conclusion on the left like you do on the right (where the idea that social theorizing should be done a priori is explicitly defended and even used as a tribal marker.) So while the above statement should be taken as applying, of course, to those who are as materialist as they come, take it further, as applying to those who are as historical materialist as anyone could possibly be.

Some thirty-five years ago I had in dream. In the dream, I was in a rather fancy restaurant and for some reason was inspired to hop up on the table and start singing The Internationale. Somewhat to my surprise (but not entirely as this was a dream) the other patrons joined in and started singing along in a triumphant rendition.

Last night, I was at a banquet for the conference of the Pacific Northwest Labour History Association. After the dinner, there was a performance by the local Solidarity Notes choir. The climax of the performance was the singing of The Internationale, first in French, but then in English with the now standing academics, labour union officials and New Democratic Party politicians joining in full voice with raised, clenched fists.

Just to prove that sometimes even dreams come true. More or less.

Surely if we are to have a general view on whether Revolutions generally are “worth it” (and however we might want to measure this), then we need to have some idea as to whether Revolutions foregone are generally “worth it” or not?

I see now way of making this tractable.

Chris,

Phil was being sarcastic.

Tony Lynch @ 15

One way — possibly the only way — is to wait and see if the revolution foregone leads us up a blind alley. Needless to say, rarely is any one of us as an individual around long enough to find out. John Q, like many other social democrats, appears not to think that we’re up a blind alley now. If so, it’s an assessment which most social democrats and neoliberals share. Not only that, but each according to his own lights is far more sanguine about that assessment than are most people who take Marx seriously.

As someone said in the Marx without revolution thread, if you just discount the ravages of financial capitalism in the last twenty years or so, the income inequality stats don’t look so bad. Well, yeah, sure…but if by that is meant that all we have to do is pull one of our technocratic levers, and presto, we’re back where we were, permit me to doubt it.

One of the best things about Marx, et al., is that they saw that such discontinuities, irrationalities, etc., have a logic of their own, even when we don’t perceive it. You can’t just pull levers, ’cause the levers exist in pure form only inside your own closed intellectual system, you own class consciousness, if you will. I hate to cite a sci-fi reference in discussions of such weighty matters, but this thread reminds me of 2001. If you remember, everything in that technocratic New Jerusalem was securely, even beautifully tied down — all capital was under management, so to speak — until the black obelisk showed up. When it did, the managers went on managing right up to and beyond the point where it made any sense at all. That was a fantasy, of course…nothing at all like what’s going on in the real world at the moment. And yet….

I was going to contribute on the other thread, but my comment would have wound up being too long and meandering. And I think that is because I don’t quite grasp what is being discussed.

First, why did history start in 1789? If we are talking about historical examples, why none from before the industrial revolution? Surely there were classes then?

Second, what exactly is meant by revolution anyway? This sounds nitpicking, but do the leaders have to change? Does the class the leaders are drawn from and/ or the means of selecting them have to change? How much do government policies have to change? Does there have to be violence? How much do the actual proletariat have to be involved?

I have a sort of Hollywoodish image of demonstrations and barricades, but I’m sure there has be something more we are discussing than that.

At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way, with two steps forward and one step back, are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.

as a communist of third worldist sensibilities I find this bit rather distasteful. maybe for some people the system has been reformed, changed into something more humane. from my standpoint, however, most of what you see as progress appears to involve little more than extending various existing privileges to larger and larger sections of the population to bring their interests into line with the imperialist project and the massive value flow stream associated with it as greater and greater expenditures of “guard labor” from the core countries were required to maintain the growing forms of extraction from the periphery

now that the labor requirements of imperialism have changed and your masters no longer need so many of you, your stock is falling and your social assets are being sold off to private investors; meanwhile in many countries your vaunted civil liberties are being aggressively rolled back and attacked. political parties in the bourgeois governments calling themselves “Socialist” have in many places been at the fore of pushing neoliberalism and austerity on Europe. in my eyes this shows what an obvious farce it all was, and how easy it is for the capitalists to take back the bribes they offered the early labor aristocracy. only in a handful of countries has the first world working class managed so much as ongoing street demonstrations against the rollback of their benefits. the resistance so far has been scattered and helpless. how can you imagine that these forces, the withered organs of the workers’ movement which now flail uselessly against the might of finance capital, had actually managed to hold capitalism in check and make its own demands, rather than having simply been paid off and placated? but maybe this actually reveals some deeper truth about how awesome reformism is?

I also highly doubt that glory (especially in death) is an inherently aristocratic desire or taste. sometimes men and women genuinely prefer death on their feet over some compromise which is unacceptable to their conscience. there are things besides being raised into nobility which might inculcate this view

practical arguments appeal to me greatly, and I do think that obviously any plan focusing exclusively on planning and producing a single one-time event is going to be absurdly insufficient to address the total multitude of problems which socialists are interested in solving. this sort of snide, moralizing insinuation, however, is quite pointlessly offensive. besides, it’s not even like there’s a meaningful binary between a revolutionary “revolutionary movement” and a non-revolutionary ” revolutionary movement.” what do we call the process in Venezuela? participation in bourgeois government, and a reformist approach, but also a distinct breaking point with the past and a timeline defined by concrete struggle events, and changes in the structure and functions of the state introduced in bursts. no revolutionary group plans exclusively for the revolution; it is correct not to be naive about what a single day’s events can change, but I don’t see any real reason to imagine that revolutionary politics have not learned greatly from failures of the past

If we can’t have revolution, I hope at least there can be violence. That would be something.

What has “want” got to do with anything? If revolutions happened because people wanted them, they’d probably never happen. They happen because people find themselves doing things they never expected to do, for lack of a perceived alternative.

Didn’t the Philippines have a revolution in the 1980s?

Well this is all very interesting but I don’t see what it has to do with Marxism. As should be well known, I thought, Marx was perfectly happy with the idea of a peaceful, democratic revolution (“… we do not deny that there are countries like England and America… where labour may attain its goal by peaceful means.” Marx, 18 September 1872). (emphasis added). His point was far more simple: you should obviously and self-evidently prioritise peaceful democratic methods of achieving power. But don’t be surprised when the ruling class doesn’t give up its own power peacefully (in other words, ‘revolutions’ are actually counter-revolutions, defending democracy against the anti-democratic thought and actions of the ruling class). As someone pointed out above, one of the most vulgar of anti-Marxist mistakes is to ‘read back’ Leninism onto Marxism. Whatever one thinks about Lenin he was a very different kind of thinker from Marx, with a very different view of what ‘revolutions’ meant and mean.

In any case, and as again has been pointed out ad nauseum by Marxists, Marx did not say that even a revolution had to be ‘violent’. This is particularly true if one looks at the most concrete example of what Marx and Engels meant by a revolution: the Paris Commune. The revolution itself was not violent (although the resulting attempt to suppress it of course was extraordinarily violent).

Or again look at Egypt. There was a lot of violence in the Egyptian revolution, literally all of it, without exception, coming from the dictatorship, and towards its own people.

You are really loading the scales, incidentally, by adding the word ‘socialist’ the the word ‘revolution’. Since there are currently no socialist states in any sense that Marx or Engels would have recognised as being socialist, then obviously one can infer that socialist revolutions don’t work. However, ipso facto, one can also infer that the democratic movement to socialism don’t work either. If one was to broaden the ‘meaning’ of revolution to include bourgeoise revolutions then the argument would fall apart because there have been a huge number of successful revolutions, including, of course, the ’89 revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the current revolutions in the Middle East (well, some of them at least, so far).

The French revolution (which was not a socialist revolution so I don’t see why it’s being mentioned in any case) was not, of course, a failure in the long run. Is France now a totalitarian state? Are there still guillotines working in Paris?

However I will accept one point: clearly the violence involved in the ‘American Revolution’ was a mistake, and one that goes a long way to explaining why the US is now a failed, rogue state. That was one revolution that would have been a lot better if the British had successfully suppressed it.

That was the sort of ‘failed revolution’ you meant, yes?

Sorry JQ, this analysis is so old fashioned it creaks. Where did you get the idea that ‘a single violent irruption ( not that a revolution need be violent of course) is in some sense counterposed to ‘long agitation, boring committee reports and so on.’

I think the idea is always that some kind of fundamental transformation, some massive break in the previous logic of ‘how things work’ is required in order for the ‘long agitation, boring committee reports and so on’ to achieve a lasting purchase.

Now, the game may not be worth the candle in many specific historic cases, as you suggest – failure is certainly not unknown. In any event, even at the purely theoretical level, how to carry out such a transformation in a way that (a) maintains democratic norms ; and (b) protects those who carry out the transformation from the violent reaction of those overthrown is by no means obvious.

So there are real questions here, but they are really not best discussed as if we were still engaged in a 1920s debate between platform speakers representing the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.

I think Americans are wrong to call their war for independence a “revolution.”. It wasn’t. It was a war of secession to throw out a foreign occupier. Americans already thought of themselves as apart from British subjects even as Paul Revere rode around warning that “the British” were coming. Wasn’t Revere British at that point? That they already had a nationalist identity apart from Britain is key.

Question: if the south had been permitted to secede in the 1860s, would we call that the “second American revolution”? I think not.

Once more with added civility:

1. To believe in revolution does not entail believing in Jacobin or Leninist revolution, still less to maintain that the actual Jacobins and Leninists didn’t get anything wrong. Most believers in revolution will happily agree with critiques of real-world Leninism.

2. To believe in revolution does not entail being opposed to reform. Many believers in revolution will happily agree with critiques of abstentionist maximalism. (Others will maintain that A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait., and fair play to them. But the fact that abstentionist maximalism is a thing doesn’t license you to conflate it with belief in revolution tout court. )

3. The suggestion that Mr Karl Marx would have been a bit less cocky about his plans for a so-called revolution if he’d known how badly things turned out in France harbours a logical flaw, and should be used with caution.

And even after decades in which the upper 1 per cent has steadily gained ground, they remain far from omnipotent. Despite continuous attack, the basic structures of the welfare state remain intact, and there have even been some important extensions[2].

—

Apologies for not having read Quiggin’s item more carefully. I was under the impression that he was arguing on behalf of socialism, even if on a Irving Howe basis. Upon further reflection, and especially in light of his spin on Bush and Obama’s health care “reforms”, he much more of a mainstream liberal. I only wish that these Timberites would not write about Karl Marx or David Harvey. It is like giving a loaded .38 to a child. Of course, Jerry Cohen is much more their thing–a water pistol to be sure.

Louis, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

I think there is something large to be said for the theory which holds that the mere existence of “Communism” as practiced (however imperfectly) by the Soviet/Eastern bloc through to 1991 was a significant incentive to the Masters of the Universe in the West to ameliorate their demands of the bottom 99%.

It became an ideologically unipolar world in a sense, where without another pole pulling away from neoliberalism directly, everything shifted towards that and continues to.

Maybe we don’t need a revolution per se, just a compelling counter-system to neoliberal capitalism to rally around. I don’t think Marxism is that system, and while I still think social democracy (ie highly managed capitalism) works better than the alternatives yet tried, it does suffer from being too close to neoliberalism and too easily confused by the masses (and hell even the people who pay a lot of attention can be fooled*). Elites can run for office on social democratic ideals, and enact neoliberal policy that is dressed up to look social. At least if there was another “ism” that wasn’t anything like capitalism, the people we put in power would find it much more difficult to fool us with their policy choices.

(* – I will submit the ongoing debate about the real effects of the ACA among smart, well intentioned people of the left as a good example of this – it’s not hard to find people who think single payer would have been ideal, but the ACA is still better than the status quo – and others that write the whole thing off as a big giveaway to Big Insurance)

#42: Bismarck’s reforms followed this logic, to an extent.
At the time, he was also keen to win the allegiance of important groups to a particular level of government (in his case, the nation-state). Over the last decade or two, you’d often hear arguments along those lines from advocates of EU-level social policy. Seems to me that regulators and legislators keen to win legitimacy for themselves (whether sincere or self-interested) can present a promising opening for advocates of specific reforms.
From what I gather, people in Massachusetts quite like Romneycare. Of course, if you ask Romney about Romneycare today, you’ll see a robotically smooth example of Quiggin’s ‘one step back’.

I think there is something large to be said for the theory which holds that the mere existence of “Communism” as practiced (however imperfectly) by the Soviet/Eastern bloc through to 1991 was a significant incentive to the Masters of the Universe in the West to ameliorate their demands of the bottom 99%.

Old age pensions, national insurance, free school meals, the Factory Acts, unemployment benefits, free medical care, workers’ compensation payments, legal protection for striking unions, minimum wages, free education, etc all predate Soviet Communism by a few years.
There’s definitely a case for the slightly more general form of this argument, i.e. that they were brought in as a conscious attempt to stave off general socialist-inspired unrest, which is I think what bert is getting at in 44. But saying that all the good stuff that happened for ordinary Western people’s legal and economic rights in the 20th century is because of the USSR is a) anachronistic and b) denies agency to the ordinary people themselves.

Barrington Moore in his classic 1966 book,_ Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Modern World _ argues that the American Civil War was a social revolution more important than the War of Independence. According to Moore in order to become a democratic industrialized society you have to eliminate the peasant class and replace them with commercialized agriculture. The US had no peasants, but slaves in the South played a similar social-economic role in retarding the development of a society that was both democratic and industrialized. According to Moore the Civil War allowed free White settlers in the West growing grain and raising livestock to became a more important part of the US economy than bonded labor in the South growing cotton. It was this alliance between western farmers and northern industrialists that allowed industrialization to take a democratic route in the US after the Civil War in Moore’s view.

> Old age pensions, national insurance, free school meals, the Factory
> Acts, unemployment benefits, free medical care, workers’
> compensation payments, legal protection for striking unions,
> minimum wages, free education, etc all predate Soviet
> Communism by a few years.

In the United States perhaps; most of your list were ideas adopted or developed by Bismark’s brain trust. For many reasons, but forestalling the development of communard movements certainly among them.

Cranky

all predate Soviet Communism by a few years … but in many cases only by a few years, and I don’t think it’s repulsively ridiculous history to say that the passage of them was significantly motivated by fear of socialist revolution.

@42: Is it your position that the ACA is not an improvement on the status quo? Does this involve some prediction of the path of future legislation and executive action to alter it’s impact?

In general though, I agree with your observation that one of the difficult parts of democratically managed capitalism is that it’s hard to know what is called for so it’s easy to be fooled by self-serving elites. We can’t even get macroeconomic policy agreed upon by liberal elites.

I agree with ajay #53. Fear of socialist revolution is now acknowledged even by many mainstream political scientists as a major impetus for historical instances of democratisation and redistribution. The answer to the old question ‘If the condition of the workers was so poor in the C19th and early C20th, why weren’t there more revolutions?’ turns out to have two parts. 1) Collective action is difficult 2) When the w/class started to get organised and overcome collective action problems, elites responded either by pre-empting their demands (co-option), allowing the w/class to be incorporated more fully into the political system (social democratisation), or by responding hysterically with repression (reaction and fascism). The latter didn’t work out too well for the 3rd Reich or Tsarist Russia in the end, of course.

Regarding the Soviet Union’s influence on forcing Western elites to accept more egalitarian policies than would otherwise have been the case, the spectre of communism in the then Third World certainly influenced US policies towards development. For example, the US attempted to encourage land reform and state building in East Asia to remove the grievances that could have generated an opportunity for the growth of communist movements. It also gave large quantities of aid to its regional allies and did not insist that they fully liberalise their markets or trade policies. Scholars of the region, such as Amsden, argue that this would not have occurred outside of the Cold War context.

the spectre of communism in the then Third World certainly influenced US policies towards development. For example, the US attempted to encourage land reform and state building in East Asia to remove the grievances that could have generated an opportunity for the growth of communist movements.

Very true. Blowtorch Bob Komer and his Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support plans, for example. It even had the word “revolutionary” in the name; Komer was very well aware that he was trying to overturn the structure of rural Vietnamese society.

There’s definitely a case for the slightly more general form of this argument, i.e. that they were brought in as a conscious attempt to stave off general socialist-inspired unrest</i.

Indeed, it is quite hard to understand the Marshall Plan without this perspective, even if there were other motives behind it as well.

Norwegian guy: The Bolshevik revolution was in 1917. The eight-hour day was legislated in many countries in 1918 or 1919. There might have been a connection.

Being a Dutch guy myself such connections seem very clear to me: democracy first came to the Netherlands in november 1848, following the various attempted revolutions all over Europe earlier that year, which terribly frightened the poor king. Proportional representation was introduced in 1917, women’s suffrage in 1919…

The Bolshevik revolution was in 1917. The eight-hour day was legislated in many countries in 1918 or 1919. There might have been a connection

The eight-hour day had been a labour reformer’s demand for a century by then – it became law in the US in 1916, and in NZ considerably earlier. I think it’s dubious to argue that the Masters of the Universe saw the red flag in Moscow and thought “we’ll be next unless we reduce working hours”. This is kind of what I was getting at with the point about denying agency to the people who were campaigning for all these changes in the West, by reducing it to a two-actor play: the MotU and the CPSU, with the actual population of the West as a backdrop.

I should’ve said unbeknownst to (that is, unacknowledged by) its Eurocentric organic intellectuals.

64: That it wasn’t a 2-actor play is exactly the point, nobody was worried about Lenin himself in Chicago. But it also wasn’t the case that the MOTU suddenly became aware of socialism and radical worker movements in 1917, as you say there had been a century in social disorder, possible social disorder, and pressure from the radical left. 1848, 1871, Haymarket etc, Colorado Labor Wars, May Day Riots 1894, Couer d’Alene decades of labor violence…with the International always in the background.

Really, what the post-WWI revolutions only showed was exactly how far it could go if labor and social democratics were not accommodated;the threat of social disorder and violence was always always there, and had been for a century.

The other thing that is being missed in this discussion that I think is important comes from the right. Yes, for examples Bismarck, Meiji, and the US were pressured from the left, but there was also a program of Fordism from the right, of developing and supporting a placid semi-educated healthy labor force that could be productive in industrial democracies. Pullman’s and Ford’s villages.

And that was the success and failure of social democrats, that they helped create the Fordist social welfare states that provided a modicum of social welfare and security but completely erased any sense of class consciousness, historical memory, and politico-economic agency. Social democrats helped the MOTU win, perhaps once and for all, and now the workers are so domesticated that the rich can now roll back the wlfare state without fear.

there obviously doesn’t need to be a direct connection with the Bolshevik revolution in order for us to say that various reformist demands were able to be pushed through because of the fears of revolution if they weren’t allowed to.

Yes, exactly.

Is it a coincidence that much of the beginning of this rollback coincided with the disillusionment with and eventual defeat of the revolutionary left?

Did it though? Depends when you date “the disillusionment with and eventual defeat of the revolutionary left”. Some might say that was the 1950s – XXth Party Congress and Hungary. Some could say it was the 1980s – fall of the Wall – or the 1990s. You could even say it was the 1930s and/or 1940s (abolition of the Comintern, the Great Terror, purges of Trotskyists etc).
If you’re talking about the welfare state rollbacks of the 1980s in the UK and US – and these weren’t really matched elsewhere in the West – then these started at the time when the USSR was at its height and no one was expecting it to crumble at all.

also, I normally don’t much agree with Ajay but I think he’s very much right on this. Most reformers in the US didn’t argue for Soviet-style reforms and the prospect of the Soviets taking over America was, fears of some aside, not likely. It was probably more motivated by the much more real threat of people like Eugene Debs (a socialist getting 6% of the popular vote, even after having been arrested for sedition? methinks that may have scared certain elites in gov’t a lot more than a Lenin pamphlet that maybe .01% of that number read in this country) or the rising unions or any other number of more pressing issues. And even if it’s true that the numerous downsides of life in the USSR weren’t widely publicized until later, most Americans assumed that it sucked, anyways.

J. Otto Pohl: “The problem is that the Bolsheviks led a proletarian revolution and established a dictatorship of the proleteriat in a country where there was not much of a proletariat. ”

Actually, the Bolsheviks simply made a revolution along the lines that Marx recommended in his letters to Zasulich, Danielson et al. All this is described in Shanin’s “The Late Marx”. The idea was that peasant communes could have been a springboard to revolution all across Europe. The failure of such revolutions can be traced to the lack of a “subjective factor”, namely a revolutionary party. The Comintern fostered a model that was ironically at odds with the Bolshevik party that Lenin built, a dubious contribution of Zinoviev. In terms of Quiggin’s overall analysis, revolutions are not something that Marxists “organize”. There will be revolutionary uprisings whether or not Marxists exist. Capitalism is responsible for these uprisings, not Marxists. When such uprisings fail, the inevitable result is terrible repression and a journey into darkness. To imagine that capitalism can continue to work for the majority of humanity is an illusion that almost requires no debunking. One imagines that the material conditions of tenured academic life is a breeding ground for them.

I want to repeat that a lot of what social democrats take credit for came from the right, that toward the beginning of the 20th, especially in the later developing societies, it was well understood by enlightened industrialists and capitalists that the ten-yr-old you had working on the factory floor was not going to be a productive technician twenty years from now when the machinery had become even more complicated.

There were many implications to universal education. A stable homelife with a wage high enough that mothers could stay home, medical and retirement benefits, most of this is necessary to maximize productivity in ways East Asia is starting to discover.

The social democrats always served capital rather than workers.

I was expecting this to be an awful thread but in fact it’s one of the best I’ve seen on CT in a while. Hidari @30, J. Otto Pohl @35, The Tragically Flip @42, Nick L @56 and Rob K @69 are particularly good.

I’m glad to see general agreement that the accomplishments of social democracy owe a great deal to the existence of a radical alternative. It’s an enduring mystery why liberals are so compelled to denounce and denigrate their own best allies. (And yes, the same thing also happens the other way round — but I think that radicals are generally more willing to acknowledge the strategic value of reformers.)

Okay, I’ll be teh troll in teh ointment*. I’m going to have to say that the existence of the USSR and teh Cold War and all that 50s Red Scare stuff did moar to entrench teh ruling class than is made up for by “OMG we gotta give ’em some labour reforms or we’ll be up to our ears in Bolsheviks”.

Most attempts at revolution fail, leaving the participants and the oppressed worse off than before. Even where revolution is successful, attempts by the revolutionary party to hold on to power usually lead to reactionary dictatorship in short order.

There were several successful revolutions in 1989 in Eastern Europe that changed the type of government forever for the better and left people better off (at least according to most people affected).

He quoted the OP, so what makes you think he was responding to you?

“the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. ”

Sic et non. A lot of this followed WWII, which had the effect of destroying or discrediting the a large chunk of the rightist political spectrum while legitimizing interventionist government policies. There was certainly a lot of long agitation and boring committee reports before WWII, but how much would have been realized without the war?

I’m glad to see general agreement that the accomplishments of social democracy owe a great deal to the existence of a radical alternative. It’s an enduring mystery why liberals are so compelled to denounce and denigrate their own best allies.

I think that in the US, it’s two things:

1. Cold War Red-baiting and its persistent aftereffects (as dsquared likes to say).

2. The party structure. For constitutional reasons, our politics are dominated by two great big ideologically loose parties (the Republicans lately have developed real party discipline, but the Democrats never will). Anyway, that affects how people see the range of viewpoints that need to be taken into consideration. Liberals who put great value on responding to alternate perspectives will go out of their way to listen to “the other side”, but left factions that are forced either into powerless subsets of the Democratic Party or into minor third parties don’t even count as a side.

It personally took me a long time to think about this last point in a reasonable way. I’m a liberal, not a leftist really, but I assume I’m not right about everything. However, if I think my opinions are generally close to correct (which I must, or they wouldn’t be my opinions), I’d expect a priori to err toward the right as often as toward the left. So it makes no sense to only listen to people to my own right when I’m being all open-minded. But if you see the available menu of attitudes as Democratic or Republican, and especially if you do the ridiculous media thing of equating reasonableness with centrism, this gets obscured.

“the MotU and the CPSU, with the actual population of the West as a backdrop.”

Around 1917, a nontrivial share of the population of the West saw itself as part of the same class that they – mistakenly – thought had seized the power in Russia. And in the minds of much of the MotU too, there wasn’t much difference between the Western labour movement and the CPSU. Now, this was partly out of ignorance, but the partition between Communists and Social Democrats wasn’t always waterproof, at least not immediately.

“If you’re talking about the welfare state rollbacks of the 1980s in the UK and US – and these weren’t really matched elsewhere in the West – then these started at the time when the USSR was at its height and no one was expecting it to crumble at all.”

Oh there have been welfare state rollbacks, privatizations, and increasing inequality, in other countries as well, though not to the same extent. But lots of countries had right-wing governments in the 80s; West Germany, Canada, Denmark, Norway, etc. Even in France, Mitterrand took his neoliberal turn from 1983 on.

And the USSR might have been at its height at that time, but by 1980 Soviet Communism had lost its attraction to the western working class. But there would have been an amount of inertia to such processes.

“Most reformers in the US didn’t argue for Soviet-style reforms and the prospect of the Soviets taking over America was, fears of some aside, not likely.”

Perhaps not in America, but in Europe there were parties with mass support that argued for more or less Soviet-style reforms. Sometimes even revolution.

But I really don’t think revolution is the solution. And if there is to be a revolution, the 1918 revolutions in Austria and Germany are better models than Russia, 1917. They were relatively successful in the short run, and if you ignore the unpleasantness in the 1930s and 1940s, they have worked out decently in the long run as well.

It’s not as if it were in our hands

I don’t think that we have historical examples of revolutions carried out by the downtrodden in successful societies. Even if the downtrodden arguably could do a better deal if they got rid of the parasites, they aren’t likely to have enough faith in that proposition of greener grass in some notional better society as long as things are still liveable in this society. The downtrodden are more likely to assume that their own success relative to people in other societies is dependent on allowing the elite parasites to get away with even outrageous abuses, as long as things are going tolerably well for society as a whole under their direction.

The French Revolution was carried out by the elite of the ancien regime, when the grandees who sat on the Parlement de Paris refused to register the laws implementing Necker’s tax reform. To people who felt that complete freedom from taxation was their due, even the very modest level of taxation of the wealth accumulators proposed by Necker was simply intolerable. Politicla revolution, overturning the Bourbon monarchy and forcing the return of the Estates General was preferable. They were supremely confident that they could manage the revolution, that the lesser folk summoned to the Estares would be even more easily controlled than the king. Only people who cannot really imagine that things will not go their way in any turn of events would be willing to risk a complete overthrow in the usual way of doing business.

This is what we’re seeing today. The coddled elites of the most successful society in the history of the planet, unused to having to put up with any obstacles or live within any limitations, simply do not find the amazingly good deal they have arranged for themselves to be good enough. They have to pay some taxes. Intolerable! Lesser folk are accorded a social safety net, and thereby some of their meager accumulable wealth is shared out directly among their pitiful selves, rather than the wealthy having their go at diverting their just share by diddling in the middle somewhere. Intolerable!

If it takes revolution to end this intolerable state of affairs, then revolution they will have. Perhaps the means to that revolution will be the same sort of totally unnecessary, self-inflicted, national bankruptcy that caused the calling of the Estates General, and they will have their creatures in the House persist in their refusal to raise the debt ceiling. Perhaps they will allow that crisis to abate without forcing the issue, and perhaps we shall then see gradual change in the climate of opinion that will pull us back from the brink. But at this point, we are near that brink, and that is entirely the doing of the wealth accumulation elite and their political creatures. All the current impetus to constitutional hardball and brinksmanship, to outright revolution, comes from their side.

If we are to have revolution, it must come from their side, from the privileged. Amazingly enough, they seem intent on doing just that, fomenting revolution.

/me is with Glen Tomkins.

I don’t think these fools who think they’re so hot to prevent 1993 really understand that they don’t have choices about certain facts of life. When the coup happens, it’s almost certainly to be Peronist to some extent, eventually.

Obama ignored Congress on Libya because he isn’t about to get any sort of rational response. This is true across the policy spectrum where executive administrations have to do things Congress should be doing, and they are just not equipped to do that. The economy, for example, needs fiscal stimulus, new investment regimes, and crackdowns on discrimination (equal pay, good home/car loan terms, etc, etc, you wouldn’t *believe* how much economic activity is forgone because of assholes). The Fed isn’t capable of doing what is needed. They only do monetary stuff. Congress impairs the IRS and the new Consumer Credit Beauro, the EPA, all of which would have forced more money in the economy for various reasons.

Revolutions happen because they must happen, not because anyone really wants them. Congress and the Supreme Court cannot be this irrational and dysfunctional without dire consequences.

I don’t see how the Marxism is relevant to anything. People used to believe some really weird stuff in days gone by. Remember the Aztecs? Why would Marx be any better guide to the economic or political organization of modern society?

Marx died before the internal combustion engine, air travel, speed, mechanized warfare and radio. Why expect it to be relevant today?

Arguably, Marx himself and his body of work is the main reason that industrialized societies did not see revolutions in the Victorian age. contrary to his express predictions, Victorian society did adapt to share the wealth of industrialization. And one of the reasons that happened was that enough eminent Victorians were scared stiff of a French style uprising to make concessions to the rising working class.

Back in the 1970s, liberal democracies were quite rare, outside the former British Empire, remarkably so. More than two thirds of Europe was under some form of dictatorship along with practically all of Africa, South America and Asia.

Today it is tyrannies that are the exception. Liberal democracies are still a minority but most of the rest are some form of authoritarian kleptocracy. The North Koreas, Saudi Arabias, Irans etc are now exceptional rather than the norm. If we exclude the countries currently in some form of revolution (Lybia, Syria), the opportunities for further overthrow of tyrannies are diminished by limited supply.

Even in a country like Zimbabwe, it is probably a better strategy for the opposition to wait for Mugabwe to die (from natural causes or otherwise) or to engineer a military putsch rather than take up arms.

No revolution? Oh well, I was so looking forward to it.

The revolution will begin as the diminution of market theory and the relegation of markets to a smaller part of control/switching theory and policy, as I remember Dsquared once characterized them. This is basically because the world is too complicated to be adjudicated by prices, because the welfare state is not about to be ended, and because nonmarketable institutions can provide value and utility by reducing risk, uncertainty, and negative externalities. It has already begun, and there will be no reprieve from this historical eclipse of market fundamentalism for anything other than capital and consumer goods. One reason is because the ruling class really isn’t that smart.

Ok…so if falsifiability doesn’t matter, couldn’t I equally argue that the social welfare state was caused by mind control rays from outer space? At some point we have to figure out some way to assess these claims and that involves some way of assessing whether a factor wasn’t operating.

“The first is rather easy to dispose of: the upper social orders of Great Britain were petrified of revolution both at home and abroad and the risk of a new wave of terrors and ‘Bonapartism’. The debates on the corn laws and the great reform bill are full of references to revolution as the alternative to reform.”

This I don’t find satisfying either. In the 18th and 19th centuries, fear of revolution led to the Gagging Acts, the Combination Acts, the suspension of habeus corpus, Peterloo, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, etc. Without the presence of reformist political organization and agitation, I don’t think autocratic fears of the lower orders –> reform.

Without the presence of reformist political organization and agitation, I don’t think autocratic fears of the lower orders—> reform

Well of course. I don’t think anyone has suggested otherwise.

Re the OP:
A true political or, even more, social revolution in a highly ‘developed’ country today would be both more difficult and less likely than, say, the French Revolution b/c, among other things, modern state apparatuses are much more deeply entrenched in and connected to their societies than were the monarchies of ancien regime France or tsarist Russia. (I think I’m just parroting Skocpol at the end of States and Social Revolutions but not going to bother looking it up now.)

The revisions are welcome. But I’m struck by the fact that nobody’s challenged this:

Most attempts at revolution fail, leaving the participants and the oppressed worse off than before.

Really? There’s plenty to be said against Stalin’s rule (and Lenin’s), but the idea that it was actually worse than Tsarism is a new one on me. It was certainly worse for the Crimean Tartars, for several years it was worse for Ukraine, and you could argue that it was worse for political dissidents, if only because the Cheka had a better bureaucracy than the Okhrana. Beyond that, it seems to me that most people exchanged greater interference in everyday life for a much higher standard of living, materially and otherwise (my wife’s grandmother was the first woman in her family ever to be taught to read). Civil liberties, legal protections and rights to political participation were more or less non-existent, so no change there.

‘Most attempts at revolution fail, leaving the participants and the oppressed worse off than before.’

Sorry I just noticed this because it was highlighted. If one appends the word ‘socialist’ in front of the word ‘revolution’ it is arguably true (although even then only arguably as some commentators have pointed out). But written like that it’s self-evidently and obviously false. There are many harsh things one could say about the various regimes in power now in Eastern Europe. But one would have to have a remarkably small amount of knowledge of what life was like Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1970s to actually argue that people there were better off before the revolutions.

Even with the appended paragraph it’s still not true.

‘The successful revolutions have mostly been those where the ancien regime collapsed under its own weight.’

Is this really what happened in, say, East Germany? Poland? Romania?

Most attempts at revolution fail, leaving the participants and the oppressed worse off than before.

Yep, that seems very wrong, except if you take into account that revolutions are usually extremely bloddy business. Then you enter a calculation of suffering that is not easy (assuming it has a meaning in the first place). So, for instance, the French revolution left at least 90% in a far better state than under the monarchy (in pretty much any conceivable term) but is also massacred 100 000 vendéens (at least). Likewise, I think that it is relatively uncontroversial that a majority of the Soviet population had a far better life in 1929 than in 1909, but millions had died too.

All in all, depending on your calculation (or even on whether you think such calculations are morally legitimate, Omelas and all that), you might get very different valid evaluations. That said, this raises the question has whether one should write such a sentence without even a comment in the first place. Would you like to clarify what you meant, John?

There’s plenty to be said against Stalin’s rule (and Lenin’s), but the idea that it was actually worse than Tsarism is a new one on me.

I’m not sure that Tsarism, brutal though it was, has anything to set alongside the purges. Nothing on anything like that scale. Does it?

And it’s made even more difficult by the fact that a majority of (frex) the British population had a far better life in 1929 than in 1909, without having had a revolution.

a. Far better?
b. These were years in which revolution was considered a distinct possibility, weren’t they?

116: yes, I think “far better” is about right. Look at the life expectancy and infant mortality numbers. And then you’ve got all the Lloyd George et seq. social-welfare stuff that was only just coming in in 1909 but was established and universal in 1929.

ejh seems to have missed the joke, “aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

Between the horrible destruction of the 1914-1918 war and the economic mobilization that was created by it, who was better off when and where is complicated. And how many of those who were better off in 1929 were so a few years later. If capitalism didn’t order up those meddlesome wars in the 20th century, it certainly enjoyed the collateral benefits.

I’m not sure that Tsarism, brutal though it was, has anything to set alongside the purges.

True enough – or the Ukrainian famine, which I mentioned. But there were an awful lot of people in the USSR, and you don’t have to be a CP hack to think that the welfare of the majority should be aggregated as well as the sufferings of the many poor buggers who suffered.

Is this really what happened in, say, East Germany? Poland? Romania?

Save Romania, no. Foreign occupier left – puppet regiemes collapsed.

‘Foreign occupier left – puppet regiemes collapsed. ‘

I think you’ll find that the timescale is very much back to front in that précis of events. Add Albania to the list to make my point clearer.

belle le triste @ 124

Too true. Which is where, it seems to me, that we get the idea that the successive historical phases of economic development require the eradication of previous cultures, and, if necessary, the adherents of those cultures who can’t be enticed — or forced — to abandon them. Stalin was in a helluva hurry compared to the English lords, so we were able to watch a classic example of the general principle go to completion in real time. (I’ll show you a Wirtschaftswunder, folks!)

Nor is U.S. history exempt from the general trend. We can find no end of comments like this in our older books: Those damned redskins would rather sit in a circle and starve than learn to use a plow.

And now that we’ve all learned to use plows, and been rewarded for it by being allowed to possess flat-screen television sets, and vacation in Ibiza and Amalfi and Phuket, our betters are simply beside themselves trying to figure out why we some of us are still trying to talk back to them.

We must be cultural elitists.

The Tsarist regime certainly killed many people. Plenty of pogroms against minorities, especially jewish people. The regime also exposed the people to the unmitigated forces of capitalism, in the sense of international grain markets. While deaths from famine aren’t more than what happened later, the shock of them was a key driver to revolution. Russia was functionally a colony of the West, in terms of rim/hub dynamics.

“Really? There’s plenty to be said against Stalin’s rule (and Lenin’s), but the idea that it was actually worse than Tsarism is a new one on me. It was certainly worse for the Crimean Tartars, for several years it was worse for Ukraine, and you could argue that it was worse for political dissidents, if only because the Cheka had a better bureaucracy than the Okhrana. Beyond that, it seems to me that most people exchanged greater interference in everyday life for a much higher standard of living, materially and otherwise (my wife’s grandmother was the first woman in her family ever to be taught to read). ”

Zoink!?!? The idea that the Soviet path to Russian modernization was the necessary one is just Soviet propaganda. The idea that anyone really bought it anymore is a new one to me. Russian modernization in agriculture, politics, mechanization, and education was well under way before the revolution. Your wife’s grandmother would very likely have been the first woman in her family ever to be taught to read under a tsarist continuation. All sorts of countries went through modernization at about the same time as Russia plus or minus 50 years. While all of the modernizations were painful, almost none of them were as bloody as in Russia and China–the big socialist revolutions. The idea hundreds of millions of people very literally had to be sacrificed in order to get to ‘modern’ is ridiculous. The proper measure is not “were some *surviving* people better off two generations later”. The proper measure is “could they have gotten there without going through two of the most bloody revolutions in the entire history of the world”. The answer to THAT question is clearly, yes.

Major cause of Bolshevik revolution: the Great War
Political grouping in no way responsible for the Great War: Bolsheviks
Deathcount of the Great War: dwarfs deathcount of the Soviet Terror (insofar as the latter is considered independent of the former)

I fail to see how this morally justifies the crimes of Stalin

The idea that the Soviet path to Russian modernization was the necessary one is just Soviet propaganda.

Steady, lads. I didn’t make either of the assertions you challenge. I objected to the assertion that the Russian Revolution left the people of the former Russian empire worse off than before, unquote. If you think that was the case, have at it.

Just in passing –

Your wife’s grandmother would very likely have been the first woman in her family ever to be taught to read under a tsarist continuation. All sorts of countries went through modernization at about the same time as Russia plus or minus 50 years.

So it might not have been my grandmother-in-law in the 1930s, it might have been my wife’s second cousins in the 1980s. That’s a seriously long view you’re taking there. The fact that the Bolsheviks had a literacy programme which they got cracking on pretty much as soon as their power wasn’t being challenged any more, whereas the Romanovs ruled over an illiterate populace for 300 years, seems like a significant difference to me.

“So it might not have been my grandmother-in-law in the 1930s, it might have been my wife’s second cousins in the 1980s. ”

That isn’t what I was suggesting. I was stating that A) Russia was already going through modernization, which it was;

B) lots of other countries went through modernization in the hundred years bracketing the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and almost all of them managed to do so with significantly less violence.

so

C) the idea that the violent revolutions had anything significant to do with the modernizations, much less that they were even remotely necessary for the modernizations seems tenuous at very best.

Now I focus on the modernizations, because you mention the literacy and such and because it seems to me the only possible dimension by which you can state things like “There’s plenty to be said against Stalin’s rule (and Lenin’s), but the idea that it was actually worse than Tsarism is a new one on me. ” Maybe you have some other dimension of rule that you are thinking of where Stalin or Lenin weren’t worse, but if you take away the modernization (which could have been done without the enormous bloodshed) I don’t see where you think they did better. It must be some really limited area.

The fact that the Bolsheviks had a literacy programme which they got cracking on pretty much as soon as their power wasn’t being challenged any more, whereas the Romanovs ruled over an illiterate populace for 300 years, seems like a significant difference to me.

Their electrification programme was pretty impressive too.

Again my plus or minus 50 years isn’t about the timing of Russian modernization. Russian modernization was already starting, that is one of the reasons the Bolsheviks were able to come to power at all. My plus or minus 50 years is comparing other countries which successfully modernized in the hundred years bracketing the two large communist revolutions. Nearly all modernized very successfully with orders of magnitude less bloodshed. You’re positing a Russia that wasn’t modernizing. That is ahistorical. Russia may not have modernized in EXACTLY the same tempo on a year by year basis, but the idea that two or three more full generations would have passed is fairly ridiculous. Ten years more? Maybe. Twenty? I doubt it. Sixty, which is what you seem to be talking about? Almost certainly not.

I objected to the assertion that the Russian Revolution left the people of the former Russian empire worse off than before, unquote. If you think that was the case, have at it.

Russia was in a pretty grim state immediately after 1917 – the Civil War. No Revolution – no Civil War, no millions of dead soldiers and starved civilians and typhus cases.

Of course, eventually it got richer and people got better off; but that tends to happen anyway. We’re really into counterfactual territory, but it’s worth noticing that pre-war tsarist Russia was industrialising and urbanising very fast and that tends to lead to rapid economic growth. People who say “well maybe my cousins would have been illiterate Russian peasants in 1980 under the Tsars” may overlook this.

“No Revolution – no Civil War”: ajay, this won’t really fly. The Bolsheviks were able to seize power because (a) the Tsarist state had collapsed, and (b) Kerensky’s Feb Revolution was paralysed in the face of the threat of a Tsarist restoration–and also because it didn’t dare withdraw from the war, which was a primary cause of the mutiny that became October. Civil war had already broken out, in fact if not in name.

Isn’t anyone going to challenge the assertion that the number killed in the Great War “dwarfs” the number killed by Stalin?

julian f: That would seem to depend critically on whether you score the influenza pandemic up against the war. (John M. Barry’s book concludes that there was (probably) a clear causal link — a mutated virus that arose in rural Kansas spread worldwide because of US mobilization.)

StevenAttewell@139-

It seems self-evidently obvious to me, and to lots of other people, that most concrete histories of progressive reforms show that they importantly depended on the existence of a radical alternative. I find that almost any time I read a book on the history of some progressive movement — and I’ve read a lot of them — this theme comes clearly through.

But you are right: it would be good to see the argument made more systematically. To be honest, this is a real source of frustration to me. Maybe there’s a good book or article that lays out in a comprehensive way the ways that reformers and radicals have been mutually dependent, but I haven’t seen it. If someone else has, please share!

One other thing: Fear of upheaval is just one channel. The other is that even incremental reforms often require years and years of immensely hard work, frequent setbacks and enormous sacrifice. It’s a lot easier for people to commit themselves to that if they believe that today’s small change is a step toward much bigger change in the future. (And maybe it’s true!) I know this, or think I do, from first hand experience. But it’s a hard thing to prove. I look at all the pragmatic reform movements whose best leaders and activists were drawn from some strand of revolutionary politics, and say, See, pragmatic politics needs the radical vision to give it life and energy. Whereas you could look at the same phenomenon and say, See, revolutionary politics must be a dead end, since so many people involved in it end up shifting toward more incremental goals. I don’t know what kind of evidence could resolve this question, to be honest.

Stalinism is not an interesting topic, wrt socioeconomic evolution/experimentation. One individual having total control over 170 million people for 20-25 years, it was clearly pathological.

On the other hand, J. Otto Pohl’s claim that the NEP was a highly successful experiment, that certainly could use some debating.

I think so. I know far less about that period than I might.

That’s not my argument, though, novakant: ” The Bolshevik experiment was an attempt to end-run a long and extremely horrible historical process; and it failed,” is what I said further up. WW1 was an element in this process in that it fed into the beginning of the civil war, indistinguishably for many (there are war monuments in villages all over the UK which say 1914-19 because that regment went straight from Western Front to Archangel, or wherever); but it’s not a prior cause at all; in some ways it’s as much symptom as cause. I’m arguing that there really wasn’t a “nice” route to modernisation–turns out you don’t get to sidestep it–so I don’t see the various hideous megadeaths as somehow counterbalancing each other, indications of a “better” versus a “worse” way to the future, on one side or the other; they’re much more intertwined than that. Part of the cause was identical on both sides, a historical process no one knew how to escape; part of it is a cumulative barbarism arising out of this process, with WW1 as a particularly destabilising causative step, or catastrophe.

What would be the difference between counting the Flu dead against WW1’s ledger and counting AIDS against the modern system of easy international travel? While the latter is true in a sense, I don’t see anyone outraged that jet flights and borders open to tourists are responsible for the deaths of millions. Consequences that are neither deliberate, foreseeable, nor necessary don’t really belong in the same class as willful slaughter nor mass death as the result of indifference.

there are war monuments in villages all over the UK which say 1914-19 because that regment went straight from Western Front to Archangel, or wherever

To be needlessly pedantic, that’s not down to the Russian intervention, AIUI, but that although fighting stopped in November 1918, the formal process of orderly liquidating the war finished in 1919.

Not really convinced that no one could have foreseen that disease and war go hand-in-hand: this would have been pretty much the opposite of news to any of the armies involved.

Richard J: haha, OK that serves me right for dredging an anecdote up out of my memory that was put there many years ago by Christopher Hitchens.

Belle, the reasonable standard would be did the heads of Europe who decided to go to war know that a likely consequence was a global pandemic that killed millions, not any increase in disease at all. Keep in mind the poor state of epidemiology at the time.

Excuse me, can I go meta here for a second? What determines when threads here close? I thought it was 10 days, but then some closed in 5. So I expected 1 to close in 5 and it lasted a day or so longer. Doesn’t seem to be time since last comment, nor have anything to do with when posts scroll off the front page. Is it some combination? I tried getting this answered by emailing a Timberite privately, but it didn’t work.

I have a feeling I’m dragging the discussion in an even more arid direction than the last one, but isn’t basing judgment on what’s occurred to heads of state as a likely consequence (and to would-be revolutionaries, come to that) just a fancy way of saying “who could possibly have known”? Globalisation is great! Because I am being well-paid not to imagine a downside!

once the revolutionary threat turned into actually existing Stalinism, it was a big net negative for the left

I’m not convinced that it was, if only because I remember 1991 (you may do too). And what I remember is not only a ridiculous amount of triumphalist grave-dancing on the Right, but a fair amount of genuine dismay and confusion on the Left – even those parts of the Left (such as the one I inhabit) which had been denouncing actually-existing Stalinism for as long as they could remember. Maybe it wasn’t a very good alternative, but it was an alternative; maybe it wasn’t any kind of socialism that we could possibly support, but it was a place where people talked about socialism in positive terms. By 1989, never mind 1991, this was something of a mirage – the entire system had been undermined from within by the complete disillusionment of a generation of cadres, and (more corrosive) the spread of a positive belief in capitalism. But until the signage came down, it did give the world the sense of an alternative to capitalism, in a way that nowhere now does, and that did count for something. Psychologically these things run quite deep.

If we’re going to blame WW1 for flu, surely we need to thank WW2 for antibiotics? Seems a bit far-fetched to me.

On the other hand, the issue of whether or not the revolution was bad for the people of Russia seems like a perfect opportunity to a cost-effectiveness analysis using Quality Adjusted Life Years. Get to it, Sebastian.

Like Glen Tomkins @94, I’m not sure it is fair to blame the revolutionaries for the revolution.

Society, the political economy and its institutional order are systems of social cooperation founded on a deep division of labor, sunk-cost investments and some centralized control by hierarchies of authority. Organized social cooperation is the basis of power, and power is the basis for resolving conflict and deciding the distribution of benefits.

Haggling over the social contract never ends. If “the revolution” aims at a social order without conflict, or without an elite, or peopled by super-humans, it is, indeed, quixotic. (Although, maybe voluntary human extinction is not such a bad idea, even if it turns out to be a little less voluntary for some, than others.)

It is the functioning of a social order that delivers the material benefits of social cooperation; the collapse or overthrow of the old order will, inevitably, involve considerable cost, and expose . . . disorder. It does not follow that preserving a highly dysfunctional order is a superior choice, even if one expresses a pious intention to “reform” the old order.

The near-collapse of the dysfunctional, global financial system of the Anglo-American Empire in 2008, and subsequent herculean efforts to preserve it against all economic good sense, constitute a potential “revolutionary moment”, which surely must be familiar to all, here. I presume that the post’s topicality relates to a widely shared ambivalence over the on-going struggle to re-order the American and global economy, on a basis far less beneficial to the mass of what used to be, when they had work, the American working class (and the ordinary Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, etc.). These struggles do not end with revolution or reform; they just go on.

“Reform” is just a name we give to offering a revision to the social contract, which offers benefits to the existing elites. “Revolution” is a continuation of reform by other means, without the offer of continuing benefits to at least some of the previous elite.

It does seem to be that we should blame the reactionaries of the old order for failing to reform, before we blame the revolutionaries for desperate measures in desperate times. Maybe, sometimes, it is like Life of Brian and the revolutionaries are numbskulls railing against roads, law and world peace.

In general, though, I would think that “reform” proposals are ordinarily a “good deal” for those with power. At some extreme, though, in the progressive entropy of the old order, it is not always possible to both offer benefits to the whole of the old elite, and reform the old order in the direction of something that functions adequately in material terms.

Thus, I would argue revolution may be just a continuation of the work of reform by other means.

In our own time, the best argument for “revolution” is the essentially binary choice presented in our recent Global Financial Crisis. The economic order represented by the global financial system of Anglo-American Empire is dysfunctional in the objective, material sense of being something of a negative-sum game (cooperation that reduces net material benefits, aka parasitism). We could preserve the banks or the social-welfare-state. The banks chose politicians, who would choose to preserve the banks.

If there’s space for “reform” here, it is exemplified by Obama’s ACA — a deal that buys benefits for a segment of the marginally middle-class, at the expense of additional benefits for predatory financial and corporate entities, without addressing the increasing functional inadequacy of the medical services economy. Giving such large benefits to the corporations and the elite of corporate executives and financial managers, is coming at the expense of the actual performance of the medical services economy.

Revolution looks good, when the space for reform runs out: when the functional output or yield of social cooperation has been sufficiently compromised, and there’s no more dividend to divide, given the claims of the elite.

If it is possible to save the American economy and social welfare system without destroying a large part of the American and global financial system, I’ve missed it. And, vice-versa; if there’s a way to save American banking at its present size and scope, without sacrificing Social Security and the nation’s fiscal integrity, it is lost in the fog. Maybe, that choice is hiding behind Door Number 3. But, I’m willing to venture that revolutions are a good alternative, in the face of such dilemmas.

So after we dip our fingers in the holy water of Marx and make the double sign of 18 Brumaire on head, shoulders and chest, and passing through the gallery where the signs of the revolutions crossed off our list of revolutions we’d ever want are displayed, we enter the nave and from there the confessional where the question is posed once more. You say you want a revolution?

I understand there’s going to be a mass mobilization against bad times in Britain on June 30. Some unions are going out on strike that day from what I understand, and I guess the idea is to mobilize all the people disgusted with the way things are going over there to get together in public and represent. From this distance it appears there’s good cause.

Would I like to see this event metastasize into a Tarhir Square moment for Britain? Oh, for their sake, sure. I don’t know if the Brits themselves have any stomach for the sort of resolute massive democratic action embodied in the Egyptian case, even if June 30 presents a perfect opportunity. But it’s there to be had. The people, united, can often be insistent.

Right, Bruce Wilder makes a good point (as usual). Revolutions happen when constitutional politics breaks down in the face of acute conflict within the elite, or else when a popular movement comes to power constitutionally and attempts to carry out a program that is too threatening to the elite. Either way, when it comes to violent conflicts, the counterrevolution almost always precedes the revolution.

Belle, my original comparison was to AIDS. If you want to take a “No one should say nobody could have known” standard, take it there too, and see how it looks. In 1915, we did not understand how disease was spread, but in the 1970’s we pretty much did. It was known that there were serious disease dangers when previously-isolated populations came into contact. Yet, huge amounts of international aid went into developing infrastructure to end rural African isolation: roads, airports, etc. I think it silly to say that people in 1915 should have known, but those in 1970 should not. And it is not just the conditions in the trenches. What made the Flu pandemic so deadly is that it spread so far beyond the trenches or even the countries where the trenches were located. I think the knowledge to realize that this was possible and how was much more developed in 1970 than 1915.

Two unrelated points:

One is that the balance between elites and masses is not a two-sided affair, but many-sided. The elites may give for fear of revolution, but also because they need mass support in other areas. International war was a major driver of change in Europe (Kiderlen, German Foreign Minister in 1909: “ All great victories are the work of the people and the people must be paid for it. After the victory of 1870 we had to pay with universal suffrage. Another victory will bring us a parliamentary regime.”). In Britain, a lot of social policy was made more urgent by the unpleasant realisation that a large part of the workforce was either too sick or too starved to fight in an era of mass warfare. The need for social solidarity against environmental threats can also play the same role – see the Netherlands or Venice.

The key is that, absent some very active countervailing force(s), elites tend to take more and more of the cake. Committees don’t have a good record as active countervailing forces.

Second point is that, at the lowest level, revolutions seem to be driven as much as anything by a community-wide moral revulsion – “anything but this”. The “leaders” run around offering various alternative visions, and one or other wins out. But they don’t make the revolution, they surf it. The revulsion is sparked by elites violating some very basic, often inarticulate, felt sense of what some particular society is all about. And people, when they reach this point, are not paying attention to programs, but they will die rather than compromise on the point (“wir sind das volk”, or the thousands of Tehranis who, the day after the Shah’s troops killed 400+ people in Jaleh Square, went and sat down there again).

So revolutions are not made by intellectuals, they are made by elites forgetting who bakes the bread. The intellectuals pick up afterwards.

Maybe, sometimes, it is like Life of Brian and the revolutionaries are numbskulls railing against roads, law and world peace.

As I recall, in the celebrated scene, the revolutionaries actually speak in favour of these things.

I’m arguing that there really wasn’t a “nice” route to modernisation—turns out you don’t get to sidestep it

We’ll just have to disagree then. I simply cannot accept it as a given that modernization required the killing of millions. Modernization would have run its course anyway, without WWI, Stalin or Hitler.

Maybe it wasn’t a very good alternative, but it was an alternative

No, it wasn’t, the system was unsustainable and the people were sick of it.

How about Japan, Belle. Their modernization process was fairly peaceful, wasn’t it?

Not so much prior to 1945, sg: and if you decide that modernisation is simply everything after 1945, and nothing before it, you still surely have to demonstrate how this modernisation would have arrived without what led to it.

Modernisation “running its course” elsewhere included hideous famines in the colonies and quasi-colonies (Ireland; India; China; Africa) and wars, culminating in WW1: it didn’t occur anywhere without killing millions somewhere.

I am still not convinced by the causal chain you are suggesting and the verbs you are using to describe it (“include”, “culminate”, “occur”) make it seem as if you are not so clear about the causality yourself, nor what you actually mean by modernization. There certainly was a lot of mass murder going on from late colonialism to the end of WW2 and beyond – but to explain all this with and blame it on “modernization” seems way too broad and vague to me, sorry.

That’s the sense in which it was an alternative – a whole range of countries where capitalism was officially a dirty word and something other than capitalism was, apparently, working.

Possibly true, but it also laid the foundation for the kind of shadow state/politics we see in Italy and Greece, which arose out of the (legitimate) need to prevent the installation of precisely this kind of capitalism-is-a-dirty-word equilibrium in the liberal-capitalistic West.

You can’t possibly say that the USSR (and even Stalin) was a legitimate reference (of terror, perhaps) for the Left in the West without at the same time admitting as well that the semi-legal anti-Communist infrastructure (up to and including Gladio) that was built in Italy and Greece were legitimate responses to precisely that threat. Both were dirty and tainted in some sense (although perhaps not to the same degree).

The problem with the way this discussion has gone on is that, like so many Eurocentric debates, it assumes that the only two revolutions in world history were the French and the Russian: two revolutions that really didn’t have that much in common.

If, instead of those two revolutions one started with a historical perspective (perhaps looking at Spartacus and then going on to look at the Peasant’s Revolt) and then, in the modern era, looked at Haitian revolution, the career of Simón Bolívar , the revolutions of ’89, and current events in Nepal and the Middle East, very different conclusions might be drawn. And many other, different examples could be chosen.

Having said that, I do wonder if everyone who wanted to get rid of Communist rule in their countries wanted to get rid of everything that was lost as a result.

No, but it’s not like maternity leave and things like that only existed behind the iron curtain. Personally, I’ve always hated socialism (by which I mean real socialism) and neo-liberalism in equal measure.

That’s the sense in which it was an alternative – a whole range of countries where capitalism was officially a dirty word and something other than capitalism was, apparently, working.

I share your frustration that capitalism is now more or less unquestioned, that there is little critical discourse about it in the mainstream. Yet I don’t think the existence of socialist countries was really a good argument for the left – considering how rotten the whole system was.

You can’t possibly say that the USSR (and even Stalin) was a legitimate reference (of terror, perhaps) for the Left in the West

I didn’t.

I don’t think the existence of socialist countries was really a good argument for the left

Didn’t say that either. Just that there’s a huge difference between living in a world where the only apparent alternative to capitalism is horrible (“what do you want, Communism?”) and living in a world which doesn’t seem to offer any alternative to capitalism (“what do you want, four-sided triangles?”). All things considered, I’d rather be hated as a Commie than dismissed as a deluded crank.

Myles’s point about Gladio etc is fair enough, except that anti-Communism both predated Communism and outlived it. “They turned themselves into Labour in Britain and Social Democrats in Germany, but here they always were Communists and they still are. And that’s why I’m in politics.” – Silvio Berlusconi, 26/2/2011. (There is still one party with Communist in the name, but they’re currently running at 1.5% in the polls; I don’t think he was talking about them.)

Revolutionary socialism just gave the bosses an excuse to expand their secret police, which they could then use to attack their real foes – the unions.

They needed an excuse?

This is the old line you always hear from anti-communists — the bosses will play fair, as long as we don’t do anything to make them mad.

Just that there’s a huge difference between living in a world where the only apparent alternative to capitalism is horrible (“what do you want, Communism?”) and living in a world which doesn’t seem to offer any alternative to capitalism (“what do you want, four-sided triangles?”).

Well, I think what you are saying is that the quite apparent horrible-ness of the Communist alternative served as a strong incentive for capitalists to make capitalism work for everyone so they don’t turn Communist. Which is fair enough, although again it worked for socialism rather than liberalism (which aren’t the same thing). Liberalism suffered a huge setback in the 20th century and didn’t really recover until the H.W. Bush/Clinton era; socialism (of a kind) on the other hand prospered. I’m a liberal, not a socialist.

“They turned themselves into Labour in Britain and Social Democrats in Germany, but here they always were Communists and they still are. And that’s why I’m in politics.” – Silvio Berlusconi, 26/2/2011. (There is still one party with Communist in the name, but they’re currently running at 1.5% in the polls; I don’t think he was talking about them.)

Berlusconi (whom I like for his irreverence) isn’t close to being the same thing as Gladio or CIA-funded elections or whatever. It’s just not close to being the same thing. His anti-Communist is superficial and theatrical; the anti-Communist of the post-war era was for real.

Even in a more serious case, say the first Red Scare in the U.S. or the anti-Soviet feeling in interwar Britain and Europe, the anti-Communism there was clearly distinguishable from the post-war model where the normal, democratic deep state (including the intelligence and security infrastructure) was wholly and unwaveringly invested in the struggle, because up to until Stalin’s troops reached the Elbe the Soviet Union did not prove an existential threat to Western liberal capitalism. Edgar Hoover might have been a monomaniacal anti-Communist (and much else), but Edgar Hoover wasn’t comparable to the OSS/CIA.

Some more or less unrelated observations:
1: Up in the comments some people were discussing whether the american civil war could be seen as a form of revolution. Marx wrote various articles about the USA civil war, it this that I read he saw the civil war as a “defence” of the north from a “counterrevolution” of the south. In some sense, I think that “Marxist revolutions” should always represent a sort of counter-counterrevolution against elites that try to enforce a “superstructure” that is already too old for the the “base”.
2: @ sg 205: I relate japanese modernization process to italian modernization process. I believe that both processes actually “externalized” problems through imperialism – Mussolini was obviously imperialist, but the unification of Italy could be seen as imperialism from the industrialized north to the rural south. In the same sense, I believe the Meiji restoration could be seen as a sort of internal imperialism. Imperialism isn’t in itself ultra-violent, however is the expression of strong umbalances and, when it hits a wall, it becomes ultra violent (like Japan and Italy during WW2).
3 @Myles 208: As an italian I couldn’t agree more with Phil(209), but an important point is that Berlusconi isn’t “irreverent”, he really means whathever he says, so when he says that he is saving the world from communisn, you can be sure that he really believes that (wich implies that he is crazy or a moron, most likely both). Do not underestimate the importance of craziness in politics.

Sorry, sg, I did misunderstand your question — I assumed you must be talking about the post-war post-imperialist phase, when you were talking about the pre-imperialist phase. In which case, I think I’d argue that (just as the Bolshevik experiment entirely failed to dodge the worst of modernisation: quite the opposite), the Meiji period’s bid, conscious or otherwise, to sidestep the process as it happened elsewhere failed: in the sense that in effect it both deferred the costs (to the period from c.1930-45), and transferred them (to Korea, China, South-East Asia etc, via its various imperialist incursions).

This is really all I’ve been objecting to, from the outset: the boxing off of the concept of modernisation in such a way that it appears relatively cost-free if you only look at one part of the picture: and take no account of costs already incurred getting to modernisation (which is what I take “primitive accumulation” to mean, very loosely speaking); or costs deferred, as rather seems to be the case with Japan (the military period being the social bill, as it were, for the Meiji period); or costs exported, which is what happened with all the various 19th and 20th century imperialisms — and is understandably, for many, the very definition of imperialism.

novakant is basically correct that my way of looking at it makes it very much harder to draw lines between modernisation, what came before and what came after — since I’m after all basically saying “if you draw the line there you don’t see the whole picture” — and also demands a far denser causal map than is easily summarised in blog comments threads, hence the fact that I’ve been using quite vague connective words and handwaving quite a bit.

Since the welfare state is unraveling faster than I ever could have imagined post-1989, I think the position that international socialism made their job easier is hard to defend. International socialism has completely disappeared as a political force in the world. Have labor unions marched from victory to victory?

Just to clarify – my thesis is that industrial modernisation is a process that threatens elites. They have mostly not favoured it unless they have had good reasons to – like the alternative of invasion and dispossession. Japan was well aware in the 1850s of the fate of much of the rest of Asia, and set out to avoid it by modernising itself. Taiwan and South Korea were in competition with mainland China and North Korea respectively. England had to worry about France and, later, Germany. And Germany about Russia (and vice versa).

The German, Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist Russian and Japanese paths all involved attempts to combine the dominance of pre-industrial elites with the military strength of industrialisation. Politicians in all of these consciously thought of (short, victorious) war as a possible means of preserving the pre-industrial social structure – although most were also aware this was a gamble. The main cause of World War I was that the German, Austrian and Russian elites chose war in a flight forwards from the (as they saw it) intolerable alternative of parliamentarism and social democracy.

And, to be clear, it was not “socialism” they feared and found intolerable, or communist revolution, but liberal democracy. Berlusconi’s view of the broad left as “communists” (and his evident distaste for parliamentarism) has deep antecedents.

Perhaps what you’re missing is that Italian Communism was never very radical in the first place – their typical approach to the Christian Democrats was to say that they really ought to share power, essentially because keeping it all to themselves was selfish. So if you’re an Italian anti-Communist, that’s who you hate – those bastards who want to… er… make people pay their taxes… and interfere with free enterprise, by stopping businessmen making dodgy deals, and making them pay their taxes… and anyway, Stalin!

Italian political culture, as RL will hopefully confirm, is weird, a word which here means “tainted by years of official and unofficial propaganda”. When Dario Franceschini – a former Christian Democrat – was elected leader of the Partito Democratico, Berlusconi dismissed him as a “Catholic Communist”. Everyone on the Left said “What?“, everyone on the Right said “you tell ’em, Silvio!” and the caravan moved on.

True. And the old will-you-condemn two-step – demand that Bob denounces his radical friend Bill, wait till he does it and then denounce Bob for being too radical – never seems to wear out. (Which is ironic, really, because the Italian Communist Party itself did lots of it at one time.)

There was such a thing as a Catholic Communist, it’s true – generally rather austere types who were too religious to join the Party but too serious about politics to be Christian Democrats. The idea that Franceschini was such a person – as distinct from a well-meaning mildly leftish Catholic with Blairite tendencies – would make a cat laugh.

RE: “Catholic Communist” in Italy
In fact, “cattocomunisti” were rather common in Italy, since 90% italians are registered as catholics, and at some point the communist party got 28% popular vote.
When I was a catholic, I saw no contradiction in being a catholic and a communist, I saw the two things as completely separate.

Re cattocomunisti, fair point – I was thinking more of people like Berlinguer and Tatò, who genuinely thought that framing Communist principle in Christian terms and vice versa would be a vote-winner.

Hey ho. If you’re interested in following the discussion, my point was in answer to John’s claim that “actually existing Stalinism … was a big net negative for the left” (in the West). If you’re interested in denouncing people for being soft on Communism, knock yourself out.

You seem to be saying, though I may be misunderstanding, that having an alternative to capitalism even so bad as Stalinism or Maoism was better than having no alternative (I’m not going to look it up but I think you said four legged triangle).

It doesn’t take much looking up. Quote from upthread:

Just that there’s a huge difference between living in a world where the only apparent alternative to capitalism is horrible (“what do you want, Communism?”) and living in a world which doesn’t seem to offer any alternative to capitalism (“what do you want, four-sided triangles?”).

The problem is it isn’t really an alternative to capitalism if you yourself, much less people you want to convince, would definitely prefer to live under Thatcher or Reagan rather than Stalin or Mao (or even Brezhnev)

An alternative can be real without being desirable. More to the point, you’re thinking in terms of end states rather than continuing systems which embody particular possible futures. Lots of people believed for a long time that something good, in terms of socialist democracy, might eventually come out of 1917 – not necessarily in Russia itself, quite possibly by way of a rebellion against actually existing socialism, but nevertheless a position that wouldn’t have been reached if Bolshevism had never happened. Equally, the idea that the long-term prospects for democratic socialism were even worse in the UK and US than in the USSR wasn’t all that unusual.

Well, apart from the freedoms.