Common Dreams
I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.Photo by Poster Boy NYC (CC-BY)
Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a
professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral
constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the
worker’s state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened
workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the
proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin
predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something
we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker
federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman,
along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of
violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,”
Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx,
“clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry
Crucify!”The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.
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