On Revolution
17 01 09 - 17:46 There's been much talk of late on the subject of the enemies of the Revolution; I feel that while this is an appropriate topicof conversation, it is one which should be considered with equal amounts of introspection. After all, how can we rightly
determine who or what may be counter-revolutionary, when there is no single 'Revolutionary Way'? And what good does it
for us to throw about very serious labels which might in fact be counter-productive to our splendid cause? We must be
very cautious comrades; there are real enemies all about, and we must not make enemies of each other. In the old days,
bosses sent spies into unions, to pose as workers, in order to subvert those unions and their causes. The spies would
accomplish these tasks in a wide variety of ways, as clever as any you or I might devise. They would always be there, an
anonymous face in the crowd or sometimes even a close associate, pushing the discussion further radical, further extreme;
to encourage violence and criminality.
There lies the true danger comrades. Once we allow the bosses, the bourgeoisie,
our true enemies, to provoke us to anger, we fall into their trap--- once we stoop to violence, we become the criminals
they need us to be so that they can lock us up and silence our voices; We become the barbarians their newsmen need
us to be, so that they can villainize us on the TV-screens and morning newspapers of millions of otherwise uninformed
people. When we allow ourselves to descend into pointless bickering and in-fighting, when we are divided, we proove
ourselves to be the disunified rabble that they need us to be, in order to justify the oppression they feel that they
need to levy upon us. And most of all- when we stoop to violence, when we allow ourselves to implement violence as
a means of imposing our own authority, we become no better than them, no different from what we seek to overthrow.
Force is the most crude expression of power and authority that there can be, and if we truly intend to create a
non-authoritarian society, we must abhor its use, both against us as well as by us. A revolution is 360 degrees- upon
its completion, you're exactly back where you started, facing the same problems, though perhaps with different names.
Such was the case with the Soviet Union. Be cautioned, reader, many gross over-simplifications follow. At it's outset,
the revolution was quite a spontaneous thing, undertaken by the vast majority of the proliteriat in that country. During
what came to be known as the Russian Civil War, foriegn interests from the world over invaded Russia, strangling her of
her resources in the hopes primarily of, among a long list of various other imperial objectives and ambitions, collecting on
debts incurred by the Tsar during the first World War. The resilience of the Russian People has often been
underestimated throughout history. Eventually, the proud socialist people of Russia repelled the foriegn occupiers of
the USA and other western powers, not by force of arms, but by fomenting of a series of pro-socialist rebellions and
mutinies among the foriegn troops there; The Russian people never gave up on spreading the word of socialism, printing
newspapers and "zines" on anything that would take ink- from trash to leaves, and they were not afraid to distribute
their ideas; they were not afraid even though they were cold and starving, bloody and unarmed. And make no mistake,
comrades, many died doing so.
The sturdy Russian people prevailed, and thereafter ocurred one of history's greatest
tragedies; the establishment of a centralized State over the recently freed proliteriat. It is an old debate among the
socialist tradition- How exactly to implement the revolution? Shall we work within society, to change it peacefully?
Or shall we work to destroy the state and start fresh? And there are so many answers to either one, and many
questions and sub-questions, and ideas and theories abound. In Russia was established a centralized state, to
single-handedly foster the revolution. A single, organized body to legislate it all, one voice to determine the logistics,
and to re-distribute the wealth. Which, as we know now, became a highly dysfunctional system, as well as
counter-revolutionary. The elephant in the room about centralized authority, even when legislated by a representative
majoritarian assembly, is that on every issue such a system encounters, there is necessarily a small, sometimes
not-so-small, dissenting group--- but the party cannot allow for dissent among any sector, as such would undermine
the central authority of the organization; and so you have a system which ultimately serves the interests of a small
ruling class in disproportion to the proliteriat which the system is supposed to serve; one which is used to stratify power,
and to seclude such power from the proliteriat. Such a system is particularly prone to overthrow by men like Stalin.
And so the revolution was complete- 360 degrees, right back to where they started, with Tsar Stalin in the Kremlin.
It could just as easily be Putin. The same is, in it's own way, true of the US revolution, or the French revolution,
or any of the countless Democratic revolutions of any country that have ocurred. Once the power from that revolution
is centralized, authority and its venomous ways again come to prey upon the people. And if a revolutionary people
do not centralize their power, such as it was with the Paris Commune of the Spanish Collectives, that such a people
can be reasonably be sure that the centralized authority of other states elsewhere in the world will not stand for
open defiance of political dogma. Neither will those authorites miss the opportunity for plunder as has been shown
by the Russian Civil War and countless others like it. What then is there to be said for we revolutionaries today?
We surely do not wish to see such betrayals befall our own causes.
The trick is not to foster one revolution, but
rather a condition of perpetual revolt--- not necessarily destructive, rather, a state of continual, creative flux;
with individuals, not centralized authorities or sectarian political alliances, as the active component of all human
society at all levels and extremities. Where if a man is in a situation which is counter-productive to his personal
goals, he is not only free to alter his situation as he sees fit, but is facilitated in his efforts to do so by a political
and economic system in which all resources, including power, are equally and effectively distributed to all individuals,
each man (no gender distinction) producing freely according to his abilities to produce, and each man
(again no gender distinction) recieving recieving the necessary implements and resources according to his requirement for them,
without precondition of servitude or debt.
Hale
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