Revolutionary Weather
Less than nine months after the Mexico City quake, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, melted down and eventually dragged down an empire with it. In 2006, the man who had been head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, reflected, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was a historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.” Part of the catastrophe was due to the secrecy that was by then habitual to Soviet bureaucrats, which endangered millions, and to the overall sense of unaccountable, incompetent, and callous governance. The forces that emboldened the civil societies of the Soviet satellite states in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to liberate those nations are not directly related to Chernobyl, but they benefited from a superpower that did not crush them when they rose up, a power that had mutated beyond recognition. Gorbachev asserts, “The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost, and I must say that I started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl.”
The relationship between disaster and revolution has seldom been explored, though it crops up throughout the history of revolutions. Catastrophic weather across France in the summer of 1788 brought on the crop failures and bad harvests that led to the rising bread prices, shortages, and hunger that played a major role in triggering the French Revolution the following year. The 1870-71 siege and occupation of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War brought on the sense of daring and solidarity that made possible the Paris Commune—several weeks of insurrectionary self-government Kropotkin and anarchists everywhere have cherished ever since. Belli spoke of Nicaraguans feeling after the earthquake that since they could lose their life, they wanted to make it mean something, even if that involved risks. Disaster and crisis can stiffen resolve, as did disarming a bomb single-handedly for that young woman in the London Blitz who then felt emboldened to confront her boss. Sometimes they work by making a bad situation worse to the point of intolerability; they create a breaking point. Sometimes they do so by making obvious an injustice or agenda that was opaque before. Sometimes they do so by generating the circumstances in which people discover each other and thereby a sense of civil society and collective power. But there is no formula; there are no certainties. Leftists of a certain era liked to believe that the intensification of suffering produced revolution and was therefore to be desired or even encouraged; no such reliable formula ties social change to disaster or other suffering; calamities are at best openings through which a people may take power—or may lose the contest and be further subjugated.
Still the resemblances and ties between disaster and revolution matter. If a revolution is a disaster—which many who oppose them would heartily endorse—it is so because a disaster is also a utopia of sorts; the two phenomena share aspects of solidarity, uncertainty, possibility, and the upending of the ordinary systems governing things—the rupture of the rules and the opening of many doors. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine explores one side of the impact of disaster: the scramble for power on the side of the powerful, of authorities, institutions, and capitalism. It is a scramble because multiple parties or facets of society are contending for power and legitimacy, and sometimes the other side—the people, civil society, social justice—wins. Not easily—in Nicaragua, Somoza strengthened his hold temporarily, but the same earthquake that gave him his opportunity intensified resolve and brought on the revolution. The destabilization of disaster is most terrifying to those who benefit most from that stability. (Perhaps future historians will regard 9/11 too as an event that initially strengthened right-wing power in the United States but led to the election of Barack Obama and long-term change.)
Historian Mark Healey writes of natural disasters: “Insurrections by a ‘nature’ that had seemed subdued, they unsettle, disrupt, and potentially overthrow apparently natural structures of social power. Because the existing arrangements of power are so often justified as ‘natural,’ the unexpected reshaping of the ‘natural’ can call many of those arrangements into question. Such theaters of ‘outrage and blame’ test the authority of states and technical elites: they can serve to challenge or undo that authority, but also to justify or reaffirm it.” This declaration comes in his essay on the 1944 San Juan earthquake and the rise to power of Juan Perón. The temblor that hit San Juan at the foothills of the Andes on a summer evening was the worst natural disaster in Argentine history, killing ten thousand and destroying the housing of half the people in the province. Secretary of Labor Perón led the rescue and reconstruction effort and through it achieved the national visibility that helped launch him to the presidency. (Then U.S. secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover attained a similar prominence with his relief efforts in response to the great Mississippi flood of 1927, likewise sometimes credited with bringing him to the presidency.)
Perón ruled the country for eleven years, and his blend of authoritarian populism is still known as Peronism there. “The provision of relief by outsiders can undermine the recovery it is intended to produce. As the gratitude of the moment faded, the disaster revealed and produced widening fissures within San Juan,” writes Healey. The top-down disaster relief produced alienation and despair: bodies were incinerated in great heaps without being identified; children were evacuated without careful records being kept so that many of them too were lost to those who loved them; the sale of food and goods was forbidden, and though supplies were given away, not enough were available to forestall want. People became helpless and hopeless, denied a role in their own survival. And Perón rose to an extraordinary career as Argentina’s most charismatic politician to date, so much so that more than six decades later Peronism is still an important force in that country’s politics, though other strains matter more in this millennium. Many trusted authorities and centralized power more in that era when even most of the alternative visions included Socialist or Communist governments with pervasive control. In Argentina that trust is gone.
On December 19, 20, and 21 of 2001, Argentines launched an unprecedented uprising in response to that country’s financial crisis and growing political disgust. In the election that October of 2001, citizens were so disgusted that nearly half did not show up or cast blank or spoiled ballots—putting pictures of Osama bin Laden in the ballot envelopes was one popular response. Three months later, the economy collapsed, victim of the neoliberal policies of “free trade” that brought in a rush of cheap imports that undermined many Argentine companies, privatized formerly public services and companies, caused massive foreign debt, and pegged the peso to the dollar in ways that destabilized the currency and the economy. Spreading poverty and unemployment had dogged the country in the 1990s, and the economy finally crashed in the South American midsummer of 2001. All personal bank accounts were frozen, and the middle class found themselves nearly as penniless as the chronically unemployed. The president resigned, the public rose up, chanting “Que se vayan todos!” (“Out with all of them!”), and within the next two weeks, the country went through three more presidents. On New Year’s Eve of 2001 the American secretary of state tried to put through a call to the Argentine president, only to be told that there wasn’t one at the moment.
An economic disaster is on the face of it not at all like a natural disaster. What has been wrecked is immaterial and abstract, but its consequences are more than tangible: it creates hardships, even emergencies, upends everyday life, throws people together in unexpected ways, changes their status, and often prompts them to take collective action. That first night, people everywhere were out in the streets banging pots and pans, and others saw them on television and went outside themselves to jo
in them. One Buenos Aires inhabitant was on the phone with his brother when he heard over the line a racket from his brother’s downtown neighborhood. A moment later he heard the cacerolaza, the banging of pots and pans, in his own neighborhood and hung up to join it. “What began angrily, with people coming out on the street in a rage, quickly turned joyful. People smiled and mutually recognized that something had changed. Later came euphoria,” he told historian-sociologist Marina Sitrin.
Tens of thousands took over the streets of the city and fought the police for their right to be in public—a few died in the struggle, and many were teargassed or beaten, but they did not surrender. “I also remember the feeling of walking back after everything was over. That feeling of returning with so many people, walking openly on Corrientes, a main avenue in Buenos Aires, with the satisfaction of having played a part; feeling that we were in charge of ourselves,” says that man who hung up the phone to head out into the street. Another recalls, “When you went out with the cacerolaza on the nineteenth, you saw your neighbors also cacerolando. And you said, how crazy! Because I never speak to this person, or we see that one in the street and only say good morning, or not, and here my neighbor is also banging a pot. Or, my neighborhood butcher is cacerolando! The neighborhood pharmacist! How strange . . . it was a reconnection with something that was lost. Many ways of being social had been lost.”
Some of those things had been lost during the years of terror from 1976 to 1983, when those even suspected of subversion or dissent were tortured and disappeared; some during the frenzy to survive the economic pressures and privatizations that came after. As a result, people had withdrawn in fear from civil society, from a sense of membership in the body politic. The 2001 meltdown created something akin to disaster’s sense of community. It was a revolution in spirit as well as in practical things. In fifty years of bad government, including a few murderous military regimes, Argentines had become deeply distrustful of politicians and state power, and most had abandoned public life. This time, they sought to withdraw from and reduce government’s sphere, turning not to left-wing movements but to each other, relaunching a vital civil society. What they created was so new it required new words—horizontalidad, or horizontalism, to describe the nonhierarchical way many communities made decisions; protagonism to describe the new agency many found; politica afectiva to describe the politics of affection. The examples of Argentina in the earthquake of 1944 and the financial crash of 2001 demonstrate again that disasters are ultimately enigmas: it is not the disaster but the struggle to give it meaning and to take the opportunity to redirect the society that matters, and these are always struggles with competing interests.
These moments in which revolution resemble disaster utopias are strange. On the one hand, the revolution seems to have already, instantly, fulfilled its promise: all men are brothers, everything is possible, anyone can speak, hearts are full, solidarity is strong. The formation of a new government historically reallocates much of this potency to the state rather than civil society. On the other hand, much of this moment’s glory is often regarded as a side effect, an incidental, and the revolution moves on to set up better education or economies but loses this fellowship and openness. Something trickles away.
The real revolution may be the period between regimes, not the new regime (and Jonathan Schell points out that, contrary to what we usually believe, the French and Russian revolutions terminated the old regimes without significant bloodshed; it was establishing the new one that was so violent). Certainly the period immediately after, or during, the revolution comes closest to the anarchist ideal of a society without a state, a moment when everyone has agency and no one has ultimate authority, when the society invents itself as it goes along. What makes the Argentine uprising remarkable is that the people seemed to recognize that ephemeral spirit and sought to cultivate it and see it as an end in itself rather than a means or byproduct. It was a revolution not to create a new state of government but a new state of being as free of government as possible, a revolution to embrace the richness of civil society and social possibility. Though like all revolutions it subsided, some of its effects are indelible—and influential elsewhere. It demonstrated that societies can change themselves, suddenly and for the better. The way the imagination of the possible changed is a longer story that continues into the present in Mexico, again linked to that earthquake of 1985.
STANDING ON TOP OF GOLDEN HOURS
The True Feast of Time
Falling in love is easy. The experience carries you along effortlessly for a while, everything is harmonious, and the possibilities seem endless. Then one day you wake up in the same room as another human being with his or her own needs and views and the interesting process of actually finding common ground and forming a resilient and lasting bond begins . . . or fails. A disaster is as far from falling in love as can be imagined, but disaster utopias are also a spell when engagement, improvisation, and empathy happen as if by themselves. Then comes the hard business of producing a good society by determination and dedication. Civil society has moments when it falls in love with itself or celebrates its anniversaries, when those ties again become enchantments rather than obligations. That era when the connections were made, the possibilities were exciting, and joy came readily matters afterward. Memory of such moments becomes a resource to tap into through recollection and invocation, and celebrating those moments revives and reaffirms the emotions. Thus it is that we celebrate birthdays, the dates on which couples met or were married, on which revolutions began, battles were won, on which a god, saint, or hero was born, performed a miracle, left the earth, and more. The enchanted time can be reclaimed and renewed by memory and celebration, and most cultures have a calendar of such occasions, when the linear time of production pauses and the cyclical time of celebration appears.
Disaster and revolution both create in some sense a carnival—an upheaval and a meeting ground, and there are carnivalesque aspects to disaster. We could think of revolutions as carnivals, for whatever good they create in the long term it is only in the moment that they create the sense of openness to each other and to possibility that is so exhilarating. That is, imagined as moments of renewal and reinvention rather than attempts to secure some good permanently, we could see the ephemeral utopia they create with new eyes. And certainly carnival and revolution have long been linked. (Though the word is used more generally in the English-speaking world, Carnival is most specifically the festivities that occur before Lent—in other words, a series of celebrations in the span of time between Christmas and Easter.)
Carnival makes sense as revolution too: an overthrow of the established order under which we are alienated from each other, too shy to act, divided along familiar lines. Those lines vanish and we merge exuberantly. Carnival is a hectic, short-lived, raucous version of utopia, one that matters because it is widely available, though just as carnival is scheduled and disaster is not, so carnival has known limits and consequences and disaster does not. Still, the resemblances are significant—carnival, for example, often features grotesque images, motifs of death, role inversion and transformation, and much chaos, as well as the basic ingredient of people living together in a shared space and going beyond their usual bounds. Carnival is in some sense a formalized disaster, a ritual to reap disaster’s benefits with a minimum of disaster’s tragic consequences. You could call it disaster made predictable, both in when it happens and what it wreaks. Fritz spoke of “the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual’s basic human needs for community identity” and concluded that “disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.” He could have also been describing what carnival provides in the more safe and structured break from ordinary time.
Some ancient calendars had three hundred sixty days; the five
at the end of the year were categorically outside time, so that the ordinary rules did not apply (similarly, Halloween was initially a Celtic year’s-end festival when the dead could travel through the gap between the old year and the new). A sense of being outside ordinary time, of disorder and inversion, governs saturnalias and carnivals. They are liminal in an almost literal sense, since that word means crossing lintels or thresholds. The Roman Saturnalia was a year-end winter festival of freedom: gambling was permitted in public, everyone wore the wool caps of freedmen, slaves were relieved of their duties and masters sometimes waited on slaves, a lord of misrule was chosen (and in some accounts, this holiday of Saturn was assimilated into that of Kronos, the god of time and the Golden Age). The festival lasted a few days and then several days, but long after it was over it must have left a lingering sense that the everyday order of things was not the inevitable one; it must have, like disaster and revolution, opened up the possibilities.
Scholarship nowadays denies a direct relationship between the Roman Saturnalia and Christian Carnival, but there are many similarities, including a lord of misrule and acts of inversion of ordinary power relations. In his book Carnival and Other Christian Festivals, Max Harris recounts the theological basis for the inversion of hierarchies, the passage in the Magnificat where Mary says (in Luke 1:22), in celebration of the impending birth of her son, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble.” And he quotes Peter Burke, who wrote that the whole Christmas season was “treated as carnivalesque, appropriately enough from a Christian point of view, since the birth of the Son of God in a manger was a spectacular example of the world turned upside down.” Carnival, which was originally part of the Christmas season rather than the prelude to Lent, could include impersonations of the clergy; cross-dressing actual members of the clergy; comic blasphemies, including parodies of the Mass and risqué humor; ritual enactments of historic battles (particularly in the New World) in which the losers were no longer necessarily the losers; masks; dances; fireworks; spectacles; uproar; and chaos. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin goes further in his famous description of carnival: “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. . . . People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced.”
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 20