by Chris Hedges
Already, in Egypt and Yemen, more than 40 percent of the population live below the poverty line and suffer from some form of malnutrition. Most of the poor in these countries have no access to social safety nets. Images of bread became central to the Egyptian protests, from young boys selling kaik, a breakfast bread, to one protester’s improvised helmet made from bread loaves taped to his head. Although the Arab revolutions were united under the slogan “the people want to bring down the regime” not “the people want more bread,” food was a catalyst.18
The contraction of the Greek economy by 20 percent in the last five years resulted in an unemployment rate of more than 27 percent. An estimated 10 percent of Greek children arrive at school underfed, hungry, or malnourished. Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group, told the New York Times: “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries.”19
The poor population in the United States—15 percent of the total population and a disturbing 21.8 percent for children under the age of eighteen—is expanding. The 46.5 million people living in poverty in 2012 was the largest number of poor counted during the fifty-four years in which the decennial census has calculated poverty rates. The weighted average poverty threshold for a household of four was an annual income of $23,492.20 That is well below what many economists believe constitutes a realistic poverty rate.21 And among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people lived in what was categorized as “deep” poverty, meaning that their incomes were 50 percent below the official poverty line. One-quarter of the nation’s Hispanic population, 13.6 million people, and 27.2 percent of African Americans, 10.9 million people, lived in poverty.22 There are 73.7 million children in the United States, and they represent 23.7 percent of the total population. Yet in 2012 they made up 34.6 percent of Americans living in poverty and 35 percent of those living in deep poverty.23
Climate change will only exacerbate these conditions. As pointed out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change will cause a decline in crop production and food prices will soar.24 Poverty and hunger have already begun to expand in the developing world and parts of the industrialized world.
The realization that our expectations for a better future have been obliterated, not only for ourselves but more importantly for our children, starts the chain reaction. There is a loss of faith in established systems of power. There is a weakening among the elites of the will to rule. Government becomes despised. Rage looks for outlets. The nation goes into crisis. Vladimir Lenin identified the components that come together to foster a successful revolt:
The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions, and particularly by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: it is not enough for revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution win.25
I have covered, as a foreign correspondent, revolts, insurgencies, and revolutions, including the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America; the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan, and Yemen; the two Palestinian uprisings (or intifadas); the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; and the war in the former Yugoslavia. I have seen that despotic regimes in the final stages collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers of the elite—the police, the courts, the civil servants, the press, the intellectual class, and finally the army—no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished. When these state organs are ordered to carry out acts of repression—such as clearing people from parks and arresting or even shooting demonstrators—and refuse their orders, the old regime crumbles. The veneer of power appears untouched before a revolution, but the internal rot, unseen by the outside world, steadily hollows out the edifice state. And when dying regimes collapse, they do so with dizzying speed.
When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker, who had been in power for thirteen years, was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, the regime was finished. He lasted another week in power. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the Communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. In Romania the army general on whom the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had depended to crush protests was the general who condemned him to death in a hasty show trial on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak also lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces and the military to fire into crowds.
Historians and political philosophers have often described these episodic revolutionary moments in human history, which are not confined by national borders, as waves.26 Walter Benjamin, in his essay about Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, makes the same point. The novel is about the decay of institutions—in this case marriage—and the forces that are unleashed when institutions, and most importantly the ideas and rituals that sustain them, lose their hold over the imagination. In these moments, Benjamin argues, the mythic and the ideas of the visionary cause people to abandon established mores and traditions to revolt.27
Benjamin noted that the role of the critic, like that of the rebel, is to steer the reader, or the population, toward the mysterious forces embodied in great art, or in revolutionary visions. Language restricts both art and the possibilities of re-creating human society. In these moments, it matters more what is felt, Benjamin understood, than what is said. Immanuel Kant made much the same distinction between transcendental and critical forces in human existence. Once the transcendental is liberated through the decay of institutions, it harnesses a mythic power, or vision, that can inspire people to tear down the decayed structures that confine them.28 Revolt by the populace in one nation, inspired by these transcendental forces, inspires revolt in another nation. The important point that Benjamin and Kant make is that revolutions, whether in art or in society, are about emotion. These moments engender not simply new ideas but new feelings about established power and human possibilities.
The past few years, particularly since 2011, have witnessed popular uprisings exploding in waves around the world. In the Arab world, protests overthrew in quick succession the governments in Tunisia and Egypt and convulsed Morocco, Yemen, and Bahrain. Massive street protests have rattled Turkey, Greece, Portugal, Spain, the Ukraine, Georgia, and the United States. Movements feed off of other movements. The uprisings of the Arab Spring and the Portuguese and Spanish Indignants in the Iberian Peninsula morphed into Occupy encampments in the United States.
Revolutionary movements, nourished by radical new ideas and the collapse of bankrupt ruling ideologies, have throughout history spread in waves like these across the globe. The American Revolution of 1776 was an inspiration to the French Revolution in 1789. The French Revolution inspired the Haitian Revolution in 1791—the only successful slave revolt in human history—as well as a series of revolts in Europe, from the Batavian Revolution in 1795 to the 1798 uprising in Ireland. The wave of revolt also swept over Latin America in the wars for independence from 1810 to 1826, led by revolutionaries such as José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar.
In 1848 there was another outbreak of revolutionary fever. It first spiked in the Sicilian capital of Palermo before raging throughout Italy and Europe. The uprisings in Paris in February 1848 ended the Orléans monarchy and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. Civil war broke out in Germany, Denmark—which saw the end to its absolute monarchy—Austria, and Hungary, which abolished serfdom. The 1848 revolt in Hungary led to the resignation of Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian prince and foreign minister, and forced Emperor Ferdinand to grant Hungary a constitution, an elected pa
rliament, and the end of censorship. Polish rebels, although unsuccessful, rose up against their Prussian masters. Ireland also saw a failed uprising. Chartism, a working-class movement that from 1838 to 1858 organized millions of laborers to demand political reform and suffrage, arose as a powerful force in Britain and influenced Engels, although it was not a socialist or communist movement.29
Revolutionists who took part in uprisings in one part of the globe would often migrate to take part in uprisings in another. Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan radical who launched his country’s wars of liberation from Spain, went to the United States to meet with revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, and he participated in the French Revolution. Paine fomented revolt in the United States, England, and revolutionary France, where he was initially embraced as a hero. Giuseppe Garibaldi fought in Brazil and Uruguay before he returned to Italy in 1848 to play a central role in uprisings in Milan and Rome and a few years later in the Risorgimento.
The great European theorists of revolution, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, participated in the revolutionary wave. With his radical views, Marx was denied an academic career despite his brilliance as a scholar. He began writing for the radical journal Rheinische Zeitung and soon became the journal’s editor. The journal was shut down in 1843 by the Prussian authorities. Marx moved to Paris, the epicenter of nineteenth-century radicalism. France had spawned Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the fathers of modern socialism, who argued that the state and industry should be subjugated to the common good.
Between 1843 and 1850, against the backdrop of worldwide political and economic upheaval and his personal experiences with state persecution, Marx formulated his most important ideas on communism. He returned to Germany with Engels for the uprising of 1848 and started another radical newspaper—Neue Rheinische Zeitung. During the year he spent in Germany, Marx functioned as a revolutionist attempting to organize an insurrection in Germany modeled on the French Revolution. His paper was eventually banned, and he was expelled from Prussia. He fled to Paris, but was forced by the Cavaignac government to leave that city in 1849. Moving on to London, Marx found his famous refuge in the reading room of the British Museum.
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who, like Marx, was in Germany during the revolution of 1848, was what the historian Adam Ulam calls “a visiting revolutionary.” “There was no insurrection, actual or planned—Prague in 1848, Dresden in 1849, Poland in 1863, the numerous attempted revolts in France and Italy—in which he was not ready to fight, lend his assistance as a drafter of manifestoes, theorist of revolutionary dictatorship, and the like,” Ulam writes. Bakunin, as Ulam points out, “never worked out a systematic philosophy of revolution or of socialism. His socialism was mostly of a visceral type: the revolt against any kind of oppression and injustice, rejection of any palliatives or halfway measures.”30
But Bakunin, however inchoate his own ideas were about the new society, was at the same time remarkably prescient about Marxism. He warned that it would lead to a centralized and oppressive state. He foresaw what would happen to workers once their self-identified representatives in the revolutionary vanguard took power. “Those previous workers having just become rulers or representatives of the people will cease being workers; they will look at the workers from their heights, they will represent not the people but themselves.… He who doubts it does not know human nature.”31 Bakunin grew to hate Marx and Marxism. But he never offered much in the way of a concrete vision to replace the capitalist state he sought to destroy.
The Russian anarchist Alexander Herzen, although he did not embrace Bakunin’s lusty calls for action, violence, and sometimes terrorism, also detested Marx. But Herzen, like Bakunin, offered little more than hazy notions of volunteerism and autonomous collectives and communes to replace the state. The anarchists proved more adept at understanding autocratic power and challenging it than at constructing a governing system to replace it.
The remarkable French revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui, like Bakunin, took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in France in May 1839, the 1848 uprising, and the Paris Commune—a socialist uprising that seized control of France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.
Blanqui is an important, if neglected, nineteenth-century theorist, for unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, he dismissed the naive belief, central to Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is the lie perpetrated by oppressors: “All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature.… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.”32 He also foresaw that scientific and technological advancement, rather than a harbinger of progress, could be “a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”33 He even decried the despoiling of the natural world. “The axe fells, nobody replants. There is no concern for the future’s ill health.”34 “Humanity,” he wrote, “is never stationary. It advances or goes backwards. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”35 His understanding that history can usher in long periods of repression as well as freedom and liberty is worth remembering.
It was Blanqui who first used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.”36 Blanqui’s call for a small, conspiratorial group to seize power in the name of the working class was a tactic that would be successfully employed by Lenin, who then set out to dismantle the autonomous soviets and workers’ committees. Lenin, with a handful of subordinates, carried out what became, in essence, a right-wing counterrevolution that introduced a system of repressive, centralized state capitalism and state terror.
Marx never embraced Blanqui’s or Lenin’s call for a small group of disciplined revolutionaries to seize power. Marx hoped that a broad-based mass movement of industrial workers like the Chartists would organize to overthrow the capitalist order and usher in communism. The question of how to carry out a successful revolution, which occupied much of Lenin’s thought, brings with it the question of whether the ruthless tactics and a small, disciplined class of professional revolutionaries that make a revolution possible make an open society impossible. Any revolution, once begun, carries the potential for fanaticism. Revolutionaries in power can erect, in the name of a glorious utopian ideal, a system of state terror, as demonstrated by the Leninists and Stalinists, the ideological heirs of the French Jacobins.
The next great revolutionary wave swept Russia in 1905 with its humiliating defeat by Japan. The defeat triggered the abortive uprising against the Czar—the dress rehearsal for the 1917 Russian Revolution—and ignited another round of revolutionary upheavals around the world. The Argentine Revolution of 1905 was followed by the Persian Constitutional Revolution, which took place between 1905 and 1907 and overthrew the monarchy, establishing a free press, competing political parties, and a parliament. The Young Turk Revolution in 1908 reversed the 1878 suspension of the Ottoman parliament, the General Assembly, by Sultan Abdul Hamid II and inaugurated the Second Constitutional Era. These uprisings were followed in 1910 by revolutions in Portugal and Mexico and by the 1911 Chinese Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. The February Russian Revolution in 1917 forced the Czar to abdicate and, after an armed putsch led by Lenin in October, brought the Bolsheviks to power.
The Russian Revolution inspired socialist uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Hungary—indeed, in most of Europe—and fueled the imagination of radical movements i
n the United States as well as the Indian independence movement led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It was the Russian Revolution’s catalyzing of the radical wing of the trade union movement that led to the formation of the first communist party in the United States and triggered the “Red Scare” hysteria, which allowed the state to carry out a preemptive war against radical and populist movements. Unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies,” were destroyed. Publications such as The Masses and Appeal to Reason were banned. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned in 1918. Emma Goldman, along with more than 200 other “radical aliens,” was stripped of her passport and deported in 1919 to Russia.37 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in 1927. By the 1920s, a once powerful and radical labor movement in the United States had been broken. Although it was revived with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, it would be crushed again by World War II and the anticommunist hysteria that followed.
The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908—led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover—was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African Americans—antiwar groups, and later the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices. They illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps, created blacklists, and demanded loyalty oaths. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives.