"We hear the word Revolution in America"

" ... Now, today, with increasing frequency we hear the word revolution in America. The revolution in the making has been defined as the Third American Revolution -- after those of 1776 and 1865. The atmosphere is coming to resemble the mood that swept across Europe in the 1970s and 80s when the Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Fraction in Germany and Direct Action in France launched their armed attacks on the state, in the conviction that they were the revolution's vanguard.

Australian writer Desmond O'Grady describes in his Stages of the Revolution (Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2004) the 1854 rebellion of gold miners on the Eureka field in the city of Ballarat, Victoria, who organized themselves in a stockade against the maladministration. Some 30 people were killed when a scared government put them down. Some in the government thought it was a “democratic revolution,” and feared it foreshadowed a republic. Nowadays that Eureka stockade is still an inspiration for some for a different Australia. Some would like its flag to be the Australian flag.

The symbol of the Eureka Stockade is a flag, a flag that ignores the Union Jack. Instead, on a blue field a cross with stars at the extremities represents the Southern Cross seen so vividly in the Southern hemisphere -- the original is still preserved as a symbol of rebellion.

[ ... ]

The Russian born anarchist, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), wrote in his major work, The Great French Revolution: “A revolution is infinitely more than a series of insurrections in town and country. It is more than a simple struggle between parties, however sanguinary; more than mere street-fighting, and much more than a mere change of government. . . . A revolution is a swift overthrow, in a few years, of institutions which have taken centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and irremovable that even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in their writings. It is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief period, of all that up to that time composed the essence of social, religious, political and economic life in a nation. It means the subversion of acquired ideas and of accepted notions concerning each of the complex institutions and relations of the human herd. In short, it is the birth of completely new ideas concerning the manifold links in citizenship -- conceptions, which soon become realities, and then begin to spread among the neighboring nations, convulsing the world and giving to the succeeding age its watchword, its problems, its science, its lines of economic, political and moral development.”

The Italian writer and semiologist, Umberto Eco, defines revolution as “the sum total of a long series of revisions.” He says that “society on the other hand has become a universe devoid of a center. Everything is periphery. There is no longer a heart of anything. Only romantic terrorists of the Red Brigades believed that the state had a heart and that it was vulnerable.”

In an interview with me, Eco said that Michel Foucault had elaborated the most convincing notion of power (against which revolutions explode) in circulation: “power is not only repression and interdiction but it is also incitement to speak. . . . Power is not one single power. It is not massive. It is not a unidirectional process between an entity that commands and its subjects. Power is multiple and ubiquitous. It is a network of consensuses that depart from below. Power is a plurality. Power is the multiplicity of relationships of strength.” Eco's theory is that criticism of power has degenerated because that criticism became massive which in turn spawned ingenuous notions that power -- the system -- had one center, symbolized by the evil man with a black mustache manipulating the working class.

The French Revolution proved Kropotkin right. It had the effects he outlined. In that sense, the Paris Commune was not a revolution; at the most it was the tail end, the last throes of the French Revolution a century earlier.

In the same manner, the aspirations of the European so-called terrorist organizations of the last century pale in comparison to revolution; though ambitious, generous, idealistic and highly ideological, and based on the two pillars of an intellectual vanguard and workers, they were limited in scope and realism. Their only symbols were the pistol, the red flag and the five-pointed star. Nor were the objective conditions in modern United Europe ready for revolution. The Red Brigades chief, Alberto Franceschini, told me afterwards that they had truly believed the modern state had a heart and that they could strike it and turn history around.

The Red Brigades had however learned many lessons from Russian revolutionaries. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky insisted that to make a revolution, it is not enough that a movement of ideas should manifest itself only among the educated classes. Insurrections by the people do not make a revolution. Revolutionary action by the people must coincide with a movement of revolutionary thought among the educated classes. The two approaches to revolution were necessary, dedication and heart: the professional revolutionary Lenin created revolution with words; Trotsky was the revolutionary of the heart. There must then follow a union of the two, the people and the vanguard, as happened in England in 1640-1660, in France in 1789 and finally in Russia in 1917.

Recognition of the original international character of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is fundamental to understanding its success: Workers of the world unite was its slogan and the hammer and sickle the symbol. Lenin furthermore believed the Russian Revolution was doomed to defeat by capitalist counter-revolution unless it generated proletarian socialist revolutions in West Europe. Russian revolutionaries originally had no illusions that a revolution in Russia alone could succeed: permanent and international revolution was the key to victory. Therefore, its internationalist slogans.

We have the example of the Cuban Revolution today. Though it overthrew the corrupt US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba faced US sanctions and an entire Latin America dominated by US capitalism. The Cuban Revolution brought social progress to the people, universal health care and education and exported doctors and medical care to several African countries. Still today Argentineans and other Latin Americans go to Cuba for serious medical care. Cuba remains as a spiritual guide for the Left in Latin America.

Economically, Cubans continue to suffer because of the US embargo. Its problems lie in its isolation. As Lenin and Trotsky insisted in the early days of the Russian Revolution, Socialist revolution in one country is not possible. If impossible in huge Russia, how much more so in the island state of Cuba. Since it could rely only on the Soviet Union, since the collapse of the USSR, Cuba's economic sufferings have increased. Now, with Castro's retirement, the capitalist world is ready to pounce.

However, times have changed. The emergence of the Left and diverse forms of Socialism in Latin America has created a new objective situation. Cuba is no longer in total isolation. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have elected pro-Cuban left-wing governments; the Mexican electorate has swung Left; Brazil, Argentina and Chile are now friendly states. ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), the Venezuelan creation to oppose the IMF, the World Bank and US neo-liberalism in general. The figures of the freedom fighters Martí and Bolívar and Che Guevara are symbols of liberation from US hegemony, in the same way the Cuban Revolution itself is a symbol of Latin American revolution. For this reason alone, the capitalist world is dedicated to crushing the Cuban Revolution. Cubans themselves however continue to favor Castro but, as happened in the Soviet Union, they detest the plague of Bureaucratism.

Today, Cuba's new slogan is: Down with corruption and the new bourgeoisie. ... "

~ From Symbolism, ideology and revolution ~