On Revolution Pt.1 .... Socialism or Barbarism?

"As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism."[1] Wrote Karl Kautsky in 1892, at the end of a century filled with revolutions, counter-revolutions and wars.

The Aristocratic ‘Ancient Regime’, still held sway over much of Europe, however in the Old World as the New, the bondsmen of the Feudal Age were beginning to outgrow the traditional constraints of their former masters. Men of merit & independent means were beginning to flourish in fields that were formerly the reserve of those who’s privilege and entitlement outweighed both their intelligence and capability. Remarking around the  turn of the century upon the rise of the middle classes in Europe, King Leopold II of Belgium said: “there is really nothing left for us kings except money”, but the wealth & influence of the Aristocracy was beginning to be rivaled by many of the military men, industrialists & investors, capitalizing where Feudal chains had been loosened & replaced with rationalized systems of financial exploitation.

The liberation of productive power from it's Monarchical constraints, did not include the liberation of the productive forces themselves, the middle-class revolution merely taking the form of an exchange of the old agricultural boss for a new, industrial one, and a more thoroughgoing reduction in the quality of everyday life. 

What had been domination of the weak, by those who derived their strength from God, was gradually becoming management of the dissolute, by those who’s strength derived from balance sheets, and immense holdings of land & capital. The Rule of Kings and Queens had become, "equality, liberty and fraternity" under the reign of Numbers.

Writing in 1855 of events in France, Russian émigré Alexander Herzen noticed the apparent proclivity to play the tyrant among the ascendant Middle Class:

“Immediately following the French revolution, the political Liberals who had played happily with the idea of revolution for a long time prior, began to see that what was crumbling was not only what they had considered prejudice, but also everything else -- what they had considered true and eternal. They were so terrified that some clutched at the falling walls, while others stopped half way, repentant, and began to swear that this was not at all what they wanted. This is why the men who proclaimed the Republic became the assassins of freedom; this is why the liberal names that had resounded in our ears for a score of years or so, are those of reactionary deputies, traitors, inquisitors. They want freedom and even a republic provided that it is confined to their own cultivated circle. Beyond the limits of their moderate circle they become conservatives....

Since the restoration liberals in all countries have called the people to the destruction of the monarchic and feudal order, in the name of equality, of the tears of the unfortunate, of the suffering of the oppressed, of the hunger of the poor....They came to their senses when, from behind the half-demolished walls, there emerged the proletarian, the worker with his axe and his blackened hands, hungry and half naked in rags -- not as he appears in books or in parliamentary chatter or in philanthropic verbiage, but in reality. This 'unfortunate brother' about whom so much has been said, on whom so much pity has been lavished, finally asked what was to be his share in all these blessings, where were his freedom, his equality, his fraternity?

The liberals were aghast at the impudence and ingratitude of the worker. They took the streets of Paris by assault, they littered them with corpses, and then they hid from their brother behind the bayonets of martial law in their effort to save 'civilisation and order'!"[2]

The tendency Mr Herzen describes, of power to be anathema to a person or group, imbued with an obscene, irrational character of excessive, sadistic enjoyment, until it rests firmly in their own hands, is by no means an isolated case in the annals of history.

We find direct correlation in the destruction of the Kronstadt rebellion circa 1925, the demands of which included freedom of speech, the end of deportation to work camps, liberation of the soviets (workers' councils) from "party control", among others not in anyway dissimilar to the demands of the Party which overthrew Tsarism.[3] The betrayal by Oliver Cromwell of the libertarian and communistic Diggers and True Levellers, when they became too radical in their demands, threatening the privilege of various anti-Papist nobles & Earls to whom Cromwell owed much of his own success & power.
In the failure of the American revolutionaries and Founding Fathers to extend the right to property or  those of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", to the African slaves and indigenous American's they themselves treated like feudal serfs; and of-course in the betrayal of the German working classes and murder of our heroine Rosa Luxembourg, by the German Socialist government during the Spartacist uprising in Germany 1919.

 

It should be noted that in each of these examples, after power had been challenged, and usurped by a political faction enacting liberal reforms, before long there emerged forms of government whose brutality & ‘purifying’ violence, who’s abuses of state power, were often far greater than those immediately preceding them. In France, the Jacobin "terror", succeeded very quickly by the military, Imperialist dictatorship of Napoleon; in England Cromwell’s brutal religious purges and campaigns in Ireland, the aftershocks of which are still felt today; In America the division of North & South, continuation of brutal slavery and bloody Civil War; in the USSR, the secret police's rationalized paranoia under Joseph Stalin; in Germany, the psychotic madness of organized genocide under Hitler.

Under these various new regimes, new Wars were launched and new territories conquered, all over the world. Old conflicts and antagonisms were rekindled & stoked at home. Those who perhaps less than a generation previously, were uniting to affirm their political liberty & a sense of self-ownership, found themselves dying and being subjected to the most unbelievable horrors,  at home & on far away battlefields.

In hindsight this process takes the appearance of a punishment as described by Victorian author George Trevelyan, who noted how determined King George III was,"never to acknowledge the independence of the Americans, and to punish their contumacy by the indefinite prolongation of a war which promised to be eternal."
The King, by nature and profession a tyrant, wanted, in true sadistic fashion, to "keep the rebels harassed, anxious, and poor, until the day when, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and disappointment were converted into penitence and remorse". [4]

For some of those involved in various republican struggles and revolutions, it must have appeared as though the wrath of God himself, was being poured out on all who dared challenge His divinely appointed rulers on Earth. Who can deny that various institutions of power such as the Catholic Church or European Monarch's, which came under threat from revolutionaries, intellectuals, and historically displayed a propensity for such punitive deeds, tended to emerge from the shadows sooner or later, to exist in our present age with less to worry about & fewer challenges to their authority?

France’s 2^nd republic came to ruin through internal divisions between Conservatives and Radicals, leading to thousands of citizens being exiled to the colonies, & the founding of the 2^nd Empire which itself soon fell under the sustained attack of Prussian Junkers, giving us the 3^rd Republic, under who’s ‘Moral Order’ the radical workers of Paris were murdered in the tens of thousands.

The USSR now consigned to the dustbin of history, was a mere flash in the pan compared to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has perhaps never been as strong in its entire thousand year history; Catholicism rebounded in Spain under Franco, who had himself come to power in the overthrow of a newly founded Republic; Fascism in Germany destroyed the Wiemar Republic, Poland and the majority of European Jewry; World War 1 & 2 decimated the European working classes, and the Cold War, their radical political traditions more specifically and completely.

The tyrants died smiling; for they knew that after their death tyranny would merely change hands, and slavery would never really end. Although in order to flourish, it would have to change form...

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[1]     Karl Kautsky, Erfurt Program, Ch4.1 (1892)

[2]     Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore (1855)

[3]     Demands of the Kronstadt Insurgents: Expressed in the Resolution of the General Meeting of the Crews of the Ships of the Line Kronstadt, 28 February 1921

"Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews despatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to learn the state of affairs in Petrograd, we decided:

    In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.

    Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.

    Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.

    To convene, not later than 1 March I92I, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.

    To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.

    To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.

    To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state.

    ......................................

    To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgment of the workers.

    To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labour.

    To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate themselves with our resolutions.

    We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.

    .....................................

    To permit free artisan production with individual labour.

The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

 President of the Meeting, PETRICHENKO.

      Secretary, PEREPELKIN."

Ref. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1965), VOL. II, p. 495.

[4]     Trevelyan, vol. 1 p. 4&5