Some quotes from James & Grace Lee Boggs and attendant thoughts

Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, by James and Grace Lee Boggs, was published in 1974 by Monthly Review Press. It was written, they said, "for those Americans of our time who have become aware of the need for profound and drastic change, who want to do something to improve human life and are ready to dedicate their lives to this goal, but who are unable to see a path, a direction for their dedication". I'm about halfway through the book, and it's a fascinating read.

In the opening chapter, the authors seek to define what revolution is not, before getting into what it is. Here they are on rebellion:

Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the "standing up," the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed. Rebellions inform both the oppressed and everybody else that the situation has become intolerable. They establish a form of communication among the oppressed themselves and at the same time open the eyes and ears of people who have been blind and deaf to the fate of their fellow citizens. Rebellions break the threads that have been holding the system together and throw into question the legitimacy and the supposed permanence of existing institutions. They shake up old values so that relations between individuals and between groups within the society are unlikely ever to be the same again. The inertia of the society has been interrupted.

Only by understanding what a rebellion accomplishes can we see its limitations. A rebellion disrupts the society, but it does not provide what is necessary to establish a new social order.

In a rebellion the oppressed are reacting to what has been done to them. Therefore rebellions are issue-oriented. They tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future. They also tend to be limited to a particular locality, or to a particular group—workers, blacks, women, chicanos. For all these reasons the time span of a rebellion tends to be limited—usually to a few days or a few weeks.

It's interesting thinking of these terms in context of the Occupy movement of the last six months. In many respects, it's unclear whether it is (or has been) merely a rebellion, or in fact has the possible seeds of a revolution. The continued refusal for demands to be issued has to be seen to be a good sign, in this respect:

When those in rebellion talk about power, they are employing the rhetoric of revolution without the substance. In fact, they are simply protesting their condition. They see themselves and call on others to see them as victims and the other side as villains. They do not yet see themselves as responsible for reorganizing the society, which is what revolutionary social forces must do in a revolutionary period. Hence a rebellion begins with the feeling by the oppressed that "we can change the way things are," but it usually ends up by saying "they ought to do this and they ought to do that." So that while a rebellion generally begins with the rebels believing in their right to determine their own destiny, it usually ends up with the rebels feeling that their destiny is, in fact, determined by others.

Once you start making specific demands, you have accepted the logic of the oppressor, or revealed that some modest reform might quiet you down. And once the state is able to offer you something to satisfy a demand, that offer can be softened, eroded. Many people have written about Occupy and the question of demands, but it's a difficult question, because of who we are as Americans, what we've become accustomed to. I don't mean to offer any criticisms of Occupy here, especially given my personal lack of actual political experience. My true radicalization, you might say, is yet to come, even if in recent years my diagnosis and understanding of the problems facing us has become ever more radical.

Anyway, the authors continue in this vein, turning to the U.S.:

It is very hard for those who have been oppressed to get beyond the stage of asking others to do things for them. It is particularly difficult in the United States. The Welfare State and the abundance created by exploitation of other countries and by advanced technology have made possible a vast apparatus of social workers and welfare workers whose economic well-being depends on expanding the agencies for helping the oppressed. This country has also had the wealth to create a vast network of programs by which the oppressed are pacified and the most militant leaders are rewarded with high-paying jobs in community projects.

We can replace the Welfare State with the huge non-profit industry, perhaps, and I'd expand on "the abundance created by exploitation of other countries" to include our consumer culture and television and cars, among many other countless things pacifying us all, lulling us into sleep, into inaction, into believing politics can be reduced to voting, into not even noticing, or at best remembering, how much our lives are shaped by that exploitation. How many of us have jobs that depend on it directly?

It is hard to go beyond rebellion to revolution in this country because of the widespread belief that revolutions can be made as simply and instantly as one makes coffee. Therefore the tendency is to engage in acts of adventurism or confrontation which the rebels believe will bring down the system quickly. It is always much easier for the oppressed to undertake an adventuristic act on impulse than to undertake a protracted revolutionary struggle. A protracted revolutionary struggle requires that the oppressed masses acquire what they never start out with—confidence in their ability to win a revolution.

I don't know that people believe revolution is as easy as all that, not anymore anyway. It's seen as hard, all too hard, and we grow impatient, our attention wavers, and we have to get up early for work tomorrow and hey isn't there something on TV tonight? And there's the still, all-too-widespread belief that the system itself is somehow salvageable (but it's not, it's not). It's the only framework most of us understand. (By the way, I almost elided that reference to "adventuristic acts", wary that it could be read as implicit attack on or criticism of anarchists or Black Bloc. It is neither.)

Overall, that opening chapter was interesting, if a little too general, but I found the next four chapters riveting. In these chapters, the authors explore the histories and problems of four revolutions of the 20th century: the Russian, Chinese, Guiné, and Vietnam. They sketch brief histories of the revolutionary movements in these countries, all too much of which is embarrassingly new to me, but they are primarily interested in discussing the ways in which those movements, and their leaders, posed questions about the specific problems they faced, how they responded to failures, how positions were debated and decided on, how each different revolution went beyond the ones that came before, learning and teaching new lessons, and so on. In doing so, they almost have me persuaded of the need of a vanguard party, which is surprising given that I have long more or less dismissed the idea out of hand, given my attraction to anarchist arguments against it. But the problem does remain, doesn't it, how to move forward, how to expand, without becoming politically muddled.

Dangerous Tendencies

Here's another passage from Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy, on the topic of public attitudes towards corporations in the 1780s (with the Bank of North America as the particular case in point):

. . . people worried that the bank would eventually destroy democracy. Thousands of Pennsylvanians complained in their petitions that bankers [...] had begun "to acquire influence in our public councils, and an ascendancy in the government, subversive of the dearest rights of the people." They were worried that "a small number" of "monied men" and "perhaps a single stockholder" could eventually use the bank's growing economic might to begin "actually governing" the state as a shadow government. Others spoke of how it was "highly dangerous" and "Contrary to [the] spirit of a republican government" to have an "institution" that was "placed out of the reach of the legislature," noting that not even "the former government" had been willing to create a private "influence" so "powerful and alarming."

It was not that these people thought bankers were somehow innately sinister; instead, they worried about [...] the "nature of the institution." As a profit-driven company, the bank operated under "natural principles" of doing whatever it took to make money. [...]

The belief that profit-driven corporations pose a grave threat to democracy led many people to declare that they should all be made illegal. Echoing the phrases in popular petitions, some state legislatures said for-profit corporations were "totally destructive of that equality which ought to prevail in a republic." "The accumulation of enormous wealth in the hands of" a company with corporate status, they declared, "will necessarily produce a degree of influence and power which cannot be entrusted in the hands of any set of men whatsoever without endangering the public safety." Others spoke of the "dangerous tendencies" of for-profit corporations or talked about corporate power as "an engine of destruction" that enabled "a few men to take advantage of their wealth." Even one of the state's leading writers on economics argued that any institution chartered for "its own immediate profit [was] incompatible with the interest of the State." "So powerful and uncontroulable a combination of property in private hands," this economist declared, could only lead to "an undue exercise of influence" over economic and political life--just as private corporations like the Bank of England had an "injurious" hold over the British Parliament.

This anti-corporate belief was so strong that, during the postwar decades, few government actions prompted the kind of swift, widespread, and visceral public condemnation as did the attempts of state leaders to grant corporate status. (pp. 111-112) (Elisions are mine; bracketed words are Bouton's.)

Myth Rushes in to Fill the Gap

"We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believed it must depress the level of culture and of public life." - Marilynne Robinson (2007)

". . . when communal memory, dialogic memory, breaks down or disappears, myth rushes in to fill the gap." - Gabriel Josipovici, "Memory: Too Little/Too Much" (1999) in The Singer on the Shore (2006)

"Opportunitys once lost is not easily recovered." - William Petrikin, letter to John Nicholson (1789) quoted in Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy

I've made the argument here that democracy, properly understood, should mean a society in which people have non-trivial say over basic decisions affecting their actual lives. We have a fantasy that the history of the United States is the unfolding of this great experiment in democracy, but it is exactly that: a fantasy. A case can be made, fairly easily, that the history of this country is in reality the history of the systematic prevention of democracy. The U.S. Constitution, that holy document, in particular is a key element in this thwarting of democracy, and yet in our imagination, the Constitution is held up as defining and protecting democracy.

In a recent post, I mentioned my reading of Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. I said that, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was how it showed "how the established leaders of Pennsylvania, for example, co-opted the more radical elements, before re-consolidating their power during the revolution itself, with the resulting system being far less free than many had hoped and fought for." Subsequent to that post, I read the book Taming Democracy (Oxford 2007), by Terry Bouton. Bouton's book is subtitled "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution and is a fascinating study of the raised and finally crushed hopes of the revolutionary generation. (Full disclosure: Bouton was one of Aimée's college professors. I've never met him.) One thing that struck me about reading the book is the centrality of economics to the arguments and struggles of the time. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown (see her Democracy Against Capitalism or Empire of Capital or The Origins of Capitalism), one of the key features of capitalism is the wholesale separation of the economic from the political. Economic decisions are made outside of the political realm, whereas the state enforces the conditions necessary for these decisions to have weight. That is, since economic power lies elsewhere, our impact on crucial decisions is negligible, regardless of whatever political victories we may claim. This is why voting is reduced to our selection of one of two candidates, both of whom ultimately serve not the people, but big money. This is difficult to see, since capitalism is like the air we breath, so it is bracing to read about the obvious role of economics in the conceptions of freedom held in earlier eras.

Bouton focuses on Pennsylvania, as did Foner, largely because of Pennsylvania's role as both the center of the most radical popular revolutionary attitudes and as the focus of the counter-revolution that began during the war itself, finally resulting in the Federal Constitution, “taming democracy”, as the title has it. He explains the various economic policies imposed by the British that led to the revolution. It begins with British attempts to extract payment from the colonies in order to pay for the heavy expenses of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which it tried to do by "enact[ing] a set of policies encompassing trade, finance, and taxation that created a profound scarcity of money". Colonies were forbidden from printing paper money as legal tender, and paper was pretty much all the colonies used, since they had so little gold or silver (there was a huge trade deficit with Britain). Through the 1760s, it was increasingly argued by ordinary people that what was wrong with British policies was not just abstract political concepts like "Taxation without Representation”, but that such policies impacted the population unequally, and that this inequality, aside from being unfair, meant that people lacked say over important decisions. In the popular conception, independence meant owning property; most people were farmers. Economic independence meant political independence. It was widely felt that one could not be "free" if one was economically dependent. For most people, this meant owning land. (We are, of course, talking about white men, let's not forget. And it was taken for granted that they had the right to take land from Native Americans.)

By 1776, a decade-plus of popular agitation led to the adoption in Pennsylvania of a new constitution. It was the most radical, most democratic constitution in the colonies, and very popular with ordinary Pennsylvanians. It included many of the features which later became part of the Bill of Rights, and most interestingly, a unicameral legislature:

Modern Americans are accustomed to thinking about the height of democratic government as a divided legislature (house and senate) and a powerful executive (president) armed with the veto. Pennsylvania’s revolutionaries thought otherwise. They viewed such a government as checking democracy rather than promoting it. After all, divided government was a British legacy, where the king and upper chamber of Parliament (the House of Lords, filled with titled aristocrats who served for life) checked the democratic branch (the House of Commons). Most Pennsylvanians believed they had suffered under such a system. Consequently, they wanted a new government that would remove the barriers that had kept their voices from being heard.

The executive had only advisory and enforcement powers. "[T]his was the most democratic government in the new nation; according to Benjamin Franklin, that meant it was also 'the safest and best.'" Consider Marilynne Robinson's quote at the top of this post. She's right, isn't she? Don't we think it's in our best interests that there be an "upper" house of Congress, or any legislature? Got to keep the rabble in line. That is, I would wager, our official American position. Whenever I see a discussion about democracy in its purest form, there is a recoiling away: always the assumption is that you simply can't have it; people can't be trusted. But in the 18th century, the bulk of ordinary people seemed to believe otherwise. Naturally, the wealthy were horrified at the idea.

I don't plan a detailed review of the Taming Democracy here, but suffice it to say that reading it was an often revelatory and infuriating experience. I was inspired by the simple idea that most people believed they had the right to a say in decisions affecting their lives, that they believed they had the right to fight for it and did in fact fight for it. I was especially inspired by what he calls the "rings of protection", concentric rings of people resisting unpopular laws: sheriffs refusing to enforce, judges refusing to sentence, people refusing to attend property auctions, people digging trenches across access roads, preventing tax collection and eviction, and countless other kinds of acts in common cause. To quote from John Pilger, writing about his native Australia (in his book Heroes): "Genuine Australian radicalism, without the closed logic of any fear or prejudice, flowed from experience and conditions, rather than from theory or intellectual fashion. . ." The experience of ordinary colonial Americans led to the radicalism of the Revolution against the British, and to the decades-long resistance to the counter-revolution and to the unpopular Constitution. Most of this history is lost, effaced, forgotten, replaced by the myths of the founding fathers and the glory of that Constitution.

Marilynne Robinson's words quoted at the beginning of this post come towards the end of her short essay, "A Great Amnesia", which was adapted from a talk she gave at Amherst college and which appears in the Readings section of the latest issue of Harper’s (May 2008). I think it's an important piece. She discusses the time she spent reading political economy in her spare time at Amherst, during which she learned of the "iron law" of wages, which has it that "the great class of those who lived by their labor could not earn more than subsistence", an iron law that "has come into force again in much of the world as a consequence of a form of competition that has based national economies on the poverty and low expectations of the mass of their populations." But her discussion begins in the library at Amherst, a library that was "almost always equal" to her demands. She talks about a house that was part of the Underground Railroad, and "other hints at participation in the great issues of an earlier America". And here's where her piece unfolds. The significance of these hints only struck her when she found herself in the Middle West, and "found any number of Amhersts . . . scattered over the landscape." She talks of colleges founded in the Midwest, the faculties of which

seem to have been composed largely of graduates of divinity schools in New England and New York, which sent bands out in to the West to advance the cause of liberal education and the reforms it was meant to promote, including the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women. Many of these colleges were racially integrated and integrated by gender also before the Civil War.

She elaborates:

A very generous hope was abroad in America which undertook to realize itself in the wide diffusion of a kind of education historically associated with privilege. That it was intended to break down the barriers education had historically enforced is clear from the fact that it was open to otherwise excluded groups, African Americans and women. Also, many of these schools were organized according to what was called the Manual Labor System. This meant that everyone in the college community, including the faculty, did the work involved in the keeping it fed and housed, in order to assure that there would be no economic barriers to education. On the frontier this meant everyone chopped weeds and butchered hogs and operated the printing presses that poured out abolitionist pamphlets, many of them mailed to the South. The association of learnedness with privilege or leisure was intentionally undercut.

. . . the strength of this movement was based on the willingness of a surprising number of highly educated people to leave the relative comfort of the East for lives of almost unimaginable difficulty, based on the assumption, which proved true, that the populations that found their way to the prairie would have an interest in Latin and Greek, mathematics and logic. [. . .] Their intention was to re-create American society by practicing as well as promoting standards of justice and freedom to which the nation had not risen.

What happened to destroy this great experiment in democracy? She points to "the emergence of Social Darwinism". Certainly Social Darwinism "had precursors in many forms, not surprisingly, since there is nothing easier than persuading people of their natural superiority to other people." But Social Darwinism was accepted as science for a long time, and "[t]here is no arguing with science". She talks about a "great amnesia": it mattered not that there had been blacks and women admitted to and succeeding in colleges before the Civil War; since science now "proved" that they were inferior, "there was no use for that kind of information." I think she makes a compelling point about Social Darwinism and its scientific imprimatur. (This is not the place for me to go into the differences between science as a practice, and the effects and practices of institutional Science then and now.) I would also point to the bottom-line needs of the emerging industrial economy (though they are related: Social Darwinism was tailor-made for capitalism).

Robinson in her essay notes that if she "had not been struck by the anomalous presence" of these Midwestern Amhersts, these New England colleges and towns found in the middle of the heartland, she would not have "learned that aspirations for American democracy had once been so generous and at the same time so high". While reading the essay, I immediately linked it in my mind with the stories found in Taming Democracy. With both, we have the lost history of a more expansive conception of what democracy can be, of what community can be, conceptions that I believe can help us find a way forward, out of our current mess. These conceptions have been buried beneath the weight of History. As she says, these things are not part of the "story we tell ourselves". We tell ourselves other stories, exaggerated stories: of individual freedom, of invention, of progression over time, of rights granted from above instead of won from below. Meanwhile, our communal memories of what once was, and what once was thought possible in common cause, have been obliterated, replaced in many ways by persistent "fear and prejudice" and by diminished expectations. And myth rushed in to fill the gap.

Unenlightened Exceptionalism

Lenin at Lenin's Tomb wrote an interesting post earlier this week about the American Revolution and the role of slavery in it. I don't know enough about the specifics to comment on the bulk of his post, but in the opening paragraph he makes the following necessary point:

The fable of America's origins in liberty and rebellion, and its peculiarly missionary quality, is still one that commands a great deal of irrational support from various quarters, and it is the basis for an unenlightened exceptionalism whose function is to turn the global projection of violence and tyranny into a story of the expansion of human freedom.

And at the recent interesting roundtable at Filthy Habits about Nicholson Baker's new book Human Smoke (which I would very much like to read), Robert Birnbaum posted an excerpt from his forthcoming interview with Howard Zinn (scroll down quite a bit for the excerpt). Zinn refers to the "holy wars" of American history; that is, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II:

I think it is worth questioning the justice of those wars. It's a complicated moral issue. You might say Vietnam is easy [to recognize as unjust - RC]. Iraq is easy. And the Mexican War is easy. And there are no wars which are more morally complicated [than the three holy wars]. But the fact that they re are morally complicated wars shouldn't stop us from examining them. The American Revolution, in terms of casualties, was the bloodiest of wars. A lot of people don’t realize that. .. and the question is, as questions in all of these holy wars, could the same objective have been accomplished, independence from England, ending slavery, defeating Fascism—could those have been accomplished at less than the bloody toll that was taken and without corrupting the moral values of the victors in the war? And with better outcomes. Those are question worth asking. The American Revolution won independence from England at the expense of the Indians, at the expense of the native Americans. The English had set a line, by the Proclamation of 1763, you couldn’t go beyond it into Indian territory. They didn't want trouble with the Indians. Independence from England takes place, the Proclamation of 1763 is wiped out. The settlers are free to move into Indian territory. Black People—most of them joined the British side rather than the American side. It was not a revolution for them. And the question I haven't seen asked. Canada won its independence from England without a bloody war. Conceivable? It's like asking the question about the nature for the Civil war. Slavery was abolished in all of the countries of Latin America by 1833. Without a bloody civil war. Now, of course, all those situations are different. And complicated. All that I am saying is that I think there are questions about history that so far have been untouched and untouchable and should. At least be opened up.

We don't want to open this stuff up. Americans are all too easily swayed by talk about freedom and democracy. Too many of us continue to believe in the myth of American exceptionalism; too many of us refuse to accept that our government does the things it does, and does them intentionally, with specific purposes in mind. Too few of us take the trouble to imagine what it might be like if some foreign power invaded our country, spouting nonsense about regime change and democracy. How might we react? What unsavory movements might develop here over the course of decades of continuous tampering and aerial bombardment? Even when Americans--mainly white Americans, let's face it--bother to acknowledge some of the bloody history, the reflex is still to dismiss events as aberrations, or as well-intended, or as mistakes, or as conditions we've "progressed" from, so completely do white Americans believe in the fanciful notion of the United States as the "mansion on the hill", as the last best hope for civilization (aren't these Barack Obama's ridiculous words?). This exceptionalism, unexamined, reflexive--this refusal to address the implications of history--is one of the major obstacles to any sort of real change in this country. The flap over remarks made by Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama's response, are just the most recent cases in point. . . (about which, more to come, I hope. . .)

(Incidentally, I read a useful book last year on the revolution: Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, by Eric Foner. Foner traces Paine, of course, in his route from England to America, and his role as pamphleteer. More interesting to me, however, was the material on how the established leaders of Pennsylvania, for example, co-opted the more radical elements, before re-consolidating their power during the revolution itself, with the resulting system being far less free than many had hoped and fought for.)