So
you say you don't want a revolution?
Dmitry Orlov
21
July, 2015
Over
the past few months we have been forced to bear witness to a
humiliating farce unfolding in Europe. Greece, which was first
accepted into the European Monetary Union under false pretenses, then
saddled with excessive levels of debt, then crippled through the
imposition of austerity, finally did something: the Greeks elected a
government that promised to shake things up. The Syriza party
platform had the following planks, which were quite revolutionary in
spirit.
Put
an end to austerity and put the Greek economy on a path toward
recovery
Raise
the income tax to 75% for all incomes over 500,000 euros, adopt a
tax on financial transactions and a special tax on luxury goods.
Drastically
cut military expenditures, close all foreign military bases on Greek
soil and withdraw from NATO. End military cooperation with Israel
and support the creation of a Palestinian State within the 1967
borders.
Nationalize
the banks.
Enact
constitutional reforms to guarantee the right to education, health
care and the environment.
Hold
referendums on treaties and other accords with the European Union
Of
these, only the last bullet point was acted on: there was a lot made
of the referendum which returned a resounding “No!” to EU demands
for more austerity and the dismantling and selling off of Greek
public assets. But a lot less was made of the fact that the results
of this referendum were then ignored.
But
the trouble started before then. After being elected, Syriza
representatives went to Brussels to negotiate. The negotiations
generally went like this: Syriza would make an offer; the EU
officials would reject it, and advance their own demands for more
austerity; Syriza would make another offer, and the EU officials
would reject it too and advance their own demands for even more
austerity than in the last round; and so on, all the way until Greek
capitulation. All the EU officials had to do to force the Greeks to
capitulate was to stop the flow of Euros to Greek banks. Some
revolutionaries, these! More like a toy poodle trying to negotiate
for a little more kibble to be poured into its dish, if it pleases
the master to do so. Stathis Kouvelakis (a Syriza member) summed up
the Greek government's stance: “Here’s our program, but if we
find that its implementation is incompatible with keeping the euro,
then we’ll forget about it.”
It
is not as if revolutions don't happen any more. Just one country over
from Greece there is a rather successful revolution unfolding as we
speak: what used to be Northern Iraq and Syria is controlled by the
revolutionary regime variously known as ISIS/ISIL/Daash/Islamic
Caliphate. We can tell that it is a real revolution because of its
use of terror. All revolutionaries deserving of the name use
terror—and what they generally say is that their terror is in
response to the terror of the pre-existing order they seek to
overthrow, or the terror of their counterrevolutionary enemies. And
by terror I mean mass murder, expropriation, exile and the taking of
hostages.
Just
so that you understand me correctly, let me stress at the outset that
I am not a revolutionary. I am an observer and a commentator on all
sorts of things, including revolutions, but I choose not to
participate. Remaining an observer and a commentator presupposes
staying alive, and my personal longevity program calls for not being
anywhere near any revolutions—because, as I just mentioned,
revolutions involve mass murder.
In
the case of the French revolution, it started with
liberté-égalité-fraternité
and proceeded swiftly to guilliotiné.
The Russian revolution of 1917 remains the gold standard for
revolutions. There, thanks to Uncle Joe, so-called “red terror”
went on and on, eventually claiming millions of victims. Mao and Pol
Pot are also part of that revolutionary pantheon. The American
revolution wasn't a revolution at all because the slave-owning,
genocidal sponsors of international piracy remained in power under
the new administration. Nor does the February 2014 putsch in the
Ukraine qualify as a revolution; that was an externally imposed
violent overthrow of the legitimate government and the installation
of a US-managed puppet regime, but, as in the American Colonies, the
same gang of thieves—the Ukrainian oligarchs—continue to rob the
country blind just as before. But if the Nazi thugs from the “Right
Sector” take over and kill the oligarchs, the government officials
in Kiev and their US State Dept./CIA/NATO minders, and then proceed
with a campaign of “brown terror” throughout the country, then I
will start calling it a revolution.
*
* *
The
fact of mass murder does not automatically a revolution make: you
have to make note of who is getting killed. So, if the dead consist
of lots of volunteers, recruits, mercenaries, plus lots of
nondescript civilians, that does not a revolution make. But if the
dead include a good number of oligarchs, CEOs of major corporations,
bankers, senators, congressmen, public officials, judges, corporate
lawyers, high-ranking military officers, then, yes, that's starting
to look like a proper revolution.
Other
than big huge pools of blood littered with the corpses of
high-ranking representatives of the ancien régime,
a revolution also requires an ideology—to corrupt and pervert. In
general, the ideology you have is the ideology you make revolution
with. It stands to reason that if you don't have an ideology, it's
not really a revolution. For instance, the American Colonists had no
ideology—just some demands. They didn't want to pay taxes to the
British crown; they didn't want to maintain British troops; they
didn't want limits on the slave trade; and they didn't want
restrictions on profiting from piracy on the high seas. That's not an
ideology; that's just simple old greed. With the Ukrainian
“revolutionaries,” their “ideology” pretty much comes down to
the statements “Europe is wonderful” and “Russians suck.”
That's not an ideology either; the former is wishful thinking; the
latter is simple bigotry.
Taking
the example of ISIS/ISIL/Daash/Islamic Caliphate, they are Islamists,
and so the ideology they corrupt and pervert is Islam, with its
Sharia law. How? Islamist scholars have been most helpful by
compiling this top-ten list:
1.
It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as “People of the Scripture.”
2.
It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.
3.
It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.
4.
It is forbidden in Islam to disfigure the dead.
5.
It is forbidden in Islam to destroy the graves and shrines of
Prophets and Companions.
6.
It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat Christians or any
“People of the Scripture.”
7.
Jihad in Islam is a purely defensive struggle. It is not permissible
without the right cause, the right purpose, and the right rules of
conduct.
8.
It is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and
diplomats — hence it is forbidden to kill journalists and aid
workers.
9.
Loyalty to one’s nation is permissible in Islam.
10.
It is forbidden in Islam to declare a Caliphate without consensus
from all Muslims.
But,
as Lenin famously put it, “If You Want to Make an Omelet, You Must
Be Willing to Break a Few Eggs.” And if you want to make a
revolution, then you must be willing to pervert your ideology. Those
Islamist scholars who eagerly exclaim “That's not Islam! Islam is a
religion of peace and tolerance!” are missing the point: the
ideology of ISIS/ISIL/Daash/Islamic Caliphate is still
Islam—revolutionary Islam.
The
example of ISIS/ISIL/Daash/Islamic Caliphate is germane to the topic
of Greece, because it is a contemporary example of what is definitely
a revolution, and it is taking place just one country over from
Greece. But the ideology of Syriza is not Islam—it's socialism, and
philosophically they are Marxists. And so a better example for Syriza
to follow, were they to suddenly stop being Europe's pathetic poodles
and don the mantle of fearless, heroic revolutionaries, is still the
good old Russian revolution of 1917.
*
* *
As
I mentioned, one of the most important tools of a revolution is
terror. In Russia, revolutionary terror was called “red terror,”
which, the revolutionaries claimed, arose in opposition to “white
terror” of the Russian imperial regime, with its racist bigotry
(Jews weren't allowed in any of the major cities), numerous forms of
oppression, some major, some quite petty, and rampant corruption. An
interesting feature of the Russian revolution is that the terror
started several years prior to the event.
Let
us pause for a second to consider why revolutionary terror is
necessary. A revolution is a drastic change in the direction of
society. Left alone, society tends to worsen its worst tendencies
over time: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the police state
becomes more oppressive, the justice system becomes more riddled with
injustice, the military-industrial complex produces ever less
effective military hardware for ever more money, and so on. This is a
matter of social inertia: the tendency of objects to travel in a
straight line in absence of a force acting at an angle to its
direction of motion. The formula for momentum is
p=mv
where
p is momentum, m
is mass and v is
velocity.
To
make a radical course change, revolutionaries have to apply force,
counteracting the social inertia. To make it so that it is within
their limited means to do this, they can do two things: reduce v,
or reduce m. Reducing
v is a bad idea: the
revolution must not lose its own momentum. But reducing m
is, in fact, a good idea. Now, it turns out that, with regard to
social momentum, most of the mass that gives rise to it resides in
the heads of certain classes of people: government officials, judges
and lawyers, police officers, military officers, rich people, certain
types of professionals and so on.
The
rest of the population is much less of a problem. Suppose some
revolutionaries show up and tell them that
they
don't have to worry about paying taxes (because we are confiscating
the property of the rich),
medicine
and education are now free,
those
with mortgages can stop making payments; they automatically own
their real estate free and clear
renters
now automatically own their place of residence,
employees
are automatically majority stockholders in their businesses,
they
should fill out an application if they want a free (newly liberated)
parcel of land to farm,
there
is a general amnesty and their loved ones who have been locked up
are coming home,
ration
cards are being issued to make sure that nobody ever goes hungry
again,
the
homeless are going to be moving in with those whose residences are
deemed unduly spacious,
they
are now their own police and are in charge of patrolling their
neighborhoods with the revolutionary guards available as back-up,
and
if
any non-revolutionary authorities, be they the former police or the
former landlords, come around and bother any of them, then these
traitors and impostors shall face swift, on-the-spot revolutionary
justice.
Most
regular people would think that this is a pretty good deal. However,
government officials, the police, military officers, judges,
prosecutors, rich people whose property is to be confiscated,
corporate officers and shareholders, those living on fat corporate or
government pensions, etc., would no doubt think otherwise. The
revolutionary solution is to take them as hostages, exile them, and,
to make an example of the most recalcitrant and obstructive, kill
them. This dramatically reduces m,
allowing the revolutionaries to effect drastic course changes even as
v increases. I
compiled this list because it would be such an easy sell—piece of
cake, a slam-dunk, a no-brainer. But I lack the uncontrollable desire
to smash eggs and the insatiable appetite for omelets. As I
mentioned, I am no revolutionary—just an observer.
In
the run-up to the Russian revolution, from 1901 through 1911, there
were 17,000 such casualties. In 1907, the average toll was 18 people
a day. According to police records, between February 1905 and May
1906, there were among those killed:
8
governors
5
vice-governors and other regional administrators
21
chiefs of police, heads of municipalities and wardens
8
high-ranking police officers
4
generals
7
military officers
79
bailiffs
125
inspectors
346
police officers
57
constables
257
security personnel
55
police service personnel
18
state security agents
85
government employees
12
clergy
52
rural government agents
52
land-owners
51
factory owners and managers
54
bankers and businessmen
|
Good
old Zinka
Schoolteacher,
Revolutionary, Assassin
|
Clearly,
these terrorist acts must have had some not inconsiderable effect in
softening the target, making the government overthrow easier. This
was not an accident but a matter of well-articulated revolutionary
policy. The concept of “red terror” was first introduced by
Zinaida Konoplyannikova, a rural schoolteacher who first got on the
police radar for being an atheist and was later convicted as a
terrorist for shooting a notorious general-major at point-blank
range. At her trial in 1906, she said this: “The
[Socialist-Revolutionary] Party has decided to counter the white, yet
bloody, terror of the government with red terror...” She was
executed by hanging that same year, aged 26.
After
the revolution, red terror became government policy. Here is Lenin's
response to being questioned by Communist party members about his
“barbaric methods”: “I reason soberly and categorically: what
is better—to imprison a few tens or hundreds provocateurs, guilty
or innocent, acting consciously or unconsciously, or to lose
thousands of soldiers and workers? The former is better.
Let them
accuse me of any deadly sins and violations of liberty—I plead
guilty, but the interests of the workers win.”
Grandpa Lenin belting out a tune
Grandpa Trotsky going wild on the harmonica
Trotsky
produced a particularly crisp definition of “red terror.” He
called it “a weapon to be used against a social class that has been
condemned to extinction but won't die.”
Estimates
of the exact number of victims of “red terror” vary. Robert
Conquest claimed that between 1917 and 1922 the revolutionary
tribunals executed 140,000 people. But the historian O. B. Mozokhin,
after an exhaustive study of the data available from government
archives, put the number at no more than 50,000. He also noted that
executions were the exception rather than the rule, and that most of
those executed were sentenced for criminal rather than political
acts.
But
this was nothing compared to what Stalin unleashed later on. The
ideological foundation of Stalin's terror was “intensification of
class struggle at the culmination of the building of socialism,”
which he articulated at the plenum of the Central Committee in July
of 1928. According to his logic, USSR was economically and culturally
underdeveloped, surrounded by hostile capitalist states, and as long
as there remained the threat of foreign military intervention with
the goal of reestablishing the bourgeois order, only the preventive
destruction of the remnants of “bourgeois elements” could
guarantee the security and independence of the USSR. These elements
included former police officers, government officials, clergy,
land-owners and businessmen. The peak of Stalin's repression occurred
in 1937 and 1938. During these two years 1,575,259 people were
arrested, of which 681,692 were shot.
You
may be forgiven for thinking of Stalin as a psychopathic murderer,
because he was certainly that, but more importantly he was a
competent, and sufficiently ruthless, head of a revolutionary state.
For a revolutionary regime, killing too many people is rarely a
problem, but killing too few can easily prove fatal. To play it safe,
a revolutionary should always err on the side of murder. This
attitude tends to pervade the entire power pyramid: if you give
Stalin a memorandum recommending that 500 priests get shot, and
Stalin crosses out 500 and pencils in 1000 in red pencil, then you
better find 500 more priests to shoot, or the number becomes 1001 and
includes you.
This
guarantee of security and independence did seem to hold. After all,
there was a subsequent invasion by a hostile bourgeois capitalist
state (Germany) and bourgeois order was temporarily reestablished on
the territories it occupied. But there was nobody left to instigate
anti-revolutionary rebellion elsewhere in the USSR because most of
the would-be counterrevolutionaries were by then dead.
Of
course, this took a terrible toll on society. Here is what Putin had
to say on the subject of “red terror”: “Think of the hostages
who were shot during the civil war, the destruction of entire social
strata—the clergy, the prosperous peasants, the Cossacks. Such
tragedies have recurred more than once during the history of mankind.
And it always happened when initially attractive but ultimately empty
ideals were raised above the main value—the value of human life,
above the rights and liberties of man. For our country this is
especially tragic, because the scale was colossal. Thousands,
millions of people were destroyed, sent to concentration camps, shot,
tortured to death. And these were primarily people who had their own
opinions, who weren't afraid to voice them. These were the most
effective people—the flower of the nation. Even after many years we
feel the effect of this tragedy on ourselves. We must do a great deal
to make sure that this is never forgotten.”
Given
that the price is so high, perhaps it would be better after all if we
just sat quietly, allowed the rich get richer as the poor get poorer,
watched listlessly as the environment got completely destroyed by
capitalist industrialists in blind pursuit of profit, and eventually
curled up, kissed our sweet asses good-bye and died? Good luck
selling that idea to young radicalized hotheads who have nothing to
lose—except maybe you, if you happen to stand in their way as they
change the world! No, revolution is here to stay, and one of its main
weapons is terror. No matter how well we remember, the annihilation
of counterrevolutionary social elements is bound to recur.
*
* *
Getting
back to Greece and Syriza: what if Syriza were not just a
particularly fluffy breed of miniature Europoodle but actual
honest-to-goodness revolutionaries, ready to do whatever it takes?
How would they act differently? And what would be the result?
Well,
one thing that comes to mind immediately is that they wouldn't try to
stay in the Eurozone—they would seek to destroy it. The solution is
simple: no Eurozone—no Euro-debt—no problem. There is a general
principle involved: never accept responsibility for that which you
cannot control. Speaking from experience, suppose you invite a
plumber to fix your toilet, and the plumber finds that the toilet has
been Mickey-moused in multiple ways by an incompetent amateur. In
this situation, the professional thing for the plumber to do is to
completely obliterate that toilet. Now the solution becomes simple:
install a new toilet.
Here's
a very simple one-two punch which Greece could have delivered instead
of futile attempts at negotiation:
1.
Immediately announce an open-ended moratorium on all debt repayment,
taking the position that Greece has no legitimate creditors within
the Eurozone—it's all financial fraud at the highest levels. After
a few months, the fake bail-out financial entities that magically
convert garbage Eurozone debt into AAA-rated securities (because they
are guaranteed by Eurozone governments) are forced to write off Greek
debt. In turn, Eurozone governments, being pretty much broke, balk at
refinancing them out of their national budgets, showing to the world
that their guarantees aren't worth the paper they are written on.
There follows a bond implosion. Shortly thereafter, the Euro goes
extinct, and along with it all Eurozone debt.
2.
Start printing Euros without authorization from the European Central
bank. When accused of forgery, make the forgery harder to detect by
changing the letter at the front of the serial number from Y (for
Greece) to X (for Germany). Flood Greece and the rest of the Eurozone
with notionally counterfeit (but technically perfect) Euro notes. As
the Euro plummets in value, institute food rationing and issue ration
cards. Eventually convert from the now devalued and debased Euro to a
newly reintroduced Drachma and reestablish trade links with the now
“liberated” former Eurozone countries using trade deals based on
barter and local currency swaps with gold reserves used to correct
any minor imbalances.
Could
this have been done without any “red terror”? I doubt it. Greece
is very much oligarch-ridden; even the celebrated former Syriza FM
Yanis Varoufakis is the son an industrial magnate. The Greek
oligarchs and the rich would have had to be rounded up and held as
hostages. Numerous people in the government and in the military have
a split allegiance—they work for Europe, not for Greece. They would
have had to be sacked immediately and held incommunicado, under house
arrest at a minimum. No doubt foreign special services would have run
rampant, looking for ways to undermine the revolutionary government.
This would have called for drastic preemptive measures to physically
eliminate foreign spies and agents before they could have had a
chance to act. And so on. This wouldn't have been a job for fluffy
mini-poodles. As Stalin famously put it, “Cadres are the key to
everything.” You can't make revolution without revolutionaries.
But
is this a job for anyone? Anyone at all? I leave this question as an
exercise for the reader.
Posts
Courtesy: the National Museum of African American history and culture
