Class warfare and what makes a successful revolution
If Karl Marx is to be believed, the world is only a step or two or so away from the glorious condition of stateless communism, an end of history or dialectical nirvana that awaits only rising of the proletariat—with a bit of dictatorship of the same—to complete.
This sounds lovely, except for all the bloodshed and bloody-mindedness that tends to accompany revolutions, but as someone may have said, the making of omelets requires the breaking of some eggs, and we all want omelets, of course.
But it is not just the sanguinary nature of such methods that gives me a moment of pause. The historical record also calls into question the efficacy of revolution, at least if the goal is to produce a more equitable society. Nicholas II deserved to be replaced, but once things settled down, Stalin ended up recycling many of the imperial tools of repressing the people, and he and those whom he favored enjoyed a standard of living that remained far above what ordinary Soviet citizens had access to. The same may be said about the transition from Louis XVI to the Directorate to Napoleon. Haiti revolted from the French and remained poor, with a long string of tyrants who had the luxury of being somewhat less badly off. And then there are the many peasants’ revolts that ended with a lot of hanged peasants and perhaps a few minor reforms.
One example of particular relevance to contemporary American politics is the rise and fall of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar whose sermons to the people of Florence and backroom machinations with kings, popes, and leading citizens of Italy’s city-states placed him temporarily as the de facto leader of the region that gave birth to the Italian Renaissance.
As discussed in Paul Strathern’s book, Death in Florence, Savonarola exploited the grievances of the poor of the city, the political instability of Italy, and a looming sense of a coming apocalypse—inspired in part by the still-extant Black Plague and the approaching year of 1500—to offer his paired solutions of republican government and getting right with God.
In that, he was far less genial than one of America’s would-be reformers with a similar mix of populism and preaching, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lived more and more peacefully than did Savonarola, the Italians of the late fifteenth century being more vigorous about their politics, but the two would have understood each other, from their support for the poor through their suspicion of the pleasures of the flesh—sex in the friar’s case, alcohol for Bryan—to their desire to rein in education as the pack animal of theology. And the portion of the population in whom they found their greatest support were the economically downtrodden and, as Donald Trump would later say of his beloved voters, the poorly educated. Savonarola did also have the backing of some of the leading intellectuals of his day, including Pico della Mirandola, though the power of the Church and its mythology about the destiny of souls was a useful tool for persuading even intelligent believers.
The problem is that a sophisticated leader at the head of disadvantaged masses will always suffer the temptation of demagoguery. In the leader’s propaganda, the movement can only succeed if the leader does, but all too often, reality agrees. The followers lack the knowledge and skills necessary to shape a new working government and keep it running, and the leader realizes that if they ever make good their deficits, he will no longer be required.
What is more, a dictatorship of the proletariat—or even a parliament of the same—can only work if the masses acquire a sufficient education. They have to learn a method of thinking and learn to think about such matters as is reminiscent of the bourgeoisie that they fought to overthrow—in which case, they inevitably, as least experience tells us so, want to adopt a bourgeois life.
I can come up with two examples of successful revolutions, both of which made good by a long and slow transition and a strategy, often unconscious, of moving more and more people into whatever counted as the middle class of that day and handing increasing amounts of the decision-making to them. With England, this started at the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta and continues in fits, retreats, and starts to the present. Something similar was arranged in America in 1776, in our case a more explicit process that benefited from being able to observe the history of our English cousins and other cases throughout Europe.
What these show is that a just society must take the interests of the masses of citizens into account while at the same time lifting them up to the level that makes popular government more than mob rule. In both countries, long-term change was accompanied and I would argue driven and sustained by an ever wider spread of education and labor reforms that made the worst jobs less bad and a large number of jobs tolerable.
But both of those are under attack today. In the United States, the nation I am most familiar with, unions have been broken, schools are failing, and wages have been stagnant for decades. It is easy to dismiss the appeal of Donald Trump as simple racism, but we have had racist leaders throughout our history. When the economy works for a large portion of the population, our George Wallaces get little traction. When we are in crisis, a Trump or a Father Coughlin have ready listeners yearning for solutions.
If we want a sustainable revolution that does not merely shift the name of the current tyrant, we have to dedicate it to the lifting of everyone. A class war that involves no genuine promotions for the masses of recruits will only be a case, in the words of Pete Townshend, of the “banners, they all flown in the last war.”