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Four Theses on Revolutionary History

by Ross Gandy
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

SUMMARY: From a radical standpoint the four theses imply a political philosophy of anarchobolshevism: a revolutionary elite practicing equalitarianism may lead social movements into a Republic of Equals . The theses are aimed against those contemporary anarchist tendencies that reject all violence on principle and all politics on principle. The brilliant protest tactics of these anarchists in the Alternative World Movement are accompanied by an ignorance of history. The four theses are illustrated and defended with historical examples and generalizations drawn from historical sociology: Pareto, Marx, Mosca, Bakunin, Michels, Lenin. Conclusion: implications for the future. The theses:

1: Rebellions are always provoked by the ruling classes.

2 : The social protests and popular explosions repeatedly occurring in every civilization in world history never resulted in a change in the political or economic institutions. Unless . . . .

3 : Popular explosions better the living conditions of the underclasses only when led by an elite that knows what to do.

4 : Throughout history revolutionary elites have turned into ruling classes and always will, if not governed by equalitarian rules—austere and iron-clad.

After 1989 when the world communist movement collapsed, its followers moved to the right toward social democracy or to the left toward anarchism. The right option is not economically transformative, but reformist and integrative. Could it be that without realizing what they are doing, these good people on the reformist left are strengthening the system of exploitation? The anarchist left option is more interesting if you come from a radical tradition.

You remember that the anarchist worldview rejects political struggle through parties and parliaments. Classical anarchism counts on spontaneous action of the underclasses to overthrow governments and to build a new society from the bottom up. Revolutions will destroy the old order. From its ruins arise co-operatives, mutual aid, collective farms, egalitarian communities, autonomous communes and agrocities trading with one another only for necessities. In the communes there will be equal ownership, equal pay, equal work and equal say. Who on the Left can say No to that goal?

Today’s anarchists identify with tendencies in the social left such as direct actions, trashing in Seattle, protest movements, feminist sit-ins for equality, base Christian communities in the slums, land takeovers in Brazil, general strikes of French youth, co-operatives of Mayas in Chiapas, the pestering of WTO meetings in Cancun and Hong Kong. Anarchists reject political parties and political struggle as a snare and a delusion: the French socialists, the British Laborites, the Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands talk on the left and govern on the right. The Brazilian Partido do Trabalho and the Mexican PRD do the same. No wonder that anarchist currents of thought are influential in the Movement for an Alternative World.

For thinking about anarchism let us consider the following theses:

THESIS 1: Rebellions are always provoked by the ruling classes.

Throughout history the underclasses have usually been peasants—traditional, religious, legalistic and patient. They endure the oppression of the aristocrats, the landowners, the nobility, the patricians, the zamindars, the boyars, the hacendados, the lords, the barons, the princes--they suffer in silence. They see the king as the fountain of justice surrounded by wicked ministers who deceive him, they sing that the social order is God’s will:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them great and small,
and ordered their estate.

When peasant rebellions, jacqueries, uprisings, insurgencies, and social explosions light up the political sky, that is because the ruling classes never get enough and have finally ground the faces of the poor beyond endurance.

A classic example is the zapatista rebellion. In the two decades before 1910 the state of Morelos south of Mexico City was covered by 40 giant sugar estates exporting to the world market. By 1910 the millionaire landowners had violated the Constitution guaranteeing private property by stripping the peasants of their corn patches in order to grow more sugar cane. In 1911 the peasant rebellion exploded as a struggle for “Constitution and Reform!” Emiliano Zapata proclaimed his Plan de Ayala. This famous program was to become the inspiration of Mexican agrarianism. It declared that the stolen lands would be returned to the peasants. (To return property to rightful owners is hardly a revolutionary proposal.) Next the Plan declared that one third of the landowners’ estates would be distributed to remaining landless peasants--with compensation for the landowners! (Again, this is only a timid legalistic reform.) And finally there was a threat clause: any landowner who resists the reform will be expropriated, losing his estates, horses, bank account, and sugar mills. And herein lay the Revolution. For they all resisted the timid reform of the traditional, legalistic, religious, conservative peasants and were finally driven from the state in a total social upheaval. In Latin America the criminal ruling classes violate constitutions and provoke rebellions around the continent: Mexico 1910, Haiti 1914, Nicaragua 1926, El Salvador 1932, Cuba 1933, Guatemala 1944, Bolivia 1952, Cuba 1959, la Dominicana 1965, Argentina 1976, Nicaragua 1979, Peru 1980, Chiapas 1994, Guerrero 1996, Colombia now.

In the cities too the working people usually suffer in silence, but explode in riots, insurrections, and tumults when their exploiters push them down into starvation and despair. A classic example is the tumulto of 1692 in Mexico City . A drought made the corn scarce, merchants hid what was left to drive up prices, the underclasses exploded in riots, tore open the prision, burned the gallows, threw rocks at the Viceroy’s palace, were masters of the city. But none of them knew what to do. Finally someone roared: “To the taverns!” They rioted drunkenly all day until a priest came out of the Cathedral with the sacrament and they fell on their knees. “Go home!” roared the good Father. Next day the agitators hung from gibbets in the plaza.

Slave revolts, peasant rebellions, urban riots, naval mutinies, racial outbreaks, worker insurrections, regional secessions, municipal insurgencies continually tore holes in the social fabric of every civilization in history. These explosions were unexpected, sudden and short. The result? Continuation of the merciless exploitation.

Well, that’s life! Life means exploitation of the weak by the strong. Nietzsche explains it like this: “Exploitation does not belong to a depraved or imperfect primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function. . .it is the fundamental fact of all history.”

Stamping on the poor is the normal situation in society and the class struggle is merely a defense of the underclasses against ruthless exploitation, it is a cry for the right to live. When the ruling classes go beyond the tolerable and massacre protestors or suck up so much profit that the people starve, then all hell breaks loose: riots, mutinies, tumults, insurrections.

In the second half of the nineteenth century revolutionary socialist parties appeared in Europe and frightened the conservative classes. So conservative leaders like cunning Disraeli and stiff-necked Bismarck gave the common people the vote. Labor unions won recognition, socialist parties walked into parliament, social medicine and pensions became law.

Then the Russian Revolution really frightened the ruling classes. The Revolution brought cradle-to-the-grave economic security for the Soviet workers. Therefore, in the West the Weimar Republic , the Scandinavian social democrats, the U.S. New Deal, the French Popular Front beefed up the welfare state in order to keep their workers’ loyalty.

After 1948 the expanding Soviet bloc and the Cold War knocked the West’s rulers into a panic: the USA kept the welfare state and Western Europe put it in all along the line. Cradle-to-the-grave economic security increased in Germany and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s although workers’ wages were so low that the stores were empty—for them! But they were empty in the East too. Full employment in the East, unemployment compensation in the West: the social state flourished for three decades.

By the 1980s Western European economic growth allowed its workers to go shopping, while the eastern economies stagnated. The West was winning the Cold War and the ruling classes in the USA and England were no longer afraid: they began taking down the welfare state. They hid the money for taxes needed to finance it in the Caiman Islands , in the labyrinth of the new electronic money, or escaped through widening loopholes in the laws. After 1989 German and French rulers followed them in the neoliberal offensive to push working people back into the cellars of history.

To justify the neoliberal offensive, Western economists fired a burst of sparkling arguments at public opinion. But the secret inspiration of the offensive was the collapse of cradle-to-the-grave economic security in the East and the emergence of the United States military as without rivals. Why make concessions to the underclasses when for them “there is no alternative”?

The twentieth century (1917-1989) was a parenthesis in world history created by the Russian Revolution. The parenthesis has closed and we are back to normal. The transnational elites will not stop until they have pushed the laboring classes of the developed countries down to the subsistence level where Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans usually live. And this brings us back to our first thesis: rebellions are always provoked by the ruling classes.

By the middle of the twenty-first century we will have seen a number of social explosions but what form they will take is hidden in the mists of the future. Deepening ecological catastrophe, the coming collapse of the U.S. economy, and the end of world economic prosperity—all this coupled with the pitiless offensive of the rich will bring a social violence that makes the twentieth century seem a mere dress rehearsal for the big tragedy. Will the revolutions take a fascist turn as in the 1930s in Europe and the 1970s in Latin America ? Or will they open paths toward liberationist transformations? Only the Weltgeist knows. But one thing is clear: those anarchists who hope to change the world through non-violent tactics are in for a shock. Their tactics are right at this time, but can we project them into the future on principle? Throughout history the ruling classes have rarely conceded anything to the underclasses without a violent push—such as the Russian Revolution!

THESIS 2: The social protests and popular explosions repeatedly occurring in every civilization in world history never resulted in a change in the political or economic institutions. Unless . . . .

THESIS 3: Popular explosions better the living conditions of the underclasses only when led by an elite that knows what to do.

For millennia the downtrodden classes in fields and workshops agonized under the surface of history, their long night broken only by flashes of rebellion. In modern times Marxists developed the concept of the “revolutionary situation” to study these outbreaks of the people’s wrath in Europe ’s economically advancing societies.

A revolutionary situation is a political crisis combined with a national crisis. T he political crisis is a split in the ruling class such that it cannot go on in the old way. The national crisis is a worsening of the condition of the masses such that they will not go on in the old way. But a revolution occurs only if a subjective condition is met: there must be an elite that can take over the state and direct the transformation of society.

In France during the eighteenth century there were a hundred scattered outbreaks of the people’s wrath that came to nothing. But in 1789 there arrived a political crisis as the ruling class split: the nobility refused to pay taxes to the bankrupt king while the bourgeois fraction of the landowners demanded a constitution. The rulers could not go on in the old political way. There was also a national crisis: 7,000,000 unemployed, the worst winter of the century, super-inhuman oppression of the serfs, hunger stalking the land. The masses would not go on in the old way.

A Jacobin elite led the revolutionary attack on feudalism and the French Revolution convulsed the continent.

In 1914 Pancho Villa rallied the drifters, cowboys, peons, unemployed, miners, prostitutes, rustlers, Indians, sharecroppers and bandits of North Mexico and formed an army out of the rural lumpenproletariat. This natural anarchist planned to give the Mexican poor 50 acres each and a rifle. Dreaming of equality they fought their way toward the dictator in Mexico City with suicide charges, burning haciendas, sacking cities, and smashing the old army. The dictator fled to Paris —glass in hand. In Mexico City unschooled Villa sat down in the presidential chair. What to do? He arose from the chair and went out to chase women while his commanders sacked and raped the rich. When they had eaten the capital bare the lumpen army withdrew to forage. Conservative armed factions destroyed it and the remnants fled north: the bandit general Rodolfo Fierro drowned in a swamp hanging onto saddle bags of gold.

Vilfredo Pareto, the distinguished sociologist who studied dozens of past societies, made this judgment about the action of the masses in history: “the underclasses are incapable of governing: the only thing that has ever resulted from the government of the crowd is a disaster.” And this brings us back to our THESIS 3: Popular explosions better the living conditions of the underclasses only when led by an elite that knows what to do.

L.D. Mallory wrote in the State Department Bulletin that his collaborators should thank God that the Mexican Revolution broke out before the Russian Revolution, which raised Marxism to the level of a world ideology. If the Mexican Revolution had come in 1923, there would have been in existence a Mexican Communist Party. And that, he reasoned, would have meant a wholly different course for Mexico.

In 1917 in Russia the aristocracy split over Rasputin’s political influence and the economy collapsed under the blows of the Germany army: the starving masses rose in spontaneous insurrection. In the revolutionary situation the Bolshevik elite knew what to do.

But the Bolsheviks soon found themselves fighting 122 armies on 11 fronts—the Western intervention. The West destroyed democracy in a Party which needed blind obedience and iron discipline to win the Civil War. Afterwards, capitalist encirclement continued to threaten war. So in 1931 Stalin proclaimed that he would industrialize backward Russia in a decade and he abolished the rule that no communist could earn more than a skilled worker: technocrats working day and night in the industrialization drive must be paid for their sacrifice. The Party quickly turned into a new class exploiting everyone else through high salaries and secret perks. The 1941 war arrived right on schedule and Stalin won it. But communism was dead.

And this brings us to Thesis 4: Throughout history revolutionary elites have turned into ruling classes and always will, if not governed by equalitarian rules—austere and iron-clad. This means that the revolutionary must practice the principle of renunciation:

The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings or inclinations, not even a name. Everything in him is swallowed up by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion--the Revolution.
-- Michael Bakunin, Revolutionary Catechism, 1869

And the revolutionary certainly does not live better than the underclasses. Maybe some of us middle class “radicals” gathered here are really liberal sheep in radical wolves’ clothing, and this thesis will hardly be welcome. But it is the judgment of history.

From a radical standpoint the four theses imply a political philosophy of anarchobolshevism: a revolutionary elite practicing equalitarianism may lead social movements into a Republic of Equals . The theses are aimed against those contemporary anarchist tendencies that reject all violence on principle and all politics on principle . The brilliant protest tactics of these anarchists in the Alternative World movement are accompanied by an ignorance of history.

Anarchobolshevism is a philosophy for the coming decades when the ruling classes have provoked social explosions. Already in industrial powers like Mexico and Brazil inequality soars toward never-before-seen levels, one third of the youth between the ages of 15 and 30 neither work nor study, one billion potential rioters concentrated on the peripheries of Third World cities sharpen their knives. From Sao Paulo to Paris the marginalized promise a social war that will become a devastating conflagration.

When the explosions arrive, someone has to know what to do.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche , New York : Modern Library, 1927, 577-79.

Lenin explains this in The Collapse of the Second International II, 1915 and in Left-Wing Communism, IX, 1920 and comments: “Such are the Marxist views on revolution, views that have been developed many, many times, have been accepted as indisputable by all Marxists.” See his Collected Works, volume 21, pp. 213-214, and volume. 31, pp.84-85, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1964.

You can find a classic description of the class components of Villa’s army in Friedrich Katz, “?Adónde ibamos con Pancho Villa?” in Ismael Colmenares et. al. (recopiladores, Cien Anos de Lucha de Clases en México 1876-1976, tomo 1, Mexico City : Ediciones Quinto Sol, 1990, pp. 283-296.

John Reed, Insurgent Mexico , New York : Appleton and Company, 1914, 145-146.

Vilfredo Pareto, “Introducción”, Les Systemes Socialistes, volume I, Paris, 1902.

L.D. Mallory, “The Land Problem in Latin America,” The Department of State Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 1118, 1960.

“Der Revolutionskatechismus” of Bakunin is reproduced complete in Marx-Engels Werke, volume 18, Berlin : Dietz Verlag, 1964.

As I preach equality, my forefinger jabbing at you, my thumb is pointing back at myself.

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