On imagining revolution

[Carrol Cox]

My point of departure is an exchange on another list, but both of the authors
are on lbo.



Doug Henwood wrote:

> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >I hope this isn't an offensive example, but Doug believes that a
> >revolution in the U.S. is pretty definitely unimaginable for some time.
> >Isn't that correct, Doug ?
>
> That's correct, Charles. No offense taken. And as I say whenever this
> subject comes up, if someone can evoke a compelling scenario of revolution
> in the U.S., I'll happily shed my skepticism and sign on. I'm not happy
> about the absence of revolutionary potential in the U.S.

Doug has also urged the principle that it was useful to think out what
questions to think out what questions to give your answers. And I would like
both to ask Doug to think out what questios to give this answer and to propose
some myself.

Actually, it's a bit difficult to find a good question for this answer. In
fact, while I had two or three questions in  mind that Doug might be
responding to, I ended up being unable to formulate any of them. So I'll have
to ask my own, which give (I think) a slightly different twist).

My first question is, "Why should anyone want to imagine a 'compelling
scenario' for a revolution in the U.S.?" That won't quite do, because I can't
understand why anyone *would* want to imagine such a thing.

Try another possibility: "Why should we assume the possibility of a revolution
in the U.S.?" By going round about a bit, I think there may be some possible
reasons for asking this question.

Over on L-I I recently had an argument with a young man who was (I thought) to
"idealist" in the popular rather than technical sense (though in this case the
two might be related). He thought that it was a good enough reason to
establish communism to free human beings from exploitation and slavery. My
response was that even on the most optimistic premises neither he nor I nor
probably any of our great-grandchildren were going to live in that social
order free from exploitation and slavery, and that we had better find some
better reasons in the present for the messy business of revolution. But, I
pointed out, there was still a reason for wanting to grasp the princples of a
communist society, not teleological but histsorical. To understand the
present, we need to understand it historically, to see the present as history,
and hence we needed to look back on it from the perspective of the future. And
for that reason limited exploration of the necessity of communism was of great
value.

And so that is why we want to imagine a revolution in the U.S. -- not (to
begin with) to make a revolution or even to plan one, let alone argue for the
need of one. (I take it the need for one is for any marxist self-evident --
Marx discovered that before he discovered any other part of what came to be
marxism; that is what it *means* to be a marxist.) It is because the *present*
only makes sense from the perspective of workers' revolution -- which doesn't,
of course, mean that such a revolution will occur, for to assume that would be
to assume some god who could guarantee that all would turn out well.

So I guess *my* question is "How can we understand the world we live in?" And
in answering that I am forced to hypothesize the possibility of revolution in
the U.S. All other hypotheses lead to making the world we live in
unintelligible -- wholly chaotic.

Carrol