Global Financial Crisis 2008 – Article No 18
by Humphrey McQueen
A Revolution is not a Dinner Party
The crisis in the accumulation of capital is reviving hopes that real existing capitalism is not the outer limit of human creativity. In the years of “free-market” triumphalism, socialists either shut up about revolution or flaunted “Revolution” to assert their purity over rival grouplets. Neither extreme is appropriate now.
The cusp of catastrophe is no time for chest-beating. Sounding further to Left than everybody else in the phone box is easy. Tossing the word “Revolution” around is easier still. The Rudd-Gillard prattles about an “Education revolution”, and Revlon brands its brightest apocalipstick “Revolution”.
Instead, a revolutionary response to the crisis begins from understanding the state as an instrument of class rule, that is, as class violence raised to an obligatory norm. That is why socialism becomes possible only after the capitalist state has been smashed. Even were a mass socialist party to take 60% of the vote, the guardians of capital would move to defeat such subversion by whatever it takes.
Almost every revolution in the modern period became possible only after the ruling class had lost its monopoly of violence. The Paris Commune in 1871 rose in the space, physical and political, vacated by the defeated Imperial army; the Bolsheviks were able to seize power because the Czarist regime had armed workers and peasants against the Austro-German-Turkish alliance; in the 1940s, similar opportunities appeared in Yugoslavia and Albania, China, Korea and Indo-China. Many of the volunteers for the International Brigades in Spain had been battle-hardened by capitalist states in inter-imperialist wars, which is why sending “brigades” to Venezuela is risible. Who on the local Left has so much as heard a shot fired in anger? Any who have are refugees from being shot at.
Among the rulers, one lesson from those wars and revolutions has been to de-laborise their military, keeping conscription as a last resort, going to almost any expense to avoid arming their own populations.
Engels saw that while the workers might form a militia, the bourgeoisie owned the horses. He explained away his fox-hunting as training to lead a proletarian cavalry against counter-revolutionaries. Today, the equivalent of horses are helicopter gunships – and who on the Left has a pilot’s licence?
Hugo Chavez is alive only because a sizeable segment of the armed forces came with him into the revolution. If political power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, why is the opposition in Zimbabwe insisting on the police portfolio?
In Australia, capital has an absolute monopoly over armed force. Hurling onesself against a line of cops is, therefore, a game at which the police can beat us. Talk about revolution as smashing the capitalist state will return to the realms of scientific socialism when the SAS defects to the proletariat, or “revolutionaries” stop betraying our every move on their mobiles and over the internet.
For the moment, the Left has our time cut out exposing the state as a covert dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The prospects of the present crisis leading to an open dictatorship are considered next. Steps towards averting that repression will follow.
Next: Fascism