Revolution
Revolution n. In the political sense, a word which inspires dread in those who even passively support the status quo in a society, ie, most people – the rich through fear of dispossession, the poor through fear of violence and instability.
In fact, in history, political revolutions have arguably saved the poor from violence more than they have subjected them to it. Such examples would be where revolution has shortened or ended war, by overthrowing the rulers making the war – as in the case of Russia in 1917, where the mass slaughter on the eastern front was brought to a halt by the action of the soldiers themselves and their fellow workers at home. Disobedience and mutiny, often signs of approaching revolution, have thus saved lives.
However, revolution in the popular imagination (mostly drawn from the violence and turbulence of the minority revolutions of France and Russia, which freed the capitalist minority class from the restraints of feudal and semi-feudal monarchy) is not what socialists mean by the word revolution. Indeed, had these minority revolutions not been symptomatic of revolution in the economic basis of society, but merely political, socialists would not even call them revolutions at all.
Hence, whereas the French and the Russian, and the English, revolutions were revolutions, the so-called American Revolution was not, but merely a war for the independence of the colonial capitalists from the British capitalist state. It did not change the basis of colonial society, which remained capitalism. This is also true of national uprisings miscalled ‘revolutions’ which are simply the result of capitalist quarrels between national factions or between colonial and national factions for the control of capitalist loot.
All revolutions hitherto have been minority class revolutions, and hence marked by violence, as former classes of society have been expunged and others become ascendant. The revolutionary minority in all cases have made use of the majority in order to seize power, but the majority has yet to make its revolution.
With only two classes remaining in society, the 1 percent capitalist class who exclusively own the means of production and the 99 percent working class who are thus compelled to work for them, the socialist revolution will be the revolution of the majority of humankind. Since this can only happen when the majority are conscious and desire it, violence will not be necessary, unlike the minority class revolutions of the past.
The means for peaceful majority revolution have long existed in parliamentary bourgeois democracies, namely the ballot.
This political act will be the formality that will liberate the transformation, already long since waiting in the wings, of the economic basis of society in the interest of all – hence, real revolution.
A.W.