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Why do Men Revolt? -II
A political view on Crane Brinton's concepts of social
explosion
By Laishram Omorjit
In his world acclaimed book, The Enemy (Jonathan Cape Ltd. 30 Bedford Square, London, 1970), Felix Green, the most famous American opponent of American imperialism of cold war era exposes the original sin of the grand failure of social revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. He said, "when we look carefully, as we have tried to do in this book, at the social conditions in the advanced capitalist countries and at the widespread human misery that the violence and exploitation of imperialism creates, we see that revolution is ripe, over-ripe. And yet the revolutionary moment seems as far away as ever."
The wall has two sides: Crane Brinton's surgical argument regarding the promise of the four revolutions of England, America, France and Russia can be shown as the other side of the revolution wall that Felix Green underestimates in his vision of a new revolutionary world order. "These four revolutions exhibits an increasing scale of promises to 'the common man' - promises as vague as that of complete happiness and as concrete as that of full satisfaction of all material wants, with all sorts of pleasant revenges along the way. Communism is but the present limit of this increasing set of promises."
"It is not for us here to rail or protest, but simply to record. So far, these promises in their extreme form have been fulfilled nowhere. That they are made at all offends the traditional Christian, the humanist, perhaps even the man of common sense. But they are made more vigorously perhaps today in China, in South East Asia, in the Near East, wherever communism is still a young, fresh and active faith."
"It is not enough for us Americans to repeat that the promises are impossible of fulfillment, and ought not to be made. It would be folly for us to tell the world that we Americans can fill these promises, especially since we have not filled them at home. Revolution is not a fever that will yield to such innocent and deceptive remedies. For a time, at least we must accept it as being as incurable as cancer."
The failure of revolutionary movement in the west: Felix Green questions the fundamental reason that hypnotizes modern capitalized consciousness of the Western people by showing the mystique of British colonial Empire, thereby helping Crane Brinton's theory to reach its perfection.
(1) Why do we allow the present state of affairs to continue?
(2) Why do we allow ourselves to remain under the tyranny of a very small minority?
(3) What is it that is holding back the revolutionary moment?
"It is almost as if people are seduced by the immensity and apparent inevitability of the present structure so that the very notion of overthrowing it seems hopelessly visionary and unreal. It is somewhat analogous to the power that Britain was able to exercise over the large population of India. If ever the Indians had realized their power and had combined, the British could have been swept out of India without any difficulty" No Indian Mao-Tse-Tung to tell the Indian people:
"Yet so strong and so carefully nurtured was the 'mystique' of British authority that for more than a century a mere handful of British were able to control and exploit over 400 million subject people. There was no Indian Mao-Tse-Tung to tell the Indian people that the British - whatever their apparent power- were no more than 'paper tiger'. The Indians did not realize where their solution lay - that is, within themselves.
They never realized their own power, were never able to unite - and the British of course did their best to see that they never did - the British colonial rule was able to continue until quite other factors resulted in India's independence.
The Old State of Affairs continues as before:
"Certainly the people in capitalist countries have the physical power to overthrow the existing order. Every major strike proves that a comparatively small section of the industrial working class has the capacity to bring the whole system to a halt. Yet every time, with some trivial upward adjustment in wages, the strike is settled and the old state of affairs continue as before." Why?
We have been accustomed to thinking of the enemy as 'out there' - the tangible forces of exploitation and repression which we can see with our eyes and whose bludgeons we feel on our heads when we attempt to fight it - that we have not realized the extent to which the enemy has conditioned and repressed our minds. We are like the people of India, unaware that the ruling classes are very cleverly dividing our forces and buying our allegiance; unaware of how successfully they have persuaded us that we are really ruling ourselves, that we are 'free'; that they have our interests at heart.
Like the Indians we cannot get it into our heads: "We don't realize how they have conditioned us to think that the very idea of an alternative system is both treasonable and absurd. Like the Indians, we cannot get it into our heads that the tiny minority who exploit us are 'paper tigers'.
"The single greatest reason why the revolutionary movements develop so slowly in Western capitalist countries and why they remain so weak and so fragmented is because our minds have been deformed by the social conditions imposed upon us. This means that the initial battle needs to be fought within ourselves. We have never, the way we feel and think and act, have been created by the very system we now hope to overthrow. As with the Indians, as long as we now consciousness remains a 'colonial consciousness' we will remain helpless. Revolutions in other words can be made only by those who are themselves in a state of revolution."
Know yourself, Know your enemy: According to Felix Green, 'Know yourself, Know your enemy', is the two-sided recipe for revolutionary success. He says, "A revolutionary, therefore is a man who has freed himself from self-defensiveness and is in consequence free to know himself. From the moment that he understands that a transformation is required in his own consciousness as well as in the outer world and begins to act on this knowledge, he engages in the revolutionary struggle. Once he is ready to examine himself without defending or blaming himself, but to know himself, he will no longer be content to play at life; he will demand clarity and unity.
"He will no longer be able to live in conformity either with the hypocrisies of the existing order or with those in his own behavior. The revolutionary above all wants passionately to quit the world of pretence and enter the world of reality and action.
As Camus so eloquently said, the revolutionary affirms life, ... The revolutionary is not concerned with his own, misfortunes, he is not envious, he is not embittered.
(To be concluded next week)
(The writer is a post-graduate degree holder in Political Science from Bombay University).
(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press)
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