In the final installment of their three-part examination of revolutionary waves, Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen consider their practical implications for activists and social movements.
At one level, the practical implications of this series of articles amount to little more than a collection of fairly common observations ā which is perhaps grounds for hope if they are also accurate. One reason for this is of course that the Marxist tradition ā that of the founders, of the generation formed in the movements around 1919, of the Resistance generation and of that of 1968 ā has been formed in dialogue with these waves, both intellectually and politically. This alone would justify keeping the Marxist tradition alive, and if necessary repeating what should be obvious in the face of āsophisticatedā arguments which miss the essential for the sake of seeming clever.
Not to give up hope. In particular, not to spend so much time staring at the suffering caused by neoliberalism and analysing its deep structure as to become convinced of its inevitable or unstoppable character ā and not to focus on writing and speaking in ways that induce this kind of despair in others who might otherwise be inclined to take action.
There is of course a converse risk, best expressed by the phrase āone more push, comrades!ā and consisting in the assumption that the time is always ripe. However, in the midst of revolutionary waves it can be genuinely unclear to participants what is, and is not possible ā as shown by the large number of revolutionary situations during such waves which do not have revolutionary outcomes in any sense. If we are in a revolutionary wave, then, we should try to stretch our sense of possibility at least somewhat. This is probably particularly true today given that in the global North the risks are more likely to be measured in terms of burnout rather than of massacres.
It is particularly important to stress that revolutions are not simple win/lose situations. This is in part why 1848 and 1968 are often mentioned as revolutionary situations that were ālostā in the immediate sense but nevertheless had substantial effects in terms of social change. Something similar can be said of many, if not most, revolutions on some level. Another way of putting this is that even where a regime was able to recover temporarily, in the longer term a new set of hegemonic arrangements, incorporating some movement demands and actors, has been necessary. This, of course, nuances the calculations about whether and when it is worth taking risks. At one level, the question is the extent to which a revolution can permanently disrupt a given set of power relationships; at another level, of course, the question is whichactors are offered concessions, and to what extent we rate formal democracy, welfare, national independence etc. as valuable in themselves.
For fairly obvious reasons, internationalism in all its various forms is an important way of learning from struggles elsewhere and not having to do all our learning in the first person, with all the costs that entails. At times it can also open the possibility of effective solidarity in one or another direction and of enabling a broader part of the population to start from at least some of the gains of movements elsewhere.
If an immediate revolutionary opportunity is not visible in our own context, it nevertheless makes sense in a revolutionary wave to do whatever we can to build popular capacity for revolution: in the sense of disseminating ideas, developing forms of communication and education, and building links of solidarity and cooperation, in particular across movements and communities. History has not been kind to the idea of first creating an organisation and then using it in a revolutionary context: at times (1914) such organisations have simply balked at taking action; at others (insurrectionary parties) they have succeeded in installing deeply authoritarian regimes; more commonly they have simply been overtaken by events. In this sense, it makes more sense to put time and energy into movement and less centralised forms of organisation; as we argue in We Make Our Own History, the desperate need of many on the left to find a Party to believe in, at home or abroad, is a real weakness, a search for Prince Charming rather than for a Modern Prince. Put another way, the measure of Marxism is not whether one can identify with a party; it is whether a party is an adequate expression of the best in social movement struggles.
More generally, fetishising any single mode of organising or tactic is a risky strategy ā both because parties, unions, networks, community organising, radical media, general assemblies, occupations and everything else change their practical meaning over time, but also because the key fight may not at any given point in time be where we would like it to be, or not only there. Of course it remains important to reflect on organisation or tactics, and to make clear choices when needed; the challenge is how to subordinate those reflections and choices to broader discussions of strategic principles around how power is organised in society. Put another way, a concept like ādual-power situationā is in the long run more useful than an emphasis on a particular type of organising as the only way forward. Defining a whole tradition through the prism of loyalty to a particular site and mode of action is to invite a giant clout on the head from history. It is of course hard to clarify our principles in a broader sense that still retains practical meaning ā something which is perhaps a general problem of human action and certainly a frequent one in social movement organisations. (Perhaps the single most important principle is precisely the legitimacy ā and possibility, under some circumstances ā of revolutionary action. It is a real challenge to recognise this and hence become able to think about power and strategy in revolutionary situations seriously but also, as Wolf Biermann puts it, without āhardeningā into a narrowly militarised or paranoid mode of thought and action.)
A more indirect implication is the need for an attentive eye to the weaknesses of likely opponents: the ācracksā, as John Holloway puts it, which may enable us to win. Here, too, fetishisation is a risk: university libraries are full of now-unread texts which discern the internal contradictions in this or that aspect of economics, state legitimacy, popular culture, international relations and so on without identifying these as aspects of a broader totality, or as historical products subject to change. The crucial level in practice is that of the organisation of hegemony ā what Gramsci calls ātheoretical and directive leadershipā ā and it is here in particular that we should look for opportunities to disaggregate currently-hegemonic alliances and to detach individual actors to our side as allies, or at least as neutrals.
These should be fairly obvious, but there is no harm in stating them once in a while: since revolutionary situations arise so rarely in any individual lifetime, the risks and potential costs are high and the scope for learning in action are limited, the more that can be done by way of articulating what we think are useful lessons ā and exposing our own limited understanding to the critique of others ā the better.
