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Authors: Chris Hedges
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nonviolent campaign may bring greater and more sustained pressure to bear on the target, whereas the public may eschew violent insurgencies because of physical or moral barriers. 30
Although it appears, as I write this book, that political ferment is dormant in the United States, this is incorrect. Revolutions, when they erupt, are to the wider public sudden and unexpected, because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is, as Berkman observed, invisible. Revolutions expose their face only after revolutionary ferment has largely been completed.
Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to begin by discrediting the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and constructing alternative ideas and language. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, once the old vocabulary no longer holds currency, the power elite is finished, although outwardly it may appear that nothing has changed. But this process is difficult to see and often takes years. Those in power are completely unaware that the shift is taking place. They will speak, like all dying elites, in the old language until they finally become figures of ridicule.
In the United States today, no person or movement can program the ignition of this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, its abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment and the massive debt peonage 31 that is crippling millions of Americans, and the widespread despair and loss of hope, along with the collapse of institutions meant to carry piecemeal and incremental reforms, including the courts, make blowback inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.” 32
If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants, and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls “terrorism.” Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, swiftly descends into nihilism, terrorism, and chaos. It consumes itself. This is the minefield we will have to cross.
“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions,” wrote Thomas Schelling.
They can deny him most of what he wants—they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration. And he can deny them just about everything they want—he can deny it by using force at his command.… They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves.… It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins. 33
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case, neoclassical economics and globalization—that sustain their structures of power. The process of understanding this can take years, but once people do understand it, “the slow, quiet,
Although it appears, as I write this book, that political ferment is dormant in the United States, this is incorrect. Revolutions, when they erupt, are to the wider public sudden and unexpected, because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is, as Berkman observed, invisible. Revolutions expose their face only after revolutionary ferment has largely been completed.
Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to begin by discrediting the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and constructing alternative ideas and language. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, once the old vocabulary no longer holds currency, the power elite is finished, although outwardly it may appear that nothing has changed. But this process is difficult to see and often takes years. Those in power are completely unaware that the shift is taking place. They will speak, like all dying elites, in the old language until they finally become figures of ridicule.
In the United States today, no person or movement can program the ignition of this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, its abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment and the massive debt peonage 31 that is crippling millions of Americans, and the widespread despair and loss of hope, along with the collapse of institutions meant to carry piecemeal and incremental reforms, including the courts, make blowback inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.” 32
If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants, and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls “terrorism.” Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, swiftly descends into nihilism, terrorism, and chaos. It consumes itself. This is the minefield we will have to cross.
“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions,” wrote Thomas Schelling.
They can deny him most of what he wants—they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration. And he can deny them just about everything they want—he can deny it by using force at his command.… They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves.… It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins. 33
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case, neoclassical economics and globalization—that sustain their structures of power. The process of understanding this can take years, but once people do understand it, “the slow, quiet,
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