revolutionary hopes, naivetes

Life is plenty full of personal frustration … and people lash out.

History documents times of social discontent when groups of people together rose up in protest or rebellion. It usually was just a collective spasmodic lashing out.

Theorized revolutionary praxis may be a fairly modern phenomenon.

There has been a tendency for it to be imbued with naive hopes and expectations. A person in 1848 reading The Communist Manifesto would have gotten the impression that the capitalist system was nearing a crisis point and its revolutionary overthrow was all but imminent. Likewise, many people had excessive hopes for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

The 1970 idea of cultural rather than political revolution was more sophisticated. Yet it was still naive in terms of timeframe.

I’ve often quoted the beginning of the book:

There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is based on a new consciousness that promises a higher reason, a more human-scale community, and a liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a renewed relationship to the Self, to society, to nature, and to the land.

. . . here is the ending of the book:

We have all known the loneliness, the emptiness, the plastic isolation of contemporary America. The extraordinary thing about the new consciousness is that it has emerged out of the wasteland of the Corporate State, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement. Whatever it touches it beautifies and renews, and every barrier falls before it. We have been dulled and blinded to the injustice and ugliness of the system’s intractable poverty and inequality. We have been persuaded that giant institutions and organizations are necessary. But the new consciousness sees that they are absurd, as if the absurdity had always been obvious and apparent. We have all been induced to give up our dreams in favor of the escalator of success, but it says that the escalator is a sham and the dream is real. And these things, buried, hidden, and disowned in so many of us, are shouted out loud, believed in, affirmed by a growing multitude of young people who seem too healthy, intelligent and alive to be wholly insane, who appear, in their collective strength, capable of making it happen. For one almost convinced that it was necessary to accept ugliness and evil, that it was necessary to be a miser of dreams, it is an invitation to cry or laugh. For one who thought the world was irretrievably encased in metal and plastic and sterile stone, it seems a veritable Greening of America.

The revolutionary heart was in the right place, but the head was still in the clouds. In 1848 and 1917 and 1970 … deeper formulation of the problems and the solutions was needed.