A Note on the Internal Structure of Revolutions
1 March 2010
Monday
Eugène Delacroix's 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' is often employed as a symbol of revolution.
The political history of the Enlightenment was punctuated by the American and French Revolutions, and since that time to the present day revolution has played a central role in political thought and practice. But as revolutions have become more common, they have also engendered a kind of political fatigue, not least because the iteration of revolution seems to have weakened the efficacy of subsequent revolutions. A revolution is declared today and everyone yawns. No one expects much to come of it. We could even say that there has been a revolution in revolutions to the effect that they are no longer revolutionary.
Connected to the political fatigue with revolution, but distinct from it in subtle ways, is the widespread disillusionment with the consequences of revolutions. There seems to be a growing gap between the promises and ideals of revolutionary movements and the policies and practices instituted by revolutionary movements when they come into power. Some of this must be understood as the result of the inevitable tension between revolutionary activity and establishment and cultivation of institutions. It is no doubt difficult for the successful revolutionary to suddenly shift gears upon the triumph of his cause and make the switch from seeking the destruction of institutions to attempting the construction of institutions.
The tension between making revolutions and making institutions is one interesting structure that emerges from revolutionary activity. But today I want to merely suggest (without systematically developing the idea) another tension within revolution, and a tension that is intrinsic to revolution itself and therefore a tension that is independent of and prior to that of institution-building upon revolutionary models.
A familiar feature of Marxist thought, and one to which I have had occasion to refer in many posts to this forum, is the distinction between economic infrastructure and ideological superstructure. Some Marxists hold a thoroughly reductionist view, such that everything in the ideological superstructure of a society ultimately has its source in the economic infrastructure. But this literalistic and reductionist account of the distinction is more limiting than helpful. A more subtle and articulated account of the distinction does not systematically trace one to the other, but recognizes that ideological superstructure and economic infrastructure exist in parallel and mutually influence each other.
It occurred to me a few days ago that within the structure of a revolution one can recognize distinct forces that correspond to ideological superstructure and economic infrastructure. In other words, revolution itself has an intellectual component and a component constituted by how things actually get done, and these two parallel tracks of revolutionary movements are distinct even while mutually influencing each other.
As is appropriate to a movement that dedicates itself to rapid and fundamental change in social structures, the dynamic of ideological superstructure and economic infrastructure of revolution seems much greater than the two forces in established societies. Revolutionary cadres are often credited with fomenting revolution, directly inspiring the masses who engage in direct action such as killing, looting, and reprisals. But the intellectual elements that seem to foment and direct revolutionary action are often powerless to control the revolution once it starts, and such cadres can retain their credibility only by confirming the facts on the ground, essentially giving rationalizations and justifications for what has already been done in the name of a revolution.
It may help us to better understand the phenomenon of revolution if we analyze revolutionary activity into ideological superstructure and economic infrastructure. It is a suggestive analysis that could also be applied to non-political revolutions, as in our recent discussion of scientific revolutions (in Philosophy of Science in the FT). In the case of scientific revolutions the infrastructure isn’t economic, but the pursuit of this idea can help us to formulate a more objective conception of the distinction which will then in turn be more generally applicable. Philosophically what we want is ultimately an absolutely general theory of revolution that can be applied to explicate and clarify any revolutionary activity whatever.
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