Train Tracks
Hope is the mother of fools.
—Polish proverb
Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.
—Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
There are two common ideas as to why revolutions happen. The first, more traditional one is that when people are driven to the wall, when they are on the brink of starvation, when they lose all hope, they revolt. The second theory popularized in the 1950s, and first formalized by James C. Davies in his J-curve hypothesis, was called “the revolution of rising expectations.” It refers to circumstances in which the rise in prosperity, opportunity and freedom gives people hope they can improve life for themselves, their families and their communities, and so they revolt. Two apparently opposing reasons why people start revolutions—classic hopeless immiseration, modern hopeful expectations—except that as far back as the 1800s Alexis de Tocqueville observed that bastions of the French Revolution were in regions where living standards had been improving.
De Tocqueville was a French aristocrat, historian and political scientist who analyzed the 1776 American and 1789 French revolutions, but didn’t comment on the geographical dismemberment of Poland during the same period. Perpetrated by Russia, Prussia and Austria, the three territorial divisions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) ultimately resulted in Poland ceasing to exist as a sovereign state. Which is ironic because the Alexis de Tocqueville Center for Political and Legal Thought was founded in 2007 at the University of Łódź in Poland. The Polish people have had a fraught relationship with both hope and revolution. Not as fatalistic as their Russian slavic counterparts, the Poles are often quite politically pessimistic and yet incredibly rebellious, staging numerous protests and uprisings, from the country’s dismemberment to the present.* Since the Polish right turn under the Law and Justice party after 2016, Poles have taken to the streets against reactionary judicial reforms, restrictions on abortion, and for women’s rights. In turn, ultraconservative far-right elements have countered with protests against the restitution of Jewish property, immigration, and COVID-19 business lockdowns.
You might say we Poles are simply revolting.
Jacek Malczewski, Vicious Circle, 1897
I’m proud of my rebellious Polish heritage. Yet I’m the first to acknowledge that Polish protests and revolts have frequently been tinged with a persistent antisemitism. Given my recent analysis centering utopianism as a key tool for Leftist reform and revolution, I’m specifically interested in formulating an argument for “revolution without hope.”
William Morris’s book News from Nowhere has been considered a utopia without utopianism, as was Leszek Kołakowski’s essay “The Concept of the Left.” Karl Marx formulated the notion of communism as a classless, stateless, borderless global human community, yet he refused to indulge in elaborating the details of his communist utopia, unlike the utopian socialists before him who were all too eager to blueprint their utopian schemes. Two Leftist survivors of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, debated the need for an “existential revolution.” A concept of the power of the powerlessness that was not “merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, or even merely political,” the idea of an existential revolution was meant to avoid the dictatorship of party politics and external proposals for change, but which instead had an “intrinsic locus” rooted in the particulars and totality of “human existence.” Thus it was utopian, and clearly doomed.
YIPpie turned communist Abbie Hoffman wrote a book called Revolution for the Hell of It! that was said to have earned him a 5-year prison term at the “Chicago 8” conspiracy trial. That sentence was subsequently overturned by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but the flippant notion that we make revolution for the sheer hell of it, on a whim, is a degeneration of the idea that revolution is natural or a right. Or as Maoists opine: “It is right to rebel!” What I’m exploring instead is a realistic utopianism, a revolution without hope or despair and therefore without entitlement or expectations.
Hope and its twin, despair, are to be avoided. Both involve expectations of the future, either desire or distress, that run counter to the hear-and-now of the revolutionary moment. Of course, realizing a revolution involves tactics and strategy—planning in other words. But the revolutionary act is the ultimate zen moment when the catchphrase “be here now” reigns supreme. The lead-up to revolution invokes organization and Lenin, but the revolution itself summons spontaneity and Luxemburg. This also means not dwelling on the past—on past slights, injuries and grievances—nor seeking to avenge, revenge or retaliate for past wrongs. Misery and pleasure tend to be immediate feelings exacerbated by memories of the past and expectations for the future. Attempting to live in the here-and-now does not eliminate either misery or pleasure. So we are still faced with what exactly causes revolutions and on what to base a revolutionary response, whether misery or pleasure.
Chemnitz Karl Marx Monument
I tend to side with pleasure and the famous misquotation of Emma Goldman’s that “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Goldman never said those words, but rather lived them. I also tend not to believe that deliberately maximizing popular immiseration, social chaos, capitalist oppression and state repression will hasten the coming of any revolution, which is accelerationism. I have some sympathy for the strategy of indirectly pushing the capitalist mode of production to its limits in order to bring about a revolution. Tangential accelerationism, if you will.
For Marx, an economic mode of production was comprised of interacting forces of production and relations of production. Forces of production encompass means of labor (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, etc) and human labor power. Relations of production entail voluntary and involuntary social relationships formed during the process of production as well as the official and de facto power relationships that both undergird and are the result of the division of profits from society’s total labor. If either one outstrips the other, there is a heightened potential for revolution. Or as Marx argued: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” (“Preface to the Critique of Political Economy,” 1859)
When aggressive working class struggles push for more free time and more money for less actual work, as with the old IWW campaign for an eight hour work day and forty hour work week or the modern demand for eight hours of pay for four hours of work, this forces the capitalist mode of production toward its limits. Class struggle heightens the contradictions in the relations of production which, in turn, speeds up the development of the forces of production. The working class has no control over what technologies or infrastructures are introduced by capitalism, but it does have some control over how organized and militant the labor movement is in fighting capitalism. Creating a combative labor movement and a revolutionary working class has the advantage of not only indirectly hastening development of the forces of production but of directly confronting and potentially overthrowing the capitalist ruling class.
A win-win.
The caveat? Fully developing the forces of production means eliminating economic scarcity. If workers achieve a successful revolution before this happens, what results is a generalized sharing out of scarcity. A socialism of scarcity instead of abundance.
Paul Klee, Angelus novus/Walter Benjamin
*(Polish unrest: 1789, 1806, 1830-31, 1846, 1848-49, 1863-64, 1905-07, 1918, 1923, 1937, 1944-47, 1956, 1968, 1970-71, 1976, 1980-81, 1982, 1988, 1998, 2015, 2016-17)
SOURCES:
Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville
News from Nowhere by William Morris
Collected Works of Karl Marx (50 volumes) International Publishers
The Arcades Project and Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
“The Concept of the Left” by Leszek Kołakowski
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski
Revolution for the Hell of It! by Abbie Hoffman
When Men Revolt and Why – A Reader in Political Violence and Revolution edited by James C. Davies
Oxford University Press series on revolutions and rebellions
God’s Playground: A History of Poland (2 volumes) by Norman Davies
Buy my book, 1% Free, here.
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