The Beginning of the Middle

The global revolution enters adolescence

It has been ten years since the Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri lit a QwikTrip on West Florrisant Avenue on fire in the memory of Mike Brown and thereby set the whole country alight. It is fourteen years since Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were overthrown, an upheaval that flowed across borders from Tunisia to Egypt and grew in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain. That uprising jumped the Mediterranean that summer, to Spain and Greece, where folks camping out in squares demanded a reckoning with real democracy, which crossed the channel as fierce anti-police riots overtook England, then the Atlantic in Occupy Wall Street. It is sixteen years since the uprisings in Athens and Oakland, as populations reeling from economic crisis and austerity regimes rose up against the state in the first inkling of this wave of global resistance.

In the meantime we have seen more uprisings, revolutions and counterrevolutions than it is easy to list. The rise of ISIS and the bloody drowning of revolution in the Syrian Civil War, and the emergence of Rojava's radical experiment in democratic confederalism from the ashes of that conflict, is perhaps the most acute and concentrated picture of this era's hopes and horrors. But the list is long: from the top of my head there's the uprising in Turkey against gentrification in Gezi Park; the Brazilian revolts against rising public transit fares; riotous rebellion in Nigeria France and Mexico against proposed fuel subsidy changes; the Gazan Great March of Return; mass environmental protection campaigns across Western Europe; indigenous led struggles for decolonization and water protection across Turtle Island; student uprisings in Canada, UK, US and Chile; anti-government and anti-repression struggles in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Ukraine; feminist uprisings in Iran and Mexico, and the continued Black revolution from Haiti to France to Sudan to the USA.

But for all this upheaval, there has been little liberation. Indeed, fascism and counterrevolution seem to have made the most of these unsettled times, as liberals and centrists largely managed to hold off the waves of uprising and concede little, only to lose elections and public ground to far right parties and demagogues. Was all this struggle for naught?

Some have argued that these inchoate uprisings require a redirection, a focus into radical political parties and more formal organizations. They argue that the problem was the lack of hierarchy, discipline, organizing and leadership. The undeniably shared factor of "disorganization", is that why these uprisings, despite the wide range of different issues, political stances and constituencies, overwhelmingly failed? Was the lack of formal mass political organizations why the movements that did manage to succeed and overthrow their governments were outmaneuvered by reactionary political actors, as in Egypt and Tunisia?

This, I think, is a real and valuable question to ask, but how it is asked defines 'revolution' and 'victory' in a way that embeds within it an entire worldview. The fact that this worldview is widespread and commonplace within most leftist ideologies means that we may not even recognize how many claims shape the question and therefore limit its possible answers.

When people talk about revolution, they usually think of the storming of palaces, the abdications of governments, declarations, constitutions and new organizational forms on a national scale. This indelible link between revolution and the government of the nation-state, from the overthrow of the European monarchies beginning in the 18th century to the anti-colonial uprisings of the 20th, has lead to a reduction of the broad process of revolutionary change into the days, weeks or months involved in seizing power.

The point is not to make a strawman definition though. People who refer to e.g "The Russian Revolution" as events in St. Petersburg in October 1917, do so as a shorthand: they know that the revolution extends well beyond those weeks. Even those who, against three centuries of evidence, continue to believe that leftists seizing the reins of state is an absolutely necessary step in revolutionary social change, recognize that the revolution continues beyond the moment the ancien régime falls. They just believe from that point onward the state and the revolutionary people work hand in hand, that the state is now helping expand the successful revolution – a belief which almost always leads to the conclusion that anyone resisting the now-revolutionary state must, as a matter of course, be a counterrevolutionary, and is to be dealt with accordingly.

The long, repetitive, ignominious history of victorious leftists murdering their former comrades, destroying opposing parties and undermining unions, shutting down free expression and bringing forth terror and police, has produced a wide range of liberatory thought that positions itself against revolution. This mode concedes that "revolution" is contained to the violent moment of state capture, but comes to the opposite conclusion: that revolution is therefore undesirable. This rejection of revolution is shared by two otherwise quite incompatible forces: on the one hand, left liberals and social democrats, who see revolution as too risky and violent a proposition and believe a path to transformation can be found through standard political procedures, and by some illegalist, nihilist and social anarchists/anti-state communists who desire total transformation of society but see mass interaction with the political structures of the state, even in violent opposition, as at best an opportunity for action and at worst a political trap.

Whichever position they take on revolution, both the social democrats and the revolutionary statists agree that little of substance was achieved in the fifteen years of struggle we've just lived through. They differ on how to solve this impasse. The one proposes socialist candidates for office, or advocates marching through the institutions and non-profits, while the latter proposes joining an acronymed revolutionary party and/or aligning yourself with 'anti-imperial' state forces (this somehow always means Assad, not Rojava) who are more likely to succeed in achieving "real power".

All of these arguments, however, look at the movements of the last decade and a half and see "failure" on terms that the movements themselves often ignored or transcended. They define failure against "successful" revolutions that take state power, and they treat it as reactionary to name the historical fact that, across the last three centuries, this kind of "success" has tended to produce history's most effective counterrevolutionaries. The American revolution produced a global regime of 'liberty' built on slavery; the French revolution gave us Napoleon and the bloodiest global war since Genghis Khan; the legacy of the Bolsheviks and the CCP has left the proletariat across one third of the globe believing that revolution and communism are the worst imaginable outcome. The USSR eventually defeated Hitler and Nazi Germany, but only after ensuring Franco's victory in Spain and sharing the "spoils" of Poland with Hitler, condemning millions to death in the camps: it was the Soviet people, not the state, that stopped fascism. Some of the anti-colonial revolutions fared better, but too many produced their corrupt dictators and venal neocolonial administrators.

But they will correctly point to the equally undeniable historical fact that those revolutions produced some of the most important and hopeful moments of possibility: the overthrow of the Tsar shook the world imperial system to its core; the French revolution led directly to the Haitian revolution; the American Revolution's discourses of liberty and independence (stolen though they were from the Iroquois Confederation) would eventually give moral power to revolutionaries the world over, including to the Black rebels who would transform the entire world through decades of revolution, civil war and reconstruction; anti-colonial struggles gave power, legitimacy and sometimes arms and instruction to one another across the 20th century and inspired radical action within the metropole; the Soviet Union was ultimately overthrown by its people; rebellion in China defeated the fascist Japanese occupation and the genocidal KMT.

If we hold this contradiction, however, if we don't excuse or pretend away the horror in the name of holding on to a legacy of victory, we might recognize that what was powerful about the revolutionary tradition was found in its capacity to inspire and spread the fire, tactics and dreams of revolt rather than in the victorious capture and deployment of state power. If we allow our definition of victory to become something as petty and commonplace as state capture or even just governance transformation, the centuries-long survival and resistance of indigenous peoples, the proliferation of maroon communities, prison rebellions and uprisings, queer and feminist struggle, and even more "proper" failed proletarian struggles like the Paris Commune or the Shanghai Commune or the German Revolution of 1918 can only be seen as mistakes to be corrected, movements that should be studied largely to learn "why they failed".

These 'failed' struggles, because their failure lies in the fact that they didn't consolidate a new state power, tend to feature fewer betrayals, produce fewer world historical counterrevolutionaries like Napoleon, Stalin or Mao, and leave fewer residually dangerous organizations like the CCP or the Comintern that, in the name of proper revolutionary strategy, strangled innumerable struggles in their cribs. People tend not to relativize genocide in the name of the Underground Railroad or the Trewlaney Maroons, but start talking about the historical crimes of the Bolsheviks and even principled comrades will bring up the "necessity" of the terror in the face of global enemies.

I believe that climate catastrophe means we are living through the collapse of the current capitalist world system. We would be living through that collapse even if the uprisings and revolts of the last fifteen years had been less widespread, less massive or even less "successful". But while the unsustainability of global hegemony as currently constituted is undeniable, it does not produce revolutionary struggle mechanically like a doctor's hammer striking a knee. Imperial collapse can come from or lead to war, climate change, invasion, famine, economic devastation. Much of the world could divide into high-tech capitalist city-states surrounded by vast periphery and sacrifice zones dominated by warlordism and neo-plantation agriculture, or be 'purified' by global war and fascist genocide. These processes are, of course, already ongoing.

The uprisings and revolutions are the countervailing force not against the collapse itself but against the worst of these outcomes. Taken on their own terms, the movements' lack of leadership or formal organization, their frequent lack of concrete demands, the tactics and the worlds built went far beyond appeals to state and system, and the movements converged on similar points of tactical unity around living, deciding and sharing in common.

This can be interpreted as a failure to achieve sufficient political organization and consciousness to take power, to truly win the struggle. There is ample evidence for that, especially since it's basically a tautological argument (the movements that are politicized and organized enough are the ones that take power and achieve their aims, the movements that don't, aren't). But over the last fifteen years, dozens of projects have emerged that attempt to answer a question or solve a problem of the uprisings that don't require unifying the entire movement behind a certain political program or party. People are thinking now toward the next uprising, acting and building in a way that would give them more options and capacity should an uprising occur, that gives material pathways toward solidarity across borders and time, but also that allows them and their friends, neighbors and communities to live better in the present.

The uprisings did not create many revolutionary governments, but whether you believe that's a strength or a weakness, they have produced a generation of people who believe in their own capacity to change the world, and who have adopted strategies, political goals and methods of building community and strength in resistance. They have produced movements all over the world. And the counterrevolutionaries put forward by capital and its boot-lickers to put down those movements have proved unable to offer an opposing vision, instead they have promised a small group of aging white folks that they can live out the rest of their squalid lives without having to think about other people, a pathetic and miserable promise that only the most selfish can truly embrace.

Human lives are short, we do not live on the scale of historical time. We need to survive, not just to survive but to live well now, not in some future revolutionary space. But if revolution isn't simply the overthrowing of the government, if revolution isn't defined by the status of the political situation in one country, if we don't need the messianic moment to deliver us, then there is no clean "after the revolution" to wait for. We are either in it already or we never will be. And our pleasure, our joy, our capacity, our health and our thriving matter not so that we can sacrifice them for some struggle to come but because they are, indelibly, part of the struggle, both its means and some of its core desired results.

I'm an optimist. I believe that we're in the beginning of the middle of such a revolutionary process, that with Al-Aqsa flood and the Palestinian resistance, with the Palestine solidarity movement, the uprisings in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Kenya and Malaysia, we are entering another global wave of uprisings. If this revolution, which lasts decades in fits and starts, which has no clean beginning and end, if this revolution fails it will have been like every other revolution since 1492, when Europe began to consume and destroy the world. Failed: at least for now. But in that long long span there have been countless beautiful, happy and revolutionary lives, ones whose living can teach us much more than the actions of parliaments and generals.

Many of us will not survive through this collapse. We've lost too many already. We do not lack for urgency, and anyway, there is nothing to wait for. Revolution is not promised: we know this because it hasn't happened yet. Change is inevitable, collapse quite likely, but if we don't make liberation real, if we don't change our lives, communities and societies in the ways we are able, if we don't support one another, fight together, for one another and for another world, then there is one sure thing, one absolute promise and guarantee: we will not have a revolution. And as long as my heart continues to beat in my chest, that's a promise I will never accept.