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Title: The Reaction This Time Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: Sep 5, 2020 Language: en Topics: the state, political repression Source: Retrieved on 2020-09-06 from https://itsgoingdown.org/the-reaction-this-time-understanding-reaction-in-a-global-historical-perspective/
A historic look a waves of reaction to periods of revolt and upheaval
and how this relates to our own current situation.
---
To speak of reaction, I want first to distinguish it from
counterinsurgency. Readers who are less interested in a condensed theory
of counterinsurgency and want to read about the patterns of reaction
leading up to the present moment should skip to the second section.
Counterinsurgency is a constant aspect of life under the State. It
refers to the strategies and activities implemented by government and
its privileged partners (capitalists without public office) to prevent
effective rebellion and maintain control. This can include varying roles
for military, police, courts, political parties, media and cultural
production, organized religion, social reforms, institutionalization,
structural adjustment, impoverishment, disease, drug epidemics,
basically the whole gamut from repression to recuperation to
necro-politics.
If we restrict ourselves to counterinsurgency under the modern State, we
can identify three different modes. Pre-modern counterinsurgency
(roughly, the 17^(th) to sometime in the 19^(th) century) largely
overlaps with what I refer to as “cratoforming” in Worshiping Power: the
violent reengineering of decentralized society/nature into a separated,
alienated society and nature that can be administrated by a centralized,
rational authority. This process happened simultaneously, albeit
divergently, in Europe and the Americas through the destruction of the
commons and commoning, the institution of differentiated regimes of
forced labor (chattel slavery, indentured or penal servitude, wage
slavery, and unwaged domestic servitude), and the imposition of an
atomistic, patriarchal, punitive legal system. In many instances
cratoforming parallels primitive accumulation, though the term
recognizes the paramount role of state intervention in the process and
understands capital accumulation as a rationalized logistics of fueling
expansion, “a way of keeping score,” and a metric for facilitating the
permanent alliance between government and capitalists within the broad
State; in other words, capital accumulation is certainly not the
foundation of the process, being dependent and subsequent to other
elements, and is no more or less “material” than those other elements,
19^(th) century European mythologies notwithstanding.
Modern counterinsurgency, arising in flashes in the 18^(th) century and
systematically in the 19^(th), is fully scientific, though no less
mythological for its efforts. It is largely biologicist and, following
Hobbes, sees alienated or statist society as a body.
Social control in this mode is a strikingly hygienic affair, with
health, assumed to be the natural state of the social organism, being
equated with submission to hierarchical order. And though this paradigm
is based, both mythologically and materially, on alienation and the
polarization of society and nature, the split pair is constantly trying
to reunite, even within the thought and practice of the modernists. A
nod to Enlightenment science’s Christian heritage, nature is still
teleological and ethically biased. As such, the social body, in order to
achieve its intended, natural, healthy state, relies on no end of
prostheses and surgeries, provided for in this case by the police, urban
planning, and the unfolding institutions that would organize healthcare,
education, and criminality/justice in a fully patriarchal, capitalist,
statist way.
Post-modern counterinsurgency, arising in the imperial campaigns to
repress anti-colonial movements in the post-war period, when the new
order governed by Washington had supposedly set the colonies free, is
the first to recognize and name itself, particularly through the
experiences of the British, and one officer, Frank Kitson, in trying to
crush the independence movement in Kenya. Of course, French experiences
in Algeria and Indochina, British experiences against India and the
Irish, and US experiences against its African population quickly became
part of the ever expanding canon of this new paradigm. And its chief
innovation was to discard the idea that social peace is the natural
state of affairs and is only interrupted by foreign or unnatural agents.
On the contrary, through post-modern counterinsurgency, the ruling class
tacitly acknowledge that they are an unwanted burden, that rebellion is
the constant state of affairs in society (society under the State, we
would specify), and the purpose of counterinsurgency is to keep
resistance in the lower stages, preparation or nonviolence, and not let
it mature into full blown insurrection. As such, completely crushing
resistance is an unrealistic goal. It is far more profitable to
cultivate opportunities for unthreatening resistance, and to prioritize
intelligence-gathering. States using this strategy effectively will
allow a certain amount of resistance to continue so that they may gather
intelligence and carry out social mapping, rather than striking the
pocket of resistance and risking a loss of intelligence-gathering
opportunities. After all, if people can get away with a certain level of
illegality without being punished, they will assume the State is unaware
of their activities and they will not improve their security practices.
Tangentially, the US government does not use this kind of strategic
tolerance as much as its European counterparts, perhaps in part because
its history as a settler state encouraged the ruling class to strike
viciously at the first hint of a slave rebellion or Indigenous
counterattacks. Additionally, the reactionary project of the Cold War
installed a totalitarian imaginary in the US that seduced rulers with
the dream of a totally obedient society threatened only by “outside
agitators,” a trope repeatedly encouraged in the US by the history of
the plantation system and the historical prevalence of working class
immigration.
I wonder, though it would take a great deal of research to say so
conclusively, whether the British state’s advantage in intelligence
gathering amongst its lower classes, far more advanced than its
continental and North American rivals for several centuries at least,
can be traced back to the British elite’s long-time position as an
ethnic minority ruling over peoples speaking languages from completely
different families (Anglo-Saxons over Celts, Normans over Britons,
English over Scot and Irish Gaelic). Such a position, which the French,
Iberian, and German ruling classes did not share, certainly not over the
course of centuries, would have been untenable without the British
ruling class quickly developing a system of reliable informants among
the locals as one of the primordial activities of state formation.
A reaction is an intensification of the methods of counterinsurgency,
often with new strategies emerging that tend to include some kind of
communication among global powers, in response to a global wave of
uprisings with revolutionary potential. It is very much a historical
feature of the world system, the interconnected structures and flows of
capitalism and the State across the globe. Though specifics will differ
from country to country, the reaction (as well as the revolutionary wave
that triggers it) can only be properly understood in its global,
systemic context.
A study of reactions over the last century or two shows that they exist
in relation to the revolutionary conditions they attempt to foreclose,
and that both the revolutionary wave and the reaction exist in relation
to the reactionary process that preceded them. Patterns emerge, and
though they are neither precise nor geometrical—they do not repeat as
facsimiles, never occurring the same way twice—they do help us
understand the forces at work.
One of the longest and best known periods of reaction began in 1919 and
led to some of the most extreme and divergent outcomes, compared with
other reactionary periods. In a world systems theory analysis, this was
a period of “systemic chaos” when the global system of capitalism and
mutually recognizing states did not have a consensual arbiter or a
shared set of rules. Great Britain was the undisputed world leader, even
more so after WWI: a quarter of the world’s population and land area was
within its empire; long-time rivals France and Russia had now been
stabilized as subordinate allies; and newer rivals Germany, Italy, and
Turkey had recently been defeated and stripped of their colonies.
However, Great Britain no longer had the military means to defend its
swollen empire, its monopolistic form of imperialism did not give the
bourgeoisie of other countries any opportunities for growth short of
direct conflict, and its methods of economic organization were not the
best suited to capital accumulation in the changing circumstances.
As usual, the prior reaction conditioned the subsequent revolutionary
movements, influencing how this reaction would unfold. In this case, the
prior reaction can be found in the vicious suppression of a series of
revolutionary movements, culminating in the annihilation of the Paris
Commune and the slaughter of tens of thousands of its participants.
Elsewhere, Bismarck united Germany under a centralized, nationalist
government that brooked no dissent; in Spain the First Republic
repressed the anarchist-inspired Cantonal rebellion and then a military
coup restored the monarchy and put an end to the Carlist revolt and with
it self-government and the peasant commons; in Russia Alexander III
instituted a reactionary reign and crushed the Narodnik movement; in the
United States, the potentially revolutionary moment of emancipation was
shut down through the bloody imposition of capitalist discipline via
racial terrorism, as seen in the Memphis riots, the New Orleans
massacre, and the rise of the KKK, while simultaneously the state
concluded genocidal wars against those nations that had successfully
resisted settler encroachments, like the Apache and Oceti Sakowin, and
finally a nascent workers’ movement was met with growing brutality. More
than a century of uninterrupted terrorism against its lower classes and
Ireland meant that the United Kingdom was relatively untouched by the
revolutionary wave: if anything, they had anticipated the reaction and
made it systematic long in advance.
All of these reactions tended towards a totalitarian use of state power,
pushing the envelope for what was possible at the time, and all of them
were extremely effective at terrorizing and silencing their populations.
One consequence was that the ruling classes developed an inflated sense
of their own power and an unrealistic belief in the ability of brute
force to manufacture social peace (remember, this was a time when the
modern view of counterinsurgency still prevailed). This meant that they
were not prepared for the next wave of revolutionary movements, and that
brute force would be their go-to response.
The reaction of the 1870s to 1880s (a period of economic depression
followed by financial expansion and extreme corruption) also dehumanized
the ruling class in the eyes of their subjects. For centuries (since the
bloody repression of the revolutionary movements of the 15^(th) and
16^(th) centuries), peasant movements had sought to preserve a balance
rather than annihilate their opponents, the landlords. Similarly, in the
early 19^(th) century the workers’ movement focused on relatively
peaceful campaigns like sabotage, “combinations”, and the mutualist
schemes of Proudhon (keep in mind that while the sans-culottes may have
been happy spectators to the Terror during the French Revolution, the
killings themselves were organized by the bourgeoisie).
But after the vicious massacres that ended the Paris commune, the chief
methods used by the lower classes for two decades focused on
assassinations and bombings, importing the techniques used by the
Russian nihilists in the brutal context of serfdom. Subsequently, as
labor organizing shifted back from a primarily clandestine to a
primarily visible terrain, the emphasis was placed on taking over
industry and completely getting rid of the bosses and rulers. They were
no longer interested in negotiating with those in power.
World War I was a perfect expression of the greed, blood-thirst, and
vanity of the ruling classes. At its end, the next wave of revolutionary
insurrections broke out across Russia, Germany, Italy, the Balkans,
Hungary, and Austria, with major revolutionary surges in France, Spain,
the UK, the US, India, Argentina, and Chile, and of course there had
already been a successful revolution in Mexico, though it was eventually
taken over by the bourgeoisie and professional military. The reaction
began in 1919 when the Freikorps, a predecessor of the Nazis, suppressed
the insurrections in Germany, and even earlier when the Bolsheviks
became systematic in the way they annihilated the workers’ and peasants’
movements, to “become our own Thermidor” or become the reaction to their
own revolution in order to hold onto power, in the words of Lenin.
The revolutionary movements caught the authorities off guard. The ruling
class suddenly discovered that the wolf was at the gate and the gate was
open, so they responded with extreme, often panicked measures that
usually resulted in a great deal of bloodshed. They also suddenly came
face to face with a workers’ movement that was better organized than it
had been in a long time. Methods for recuperating and institutionalizing
the workers’ movement had been at the forefront of their
counterinsurgency methods during the prior decades, so in many
countries, the reaction looked like a more aggressive recuperation,
allowing more changes to the balance of power than the capitalists and
the traditional ruling class might have preferred in less urgent
circumstances. This is one of the main paradoxes of fascism: it defeats
the workers’ movement while also giving the citizen workers more
stability and protection than they enjoyed under the prior regime of
liberal capitalism. It does this primarily through extreme violence and
expropriation of non-citizens and through renewed access to colonies,
while also convincing the owning class of the need to make some
concessions in order to avoid a revolution.
In Italy, the reaction was a straight up coöptation of the workers’
movement. Italian fascism convinced one half the workers’ movement to
attack the other half to commit their obedience to a nationalist,
centralized state. The capitalists gave their vital support to this
movement, even though it meant removing much of the traditional ruling
class, after the Bienni Rossi convinced them that a revolution was just
around the corner.
In Germany, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazis,
also grew out of an initiative by German industrialists and military
intelligence to co-opt the workers’ movement, which had launched the
failed insurrections of 1919.
In Spain, a regular military dictatorship in the ’20s failed to achieve
stability, and then the largely left-wing Republic that began in 1931
failed to recuperate the anti-capitalist movement, which was majority
anarchist, so the military launched a much more brutal dictatorship
modeled on fascist lines in 1936. 1937, the year I have chosen to mark
the culmination of the reaction and thus the end of the revolutionary
moment, was when Soviet-aligned interests crushed the revolutionary
currents—and pressured the CNT to stand by and do nothing—during the
“May Days” in Barcelona.
The USSR was a vital player in the reaction precisely because they found
themselves on the other side of the barricades from the Right and could
therefore destroy revolutionary movements from the inside. They decided
in the early ’20s to use the International to destroy any revolutionary
movement they could not control, after they had already destroyed the
workers’ and peasant movements within the Tsarist empire they had
inherited. By the end of the ’20s, they had explicitly decided that
“revolutionary” simply meant advancing Russia’s geopolitical interests,
whatever the cost, which is why the Communists frequently acted in
complicity with the Nazis, in Germany in the early ’30s or during the
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact that gave Germany a green light to
invade Poland (dividing it, incidentally, with the USSR) and start WWII.
For these reasons, Voline described the USSR as “red fascism.”
In Argentina, the military cracked down on the anarchist movement with a
series of brutal massacres, and heavy repression similarly occurred in
Chile, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere, as the British, Dutch, and
others maintained their colonial regimes.
Incidentally, the main countries that turned to fascism during this
period, Italy, Germany, and Japan, were the world powers that had been
locked out of a colonial expansion by the successes of major players
like the UK and France. Germany, Italy, and Japan had everything they
needed to be major powers except for access to important colonial
markets, which was a key ingredient in the recipe for prosperity
effectively cooked up by the UK and France over more than a century. The
capitalists and the ruling classes in Germany, Italy, and Japan knew
that their only hope for being serious players was to conquer territory
that they did not currently possess, which meant that they had to start
a war and win it. The recent lesson of WWI showed how dangerous the
mutinies of soldiers could be, how people forced to fight wars they did
not believe in quickly became revolutionaries. As such, the ruling
classes in these countries knew they would need an ideology that could
motivate their populations and justify warfare. Fascism provided some
unique advantages in this respect. (Compare this to France, the UK, and
the US, where war mobilization only became effective after the home
territories had already suffered serious attacks.)
This is an important point: though fascism is the best known outcome of
the 1919–1937 reaction, it was not the only one, and in fact it was not
the most successful one. Nearly all the countries that went fascist
crashed and burned.
The reason we care more about fascism today is because the other major
reactionary current from that period, the current that actually won,
achieved a huge public relations victory by claiming to be the moral
opposite of the fascists, and claiming that fascism was the greatest
evil the world had ever known.
These were the centrist and progressive democrats. They included the
ruling classes of the United States, who had gained their power through
the genocide of hundreds of Indigenous nations and would shortly murder
hundreds of thousands of civilians through fire bombing and dropping
atomic bombs, and who would prove they were by no means the moral
opposite of the Nazis through Operations Paperclip and Gladio. They
included constitutional monarchies like Belgium, the Netherlands, and
the UK, that held free elections amongst citizens, but killed literally
tens of millions of people in Africa and Asia. In the ’30s and ’40s,
numerous leaders of the Indian independence movement tried to make
alliances with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It’s not because they
were evil, it’s because they had experienced the violence of the British
first hand and did not see a major ethical difference between fascists
and constitutionalists.
Even today, when you try to point out that mass murder and political
repression are not necessarily signs of fascism because these tactics
have been practiced for far longer and far more effectively by
democracies, people will scream out that you are excusing the violence.
The much greater violence of colonialism has been normalized, and
democracy has won a great propaganda victory.
The states that became the most effective oppressors and mass murderers
of the 20^(th) century went in a different direction during this
reactionary period. France brought in the Republican Socialist Party,
which carried out a number of progressive reforms. The US initially
reacted with the knee jerk repression of the Palmer Raids, the Red
Scare, and renewed violence against Black people (such as the 1917
murder of Black soldiers in Texas, the Tulsa massacre, and other
events). In 1929, however, the government changed course and introduced
a sweeping series of progressive social reforms that provided economic
security and increased democratic participation. The major,
institutionalized labor unions played an important role in carrying out
this recuperation, though it is important to note that independent labor
unions like the IWW and the UMWA were subjected to bloody repression
during the earlier period. The UK, for its part, extended voting rights
to a much larger portion of the population and conceded independence to
Ireland and greater sovereignty to the “Dominions” as part of a
recuperative movement towards greater democracy and decentralization.
As we have seen, all major states enter into a period of reaction at
roughly the same time and there is a high level of communication between
them, with the same tendency being able to sweep multiple countries, but
their differing circumstances might also cause them to go in opposite
directions.
The reactionary period from 1944–1948 presents a stark contrast with the
earlier reactionary period, in a way that is nonetheless fully
conditioned by it. Whereas the revolutionary wave beginning in 1917 took
ruling classes largely by surprise, this time around, they remembered
and preempted the revolutionary wave that was sure to break out at the
end of World War II.
Their fears were not ungrounded. Anarchist and communist partisans were
well armed and well organized, and they had played a major role in
defeating the fascists in France, Italy, Poland, and the Balkans. They
expected to be able to sweep Franco out of Spain and usher in new, more
just realities in country after country. However, they were also more
cautious. The extreme brutality they had experienced under fascism made
them afraid to take the plunge and commit to revolution they way they
had thirty years earlier. It also made them more likely to accept
alliances of convenience with the democratic powers. Especially in
France and Italy, these alliances were their downfall, but we can
understand why revolutionaries made this mistake. After all, such
alliances had helped them survive fascist occupation, and anyone who
might access the category of citizenship, as opposed to someone in the
colonies, was clearly safer under a democracy than under a fascist
government, even if both practiced some form of capitalism.
Importantly, this lead to a divergence in the collective reality of the
Global North and the Global South that has largely survived to this day
(the divergence was initially created by colonialism and whiteness, but
it had waxed and waned over the centuries and in the early 20^(th) was
at a historic low). In the Global North, people chose survival and
ultimately comfort instead of revolution, whereas in the Global South,
people had no such choice. In fact, World War II presented them with an
opportunity, giving many of them military experience as they were called
up to fight for Britain or France, and showing them that their colonial
masters were weakened and could be defeated. Over the next decades,
nearly all revolutionary struggles would take place in the Global South,
with little support from people in the Global North.
The reactionary measures unleashed by the leading states began before
World War II even ended. In 1943 and 1944, the Allies carried out heavy
bombing campaigns against working-class, communist strongholds like the
San Lorenzo neighborhood of Rome. They encouraged the Vercors maquis, a
large partisan network in southeastern France, to rise up prematurely in
June 1944 and then failed to give them promised aid as they were
slaughtered by the Nazis. The Soviet Union halted its inexorable advance
through Poland just on the other side of the river from Warsaw, giving
the Nazis time to massacre nearly all the participants of the Warsaw
Uprising. They also ordered the hugely successful Greek partisans to
disarm, and looked the other way when the British shot down the ones who
refused. In this way, the Allies made sure that the revolutionaries
would take heavy losses and would start the post-war period on their
back foot.
Then, they began preparing the Cold War, a new world order in which the
entire planet would be ruled by one of two authoritarian factions each
practicing a different model of capitalism. There could be no room for
independent movements. What would become the NATO bloc prepared a tacit
alliance with Franco, as he was their best bet to preventing the
reemergence of revolutionary movements in Spain. Throughout Europe, they
recruited ex-fascists for Operation Gladio. Initially to organize “stay
behind” actions should the USSR invade Western Europe, the Operation
quickly morphed into carrying out terrorist attacks against
revolutionary movements. From this point, we can talk about fascism
having been subordinated to democracy and turned into a tool in the
democratic toolbox, rather than a paradigm or governmental mode with a
serious chance of defining an entire world system.
For its part, the USSR invaded and occupied Poland, East Germany, all of
Central Europe shy of Austria, and most of the Balkans, as well as
preserving the limits of the Tsarist empire throughout Asia, making sure
there would not be any autonomous space where free, revolutionary
movements could develop.
In East and West, this period of reaction did not confine itself to
repressive measures. In fact, its major thrust was the cooptation of
anti-capitalist demands relating to quality of life. Before a
revolutionary movement could manifest, the ruling classes implemented a
sweeping array of social welfare measures. Whereas in 1916, they thought
they were at the height of their power, in 1944 they remembered history
and realized they would face a real danger if they did not implement
reforms. So, in 1944, Britain created an advanced welfare state under a
Labour government. Between 1944 and 1946, the Provisional Government of
France under De Gaulle, with the Communists and Socialists as the major
players, passed protective labor laws, established occupational health
care, and gave women the right to vote. Italy was a little more moderate
but also passed similar laws in this period. For its part, the Soviet
Union embarked on a major campaign of constructing cheap public housing.
As for the United States, FDR had already taken huge steps towards a
welfare state before the war. And unlike most other countries, the US
was not devastated by the war, it was thriving. To pad the bubble of
comfort it was promising the working class, the US government expanded a
system of loans for university education and specific support to
veterans through the G.I. Bill, which included support for mortgages.
Cheap loans for university education and home mortgages became the
guarantor of the burgeoning US middle class and a basis for US financial
expansion. And to prevent a global economic recession and the kind of
revanchism that set the stage for World War II, they started the
Marshall Plan, opening up new territory for the investment of surplus US
capital and providing the funds for Western Europe to quickly rebuild.
The model provided by the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods
institutions of 1944 led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel
Community, the precursor to the European Union.
The reactionary period of 1944 to 1948 was the polar opposite of the
previous period. It was short, it was highly effective from the state’s
point of view, and it shows that states are capable of being
intelligent, that they can learn from their mistakes and think of
innovative tools for killing revolutions besides just bludgeoning them
with brute force. It resulted in the creation of a world system that
still exists today, that is, in fact, only now falling apart, and it
effectively prevented serious revolutionary movements in the Global
North up until the present moment, ushering in an unprecedented period
of social peace and enrichment for global capitalists.
The main exception appears to be in the decades of warfare that followed
in the Global South; however, independence movements found their place
within the world order created between 1944 and 1948. World leaders
recognized that old-style colonialism was unsustainable, so the United
States announced national sovereignty, independence, and the abolition
of colonialism as founding principles of the United Nations from the
very beginning. However, in specific cases, the US, the UK, France, the
Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium would intervene in independence
movements, slowing them down, favoring certain factions, and guiding the
outcomes to the sort of neo-colonialism we have today. Interventions by
the USSR and China ensured that independence movements were never fully
revolutionary, and instead corresponded to the mercenary, geopolitical
interests of the major states. As such, the constant wars in the Global
South were minimized as a source of instability for the new world
system, which had recognized from the beginning that colonized countries
should eventually be set free. Instead of instability, such warfare
provided a growth opportunity for the armaments industry and ensured
access to extractive industries. Continuing warfare and the military
coups that went along with it also destroyed the revolutionary potential
of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Several things happened in 1968 that marked the opening of a new
reactionary period: the defeat of the autonomous student and workers’
movement in France; the assassination of MLK and the end of the pretext
of reform in the US; the Tlatelolco massacre against the student
movement in Mexico; and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to put
down a series of reforms.
In fact, the reaction had kicked off earlier in the socialist world,
with Mao beginning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China in
1966 to strengthen his grip over the country, leading to hundreds of
thousands of deaths. In the same year, Brezhnev consolidated his power
over the USSR and held the first public trials (of two writers) since
Stalin.
In the post-colonial world of the Global South, 1966 was also a key
year: the socialist independence leader of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was
deposed by a government that worked closely with Western financial
institutions to privatize the industries and services Nkrumah’s
government had nationalized. And the left-leaning independence leader of
Indonesia, Sukarno, was deposed in a coup between 1965 and 1967,
initiated by British secret services and the CIA, and resulting in the
deaths of one million suspected communists and sympathizers.
The revolutionary movement that triggered the reaction is closely
related to the question of decolonization, a pressure valve that
constituted the most ungoverned space of the world order created by the
1944–1948 reaction. The world order created by the United States in the
aftermath of World War II was nominally committed to decolonization.
What this meant to Washington was the eventual dismantling of the
British, French, and other empires, opening up the entire Global South
to investment by all capitalist entities. Just as the United States had
profited immensely from the Bolivarian revolutions that freed Latin
America from Spanish colonialism, they expected to profit from
decolonization throughout the rest of the world. They had no need to
impose the kind of monopolies associated with British-style colonialism,
as both free trade regimes and clientelism with nationalist
dictatorships would favor what were the most effective vehicles for
large scale, transnational economic exploitation at the time: the
private corporations that were concentrated in the US and its ally
states like the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. They viewed it
as a positive sum game: all capitalists would win more if none of them
tried to hoard the honey pot, and the home countries of those
capitalists would grow military the more productive their corporations
became. After all, World War II was the high point of the
industrialization of warfare, completing Napoleon’s realization of
capitalist logistics, “an army marches on its stomach.” At the time, it
was therefore easy to think that military victory would always fall to
the country that could best increase its productive output and
rationalize its death delivery systems.
Simultaneously, the US ruling class understood that they had no chance
of dominating the entire world through direct military means. As such,
they created mechanisms for political cooperation, like the UN, and
gained legitimacy by inviting their main adversary, the USSR, to
participate as a full member. Washington recognized the inevitability of
a bipolar world in which they would not have absolute power, so they
designed a bipolar world with structures that favored corporate
capitalism and they prepared a clever endgame. They were banking on the
belief that they and their allies, which were the countries with more
advanced mechanisms for transnational capitalist exploitation, would be
able to profit much more from the “opening up” of the Global South than
the USSR could, meaning that after a few decades’ time, they could
redraw the balance of powers.
For this game to work, decolonization had to go a certain way: it had to
lead to Western-style, nationalist governments that were either
democracies or military dictatorships seeking development along a
Western path and dependent on Western military hardware, loans, and
technical expertise. Decades or centuries of colonial tutorship, which
reinforced the myth of European superiority, succeeded insofar as every
major independence movement in the Global South accepted the legitimacy,
or at least the neutrality, of Western-style institutions from
governments to mass media to banks.
However, people tend to be much more independently minded than most
rulers believe. Both conspiracy theory thinking and the version of
anti-imperialism that sees everyone as a puppet of one of two camps
share the belief that the only people with any agency are those in
power.
Decolonization did not go entirely as planned. In 1956, Egypt, under the
socialist-leaning, pan-Arabist Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal—one
of the most important waterways in the world—and successfully defended
it against Britain, France, and Israel. And in 1958, Castro’s party won
the Cuban revolution and soon demonstrated they would not be obedient
pawns to US interests, even if they failed to change Cuba’s position in
the world economy as a producer of sugar cane.
Things completely blew open in 1961, when the Chinese Communist Party
denounced the USSR as “revisionist traitors”. China, which had not been
previously considered a major player by NATO or the USSR, had already
demonstrated its power in the ’50s when it effectively defeated the US
in the Korean War. Now, it had put an end to the bipolar world system
that US strategic planners had prepared for. Subsequently, it would no
longer be a simple matter to divide the Global South into the clients of
one or another superpower. There would be greater possibilities for
entirely independent positions.
And in fact the same year, 1961, saw the creation of the Non-Aligned
Movement, bringing together Ghana, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Yugoslavia,
and dozens of other countries. Though newly independent countries were
still beholden to world powers, now their revolutions could take on
subversive meanings.
General prosperity in the Global North limited the possibilities for
revolutionary movements there. When they did come about, their principal
claims were to justice and freedom. They claimed solidarity with the
independence movements that had already been going on for years, allying
with Vietnam or Algeria against their own governments, and excoriating
those governments for the hypocrisy of their ostensible support for
political freedoms. In socialist countries, they called for more
openness and freedoms, sometimes conflating this with economic
liberalism and sometimes pointing out a more libertarian path to
socialism. In the US, the racist oppressions at the heart of the settler
state were the core cause of the revolutionary groundswell, though
rebellion against the strict cultural controls of the Cold War era also
played a major role, as it did throughout Western Europe. In Germany,
for example, the movement coalesced in part around the admission of an
unspoken post-war truth, that the government was comprised largely of
rehabilitated Nazis who had been absorbed into the democratic system. In
a way, all of these movements were claiming that the social contract,
supposedly renovated in 1945, was phony.
The peak of revolutionary activity, 1968, actually occurred after the
reaction had already begun in the Global South and the socialist
countries. Though there were major movements in Germany, Mexico, Italy,
the Netherlands, the US, and elsewhere, the most famous epicenter was
France, when hundreds of thousands of students and workers took control
of much of the country and caused President De Gaulle to flee to
Germany, believing a revolution had already begun.
An aspect of the revolutionary movement was its extreme vulnerability to
authoritarianism, a direct consequence of the 1944–1948 reaction. The
welfare state in the West, and socialism/state capitalism in the East,
destroyed people’s ability for self-organized, collective action. As
such, revolutionary action in the West was dominated by small groups
claiming to be vanguards and battling for supremacy, even as the much
more numerous phenomenon of decentralized, anonymous action failed to
generate a collective consciousness of its own power and nature. In the
Warsaw Pact, decades of living under states that claimed to be the
revolution and crushed any disagreement had created even greater levels
of passivity. In Czechoslovakia, citizens dutifully waited to see what
reforms their rulers would pass, and they only went so far as to mount a
mostly pacifist defense of those rulers when Soviet tanks were sent in,
such a difference from the decentralized initiative and gusto of the
Hungarian Revolution twelve years earlier. In China, the lower classes
mobilized largely on the basis of Mao’s exhortations. As such, they
could be mobilized to support revolutionary measures just as easily as
reactionary ones.
And in the Global South, the movements tended to be entirely dependent
on charismatic, intelligent leaders from the independence struggles. The
death or retirement of those leaders nearly always resulted in a shift
towards nationalism or liberalism and an end to the revolutionary
experiment. The way decolonization was set up in 1945 gave the
superpowers a great deal of influence over how independence could be
achieved, and an absolute limit was placed on an acceptance of
authoritarian politics within a Western nation-state framework. Both
Soviet and NATO influence meant that political parties, with all the
dynamics they entailed, would be the vehicles for independence.
As we have seen, the reaction beginning in 1919 had underestimated the
revolutionary movement and then overcompensated, whereas the reaction of
1944 took its measure exactly. If anything, the reaction beginning in
1966 overestimated the revolutionary potential of the moment, as
symbolized by De Gaulle’s flight.
Governments around the world used a combination of repression and
recuperation to weaken revolutionary movements; then they increased
their repressive powers; and then, perceiving themselves to be in a
position of great strength, they set about dismantling barriers to the
accumulation of capital. Incidentally, in nearly every country, the
level of repression was less openly murderous than in earlier periods of
reaction.
The USSR did not engage in mass killings when it invaded Czechoslovakia,
and though Brezhnev increased political repression and expanded the
police apparatus, the purges he carried out did not result in mass
executions, as under Lenin and Stalin.
In the US, police and soldiers killed hundreds of mostly Black people
during urban riots in the revolutionary period, which is consistent to
how the government responded to unrest in earlier moments, such as
Reconstruction. But as the country shifted to a reactionary mode in
1968, the government tried to hide the majority of its repressive
violence, using the FBI to covertly infiltrate groups and organize
secret assassinations or get rival revolutionary groups to attack one
another. And the greatest violence was inflicted by the drugs that
flooded into racialized and lower class communities at this time, either
with police support or negligence. Drug addiction became an epidemic in
the ’70s, leading to countless deaths from overdose, disease, and
criminal gangs, and making solidarity and self-organization within
oppressed communities all but impossible. From the state’s perspective,
the best part of this kind of repression was that it could claim not
only to be innocent of all the killings, but even that it was trying to
help the afflicted communities. While pretending to be blameless, the
government unleashed a massive amount of violence, first by permitting
the drug epidemic and then by intervening with police and social
services against the lower classes.
Western Europe experienced a similar wave of addictive drugs that
weakened revolutionary movements and obstructed lower class solidarity,
and police operations also tried to hide the extent of their violence.
The German state murdered revolutionaries under the guise of suicides,
and in Italy the police used fascists to attack the movement, generally
blaming their bombings on anarchists.
All of these tactics reveal a specifically democratic mode of reaction,
using fascist street gangs or covert police operations to murder social
rebels and weaken movements, often turning factions against one another.
All the while, the government maintains its mythology of human rights
and neutrality, so that the majority of the population does not realize
what is happening, and believes the narrative claiming that all the
social violence is the product of unreasonable extremists on the Right
and Left fighting each other. This is the “Strategy of Tension” used
effectively in Italy throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Notably, a strategy
of tension relies on fascists or other far Right actors, but it does not
lead to a fascist takeover. On the contrary, the result is to neutralize
revolutionary movements and then allow a renewal of faith in centrist
democracy.
Another advantage of the democratic mode of reaction is its ability to
use necropolitics. State capitalism has to be able to at least claim
that it improves quality of life for the whole population, whereas
liberal capitalism champions the laissez faire idea that if you starve
to death, it’s your own fault. That’s why the democratic countries were
able to destroy entire movements with drugs and then the AIDS epidemic,
even though it meant hundreds of thousands of people died, without ever
having to take responsibility for those deaths. But in the end, having
the police look the other way (or run the shipment) as kilos and kilos
of heroin and cocaine went into the ghettos proved much more effective
than opening fire on crowds of demonstrators.
The final major advantage of the democratic mode of reaction is the
political pressure valve of elections. In nearly every case, political
power changed hands right after the peak of revolutionary potential. In
the US, largely because of white supremacy, the revolutionaries never
got a majority on their side, and starting in 1968, the government went
to the Right for 20 of the next 24 years. In France, the Left was weak
since the Communists had played such a major role in stopping the
revolution, so again, the right-wing came to power. But in Germany,
where the Right was already in power, things shifted the other way and
the Socialists got into government, institutionalizing some of the
movement’s demands. In Italy, they had a harder time, as the government
had long been dominated by a centrist party, and neither the Right nor
the Left had the power to sweep the elections, which is part of the
reason why things were much more conflictive and unstable in Italy
throughout the ’70s.
Spain is a useful case study because it was governed by the longest
lasting fascist dictatorship and also formed a part of the wave of
revolutionary movements associated with May ’68. In the late ’60s, an
autonomous workers’ movement was spreading throughout the country.
Workers’ councils started popping up in factories, mines, the ports, and
other workplaces. They quickly started organizing wildcat strikes, and
also federating, linking up across the country. The Communist Party
tried to take over the Workers’ Commissions, as they were called, but
they didn’t succeed until the early ’70s. In the meantime, many
different anticapitalist currents were active in the councils, and some
of them also started forming armed groups to support the striking
workers (it was understood that the Communists were not anticapitalists,
as their stated goal was to advance capitalism in the Spanish state). By
the early ’70s, hundreds of thousands of people were participating in
wildcat strikes. The police and military shot down dozens of protesters,
but people were also improving their ability to defend themselves and
strike back. Around this time, the entirety of the fascist regime
realized that it would best serve their interests to transition to
democracy. They negotiated with the Communist Party and eventually
settled on a constitutional monarchy. The left-wing parties were very
careful to build unity around antifascism and not around anticapitalism,
and they ended up preventing a revolution by transitioning to democracy.
Once the revolutionary potential had been defeated, governments across
the board focused on increasing their repressive powers. In Spain, they
just left the fascist police intact. In the USSR, Brezhnev increased KGB
infiltration of all dissident groups, and they put thousands of
dissidents in mental hospitals. Britain reduced the power of the labor
unions, defeated several miners’ strikes, and effectively invaded
Northern Ireland, carrying out a number of massacres and widespread
repression. These were unpopular moves, so the Labour Party briefly got
back in power in the mid-70s, an example of the democratic pressure
valve, but this was the point when they backed away from their position
of increasing public ownership.
In the US, these are the years when the War on Crime and the War on
Drugs began. These policies constituted a smart form of repression,
because they clearly targeted the lower classes, but were also
completely depoliticized. It was easy for the government to claim that
they were neutral policies simply responding to crime and had nothing at
all to do with repression. In 1968, President Johnson, a Democrat,
passed the major bill in his newly announced “war on crime” that began
federal assistance to local law enforcement and expanded the FBI,
particularly with an eye to urban riots. And then a few years later,
Nixon declared the War on Drugs, which gave rise to the prison
industrial complex.
Parallel to this was the beginning of the Culture Wars. These began in
the ’70s as a campaign by evangelicals, Heritage Foundation types, and
disgruntled white Marxists who had moved to the right in reaction to the
anti-racist movements of the previous years. They saw how the cultural
conservatism assiduously implanted in the population by the Cold War had
been shattered by all the struggles of the 1960s, and they sought to
bring this conservatism back, using flashpoint issues like abortion and
gay rights, as well as lots of racially coded language around crime,
drug use, and unemployment. They were a fundamental part of the
rightward turn that led to the ’80s and ’90s being deeply conservative
decades.
Similarly, in Italy, Berlusconi laid the foundations for the
stabilization of capitalist society with a shift to the right by
creating a media empire based on tabloids, soap operas, and Fox
News-style programming.
This follow-up to the first phase of the reaction was similar to the
Cold War politics of the late ’40s and ’50s: after defeating the
revolution, the State makes sure it ends up stronger and more able to
prevent the next one. The result was to leave governments in a position
of such uncontested dominance, that they could dismantle most of the
reforms and protections that had been won by previous revolutions (or
the reactionary concessions used to preempt such revolutions), and usher
in the age of unbridled, mercenary capitalism most of us have grown up
in.
In 1972, Mao met with Nixon and began the liberalization of the economy,
beginning a shift to a profit-oriented economy that would be completed
under Deng Xiaoping in the ’80s. In 1965, the USSR had already
instituted an economic reform that made profitability and sales two of
the primary metrics to be used by economic planners, while granting more
independence to individual enterprises to manage their business. The
reform was never fully implemented, but in the ’80s Gorbachev introduced
more far-reaching changes to liberalize the economy.
In 1979, Thatcher came to power in the UK and quickly became the queen
of neoliberal austerity. Reagan followed her a year later in the US, and
at that point, all major parties in democracies around the world adopted
practically identical programs of austerity, slashing spending on social
services, selling public infrastructure and resources, and dedicating
funds to military spending, paying off debts, and subsidizing key
industries.
Another important aspect in this growth of unbridled capitalism was a
détente between East and West and the gradual end of Cold War politics.
From 1929 to 1973, the USSR experienced economic growth (measured in
capitalist terms) faster than the US, and China would soon begin to take
off as well. A centrally planned economy was more effective than
liberalism in enabling the growth of capitalism in those two countries,
that had previously been devastated by feudalism and by old-school
imperialism, respectively. But now they had largely caught up. Continued
economic growth in the USSR (and in China, by the ’90s), if it happened
along the lines pursued during the era of mostly central planning, would
lead to an increase in the quality of life of the lower classes beyond
what was in the interests of the ruling classes. After all, if the lower
classes aren’t sunk in poverty, dependent on aid, what do they need
rulers for?
To be clear, liberal capitalism and centrally planned economies exist on
a continuum. Free markets do not exist—corporations, after all, are
monopolistic bureaucracies—and the US economy, like any other, is
dependent on government planning. The question is how much government
planning, and how much competition between private corporations? The
USSR and China began to increase the proportion of investment by private
corporations and decrease the proportion of central planning as the best
way to allow for further economic growth. In China, that growth
transformed the country into a dynamic, international capitalist player
(as Xi Jinping says, the Chinese Communist Party took the organizational
principles of the capitalist corporation and applied it to the entire
country). In the former USSR, “growth” looked more like plutocratic
vultures stripping the entirety of the welfare state and social
infrastructure, but both of these are legitimate forms of capital
accumulation.
Because the USSR and China no longer had to protect their domestic
economies from the neo-colonial intrusions of Western corporations, but
were ready to come to the banquet hall of global liberal capitalism, the
Cold War had to give way to a period of economic “cooperation” among
plutocrats, exemplified by the WTO. The War would not return until the
updated balance of power (with Russia losing rank and China gaining it)
led to geopolitical conflicts in former Soviet satellites and in
Southeast Asia, the former due to NATO expansionism and the latter due
to Chinese expansionism (which, to be honest, was simply China butting
heads with the post-1945 US expansionism).
What can we say about the current period of reaction, which is still
crystallizing around us? Much of it depends on the revolutionary wave it
responds to. That wave, in turn, is conditioned by the reactionary
period that preceded it. We can recall that a major weakness of the
earlier revolutionary wave was its authoritarianism, that prevented
effective solidarity and self-organization, and facilitated
recuperation.
It should be no surprise, then, that the current revolutionary wave,
beginning with the Zapatista uprising in 1994, passing through the
Second Intifada in Palestine, the piqueteros in Argentina, the Water and
Gas Wars in Bolivia, and the Black Blocs of the Global North, and
metamorphosing into a wave of sudden insurrections starting with the
banlieue revolts of 2005 and maturing with the Mike Brown and George
Floyd revolts in the US, is thoroughly decentralized, anti-political,
and frequently, consciously anti-authoritarian. Hardly a single one has
centered around a political party or union, though such organizations
have ridden the coattails of a few of the uprisings, killing them off in
the process.
This anti-authoritarianism conditions the reaction in several ways. The
ruling class will have a perpetually difficult time understanding the
current revolutionary wave. They will not be able to take its measure
like they did in 1944. Due to its subterranean, rhizomatic, spontaneous
nature, it will not be easy for them to stabilize it through traditional
means of recuperation, like institutionalizing the movement with a union
or political party. In fact, we have already seen that the benefits of
institutional recuperation, such as the Pink Wave in Latin America, or
the string of far Left and municipalist governments across the northern
Mediterranean, succeeded in dampening insurrectionary fervor for only a
few short years.
This brings us to a second point. The ruling class does not feel
particularly threatened by the current revolutionary wave. They
recognize that the lack of “consumer confidence” is a problem for the
economy, but when they discuss the future of capitalism in Davos and
other settings, what they fear are populist regimes of economic
protectionism that take advantage of massive discontent with growing
inequality, information warfare, and a total collapse of capitalism
brought about by climate change. Revolution doesn’t make the list. The
most “the people” can do to threaten them, in their mind, is support
counterproductive populist governments that bank on inequality.
It makes sense that the ruling class does not fear revolution. They are
coming off of one of the longest periods of social stability in modern
history. Their power has grown immensely. And they are also protected by
one of the greatest weaknesses of the current revolutionary wave: unlike
in previous moments, revolutionaries today do not believe in revolution,
and they cannot even imagine what a revolution would look like. Though
our capacities for short-term self-organization have been astounding,
time after time, once everything has been set on fire, we just go home.
Seen in historical perspective, this is little better than voting.
(Don’t get me wrong: there can be no revolution without the fires and
barricades, whereas the same cannot be said for the ballot.)
However, the fact that the ruling class does not fear the current
revolutionary wave does not mean they will not take it seriously or will
not react quickly enough as in 1917. We have already seen proof of this.
Because repressive technologies have advanced the totalitarian project
and the ruling class has enjoyed social peace for so long, they are much
less likely to feel a need to tolerate explosions of anger and
discontent. Rather, they will increasingly try to punish illegality,
even if it means shutting off the social pressure valve.
And, as we have seen from the Pink Wave in Latin America and the
governments of SYRIZA and Barcelona en ComĂş, the ruling class is not
feeling particularly generous. They do not see the need to carry out
major reforms that renew the social contract or improve the quality of
life for those on bottom. They think, erroneously, that the kind of
empty, symbolic bandages that worked all throughout the ’90s and ’00s
will suffice, or that they can regain the social peace by switching the
political party in charge, as happened at the end of the ’60s in many
countries. But that trick has also lost its edge.
Encouraging nationalism has been a rote response for the ruling classes,
as in most previous reactions. Again, this is another trick that seems
to be losing its edge. Few countries have been able to develop the
stable, nationalist majority that was a plank of fascism, socialism, and
Cold War democracy. Rather, the growth of nationalism has actually made
governments more unstable as populations are divided with no clear
winner. Part of the problem, for the ruling classes, is that the new
Cold War does not have a convincing ideological underpinning. It’s not
humanistic socialism against barbarous capitalism or freedom against
autocracy. It’s just Machiavellian geopolitics, a cast of bullies each
trying to come out on top. As such, the center Left in the US has led
the charge to try to infuse this new Cold War with an ideological alibi:
once again, freedom against autocracy. But they’re going to have a hard
sell as long as they keep encouraging police murders and opposing
universal healthcare.
Furthermore, the ruling classes have their work cut out for them: though
the revolution has little chance of success, so too does the reaction.
We are once again in a period of systemic chaos, in the twilight of US
dominance. There is no clear leader, no agreed set of rules anymore.
Therefore, the reaction does not only need to foreclose the possibility
of revolution, it needs to reassemble a tenable world system, and as
long as it fails to do so, the possibilities of revolution will
reappear.
For all these reasons, one of two things might happen. The first is that
the current revolutionary moment continues to mature, with the
elaboration of positive projects (decolonization, autonomy, mutual aid)
and greater international solidarity. This would force the ruling class
to expand their repressive technologies in a way that does not inhibit
economic growth, which is a difficult balance to strike. Dead workers
are unproductive, and closed borders block many of the flows of capital.
Alternatively or additionally, they would need to break with
neoliberalism and consider real, deep-seated reforms capable of renewing
the social contract and also open up a new sector of economic growth,
probably the transition away from fossil fuels. Because of the weakness
of current revolutionary movements, such reforms would easily be enough
to pacify the lower classes; however it would also require capitalists
to slow down their aggressive, mercenary binge of speculation and
accumulation, which is most apparent in the parasitic extremes of
private equity firms plundering everything that is left of the social
wealth. And this is a hard sell, because capitalists have not had to
temper their piratical urges since the end of World War II. In other
words, no capitalist who is alive today knows what it is like to make
some sacrifice for the “collective good,” which for them means the good
of all capitalists and the capitalist system as a whole. On the
contrary, they have all spent decades devouring the goose that lays
golden eggs and at this point have come to believe it is immortal.
The second possibility is that the current revolutionary wave gets
exhausted by the forms of repression currently being employed against
it, maybe taking advantage of some electoral changes to call it quits.
If that happens, the reaction will probably come to a quick end as the
ruling class tries to get back to the illusion of normality it so
fervently believes in. If that is the case, there will be a historically
short gap between this wave of revolutionary potential and the next one.
And the next one will be stronger indeed, as a growing portion of the
lower classes will be forced to elaborate more effective forms of mutual
aid and coordination to survive our growing poverty.
A study of reactions throughout history does not make it clear what will
happen next, but it does show us how the ruling classes operate in these
circumstances, the range of weapons they use, and the ways they tend to
think. History never repeats exactly, but it does move in patterns, and
by becoming aware of these patterns, we can stay ahead of the curve, and
maybe even alter our course.