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Title: The Revolutionary Moment Author: Janet Biehl Date: 2015 Language: en Topics: revolution, Rojava Source: https://www.academia.edu/27798301/The_Revolutionary_Moment_2015_ . Proofread online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4146, retrieved on November 21, 2020.
The Revolutionary Moment by Janet Biehl. Today Rojava has become the
epicenter of popular desires for radical democratic change. Like Paris
in 1789, St. Petersburg in 1905 and 1917, and Barcelona in 1936-37, it
crystallizes an era’s aspirations for social and political revolution.
The last book that Murray Bookchin authored before his death in 2006 was
a history of such revolutions, with emphasis on the popular movements:
The Third Revolution
(4 vols., 1996-2004). The book’s title is the key to its meaning. The
First Revolution is the preindustrial revolution, in which the people
rebel against feudalism, as in 1789, when the French peasantry rose up
against the aristocracy and monarchy. In 1792-93, working people in
Paris created neighborhood assemblies and all but governed the city
through them. But the First Revolution failed to liberate the people,
because authoritarian figures (Jacobins) emerged and harnessed the
movement for liberty into a dictatorship, destroying the liberatory
assemblies and paving the way for Napoleon’s counterrevolution. The
bourgeoisie was the ultimate beneficiary of the first revolution. The
Second Revolution is typical of the industrial age, the revolution of
the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The working class, as Marx
described it, was exploited and when its misery became extreme, it would
seize control of the means of production and create socialism. But the
Second Revolution, too, failed to liberate the people, as its driving
forces were harnessed into a tyranny, which that once again instituted a
dictatorship, this time in the name of the proletariat. In 1917 the
workers of St. Petersburg demanded democratic soviets, by which they
meant soldiers’ and sailors’ councils. They wanted to create a council
democracy, with several tiers, in which power flowed from the bottom up.
But once the Bolsheviks came to power on the revolutionary wave, they
transformed the flow of power through the layers of soviets from bottom
up to top down, transforming them from democratic expressions of the
popular will into instruments of dictatorial rule. The totalitarian
states of Stalin and his imitators were the ultimate beneficiary of the
second revolution. The Third Revolution--the one Bookchin advanced—would
be the revolution of the people against dictatorships, a libertarian
revolution against domination by the state and capitalism, but also
against all social hierarchies, especially sexism and racism. In this
anarchistic revolution, once again, people create democratic
institutions--neighborhood assemblies and the councils—to empower
themselves. But this time they have learned the lessons of history. They
know not to let the bourgeoisie capture society’s wealth, or to let
vanguards create dictatorships in their name. The assemblies become the
institutions of the new society, and by confederating they wage a
struggle against the forces of capitalism and the nation-state. For
Bookchin, the libertarian revolution was inspired by the Spanish
revolution of 1936-37.Bookchin’s lifelong project was to try to bring
the revolutionary tradition into the postwar period. The era of
proletarian revolutions was over, he knew, and the new revolutionary
agent would be the citizen; the arena of the revolution would be not the
factory but the city, especially the urban neighborhood. New social
movements—feminism, antiracism, community, ecology—were creating a new
revolutionary dynamic. Modern technology wa seliminating the need for
toil, so that people would soon be free to participate in the democratic
process. Hence his ideology of libertarian municipalism—the creation of
face-to-face democratic institutions in urban neighborhoods, towns, and
villages.
Had Bookchin lived to see the Rojava Revolution, he would surely have
considered it emphatically part of the Third Revolution. In July 2012
the Assad regime simply let go of power there. Freed of that brutal
yoke, people in the three cantons, following the principles of
Democratic Confederalism, went on to create people’s assemblies and
tiers of confederal councils, very much as Bookchin envisioned. Bookchin
had not foreseen it happening so nonviolently. In the United States, for
example, the federal government in Washington would not simply roll over
and abandon New York and Chicago and Los Angeles to people in
assemblies. It would fight hard with its powerful high-tech military. So
he thought the confederated assemblies would have to form a counter
power to the nation-state, or a dual power (in Trotsky’s phrase). Acting
a dual power, the confederation would express the people’s will and
constitute a lever to force a transfer of power, initiating a
revolutionary conflict. The people would form people’s militias, but it
would be crucial, he thought, for the existing armed forces to cross
over from the side of the state to the side of the people. But one thing
he emphasized repeatedly in his later years. Revolutionary moments do
not come around often in history; for a revolution to succeed, history
on must be on the side of the revolution, and such “revolutionary
moments,” as he called them, are relatively uncommon. Too often, when a
revolutionary moment appears, the people are not ready. A social and
political crisis explodes, and people pour into the streets and
demonstrate and protest—but they are an angry crowd, wondering what to
do. By the time the revolutionary moment occurs, it is too late to
create revolutionary institutions. It was crucial, Bookchin told his
students, to begin to create the institutions of the new society within
the shell of the old. In the United States, he said, people could create
town meetings like those of New England throughout the country, and
gradually, as more and more people began to use them to express their
will, they could become powerful institutions of self-government, and
through confederation could mobilize against the nation-state. The more
I read about the Rojava Revolution, the more I am struck by the fact
that its architects understood clearly the need for organizing in
advance, even with no foreknowledge of when the moment would come.
Yekitiya Star and the PYD began organizing clandestinely under the
brutal Assad regime. Then in March 2011 the conflict that began at
Dara’a opened up space for more overt organizing, and they plunged ahead
in full force. The MGRK and Tev-Dem created councils in neighborhoods,
villages, districts, and regions. People began to pour into the
institutions, so much so that they a new level was needed, the
residential street, which became the home to the commune, the true
citizens’ assembly. By the time the revolutionary moment occurred in
July 2012, this process had been underway for over a year, and the
movement was more than ready. The democratic council system was in place
and had the support of the people. The next challenge will be not only
to survive in the war against the jihadists, but to ensure that power
continues to flow from the bottom up. For the rest of the world, the
Rojava Revolution offers many important lessons, but the most important
may be the one about advance preparation. It is crucial to build popular
institutions in advance, long before the revolutionary moment comes
around, so that when it does, they will be ready to take power. While
Western activists often face repression, they face nothing like the
brutality of the Assad dictatorship, and they have the relative freedom
to begin to create new institutions now.
Will they be ready, on the day their revolutionary moment comes around?