Wages of Rebellion (2 page)
Read Wages of Rebellion Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
James Davies, in his essay “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” names the “intolerable gap between what people want and what they get” as the most important component of revolt. “The rapidly widening gap between expectations and gratifications portends revolution,” writes
Davies. “The most common case for this widening gap of individual dissatisfactions is economic or social dislocation that makes the affected individual generally tense, generally frustrated. That is, the greatest portion of people who join a revolution are preoccupied with tensions related to the failure to gratify the physical (economic) needs and the needs of stable interpersonal (social) relationships.”
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However, like Marx, Engels, and Brinton, Davies adds that “socioeconomically deprived poor people are unlikely to make a successful rebellion, a revolution, by themselves.” It is rather a disenfranchised middle class and alienated members of the ruling class who orchestrate and lead a revolt. “Without the support of disaffected bourgeoisie, disaffected nobles, and disaffected intellectuals, the French Revolution might have been some kind of grand, episodic upheaval,” he notes.
But it would not likely have amounted to the successful assault on the political power structure that a revolution amounts to. The same can be said for the American Revolution. Those who signed the Declaration of Independence and/or became rulers of the new nation were gentleman farmers like Washington and Jefferson rather than callous-handed yeomen, who became the rank and file of the Continental Army. The Russian Revolution, particularly in its 1905 phase, depended on the disaffection not solely of factory workers and peasants but also of urban bourgeoisie and—almost incredibly it seemed at first glance—of substantial numbers of the landed nobility.
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Brinton and Davies argue that expectations have usually been most frustrated—especially when coupled with economic depression and increased repression—immediately after periods when the standard of living rose and the political space opened. This is what took place in Russia, for example, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, began the process of industrialization, and created a state-administered legal system that attempted to wrest absolute authority from the noblemen and landowners, who had been imposing jail terms and punishment by fiat. The urban population nearly doubled between 1878 and 1897. Strikes, union organizing,
workers’ associations, and emergent political groups, along with a dissident press, gave hope for the future. Wages rose. The estimated annual net income at the end of the nineteenth century for a peasant family of five was 82 rubles. A factory worker could make 168 rubles.
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The process of reform ended when Alexander II was assassinated on March 13, 1881.
Alexander III and his successor, Nicholas II, attempted to return the country to a rigid autocracy. Repression mounted, and the opening provided to a free press ended, especially in 1907 with the reinstatement of censorship and the banning of publications. Executions for offending the Czar mounted: there were 26 death sentences during the thirteen years of Alexander III’s reign (1881–1894) and 4,449 between 1905 and 1910—just six years of the reign of his grandson Nicholas II.
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“This fifty-six year period [from the freeing of the serfs in 1861 to the Russian Revolution in 1917] appears to constitute a single long phase in which popular gratification at the termination of one institution (serfdom) rather quickly was replaced with rising expectations which resulted from intensified industrialization and which were incompatible with the continuation of the inequitable and capricious power structure of Tsarist society,” Davies notes.
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The expectations for political and economic improvement were further stymied when the country entered World War I. The poorly equipped Russian army suffered catastrophic defeats and massive loss of life. The economy broke down. By 1916, inflation had made food difficult to afford, and famine gripped parts of the country. But more than deprivation itself, Davies and Brinton highlight, it was the cycle of heightened expectations, economic improvement, and then frustrated hopes that led to revolt. “In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt,” Leon Trotsky noted.
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Today this key component of revolution—the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get—is being played out in the United States and many states in Europe during a new age of mounting scarcity, declining wages, joblessness, government-imposed “austerity” measures, and assaults on civil liberties. The rising living
standards experienced by the American working class in the 1950s have been in precipitous decline since the 1970s. The real earnings of the median male have declined by 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall by 41 percent from 1970 to 2010.
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Moreover, the memory of the postwar moment of prosperity and the belief that prosperity should still be possible—along with the revocation of protections under the Constitution that most Americans want restored—have left Americans increasingly alienated, frustrated, and angry. They have experienced the diminished expectations highlighted by Davies and Brinton. They have set those expectations against the bleakness of the present.
Politicians, a moribund labor movement, and the mass media—either cowed or in the service of corporate power—assure the population that the old prosperity is still attainable, but via a different route. Prosperity will no longer come from expanding the manufacturing base, which characterized the very real prosperity of working men and women immediately after World War II. The neoliberal version of the promise of rising living standards is based on the fallacy of economic deregulation and financialization. Let us be rich, the elites say, and you will share in the spoils. All you have to do is work hard, obey the rules, and believe in yourself. This myth is disseminated across the political spectrum. It is the essential message peddled by everyone from Oprah and the entertainment industry to the Christian Right and positive psychologists. But this promise, as the masses of underemployed and unemployed are discovering, is a fiction.
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In this discovery, this understanding that workers will never have what they expect, lies revolutionary fodder. Today’s economic stagnation, accompanied by a steady stripping away of civil liberties and the creation of a monstrous security and surveillance system of internal control, has followed the kind of roller-coaster pattern of rising and then declining hopes that presages revolt, according to Brinton and Davis.
The revolutionary ideal, the vision of a better world, the belief that resistance is a moral act to protect the weak and the poor—in short, an ideology—fuses with the sense of loss and betrayal engendered by
a system that can no longer meet expectations. The revolts and revolutions that have convulsed the Arab world and the unrest in Greece and Spain share these vital characteristics. The primacy of corporate profit in a globalized economy has become universal. So have its consequences.
Professor Rami Zurayk, who teaches agriculture and food sciences at the American University of Beirut, pointed out in
The Guardian
in 2011 “that when international grain prices spiked in 2007 and 2008 Egypt’s bread prices rose by 37 percent.” Fifty percent of the calories Egyptians consume, he wrote, come from outside the country. Moreover, Egypt, as the world’s largest wheat importer, is hostage to world commodity prices, and he notes that only three corporations—Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland Company, and Bunge (all American)—control 90 percent of the global grain trade.
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Zurayk argues that the rising price of food (especially bread)—which puts a family’s ability to feed itself in jeopardy, as happened during the French and Russian Revolutions—was one of the major causes of the uprisings across the Arab world in 2010 and 2011. “Should the global markets be unable to provide a country’s need, or if there are not enough funds available to finance purchases and to offer price support, then the food of the poor will become inaccessible to them,” Zurayk writes, adding:
Already, in Egypt and Yemen, more than 40 percent of the population live below the poverty line and suffer from some form of malnutrition. Most of the poor in these countries have no access to social safety nets. Images of bread became central to the Egyptian protests, from young boys selling
kaik
, a breakfast bread, to one protester’s improvised helmet made from bread loaves taped to his head. Although the Arab revolutions were united under the slogan “the people want to bring down the regime” not “the people want more bread,” food was a catalyst.
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The contraction of the Greek economy by 20 percent in the last five years resulted in an unemployment rate of more than 27 percent. An estimated 10 percent of Greek children arrive at school underfed, hungry, or malnourished. Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at
Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group, told the
New York Times:
“When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries.”
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The poor population in the United States—15 percent of the total population and a disturbing 21.8 percent for children under the age of eighteen—is expanding. The 46.5 million people living in poverty in 2012 was the largest number of poor counted during the fifty-four years in which the decennial census has calculated poverty rates. The weighted average poverty threshold for a household of four was an annual income of $23,492.
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That is well below what many economists believe constitutes a realistic poverty rate.
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And among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people lived in what was categorized as “deep” poverty, meaning that their incomes were 50 percent below the official poverty line. One-quarter of the nation’s Hispanic population, 13.6 million people, and 27.2 percent of African Americans, 10.9 million people, lived in poverty.
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There are 73.7 million children in the United States, and they represent 23.7 percent of the total population. Yet in 2012 they made up 34.6 percent of Americans living in poverty and 35 percent of those living in deep poverty.
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Climate change will only exacerbate these conditions. As pointed out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change will cause a decline in crop production and food prices will soar.
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Poverty and hunger have already begun to expand in the developing world and parts of the industrialized world.
The realization that our expectations for a better future have been obliterated, not only for ourselves but more importantly for our children, starts the chain reaction. There is a loss of faith in established systems of power. There is a weakening among the elites of the will to rule. Government becomes despised. Rage looks for outlets. The nation goes into crisis. Vladimir Lenin identified the components that come together to foster a successful revolt:
The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions, and particularly by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: it is not enough for revolution that
the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. Only when the
“lower classes” do not want
the old way, and when the “upper classes”
cannot carry on in the old way
—only then can revolution win.
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I have covered, as a foreign correspondent, revolts, insurgencies, and revolutions, including the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America; the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan, and Yemen; the two Palestinian uprisings (or intifadas); the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; and the war in the former Yugoslavia. I have seen that despotic regimes in the final stages collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers of the elite—the police, the courts, the civil servants, the press, the intellectual class, and finally the army—no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished. When these state organs are ordered to carry out acts of repression—such as clearing people from parks and arresting or even shooting demonstrators—and refuse their orders, the old regime crumbles. The veneer of power appears untouched before a revolution, but the internal rot, unseen by the outside world, steadily hollows out the edifice state. And when dying regimes collapse, they do so with dizzying speed.
When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker, who had been in power for thirteen years, was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, the regime was finished. He lasted another week in power. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the Communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. In Romania the army general on whom the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had depended to crush protests was the general who condemned him to death in a hasty show trial on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak also lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces and the military to fire into crowds.
Historians and political philosophers have often described these episodic revolutionary moments in human history, which are not confined by national borders, as waves.
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Walter Benjamin, in his essay
about Goethe’s novel
Elective Affinities
, makes the same point. The novel is about the decay of institutions—in this case marriage—and the forces that are unleashed when institutions, and most importantly the ideas and rituals that sustain them, lose their hold over the imagination. In these moments, Benjamin argues, the mythic and the ideas of the visionary cause people to abandon established mores and traditions to revolt.
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