Mark Phillips: The American Question

In America, revolution means civil war.

On the far left, we don't like to talk about this. We live inside a culture of silences. This one is, I think, one of the loudest.

Indeed. In this particular case we're even more inventive than usual with the silencing incantations we deploy. I'm thinking right now of that lovely, compelling, brilliant lecture by Deutscher on Marxism and nonviolence. As I remember it, he answered a question from the audience by sketching the great lengths to which the Bolsheviks and the leadership of the Petersburg Soviet went in October to minimize bloodshed. Instead of attacking the army barracks, they sent Trotsky in to talk to the soldiers. In a context of overwhelming popular support for the revolution, the insurrection was accomplished with only a handful of casualties. We'll stop there, 'cause the civil war which followed killed about ten million, and that's what we're trying to not think about.

Engels was more straightforward. Revolution is violence. He lectured Duhring on this point as if he felt Duhring were retarded.

There's a softer version of this silence -- a whisper? -- that while civil war is inevitable, it's not our fault. The civil war wasn't the Bolshevik's doing. They were attacked: they defended themselves. Seems to me the right answer to this is: Yeah? So? If we accept responsibility for the implications of our views, then we have to acknowledge that in any practical sense, to advocate revolution in the U.S. is to advocate civil war.

Maybe there's another scenario? Can we envision a velvet revolution? Where the people's support is so profoundly overwhelming that the other side simply gives up?

The history of the last hundred years suggests that our rulers have no qualm about who they kill, or how many. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, My Lai, the Phoenix Program, the Gulf War. Two to four million in Vietnam alone. In all of that experience there's almost nothing to suggest that the soldiers tasked with those killings would refuse their orders. There's Hugh Thompson, and there's the slow revolt of the ground troops in Vietnam. Too late: millions dead.

Our silence obscures significant strategic dilemmas. One really crucial example is that the state will *not* wither away during a civil war. What impact does the militarization of state and society during a period of civil war have on the goal of stateless workers' democracy? (What impact does nuclear winter have? The need to rebuild the productive forces, which are likely to be devastated? Three bazillion dead workers?)

I no longer describe myself as a "revolutionary". I stopped many years ago. I advocate deep structural reform of our political system, intended to make it more democratic; a mixed economy; and use of the state to ameliorate the most egregious abuses. Perhaps something like a renewed Debsian socialism, based in mass mobilization of working people and the poor, combining resurgent street movements with a new electoral party allied with them. I'm for the public ownership of public utilities, such as energy, transportation, banking, insurance and medical care. A vast and thorough disempowering of the office of the Presidency, in favor of an expanded legislature, a multiparty system with proportional representation and recallable delegates who are required to vote their mandates. An international minimum wage, combined with international standards of environmental protection and working conditions. A government which defends the interests of working families and the poor. A new party which represents them.

It's possible that this posture of "deep reformism" is fundamentally nothing but another silence. Is there any guarantee that, if successful, a reform movement like the one I advocate would achieve its purposes without triggering a violent backlash by those whose privileges would be diminished? Wouldn't there be a military coup, as there was in, say, Chile?

I think that any ultimate answer to that question would depend on the balance of forces. The stronger the popular mobilization, the less the likelihood of violence from the right.

Isn't this also true of a revolutionary conjuncture? I agree with Engels that the answer is no.

That's the difference, to my excuse for a mind. Revolution makes civil war inevitable. With it, very severe consequences for the kind of working class democracy which the old Communist movement began by advocating. "Deep reform" offers the hope of avoiding that violence, while acknowledging that the possibilities of human liberation are correspondingly limited. I accept that trade off. To my mind it's better for people to be alive and more empowered than they are today, than to be dead and in charge.

I'm sure that many on the far left will think this is nonsense. Let's talk about it. I want to talk as best we can about these silences which we've inherited from the past. In this case, that in America revolution implies civil war, and that the consequences of civil war for a project of liberation have never been theorized.