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Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle
9/7/02: Eric Hobsbawm on Anarchists, Revolutionaries, and Surfers.
"The
contribution of anarchism to revolutionary strategy and tactics
cannot be . . . easily dismissed. It is true that anarchists are
as unlikely to make successful revolutions in the future as they
have been in the past. To adapt a phrase used by Bakunin of the
peasantry: they may be invaluable on the first day of a
revolution, but they are almost certain to be an obstacle on the
second day. Nevertheless, historically their insistence on
spontaneity has much to teach us. For it is the great weakness of
revolutionaries brought up in any of the versions derived from
classical marxism, that they tend to think of revolutions as
occurring under conditions which can be specified in advance, as
things which can be, at least in outline, foreseen, planned and
organized. But in practice this is not so.
"Or rather, most of the great revolutions which have occurred and
succeeded, have begun as 'happenings' rather than as planned
productions. Sometimes they have grown rapidly and unexpectedly
out of what looked like ordinary mass demonstrations, sometimes
out of resistance to the acts of their enemies, sometimes in
other ways--but rarely if ever did they take the form expected by
organized revolutionary movements, even when these had predicted
the imminent occurrence of revolution. That is why the test of
greatness in revolutionaries has always been their capacity to
discover the new and unexpected characteristics of revolutionary
situations and to adapt their tactics to them. Like the surfer,
the revolutionary does not create the waves on which he rides,
but balances on them. Unlike the surfer--and here serious
revolutionary theory diverges from anarchist practice--sooner or
later he stops riding on the wave and must control its direction
and movement."
(From Eric Hobsbawm,
Revolutionaries,
[NY: The New Press, 2001 (1973)], pp. 105-6.)
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