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21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

ocw.mit.edu

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Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#11

Post by jacquesm »

Tichy wrote: post #9
mahmud wrote: post #2

Such huge potential yet such underwhelming delivery. Just read their "Reading List" and was unimpressed by it: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/... It's mostly academic, capitalist/liberal pseudo reflection and philosophy. And more than half of the people on that list are the dullest, most conservative and anything but revolutionary. The leftist literature has far more explosive, pin-point,…

Hm, maybe, but I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes. Almost all dictatorships in recent times I am aware of started out with communism or socialism. Also, how much philosophy is really needed? I wonder how to overthrow a regime with a huge police force and secret police everywhere. Are there even any example where this happened without external forces? Maybe Rumania? In any case,…

Many Romanians consider their revolution only a partial success.

Many of the old party bosses made it into high spots in the government after the revolution, and continue in these positions to this date.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#12

Post by plesn »

The true revolution changes social relations, changing people in power is quite superficial and it is foolish to blindly believe in it.

Revolutions is the usual sense happen when current structures are so rotten that something else is needed, then some other form of social organisation prevails, often not really what was expected at the beginning (think russia in 1917 vs. russia after the civil war in 1921).

But it is our role as humans to modify the world at our scale, to modify our ways of interacting with others and doing things to make the world a little better. Think of the changes between the middle age and now... there's so much room to do much better... At a bigger scale, for me, the next point is introducing more participative democracy in companies, especially big companies (they are truly the most prominent fascist-like organisations there...)

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#13

Post by quizbiz »

This past year, senior year of high school, my history teacher based his curriculum on teaching us how to stage a revolution. He asked us to plan a revolution of the school, consider what/who needs to be revolted against, and how. It was entertaining at first and it made learning the Russian Revolution, the revolution in Argentina, and others more relevant but my teacher seemed to be bent on the fact that we should actually revolt against our government as soon as possible. I consider(ed) it nonsense.

I'll try to stay away from a political debate and focus on the psychological argument. That Political revolution in the United States can be done within its current system, through election and democracy, and as bad as things are, there is no need for a cataclysmic shift. As I see it, democracy is evolutionary, it continuously evolves, checks and balances are self correcting just like natural selection. I'm all about learning practical stuff and I just don't see where this fits beyond in establishing a critical mindset.

Please broaden my mind.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#14

Post by tayssir »

mahmud wrote: post #6
colins_pride wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would read even more recent stuff. I agree on Che. How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world. It's through a mix of ancient literature, philosophy and political economics that one gains perspective on human nature. And human nature does not, has not, and will not change. But the…

How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world. Now that you mentioned Petraeus, I see you're confused about what "Revolution" means in this context. The course is teaching actual political, armed-struggle type revolution. Big-R Revolution is very different from anything else. It's the…

I think this is too dismissive of other forms of revolution. I like Michael Albert's explanation of revolution, which is a fundamental change in at least one of a society's defining institutions. http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/2564

From this perspective, the 1953 US overthrow of Iran's parliamentary democracy (to install a monarch) was a successful revolution. And even a revolution with the best of intentions (which obviously wasn't the case with the 1953 revolution) won't necessarily result in an improved society. To the contrary, society might even regress. If a revolution suddenly occurred right now in the US, since we US citizens haven't laid the groundwork of serious popular organizing and institutions, we might expect a form of fascism to probably result.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#15

Post by drags »

Tichy wrote: post #9
mahmud wrote: post #2

Such huge potential yet such underwhelming delivery. Just read their "Reading List" and was unimpressed by it: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/... It's mostly academic, capitalist/liberal pseudo reflection and philosophy. And more than half of the people on that list are the dullest, most conservative and anything but revolutionary. The leftist literature has far more explosive, pin-point,…

Hm, maybe, but I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes. Almost all dictatorships in recent times I am aware of started out with communism or socialism. Also, how much philosophy is really needed? I wonder how to overthrow a regime with a huge police force and secret police everywhere. Are there even any example where this happened without external forces? Maybe Rumania? In any case,…

1980-89 is pretty weak on their reading list, which would provide some insight to your question of how to overthrow a police state without external forces. Reading Timothy Garton Ash's work on Poland (The Polish Revolution is a good starting point) gives a lot of perspective into how a conservative Catholic majority can be the impetus for revolutionary change, and with greater earnestness than the dissident intelligensia at many times.

For theory, Havel's work is a bit out there but definitely interesting. Try "Power of the Powerless" and "On Evasive Thinking" (it's in his Open Letters, I think); these are two of his best political theory essays. Havel's a bit of a contested figure, but I think it's fair to say that he roughly lives by the principles he expounded in his theoretical works, and that his emphasis on public dissent as a means of taking down authoritarian regimes heavily influenced other East Bloc dissidents.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#18

Post by asciilifeform »

Tichy wrote: post #9
mahmud wrote: post #2

Such huge potential yet such underwhelming delivery. Just read their "Reading List" and was unimpressed by it: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/... It's mostly academic, capitalist/liberal pseudo reflection and philosophy. And more than half of the people on that list are the dullest, most conservative and anything but revolutionary. The leftist literature has far more explosive, pin-point,…

Hm, maybe, but I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes. Almost all dictatorships in recent times I am aware of started out with communism or socialism. Also, how much philosophy is really needed? I wonder how to overthrow a regime with a huge police force and secret police everywhere. Are there even any example where this happened without external forces? Maybe Rumania? In any case,…

> I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes.

It is actually very easy - just get yourself a place on the CIA payroll. This will take care of funding for propaganda, bribes, and parties for the right locals. It will also arrange a speedy getaway should your plan fail. Do your best to create and gather up "dissidents." Hype the bright capitalist future with stylish American pants for everyone which will surely come. Provoke demonstrations at every opportunity, inciting the local regime to violence; or, if the latter has become sclerotic and emasculated, you can stage an "orange" revolution using herds of bored college students. After you're done, invite your moneyed friends to buy up whatever is left of the country's industry and natural resources.

This recipe has an excellent track record in the former Soviet block.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#19

Post by drags »

asciilifeform wrote: post #18
Tichy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, maybe, but I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes. Almost all dictatorships in recent times I am aware of started out with communism or socialism. Also, how much philosophy is really needed? I wonder how to overthrow a regime with a huge police force and secret police everywhere. Are there even any example where this happened without external forces? Maybe Rumania? In any case,…

> I would actually be most interested in how to overthrow communist regimes. It is actually very easy - just get yourself a place on the CIA payroll. This will take care of funding for propaganda, bribes, and parties for the right locals. It will also arrange a speedy getaway should your plan fail. Do your best to create and gather up "dissidents." Hype the bright capitalist future with stylish American pants for eve…

It's more accurate to say that this had little to no track record in the former Soviet sphere. The US had essentially no involvement (often to the despair of Soviet bloc citizens) in any of the three major uprisings (1956, 1968 and 1980-89). In fact, in the last of these (the period of instability beginning with the Gdansk Shipyard occupation in Poland, kicking up in 1988 and continuing through the "Year of Revolutions"), US reaction was initially completely curtailed by the lack of a coherent Reagan policy on Russia/Poland. People were speaking freely, striking on a regular basis and eviscerating censorship, and the US couldn't decide whether providing increased economic assistance to Poland in exchange for continued toleration of the political situation might be a threat to detente/whether detente was really the best solution at all. It wasn't until later in Reagan's presidency that Gorbechev handed him an effective Russian policy.

Another thing that I think it's hard for the modern observer to acknowledge, given the benefit of hindsight, is the incredible ambivalence the Western left felt for some of these revolutionary movements. Many leftists of the 1968 generation wanted some form of socialism to work, and there was always a hope that an East Germany or Czechoslovakia could slowly reform into an authoritarian, yes, but competitive working-class social welfare state. The Polish uprising especially seemed to throw leftists off guard; here was a revolutionary movement dominated by conservative, Catholic traditionalists who wanted things to be _like they were before the war_. This wasn't in the discourse of the Democratic (by which I mean the party) mainstream, but it was a major element of leftist political thought of the time, and it's not hard to see how that could rub off on the measures and rhetoric American administrations were willing to take.

In short, the US was pretty much a nonentity when it came to "interference in the internal affairs" of Soviet puppet states. The "hardline" right was all talk and no action in deference to the longstanding policy of detente, and the moderate/radical left was too focused on criticizing American nuclear policy and too ambivalent about the broad-based dissident movements focused on individual liberties springing up in the Soviet bloc to push for intervention.

Re: 21H.001: How to Stage a Revolution

#20

Post by anigbrowl »

mahmud wrote: post #2

Such huge potential yet such underwhelming delivery. Just read their "Reading List" and was unimpressed by it: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/... It's mostly academic, capitalist/liberal pseudo reflection and philosophy. And more than half of the people on that list are the dullest, most conservative and anything but revolutionary. The leftist literature has far more explosive, pin-point,…

Just studying Marxism is an individual act of revolution. The mental impact on one's mind, when you finally get it, is irreversible. "Class Consciousness" is a revolutionary virus of the mind.

Thank goodness for a healthy mental immune system, then. Proponents of Marxist thought seem to believe that because they've found there's a different way of looking at the world that explains some things better than their default view, it must thus be correct in all respects. Pointing out that one has simply swapped one kind of tunnel vision for another tends to be poorly received. This is not to say the study of Marx is without value, but I'm being a lot kinder to Marxism here than Marxists are towards their perceived 'class enemies'.

Anyway yes, the reading list is underwhelming. 4 works about Mao, but nothing by Mao himself, or by Che Guevara? Disqualifying fail.

On Guerilla Warfare by Mao Tse-Tung

Guerilla Warfare by Ernesto Che Guevara

Coup d'etat: a practical handbook by Edward Luttwak

The Authoritarian Specter by Robert Altermeyer

On the psychology of military incompetence by Norman F Dixon

That should see you through the practical end of things.

48 Laws of Power and other books by Robert Greene are good introductions to political strategy, along with Machiavelli's classic The Prince. A look at the aftermath of the French revolution is probably good idea as well if you intend to retire peacefully.

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