QOTD: Lewis Lapham

I have seen, over the course of my lifetime, revolutions practically every year somewhere in the world, whether it’s in North Africa, Ukraine, the Sudan, Hungary, Cuba. . . it’s a long list. And what usually happens is that one police force replaces another police force.

[T]he way we deal with revolution in the United States is to turn it into a product. It’s sort of an advertisement for rebellious clothes. But nobody is particularly willing to go up against the military force of the state. I open my essay by saying there is a lot of talk about revolution. We know and understand and see in plain sight that our government is in the hands of the banks. That the war of the rich against the poor, the class conflict that’s going on . . . this is in the newspapers every day. The biggest growth industry in the United States is surveillance, and NSA, and everybody’s cell phone is a tracking device. These are means of crowd control.

The American government, which I would call the American oligarchy, is afraid of the American people. And God forbid, they should have too many dangerous ideas wandering around loose in the streets. Thus, we have I don’t know how many hundred thousand surveillance cameras on the streets of New York. That’s only going to get worse in my view, because as we get more and more people and more and more people reduced to food stamps and poverty and as the resources of the planet are finite and the American dream assumes infinite growth which is a contradiction in terms with a finite planet. The divisions between rich and poor are going to become more and more well-defined and heavily patrolled.

I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system. That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancien regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

There’s an old axiom of Trotsky’s: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And you could say the same thing about revolution. So I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets. It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.