You Say You Want a Revolution. Radical Idealism and its Tragic Consequences. By Daniel Chirot. Princeton University Press. 2020
This is a history book whose very title makes no bones about its purpose. The author’s stated aim is to warn against the ‘radical idealism’ which he sees as underlying many attempts at political revolution, since such action almost inevitably has ‘tragic consequences’ in terms of death, destruction and social disorder and rarely leads to worthwhile gain even in the longer term. As he puts it, ‘a strong revolutionary utopian ideology held as an absolute faith, if its believers come to power, will lead to immense human tragedy’.
Starting with France in 1789, the book takes us through the numerous risings that have convulsed societies in the last two hundred years, right up to the ‘Arab spring’ events of the present century. On the way he takes in the Meiji restoration in nineteenth century Japan, the Mexican and Russian revolutions, the Nazi takeover in Germany, Maoism in China, the anti-colonial wars in Algeria, Vietnam and Angola, Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, and the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. What, he argues, characterizes all these episodes is that they were either brought on by radical ideologies that failed to live up to their promises of social and economic improvement and in fact had disastrous results for the people of the countries involved.
This is an argument the author makes compellingly, providing abundant, well documented evidence of the mayhem wrought by many in these chapters both in the short and long term. He dwells in particular on the horrors of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union and of Mao’s leadership in China, both of which caused the deaths, through famine, disease or extermination, of tens of millions of people. He shows too how many other countries with smaller populations suffered similar fates following violent uprisings or radical political change.
However, this book has little notion of any historical forces that might have been driving these events and even less of the idea that, in many cases, for all their disruption and bloodiness, they were the signal of a new form of production, capitalism, taking over, even if under a one-party government, from more antiquated social and economic forms. The author sees much depending on ‘the personality of leaders’ and on ‘chance events’, this being reflected in the title of one of his earlier books Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age. In so much as he has a sense of historical development, it is the belief he expresses that things progress best if those leading change can be, as he puts it, ‘gently liberal’, and there can be ‘gradual change, compromise and flexibility’.
A greater deficiency, moreover, for those likely to be reading this journal, is the author’s insistence that many of the revolutions he deals with were driven by the ideas of Marx and by socialist or communist ideology (‘the Russian, Chinese, and other successful communist revolutions were inspired by Marxism and killed tens of millions in order to achieve an impossible egalitarian ideal’), when in fact they were not aimed at establishing socialism but state capitalism, as happened in Russia and China. There is no warrant in Marx for state capitalism, even if those setting it up and running it call it socialism or communism, as has often been the case. Though no one has a patent on the word, socialism in Marx’s writing clearly involves abolition of the wages system and a worldwide society of from each according to ability, to each according to need, not state control of the economy, which is in fact just an alternative form of capitalism – state capitalism.
Howard Moss
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We have received the following from the author of the book on revolution.
Thank you for sending me this, It is a fair review even if, as you say, I might not agree with its conclusion.
I’m not sure I think it is worth entering into an argument because, as you well know, this is now an old dispute about Marxism that has generated millions of pages. I think that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao were careful readers of Marx’s work. So were many others of the major communist leaders. And many, though not all, had serious intellectual educations, like Pol Pot or Enver Hoxha. They thought they were Marxists. My favorite epigraph in my book is the Eric Hobsbawm quote:
“The possibility of dictatorship is implicit in any regime based on a single, irremovable party…And irremovability was merely another name for the total conviction of the Bolsheviks that the Revolution must not be reversed and that its fate was in their hands…Stalin showed a sound sense of public relations…His terrifying career makes no sense except as a stubborn, unbroken, pursuit of that utopian aim of a communist society to whose reassertion he devoted the last of his publications, a few months before his death.” Eric Hobsbawm[i]
[i] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage / Random House, 1996), pp. 389-390.
I knew Hobsbawm somewhat and once spent almost a week with him at a conference I had organized in Bellagio on Lake Como. He was an utterly charming, persuasive, reasonable, extraordinarily learned life long communist. He had wonderful explanations of why he had always maintained his faith, but he never denied the brutality of what was required to create socialism. He eventually explained it all in his autobiography. The essence of it was that the tragedy was not all that suffering and death but that in the end it didn’t work.
I was personally influenced by a year I spent in Romania in 1970-71 doing research for my dissertation. Through a set of circumstances, I was placed into a research think tank attached to the Central Committee, with offices across the street from the imposing Central Committee building in the center of Bucharest. There I made friends with exceptionally talented young people my age, in their mid- to late 20s, assigned to this group because they were highly educated, knew many languages, and were devoted to the Party. Later, as I returned many times for visits, I found out that they had all become deeply disillusioned. What eventually struck me the most was the petty corruption, cruelty, indignities, and moral vacuity of the system.
I completely agree that is not at all what Marx had hoped for. And indeed, China’s solution to the empty promise of Marxism is to create an almost textbook version of fascism. Mao once said that if communism in China fails it will become fascist. He was right. How sad.
Best wishes,
Dan Chirot
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