Could a Revolution be peaceful?

[Cork Socialist]

Hey was just reading a article on whether or not a Peaceful revolution could take place etc and was wondering what the general mood on the forum was ?

Here is a http://www.socialistparty.net/theory/530-can-a-socialist-revolution-be-peaceful link to the Article.

[PhoenixAsh]

I think it could be...if the capitalists decide they do not want to oppose a revolution. But they logically won't ever do that. So my answer is that it theoretically could be peaceful but in reality it will never be.

I can not think of one revolution which did not contain violence unless the revolution was a shift into the direction of the right...which is to say...I can not think of one situation were the revolution itself or the reaction to it were ever non-violent.

[hatzel]

I'm a-gonna keep my nose out of this one :o

[Bronco]

I think it could be...if the capitalists decide they do not want to oppose a revolution. But they logically won't ever do that. So my answer is that it theoretically could be peaceful but in reality it will never be.

I can not think of one revolution which did not contain violence unless the revolution was a shift into the direction of the right...which is to say...I can not think of one situation were the revolution itself or the reaction to it were ever non-violent.

The Portuguese revolution? The revolution in the Phillipines? Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

[Tommy4ever]

The Portuguese revolution? The revolution in the Phillipines? Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

But none of these revolutions have threatened the rule of the bourgeiosie as a class.

[a rebel]

yes, there is a difference between putting in a new president, and totally overthrowing the government. I don't think that any communist revolution could be anything but violent. The Bourgeoisie will fight to keep their power, so we must do the same

[Bitter Ashes]

Seeing as though goverments only have as much power as we consent them to, the revolution is happening now. It's not happening with guns and bombs, but within the hearts of millions worldwide right now. To defeat your enemy, you do not need to kill them, you merely need to disarm them of their power and that is already happening. Capitalists and the state like to threaten us mainly through denial of food, shelter, entertainment, etc if we do not play their game by their rules. People are starting at looking at new ways to get hold of the things they need in a way that is under their own control and cannot be denied to them.

Behold "The revolution"

I'm not suggesting that there's not the significant risk that capitalists and the state wont try using physical violence to hold onto their monopoly of control, but by the time that happens, the hard work will already have been done and I would not describe the armed defence of what we are gaining to be a revolution, but the gaining itself.

[pluckedflowers]

Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

How exactly do you define peaceful? These uprisings (revolutions still in progress) weren't just a bunch of people standing around in the streets. There was a lot of fighting outside of Cairo (in Suez, for example). Headquarters of the ruling party were torched throughout the country. And even in Tahrir Square if the protesters hadn't fought back against the pigs they would have been butchered. Change doesn't come from having a party in the town square.

[Bronco]

How exactly do you define peaceful? These uprisings (revolutions still in progress) weren't just a bunch of people standing around in the streets. There was a lot of fighting outside of Cairo (in Suez, for example). Headquarters of the ruling party were torched throughout the country. And even in Tahrir Square if the protesters hadn't fought back against the pigs they would have been butchered. Change doesn't come from having a party in the town square.

Peacful in that it was not geared by violence even if there was some bloodshed involved

[Cork Socialist]

I have my doubts about a peaceful Socialist revolution, The Capitalists will look to hold onto power by any means therefore we must be willing to take it by any means. Also in the case of Portugal etc being peaceful they are not overthrowing the Capitalist establishment.

[Wubbaz]

Hey was just reading a article on whether or not a Peaceful revolution could take place etc and was wondering what the general mood on the forum was ?

It is genereally believed that a revolution is all about violence, blood and guns blazing in the streets. But if you look at the history, most worker's revolutions have been fairly peaceful. Less people died in the Russian Revolution of 1917 than in the film that was made about it later. The real bloodbath commenced when 14 imperialist countries invaded Russia after..

A true revolution comes from below. It is also a revolution of the majority. If the whole of the working class rises up against the ruling classes, it will be unstoppable. The agents of oppresion would want to shoot at their friends, neighbours, children, viwes and husbands.

The best way to avoid violence is actually through a revolution.

I imagine the revolution taking place in the form of a great strike, with the government eventually giving up power to the proletariat.

[caramelpence]

As with many issues, Marx had something useful to say on this subject. In describing the American Civil War and the prospects for emancipation he recognized that the duration and violence of any social revolution depends to a large extent on the scale of the "slave-owners rebellion" - that is, the extent to which the ruling class resist the transformation of social relations. It is conceivable that the bourgeoisie might be faced with an organized working class that has been formed and empowered through successive economic and political struggles and has succeeded in winning over classes such as the peasantry and the middle class that the bourgeoisie might otherwise have been able to rely on for support, and in this situation a bourgeoisie might well decide that the game is up, so to speak, and pursue a peaceful transition to the new society in order to guarantee the physical safety of themselves and their families. This is a plausible scenario but there are also good reasons to believe it is not a very likely one. For a start, the bourgeoisie pursuing a negotiated settlement of some kind or supporting a peaceful transition assumes a strong degree of collective action and agency on the part of the bourgeoisie as a class, whereas the history of revolution and revolutionary situations suggests that the ruling class and its allies more often fragment when faced with an immanent social and political revolution into a range of different factions, these factions being characterized by different degrees of willingness to resort to violent methods to retain or restore their privileges. Moreover, it is important in any discussion of revolution to stress that revolution is not a single event, especially when we are talking about a revolution in the sense of a transformation of social relations, rather than a change in political regime. The storming of the presidential palace is not a revolution - rather, a revolution is a protracted process, involving multiple forms of struggle and constant changes in the situation, and it is rarely possible to identify a single point at which a revolution can be said to take place, not least because particular changes that are meaningful are often the product of forces that have been building over long periods of time and are also often overcome by the continuing evolution and development of forces. I would go so far as to say that the linking of even solely political revolutions like the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt to particular events and images (e.g. the photographs of the Berlin Wall being hacked apart) is a key part of the way that capitalist culture handles revolution, because it involves the reification of those revolutions, that is, their transformation into contained objects isolated from broader social and political processes, and hence an implicit denial of just how dynamic politics can be.

At the end of the day, you can never give a categorical answer to the question of whether a socialist revolution can be peaceful - it just depends. It is clear, however, that Marx accepted the possibility of both parliamentary and peaceful socialist revolutions (they are related but still distinct) and that, whilst he was conscious of the moralizing role that political action and involvement in revolution could play, he was in no way a precursor or someone like Sorel, in that he did not think that violence was purifying or that the new society needed to be born through violence in order for people to have the right kind of consciousness.


...the revolution is happening now...

No offense, but your posts sounds a lot like the kind of "anarcho-mysticism" that people associate with the worst elements of the post-68 New Left. It is doubtless aesthetically and morally appealing to say that we can bring about a revolution through alterations in human behavior within the framework of capitalist society and that people are already looking at new ways of producing and relating to one another but the kind of things you seem to have in mind - your post suggested vague support for intentional communities, though maybe this is a radical example - can only exist on the fringes of existing capitalist societies, so that it's not really possible for them to be taken up by huge numbers of people, and they are themselves subject to the continuous cultural and economic pressures of capital, which sets constraints on their sustainability. To take up the particular example of intentional communities, there was in fact a major commune movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US after the break-up of bodies like SDS but the experiments that came out of that movement have since failed in almost every case because their members found themselves unable to break out of the self-serving and aggressive behaviors that capitalism systematically encourages, even when they were able to avoid having to buy commodities, and even when they consciously tried to develop more human or egalitarian forms of decision-making and organization. I simply don't think you can escape from capitalism within capitalist society. The power of capital encompasses every aspect of contemporary life, from work to sex to everything, and that's why it does have to be challenged at its centers, especially the state, rather than gradually eroded or evaded through peace, love, and understanding. Again, no offense intended =p.

[RedSunRising]

"Despite the eventual defeat, what the experience of France 1968 shows is that a socialist transformation of society can be achieved relatively peacefully, once the idea has absorbed every layer in society, and the workers are convinced of the need to take matters into their own hands. What they were lacking in France was a matured, revolutionary leadership to guide them."

No it doesnt. May/June 68 was not a revolution.

Of course revolution will have to be violent. The most powerful ruling class human history has ever known will quietly submit to its own destruction and neither will those existenially attached to its dominance. They will fight to death to defend their form of life.

The shrinking violet attitude to violence of many on this forum demonstrates a middle class romanticism divorced from the daily reality of the world's oppressed and exploited majority, and a fundamental lack of love for the masses.

[caramelpence]

The shrinking violet attitude to violence of many on this forum demonstrates a middle class romanticism divorced from the daily reality of the world's oppressed and exploited majority, and a fundamental lack of love for the masses.

Do you actually believe this crap, or do you just post it for "teh LOLz"? How can you read phrases like "a fundamental lack of love for the masses" and not laugh?

[RedSunRising]

Do you actually believe this crap, or do you just post it for "teh LOLz"? How can you read phrases like "a fundamental lack of love for the masses" and not laugh?

How else should I have put it?

And yes, Im deadly serious.

[caramelpence]

How else should I have put it?

In terms of form, you continuously resort to hackneyed Maoist phrases that make it seem as if you're regurgitating the most hysterical issues of propaganda journals like Peking Review and Hongqi at the height of the Cultural Revolution. More importantly, your last post and your posts in general are completely lacking in sensible content. It's pretty clear that nobody in this thread, especially myself, thinks that violence is never legitimate, or that we should be pacifists as a matter of moral obligation, but you nonetheless argue that the mere suggestion that a peaceful revolution might be possible and desirable or that we should not gleefully embrace all forms of violence is indicative of a fundamental political shortcoming and is a suitable basis for total condemnation of people other than yourself - in particular, you tie a lack of violence-fetishism to "middle class romanticism" without giving that term any content whatsoever, which suggests that you're just looking for methods of insulting people rather than articulating a meaningful political critique. As for people having a lack of "love" for "the masses", the concept of "the masses" is a populist rather than Marxist concept because of how it ignores different social relations amongst the immediate producers (the term "immediate producers" is a more sensible way of conveying all those who are involved in productive labor and subject to exploitation) not unlike "the people", another common Maoist idiom. Moreover, the idea that revolutionaries can or should have "love" for "the masses" strikes me as a very strange one because it suggests firstly that love is an emotion that can be meaningfully applied to an abstraction rather than to a specific individual or set of individuals that you have close relations with, and your language also suggests that support for revolution involves a rejection of self-interest and an aesthetic of sacrifice, rather than revolution being carried out and supported by people whose interests are directly served by the formation of a new society. Ironically, the people who are most likely to commit themselves to revolution as a matter of perceived moral obligation or sacrifice rather than in order to further the interests of the class that they belong to are precisely the middle-class revolutionaries that you accuse other people of being!

I don't want revolution because I "love the masses". I love my family, friends, and partner, and I want revolution because it would make my life better. I don't want to die for the revolution or for "the masses". As you might gather, I think you're a joke and that your politics are awful. But for your own sake, if you want people to take you seriously, it would be helpful to give up the absurd meaningless propaganda phrases and to engage in concrete argumentation and critique. Why don't you begin by answering questions such as these - is a peaceful revolution possible or not? If possible, under what conditions? If impossible, why is only violent revolution viable? In a situation of violent revolution, is violence to be seen merely as a tool that has to be used only to the extent necessary, or is there something liberating and purifying about the use of violence against political enemies?

[Bitter Ashes]

Let me put it simpler.

Employers and the state's main method of control is to deny you things that you either want or need in your life. They do this with a pricetag. If you do not behave then you have less or no money and are denied everything with a pricetag above the cash you are allowed.

In order to take the power away from rulers to deny these things then the working class needs to gain collective ownership of these things that are essential to life. If we're producing our own food, then severing our income does not mean we will starve for example.

The more things that we take control over, the less things we can be denied if we upset our rulers. The only other power they have is physical violence, which is used far less often.

If a revolution is about seizing control of our lives then the biggest part is through developing our own alternatives to the capitalist system of buying what we need from the rich. You could achieve this through stealing, but it's bloody hard to steal everything you need to live with, so we must learn to produce these things ourselves in our networks instead as a more practical solution than stealing.

[caramelpence]

Employers and the state's main method of control is to deny you things that you either want or need in your life. They do this with a pricetag. If you do not behave then you have less or no money and are denied everything with a pricetag above the cash you are allowed.

I would actually argue that the monetary economy is only the most immediate manifestation of the working class being denied access to the products of its labour and that the more fundamental basis of that separation (between workers and the things they produce) is the private ownership of the means of production and the protection of that ownership through the coercive power of the state. The reason people do not and cannot take stuff from shops without paying is not because goods have pieces of sticky paper with numbers written on them, it is because people know that if you take something out of a shop and don't pay the chances are that you will be caught and violence will be used against you in one way or the other in order to make sure that you don't take goods without paying in the future. The fundamental issue is that there are centers of power in capitalist societies and that the state is the most important center, as it is the state that ultimately enforces the prevailing relations of production in the form of property rights.

In order to produce their own food let alone all the other things they need to survive the working class would inevitably need to seize land on which to grow that food and they would also need to secure other inputs like fertilizers and agricultural implements in order to grow food on a sufficiently large scale to feed the millions of people who would, in your vision, go about producing their own food rather than buying it or otherwise relying on capitalist society - but as soon as working people set about the seizure of private property in that way the state would step in to protect the prevailing property relations by forcing people off the land and probably sending them to prison. In such a situation the working class would either have to submit or would have to develop its own institutions and forms of violent coercion in order to protect its gains against the state - and by doing that we would create a situation of dual power and would be forced to deal with all the issues that are bound up with the concept of state power and the role of the state apparatus. There is really no way of evading the state when workers set about trying to take control of the economy.

Maybe this process - of workers seizing privately-owned land - is not exactly what you meant and what you really had in mind was workers withdrawing from capitalism by creating new forms of production and then expanding those forms over time. This vision has its own set of problems. We know that there are currently some people who produce part or all of their food for themselves through vegetable patches in their gardens, through allotments, and in more radical cases through the intentional communities that I described above. These individuals and groups currently comprise a very small minority of society and in order for a majority or a more substantial minority to take up the same way of life without violating property rights it would be necessary to buy up large amounts of land, huge amounts in fact if we are thinking in terms of millions of people opting out of capitalism. But in order to do that it would be necessary for that land to be available and for people to be willing to sell it.

Assuming that condition, working people would also have to have impressive savings to begin with or take out loans in order to make the initial purchase. The latter seems more likely, but as soon as you do that you have created a powerful bond with one of the most important segments of capital (finance) and you have placed yourself in a situation where you will have to enter into commodity production - presumably selling food products back to capitalist society - in order to eventually free yourself from your debt. However, regardless of whether you incur debt from the purchase of the land, you will in any case almost certainly have to make some initial purchases in order to have seed, fertilizer, and the agricultural implements needed for food production on a meaningful scale.

Some of those items can be one-off purchases, allowing for some optimistic assumptions. But others - like fertilizer - need to be purchased regularly. You could do that by selling agricultural goods back to capitalist society, but then, as with having to repay debts, you would be maintaining commodity production and would be effectively dependent on the continued existence of people who are willing and able to purchase what you have to offer. You could alternatively try to produce fertilizer by yourself - but then a greater set of problems emerges about how you go about financing a factory, how you finance the inputs for that factory over time, and so on and so forth. All of these problems of an economic nature are compounded by the continuous cultural influences that come with trying to build a better world within a capitalist society, these influences being an important factor behind the failure of the US commune movement.

In these cases and in other historical examples of intentional communities, such as the ones that Engels analyzed in the early 1840s, the communities involved were almost always dependent on broader networks of support that were more firmly embedded in capitalism, which suggests that these forms of community are limited in their scope, in the sense of whether they can extend beyond a minority, and can never be fully independent of capitalism. If you think that your vision of non-capitalist agricultural production within capitalist society is feasible then you need to set out something like a detailed plan, because from my perspective it seems impossible to deny the all-encompassing character of capital and the need to confront capitalism as its centers of power, through the seizure of existing resources and directly overthrowing the state.

[human strike]

The Portuguese revolution? The revolution in the Phillipines? Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

Except none of those really were peaceful - they all at the very least threatened violence. They weren't like this current movement in Spain for example where it's all explicitly pacifistic and non-violent. Even reformism requires the threat of violence - either that or major disruption.

The threat of violence is a very powerful thing - sometimes even more powerful than violence itself.

[The Dark Side of the Moon]

It could, but it is very unlikely to ever happen. Most are with lots of bloodshed

[Cleansing Conspiratorial Revolutionary Flame]

If the Bourgeois are to simply hand the means of production over and allow for the Democratic Control of the Proletariat over said means of production, then there can be indeed be a peaceful revolution. As well, the Bourgeois would be required to allow for the vast changing of the current cultural system, the abolition of consumerism in the fashion that it currently exists and afterward face severe pay decreases, losses of positions due to the changing of society and being reformed in order to be apart of the newly built Proletarian based society. If the Bourgeois is to allow for this 'peacefully', then there can indeed be a 'Peaceful Revolution.'

[human strike]

The question of how one defines revolution is relevant of course. Personally I don't consider revolution to be an event, which changes how one approaches the question quite a lot.

[Tim Finnegan]

I think a common mis-step when discussing non-violent revolution is that people assume that non-violence is in fact the current state of affairs, when nothing could be further from the truth: the proletariat, of all countries, live under constant state violence or the threat of state violence, however light. It reflects the inability to break away from the hegemony of bourgeois ideology even on the left, and the unthinking acceptance that what we see outside our window "peace", and not simply a lull in the most violent conflict ever waged, the class war.


The question of how one defines revolution is relevant of course. Personally I don't consider revolution to be an event, which changes how one approaches the question quite a lot.
I also agree with this. To the extent that a significant amount of armed force is deployed, I imagine it would be emerge as something episodic within a greater revolutionary process, rather than simply being the form taken by a revolution-event of limited duration.

[PhoenixAsh]

The Portuguese revolution? The revolution in the Phillipines? Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

Well...I remember a lot of attacks by security forces and several hunderd peope dying in those revolutions. It could have been far worse but I'd not say that these revolutions were peaceful and the protesters were met with a lot of organised violent responses. (concerning Egypt & Tunesia)

What revolution in the Phillipines are you refering to?


The revolution in Portugal can come close...I agree.

However...none of these were leading to a socialist or communist goverment.

[hatzel]

If I could just quote from Bart de Ligt's The Conquest of Violence (a chapter of which can be read here (http://warisforsuckers.com/deligt.pdf)) in saying: "the greater the violence, the weaker the revolution": if the revolution ain't peaceful, it ain't worthy of the name, bro :thumbup:

[Die Rote Fahne]

It seems to me this thread is filled with those who want to take the moral and utopian high ground. The suggestion that a peaceful socialist revolution is possible is to disregard the class war altogether. You have to ask yourself, why would the bourgeois simply give up the means of production, their interests? With that question it seems that we have ignored the position of the bourgeois state apparatus as well. The state may manage the affairs of the bourgeois, it also, however, has their police and armies of the bourgeois at their disposal.

Take the mass strike or general strike. It will be tolerable until it actually starts to do damage and workers are ordered back to work. When they refuse the police are sent in, and the only way that can remain peaceful is compliance, effectively ending any further revolution. The idea that the bourgeoisie will be anything but violently resistant is the same utopian frame of mind as the reformists in parliament who think we can vote for socialism with a ballot.

A revolution will likely begin peacefully, may remain peaceful for the most part, but for a socialist revolution to succeed, there will be violence, a violence which will define the revolution. As well, the notion that the revolution will begin with just grabbing a gun and going to war with the government and bourgeoisie is equally as absurd. The revolution will begin in the form of protest or strike.

[chegitz guevara]

Less people died in the Russian Revolution of 1917 than in the film that was made about it later.

This is funny, but not actually true.

The only way that a revolution could be peaceful is if we had overwhelming force such that the ruling classes concluded that victory was impossible and any attempt to engage in counter-revolution would lead to their physical annihilation. In other words, in order to be non-violent, we have to have a credible threat of violence.

But, the ruling class is not stupid, and would NEVER allow us to get to such a point. They will strike long before their defeat is inevitable, even if we aren't even close t considering taking power.

Edit: I should say, the ruling class is not usually stupid, but it has its moments.

[ImStalinist]

I hope that a peaceful revolution can happen, it is possible. However, it is very likely that at least one person, on either side, would be dead :(. I think life is playing Call of Duty with humans.

[bricolage]

ITT hypothetical speculating

[#FF0000]

The Russian Revolution was p. peaceful.

I mean aside from the massive civil war that happened immediately afterwards.

[Hebrew Hammer]

The Portuguese revolution? The revolution in the Phillipines? Even this year we've had the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

I don't know much about the Portuguese revolution or the one in the Philippines however the uprisings in the maghreb and the mideast have been anything but peaceful. Have you not seen any pictures from Bahrain? I highly doubt that a peaceful revolution could happen. It would go against the class interests of the bourgeoisie to just give up power and be like "ok fellars, you can have it, our bad, you're right." All the successful revolutions I can think of in history have been violent, the American and French bourgeois revolutions, the proletarian revolutions in Russia and China, all have come at a heavy price but such is the nature of revolution.

Ideally a peaceful revolution would be nice but realistically I don't think it's going to or could happen.

[caramelpence]

The Russian Revolution was p. peaceful.

I mean aside from the massive civil war that happened immediately afterwards.

Or, to look at it differently, the Russian Revolution was not limited to the night the Bolsheviks took power in late October 1917, but was a protracted process that lasted from February 1917 up until the end of the Civil War in 1921 and possibly until the victory of the counter-revolution in the late 1920s, in which case the Russian Revolution was indeed violent, because of the vast scale of the slave-owners rebellion. It's actually quite common to refer to decade-long processes as revolutions, rather than to tie revolutions to precise and contained events. For example, when historians and sympathizers talk about the Chinese Revolution they quite often mean the two and a half decades from the end of the civil war up until the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, whereas the period 1945-1949 is described simply as the civil war, or the war of liberation.


It would go against the class interests of the bourgeoisie to just give up power and be like "ok fellars, you can have it, our bad, you're right."

To be fair, the possibility of a peaceful revolution doesn't have to rely on the assumption that the bourgeoisie would or could decide to yield power as a result of moral persuasion, it's more plausible that the bourgeoisie or a section thereof might yield power when faced with overwhelming odds in favor of the working class in order to secure their own safety and allow themselves to be accommodated in the new society,

[Zav]

A peaceful Revolution would be preferable, and if it was a slow, transitory, bottom-up process I suppose it would be possible, but that may or may not happen depending on whether the people side with Marxist-Leninism or with Libertarian Communism. The former would virtually ensure violence, and the latter would imply a bit less.

[Cork Socialist]

I think it would largely depend on the country and situation in which the Revolution happened, also the Amount of support for the movement.

[LewisQ]

A revolution within one nation or region could be achieved peacefully with overwhelming popular support. However, it would almost certainly be attacked by imperialist forces within months, either directly or indirectly (via reactionary elements of the local military armed by imperialism.)

[RedTrackWorker]

I largely agree with caramelpence on this thread. I would just add the question becomes different once there have been some successful socialist revolutions--esp. say, in the same region. It's much more possible for a "peaceful" revolution within a country, though I doubt in the initial stages of a regional or international upsurge in struggle could be peaceful (as we're already seeing).

[Bitter Ashes]

Look. I'm getting pretty pissed off with this now.

You do what you got to do. Right now, you don't got to go running around with rifles and grenades and the like unless your life or those close to you are under direct and immediate threat.

That moment might yet come, but it has not come yet. Prepare if it makes you feel better, but don't assume that the broad front of anti-capitalism can win through merely military efforts. It's a very small piece of the puzzle which ultimately will be a dead end, so don't commit that much thought to it.