A brief (incomplete) history of revolution

What do The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, the Communist Manifesto and the recent Wall Street sit-ins have in common? (Actually, that should be obvious, and if not, read one or both and you'll get it.) I was reading The Dispossessed and the Communist Manifesto (I always read one fiction and one non-fiction book at the same time) at the same time as the sit-ins began.

It seemed as though history (and literature) was repeating itself. I was born in the early eighties and grew up in the nineties, when a popular culture rebellion gave way to an intellectual cynicism. I tend to view any group gathering with caution (and perhaps some degree of apathy), because the efforts of decades of Russian revolution, the hippies' campaigns of non-violence (and socialist-inspired and Epicurean free love) and the more sinister rebellions of punk culture and similar obnoxious groups, came to nothing. They all collapsed into their own centres and dispersed.

I've also read enough dystopian novels to know better.

The weak point of any such collective action is that eventually it matures into sets of rules and hierarchies - becomes a system. Those rules and hierarchies become ends in themselves, and all those naive (also hopeful) values are absorbed and become means to those ends. The followers become disillusioned and are not replaced by enough new recruits to keep the movement going. If it doesn't develop, it becomes static and eventually peters out.

The version of the Communist Manifesto I was reading was The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings, which presents the writings of influential philosophers in chronological order, so that you can trace the seeds of socialism. (This was where I met Bakunin, who dipped me into anarchism.) The speeches of the leaders (and followers, who often take up their phrases as mottos, without always knowing what they mean) were less coherent paraphrases of these writings! Did they know? Were they philosophy drop-outs who didn't have the patience to delve deeper? Or did they intentionally use and abuse these phrases to hook followers and confuse their opponents?

This last is a strategy recommended by Leon Trotsky. But if these political philosophers had delved deeper, they would have found that this is Stage 1 of Trotsky's map for rebellion. The second is to link those mottos to concrete action. Even if those actions are extreme. Because they're linked to what has become a value system, the actions seem necessary. Voile, you've accomplished a coup without much (only necessary?) violence and so swiftly that the collective has no time to question it until they're already implicated.

What does The Dispossessed have to do with this? Hey, I'm not giving you all the answers! Read it and see what you think. And, while you're at it, try Woman on the Edge of Time by Madge Piercy.