[Pleb]

I'm prompted by this thread. It was a great read, and while I'm not keen to rekindle the ugly tone of that debate, it brought to mind Koestler's explanation of the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary.

A rebel is romantic and emotional whilst a revolutionary is calculating and cold, willing to completely subsume his will to the cause, while a rebel dances around with a megaphone.[1]

We've seen plenty of rebels recently here in the UK at the royal wedding protests and the anti cuts demos. It's all keffiyahs, megaphones and supplication. Asking the state to reverse cuts that will happen, asking the state to make vodafone pay its tax, asking the public to stop being overweight, self indulgent and passive.

If there is still a left where people believe it's absurd that people die of malnutrition and cheaply treatable illnesses, whilst the rest of us withdraw to individualism and spend all our money on ipads - where are the revolutionaries among the rebels?

Where are the revolutionaries climbing the corporate ladder? Unfashionably donning suits and studying finance, delaying self gratitude for the sake of a plan. I don't mean in order to become Buffett-Gates stlye philanthropists, but in order to climb right into the locus of global power, in the same way that twentieth century revolutionaries targetted the state, when it was the locus of power.

Is it that people with empathy dont have the patience to be anything other than rebels, and will continue to focus on the state and rallying the opinions of a docile western public - who let's not forget are the exploitative global class?

__________________________________________
[1]Paraphrased from Arrow in the Blue, couldn't find the quote on google

[NYYS]

There are a handful of reasons:

1) Revolutionaries are mostly society's losers. They simply aren't capable of making anything out of themselves, which is why they're in such shitty positions whining about everything in the first place. And, contrary to some people's beliefs, climbing to the heights of corporate power is really fucking hard. You're essentially asking for a group of people who were unable to do anything with their lives previously to suddenly vault past the smartest and most driven people in the world.

2) I don't really see the difference between revolutionary and rebel - they're both romantics, looking for some idealized version of a made-up reality. This alone makes them ill-suited for a lifetime dedication to a corporate career. Similarly, you lay the majority of the groundwork for your career in high school and college - you'd need someone who not only a teenage revolutionary (that part is not hard to find), but also willing to stick with it forever. I'm sure we both know that teenage political views are often discarded with a little life experience (especially stupid ones), even if you found someone willing to try this I guarantee they'd give it up the first time they realize they can buy an Aston Martin or want to take their girl to a lavish dinner.

[Pleb]

There are a handful of reasons:

1) Revolutionaries are mostly society's losers. They simply aren't capable of making anything out of themselves, which is why they're in such shitty positions whining about everything in the first place.

This isn't true, which is why I included the distinction against the rebels. All serious movements have revolutionaries. Look through history at nationalist movements, leftist movements, today's Islamist movements. You can't say that there isn't any distinction - even if they're not so apparent in the West today, they did and do exist. These are the ascetics, undeterred by Aston Martins and fancy restaurants (which, I might add, are a terrible return on your investment)

Climbing to the heights of corporate power is really fucking hard. You're essentially asking for a group of people who were unable to do anything with their lives previously to suddenly vault past the smartest and most driven people in the world.

Of course it is, but not more so than succeeding in any other competitive field like the military, like sports, like science, like academia. If graduate recruitment drives are anything to go by - though surely the oddds widen as the pyramid narrows - it's not an impossible ladder to climb, and your collegues are hardly the world's brightest. All you need is good grades from a good university, drive and some personality. I'm excepting math savant finance jobs here, but for the likes of corporate law, auditing firms, management consultancy etc, getting on board isn't terribly difficult. These fields can all be entered quite easily with a good liberal arts degree from a good university, and many such degree holders are unrepentant leftists.

Having empathy - probably the most important differentiator between leftists and liberals - doesn't coorelate with stupidity. It coorelates with resentment maybe, as empathetic people are less likely to have ruthless ambition. My question is why the ascetic types among them - the personality types that are willing to subsume themselves to history, as they do to God in Jihad and Country in Nationalism - haven't made any impact.

I'm just curious really. It's a personality type seen in all other movements.

[Aekos]

Leftist "revolutionary" sentiment is a symptom of immaturity, lack of understanding of basic economics (belief in the LTV, etc.) and like NYYS said, such individuals have little chance/capacity for climbing the corporate ladder.

[nucklepunche]

Amen. Weird ideologies like the labor theory of value are hamper, not a helper to the left. What I advocate is that those of us on the left spend our time building up workers self managed businesses with cooperative ownership built around market socialist principles.

[grassroots1]

NYYS, it's silly to say that revolutionaries are revolutionaries because they've failed at everything else... that would mean that every revolution and social movement in history has been led by people who are incompetent and stupid. It seems to me that it's those people who recognize social problems and are committed to a cause who are revolutionaries. It's the people who are honest and willing to put their own lives on the line for the sake of their community, instead of those who are willing to injure others for their own sake, or participate in the rat race.

I'm a fairly good writer and editor--just because I have that skill doesn't mean that I want to spend the rest of my life doing it. In fact, my passion is in politics, history, and social organization... who's to say that this is any less necessary or honorable than being an economist or an artist or a scientist? Can you imagine living in a time when economics was considered to be a useless or defunct science? How would that make you feel about your passion in life?

Pleb, maybe the lack of those "serious revolutionaries" in America has to do with the general lack of an organized revolutionary left in this country. If there was a more established base of that sort of thinking, maybe younger kids could be groomed to enter that locus of power and control but still have their revolutionary ideals existing in the background.

[Donna]

What a terrible thread.

Revolutionaries are the ones that gave capital all the breathing room it needed. A revolutionary is basically someone who forecasts a major change in society and has the balls to step up to the plate and hold the gate open for the stampede of change.

[ralfy]

It won't matter if corporations generally control governments.

[nucklepunche]

The bottom line is this, if we want a more just economic order I have a message for my fellow leftists.

1) Throw down your fucking picket signs. It isn't '68 anymore, now all people view protests as are a traffic nuisance.

2) Accept that it doesn't matter how hard you campaign for parliament/Congress/prime minister/president because in the end the people of most western nations are brainwashed against our ideas by the corporate-capitalist media and society in general. If you want to move beyond mere "social democracy" or simply holding onto the last scraps of your precious welfare state you need to accept that the time for parliamentarian socialism is OVER. The right has become entrenched since the Thatcher/Reagan eighties. The Labour Party and the Democratic Party worand other major left-wing parties have become shells of their former selves. New Labour is to the right of the pre-Thatcher Tories and the Democrats are to the right of where Republicans were under Nixon and Ford on the economic dimension. Facing that we also need to accept working through our dinky little political parties that hold no seats will not work either.

3) Labor unions are dead. I am sad about this but it is true. The right has won, they have crippled the labor union movement to essentially paralyze any hope for direct action. Ever wonder why they focused so much on smashing unions in the first place? They have the ballot box, they needed to break up the last organized recourse for the working class.

4) All I have to say is this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Instead of sitting on our political high horse in our halls of ivory tower academia let's get out and do stuff like this. We cannot fix society from the top down through the state. We need to work bottom up. The rest will follow. All that energy you devote to your stupid activism could be devoted to stuff like this.

[Melodramatic]

Sir Pleb, your sentiment is both correct, and the main symptom of our societal illness that caused the problem you presented. My argument revolves around one question: When was a man freer? In the days where he couldn't speak his mind, or the days where he has nothing to say?

The elite would like us to think revolution is a hopeless cause. Modern society and culture practically revolves around the notion. The idea of change seems totally absurd, hopeless and will probably have no effect whatsoever. The idea of community, of different people working together for collective good, became a fools notion. People can't work together, it is against human nature, either they are doing it for their individual profit or it is just for show and they stab each other in the back when something really important (like money) comes to replace it . If it does work at any level, people usually conclude its some cult, or that there is some manner of indoctrination going on. I can go on all day about the social stance regarding these ideas: change, thought, ideology, community, but I think you get the point. We are not tuaght they are wrong (god forbid one should take such a stance, it might be challenged) but we are robbed by our hope that such things can work, of our... youth, I would call it. After all that's what brought Stalin and Hitler, the whole "idea" business!

How... convenient for the elite. We are all little Julias*, not able to think or doubt or even truly discuss what we do think with people without our internet mask, we can only rebel and therefore our rebellion is made pointless. Change is made impossible, because we believe it is impossible.

Unless the change comes from above. Oh, we do believe in that kind of change. Money, fame and most importantly power, all with that Hollywood soundtrack. The only way to change be the richest individual (and individual is a key word here) to have the most people listen to you so you can sell your ideas best or just have the most people do what you say (and they call us indoctrinators). When this clashes with reality, with what needs be done to get power, both economical and political, the conclusion is even grimmer. The only good revolutionary is a hypocrite.

How convenient. The only way to change is to beat the elite in their own game. Even if you disregard the uneven playing field (I'm sure it just sounds more action-movie-courageous), it means that the only way to change is to accept the "truth" that people are just monkeys there for the swaying. That what the elite have done is, essentially, the right way. Like O'Brien said: "The Party is not interested in any overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.".

Well fuck that. Do you think that money can make a revolution? money can at best make the real act of change slightly easier. Will changing ones opinion, change ones way of thought? If you set a sheep in the right direction, will it be any less of a sheep? The problem in today's society is a social problem, and a "political" revolution would mean nothing on the long term, but a slight ease of pain. I was discussing the issue with a friend of mine, who believes in nothing but "change from above", using an example from (laugh it up, its a fucking good criticism of our society at times) harry potter. In the book (spoiler alert, I guess) the main governmental institution is taken over by the super duper bad guy, without any resistance. In fact the workers, and the people, barley noticed any real change as the descended into a sort of Nazism. He used the case as an example that a change of the systems head is enough for the whole system to change. I do not disagree with that claim, but that is not the solution but the problem.

Herd your sheep this way or herd them that way. Tell them they are free. Until they free themselves, until the revolution comes from the bottom up, until the people begin to think rather than follow, they will always be slaves. Sometimes with better conditions, admittedly. Give a man a fish and all that jazz applies here, just with workers and a factory. The revolution is not about workers getting factories, capitalists can do that too, its about having workers that will demand factories, and fight for them.

*of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in case you are a philistine .

[daft punk]

A rebel is romantic and emotional whilst a revolutionary is calculating and cold, willing to completely subsume his will to the cause, while a rebel dances around with a megaphone.[1]

We've seen plenty of rebels recently here in the UK at the royal wedding protests and the anti cuts demos. It's all keffiyahs, megaphones and supplication. Asking the state to reverse cuts that will happen, asking the state to make vodafone pay its tax, asking the public to stop being overweight, self indulgent and passive.

If there is still a left where people believe it's absurd that people die of malnutrition and cheaply treatable illnesses, whilst the rest of us withdraw to individualism and spend all our money on ipads - where are the revolutionaries among the rebels?

Where are the revolutionaries climbing the corporate ladder? Unfashionably donning suits and studying finance, delaying self gratitude for the sake of a plan. I don't mean in order to become Buffett-Gates stlye philanthropists, but in order to climb right into the locus of global power, in the same way that twentieth century revolutionaries targetted the state, when it was the locus of power.

Is it that people with empathy dont have the patience to be anything other than rebels, and will continue to focus on the state and rallying the opinions of a docile western public - who let's not forget are the exploitative global class?

Revolutionaries use megaphones too. And, no, they dont climb the corporate ladder, where did you get that idea from?

To get a revolution you have to have a revolutionary party. It has to have the support of the masses. You do that by supporting the workers struggles while pointing out that only socialism will bring major and lasting reforms.

If you want to read stuff by real revolutionaries, read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and in recent years the CWI (socialistworld.net)

What a terrible thread.

Revolutionaries are the ones that gave capital all the breathing room it needed. A revolutionary is basically someone who forecasts a major change in society and has the balls to step up to the plate and hold the gate open for the stampede of change.

correct and correct. There are some posts in this thread that are so bad I just cant be arsed debunking them.

Amen. Weird ideologies like the labor theory of value are hamper, not a helper to the left. What I advocate is that those of us on the left spend our time building up workers self managed businesses with cooperative ownership built around market socialist principles.

The Labour Theory of Value is hardly a weird idea. It was used by Adam Smith before Marx. People just misunderstood Marx, he never said it applied to every individual product.

I dont think the Co-op has changed society. It has been around 100 years. It functions very much like any other company. They pay the minimum wage.

NYYS, it's silly to say that revolutionaries are revolutionaries because they've failed at everything else... that would mean that every revolution and social movement in history has been led by people who are incompetent and stupid. It seems to me that it's those people who recognize social problems and are committed to a cause who are revolutionaries. It's the people who are honest and willing to put their own lives on the line for the sake of their community, instead of those who are willing to injure others for their own sake, or participate in the rat race.

I'm a fairly good writer and editor--just because I have that skill doesn't mean that I want to spend the rest of my life doing it. In fact, my passion is in politics, history, and social organization... who's to say that this is any less necessary or honorable than being an economist or an artist or a scientist? Can you imagine living in a time when economics was considered to be a useless or defunct science? How would that make you feel about your passion in life?

Pleb, maybe the lack of those "serious revolutionaries" in America has to do with the general lack of an organized revolutionary left in this country. If there was a more established base of that sort of thinking, maybe younger kids could be groomed to enter that locus of power and control but still have their revolutionary ideals existing in the background.

There is a small revolutionary organisation in America, it is called Socialist Alternative and it is part of the CWI.

The bottom line is this, if we want a more just economic order I have a message for my fellow leftists.

1) Throw down your fucking picket signs. It isn't '68 anymore, now all people view protests as are a traffic nuisance.

2) Accept that it doesn't matter how hard you campaign for parliament/Congress/prime minister/president because in the end the people of most western nations are brainwashed against our ideas by the corporate-capitalist media and society in general. If you want to move beyond mere "social democracy" or simply holding onto the last scraps of your precious welfare state you need to accept that the time for parliamentarian socialism is OVER. The right has become entrenched since the Thatcher/Reagan eighties. The Labour Party and the Democratic Party worand other major left-wing parties have become shells of their former selves. New Labour is to the right of the pre-Thatcher Tories and the Democrats are to the right of where Republicans were under Nixon and Ford on the economic dimension. Facing that we also need to accept working through our dinky little political parties that hold no seats will not work either.

3) Labor unions are dead. I am sad about this but it is true. The right has won, they have crippled the labor union movement to essentially paralyze any hope for direct action. Ever wonder why they focused so much on smashing unions in the first place? They have the ballot box, they needed to break up the last organized recourse for the working class.

4) All I have to say is this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Instead of sitting on our political high horse in our halls of ivory tower academia let's get out and do stuff like this. We cannot fix society from the top down through the state. We need to work bottom up. The rest will follow. All that energy you devote to your stupid activism could be devoted to stuff like this.

Hmm..

1. Wrong. 2. Half right (the bit about New Labour and the Democrats) 3. Half right, but the workers can force unions to move. In Britain now a lot of unions have socialists on their NECs . 4. It ain't exactly gonna change the fact that a few giant companies dominate the global economy.