Revolution per minute

“ If we look at the essential points of the theory and the hope of a certain number of those who see in the general strike an instrument of revolution, we shall see that the above is a true representation of their attitude. In their minds the general strike is a method of revolutionary training applied to a proletariat too much of whose power would remain inert without the brutal excitement of events. ”

“ I was condemned to be shot at sunrise next morning, and they went to the trouble of giving me an alarm clock and setting it for 3 a.m.
"But at about eleven o'clock that night there was another revolution. Some revolutionaries revolted against the revolutionaries who had revolted against the revolutionaries who had revolted against the Government, and, having re-re-corrupted the standing army, they swept all before them, and at about midnight I was set free. ”

“ In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is complete there will be a great rehearsal. ”

“ The processes by which and the period during which this accumulation of impulse is effected are by no means so spectacular as the events of the subsequent period when the revolutionary movement, having obtained an irresistible momentum, sweeps away like straws the obstacles that so long held it back only to swell its force and volume at last. ”

“ The moment which contains the conditions for the seizure of State power, the moment on which revolutionary leaders must rely and during which they must act if they are to succeed, is not the moment when the population gains confidence in its own self powers, in its creative capacities. On the contrary, the insurrection must rely upon that turning point in the history of the growing revolution -when the vacillations in the ranks of the weak, half hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. ”

“ In the face of such facts can any partisan of the proletariat deny that the crisis is about to burst forth, that the revolution is at a decisive turning point, that the victory of the government over the peasant rebellion now would sound the knell of the revolution, and would signify the definite victory of the Korniloff regime? ”

“ It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and insurrection, the foundation.
This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. ”

“ At one point, the conflict may, as expected, result in a revolutionary movement; at another it will keep its legal form and be extinguished in inaction. The revolutionary movement, lacking that basis and solid foundation which the deliberate free-will of men alone can give, will be delivered into the power of local events, and the machinery of revolution will not take hold everywhere in the same way. ”

“ The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise. ”

“ To answer with a simple yes or no, were just as ridiculous as to decide: "When war breaks out we will start a revolution." Revolutions are not "made" and great movements of the people are not produced according to technical recipes that repose in the pockets of the party leaders. Small circles of conspirators may organize a riot for a certain day and a certain hour, can give their small group of supporters the signal to begin. Mass movements in great historical crises cannot be initiated by such primitive measures. ”

“ The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people’s ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the moment. ”

“ Before examining how such a situation creates the field out of which a revolutionary organization can seize power, we will examine what this situation consists of.
According to the classics, a revolution, a real, profound, a "people's" revolution, is the incredibly complicated and painful process of the death of the old and birth of the new social order, of the mode of life of tens of millions of people. It is set in motion by a mighty burst of creative enthusiasm that stems from the people themselves. The people and the people alone are the moving force, the creators of universal history. ”

“ What Le Bon and others seem to ignore is that the ruling class may be just as truly a crowd as the insurrectionary mob, and that the violent behavior of revolutionary crowds is simply the logic of crowd-thinking carried to its swift practical conclusion.
It is generally assumed that a revolution is a sudden and violent change in the form of government. ”

“ If, in an agrarian country, after seven months of the democratic republic, a peasant rebellion has broken out, this proves irrefutably that the revolution has gone bankrupt throughout the country; that the crisis through which it is passing has reached a climax, and that the time is near when the counter-revolution will make its supreme effort. ”

“ The social revolution is an extension of that war in which each great strike is an episode; this is the reason why Syndicalists speak of that revolution in the language of strikes; for them Socialism is reduced to the conception, the expectation of, and the preparation for the general strike, which, like the Napoleonic battle, is to completely annihilate a condemned régime. ”

“ The men who had managed to organise the proletariat in the form of an army, ever ready to obey their orders, would be generals who would set up a state of siege in vanquished society; we should therefore have, on the day following the revolution, a dictatorship exercised by those politicians who in the society of to-day already form a compact group. ”

“ Nor shall we, the Communists, ever suffer ourselves to be deemed the revolutionary party; but the revolution once commenced, let us throw ourselves into its torrent, and with our thorough, perfect and secret organization, we cannot fail to shape it most successfully to our own, our righteous ends. The hour when revolution may commence we cannot predict, as it is not our policy to start or precipitate it ”

“ Military display will be useless on that day. The great social change will have come by the fact of that new sort of revolution which a reactionary journalist designated very justly, the other day, by the name of the passive revolution.... ”

“ The internal friction of the revolution, it is true, prepared the proletariat for political independence, but at the time it weakened energy and unity of action, caused a fruitless expenditure of effort, and compelled the revolution, after its first successes, to mark time tediously and then, under the blows of reaction, to retreat. ”

“ My point here is that, first, a revolution, in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon—and second, that it takes two crowds to make a revolution. ”

“ The first sentence is obviously wrong, since the action of the masses—a big strike for instance—is more important always than parliamentary activity, and not merely during a revolution or in a revolutionary situation. ”

“ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS The crowd-mind is seen at its best and at its worst in revolution. To many minds, revolution is so essentially a crowd phenomenon that the terms revolution and crowd-rule are almost synonymous. "Hurrah, the mob rules Russia," cried certain radicals in the spring of 1917—"Let the people rule everywhere." Others, more conservative, saw in every extravagant deed and atrocity alleged to have happened in Russia only the thing logically to be expected where the mob rules. ”

“ But if, on the contrary, the democracy is prepared, if the proletariat can, by legal measures alone, induce it to develop the first revolutionary institutions in a communistic direction, we have in the legal conquest of the democracy the sovereign method of revolution. Every other method, I repeat, is nothing but the momentary expedient, possibly necessary for a moment, of a weak and ill-prepared class. ”

“ Every revolution is accompanied by a great outburst of popular enthusiasm full of hope and aspiration. It is the spring-board of revolution. This high tide, spontaneous and powerful, opens up the human sources of initiative and activity. ”

“ But here the blow has been struck, and the whole revolution rounded off and finished in three days. No time has been afforded for the demoralization of the people; none for the formation of factions within, or combinations without. The first intelligence that Europe, or even the remote provinces of France have of the affair is, that it is finished. It is this celerity, and the constant presence of an efficient government, which distinguish this revolution from the former and constitute its safety. ”

“ The intensity and the direction of the social changes which radiate out from the climax of a revolutionary situation and the consequent, subsequent attempts at counter-revolution, are the outcome of active, purposive intervention by all of the social groups present at the center of revolutionary activity. ”

“ That which the sects of conspirators had regarded as belonging to the domain of the will and capable of being constructed at pleasure, became a simple process which might be favored, sustained and assisted. The revolution became the object of a policy the conditions of which are given by the complex situation of society; it therefore became a result which the proletariat must attain through struggles and various means of organization which the old tactics of revolts had not yet imagined. ”

“ The idea of revolution is itself so commonly a crowd-idea that the thinking—if thinking it may be called—of most people on this subject depends principally upon which crowd we happen to belong to, the crowd which sustains the ego-feeling of its members by the hope of revolution, or the crowd which, for similar reason, brands everything which opposes its interests, real or imaginary, as "anarchy" and "Bolshevism." ”

“ It is an acknowledged fact, that every revolution requires a provisional power to regulate its disorganizing movements, and to direct the methodical demolition of every part of the ancient social constitution.— Such ought to be the revolutionary power. ”

“ The idea of the revolution is to the crowd a symbol, the function of which is compensation for the burdens of the struggle for existence, for the feeling of social inferiority, and for desires suppressed by civilization. It is an imaginary escape from hard reality, a new-world system in which the ego seeks refuge, a defense mechanism under the compulsive influence of which crowds behave like somnambulistic individuals. ”

“ They understood that the revolution would be born again unceasingly, perhaps to-morrow, with a general strike—the common understanding of all workers having general funds, and so able to hold out for months, eating their own bread. ”

“ Many who were not socialists are beginning to turn from the older order, imbued with the feeling that nothing could happen in the future worse for the country at large than the conditions that are being endured in the present.
A revolution arrives after a series of connected events which exhausts the patience of the public, and events are moving with intensity as well as rapidity. ”

“ Never was revolution more menacing to the government. After the disasters suffered in the Orient, and the severities of a too oppressive autocratic regime, all classes of society, including a portion of the army and the fleet, had revolted. The railways, posts, and telegraph services had struck, so that communications between the various portions of the vast empire were interrupted.
The rural class itself, forming the majority of the nation, began to feel the influence of the revolutionary propaganda. The lot of the peasants was wretched. ”

“ Each party kicks backward at those that are pushing forward, and leans forward upon those that are crowding backward; no wonder that, in this ludicrous posture, each loses its balance, and, after having cut the unavoidable grimaces, breaks down amid singular somersaults. Accordingly, the revolution moves along a downward line. It finds itself in this retreating motion before the last February-barricade is cleared away, and the first governmental authority of the revolution has been constituted. ”

“ Never was there such a favorable position for a provincial and partial insurrection as this. A revolution was expected in Paris; the Hungarians were at the, gates of Vienna; in all the central States of Germany, not only the people, but even the troops, were strongly in favor of the insurrection, and only wanted an opportunity to join it openly. And yet the movement, having once got into the hands of the petty bourgeoisie, was ruined from its very beginning. ”