About two weeks ago, in my Readings in Modern Europe seminar, a question came up. “Are revolutions inherently violent?” We spent the next twenty-five minutes discussing it, coming to the conclusion that we could not think of any peaceful revolutions and that we did not want to admit it, but revolutions probably had violence built into their very bones. This conversation, and the question in particular has stuck with me since then. As such, I thought I better bring it to people exponentially smarter than myself, you all.
Before I look at how to answer this question, I will provide some context. This came up in a discussion about “modern” political revolutions, specifically the French Revolution. Our professor had assigned The Afterlives of the Terror by Ronen Steinberg for that week. Steinberg looks at the period immediately after the Terror, assessing how people of the time contended with, remembered, and put to rest the trauma that had occurred in the name of Revolution. Trauma as a medical concept did not exist during the Terror but Steinberg puts it to use as an effective tool of analysis despite its ahistorical nature. In particular our class expressed interest in the application of this concept of trauma to other Revolutions. How did the survivors of the American Revolution deal with the violence surrounding the creation of the United States?[1] How did Russians react after the Fall of the tsar? As a class we quickly concluded that that no non-violent revolutions had ever taken place. The two closest examples we could think of, Partition and the fall of the Soviet Union, failed the test as those two massive political changes engendered much violence.[2] Needless to say, we stepped around the question of trauma, and the inherent nature of violence, and quickly moved on.
Hopefully you noticed that I put “modern” in quotes in that last paragraph. These quotes mark another piece of necessary context. “Modern”, for those not trapped in the ivory tower of history grad school classes, has certain connotations and specific timelines in the discipline. While forests scream at the number of pages leading scholars have written on the development and definition of modernity, there still exists a lack of agreement on the specifics. But for the sake of brevity, I’ll provide a rough sketch, a general timeline, and even this generalization will make some people mad. Historians often use the Renaissance/”Age of Discovery” as a marker for the beginning of the pre-modern, and the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution as a marker of the modern period. So, in this class we were referring to revolutions occurring in the modern, or post-French Revolution period. I will now stake a claim in the debates on modernity. I’ll put forward that describing modernity as the rise of the nation-state, an increase in personal autonomy, the rise of capitalism, increased role of the state as the arbiter of violence, the birth of modern science, representative and the beginnings of human rights serves our purposes. People have, of course, argued the exact opposite, often quite persuasively. But we do not have time for all that. Modernity also often has a psychological aspect, with many historians marking the French Revolution as a turning point that saw increased conceptions of individuality and other mental markers of modernity. People have, of course, argued the exact opposite, often quite persuasively. Nevertheless, this brief sketch provides a decent starting point for our discussion of violence and revolutions in modernity. Context over!
While I started out with one question, the discussion of Steinberg’s work gifted me with a second. For me, these two questions, “Are revolutions inherently violent,” and “how do survivors cope with the trauma after revolutionary acts?” need answers now more than ever. In my estimation the U.S., and the world in general, hurdle closer and closer to some sort of seismic reckoning every day. While the results of a potential sea change could turn out many ways, the rest of this piece focuses on just one of those options. If any sort of non-totalitarian left revolution takes place, say at the bare minimum the dissolution of the current political system – referring here not the idea of democracy but to out current less than democratic system – and the implementation of an anti-capitalist economy, that revolution must reckon with, and answer, these questions. If only an overthrow of the current political/economic/cultural order can save the literal Earth and the people living on it, we need to answer them and answer them now. Americans often have a harder time dealing with this than other countries. In the U.S., history books downplay the violence of the American state, papering over the murderous acts the government has committed since day one. Outside of the American Revolution, which arguably does not count, textbooks present revolutions as things that happen somewhere else. Various Native groups fights for freedom never get styled as “Revolutions,” and neither do the many slave uprisings that happened on U.S. soil. Americans are not used to thinking about revolution. American culture conditions us to think about long slow changes, like the Black Freedom Struggle, still an ongoing effort, or the LGBT+ rights movement, still an ongoing effort, but not revolutionary ones. And while left groups and activists of all stripes have been asking themselves these questions for a while, they have not filtered into the mainstream. That needs to happen now.
“But Dylan”, you say to yourself as you read this unedited, barely cohesive screed, “we haven’t even examined the questions. We’ve looked at why we need to answer them, but not how to!” To which I say, “Good point non-gender specific dude! Let’s do that.”
Alright, let’s take a gander at the first question, “Are revolutions inherently violent?” This question contains two vague words that complicate the question. Namely “revolutions” and “violent.” Drilling a little deeper to get some more specificity seems the only way out.
Revolution, as the classes I TA’d for discovered during our last sections, resist easy definition. Are they always political? Do they have to take place over a certain time span? How dramatic does the rupture they create have to be? How many people need to be affected? Is revolution a neutral word, or does it imply a certain moral standing? These and other questions all need to have answers before we can move on to the bigger overriding question. For this piece, I’m referring to a fairly “standard” definition of revolution. A pretty quick, say less than a two-decade, overthrow of the political/economic/social/cultural order of society. A “societal revolution” as opposed to a revolution that changes one specific part of a culture, like the introduction of toasters. Think more Haitian Revolution – or Russian or French Revolution – and less hot bread. Because of the nature of this piece, I’ll also insist that the revolution exhibit socialist/left political characteristics. So, not a conservative revolution that installs a monarchy or some other retrograde form of rulership. Conservative revolutions can, and certainly do happen, but since this piece deals with the left, I will limit our discussions of revolutions to that particular brand. I would also argue that – and this surely should go into another essay entirely – that the right, at least in America has reckoned with these questions much more than the left has.
So that takes care of revolutions. In just 153 words! How convenient. My work remains incomplete, however. The distillation of “violence” into a pithy, useable tool of analysis needs doing. Once again, this word invites all types of definitional questions. What constitutes violence? Is it just physical? Do mental, emotional, economic, academic hurt also come into play? Can non-human entities commit violence? Are there different levels of violence? Similar to the idea of “revolution” these are all up for debate, but in this particular instance for this question, I’m referring to war, large-scale police brutality, extra judicial killings, planned starvation, John Brown-type popular uprisings, forced extradition, and other forms of human-committed repression done in the name of revolution, or counter-revolution.
So now that we’ve cleared some definitions up, we can look toward maybe even answering the question. A quick reminder of the question under the microscope: “Are Revolutions Inherently Violent?” For the record, my answer is “Yes, probably.” Before I discuss that remarkably ham-fisted answer, a final digression. Even if you want to move away from the definition of revolutions I so painstakingly set up in the previous paragraph and more toward say a revolution of the industrial persuasion, I’d argue that those revolutions fall under this answer as well. Just take a look at the work Empire of Guns by Priya Satia. In this work Satia argues that without the direct involvement of the British state the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred. The state got involved in the Industrial Revolution through its need for more and better guns due to the fact that it could not help getting involved in wars. Satia’s work majorly revises the existing historiography, which previously posited that the Industrial Revolution occurred due to private enterprise and a distinct lack of state intervention. So for Satia, violence wrought its name indelibly upon the Industrial Revolution. Similar arguments about events like the Reformation, or the Scientific Revolution also hold water. Digression over.
Sticking strictly to political/economic stuff still provides the “Yes, Probably” answer. How so? Well for one, revolutions happen in opposition to modern states. Go back up a few paragraphs if you forgot what modern means. Therein lies my argument. “Frigging finally,” everyone reading this says to themselves. Writers like Foucault, Max Weber, and others define the modern state as that which “lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force.”[3] I happen to buy this. Any revolution, whether it comes out of a green environment movement or the anti-capitalist/anti-racist left, will try and take down or transform the state so much as to make it unrecognizable. And since being the sole proprietor of legitimate violence within its borders defines the state, the state will most likely use its force to resist being torn down, or overthrown or remodeled, or what have you, at every turn. This particular statement assumes that the state and whatever structures the revolution targets have some sort of cohesion, a fairly easy claim to make in regards to the U.S.. We’ve seen this during even in most non-violent calls for change over the world. And while I’m perhaps annoyingly vague about who exactly makes the up the state, that’s purposeful. The state at times feel inescapable and faceless and we must deal with that. Following through with this definition of the state, any revolution that hopes to capture and retain any type of power must control the legitimate use of force, a necessarily violent act. To control violence, one must commit violence. At this point the second half of my answer comes in, the wonderfully vague “probably.” Examples of this not being the case come to mind. The Civil Rights Movement, as commonly acknowledged, preached and practiced peace. While groups such as the SCLC certainly bore the brunt of much violence, they did not react in kind, and still saw several of their goals through. However, I would not qualify this as a revolution due to the fact that society still remained essentially the same. The end of de jure segregation did not mean the end of de facto segregation, and hierarchies of race still exist in the United States. Certainly, other examples exist, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovkia and Solidarity in Poland that I do not know enough about to investigate. I also include probably, because as much as I want to believe that we can predict the future if we have sufficient knowledge of the past, I know that idea holds no truth. Revolutions do not have to exist within the boundaries of the state or even acknowledge their existence. The state is a construct! We can trace its development. It is not a “natural” part of human existence. Revolutions can change so much, why not the above? Will it be insanely hard, and nothing like the planet has ever seen? Yes, of course. Is it possible? Yes. Should the left still have to consider and prepare for the fact that violence might become a tactic? Yes, but it should never be seen as something that has to happen. A revolution will not see success without heavy resistance to violence, and imaging a stateless world. Do I have the answers for that would look like? No. But I do know that modernity must be transformed, stripped for its parts and remodeled into something completely different.
On to the second question “how do survivors cope with the trauma after revolutions?” This question assumes that the revolutions are inherently violent. This question requires some specificity as well. Trauma, as I’ve mentioned, has a relatively short historical past. Trauma came about as a term in the 20th century, largely through the post-World War One work of Freud. It gained credence and wider usage post-Holocaust. In this case, I’m using it to refer to the pain and psychological damage that people experience after witnessing, participating in, or being victims of, violent acts. Coping refers to the various methods people use to deal with trauma. Many types of coping exist, all with varying levels of success.
Why is this question important? Revolutions have been violent as a rule in the past, and fomenting a non-violent revolution could very well not work. Assuming that violence does occur, whether the state perpetrates it on the revolutionaries or vice-versa, the victors must reckon with those acts. Attempting to hide it, or vaingloriously celebrate it, does not provide a good way forward. America was born in violence, born on the backs of slaves, millions of dead Native Americans, and in violent revolution. Americans have yet to reckon with this trauma in a constructive manner. Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others, have written persuasively on the need for Americans to come to terms with our history, most eloquently in “On Reparations.” This lack of a reckoning has, in part led us to our current situation where the U.S. has seen a growth in white supremacist movements, a refusal to address any of these issues in a meaningful way, and a nation divided by an ever-widening gulf. The French Revolution birthed a new Republic washed in blood thanks to the Terror, and people dealt with the psychic damage from this decades later. The left needs to put structures and systems in place outside of the state for dealing with the aftermath of a revolution. Not only do we need to plan for what a socialist, green future must look like, but we must plan for how to deal with the trauma that comes from making a violent break, from rupturing a worldview. Otherwise a revolution would create just another state trying to hide the blood on its hands. This type of state is not something that we can afford. I do not have the answers – shitty of me I know – but the questions need asking. How do we deal with the leaders of the toppled order? How do we come to terms with violence that may have been committed in the name of a revolution? How do we create and effect moral authority after committing acts of violence? What does a state that does not rely on violent coercion look like? These are all questions that must be answered and plans made for in the creation of a successful revolution.
I, of course, am just a guy writing a newsletter that 34 people receive in their inboxes. I do not have decades of expertise. I ate a frozen lasagna I bought at a Walgreens for dinner two days ago and thought “this is a nice treat.” But these questions need answering and if you have opinions or answers please share them. The future is ours, we just need be careful in how we take it.
Huge shout out to Karl Kuehner who helped, and continues to help me, think through all this. Come get beers with us sometime while we try to figure this all out. Anything I get wrong is, of course, entirely my fault.
[1] Historians still debate over if the American Revolution was a revolution or not. I tend to come down on the side of it being more a transfer of power than a revolution, but the question remains.
[2] Partition refers to the creation of India and Pakistan from the old British colonial territories. Millions of lives were lost during this year’s long event.
[3] Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 1919.