Saul Newman
March 2006

In 1798, Kant wrote the following about the French Revolution:

But even if the end viewed in connection with this event should not now be attained, even if the revolution or reform of a national constitution should finally miscarry, or, after some time had elapsed, everything should relapse into its former rut (as politicians now predict), that philosophical prophecy should lose nothing of its force. For this event is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled on any favourable occasion by nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind…

For Kant, the enthusiasm that the1789 Revolution inspired in onlookers was a clear sign of human progress. It revealed a disposition for improvement and a confidence in being able to achieve the fundamental goal of humanity – a republican constitution which would, moreover, prevent offensive war. Even if the upheaval itself proved to be a failure, even if it drowned itself in blood, the Revolution created a permanent fissure in the fabric of time, inscribing itself on the collective memory of history. It was an event which would continue to exist, whose significance would continue to reverberate long after the din of cannons had died away and despite the restoration of reactionary regimes in its wake. It would be a permanent horizon of human progress - something which could be recalled to memory and invoked in subsequent struggles.

Why is it so hard to think of revolution in these terms today? Our time seems to be conditioned by the eclipse of grand revolutionary projects of emancipation and social transformation, the eclipse of any alternative imaginary to the current order of global capitalism. We live in a period of universal reaction in which we are told that any notion of revolution is naïve, unrealistic and potentially catastrophic; that we must reconcile ourselves with the current economic and political order and recognise its virtue. A politics of sober reasonableness and resignation has replaced the enthusiastic ‘will to revolution’ described by Kant. Could it be that humanity’s goals have been achieved, that Kant’s prophecy of a constitution that people wished for and which would prevent offensive war has been realised. I hardly think so. We seem a long way from Kant’s anticipated universal peace, and the political constitutions on offer today hide, under the meaningless label of ‘democracy’, the worst kinds of abuses.

At the same time, however, even if this ‘will to revolution’ is difficult to imagine today, we should take Kant seriously when he says that the revolutionary promise always exists. In other words, we can say that the Revolution continues to resound today, and that a permanent horizon of emancipation is yet to be realised. Perhaps, despite the bleakness of our landscape, the possibility of revolution is always present as a spectral dimension that haunts our political reality, a permanent potentiality waiting to be invoked.

However, as Foucault shows, the question raised by Kant is what is to be made of the enthusiasm for revolution or ‘will to revolution’, as distinct from actual revolutionary experiences and programs. Why was Kant able to abhor the violence of the French Revolution and at the same time admire the enthusiasm that it generated? Can we still maintain an enthusiasm for revolution – a permanent will to revolution – despite the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century? The problem here is that the idea of revolution is born of an Enlightenment belief in rationality, human progress and the perfectibility of society, and yet it is precisely these discourses which, when applied by modern revolutionary programs, have led to disastrous violence and authoritarianism. Can we continue to speak of an ethos of revolution without falling back into the old paradigm of parties and programs?

We must first try to rethink the traditional idea of revolution. One of the central problems with revolutions in the past is that, in their attempt to overthrow existing forms of political authority, they have tended only to reaffirm them or to invent new ones in their place. This is the problem that I have referred to as the place of power: the structural tendency for power to reinvent and reaffirm itself, to reassert a position of sovereignty, particularly during moments of revolutionary upheaval. Of course, here we are talking about the problem of the State. Revolutions in the past have attempted to seize State power with the view to its eventual ‘withering away’; however, the result has often been a strengthening and expansion of the State, and with it a repression of the very revolutionary forces that sought to control it. In other words, perhaps there is something in the political forms that revolutions have taken in the past that has led to the perpetuation of the State. Revolutionary politics must therefore find a way of escaping the place of power by inventing strategies and forms of activism which do not rely on the State. Perhaps revolutions can no longer conceived in terms of using existing institutions to transform society, but rather of transforming society through the avoidance of institutional and authoritarian forms of politics altogether.

To this end, a new revolutionary politics must also be a politics without a Party. For a long time, the traditional parties of the Left have been in a state of crisis, and this is because the Party is ultimately part of the State apparatus – it is a conservative institution which, in claiming to represent the ‘masses’ or the ‘working class’, ties revolutionary politics to the State, limiting its radical potential and creativity. This occurs not only in the parliamentary setting, but also in moments of revolution. The Bolshevik revolution, for instance, while it initiated forms of direct democracy through the Soviets, also channeled these into an increasingly centralized and authoritarian party apparatus. The revolutionary vanguard Party contains centralized and bureaucratic apparatuses that mirror the very power structures and hierarchies of the political order whose destruction it claims to seek. Instead of these traditional modes of representation, a new revolutionary politics would instigate forms of direct democracy and seek to mobilize people around concrete situations and issues.

Another aspect of traditional revolutionary politics that must be questioned is the Marxist politico-economic category of class. While the working class is still relevant to radical politics, the problem lies in basing a concept of revolution on a single, central proletarian subject whose struggle was said to represent the universality of society. What we found instead was that while there was a real revolutionary potential amongst certain sectors of the proletariat during the nineteenth century, the majority of the working class confined itself to winning economic concessions within the capitalist system. The category of class is, in this sense, too narrow to encompass the multitude of different and heterogeneous struggles which are taking place on the horizon of global capitalism today – struggles not only for higher wages and labor rights, but also for indigenous autonomy, the environment, civil liberties, land redistribution, and so on. What is emerging with these struggles is not a global proletariat in the way that Marx would have defined it, but rather a global poor, a global ‘lumpenproletariat’. Perhaps, as Mikhail Bakunin argued back in the nineteenth century, the term ‘mass’ was a better designator for revolutionary subjectivity, ‘class’ implying hierarchy and exclusiveness.

However, I am not talking here about a simple politics of identity either: struggles for the recognition of a particular cultural, sexual, religious or ethnic identity are just as limited and reductionist, if not more so, than the traditional notion of class struggle. Instead, revolutionary politics today must be a politics of disidentification – in other words, a form of radical subjectification where one rebels not on the basis of one’s established social position or identity, but rather on its refusal. Foucault sees Kant’s ‘will to revolution’ in terms of a critical ontology aimed at ourselves and our present. Today, revolutionary politics would imply a similar questioning of ourselves and our accepted social roles and identities. As Max Stirner recognized, it is our ‘normal’ identity which ultimately ties us to existing political and social institutions, and therefore any revolution against these institutions must first start with a revolution or ‘insurrection’ against ourselves:

The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’ It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established.

A revolution today must take place on a number of different levels – not only political, economic and social but also personal and psychological. Moreover, it would be a mode of politics which, as we have seen, refuses the centralism of established political institutions such as the State, as well as formal modes of representation such as the Party. In this sense, revolutionary politics today might be said to have a distinctly anarchist or anti-authoritarian character. Elsewhere, I have referred to ‘postanarchism’ as a way of characterising contemporary radical politics, a politics which can no longer be called, with any real intelligibility, Marxist. One could see, for instance, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, with its decentralised activist networks and non-authoritarian forms of collective decision making, as an example of an anarchist politics in action. However, what is important here are not the labels that may be applied to it, but rather its emergence as an unprecedented global politics of emancipation, a politics that takes place outside the State and fundamentally questions the inevitability of ‘free markets’.

Movements such as this suggest that revolution can no longer be seen in terms of a single, dramatic seizure of power or a single overthrowing of the existing system. Power is both much too diffuse and cunning for frontal assaults. Rather, revolution must be seen in terms of multiple points of resistance and insurrection - a series of strategies which operate on a number of different fronts. But whatever form it takes, it is always singular and surprising. It is always an ‘event’ which invokes the spirit of Revolution that Kant spoke of, something whose emergence we cannot predict and whose course we cannot determine at the outset. Like those who observed the French Revolution, we can only greet it with reverence and awe.