Reconsidering Revolution

When Richard Nixon promised the American people a “generation of peace,” most radicals chuckled and sneered. It’s a dogma with the Old Left and a tradition with the New that sooner or later, in one way or another, a revolution is coming to the United States, an upheaval that will sweep away not only the likes of the president but also the imperial order on which his pledge is apparently based. Of course, radicals argue endlessly about when and how this revolution will come, but almost all agree that it is on the way.

However, despite the rhetorical flourishes, the president apparently meant what he said. He told an interviewer, long before the rest of us had seen the light at the end of that famous tunnel, that he was convinced Vietnam would be America’s last war—“Yes,” he said, “the very last one.” I believe it’s time radicals stopped snickering and considered these assertions, because the odds are that he’s closer to being right than we are.

Consider, for a beginning, the fact that Nixon’s foreign policy over the past three years all but admits: that it was the U.S. that was the major destabilizing influence among the “superpowers.” It was our Cold War paranoia that kicked off and sustained the arms race; it was our anticommunist crusade that built bases and toppled governments all around the world; and it was our arrogance that perpetrated one of history’s dirtiest wars just to prove we could maintain our “interest” in an obscure Asian nation. The administration has backed away from and downplayed all these positions, admitting that the Chinese and their Peoples’ government exist, cutting the losses in Indochina, and replacing containment with trade.

Just how far this process has gone already was shown vividly a year or so ago when a national television news program ran a special report on American businessmen in the Soviet Union. The cameras showed them streaming through customs at the Moscow airport, gray suits, briefcases and all. We’ve all heard about the new $20 billion chemical deal with Occidental Oil and the giant wheat sales, but perhaps the most telling sign of how receptive the communist world is to the new attitude is the report that Pepsi Cola will soon be bottled and sold in Russia (though of course that country won’t get the secret recipe for the drink). The deal was closed by Pepsico’s president in person after he charmed Soviet leaders with a transistor radio shaped like a Pepsi can; the stern Peoples’ Commissars reportedly broke up when they heard it, and signed on the dotted line. It is almost unnecessary to note that the president of Pepsico is an old friend and client of an ex-lawyer named Richard Nixon, which presumably has something to do with why Russia didn’t get The Real Thing first.

Every one of these businessmen who makes a deal with Russia is one more solid, probably Republican lobbyist on behalf of a sustained detente with that country. Another crowd is forming a line in Hong Kong, waiting to do just the same thing in the Peoples’ Republic across the border.

But that’s not all there is to detente. Besides having a propensity for commerce in common, the “superpowers” are growing structurally and politically more alike all the time. This is obviously true in industry, where there are only so many ways to run a steel mill or a computer network but it is also the case in government. The need for control of the information flow that represses dissenting writers and censors the press in Moscow is the same impulse that produces the bugging and jailing of reporters, strong-arming of networks and the blanket use of “executive privilege” in Washington. (Watergate, incidentally, whatever its outcome, is not likely to erase this tendency, only delay it somewhat at best.) This is not to mention the common imperial interests and behavior: they have their Czechoslovakia, we have our Santo Domingo and Greece and others.

What the White House apparently sees emerging out of the new relationship between this government and the other major regimes is perhaps best described as an “oligopoly of power,” a community of interest among the world’s biggest industrial nations that is directly comparable to an economic oligopoly like the American automobile industry. In an oligopoly the number of players in the game is normally fixed, because cost of entry and, if necessary, political manipulation serve to keep newcomers out. The market shares, or “spheres of influence” of the various corporations are usually quite stable and well-defined. There is also normally at least a tacit agreement to keep competition among members on a superficial, even illusory level, and to keep such conflicts as exist marginal. This is so because life-and-death fights are bloody, unpredictable, and expensive even for the victors; it is much easier to simply stick with one’s share and rake in the money.

Economic oligopolies in this country have proven virtually impervious to outside intervention: antitrust laws gather dust, regulatory agencies do little more than recruit rising talent for the companies in their jurisdiction, and Washington’s elected loudmouths can be lobbied or bribed into irrelevance, if not silence.

There is every reason to expect an international political oligopoly to be just as stable and immune from direct assault. There may still be calls to smash imperialism or roll back the Iron Curtain, but they will take their place alongside the “competition” among Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick, all of whose hoopla serves only to fatten the coffers of General Motors. Conflicts among the super powers will not end, but they will tend to be marginalized—pushed out of the limelight and kept at a “reasonable cost” in money, casualties, and charges of war crimes. This, of course, is what Nixon has succeeded in doing in Indochina, at least for the moment, with the cooperation of Russia and China. And it’s clearly what he has begun to do in the Middle East. Even if Nixon should be removed, however, his successors will be more likely to continue this part of his program than perhaps any other: certainly George McGovern would have if he had been elected in 1972.

Such a world power structure would be almost impossible to overthrow by a direct assault. Where would any erstwhile revolutionaries get the necessary weapons technology, since even Hanoi could only obtain an insufficient number of third-rate anti-aircraft missiles from Russia? That is assuming they had the troops to start with. About the only thing that would seriously undermine this order would be some great international catastrophe, like the Great Famines or the ecological collapse various people have predicted. But even these eventualities are not likely to work in the direction of justice or liberation for the survivors, and should not be regarded as a substitute for overthrow.

So where would such a development as this “oligopoly of power” leave radicals who still believe that a revolution is coming? This conviction is mainly based on the Marxist doctrine that the internal contradictions of international capitalism are ripening into an intolerably unstable situation in which basic structural change will sooner or later become not only necessary but unavoidable; and that on the other side of that revolution lies a socialist society that will be qualitatively better, freer, more abundant, etc. But if in fact the drift of history turns out to be toward a new, almost feudal stability where the big industrial socialist states have more in common with the big industrial capitalist states than with their small, under-developed but more evangelically communist brethren, then the revolutionaries’ whole worldview is in basic trouble. Consider the example of Yugoslavia, where widespread workers’ control of industry has led to an explicit, “democratic” crash program of nationwide bourgeoisification, which is proceeding so rapidly that even Fortune magazine has stopped to take a breathless, four-color look at it. This rush into American-style consumerism on the part of a country that has already had its socialist revolution suggests that what erstwhile American revolutionaries have to look forward to is not as encouraging as they think.

But there is a substantial minority among native radicals whose perspective will not be so deeply threatened if Nixon’s “oligopoly of power” is actually achieved. These are the religious radicals, particularly those rooted in the biblical tradition. They will not be in such bad shape because this tradition has been warning for thousands of years that political power seen as the central means and arena of work for change and justice is an illusion. These warnings go way back: early prophets warned the tribes of Israel that they would regret setting up a monarchy in order to be like the other nations in the region; later, Isaiah and Jeremiah spoke bitterly and eloquently against the international intrigues through which the kings of Israel and Judah sought to shore up their petty realms; and Jesus, who seems to have been as offended by Roman rule of the Holy Land as any other pious Jew of his time, still refused to lead the uprising that the Zealots expected all candidates for the Messiahship to undertake.

This theme of danger and corruption of political power must carry considerable weight among those who take the biblical source seriously. Judaism and Christianity have outlasted all the empires of the West since their appearance and they have shaped history more decisively than any haughty conqueror; and this is quite a record to fall back on. Moreover they have outlasted the empires for specifically religious reasons: their biblical faith is continually subversive of the basic acceptance of unrestrained power, inequality, and injustice, which are the foundation and fruit of empire. Sooner or later these values have even undermined the unholy alliances of church and state in which their institutional executives were always getting entangled. And so, as empires have come and gone, and as one’s heroes become another’s anathemas, a small but persistent number of people in succeeding generations have found more credibility in the assertion that history is ruled by God and not man than they have in the endless variations of official emperor worship. There have always been some in each generation ready to take seriously their biblical roots, and the way of life it calls them to.

Thus for today’s religious radicals, those who agree with their Marxist cousins that Nixon’s “generation of peace” will be that of a new pax romana, a repressive peace imposed by apparently overwhelming force, the key issue is not one of power or no power, but of different kinds of power, and the values that underlie them.

One would think that such a conclusion would be axiomatic for people who call themselves Christian, but such is of course not the case. For most of America’s history the mainline churches, especially the Protestant ones, and their leaders have been full-fledged members of a white, Anglo-Saxon establishment. Thus they develop the ingrained habit of participating in and sprinkling holy water over the establishment’s use of its ever-growing political and economic power. The religious activists of the early '60s inherited this habit with their collars, even though for them it often meant dealing with and voting for Catholic and other ethnic Democrats who were uncouth newcomers to the inner circles of power. As the decade wore on and in particular the Indochina aggression grew more hideous, many of these activists were radicalized to the left, into proto or explicitly Marxist perspectives. It should not be hard to see how this new stance was an organic continuation of the earlier religious-political power connection, in different garb. There were, even as far back as 1965, important exceptions to this trend, among them two priest-brothers named Berrigan, but it is still fair to say that most approached the matter of social change as a problem in the manipulation of political power.

Today that connection is rapidly breaking down and the odds that Nixon and his successors will succeed in building his stable “oligopoly of power” are only one reason why. Another is that the religious radicals have by and large proven to be real bush-leaguers at power politics, particularly radical power politics. The vogue of clandestine draft board raids is an example. Phil Berrigan and many others apparently really believed for awhile that they could actually put the Selective Service System out of business if they could only mobilize enough conspirators and a sufficient number of cans of paint. But as soon as they began carrying out their raids and disrupting the system’s paperwork, their movement fell victim to the whole panoply of government repression: spies, provocateurs, wiretaps, grand juries, and all the other paranoia-inducing paraphernalia. The number of groups who, like the Flower City Conspiracy and the Camden 28, were prodded into carrying out foolhardy, risky raids while a corps of FBI men stood waiting and giggling in the outer darkness, is larger than most of the participants care to total up. The price they paid in suspicion and fearful isolation is still being tolled. It is a testimony to the potency of their belief that they have managed to sustain any community at all. The Communist Party’s membership never recovered from the similar ordeal they were put through in the early '50s.

On the other hand the religious radicals have been most powerful in these past years when they acted openly out of the integrity of their faith commitments, applied with a sophisticated understanding of their situation (a combination Jesus advised in Matthew 10:16 with the charge to be harmless as doves but wise as serpents). Take for instance, the March Against Death in 1969, which was thought up by a Quaker. For 36 hours its participants filed past the White House from Arlington Cemetery, each bearing a candle and a card with the name of a war victim on it, which they tossed in a pile over the White House fence as they called out the name. During that day and a half no newscast was complete without the sight or sound of this solemn procession, and by the time it was finished the names of the shouted dead were reverberating across the continent.

If Nixon’s and Kissinger’s new world order does get constructed, it should go a long way toward breaking the alliance between religion and politics that has been so much a part of our history, if only because this new kind of empire, like most of its predecessors, is its own god. This is apparent enough in the atheist socialist states; but it is very close to becoming obvious even here.

Such an actual separation of religion and politics, and the impotence and irrelevance it will mean for religious radicals, will be blessings in disguise for us. Such a separation will leave us with fewer temptations to turn away from our faith and its clear lessons about the kind of power we should seek to exercise. Moreover, this is a situation where we may well be surprised to find our credibility growing among those who still cling to the revolutionary eschatology, as well as those who have abandoned it but don’t know what to replace it with.

But what sort of “strategy,” if the term can be applied, does the religious radical perspective described here suggest for dealing with the possibility of a stable but repressive world order? It is a little early to talk with certainty about this, but some initial outlines of the response can be detected. First of all the guiding conception will shift from regarding tactics for public displays of resistance as the precursor of a direct assault on the regime (as for instance the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party regarded the massive anti-Vietnam rallies organized by the National Peace Action Coalition as precursors of a revolutionary uprising, and general strike). Instead the emphasis will be on confronting the imperial rulers with what the Bible calls signs. A sign is an action that visibly confronts one kind of reality (the empire) with another and better reality (reign of God) in a way that is vivid and direct enough that those who see it understand better the nature of the conflict and their role in it. The March Against Death was a sign. Another came when 22 Quaker canoes blockaded the ammunition ship Nitro in a New Jersey harbor as it began another trip to the Gulf of Tonkin. The sailors who crowded the edge of the deck to cheer the canoeists as they fought off the Coast Guard’s grappling hooks understood this; a half-dozen seamen understood it so well they jumped off the Nitro into the oily bay to join them.

Such manifestations, however, are but a small part of what a religious radical response would be. In between the public actions we will be at work reconstructing institutions that embody the values of our faith (if not perfectly, at least with more integrity than the empire’s agencies do). These institutions will provide our base of operations, our refuge, and will be consciously constructed to last awhile, because we live the expectation of a long struggle, in which we will be expected to suffer much.

Most importantly, religious radicals will work hard at reappropriating and coming into deeper dialogue with the roots of their traditions—a long way of saying they will study the Bible and worship a lot. This is what the Bible says we should do of course, but even the most atheist communist will agree that continuing study and explication of the basic Marxist-Leninist texts (or, depending on the variety, Trotskyist and Maoist texts as well) are key elements in discovering and maintaining the “correct ideology.”

One other reason we will study the Bible is because through it we hope to gain help in what the text calls “discernment of spirits;” in the vernacular this means being able to tell real events and issues from illusory ones, particularly those merchandised by the mass media. This is a capacity too little appreciated on the left in our generation. The Vietnam Cease-Fire, for instance, is a phony event. A real event is something that makes an actual difference whether noticed by anybody or not, and too often the media especially fail to notice these.

One such real event that radicals in this country generally have not taken enough notice of in the past decade is the arrival of our children and the demand of this new generation for nurture. Not enough of us ever stop to realize that this is one of the primary ways in which any group persists beyond the founders’ lifetimes, and that goes especially for empires. The people in charge of American capitalism know how real this process is; dedicated consumers are made and not born, and big business starts well before birth socializing our children into its way of life/death. An empire stands or falls on its capacity to turn each new generation into properly-trained subjects, especially the “house niggers” who will work at the foot of the seats of power. Yet one rarely finds in the many “alternate newspapers” of the left and its periphery serious attentions given to the problems involved in raising children so that they can escape or overcome this kind of conditioning and operate on a different set of values. You can find a great deal about how to prevent, abort, or escape children, but radical parents must mainly turn to the established parents magazines, which are part and parcel of the capitalist machinery, to find discussions of the issues that concern them. It would thus appear that the current crop of radical parents is so far not doing a noticeably successful job of dealing with this real event. This is unfortunate, because our children will get raised one way or another, and it is safe to say that if we don’t do it the empire will.

Among religious radicals who are able to apply the discernment of spirits to their situation with some success, it may well develop that the writing of children’s books might come to be regarded as a superior form of “political” activity than many of the things we have formerly regarded as supremely valuable, such as mass demonstrations. A really alternative literature for children has yet to be written and the interest among feminists in books that combat sexual stereotypes is but the barest of beginnings.

In seeking out the challenges of real rather than phony events, and in dealing with them in a manner consistent with the imperatives of our faith, religious radicals will be waging what is perhaps the most important kind of anti-imperialist struggle, a battle against the spirit of empire, against the mindset and values that make it possible for such a repressive order to exist at all. To be credible such a struggle will have to go on all the time, both during public demonstrations and in the private routine of our lives; and to keep its integrity, the struggle must be engaged in as an attempt at a faithful response to the biblical witness.

This means reminding ourselves frequently that our faith and God’s Spirit are the sources of whatever power—in the outward political sense—we may be able to cause to move. We can take confidence not just from our texts but from recent events that this power can be considerable, even crucial. If our witness does not succeed in toppling a new oligopoly of power in the 30 years left us in our prime, today’s religious radicals can at least hope to plant our faith among our children in a reasonably intact form. In the process, they will come a generation closer to subverting, outlasting, and defeating this empire the way their forebearers defeated the earlier ones. Should the president and his cohorts succeed in their design, this may be more hope than many others will be able to sustain.

POSTSCRIPT

This essay was originally written for an alternative weekly paper in the Boston area that has an overwhelmingly secular readership. In that context I felt the argument would be most effective if presented straight, without much reference to the sources of the ideas, most of which would be unfamiliar to that audience. The Post-American’s readers are from a different context, however, and I think they will not be too surprised to learn that this article was sparked above all by my understanding of the writings of Jacques Ellul. Most of my main themes—the repressive alliance of political power and technology across ideological lines, the difference between politics and the real work of the church, and the projection of a near future in which religious radicalism will be acting out of a situation of “irrelevance” and “impotence”—all these have been borrowed wholesale from Ellul. I have found these concepts to carry real prophetic weight and power, and this essay is the result of an attempt to apply them critically to the trend of events both at the national level and among religious resisters.

Further careful application and evaluation of Jacques Ellul’s works should in my opinion be an important item on the editorial agenda of this journal. Not only have they affected my own thinking and belief in a very important way, they have also been very influential in the evolution of the religious resistance of the past decade. For example, Thomas Merton held retreats at his Kentucky Abbey for people who later became key figures in the Catholic Left, years before there was such a thing, in the public eye at least. And at these retreats, he introduced them to Ellul’s works, which were then quite obscure. Years later, when Dan Berrigan was released from prison and was asked to teach a course to the activist students at Union Theological Seminary in the fall of 1972, his syllabus was built around a reading analysis of Ellul’s works. Thus it is evident that this body of work has left its mark on recent events despite the relative narrowness of the author’s reputation.

For readers interested in getting into Ellul’s writings, there are two that I would suggest for a start: The Presence of the Kingdom (Seabury, paperback) is a very compact, schematic presentation of his thought, originally published 30 years ago. In Hope In Time of Abandonment (Seabury, cloth), he takes up these major themes again, in light of his theological explorations and sociological work over the intervening three decades. His False Presence of the Kingdom (Seabury, cloth) addresses explicitly the problem of the church and political action, and does so by considering critically the experience of his own communion, the French Reformed Church. This may sound a little irrelevant to American conditions, but it is not; church liberals turn out to be about the same everywhere, and the book is full of material to ponder.

Eerdmans has published a number of his more strictly religious works, among them The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (paper), which deals with God’s omnipotence and man’s freedom, and The Meaning of the City (cloth), which I found a powerful antidote to the notions of The Secular City, though Ellul never mentioned the latter. Eerdmans has also republished a special issue of the magazine Katallagete devoted entirely to Introducing Jacques Ellul (paper), which contains articles by a number of scholars and writers, both secular and religious. A number of his sociological works have been published by Knopf: One of the most valuable for understanding and further extending some of the elements of my essay is Autopsy of Revolution (cloth), and of course the work for which he is best known in “the world,” The Technological Society (cloth and paper). He has a dozen or so other works new in English and all that I have read are well worth the effort in digging them up.

Charles Fager was a freelance writer and an editor of the Boston Real Paper when this article appeared.