The last shall be the first and the first last. – Frantz Fanon
The objective of a revolutionary is to
keep everything exactly as it was but replace those in power with
themselves, to become what they hate, to gain the approval of those they
despise. The mark of a successful revolutionary is recognition and
acceptance into the circles of oppressors.
A typical revolutionary is driven by a
desire for justice and no imagination. They can see injustice, they see
oppressors and oppressed, and they follow the obvious impulse to reverse
the two without changing the system that allows for oppression.
Revolution almost always sounds like a new system because
revolutionaries almost always call themselves The People, or at least
The [oppressed category] People, but in practice there is no
change. Revolution follows a Good Guy / Bad Guy, Manichean morality and
the goal is to kill all the Bad Guys until there is nothing left but
Good Guys. Fanon replaces white with black, Marx replaces master with
worker, no one replaces the paradigm. Malcolm X and Robert Mugabe desired
a perfect negative image of the apartheid state. Feminists celebrate
‘what women have achieved’ along their path to be exactly like caucasian
men.
A revolutionary outlook is binary. They
see themselves, as they are usually elite or part of the large, cohesive
block of powerful commoners required to keep the ruling class in power,
and they see the ruling class. Anyone else is outside their
consideration and will remain so. “I know nothing about her,” [1]
says Fanon of indigenous African women as he derides the work where
they detail their experience and describes the revolutionary desire to
be a white woman’s master. Marx sees those below the proletariat and
calls them “The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” [2] When Marx speaks of the abolition of class, he means the abolition of all class except the proletariat.
Since people are never binary,
revolutionary theory almost immediately has to start addressing the
classification problem, who is black, who is white, who is bourgeoise or
proletariat, who is male or female, and the rush to be at the extreme
end of your side creates a new class war within the class war. If the
last shall be first, the almost last have a new fight to be last. “Since
the sole motto of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner,” … the
“small people” of the nation… will be equally quick to insist that the
Dahomans go home to their own country, or will even go further and
demand that the Foulbis and the Peuhls return to their jungle or their
mountains”[3]
If, as Fanon said, “The black man wants to be white”[1]
then the justice sought is a very personal justice, for themselves only
as Malcolm X proposed in his desire for a new black state within the US
which would leave indigenous and others as unseen as always. Colonized
revolutionaries seek to decolonize by becoming the colonizers as women
seek to end subjection to men by entering masculinist establishment.
Even if they have no wish to enslave their former masters, the
revolutionary oppressed wish to master someone, to sit atop the
patriarchy, to claim their turn as a matter of justice. As long as the
paradigm remains, it matters not at all if those on top become the
former oppressed, they are just branch managers for the empire and
oppression continues uninterrupted. In no way did it make the world a
better place or change the paradigm for the better to have Barack Obama
as Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military or Condoleeza Rice
as US Secretary of State. In no way did women holding 56% of the seats
in Rwanda’s parliament, or having Louise Mushikiwabo, as Rwanda’s
Minister of Foreign Affairs & Cooperation, make Rwanda a kinder,
gentler state. In the end, the problems were not tied to gender, race or
class, but to the paradigm itself.
In the middle of a revolutionary frenzy
it is unwise to point out that oppressed may become oppressors as they
are the Good Guys who must never be accused of wrongdoing, but we really
don’t need any more Israels or Rwandas to prove the point. ‘You can’t
be racist/sexist against the oppressor!’ shrieks the illogic from the
revolutionary top, and any who question it are condemned as reactionary,
racist and sexist regardless of their race or sex. Those lower
in the revolutionary ponzi scheme of power are permitted be part of the
revolution only by exact adherence to the utterances of power. Deviance
is dangerous in a binary world.
Since the new power wants to be exactly like the old
power, continuing revolutions have created a world where everyone of
every race and gender strove to prove they were the same as powerful
caucasian men. A world where everyone sought the top of the ponzi
schemes of power, celebrity and wealth, where their desperate effort
towards the centre created the centripetal force that kept the Great Men
in power, that upheld the ponzi scheme of empire for all these years.
Everyone is defined in relation to the caucasian man of power. It is the
revolutionaries as much as the reactionaries that refuse to let the old
system go.
A dual spotlight and those in the shadows
The history of revolution is the history of Great Men overthrowing
Great Men. The revolutionary stories of oppression tell of the
oppressiveness of unsated envy and covetousness. The glory that follows
these revolutions is the glory of the new Great Man. Unheard forever are
those condemned to just get on with it, the so-called lumpenproles who
are understandably disinterested in who is currently atop the ponzi
scheme they have no entrance to.
Fanon overlooked completely the effect of
European patriarchy meeting matriarchal societies and what that did to
class relations between men and women. He exhaustively examines European
attraction to African indigenous men but he speaks not at all of any
attraction to African indigenous women despite admitting almost all
mixed race children had indigenous mothers. He attributes European fear
of the African to a repressed homosexuality in the men and a desire to
be raped in the women, but finds no such cause in the Antilleans fear of
the Senegalese. Everything pivots around the point at which he exists.
His myopic, binary gaze at the balance of power between African and
European in a patriarchy disregarded the imposition of the patriarchy in
the first place. Fanon described men who wished to overthrow other men
and sit in their place.
Marx ignored the fact that his
proletariats were part of a system of dissociation that recognized as
workers only those who served the powerful, not those who served the
weak or themselves. He also wanted to overthrow the oppressor without
acknowledging the first oppressed or the true size of the oppressive
structure itself. His ambition to flip the proletariat with their
masters required that autonomous individuals be locked in an even more
solid and cohesive block of commoners than before. His failure to
recognize the block of commoners as a creation of oligarchy caused him and all communists after to strengthen the club which held oligarchy in place.
Engels felt women lost their social power due to their loss of property ownership[4]
instead of seeing that property ownership was created to remove their
social power. The masculinist lens of Engels and Morgan was used to
reinterpret matriarchal indigenous cultures as communist, as societies
where everyone was assigned property and a place in society as
birthright instead of as social approval. This owned property and its
allocation must then be controlled by a patriarchal power or mini-state.
The approval of First Nations women that for generations was essential,
was suddenly to be disregarded as men were taught that to be a man
meant to humiliate and degrade their own source of approval. The vicious
degradation of women in formerly matrilineal societies served to
destroy not just the old power but the old structure. Indigenous women
were now last, their approval was replaced by control of currency, and
colonial government structure was taken over by property thieves both
petty and grand. Autonomy for First Nations in Canada now means
following a colonial construct of band councils revolving around
communist allocation of funds and property in formerly (mostly)
moneyless gifting cultures. Management of nations no longer includes the
most important authority, acceptance or rejection of individuals from
the nation.
A perpetual motion pendulum of revolution
As long as it is people, not actions, which are classified as Good and Evil, we will maintain a perpetual
motion pendulum of revolution. As every revolution is a simple reaction
to the initial action, they are mirror images. Slave
morality is a reaction to master morality, revolutionary militias are a
reaction to a police state, feminism is a reaction to masculinism, men
with guns are a reaction to men with guns. The centripetal force that
creates power also creates the centrifugal force that destroys it. In
every case, reactions will become what they destroy.
If you define yourself in relation to
your enemy, you’ve lost. You cannot believe armed militias are a
solution unless you believe in the worth or inevitability of a police
state. You cannot be a Feminist without endorsing the gendered world of
the Masculinist. The death penalty for murder reaffirms the right to
murder. Mirrored reactions are a result of a lack of imagination to see
outside the paradigm we live within. A reaction adds force to the
initial action. Overthrow by men with guns will be followed with rule by
men with guns. Justice through institutionalized bigotry will result in
institutionalized bigotry. “The
violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native
balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary
reciprocal homogeneity.”[3] We will have equilibrium when we step off the pendulum.
Those that protest the revolution are
told they must be reactionaries. Any criticism of the left brutality and
you must support the right brutality. Self-professed US
anti-imperialists are even more rigid than the imperialists because they
discovered the second spotlight and think they’ve seen all that there
is. Those that scream for solidarity ‘on the same side’ attempt to hide
the fact that a ponzi scheme has no sides, only a top and bottom. They
will cling to the messiahs of revolution and support revolutionary ponzi
schemes until it becomes absolutely indisputable that the two are one
again. As the revolution fights for and wins seats on the same panels
and the same international bodies as the reaction, the same dark
alliance is formed once more. Empire remains intact.
Revolutionary replacement of authority
will co-opt resistance. Revolution looks up not down. It seeks approval
and acceptance from the spotlight, not the shadows. Not only does
revolution not bring change, it brings progression down the same path
and frequently widens the window of acceptable oppression. All
revolution has simply entrenched and strengthened the hierarchy of
power, all revolutions will need to be followed by more revolutions
unless they are immediately replaced with resistance.
Between reaction and revolution there
is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different
people to drive while the same people are run over.
Revolution fights tyrants, resistance fights tyranny
It is not revolution we need, another turn of the same wheel along the same path, it is resistance. Resistance
uses the tyrant’s own power against them rather than strengthening that
power by reaction. Resistance fights all forms of oppression and
bigotry regardless of source by building and defending a tolerant
society. Resistance to patriarchy is not feminism, it is removal of
masculinism. Resistance to bigotry is not bigotry, it is diversity and
tolerance. Resistance to capitalism is not unions, it is dismantling of
the trade economy. It is not enough to weed, a new system must be
planted or the old seeds of tyranny will instantly grow again.
Oppressive power of the size in place
today will not be removed by the creation of revolutionary power. Even
if one chooses to think a new leader would stop the oppression it is no
longer in the power of a leader or leaders. Mass disobedience and a
refusal to acknowledge the authority of the powerful are the only hope
to collapse the current empire.
Anyone who occupies the old places of
power in a hierarchical ponzi scheme is an enemy of those below, even if
they just fought alongside them and ‘earned’ their place. It is the
position that is the enemy and it must be constantly collapsed by a
removal of support from every ponzi scheme of celebrity, wealth and
power. It is not enough to remove oppressors, the system of oppression
must be dismantled.
– – –
[1] Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952
[2] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), 1848
[3] Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), Grove Press, 1961
[4] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State: in the light of the researches of Lewis
H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des
Staats) 1884
