Every time when we use the idea of revolution in relation to public processes we have to understand where a qualitative change of a society in review, or an object in a broader sense, is happening? Please note that a revolution is not necessarily to mean a qualitative change of the state of society but a shift in power under a forced pressure of society. And that same society at times cherishes not a new ideology, new politics, new economics or, more accurately, the ontology of development, but an issue of the personality and the team having found themselves at the realm of power.
So, in pursue of qualitative changes, the masses sometimes advocate a revolution in the form of shift of power, failing to realize that they only could find their needs/requirements in quite a different level of action and that they could not be satisfied due to the revolutionary shift of power. Indeed, soon after a ‘revolution’, the society is beginning to realize that the overcoming of what has been achieved and what is wishful is not happening, while the situation worsens by political battles between those who came to power and those who lost the power. So, the revolutionary shift of power without qualitative changes for really satisfying peoples’ needs is hard to name a revolution, since no breakthrough is happening and the new power ends with new people with old ontology.
Can we, Malaysians, make a revolution with a qualitative change for really satisfying us ?
Are we going to be able to build a revolutionary vanguard that can lead a mass movement to overthrow the existing system ?
Can Datuk Anwar lead this revolution for us ?
Hope God will bless us ...
QUOTE
What kind of movements and strategy will allow us to take power? To make this clear, let me tell you what happened in France in May – June of 1968. I said that you need two things to make a revolution – a vanguard and an objective situation in which there is a crisis and a mass radicalization. Well, in France you had that objective situation – but you had no revolutionary vanguard. Let me show you how, if there had been a strong vanguard, revolutionaries in France would have led a struggle to take power from the ruling class:
In France you had 10 million workers on strike. You had another two million farmers supporting them. Plus the 600,000 students. Now, since the total population of the country is 50 million, this means that an overwhelming majority of families had at least one if not two people involved in the strike. It was clear that the majority of the people in France were out on strike, making certain demands. You had a majority. There was no need to negotiate with anyone.
What would a Marxist vanguard do in such a situation? First of all, we would fight for the formation of a strike council of the whole country which would simply say, “Well, it’s clear we have a majority, so we are going to have free elections to decide all the questions under demand here. And these elections are going to be run by the strike council because the government has shown itself to be undemocratic.”
Remember, at the time of the crisis, de Gaulle (the president of France –YSA) had no real power, except in the sense that there was a vacuum which he filled. Do you know that when de Gaulle wanted to hold a referendum during the strike, it was so unpopular that he couldn’t get any workers in all of France to print the ballots? He had to go to Belgium, to ask the Belgian workers to print the ballots, and they refused too! He had no strength. One might ask, what about the army? But he had no army with him. Maybe the officers, but the soldiers – who were the soldiers of France? They were the sons and brothers of the strikers.
The first thing a strike council would do would be to immediately hold elections in the army barracks for new officers, and any officers that didn’t accept this would be thrown out. And then you would go to the barracks and ask the soldiers to share their guns. The guns would be used to help form militias of the people. Then you would dissolve the police force and have the workers out on the streets patrolling. That could have been done in a number of days under the conditions that existed in France. Just to start with, you had hundreds of thousands of students who would have been immediately willing to participate in the militias and to arm themselves.
Then elections would be held in the factories, and other institutions, and delegates representing the rank-and-file workers in the factories, the students, the soldiers in the army and people in all the various institutions would come together in a central council. And you would put on the floor of this body, which would be the most democratically chosen body in the history of the country, the motion that all industries are nationalized. We would simply pass that, along with other programs which would meet the people’s needs.
When you think about it, every step I’ve outlined, every demand, is based on democratic ideas. The word “socialist” hasn’t even been used. Because what socialism means is not simply that socialists come to power, but that a class – the masses of the working people – come to power. That could have happened in France. The objective conditions were there, the radicalization among the masses. What was missing? There was no sufficiently strong Marxist vanguard. The working class in France was led by a party which supports capitalism, called the Communist Party. So the big problem in France, in order to make a revolution, is to depose the Communist Party from the leadership of the working class.
In the United States, things are going to happen in a similar way to what happened in France. Not the same, but similar. Look what’s happening on campus – it’s spontaneous; on campus after campus you see radical actions. The same thing is going to take place in the working class. It is already happening with the masses of Black people. As these movements develop, the vanguard at first is small, and can play only a limited role. But, out of these actions come young people who begin to understand that you need to think out the whole question.
They learn from experience. Maybe they get busted and they start thinking how to be effective. And someone sits down with them and explains how you make a revolution, how you form a vanguard and slowly build up and participate in mass struggles, how you get an interrelationship between the mass movements and the vanguard, and how you reach a situation where a crisis will develop and the vanguard will be able to lead the masses to take power.
The key to victory is moving the masses. Any concept, any struggle that eliminates this will only end in disaster. Unfortunately, the ultraleft idea that you can go around the masses, or make the revolution without them, is one that is creeping into the thinking of many students and young people today. But there ill be a reaction to this. One of the troubles with ultraleftism is, of course, that when people react against it, they sometimes react against militancy in general, and flip over to become opportunists. In fact, you’re going to see people who were opportunists yesterday going over to being ultraleft today, and the ultralefts of today flipping over to become opportunists. Because all of them are looking for the same thing – a shortcut. And there is no shortcut to change the system.
It takes a long time. You have to have a perspective of fighting for 10, 20 or even more years. Just like the Vietnamese say they will fight 10, 20, or 40 years – whatever is necessary. You can’t walk into the YSA and say, “I want a guarantee that the revolution will happen in five years because after that I have other plans.” The revolution doesn’t work that way.
So, to end, I want to say this. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to rise up over and over again. We don’t create these conditions, but there is one thing we can do. That is, we can create the subjective factor – the vanguard. By entering the YSA, by building the revolutionary party, by understanding and participating in the revolutionary process, we can make victory possible.
Are we going to be able to do it? Other generations have failed to do it. Are we going to be able to build a revolutionary socialist vanguard that can lead a mass movement to overthrow the system? That’s the challenge to this young generation. And the answer of the YSA is yes, we’re going to do it.
More detail: http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/revolution.html
In France you had 10 million workers on strike. You had another two million farmers supporting them. Plus the 600,000 students. Now, since the total population of the country is 50 million, this means that an overwhelming majority of families had at least one if not two people involved in the strike. It was clear that the majority of the people in France were out on strike, making certain demands. You had a majority. There was no need to negotiate with anyone.
What would a Marxist vanguard do in such a situation? First of all, we would fight for the formation of a strike council of the whole country which would simply say, “Well, it’s clear we have a majority, so we are going to have free elections to decide all the questions under demand here. And these elections are going to be run by the strike council because the government has shown itself to be undemocratic.”
Remember, at the time of the crisis, de Gaulle (the president of France –YSA) had no real power, except in the sense that there was a vacuum which he filled. Do you know that when de Gaulle wanted to hold a referendum during the strike, it was so unpopular that he couldn’t get any workers in all of France to print the ballots? He had to go to Belgium, to ask the Belgian workers to print the ballots, and they refused too! He had no strength. One might ask, what about the army? But he had no army with him. Maybe the officers, but the soldiers – who were the soldiers of France? They were the sons and brothers of the strikers.
The first thing a strike council would do would be to immediately hold elections in the army barracks for new officers, and any officers that didn’t accept this would be thrown out. And then you would go to the barracks and ask the soldiers to share their guns. The guns would be used to help form militias of the people. Then you would dissolve the police force and have the workers out on the streets patrolling. That could have been done in a number of days under the conditions that existed in France. Just to start with, you had hundreds of thousands of students who would have been immediately willing to participate in the militias and to arm themselves.
Then elections would be held in the factories, and other institutions, and delegates representing the rank-and-file workers in the factories, the students, the soldiers in the army and people in all the various institutions would come together in a central council. And you would put on the floor of this body, which would be the most democratically chosen body in the history of the country, the motion that all industries are nationalized. We would simply pass that, along with other programs which would meet the people’s needs.
When you think about it, every step I’ve outlined, every demand, is based on democratic ideas. The word “socialist” hasn’t even been used. Because what socialism means is not simply that socialists come to power, but that a class – the masses of the working people – come to power. That could have happened in France. The objective conditions were there, the radicalization among the masses. What was missing? There was no sufficiently strong Marxist vanguard. The working class in France was led by a party which supports capitalism, called the Communist Party. So the big problem in France, in order to make a revolution, is to depose the Communist Party from the leadership of the working class.
In the United States, things are going to happen in a similar way to what happened in France. Not the same, but similar. Look what’s happening on campus – it’s spontaneous; on campus after campus you see radical actions. The same thing is going to take place in the working class. It is already happening with the masses of Black people. As these movements develop, the vanguard at first is small, and can play only a limited role. But, out of these actions come young people who begin to understand that you need to think out the whole question.
They learn from experience. Maybe they get busted and they start thinking how to be effective. And someone sits down with them and explains how you make a revolution, how you form a vanguard and slowly build up and participate in mass struggles, how you get an interrelationship between the mass movements and the vanguard, and how you reach a situation where a crisis will develop and the vanguard will be able to lead the masses to take power.
The key to victory is moving the masses. Any concept, any struggle that eliminates this will only end in disaster. Unfortunately, the ultraleft idea that you can go around the masses, or make the revolution without them, is one that is creeping into the thinking of many students and young people today. But there ill be a reaction to this. One of the troubles with ultraleftism is, of course, that when people react against it, they sometimes react against militancy in general, and flip over to become opportunists. In fact, you’re going to see people who were opportunists yesterday going over to being ultraleft today, and the ultralefts of today flipping over to become opportunists. Because all of them are looking for the same thing – a shortcut. And there is no shortcut to change the system.
It takes a long time. You have to have a perspective of fighting for 10, 20 or even more years. Just like the Vietnamese say they will fight 10, 20, or 40 years – whatever is necessary. You can’t walk into the YSA and say, “I want a guarantee that the revolution will happen in five years because after that I have other plans.” The revolution doesn’t work that way.
So, to end, I want to say this. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to rise up over and over again. We don’t create these conditions, but there is one thing we can do. That is, we can create the subjective factor – the vanguard. By entering the YSA, by building the revolutionary party, by understanding and participating in the revolutionary process, we can make victory possible.
Are we going to be able to do it? Other generations have failed to do it. Are we going to be able to build a revolutionary socialist vanguard that can lead a mass movement to overthrow the system? That’s the challenge to this young generation. And the answer of the YSA is yes, we’re going to do it.
More detail: http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/revolution.html