Thoughts On Revolution

Something that I've thought about, and which has only been reinforced by a reading of Proudhon's "General Idea of The Revolution In The 19th Century", is that revolution could be thought of as a process or a tendency rather than an event or endpoint. In this sense, a social revolution could be thought of as being a perpetual tendency, and the moment that a revolution ceases to function as a process it risks becoming a stagnation and eventually a reaction to another revolution. All too often in history, various revolutionaries have culminated their project in a particular event, after which they have settled or established themselves and ceased to continue pushing foreward. They have contented themselves to revolt against a particular idea or system, only to stop there and take up the position of a conservative. This is the haunting paradox of traditional revolutions: that the old revolutionaries become the new reactionaries.

A more subtle concept of social revolution is not one in which a singular event reaches a particular absolute and stops there, but that of a perpetual process in which there is always progress to be made, in which the transcendance is on-going and the affirmations that follow from the negations nonetheless lead us toward new negations and affirmations. In this sense, we can say that "the revolution never dies" with a straight face and without fear of being misunderstood. The revolutionary destroys to create and creates to destroy. The social revolution cannot be summed up strictly as a mere negation, as there is always an implied affirmation that follows the negation. On the other hand, each new affirmation provides something new to potentially negate. In a sense, an absolute ultimate end state is never actually reached, and thank goodness that statis is neither possible or desirable. Social revolution is the perpetual dynamism of approximations.