In the process of struggle people are forced to question their ideas (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Many of the best fighters against racism in history have embraced revolution as the key means to rid society of oppression.
In the 1960s, the US black rights advocate Malcolm X contrasted his radicalism to that of the Civil Rights Movement.
He said, “Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee.”
A few years later, Angela Davis wrote in a similar spirit, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
They are part of a long anti-racist revolutionary tradition, stretching back to the 18th century revolts of enslaved people.
It continues into this century in multi-ethnic uprisings in divided societies—including Syria and Sudan, and in the Arab Spring of 2011.
A key reason for the Marxist focus on revolution is the challenge it poses to racism, imperialism and all the other divisions inside the working class.
Vladimir Lenin, who built the Bolshevik party in Russia to lead history’s first successful workers’ revolution, was determined that all socialists should understand how such uprisings come about.
He described revolutionary situations as “a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth.”
In other words, revolutions occur when our rulers are in crisis and divided about how to rule us—and when workers and the poor can no longer endure the daily hardship and indignity of the system.
Marxists point out that genuine revolutions are not coups where an “enlightened” minority grabs power with the aim of bringing change from above.
Neither are they revolutions that seek only to change the faces of those in charge, but which leave society’s structures and property ownership intact.
Instead, we argue that a real revolution is one led by the working class itself.
This mass democratic movement seeks both to get rid of those at the top and completely replace their system—and, importantly, their ideas too.
Karl Marx argued that revolution is the only way to bring about fundamental change for two reasons.
First, because there is no way the ruling class can be forced to give up its power, property and privilege voluntarily.
Second, because it is the only way the working class can “succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew,” as he put it.
The “muck of ages” he talked about is the sum of all the backward ideas and prejudices that divide us today, making us think of each other as competitors and enemies.
Rather than waiting for people’s ideas to change for the better, Marx insisted that class struggle was a far better educator.
Workers, he said, were forced to struggle, irrespective of the many backward ideas in their heads.
Strikes and protests were inevitable because the system was based on ever-increasing exploitation and misery.
In the process of struggle—sometimes including small struggles—people are forced to question their ideas and even long‑held beliefs.
Strikers, for example, learn quickly that the press is against them. Newspapers characterise them as greedy and uncaring. And, on the picket line, strikers often learn that the police and the law act in the interests of employers, not workers.
Those acting may well ask, if the newspapers lie about strikers, what else do they lie about? And, if the police don’t act for us, who do they act for?
Anyone who has been on strike will tell you about the changes they saw in their workmates during the dispute.
Such questioning arises during individual strikes, but in mass strikes and in revolutions, the hold of ruling class ideas can be ruptured.
That’s because workers finally have a sense of their collective power.
Glimpses of that process can be seen in all types of revolution.
This year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Descriptions of it tell us that many people who had been staunch pro-British monarchists at the beginning of the revolt were within weeks the polar opposite. Now they wanted full independence.
Hundreds of revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations circulated as new ideas took hold. The best known of these was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in 1776.
Paine was an anti‑slavery campaigner, describing slavery as “an outrage against humanity and justice.” America was at this time a society made prosperous by the horrors of the plantation economy.
Yet, in the midst of revolution, the seeds of anti‑slavery ideas began to take hold. Later these would help to shape the abolitionist movement that culminated in the US Civil War that began in 1861. The question of abolition became an increasingly vital debate.
The preeminent black Marxist, CLR James, observed a similar process in the French Revolution.
He described the thinking of the Parisian poor—the sans‑culottes, who became the most revolutionary force in France. James noted that they were largely indifferent to colonial slavery in 1789. But by 1792 they had come to despise the slaveholding colonialists more than any other part of the “old order.”
They derided them as “the aristocrats of the skin.” James said the masses were “striking at royalty, tyranny, reaction and oppression of all types and with these they included slavery.”
These repeated episodes of radical change in people’s ideas are why Marx argued that in making revolution, workers not only change the world around them, they are also in the process of changing themselves.
But what of the danger that oppression and backward ideas will return when the heat of events eventually cools?
Here Marxists make two key points.
Following a successful workers’ revolution, the material circumstances that gave rise to and encouraged racist ideas undergo massive change.
Capitalism uses racism as a way to divert anger against the system and those who run it.
It encourages competition among workers and the poor that leaves the question of who made them poor unanswered.
Racism offers a sense of superiority even to very poor people. It is designed to make them believe that “whiteness” means their interests are the same as those of the wealthy.
It is a barrier to solidarity and to effective class struggle.
But in post-revolutionary society, the material circumstances—and the ideas which flow from them—are changed.
Instead of competition, workers can now only rule through cooperation. In order for them to keep control of industry and society and stop the old bosses from reasserting themselves, people are forced to guard against division.
Yet revolution marks only the beginning of the process. And those who want it to fail will try their best to resurrect the old hatreds.
In his History Of The Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote about this problem. “The masses were entering upon this path in a state of struggle with their own past, with yesterday’s beliefs,” he wrote.
“At a difficult turn, at a moment of failure and disappointment, the old prejudices not yet burnt out would flare up and the enemy would naturally seize upon these as an anchor of salvation.”
So, for Trotsky, it is not that prejudice simply disappears after even a workers’ revolution, but that it is actively suppressed by the revolution’s forward momentum.
Backward ideas can resurface when that momentum stalls.
That means revolutionaries must be on continual guard against reaction, especially in the form of counter-revolution.
Such movements can emerge from outside the revolution, for example in the form of imperialist invasion or a militia loyal to the old ruling class.
But there can also be dangers within the new society itself, from those who seek to make an accommodation with the old order or with international powers that threaten them.
Here, such renegades can use what Trotsky called the “old prejudices not yet burnt out” to break the will of those determined that the revolution must stay true to its promises.
That’s why, unlike the caricature, genuine Marxists do not simply say, “After the revolution racism will be eradicated automatically.”
Instead, we insist that the huge democratic changes made collectively put us in a far better position to combat racism and all the other miserable, backward ideas.
Revolution is an opening. It is not a conclusion.
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