Che go home: No to Revolution; Yes to Government

[Epitome22]

CHE GO HOME
We don’t need a revolution. We need a clue.

By Matt Taibbi
taibbi@nypress.com

Revolutions start in the name of virtue and chastity. They are prepared for by years of well-advertised longing for better morals and manners… The evils of voluptuousness, vice, debauchery, prurience, and excess always stand with the enemy of revolution, no matter what his circumstances are—a boorish villager or a depraved aristocrat. To enjoy and exhaust life was always somewhat contradictory to the essence of revolutionary thought and procedure that, in principle, concentrates on the future.

—Leopold Tyrmand, Notebooks of a Dilettante

LAST WEEK, IN response to a column I wrote about the ineffectual New York convention protests, a reader from Missouri named Jeff Martinek sent me the above quote along with a brief letter. Jeff said that he was interested in my article and added:

"I'm passing along…some passages from a great book called Notebooks of a Dilettante, by Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish dissident who emigrated to the US in the late 60's. I think it speaks to your point."

Let me admit first of all that I'd never heard of Leopold Tyrmand. As a Russophile I generally believe that the proper workplace tool for a Pole is a broom or a shovel, not a typewriter. But there are exceptions to every rule, I guess.

As a media creature in a capitalist society, I am naturally terrified of ruminating publicly on the writings of a dead Polish intellectual. This is the kind of thing that can kill your career. But these Tyrmand passages that Martinek sent me—observations about youth politics at Berkeley in the 60s—raise a lot of interesting questions.

Tyrmand blasted the Berkeley radicals as absurd parodies of progressives whose true social ancestors were the degenerate aristocrat hedonists of 18th- and 19th-century Europe. His descriptions of the American version were amusing and refreshingly vicious:

"In the eyes of a hard-core French Communist of a Russian party official, the Berkeley fancies are a subversive intrigue, devilishly organized to discredit real progressiveness: hippies are secret service agents and Haight-Ashbury is the Establishment's poison in the soul of American youth longing for authentic social revolt and justice."

This is all very witty and sounds true enough. But did American youth really long for "social revolt" in the 60s? Do they long for it now? Should they?

I'm not a revolutionary. I used to think I wanted to be one. But then I lived in Russia for 10 years and saw a few things. If there was ever a state that deserved to be destroyed, it was the Soviet Union. But the Russian revolution destroyed not only the evil and violence of Soviet politics, but the incredible achievements of infrastructure that had held that historically inept and impoverished territory together.

Contrary to popular perception, the Soviet government was not entirely run by force and coercion. It was also held together by schools, farms, hospitals, railroads, policemen and judges. It was a bad system, but it was a system. Smashing it all at once was a terrible idea, one that Russia is still paying for.

Compared to the Soviet Union, the United States is a miracle. Almost everything in America works. The economic energy this country generates is astounding. We want to build something, it's done. If there's a need for a new service, it's created literally overnight. Mail arrives on time. Water comes out of the faucets. We spend billions and billions of dollars every year pushing the limits of science, and every day we invent new things useful to humanity.

And while there are certainly different sets of laws for different classes of people, it's still true that the average American does not expect to be pulled off the streets by drunken policemen and beaten to death by them for no reason at all. We have a consistent level of civilization here that is not merely due to laziness on the part of the ruling authorities.

America is an awesome thing. Compared to us, the other nations of history were just a bunch of bungling amateurs. We went to the moon, and someday soon we—or our money, anyway—will cure cancer. Most of the world was still using two sticks to make fire by the time we'd finished building the Golden Gate Bridge. Whatever it is that we are, it is pretty clear that we are on to something.

That's why the idea of revolution is ridiculous, and ought to seem so to any person who takes more than five minutes to think about it. It would be madness to destroy America. America kicks your ass. And any American who isn't proud of that is out of his goddamned mind.

On the other hand… This country may not need a revolution, but it does need a government. Because it doesn't have one right now. I don't mean to say it has a bad government. I mean, literally, that it has no government. What we have is an idiotic facade of political choice, masking a completely unrestrained corporate plutocracy that makes all of this country's important decisions virtually on its own.

Corporations dominate the public flow of information; they decide what gets built and what doesn't; they dictate how much job security we have and where most of us live. They decide which overseas minorities we are going to enslave at the expense of our own labor populations. Most importantly, they decide how to invest the country's money. No sensibly governed country would invest so much as a dime in trying to figure out how to sell Big Macs to three-year-olds, but an enormous percentage of our surplus is invested in precisely that kind of activity.

And we have no control over it. Corporations are dictatorships. They have only a very limited accountability to their employees and to the public—and what accountability they do have is diminishing all the time.

Changing this situation doesn't require underground cells of conspirators and a leader like Che Guevara. It just takes ordinary people taking more than an occasional interest in managing their own affairs.

In the absence of a real government, why not form one? You could do it in a way that would be completely legal. Start with a small, insulated population—a college campus would be perfect. Then you work to recruit a certain percentage of that population to participate in the experiment (in some countries, you need 50 percent of the workforce to have a legal union; you'd want to aim for a similar percentage). Once you have the union, you simply target a corporation that does business on the campus (Coca-Cola? McDonald's? Starbucks?) and starve it to death. When it is forced to pack up and leave, declare victory and move on to the next target.

Don't even give a reason for the boycott. Don't cite Coke's human rights violations in Colombia and Guatemala. Just do it for the sake of it, for no reason at all. Just as a show of force. Just as a demonstration of the very basic concept that people have a right to make organized decisions about their environment.

Once you have the mechanism down, then, far in the future, you can start making policy demands. You can demand that companies open their books up to the public, that they stop investing their profits in mansions for executives and start investing in schools and hospitals, that they stop contributing money to political causes, that they give up their 14th Amendment rights as individuals. The idea is to make American commerce work for us, not the other way around.

Our actual government will never do these things for us. We have to do it for ourselves. It won't take a revolution. Just a little effort.