The Idea of Revolution

...Hope rests only with a mass mobilization of which the sit-in movement is today but a suggestive symbol, a groping beginning...

...Indeed, even if its goals are narrow, Resistance may not often escape its own revolutionary logic and still be true to itself...

...Not sinister intentions, to be sure, for as it turns out he uses revolution chiefly as a metaphor for rather moderate political change...

...Techniques of Resistance included the "nonpayment of taxes, the refusal to publish the king's decrees, the passive refusal to stir at his command," etc...

...Resistance, as a response to oppression, was operative "long before men conceived of a plastic political order which could be refashioned at will...

...It indicates that Mr...

...But as they repeatedly invoke the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision of 1954, it is a little silly to talk of them transforming the state power...

...these, he suggests, include the revolutionary transformation of the American state...

...Kahn and I disagree secondly on the "terms" we would make with the modern state—I mean the intellectual terms, for in practice the question does not arise in any very immediate fashion...

...The Idea of Resistance can be resurrected from the Middle Ages only by reproducing a medieval state of mind...

...Kahn and I disagree first in our interpretations of the Negro civil rights movement...

...The students are further handicapped by an accident of history: their revolt has come at a time in the United States when the revolutionary tradition lies wounded, and radicals contemplate their own disillusionment...

...but different intentions, so that one can foresee his eventual battle with the Negro students' purely spontaneous defense of their interests and dignity...

...But the more a human group lets itself be represented in the management of its common affairs . . . the less communal life there is in it and the more impoverished it becomes...

...Does not the worst defect of modern society lie precisely in everybody letting himself be represented ad libitum...

...his disobedience is not revolutionary precisely because it is civil, that is, it is orderly and public, it involves no conspiracy, it does not require the total renunciation of the established social order...

...Obviously the Negro students, civil defense protesters and the like are demanding rights not recognized by the old order...

...the idea of the state dominates his political thought...

...But what is representation...

...it touches the most fundamental point of equality and freedom...

...I suppose that if the local obstruction of civil rights is legitimate and the resistance of the obstruction is imperative, then the further obstruction of the resistance is also legitimate, and so on...

...THE MODERN STATE is, of course, a gigantic, inescapable octopus...

...I believe Walzer's rejection of Revolution and indifference to political transformation of the state are at the bottom of his essentially anarchistic defense of states' rights: It is a piece of the good-willed naivete of liberal reformers to refuse to recognize the right of local obstruction...

...Resistance is fruitful not because it contemplates seizure of power but because it illuminates a spectrum of approaches to practical problems...

...The "traditional rights" the nobility defended were those of the older feudal order against the encroachments of monarchical centralization...

...The second revolutionary aspect of the sit-ins, an extension of the first, has to do with their implications for the American ruling party, the Eastland-Goldwater coalition...

...The state stands [Iii as an immediate and ever-present enemy precisely because, uniquely, it cannot exist except through enforced segregation and political disfranchisement...

...In addition, Resistance was not "aggressive and transforming but...

...Under these conditions, Resistance, if it is to come down out of the hills, if it is to remold social life, must transform the state...

...His renunciation of the established order is merely symbolic—an example of individual behavior which, if it impelled masses, would be revolutionary...

...This is not, as Walzer has "learned, the task of professionals," but of a conscious mass movement which rejects his dictum that "we need...

...Finally, those techniques "can be enacted at many different social levels, down to the smallest community of men...

...For community declares itself primarily in the common and active man...

...Walzer is absorbed in the externals of revolution and not in its essence...

...Mr...

...In short, the students are revolutionary in that the logic of their techniques and aims points necessarily to a reorganization of the state and national governments...

...Someone must bear the burden of revolution...

...To me, Mr...

...In other words, he does not come to terms with the question of social power, the question of the state...

...They seek rather to share in that power and to enjoy its benefits...

...First, the students are literally doing battle with the state...

...The FBI, that tentacular and almost autonomous secret police network, had no counterpart in feudal society...

...Implicit in the students' action is a challenge to the very existence of the Southern state as presently constituted—not only its laws but its very structure...

...Would that opposition to local obstruction were the real sin of naive liberals...

...My emphasis...

...Negro resistance did not spring unfathered out of Greensboro...

...defensive and limited...

...But masses have not been so impelled, unfortunately, and conscientious objection has not become a political force in the United States...

...the "logic" of the movement points to the seizure of state power, etc...

...I see nothing inherently more democratic in the self-rule of small units than in the rule of central authority truly responsive to the needs of the people...

...Walzer fails to explain that this is why "the idea of revolution in Western thought emerges in the 17th century from the much older idea of resistance...

...If the obstruction is itself oppressive, as it is in the South today, then men must organize and resist it in their cities, colleges, unions, in the name of human rights or of higher law...

...Such a mass movement will not seek "a defense of standards," but the creation of new standards...

...Negro political representation, now virtually nonexistent, must be instituted...

...Now what distinguishes revolutionary activity from resistance is not that resistance is orderly and public, while presumably the revolutionary is bloody and conspiratorial...

...Walzer's Idea of Resistance is unequal to the needs of the Negroes...

...On the other hand, "aggressive and transforming" movements are led by classes and groups demanding rights and privileges in the main not recognized by the old order...

...The student sit-in movement can last only if it helps to mobilize the adult Negro community...

...designed to defend natural law, traditional rights or legal order...

...He describes the modern "totalitarian" state with a perceptible shudder, yet he would "seize" that state—and seize it, I presume, to use it...

...Presumably any means to that end will do, i. e., the movement of any mass, and certainly the Negroes as well as the workers...

...That is, it must be revolutionary...

...The civil rights movement illustrates the absurdity of subordinating social problems to issues of constitutionalism...

...Kahn has intentions which are not those of the Negro students...

...Curious language with which to describe the evolution of the state...

...For those of which Walzer speaks exist only as abstractions, if at all...

...This sort of rhetoric, though it pretends to be objective analysis, seems to me something very different...

...It is an ideology of the individual in a political vacuum, operating within small groups in a stateless society...

...Without discrediting the techniques of resistance described above, it should be plain that they were particularly appropriate in medieval Europe...

...Walzer recognizes this, though not the cause for it, when he states that "Resistance has survived in the West as civil disobedience, but it has come, largely under the impact of protestantism, to be an individual activity and a matter less of objective law and right than of private conscience...

...He continues: "Every conscientious objector is practicing a form of resistance...

...It will not seek the "protection of rights and liberties," but the creation of rights and liberties...

...he cannot imagine politics as anything else than a struggle for control...

...Kahn means to suggest that this is the black man's burden, and that he must carry it whether he will or not...

...Consider the devastating effect of 100 Negroes "sitting in" at a polling place, refusing to move until permitted to register or vote...

...Obviously, local obstruction may or may not be progressive, depending on what is being obstructed...

...But the achievement of such communities requires that we surrender the millenarian fantasy of transforming the modern state and commit ourselves to the more modest work of subverting it...

...This does not mean that their success will be unimportant...

...Kahn describes...

...This is not the task of a defensive movement but of an aggressive one, not of the Idea of Resistance but the Idea of Revolution...

...King and other Negro leaders have talked about applying direct action to secure the ballot for the Negro...

...I think the goals and values of the radical ought to transcend the question of the rights of local obstruction...

...At some point, Southern state governments are going to have to be dismantled...

...He is interested in what might be called the unintended— or immanent—consequences of the movement...

...With the formation of the nation state, Resistance explodes into Revolution...

...I believe Michael Walzer's "The Idea of Resistance" [DISSENT, Fall 1960] reflects this disinclination...

...But I 'fail to see how the FBI, which he invokes with such awe, or the limited welfare state, or the arms race, or the real power of centralized government will be in any way affected...

...The "acts of stoppage and withdrawal" to which Walzer refers as nonrevolutionary are precisely the sparks which have ignited all revolutions...

...Resistance, he explains, predates Revolution, which does not emerge in Western thought until the 17th century...

...And in a "socialistic" society will there not, on top of this passive political representation, be added a passive economic representation, so that, with everybody letting himself be represented by everybody else, we reach a state of practically unlimited representation and hence, ultimately, the reign of practically unlimited centralist accumulation of power...

...the "revolution" Mr...

...The extrapolation of modes of human conduct from their historical setting is in general a risky business...

...But there are two crucial senses in which their struggle can correctly be called revolutionary...

...Kahn's terms amount to a surrender...

...Now democratic representation in Dixie means displacing a huge section of a political and economic class...

...The students have won considerable success in integrating lunch counters, but they have barely scratched the surface...

...to be less conscientious in our political activity...

...The intentions of the students, of course, are quite limited...

...As arbiter of our foreign affairs, the state has the power to plunge us into wars so totally devastating as to permit little hope of individual survival...

...The state has abdicated its responsibilities for human conduct in behalf of smaller communal units: colleges, unions, cities, etc...

...The federal government directly employs millions of Americans and indirectly, through contracts and subsidies, many millions more...

...The discussion around Revolution vs...

...In his effort to construct an ideology out of the sitins, Walzer turns to the Middle Ages for clues and proceeds to mangle history badly...

...IT DOES NOT SEEM to me that the forms of the contemporary state— whoever is in control—are compatible with the idea of freedom...

...The shudder would become a shudder of delight, and state power would be strengthened, as it has been strengthened by every previous "seizure...

...Surely we need to imagine a society in which political activity is a real possibility for all citizens—and that means a society in which the units of political life are drawn to human scale...

...The legacy of the thirties is a modern distaste for revolutionary lines of thought and a disinclination to confront the question of social power...

...It was on behalf of such a "common and active management" that I defended the idea of resistance...

...This is a difficult period for so young a movement, especially one relatively lacking in politically sophisticated leadership...

...We are back in the Middle Ages...

...The correct distinction, which indeed renders the C. 0. a nonrevolutionary, is that he undertakes an individual act of protest which does not endanger "the established social order...

...their triumph will have the effect of liberalizing our political life —and is this so different from...

...The Negro has always offered resistance: through the early slave revolts and the Underground Railway right up to the Montgomery Bus Protest...

...For resistance would be the activity of communities of men, struggling to win their freedom from the state, to resist its encroachments, above all, to defend collective interests and ideals...

...agement of what it has in common, and without this it cannot exist...

...Watching the enormous energy and obvious enjoyment of our new president, it occurs to me that Hegel's dictum about freedom might well be paraphrased: in the modern state only one man is free...

...The students are revolutionary in that they have confronted the all-important state power directly and have adumbrated the most potent weapon for its immobilization: mass direct action executed nonviolently...

...The burden of his article is that there is a terrorless alternative to Revolution— the Idea of Resistance...

...Kahn is wrong to believe that there can be a central authority "truly responsive to the needs of the people"—even more, however, he is wrong to think that such responsiveness by our representatives in Washington would be sufficient...

...People say [wrote Martin Buber in Paths to Utopia] that the chief changes in a socialist society will be this: that the workers will feel themselves represented by the holders of power...

...This is a revolutionary process and must be coterminous with the extension of the mass movement beyond the lunch counters, libraries and churches—which, after all, are peripheral—if the students are not to be stalemated...

...To take root in the real world, such standards, rights and liberties require a refurrowed social soil...

...Though they may appeal to "higher laws" they are not defending, by any means, the "legal order...

...This is nonviolent revolution...

...I DO NOT CLAIM that the Negro students of the South are now waging a revolution in the precise sense of the word...

...Revolution is "implicit" in the student sitdowns...

...Nation states were only in the process of formation, and even later, when centralized authority had been established by the king over the nobility, he depended heavily upon their fealty...

...It becomes recognized that the new need is to capture control of the state, whose increasing strength renders impossible the continuation of simple Resistance...

...Michael Walzer replies: Mr...

...Under the feudal social structure, authority was at a distance...

...But such efforts are limited and tentative so long as they leave the state untouched...

...it means ending the direct rule of the cotton and soybean plantations, the textile mills, the tobacco factories, the fruit farms, etc...