The Birth Pangs of REVOLUTION
Lens, Sidney
The Birth Pangs of REVOLUTION by SIDNEY LENS IN THE JOY that accompanies the birth of a nation, Tanganyika this month will gain its independence. By President Kennedy's count this will be the...
...Universal male franchise—without property qualifications—did not become the rule for a half century...
...The granting of a piece of land to a landless peasant, or moving him into a genuine cooperative, raises his level of decisionmaking considerably...
...Despite our many regional quarrels there is a basic loyalty to the idea of a "United States...
...Forming capital means curtailing consumption or taking over the wealth of the upper classes, or both...
...What reassurance do social democrats have that revolutions are steps forward...
...Can any of the forty-odd revolutionary nations solve the problems which challenge them on every front...
...See how the buggers devour each other," he said...
...The pauperization of Americans by inflated "continentals" was appalling...
...Voting merely expressed divergent views within the ruling class, not within the population as a whole...
...The ordinary peasant was merely a pawn in the elections...
...The Sikhs want autonomous rights...
...Elections and the party system are certainly part of this development, but they are important parts rather than the totality of democracy...
...in the other only the upper classes are expressing their differences...
...The peasant, whose class comprises the majority of the population, wants a piece of land for himself...
...This march of humanity away from imperialism is the most breath-taking revolutionary wave in all history...
...Their farms became more productive...
...Other means include strikes, demonstrations, petitions, letters to legislators, pressure group meetings, newspaper editorials, and many other forms of countervailing power...
...the number of students in its primary schools has soared...
...This was all to the good, but now a new problem arose— as it must in all underdeveloped countries...
...although other parties exist they have no chance of gaining power...
...He does not feel the compulsion for unity that we do in the United States...
...Many of the men who framed the Constitution stated categorically they wanted a government of the "rich and well-born...
...f In Paz Estenssoro's Bolivia, crisis is chronic...
...What do they mean...
...The Ashanti, for instance, have always wanted full autonomy...
...In one village after another the agents of the feudal class were swept out of power and the peasants elected men whose actions they could influence...
...If it is too much, the country cannot accumulate the necessary capital to build fertilizer plants and other industrial establishments...
...He is the author of several books on foreign affairs, including "The Counterfeit Revolution," and has contributed to many publications here and abroad, including The Yale Review, Harper's, The New Republic, and The Commonweal...
...f Fidel Castro's Cuba has abrogated freedom of press, trade union autonomy, and other elementary civil liberties...
...A second task of many of the new nations is to weld together a nation of disparate tribes or areas...
...SIDNEY LENS has studied most of the recent and current revolutions first hand in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...In Formosa, another area we include in the "free world," there are periodic pollings but opposition candidates are arrested and prohibited from running...
...Why can't they have free elections and free political opposition...
...Yet, given a choice, it is preferable to have village democracy without national elections, rather than purely formal national elections without village democracy...
...His espousal of the theory of multi-racialism is exemplary in Africa...
...Is this a fair judgment...
...Superficially this looks like democracy...
...If it is too little, the peasant refuses to produce...
...T h e National Guard is the only real instrument of power, and it is controlled from top to bottom by President Luis Somoza and his brother, Anastasio...
...They exist, for everyone to see...
...In his government will be white men, Indians, as well as a Negro majority—all treated as "Tanganyikans" rather than by their racial appellation...
...No councils are elected in the villages or cities...
...And the democratic election of village councils puts a sound floor under any future national democratic structure...
...Yet if Nehru were to permit the fragmentation of his country, administration would become next to impossible and the state would be faced with grave problems...
...Julius K. Nyerere, who takes the helm in independent Tanganyika, is one of the most admirably fitted persons to lead a revolution...
...The underdeveloped part of the world produces an income of less than $100 for each person (as against some $2,800 in the United States...
...The tribal chief in Africa used to be a benevolent despot...
...everyone was against the outsider who ruled the country...
...We judge in terms of end results, rather than the long, arduous process by which democracy and freedom evolve...
...The reason is clear...
...Ninety thousand candidates ran for 30,000 seats...
...Hunger is still widespread...
...On the other side of the African continent from Tanganyika, in the first of the postwar Negro republics, the mood this month will be cold, tense, and disturbing...
...Admittedly the Ghanaian people had a "will" to make a revolution against Britain...
...Yet Nyerere recognizes that democracy in new nations cannot pattern itself on that of the United States, or achieve such lofty levels overnight...
...Since the victory of Nasser in 1952 there has been no national election and political parties have not been legalized...
...Perhaps a thousand political prisoners have been in jail off and on, without benefit of trial...
...no parties were permitted...
...Only the minute number of intellectuals and some of the middle class...
...And the argument over democracy was as bitter as any in history...
...Under any circumstances, the response to popular will that is the essence of democracy cannot be achieved overnight, nor by the formulas that the United States has to day, 175 years after its revolution...
...Yet this was the first time in modern history that the Egyptian peasant was able to vote against the recommendations of his feudal lord...
...They are only two of the instruments by which government is used to implement the popular will...
...The problem must be put in focus...
...There are fifty-two tribes in this country...
...If Nkrumah—or Nasser, or Sekou Toure, or Castro—were to permit this leadership force to split into many political forces, he would be doomed...
...It cannot, however, be entirely avoided...
...It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself...
...He has a different history and culture...
...Ghana has a university for the first time...
...The dangers of separatism are even more pronounced in Ghana...
...In all Nicaraguan history only one strike has been adjudged legal by the Minister of Labor...
...What are the tasks of a revolution...
...Shortages of lard, meat, other foods, and various consumer items increasingly plague the citizens of the Western Hemisphere's "first socialist country...
...This was the case, for instance, in the last Vietnamese election...
...The United States survived without secondary upheavals and new revolutions because of the vastness of its frontier and the exceptional ability of its leaders...
...Even then democracy did not emerge full blown...
...Simultaneously, Nkrumah has placed in a detention camp the moderate father of modern Ghanaian nationalism, J. B. Danquah...
...T h e revolutionary nations will follow a different course toward democracy from the one we did...
...When Tito broke with Stalin, the peasants were permitted to regain individual strips of land...
...Perhaps the most pronounced change in all the revolutionary countries is the enlargement of educational opportunities...
...The one-party system in Stalinist Russia destroyed every semblance of popular pressure and produced one of the worst dictatorships in history...
...Cuba hopes to obliterate illiteracy by the end of this year, the climax of a three year campaign...
...Someone—some class—must be squeezed...
...What is the social purpose of land reform...
...The country's constitution is modeled on that of the United States, and theoretically its National Guard (a combination police force and army) is free of politics...
...After only four years of independent status Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana is deep in crisis...
...The difficulty begins with such terms as "democracy" and "freedom...
...Land reform is a long way from completion...
...At the other pole is India, which minimizes compulsion at the expense of slow change...
...To view the travail of Ghana or Egypt or India or Burma in terms different from those of the revolutions of yesterday is, therefore, complacent egotism...
...Too often," he said recently, "we have been ready to accept an AngloSaxon or an American definition of democracy, without realizing that in doing so we are allowing ourselves to be sold not simply the democratic ideal but the particular form it has taken in those countries...
...The same can be said of Nkrumah, Nasser, Sekou Toure, the Nigerians, and many others...
...Are the revolutions justified...
...But in the United States there is a rather strong concept of "nationhood...
...There are no easy answers to these questions...
...Elections, unless honest and democratically controlled, may be only a camouflage for dictatorship...
...Candidates could not form groups, and the press was far from free...
...It would have been far better if they had agreed to remain under European administration for a longer period...
...But give the Ghana unions such full reign, permit them to win wages as high as uncontrolled power would permit, and the revolution would founder...
...Yet it is possible for a no-party or one-party system to have more elements of democracy than a multi-party system...
...Viewed superficially they are highly unattractive...
...Anyone who has lived in an underdeveloped country knows how fraudulent elections can be...
...It would be hard to find a better formulation of the problem...
...We must not underestimate the importance of affluence to democracy...
...They do not reach American or British standards at once, but—with frequent regressions —they are moving in that direction...
...Under European rule he served his European paymasters rather than his tribe...
...To build schools, dams, roads, factories, and clinics, the underdeveloped nations must form capital...
...No opposition parties are permitted and the press is tightly circumscribed...
...A no-party or a one-party system is certainly not a virtue...
...But it was only a first step, and it is subject now to tremendous centrifugal stress...
...Unquestionably the most pervasive pressure on every revolution is land reform...
...T h e government party is unchallengeable...
...In Yugoslavia, during the period when Tito was a hostage of Stalin, land reform consisted of forcing the peasants into collectives...
...In contrast with today's Egypt, Nicaragua has all the forms of freedom including a multi-party system and elections every four years...
...officials are appointed...
...Remember," wrote John Quincy Adams, "democracy never lasts long...
...There are no permanent institutions by which the people of Nicaragua can exercise meaningful pressure...
...Nkrumah can stand before his people and explain this—just as President Kennedy can tell the American people that it is necessary for New Yorkers to contribute more than their share, on a population basis, for school expansion so that the "underdeveloped" state of Mississippi can gain a proportionately larger share...
...If the farmer produces more, how much can he be permitted to keep for personal consumption...
...The fact is that fully advanced democracy, of the type we have established in the West, is possible only if Castro were to abandon the revolution itself...
...It, too, had a full share of the bitterness and strife so characteristic of revolution today...
...At the opposite pole there were monarchists who hoped to crown George Washington as king...
...If the capital needed for schools and roads and factories were diverted to higher wages, the wage increases themselves would become meaningless, because unless the state can provide enough consumer goods the gains would be whittled away by inflation...
...There is no question that if the tempo of economic change were to speed up in India it would be accompanied by more political restrictions...
...There must be a balance between consumption and capital formation...
...When Kwame Nkrumah reduced the chiefs to ceremonial functions and granted genuine power to the elected village councils, he took his country an important step forward on the road to democracy...
...Daniel Shays of Massachusetts sought to overthrow the revolutionary regime by force and violence, and he almost succeeded...
...Perhaps somewhere in the middle—though closer to the Indian example—one might find the most hopeful formula...
...We share a common history, language, culture...
...Nehru prefers a snail's-pace economic progress to political restriction...
...By contrast, the 1959 elections for village councils in Egypt seemed a farce...
...But that is a matter of judgment...
...The result has been that the individual farmer may now own a strip of two or five acres but he is at the nadir of poverty anyway...
...The hope of every revolutionary is that this "squeezing" be kept to a minimum...
...India has the constant problem of separatism...
...By way of illustration, one can point to India, where political democracy is perhaps as extensive, if not as intensive, as in the United States...
...Their hostility to this system was fierce...
...The improvement of his economic plight also gives him greater potential political status...
...He has little concept of what a "nation" means...
...Yet the man at the bottom of the economy has more influence on the decisions of his government today than he ever had before...
...The fate of wages and other social gains in underdeveloped countries is tied to revolution, and revolution is a much broader exercise than collective bargaining...
...Economic domination by the landlord class vitiated the substance of democracy, while maintaining its forms...
...The caste of the Untouchables, though protected by favorable legislation, is in practice still harassed...
...If it is not curtailed enough, then there is insufficient money for new dams and factories...
...If the people are to reorient the policies of their government they can do so only through revolution...
...We tend to compare today's Ghana with today's America, rather than with the America of 1783...
...Civil liberties were virtually suspended under President Adams' Alien and Sedition Laws...
...We must judge new nations not as finished products, but by their direction...
...We forget the backward moves in our own history, the faltering steps of our own march toward democracy...
...In the one case the people are acquiring new rights...
...He was told how to vote, and he either voted as the landlord instructed him, or the following year he found himself moved to a different and less fertile strip of land, and unable to secure credit...
...Admittedly,, the deeply significant decisions are national, not local...
...Eighty-five years after the revolution the nation was temporarily severed by a four-year civil war...
...Yet a more dispassionate view gives rise to an uneasy feeling that the sparkle of independence dims significantly as the new nations seek viability...
...Grant full political democracy in any of the harassed new lands and the government soon would be overthrown by reactionary elements...
...To grant autonomy to the Ashanti would mean giving up programs for schools, road building, housing, and industrialization...
...This is hara./ full-fledged democracy, but it provides far more response to mass desires than the "elections" and "party systems" under Farouk...
...The ordeal of democracy in France was even more trying, what with the bloodbath of Robespierre, the dictatorship of Carnot and Napoleon, the undemocratic regime of Louis Phillipe, the Bonapartism of the second Napoleon...
...f Mexico, fifty years after the inception of its revolution, still does not have true democracy...
...This is the subsoil of democracy, an indispensable ingredient in nations where forty to ninety per cent of the people are illiterate...
...f Sekou Toure's Guinea subsists on a one-party system and rigorous controls...
...Nehru refuses, except in rare instances, to impose dictatorial restrictions such as detentions—though he has the constitutional right to do so...
...They may, along the path, be forced to curtail democratic rights temporarily...
...Those forms] are the result of history and of circumstances peculiar to the Western peoples . . . not essentially to democracy...
...For instance, he has encouraged personal adulation...
...The promise of elections in "eighteen months" has been repudiated...
...It destroyed the old feudal class and reshuffled the structure of power within Mexico...
...Once the peasant does get the land, how heavily should he be taxed...
...Can the government give it to him...
...Political parties in King Farouk's day were instruments for the exclusive rule of the 2,000 large landowning families...
...But with few exceptions this is not possible overnight...
...Until it can create a degree of affluence it must impose restraints and discipline...
...As for the detentions without trial, again Nkrumah has chosen the lesser evil...
...Egypt has more than doubled its university enrollment...
...Mobs raided the printing presses of Thomas Jefferson's followers, and the third President of the United States was often called an "atheist," "fanatic," "democrat"—terms of the severest opprobrium...
...But to grant it would destroy Ghana, since the Ashanti area produces two-thirds of the most vital product of the economy— cocoa...
...They haven't the foggiest notion of what democracy really is...
...My own feeling, in the case of Cuba, for example, is that Castro could well afford to permit a degree of political democracy— criticism in the press and the right of opposition within a unified political party...
...It was not until eighty-two years after the revolution that one could speak of a genuinely democratic regime in France...
...There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide...
...I am merely trying to indicate the scope of the problem...
...But there is hope for the ultimate result if they are moving in the right direction...
...The right to form free trade unions was not fully recognized until the 1840's...
...Yet the rights of the people of Nicaragua have shrunk to the vanishing point...
...Contrast today's Egypt with yesterday's...
...With one blow Nkrumah has lopped from the cabinet roster the leaders of both Left and Right...
...Mobilizing the nation against a common foe—imperialism or rightist dictatorship— is a simple matter...
...Tito made credits available to the peasants and formed cooperative buying, selling, and machine organizations to aid their progress...
...Without this reform Mexico could not have advanced even as little as it has...
...We tend to believe that if citizens of an underdeveloped country can be given the right to pull a lever or mark an "X" they have achieved the lofty plateau of democracy—"our way of life...
...Ballot counting is sometimes moderately honest, but an honest count may avail nothing if the opposition candidates are ruled ineligible in advance...
...The proponents—of whom I am one—of social revolution in underdeveloped countries cannot deny these and other failures and antidemocratic setbacks...
...Creating that unity was simple...
...The American Revolution failed for many decades to deliver on its promises...
...There is little question that land reform in Mexico has been an economic failure...
...Suppose we call the roll of some of the revolutionary nations: f Gamal Nasser's Egypt has not had a national election since he came to power in 1952...
...The loyalty of the average person there is first to his tribe rather than to his nation...
...It would be better, of course, if a nation could have both village and national democracy...
...Democracy is not achieved in a single act, or in a moment, but develops through a long evolution in which the means of dissent, discussion, and pressure are developed, and government finally responds to the will of the people as effectively as possible...
...At one extreme pole we have the kind of squeezing Stalin imposed, which lowered living standards and created such hostility that the Russian dictator had to fashion a shocking totalitarian state to combat it...
...No one can argue that he is a "Communist" or a "fellow-traveler...
...If consumption is too severely curtailed —as in Russia during the 1930's—the state soon finds itself using harsh measures against the farmers...
...But its pace of economic development is pathetically slow...
...It is easy for Americans, whose revolution is 175 years old, to be self-righteous...
...What kind of cooperative organizations are needed to supplement land reform...
...When we view the revolutionary countries from the broader focal point of "response to popular will," we see that almost all of them are widening public participation in decisionmaking...
...This is no plea against democracy or elections, or anything of the kind...
...Politically, however, it has been a marked success...
...They weren't really ready for self-rule...
...Consider the role of trade unions...
...If we accept the conclusion that the achievement of democracy is an evolving process, the question arises: Why can't the new revolutionary countries achieve more democracy than they have...
...The purpose is to create loyalty to himself as an individual, and through himself, loyalty to the nation...
...You can't trust them to run their own affairs...
...He speaks a different language from those in the other fifty-one tribes...
...There were few provisions for credits, however, and little else to make the program effective...
...Few serious students of the democratic process can visualize a democratic life without free labor organizations, empowered to strike, capable of winning higher wages and other concessions...
...The means and methods by which a true choice is perverted are numerous...
...How does it get the land in the first place...
...Everyone was against Britain, but how many in Ghana can understand the difference between a high rate and a low rate of capital formation...
...Our newspapers impatiently ask: "Why don't they have democracy...
...If one adds Bolivia, Yugoslavia, China, and Cuba to the list of revolutionary nations, the figure becomes even more impressive...
...Nyerere is recognized by many as an African Gandhi—even of temper, and most tolerant of others...
...By President Kennedy's count this will be the forty-third nation to achieve freedom since World War II...
...f Jawaharlal Nehru's India manifests more political democracy than any other new nation...
...T h e same is true of Guinea and many other new revolutionary nations...
...In Mexico, for instance, President Cardenas and some of his successors, after 1934, divided large areas of land among landless peasants...
...According to the Chicago Daily News correspondent, Smith Hempstone, all this signifies "the stripping away of the last remnant of the facade of democratic government...
...Millions of Mexicans are still not significantly enrolled in the nation's economy...
...Riots, plots, and revolts follow each other in rapid order...
...What are the obstacles in its path...
...Mobilizing it for a cause is something else...
...Should the former owners be compensated, and, if so, how much...
...Nkrumah has tried in many ways to fashion a national consciousness...
...There are now Nkrumah schools, and Nkrumah squares, and Nkrumah pictures on coins and bills...
...Few land reform programs have dealt with all the problems they were expected to solve...
...Many would like complete control over their areas, if not independence...
...Two other ingredients of developing democracy are land reform and village councils...
...One newspaper longed for the day when "Jefferson's head will be rotting cheek by jowl with that of some toil-killed Negro slave...
...I recall a conversation two years ago with a member of the Dominion Party of Southern Rhodesia...
...If he were to permit all his articulate opponents to run rampant they could no doubt mobilize enough sentiment on a simple tribal basis to tear Ghana apart and destroy the revolution...
...their leader goes on a fast to dramatize their demands...
...But in Ghana this is not true...
...Will the enthusiasm of Tanganyika turn in the next four years to the sullen mood of today's Ghana...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
