RETHINKING THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION
Landau, Saul
Rethinking the Idea of Revolution BY SAUL LANDAU Is revolution, as denned up to now, viable in the 1990s? Or have changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as those in technology and...
...military impulses, as the Ir-ait Affair illustrates...
...Nor will the Soviet presence serve to temper U.S...
...No parallel behavior can be expected from the United States...
...Moreover, the West has retained its hold on parts of the Third World through the most blatant imperialist techniques...
...On the contrary, while maintaining democracy as a principle of policy, the U.S...
...How should we talk about revolution, Third World development, superpower relations in the period of transition to the Twenty-First Century...
...Is the Cold War over, or is it now exclusively an issue between the North and South...
...How should we think about political discourse after forty-five years of Cold War conditioning...
...Saul Landau is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies...
...The New International Economic Order appears as dead as the Maginot Line...
...The notion of victory has substituted for explanation...
...Using the threat of communism as the major pretext for intervention, the United States and its allies have run roughshod over as many independence and liberation movements as they could...
...The United States remains the world's only power—albeit less than super in its economic abilities...
...The transition in the East may not cease until the West can claim total victory—not just over Soviet socialism, but socialism in all meaningful forms...
...Government invades when nations are helpless to defend themselves (Grenada, Libya, Panama), engages in low-intensity wars with those that offer some resistance (Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola), or props up regimes throughout Latin America and parts of Asia that offer a democratic facade of civilian government to hide military terrorism...
...His film on Cuba, "The Uncompromising Revolution, "was shown this summer on public television...
...So, while Soviet-style socialism has collapsed, free-enterprise capitalism has hardly produced a material or spiritual nirvana...
...Soviet aid, lest people forget, made possible resistance in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, parts of Africa, and even Nicaragua for a decade...
...Realism calls for a more balanced judgment on the performance of each system...
...The rights won or granted under the Stalin models are being contested by the free-market missionaries...
...How does the unraveling of the Soviet model at home and abroad relate to the triumphalism of capitalist ideologues...
...media, still reporting the news in the style developed for the Cold War, encourage readers and viewers to ignore history...
...Socialism in its first epoch might well be dying, but socialism will reemerge, of necessity, in the Third World...
...Without historical context, however, recent dramatic events may leave the citizen bewildered—who are the bad guys now?—or elated, because "our side" has "won" a victory for freedom and democracy, against the bad communist totalitarian team...
...The image-makers in Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, and Bonn have conveyed the idea that the good "free" market has destroyed its evil competitor, state economics...
...The alternative that appeared available to such nations as Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua has disappeared...
...Capitalism cannot offer even bare survival to most of the people in many impoverished nations...
...The U.S...
...The nonaligned nations have not utilized their collective potential to bargain for a more just system, and instead have capitulated individually to the great enforcers of Third World "free enterprise": the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...
...Soviet withdrawal as defender of the Third World revolution coincided with the decision of the Soviet leadership to practice self-determination in Eastern Europe and allow for peaceful transition there to other political destinies...
...Or have changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as those in technology and in the organization of the world economy over the past decade, made obsolete the formulations that have sustained progressive thought since Lenin...
...On the other, it is to propose a form of socialism that encompasses both environment and democracy...
...On the one hand, our task is to fashion a discourse that reveals the hype of the major media and the academic world, to present the ongoing struggle between the haves and have-nots in a form that clarifies rather than obscures...
...Without a rival partner to counter the United States, Third World people face the formidable task of fashioning resistance to what will almost certainly be a new round of encroachment from the North...
...This situation poses a challenge for progressive thinkers...
...Instead of provoking a debate on how to use U.S...
...The Soviet Union, the sole insurance company for Third World revolutions, will no longer be writing policies...
...and Western power after the collapse of the supposedly permanent enemy, celebration obscured the issues behind the Cold War...
...Indeed, the collapse of Soviet state socialism may force Third World revolutionaries and reformers to create a new means of discourse.The issue is no longer development but survival for the next decade...
...The goals of environmental sanity and democratic equity become submerged in realpolitik...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
