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Why There Will Be No Revolution
Gary North
- June 28, 2014
I recently read an article on the
Left-wing website in Great Britain, The
Guardian. This has been the most consistently Left-wing publication in
Great Britain. It was part of the organized Left as early as the 1920's, and it
has never varied in the slightest.
The author interviewed a former American spy. The spy is a very well
read man. But he cannot think straight. He is a super Leftist. He talks about
"the commons." He does not like private property. He sees all of
capitalism as an attempt to take away from the commons and privatize wealth.
But there never was a state-free commons. The commons was always a state
agency. Throughout men's history, when there is common land, it is run by an
agency that possesses political power. It possesses the power of coercion.
Every time you see the word "commons," think "commissars."
You don't have commons without commissars.
This man is singing the same old song
that he sang in his youth. He says there's going to be a revolution. No, there
isn't. He says that the open source technology will create the revolution. No,
it won't.
The essence of revolution is
centralized power. Engels knew this early, and reminded us of it for
years. There is nothing more centralizing than a revolution. Every revolution
in history has moved towards the centralization of power, including the
American Revolution. This ex-spy, singing the songs of his youth, says that we
are right at the edge of a revolution.
We are at the edge of a non-revolution.
What we're seeing is decentralization.
We are seeing the breakup of the equivalent of the Roman Empire. There was no
revolution against the Roman Empire. It simply disintegrated. The medieval
world was a time of enormous decentralization.
In the 17th century, there were
attempts to start revolutions. The Puritan revolution in England was one of
them. It was a revolt against the centralized power of the King, but it was
done in the name of the centralized power of the Parliament. It wound up with a
military dictator, Oliver Cromwell: 1649-1659. He was replaced by a new king in
1660. But the Parliament continued to centralize its power, and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 and 1689 stripped much of the power of the King, but it did
not reduce government power; it simply transferred it to Parliament. Parliament
adopted a theory of parliamentary sovereignty second to none in the history of
tyranny. It claimed, and it still claims, that it has final sovereignty over
all aspects of British life. There was no written constitution to restrain it.
There was only the common law to restrain it. That was something important, but
the centralization continued. It continues today.
With massive decentralization, there
comes, not revolution, but secession. I don't mean secession like the secession
of the American South, which was just another way to centralize power in the
South. The governor of Georgia, Joe Brown, saw that one for what it was. It was
just another group of armed revolutionaries seeking to centralize power in the
region they wanted to control. It was a replay of the American Revolution, as
they argued.
Revolutions mean the centralization of
power. Until conservatives figure this out, they are not going to understand
what is going on, and what has been going on for the past 500 years.
Revolutions centralize power. In order to fight centralized power militarily,
you must centralize power, and this only leads to a shift of loyalty to a new
group of centralists. We are slow learners.
We are not going to see an extension of
the commons; we are going to see an extension of private property. The private
enclosures of the commons were crucial for the establishment of English
liberty. This is a war against the federal state. It is a war against
centralized power. It is a war against the bureaucrats telling us what to do
with our property.
You don't need a revolution to escape
the system. You need secession. You need a withdrawal of support for the
existing systems. You need to revoke the legitimacy which you extended to these
organizations. You need to do it, and everybody else needs to do it. Nobody
organizes this. People just learn, scandal by scandal, bureaucratic snafu by
bureaucratic snafu, that the system is irreparable. It cannot be reformed. It
must not be captured. It must be de-funded. The secret of liberty is not
revolution; the secret of liberty is to de-fund the existing centralized order.
The secret of monetary stability and
sound money is not to capture the Federal Reserve System. The secret is to pass
a very simple law which abolishes the Federal Reserve System. The law revokes
the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The secret is not monetary sovereignty by
Congress; the secret is monetary sovereignty in the free market social order.
The secret of better education is not
capturing the public school system. The secret of better education is to go
online, cut the cost of education, decentralize the entire process, and put
parents in control of their families' educational programs. But conservatives
learn slowly. They always want to capture the liberal system, because they have
a better plan to make it work. That was what the Bolsheviks did with the Czar's
bureaucracy. That was what the French revolutionaries did with Louis XVI's
bureaucracy. That was what the American revolutionaries did with George III's
bureaucracy. That is what the South would have done, if it had won. Gov. Brown
saw this, and he resisted it.
The open source revolution is going to
decentralize more of the world. Decentralization is not going to lead to
revolution. Decentralization is going to lead to secession. I mean secession in
Gandhi's way. I mean the withdrawal of support. You don't take up arms against
the state; you simply refuse to cooperate with the state. You make it more
expensive for the state to tyrannize you.
There is no Yugoslavia anymore. There
is no Soviet Union anymore. This is the wave of the future. The statists and
would-be statists keep looking for the great revolution. Just like Marx, they
see it on all sides. Well, it never came. The communist revolution came where
it didn't belong, according to Marxist theory: the rural Empire of Russia. The
urban proletariat didn't pull off the revolution; a bunch of alienated
intellectuals and bank robbers did.
What are we are going to see is the
withdrawal of support from central regimes. The revolutions in the Arab world
did not decentralize anything. It just re-centralized with another group of
tyrants running the show. It is nice to see existing tyrants embarrassed. It is
nice to see them overthrown, at least from a distance. But it doesn't change
anything. Egypt is just what it was under Mubarak. It is a military
dictatorship. The revolution didn't do anything.
Revolutionaries have to have a
centralized agenda. Either it's open, or it isn't. But there is always a
centralized agenda with every revolutionary movement. Every revolutionary
always thinks his revolution is going to be the last one. Every revolutionary
thinks that when he gets in control of the hierarchical chain of command,
things are going to be different. Yes, they will be different. There will be a
different set of looters skimming off the productivity of the victims.
Until conservatives stop dreaming about
capturing existing hierarchical systems of power, nothing is going to change.
There is no centralized agenda that is
likely ever to come out of a decentralized communication system. This is the
digital Balkans. It is not Yugoslavia.
Facebook is decentralizing the world.
It has Balkanized the world. This will continue.
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