Rinky-Dink Revolution

Moving Beyond Capitalism by Withholding Consent, Creative Constructions, and Creative Destructions

Howard Waitzkin

• Editorial: Daraja Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781988832548
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

Rinky-dink revolution and revolutionaries

Rinky-dink revolution involves actions and inactions that are easy and predictably safe, at least for the most part. (Rinky-dink, a term used more commonly in the United States than in other countries, refers to simple actions that are so easy and safe to do that anyone can do them. These are the day-to-day revolutionary actions needed during this critical period of history.) Such actions are mundane, unglamorous, and feasible within every person’s life. They are much less romantic than the heroic examples of some prior revolutions, when the capitalist class violently repressed relatively small groups of revolutionaries, who then organized and fought back with violence that eventually became victorious. Rather than heroism, rinky-dink revolution demands ordinary actions and inactions by ordinary people who do not seek to be remembered in books or on tee-shirts.

Imagining the end of our economic system and then the actual creation of a new one have to be simple, low risk, and doable by about 7 to 11 million people in the United States, the third most populous country in the world after China and India. Why 7 to 11 million, among a total U.S. population of more than 328 million people?^[1] And how many committed revolutionaries would it take for revolution to happen in other, less populous capitalist countries?

The history of revolutions shows that the activists who bring them about number much fewer than countries’ entire populations. The proportion of a population needed to bring about a revolution of course depends on historical circumstances. It also depends on the “top-down” versus “bottom-up” dialectic of leadership and power. In the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and multiple countries of Latin America and Africa, revolutions have vacillated between tendencies to implement top-down, elite governance by self-appointed leaders considering themselves a vanguard, versus tendencies to implement decentralized, participatory, equalitarian, and more radically democratic governance. When they have failed, revolutions aiming to replace capitalism usually have collapsed due to a combination of external destabilization or direct military invasion by capitalist regimes, and/or inability to resolve the dialectic of top-down versus bottom-up governance.^[2]

Considering the importance of the question about how many revolutionaries would it take, the answer should have become fairly clear by now, but actually very few meaningful estimates have appeared, with some exceptions. And the difficulty of resolving Jameson’s paradox (“it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of our economic system”) comes partly from our fears that we never could convince a large enough part of the population to support moving beyond capitalism. One exception comes from research on nonviolent resistance to dictatorships. Surprisingly, that work concluded that only about 3.5 percent of a population can topple a brutal dictatorship in a capitalist regime.^[3] In their organizing, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi is aiming for a 20 percent participation rate (which includes people who are actively participating but are not leaders). These folks are struggling to bring about revolutionary transformation in a city and the region; leaders encourage other community members to participate in popular assemblies and other processes of radical democracy. Cooperation Jackson’s experience so far indicates that substantial movement beyond capitalism can happen with a regular participation rate actually lower than that.^[4]

The estimate of 7 to 11 million people required to achieve revolutionary transformation in the United States comes from a simple calculation, which may be off, but probably not way off. If the relevant population of the United States includes eligible voters (231,557,000 as of the 2016 election), using 5 percent as a more conservative figure than the 3.5 percent found in research, that would involve about 11,578,000 nonviolently resisting individuals. If instead the relevant population includes registered voters who actually voted in the 2016 presidential election (138,885,000), fundamental change could happen through concerted nonviolent action by about seven million people. Similar calculations would lead to a conclusion that in capitalist countries with much smaller populations, proportionally fewer revolutionaries could achieve this kind of dramatic change. Even if the calculation underestimates the revolutionary forces by a factor of two or three times, such as Cooperation Jackson’s 20 percent figure, the participants still would total a small minority of the population. And what about the repression that we could expect from a capitalist class in such trouble? It is not likely that the capitalist state could organize enough repression to imprison or kill 7 to 11 million revolutionaries, totaling more than those killed in the holocaust of World War II, especially for revolutionary activities as rinky-dink as those to be proposed here.

Who are the protagonists of rinky-dink revolution? That is, who are we, the revolutionaries, who make up that as yet unknown part of the population who will succeed in moving beyond capitalism? Who are they, against whom we revolt? A disappointing revelation for many of us who have tried to advance revolutionary change is that the old categories to which we are attached (electoral democracy, working class, left party, revolutionary vanguard, violent takeover of the state, etc.) are unlikely to help much during our current period of history, and maybe never have worked well. These categories, which have served as compelling guides for radical politics partly because of the persuasive rhetoric and heroic struggles advanced by some leaders using these terms, no longer illumine the transition to post-capitalism.

“They” are easier to understand than “we.” “They” represent the less than 1 percent of the world’s population who benefit from global capitalism, do not acknowledge its adverse effects, and resist change. A larger proportion of the world’s population sell their labor to protect the capitalist class through repression and threats of repression. These people include military and paramilitary forces, police forces, the military-industrial complex, and the criminal justice system. Their weapons, especially nuclear weapons, help achieve consent through violence and fear of violence. But because repression is not enough to achieve consent, the capitalist class hires even more people to safeguard the system through ideological work. By their paid labor in the educational system, the media, the medical and mental health industries, and other components of the welfare state, these workers teach people “hegemonic” ideas: that there is no alternative to capitalism, that some people are enemies (racial minorities, immigrants, and additional subgroups who become the threatening other), and that if a person isn’t happy and successful it is his or her own fault.^[5] But even with their repressive protectors and shapers of false consciousness, “they” still make up a tiny proportion of the world’s peoples.

Understanding who “we” are has become more challenging, as the old categories have become less convincing and helpful. “We” as revolutionary subjects have become much more expansive than previously. The working class—those among us who do not control the means of production and must sell our labor to capitalists in order to survive—has become very diverse and, especially when represented by large labor unions, often more interested in incremental improvements of capitalism rather than moving beyond capitalism as an economic system.^[6] Instead, the most active revolutionaries worldwide currently include people who don’t fit well at all into the traditional categories. Today’s revolutionary forces encompass members of the “precariate,” mostly young people who hold precarious jobs that usually are impermanent, part-time, and without benefits such as health care and retirement pensions and who see no future for themselves in capitalism, even if highly educated. Other key revolutionary groups involve indigenous peoples whose lands and natural resources continue to be expropriated by global capitalism; racial and ethnic minority groups who have endured slavery and genocide during the growth of capitalism and who continue to experience oppressions of many kinds; and people in the so-called informal sector who survive hand to mouth even without regular wages earned by selling their labor to capitalists.

Some of the most influential revolutions worldwide involve radical communities whose members are not selling their daily work to capitalists and who receive inspiration from indigenous roots and anarchist ideas that spurn the capitalist or post-capitalist state, as in the Zapatista and Rojava revolutions.^[7] Although the traditional working class may become part of the new “revolutionary subject,” people who want and need rev...