With the return to the commonplace tasks of daily life, some effort, and indeed further rationalization, is needed to keep up the feeling that the new and wonderful age has really come to stay. Conflicts of interest and special grievances are viewed as involving the vital principles of the Revolution. People become impatient and censorious. There is a searching of hearts. People watch their neighbors, especially their rivals, to make sure that nothing in their behavior shall confirm the misgivings which are vaguely felt in their own minds. The rejoicing and comradeship which before were spontaneous are now demanded. Intolerance towards the vanquished crowd reappears with increased intensity, not a little augmented by the knowledge that the old enemies are now at "the people's" mercy.
There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. [Remember, the feeling of outrage doesn't disappear, especially if the revolutionaries thrived on it - DMR.] The displaced crowd likely as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by attempting a counter-revolution. A propaganda of sympathy is carried on among members of this same class who remain in the dominant crowd in communities not affected by the revolution. There is secret plotting and suspicion of treason on every hand. People resort to extravagant expressions of their revolutionary principles, not only to keep up their own faith in them, but to show their loyalty to the great cause. The most fanatical and uncompromising members of the group gain prominence because of their excessive devotion. By the very logic of crowd-thinking, leadership passes to men who are less and less competent to deal with facts and more and more extreme in their zeal. Hence the usual decline from the Mirabeaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from these to the Marats and Robespierres, from the Milukoffs to the Kerenskys and from the Kerenskys to the Trotzskys. With each excess the crowd must erect some still new defense against the inevitable disclosure of the fact that the people are not behaving at all as if they were living in the kingdom of heaven. With each farther deviation from the plain meaning of facts, the revolution must resort to more severe measures to sustain itself, until finally an insurmountable barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the scene of a Napoleon. Then the majority are forced to abandon the vain hope of really attaining Utopia, and content themselves with fictions to the effect that what they have really is Utopia - or with such other mechanisms as will serve to excuse and minimize the significance of existing facts and put off the complete realization of the ideal until some future state of progress. It is needless to add that those who have most profited by the revolutionary change are also most ready to take the lead in persuading their neighbors to be content with these rational compromises.
Meanwhile, however the revolutionary leaders have set up a dictatorship of their own, which, while necessary to "save the revolution," is itself a practical negation of the revolutionary dream of a free world. This dictatorship, finally passing into the hands of the more competent element of the revolutionary crowd, justifies itself to the many; professing and requiring of all a verbal assent to the revolutionary creed of which its very existence is a fundamental repudiation. The group becomes in time the nucleus about which society finally settles down again in comparative peace and equilibrium.
In general, then, it may be said that a revolution does not and cannot realize the age-long dream of a world set free. Its results may be summed up as follows: a newly dominant crowd, a new statement of old beliefs, new owners of property in the places of the old, new names for old tyrannies. Looking back over the history of the several great tidal waves of revolution which have swept over the civilization which is to-day ours, it would appear that one effect of them has been to intensify the hold which crowd-thinking has upon all of us, also to widen the range of the things which we submit to the crowd-mind for final judgement. In confirmation of this it is to be noted that it is on the whole those nations which have been burnt over by both the Reformation and the eighteenth-century revolution which exhibit the most chauvian brand of nationalism and crowd-patriotism. It is these same nations also which have most highly depersonalized their social relationships, political structures, and ideals. It is these nations also whose councils are most determined by spasms of crowd-propaganda.
Aside from the results mentioned, I think the deposit of revolutionary movements in history has been very small. It may be that, in the general shake-up of such a period, a few vigorous spirits are tossed into a place where their genius has an opportunity which it would otherwise have failed to get. But it would seem that on the whole the idea that revolutions help the progress of the race is a hoax. Where advancement has been achieved in freedom, in intelligence, in ethical values, in art or science, in consideration for humanity, in legislation, it has in each instance been achieved by unique individuals, and has spread chiefly by personal influence, never gained assent except among those who have power to recreate the new values won in their own experience. [In otherwords, to be fair to Martin, there are things you can't pick up from reading, no matter how insightful or honest your sources. "Velvet revolutions" spread through consent. It looks like Big Brian has a real point here - DMR.]
It is often said that religious liberty is the fruit of the Reformation. If so it is an indirect result and one which the reformers certainly did not desire. They sought liberty only for their own particular propaganda, a fact which is abundantly proved by Calvin's treatment of Servetus and of the Anabaptists, by Luther's attitude toward the Saxon peasants, by the treatment of Catholics in England, by the whole history of Cromwell's rule, by the persecution of Quakers and all other "heretics" in our American colonies - Pennsylvania, I believe, excepted - down to the date of the American Revolution.
It just happened that Protestantism as the religion of the bourgeois fell into the hands of a group, who, outside their religious-crowd interests were destined to be the greatest practical beneficiaries of the advancement of applied science. Between applied and science as a cultural discipline - that is, science as a humanistic study - the line is hard to draw. The Humanist spirit of the sciences attained a certain freedom, notwithstanding the fact that the whole Reformation was really a reactionary movement against the Renaissance; in spite, moreover, of the patent fact that the Protestant churches still, officially at least, resist the free spirit of scientific inquiry.
It is to the free spirits of the Italian Renaissance, also to the Jeffersons and Franklins and Paines, the Lincolns and Ingersolls, the Huxleys and Darwins and Spencers, the men who dared alone to resist the religious crowd-mind and to undermine the abstract ideas in which it had intrenched itself, to whom the modern world owes its religious and intellectual liberty.
The same is true of political liberty. England, which is the most free country in the world to-day, never really experienced the revolutionary crowd-movement of the eighteenth century. Instead, the changes came by a process of gradual reconstruction. And it is with just such an opportunist reconstructive process that England promises now to meet and solve the problems of the threatened social revolution. In contrast with Russia, Socialism in England has much ground for hope of success. The radical movement in England is on the whole wisely led by men who with few exceptions can think realistically and pragmatically, and refuse to be swept off their feet by crowd-abstractions. The British Labor party is the least crowd-minded of any of the socialistic organizations of our day. [That might have helped, and it certainly meant there was no bloodshed, but... - DMR.] The Rochdale group has demonstrated that if it is co-operation that people desire as a solution of the economic problem, the way to solve it is to co-operate along definite and practicable lines; the co-operators have given up belief in the miracle of Jericho. The British trade-union movement has demonstrated the fact that organization of this kind succeeds in just the degree that it can rise above crowd-thinking and deal with a suggestion of concrete problems according to a statesmanlike of concerted action.
In the light of what has been said about the psychology of revolution, I think we may hazard an opinion about the vaunted "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" - an idea that has provided some new catchwords for the crowd which is fascinated by the soviet revolution in Russia. Granting for the sake of argument that such a dictatorship would be desirable from any point of view - I do not see how the mere fact that people work proves their capacity to rule, horses also work - would it be possible? I think not. Even the temporary rule of Lenin in Russia can hardly be called a rule of the working class. Bolshevist propaganda will have it that such a dictatorship of the working class is positively necessary if we are ever to get away from the abuses of present "capitalistic society." Moreover, it is argued that this dictatorship of the organized workers could not be undemocratic, for since vested property is to be abolished and everyone forced to work for his living, all will belong to the working class, and therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat is but the dictatorship of all.
Again, what is there to show that this imagined dictatorship of all is to be shared equally by all, and if not have we not merely set up a new privileged class - the very thing which the Socialist Talmud has always declared it is the mission of the workers to destroy forever? While the workers are still a counter-crowd, struggling for power against the present ruling class, they are of course held together by a common cause - namely, their opposition to capital. But with labor's triumph, everybody becomes a worker, and there is no one longer to oppose. That which held the various elements of labor together in a common crowd of revolt has now ceased to exist, "class consciousness" has therefore no longer any meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist as a class by reason of its very triumph. What then remains to hold its various elements together in a common cause? Nothing at all. The solidarity of the workers vanishes, when the struggle which gave rise to that solidarity ceases. [But not the anger - DMR.] There remains now nothing but the humanitarian principle of the solidarity of the human race. Solidarity has ceased to be an economic fact, and has become purely "ideological."
Since by hypothesis everyone is a worker, the dictatorship of the workers is a dictatorship of the workers based not on labor as such, but upon a universal human quality - say, the fact that we are all bipeds, that we all have noses, or the fact of the circulation of the blood. As the purely proletarian character of this dictatorship becomes meaningless, the crowd-struggle switches from that of labor as a whole against capital, to a series of struggles within the dominant labor group itself.
"But what opportunity can there be," is the reply, "since private capital is to be abolished?" Very well, there have been ruling classes before in history who did not enjoy the privilege of owning private property. The clergy of the Middle Ages was such a class, and their dominance was quite as effective and as enduring as is that of our commercial classes today. But let us not deceive ourselves; in a soviet republic there would be opportunity aplenty for exploitation. As the solidarity of labor vanished, each important trade-group would enter into rivalry with the other for leadership in the co-operative commonwealth. Every economic advantage which any group possessed would be used to lord it over the rest.
For instance, let us suppose that the workers in a strategic industry, such as the railways, or coal mines, should make the discovery that by going on a strike they could starve the community as a whole into submission and gain practically anything they might demand. Loyalty to the rest of labor would act no more as a check to such ambitions than does loyalty to humanity in general now. As we have seen, the crowd is always formed for the unconscious purpose of relaxing the social control by mechanisms which mutually justify such antisocial conduct on the part of members of the crowd. There is every reason, both economic and psychological, why the workers in each industry would become organized crowds seeking to gain for their particular groups the lion's share of the spoils of the social revolution. What would there be, then, to prevent the workers of the railroads or some other essential industry from exploiting the community quite as mercilessly as the capitalists are alleged to do at present? Nothing but the rivalry of other crowds who were seeking the same dominance. In time a modus vivendi would doubtless be reached whereby social control would be shared by a few of the stronger unions - and their leaders.