Revolutionaries (37 page)

There are signs that such distinctions are once again being slowly and empirically learned, but in a general atmosphere of disorientation and hysteria which makes the rational and limited use of violence difficult. It is time that we put this process of learning on a more systematic basis by understanding the social uses of violence. We may think that all violence is worse than non-violence, other things being equal. But the worst kind is the violence which gets out of anyone's control.

¹
See A. Pigliaru,
La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico
, Milan, 1959.

²
Between the wars the British Royal Air Force resisted any plans to use it to maintain public order on the grounds that its weapons were too indiscriminate, and that it might hence be liable to prosecution under the common law. It did not apply this argument to the bombing of tribal villages in India and the Middle East . . .

³
The argument that these images cannot be proved to affect anyone's action merely tries to rationalize this contradiction, and cannot stand serious scrutiny. Neither can the arguments that popular culture has always revelled in images of violence, or that its images act as a sort of replacement for the real thing.

⁴
Rational revolutionaries have always measured violence entirely by its purpose and likely achievement. When Lenin was told in 1916 that the secretary of the Austrian social democrats had assassinated the Austrian prime minister as a gesture of protest against the war, he merely wondered why a man in his position had not taken the less dramatic but more effective step of circulating the party activists with an anti-war appeal. It was evident to him that a boring but effective non-violent action was preferable to a romantic but ineffective one. This did not stop him from recommending armed insurrection when necessary.

The late Che Guevara would have been very surprised and acutely irritated by the discovery that his picture is now on the cover of
Evergreen Review
, his personality the subject of an article in
Vogue
, and his name the ostensible excuse for some homosexual exhibitionism in a New York theater (see
Observer
, 8 May 1969). We can leave
Vogue
aside. Its business is to tell women what it is fashionable to wear, to know and to talk about; its interest in Che Guevara has no more political implications than the editor's of
Who's Who
. The other two jokes, however, reflect a widespread belief that there is some sort of connection between social revolutionary movements and permissiveness in public sexual or other personal behaviour. It is about time someone pointed out that there are no good grounds for this belief.

In the first place, it ought now to be evident that conventions about what sexual behaviour is permissible in public have no specific connection with systems of political rule or social and economic exploitation. (An exception is the rule of men over women, and the exploitation of women by men which, at a guess, imply more or less strict limitations on the public behaviour of the inferior sex.) Sexual ‘liberation' has only indirect relations with any other kind of liberation. Systems of class rule and exploitation may impose strict conventions of personal (for
example, sexual) behaviour in public or private or they may not. Hindu society was not in any sense more free or egalitarian than the Welsh nonconformist community, because the one used temples to demonstrate a vast variety of sexual activities in the most tempting manner, whereas the other imposed rigid restrictions on its members, at any rate in theory. All we can deduce from this particular cultural difference is that pious Hindus who wanted to vary their sexual routine could learn to do so much more easily than pious Welshmen.

Indeed, if a rough generalization about the relation between class rule and sexual freedom is possible, it is that rulers find it convenient to encourage sexual permissiveness or laxity among their subjects if only to keep their minds off their subjection. Nobody ever imposed sexual puritanism on slaves; quite the contrary. The sort of societies in which the poor are strictly kept in their place are quite familiar with regular institutionalized mass outbursts of free sex, such as carnivals. In fact, since sex is the cheapest form of enjoyment as well as the most intense (as the Neapolitans say, bed is the poor man's grand opera), it is politically very advantageous, other things being equal, to get them to practise it as much as possible.

In other words, there is no necessary connection between social or political censorship and moral censorship, though it is often assumed that there is. To demand the transfer of some kinds of behaviour from the impermissible to the publicly permitted is a political act only if it implies changing political relations. Winning the right for white and black to make love in South Africa would be a political act, not because it widens the range of what is sexually allowed but because it attacks racial subjection. Winning the right to publish
Lady Chatterly
has no such implications, though it may be welcomed on other grounds.

This should be abundantly clear from our own experience. Within the last few years the official or conventional prohibitions on what can be said, heard, done and shown about sex in
public – or for that matter in private – have been virtually abolished in several western countries. The belief that a narrow sexual morality is an essential bulwark of the capitalist system is no longer tenable. Nor, indeed, is the belief that the fight against such a morality is very urgent. There are still a few outdated crusaders who may think of themselves as storming a puritan fortress, but in fact its walls have been virtually razed.

No doubt there are still things that cannot be printed or shown but they are progressively harder to find and to get indignant about. The abolition of censorship is a one-dimensional activity, like the movement of women's necklines and skirts, and if that movement goes on too long in a single direction, the returns in revolutionary satisfaction of the crusaders diminish sharply. The right of actors to fuck each other on stage is palpably a less important advance even of personal liberation than the right of Victorian girls to ride bicycles was. It is today becoming quite hard even to mobilize those prosecutions of obscenity on which publishers and producers have so long relied for free publicity.

For practical purposes the battle for public sex has been won. Has this brought social revolution any nearer, or indeed any change outside the bed, the printed page, and public entertainment (which may or may not be desirable)? There is no sign of it. All it has obviously brought is a lot more public sex in an otherwise unchanged social order.

But though there is no intrinsic connection between sexual permissiveness and social organization, there is, I am bound to note with a little regret, a persistent affinity between revolution and puritanism. I can think of no well-established organized revolutionary movement or regime which has not developed marked puritanical tendencies. Including marxist ones, whose founders' doctrine was quite unpuritanical (or in Engels's case actively anti-puritanical). Including those in countries like Cuba, whose native tradition is the opposite of puritan. Including the most officially anarchist-libertarian ones. Anyone who believes
that the morality of the old anarchist militants was free and easy does not know what he or she is talking about. Free love (in which they believed passionately) meant no drink, no drugs and monogamy without a formal marriage.

The libertarian, or more exactly antinomian, component of revolutionary movements, though sometimes strong and even dominant at the actual moment of liberation, have never been able to resist the puritan. The Robespierres always win out over the Dantons. Those revolutionaries for whom sexual, or for that matter cultural, libertarianism are really central issues of the revolution, are sooner or later edged aside by it. Wilhelm Reich, the apostle of the orgasm, did indeed start out, as the New Left reminds us, as a revolutionary marxist-cum-freudian and a very able one, to judge by his
Mass Psychology of Fascism
(which was subtitled
The sexual economy of political reaction and proletarian sexual policy
). But can we be really surprised that such a man ended by concentrating his interest on orgasm rather than organization? Neither stalinists nor Trotskyites felt any enthusiasm for the revolutionary surrealists who hammered at their gates asking to be admitted. Those who survived in politics did not do so as surrealists.

Why this is so is an important and obscure question, which cannot be answered here. Whether it is necessarily so is an even more important question – at all events for revolutionaries who think the official puritanism of revolutionary regimes excessive and often beside the point. But that the great revolutions of our century have not been devoted to sexual permissiveness can hardly be denied. They have advanced sexual freedom (and fundamentally) not by abolishing sexual prohibitions, but by a major act of social emancipation: the liberation of women from their oppression. And that revolutionary movements have found personal libertarianism a nuisance is also beyond question. Among the rebellious young, those closest to the spirit and ambitions of old-fashioned social revolution, also tend to be the
most hostile to the taking of drugs, advertised indiscriminate sex, or other styles and symbols of personal dissidence: the Maoists, Trotskyites and communists. The reasons given are often that ‘the workers' neither understand nor sympathize with such behaviour. Whether or not this is so, it can hardly be denied that it consumes time and energy and is hardly compatible with organization and efficiency.

The whole business is really part of a much wider question, What is the role in revolution or any social change of that cultural rebellion which is today so visible a part of the ‘new left', and in certain countries such as the United States the predominant aspect of it. There is no great social revolution which is not combined, at least peripherally, with such cultural dissidence. Perhaps today in the west, where ‘alienation' rather than poverty is the crucial motive force of rebellion, no movement which does not also attack the system of personal relations and private satisfactions can be revolutionary. But, taken by themselves, cultural revolt and cultural dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces. Politically they are not very important.

The Russian revolution of 1917 reduced the contemporary
avant garde
and cultural rebels, many of whom sympathized with it, to their proper social and political proportions. When the French went on general strike in May 1968, the happenings in the Odeon Theatre and those splendid graffiti (‘It is forbidden to forbid', ‘When I make revolution it makes me feel like making love', etc.) could be seen to be forms of minor literature and theatre, marginal to the main events. The more prominent such phenomena are, the more confident can we be that the big things are not happening. Shocking the bourgeois is, alas, easier than overthrowing him.

Whatever else a city may be, it is at the same time a place inhabited by a concentration of poor people and, in most cases, the locus of political power which affects their lives. Historically, one of the things city populations have done about this is to demonstrate, make riots or insurrections, or otherwise exert direct pressure on the authorities who happen to operate within their range. It does not much matter to the ordinary townsman that city power is sometimes only local, whereas at other times it may also be regional, national or even global. However, it does affect the calculations both of the authorities and of political movements designed to overthrow governments, whether or not the cities are capitals (or what amounts to the same thing, independent city states) or the headquarters of giant national or international corporations, for if they are, urban riots and insurrections can obviously have much wider implications than if the city authority is purely local.

The subject of this paper is, how the structure of cities has affected popular movement of this sort, and conversely, what effect the fear of such movements has had on urban structure. The first point is of much more general significance than the second. Popular riot, insurrection or demonstration is an almost universal urban phenomenon, and as we now know, it occurs even in the affluent megalopolis of the late-twentieth-century
industrial world. On the other hand the fear of such riot is intermittent. It may be taken for granted as a fact of urban existence, as in most pre-industrial cities, or as the kind of unrest which periodically flares up and subsides without producing any major effect on the structure of power. It may be underestimated, because there have not been any riots or insurrections for a long time, or because there are institutional alternatives to them, such as systems of local government by popular election. There are, after all, few continuously riotous cities. Even Palermo, which probably holds the European record with twelve insurrections between 1512 and 1866, has had very long periods when its populace was relatively quiet. On the other hand, once the authorities decide to alter the urban structure because of political nervousness, the results are likely to be substantial and lasting, like the boulevards of Paris.

The effectiveness of riot or insurrection depends on three aspects of urban structure: how easily the poor can be mobilized, how vulnerable the centres of authority are to them, and how easily they may be suppressed. These are determined partly by sociological, partly by urbanistic, partly by technological factors, though the three cannot always be kept apart. For instance, experience shows that among forms of urban transport tramways, whether in Calcutta or Barcelona, are unusually convenient for rioters; partly because the raising of fares, which tends to affect all the poor simultaneously, is a very natural precipitant of trouble, partly because these large and track-bound vehicles, when burned or overturned, can block streets and disrupt traffic very easily. Buses do not seem to have played anything like as important a part in riots, underground railways appear to be entirely irrelevant to them (except for transporting rioters) and cars can at best be used as improvised road blocks or barricades, and, to judge by recent experience in Paris, not very effective ones. Here the difference is purely technological.