Revolutionary Vengeance

What a lot of ways there are to go wrong when a revolution begins seeking vengeance! And most of them just clear the path for the next strongman.

So why would this be the first thing a revolution would want to do once it had got control of the state?

The people one would initially like to punish are normally, as in the current Egyptian case, charged with specific, notorious crimes: economic crimes that occurred before, and occasioned, the revolution, or crimes of violence, etc., in the attempt to suppress it. Those who commit the former crimes place themselves above the laws they violate; those who commit the latter, use a lawful power wrongly.

It’s easy for a revolution to identify its principal opponents and specify the crimes of these individuals. What’s difficult is to decide when, and with which individuals, the passion for vengeance must stop. The difference between a high-official thief and the people he does business with is only a matter of degree, as is the difference between the general who gives orders and the officers and soldiers who obey them.

The question is, how far will revolutionary vengeance pursue the accomplices of the principal criminals – not just the willing accomplices who are thieves or brutes themselves, but also the unwilling accomplices, and those who are merely similarly situated and are guilty only by association?

There are two questions really, and the second one is, how many enemies, real or imagined, does the revolution want to make? Because if you imagine an enemy where there is none, not only does that one become a real enemy, but anyone who can imagine you making the same mistake about them might too. That is the tendency of fears, and people begin with a certain natural fear of revolutions.

It’s at this point that the vengeance of revolutions begins a dialectical movement, one that can be fatal to the revolution if it is weak.

A few historical instances may help to illustrate the principle.

Many a tumult goes by the name of revolution until the capital is taken and it gains control of the state, but that is when the strongman comes forth and, beginning with the formal enemies of the “revolution” (those who were in power), continues to practice revolutionary vengeance until all his rivals (including some of his former colleagues) are consumed by it. This doesn’t happen in Latin America much anymore, but it still happens in Africa. I’m afraid Che Guevara himself was involved in one such revolution, until he realized it was a fake and went home to Cuba. They’ve had any number of fake revolutions and real purges in the Congo since then.

In these cases revolutionary vengeance leads directly to the establishment of the strongman as despot, and so it is not really “revolutionary” at all, but rather personal.

The Terror of the French Revolution epitomizes another species of revolutionary vengeance, in which, starting with regicide, and having disposed of all the real criminals, the revolution begins to dispose of other supposed criminals on the basis of status alone, that is, revolutionary vengeance as an extension or instrument of class war. And so, aristocrats or high churchmen might be sent to the guillotine without ever having raised a hand against the revolution.

Some aristocrats, like Lafayette, were immune on grounds of their revolutionary credentials; others were condemned merely because their near relations were in exile and known to be negotiating combinations and raising troops among foreign powers. It got so that all the aristocrats were suspect, if only because their forebears had profited from the arrangements under the Ancien Regime for as many generations as they themselves could claim noble birth. At length the Terror began consuming the Revolution itself – Danton, for example – and finally, when Robespierre was executed, the Terror itself.

And so vengeance passed from the notoriously guilty, to the possibly guilty, to those guilty by inference, to those guilty by association, to those who at first were not guilty at all, but later became guilty in the eyes of the revengers, who themselves became liable to the same judgment.

It’s a dangerous path, and not just a slippery slope, but a law of dialectics. For it leads to…

…the reappearance of the strongman as the only remedy for fear and uncertainty – though to be sure, Napoleon was more than that besides.

In the example of the Russian Revolution, revolutionary vengeance becomes a state institution, and political acts become crimes, crimes against the state, or merely against the interests of the individual strongman who happens to be at the head of the state, rather than the laws. This includes:

·         Stalin and the NEPmen – in which the privileged position certain businessmen enjoyed under Lenin to rebuild the Russian economy became a status crime under Stalin, who was rebuilding it again as a centrally-planned Soviet economy.

·         Stalin and the army – a purge, if I’m not mistaken, of left-opposition elements in the Red Army still loyal to their commander in the civil war of the Reds and the Whites, the exiled Trotsky.

On the other hand, we also know how the Radical Republications punished the leaders, military and political, of the Confederacy. Truly they – and not the Confederates, who were merely rebels – were the revolutionaries of that epoch. But they did not take their vengeance in blood, and took it only after the power to resist of the class being punished had been destroyed.

Nor did the Fathers of the first American Revolution, unlike the Radical Republications, find it necessary to deprive Tory Loyalists even of ordinary political rights, much less life and property.

For this is the dialectical risk of revolutionary vengeance: as an object of fear, it tends to make enemies for the revolution among any class whose members are being punished. When a revolution is weak, the difference between a passive enemy and an active counter-revolutionary can be very small. When a revolution is strong, can it have any real need to punish the mere accomplices of the biggest thieves? Those guilty by association? Those guilty only of what I have called “status crimes”?

The institutionalization of revolutionary vengeance in Stalinist and Maoist states is only a symptom of more fundamental contradictions in such states – contradictions that are out-of-scope for this blog. But the consequences of pressing vengeance too prematurely or too hard is not.

The big bourgeoisie makes a good example. They are, most of them, very likely the accomplices of the Arab despots. (One such is ready to be tried in Egypt.) They also have resources sufficient to make them formidable if they were to instigate or join a counter-revolution. Moreover, they are influential with people who would like to think they are or might become big bourgeoisie, and those people are susceptible to fear – the more so as they are the weaker.

The further you work down the list, from known accomplices, to people who fit the same description as the people who associate with possible accomplices, the greater the risk of adding to the possibility or strength of the counter-revolution. It is still worse too do this before the objects of the revolution – civil and political liberties – are well in hand, because in that case people who might worry about being subjected to revolutionary vengeance have two fewer reasons to side with the revolution.

Vengeance on the persons of those even notoriously guilty of crimes against the revolution is not, strictly speaking, a class interest of the revolutionary classes: it has no direct bearing on their economic activity. Getting the money back from the thieves, on the other hand, does.

And so does securing the political and civil liberties the middle classes have always found necessary to their growth as economic beings. Anything that damages the prospects for these gains should in principle be put off until they are won.