Professor Pilikian’s Theory of Revolutions – Old & New
From President Obama’s Website: professorpilikian-on-obama-website.blogspot.co.uk
Introductory Notes by Phaedra Behrent
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In this theoretical article on Revolutions, Professor Pilikian makes important, innovative and … revolutionary points (pun intended), examining every significant nook and cranny of revolutionary history, and historical revolutions, from the American to the Chinese.
While not rejecting the Marxist theory, he augments what Karl Marx lacked — the huge importance of evolutionary ‘little’ ideas and concepts.
The Professor writes;
“Marx ‘invented’ massive socio-economic forces to carry out his revolution for a more egalitarian society of social justice throughout the machinery of large scale history.
“I argue for smaller ideatic forces as cogs and wheels in the larger dynamo that History is. After all, the oak tree grows from a seed — the gigantic oak (= the revolutionary evolution) is in the tiny seed (= an idea); the genius of a Leonardo or an Einstein is in the drip of their father’s ejaculate meeting their mother’s microscopic egg !
“According to Marx’s own theory of vast socio-economic forces unleashed by the Capitalist system, mainly the Proletariat, carrying the flag and marching victoriously to a Socialist society, Marx’s big ideas would count for nothing … they are idealistic hence worthless in the context of Marxian materialist facts of history. Marx, unwittingly (and I think masochistically), rubbished his own ideas, by considering ideas to be examples of Hegelian idealism!!
“Today’s invisible non-existent Proletariat are Engels’ lumpenproletariat of petty thieves, cut-throats, disease-ridden prostitutes, the Victorian equivalent of modern mafia drug-dealers in street corners, the unemployed, the penniless students whoring for fees, the refugee slave-workers, etc., the Dickensian characters of the poor-masses Marx and Engels despised and denigrated, deleting them out of their grand history of factory-workers.
“The Great Marxist prophets (plus Lenin, Stalin, Mao) could predict little that one day what I call the British neo-mafia Capitalism of Mrs Thatcher would wipe out the carefully nurtured Marxist Proletariat out of history… its revolutionary role today taken over by the lumpen-Internet generation of public-square revolutionaries with mobiles“. (Personal Communication)
Professor Pilikian brings up a very interesting point about the evolution of Revolutions. In our modern society, an uprising of hundreds of thousands needs no proletariat to take place by a couple of clicks on a computer, laptop or even a mobile phone. To rally supporters of all white-collar professions (minus Marxian industrial proletariat) can take just a well- worded post on Facebook or Twitter.
There are often situations when, in the past, there would have been a march of thousands up to the doors of the parliamentary headquarters needed, the only way for the general population to join together and show, en masse, their view on certain issues.
We have now entered the time of the ‘on-line petition’ — the post-modern approach and the fastest way to manufacture support, and get positive results without leaving our … houses — witness an organization of almost 43 million people constituting a world-wide community http://www.avaaz.org/en/
British governments run a similar organization officially to trumpet their own political acts; there is a petition at the moment to “Stop all immigration and close the UK borders until ISIS is defeated.” (petition.parliament.uk). By 22.05 o’clock, on 11/02/16, there were already 460,523 signatures collected. Were it not for the Internet, this kind of level of support would have taken a lot of money and a lot of PR effort to achieve.
I mention the above petition as a mere example of the power of modern technology, not because I agree in any way with the content and thinking behind it.
“Far from it” confirms Professor Pilikian, “as it insidiously combines themes which are linked only through verbal dexterity, by Oxbridge trained very clever civil servants! Immigration = the importation of slave labour to substitute the ‘genocided’ British proletariat, has really nothing to do with the neo-Nazi criminals of ISIS!”
We all know about the French Revolution and the thousands of people who marched from Paris to Versailles. It is said that on the 6th October 1789, the King of France and his family went with the people back to Paris, the procession numbering between 30,000 and 40,000 people. (J.Llewellyn and S.Thompson, “The October march on Versailles”, Alpha History, accessed 11/02/2016,
http://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/october-march-on-versailles/)
All of those people marching together at the time would have presented a huge show of force and intent, however the actual number of protesters was less than 10% of the number of signatures on the petition mentioned above.
So what today constitutes a ‘Revolution’?
The Professor talks about smaller ideatic forces being the cogs and wheels, is this petition an example of such a cog or wheel? Has this become the ‘new’ approach to marches and demonstrations? Is this how modern society demonstrates its dissatisfaction with the state of the country or a government?
For thousands of years there has been fighting, people revolting against their governments, displaying the need for radical systemic change.
Many people today in the world look to America, to set an example of what can be done. The American governments have been responsible for many atrocities, but they have also been responsible for positive changes in attitudes of their own people toward one another.
They have a long history of demonstrating how people must evolve, to progress. They gained their independence by revolution, and since then they have been constructing a nation. They have shown the problems encountered when people of different origins have to live together, they have highlighted the mistakes that can occur, and the consequent changes to put things right.
I believe that this is the reason why people look up to America to demonstrate the way forward.
In 1619, the first African slaves, abused as free commodity stocks, were forcefully downloaded in Virginia.
“It took them 400 years, in 2009, to elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States, while all along, still, the white police criminals openly get away with Nazi-style murder of the Black youth of America used as sitting ducks, and there is nothing the Black-and-white President of America can do to stop such abhorrent shameless racism. Worse, the corrupt American legal system, Justices of the highest Court, exonerate the blatant trigger happy white scum“, writes Professor Pilikian (personal communication).
President Obama has an uphill battle to fight; he has inherited many issues and has much important work to do. “By putting him in charge, the good people of greater America who voted for him showed good faith, that he is the best man for the job, which does not have to be in the hands of white trash like Mr. Bush junior“.
The American people have shown the kind of national progress in attitudes that is possible to achieve. Let us hope that President Obama will show the leaders of the world how to effectuate such national evolution.
Maybe in another 400 years the human race will have learned how to live together, and proven that we can share our global resources peacefully and without artificial class or caste systems.
Only time can and will tell in our own lifetime? Perhaps?
Phaedra Behrent
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The Second American Revolution
By Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian
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A New Theory of Revolution
Revolutions are dodgy things – hard to locate, difficult to define and date, complicated affairs to disentangle, arising out of a web of complex historical facts and events.
When is a popular uprising a rebellion, turning into a Revolution? How does it differ from a civil war, or a civilian coup d’état with some military backing, or a coup d’état by military blockheads, without any popular mass-support?
Was the American Revolution (1775-83), the first of a global chain, truly one? The contemporary participants certainly thought so, calling themselves “revolutionaries”.
Were the incredible horrors of The Terror that followed on the heels of the French Revolution (1789) part and parcel of it? Some other French revolutions followed – on a revolutionary continuum, could they be regarded as the further convulsions of the first, including the corruption of Napoleon’s attempt at imperialist world-domination, as in his youth he had dreamt of spreading the noble ideals of the first French Revolution (influenced by the American one)?
Was the French revolutionary Terror the speeded-up equivalent of the American Civil War (1860-65) that could have been the belated outcome of the American Revolution?
What about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia – actually the second of … two revolutions in a single year, the first having ended the tsarist rule? It may have been mind-set-and-shifted by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party, but it owed its popular beginnings to the astounding historical event hitherto not properly understood let alone explained by historians – the sudden demise and dissolution overnight of over a million-strong Tsar’s army … the vast community of ‘Russian’ soldiers, as if the neural network of a single community-brain or mind, decided to desert the battlefield and return to their homes, letting the battlefront simply melt away and ‘disappear’ … It was the most extraordinary ‘revolution’ in mankind’s history, the first of a kind, sui generis.
It was this powerful ‘re-wiring’ of a whole nation’s mind that served as the concrete basis set in concrete that saw the Soviet Union survive the unimaginable horrors of Stalinism and the Second World War, the Korean War… down to the non-stop onslaughts by Britain and America all over the world (especially in Afro-Asia) during the Cold War.
Need Revolutions fail?
Why have all social revolutions failed and fallen into terror and beastliness? The English Civil War (1642-46) cut off the King’s head (Charles I), closed down the theatres, and choked the very liberties it professed to free … making of the puritanical parliamentarian Cromwell another tyrannical King!
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was a curious novelty, occurring amidst a Civil War in China (1946-50), and bombed horribly into the madness of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) born of Mao Tse Tun’s broken mind.
Karl Marx (to my mind) had the most insightful and incisive definition of revolutions – he conceived of a Revolution as the societal change affected by the exploitative economic relations of a corrupted system having embraced some necessary good initially.
Revolutions fail, I think because the discontent of the masses is perverted by individuals into a tool of personal ambition or what I call the god-complex (otherwise known as the personality cult of leaders) – usually the masculinist power-obsessed narcissism of the macho nature (equally exemplified in some women, like Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine Great of Russia, Lady Thatcher of Modern Britain, Condoleeza Rice of the USA etc.) destroys all, including itself in the case of the male – Hitler, Stalin, Mao …
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez seems to be the first to have developed the wisdom of off-loading the cult onto a third-dimension – the safely dead figure of the historical Simon Bolivar! Che Guevara’s solution was nobly self-sacrificing and Christian – he went away instead of locking horns with Fidel Castro. As an agnostic humanist, I prefer The post-modern Chavez wisdom – a lesson revolutionary leaders would do well to learn, and quickly.
I think Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (more than any political theory) can best explain the inevitable nature of necessary revolutions – they are the new species suddenly ‘created’ from the very long incremental evolution of the old – adaptations accumulated within certain environmental conditions, or socio-economic relations in Marxist terms – Marx had wanted to dedicate his Das Kapital to Darwin who had declined it gently.
Beyond Marx, I would say that ultimately, in the final analysis, while not denying contributory validity to the Marxist conception of revolutions, change – any change in science or society – can only occur by mind-set shifts. Let me explain;
Individual minds constitute the neurological ‘wiring’ of a certain community-mind, reflected in and by a specific culture, which is in a pro-active dialectical tension with individual minds-and-behaviors, i.e. a culture reflects the communally wired neural mind-set – e.g. The ancient Egyptian Pyramids reflect culturally an entirely different neural mind-wiring from the classical Greek one that could build the Parthenon.
One nation’s history – and let’s remember that the very concept of a ‘nation’ is a 19th c. invention of the European imperialist mind-set, to facilitate the military occupation of large swathes of territories in daylight robbery! – is thus I suggest the product of major revolutionary shifts in the cultural mind-set of that specific culture (now called a ‘nation’).
In what way are my ideas different from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 structuralist analyses of scientific revolutions in terms of paradigm-shifts?
Thomas Kuhn’s methodology I think is Deductive a posteriori, as different from mine which is a priori inductive. Kuhn speaks of theory-interpretation and scientific understanding, and is not at all aware of the brain-wiring of the neural mind-set. I really have nothing to do with his views.
The Split-second Revolution – a new form
To return to my sociological adaptation of the Darwinist theory; New species abruptly come into the fore – are ‘seen’ – emerging out of the old forms (species) as a direct result of millennia of very slow ‘invisible’ structural changes occurring subliminally. I think the same, in social structures – Revolutions are sudden revelations of evolutionary socio-cultural changes, procured over centuries of societal political frustrations.
Although the long periods spent in the accumulation of the latter is still the case in our modern technological environment, the speed of the modern US communications media however has greatly shortened the time for the revolutionary mind-jumps to occur.
Although past social revolutions, while immensely relatively faster than their evolutionary slow preparatory build-up in centuries of socio-economic failures, nevertheless still took decades to settle – not any more – what I shall define as the Second American Revolution (accepting the first one as such, dated conventionally by the Declaration of Independence on July the 4th 1776) – occurred in a split-second on the penultimate day of the Democratic Convention, and can be dated precisely as a record of history-making before the very eyes of the whole world; Wednesday, 27th August, 2008, in Denver, Colorado, USA.
I had one of the best seats at the US Democratic Convention, watching it at home in … London on the BBC, deep into the after-midnight hours … And I would not have missed it for anything.
Barack Obama’s Proclamation as the Democratic candidate struck me as the Second American Revolution, and it happened in a split second one could time exactly like that of an Olympic Sprinter … (alas, I cannot work out the exact second because of the time-difference).
It was when the graceful and gracious Senator Mrs. Hillary Clinton (during the calling of the Roll Call of States) moved a motion that the Convention suspends all procedural necessities and proclaims senator Obama by Acclamation as the sole candidate for the Presidency [of the most armed nation in the world … President Obama (as any man or woman) shall have a very difficult time wearing them, and I hope he builds up the courage to junk them, to dedicate himself totally to God’s works of global peacemaking …]
At that precise moment when the masses at the Convention hallowed their approval, I could ‘see’, as if on an MRI scan, the mind in the communal community-brain of-the-night suddenly light up and glow with a completely new neural wiring – a massive revolutionary mindset-shift had occurred – affluent white America electing a Black man, Jesus-skin colored, the son of an abused ‘race’, much tortured, frequently raped, often killed, crucified alive by the lunatics of KuKlux Clans, relentlessly for centuries … His brothers and sisters daily starved to slow death, genocided for example in Rwanda (under President Clinton’s blind watch) and now in Darfur, in raw-materials rich Africa etc. etc.
Obama’s Kenyan father may have found haven in America escaping “Britain’s Gulag” – the title of a horrendous book by a most humane American woman, the heart-warming Caroline Elkins (unlike the moose-shooting Sarah Palin), who could only unravel as late as November 2002 the British Empire’s unforgivable genocidal war-crimes in Kenya (BBC documentary – Kenya: White Terror), still uncompensated and un-apologized for… I hope President Obama shall come to whisper in the right British ears for some such dignity and humanity.
And Finally
There can be no greater lesson of sheer human decency taught to the world by the Democrats of America glorying in the halo of a decent son of African Kenya.
God forbid that Republican electoral fraud robs him of a much deserved victory, as it did once poor Al Gore … who thankfully became much wiser for it, and achieved greater works than he could as a President beholden to the grand American polluters of this world. I hope Barack Obama offers him the cabinet post of Environment, to save us all from a global catastrophe that desperately needs peace and no-armaments, but only global peace to resolve!
I think some former Presidents, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, are changed men, humanized from what they were in military-office – and I hope the Homo Africanus gives these wised-up old American males the chance to wipe off the shame of white man’s imperialism from the pages of at least post-modern history.
Americans must be reminded daily that the (First) American Revolution was a fight against imperialism (the British one), a blood-soaked struggle for freedom and self-determination, to send the British imperialists back to Britain!
How dare the Bushite Republicans turn American Imperialists themselves, genociding their way into the territories of other nations … The incontrovertible fact that they invaded the country of Iraq and murdered 1.5 million of its people (hitherto) on a despicable Lie (to eliminate non-existent WMDs) renders them war-criminals, who must be arraigned in La Hague. Unfortunately, of course they won’t be.
The only option left to the honorable Senator McCain is frankly to resign, save his own humanity, and join the Democratic Party!
For the Second American Revolution to occur in a split second, it needed centuries of evolutionary struggles by the enslaved black Africans dehumanized in the American continents.
The white imperialist scum gives nothing for nothing! The Haitian Black Jacobins liberated Simon Bolivar’s mind to lead the first non-racist revolution in South America, which fructified in our own days in Fidel Castro, of miniscule Cuba (150 failed attempts by the CIA to murder him), the democratically elected President Salvador Allende of Chile (successfully murdered, alas, by the CIA), the democratically elected President Evo Morales of Bolivia, and the democratically multiply-elected President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela the CIA would love to murder… against a President George Bush of the USA twice put there by corrupt vote-rigging.
Failure to elect Obama to atone for the crimes of the Bush administration would yet become – God forbid – the greatest shame of our own world-history.
Finis