Revolutions

444 Pages·2020·37.961 MB·English

by  Michael Löwy

REVOLUTIONS
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Michael Löwy
editor
REVOLUTIONS
translated by
Todd Chretien
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Original edition: Révolutions (Paris, Hazan, 2000)
Original updated edition: Revoluções (São Paulo, Boitempo, 2009)
(c) Michael Löwy, 2000, 2009
Published with the permission of Boitempo, Brazil
© 2020 Michael Löwy
Published in 2020 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
[email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-64259-212-2
Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
(www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International
(www.ingramcontent.com).
is book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and
Wallace Action Fund.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions.
Please call 773-583-7884 or email [email protected] for more information.
Cover photograph, Woman with Flag, 1928, by Tina Modotti.
Cover design by Eric Kerl.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
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Contents
e Revolution Photographed Michael Löwy
e Paris Commune Gilbert Achcar
e Russian Revolution (1905) Gilbert Achcar
e Russian Revolution (1917) Rebecca Houzel & Enzo Traverso
e Hungarian Revolution Michael Löwy
e German Revolution Enzo Traverso
e Mexican Revolution Bernard Oudin
e Chinese Revolutions Pierre Rousset
e Spanish Civil War Gilbert Achcar
e Cuban Revolution Janette Habel
History Has Not Ended Michael Löwy
Postscript Michael Löwy
Bibliography
Photo Credits
About the Authors
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Remnants of barricades on rue Royale, 1848.
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e Revolution Photographed
T Michael Löwy
wo barricades block a narrow street. e combatants are invisible,
awaiting an imminent attack. e barrier that is closer up in this
photograph, built out of paving stones and carriage wheels, appears
dissected by a spear that might be a flagpole (could it be red?). e street is
empty. We can almost hear an expectant silence.
is barricade cannot help but bring to mind rue Saint-Maur in June
1848 described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables:
e wall was built of cobblestones. It was plumb-straight, precise, perpendicular,
leveled square, reinforced with twine, lined with lead wire . . . . e street was deserted as
far as the eye could see. All windows and doors were closed. . . . No one to be seen,
nothing to be heard. Not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A tomb.1
Barricades before the attack, rue Saint-Maur, June 25, 1848.
A photograph of the same barricade the following day shows the scene
after a battle. e street teems with people, soldiers, shock troops,
bystanders. ey pass between the barricades, now riddled with holes, but
largely intact. e insurgents are absent. Are they dead, taken prisoner, or
have they fled? What is certain is that they have lost.
ese two daguerreotypes, taken from a window on June 25 and 26,
1848, by a certain ibaut—about whom we know very little—are among
the first pieces of photographic evidence of a revolution.2
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Barricades after the attack, rue Saint-Maur, June 26, 1848.
We have a third entry dated from this same epoch taken by Hippolyte
Bayard of a demolished barricade on la rue Royale. It is a melancholic
image. All that remains of the insurgents’ utopian dream are piles of
scattered stones. e street seems deserted, but the presence of some carts
and wheelbarrows suggests that someone is preparing to repave it. e
battle is over. Order reigns in Paris.
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ere is a sharp contrast between these first images of revolutionary
barricades—magnificent, yet immobile, enigmatic, and distant—and those
in Barcelona almost a century later. Sandbags are substituted for
cobblestones. is time, the photographer isn’t on a balcony, but closer up,
or even among the insurgents. And, most importantly, we see the faces of
the combatants, their smiles, their untrained hands holding rifles, and their
raised fists. Yet, despite these changes, the barricade is always present,
synonymous with popular uprisings, with revolutionary initiative. It is no
accident that the hymn of the CNT (National Confederation of Workers),
the great anarchist union, begins with the call: “To the barricades! To the
barricades!”
Another change of scene: we are in May of 2008. e paving stones are
once again dug up from the street, and these rebels, who are almost all
young people, are building a barricade in cheerful solidarity. But this time,
unlike in Barcelona in 1936 or in nineteenth-century Paris, there are no
rifles. ey will not kill the enemy; instead they taunt and mock him, and
once in a while a protester grazes a police officer with a stone. ere is a lot
of noise and smoke, but their defense of the barricade does not lead to the
rebels’ executions, or to them being gunned down by the forces of order.
Rather, the fight ends with the youths’ dispersal and their regrouping in
another part of the city.
Let’s return for a moment to the barricades of June 1848, the
beginning of the photographic history of revolutions. ese constitute a
historic guide, what Marx called the start of the “civil war in its most
terrible aspect, the war of labor against capital.” And they introduce a
significant new meaning to the word “revolution”: it no longer implies
simply a change in the form of the state, but an attempt to subvert the
whole bourgeois order.3
What was the politico-military efficacy of a barricade? For Auguste
Blanqui—of all nineteenth-century revolutionaries he undoubtedly
considered this question most closely—barricades were indispensable for
an uprising’s triumph, as long as the lessons from the defeat of June 1848
were taken into account. As he explained in great detail in Instructions for
an Armed Uprising (1869), he thought it was imperative to organize a
network between the barricades as well as to make them indestructible by
using no less than 9,186 cobblestones in each wall.4 Frederick Engels, in
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contrast, was more skeptical. In his well-known 1895 text, he insisted that
barricades could have more of a psychological than material impact by
rattling the government’s troops’ morale. From his point of view, the
perfection of rifles and artillery, along with broad, straight, modern streets
(Haussmann!) created unfavorable conditions for the use of barricades.5
ese technical and tactical considerations did not prevent barricades
from rising up at the heart of subsequent revolutionary crises. In Western
Europe—and sometimes in Latin America and Russia, but not in Asia—
they became almost synonymous with the notion of revolution itself. From
the beginning of the nineteenth century until 1968 and beyond, barricades
persisted as the material symbol of the act of insurrection. As the
embodiment of subversion, the barricade appears in the city center armed
with flags and rifles in an asymmetrical confrontation with the canons and
machine guns of the forces of order.
A magical moment, unforgettable light, interrupting the course of
ordinary events, the revolution can better be grasped by an image than a
concept. It survives and spreads through images and particularly, since the
end of the nineteenth century, through photographic images.6
Of course, photography can’t be a substitute for historiography, but
photos can capture what no text can communicate: certain faces, certain
gestures, situations, movements. A photograph allows us to see, concretely,
what constitutes the unifying spirit and singularity of a particular
revolution. Some critics disparage the cognitive value of photographs of
historical events. For example, the great film theorist Siegfried Kracauer
was convinced that the medium of photography did not offer a total
perspective of the past, but only a “momentary spatial configuration.” In a
1927 article, he went so far as to denounce illustrated journals as “tools of
protest against knowledge”!7 More than a century later, Susan Sontag
echoed this opinion in her book On Photography. Citing Brecht, according
to whom photos of the Krupp factory revealed almost nothing about the
reality of this capitalist institution, she reaffirmed that only narrative has
the power to impart comprehension. For her, “the limit of photographic
knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally,
never be ethical or political knowledge.”8
is point of view, I believe, is debatable. It is true that photographs
cannot substitute for narrative history, but this does not prevent them from
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