Continuing the ‘what is the left’ theme of the last few posts, I thought I should talk a bit about ‘revolution’. I identify as part of ‘the revolutionary left’, the fringe of crackpots who hang around making life difficult for the sensible ‘leftists’ trying to sort out immediate problems through state action.
Now, an easy caricature of this sort of position would be that it believes in some sudden, momentous event called ‘the revolution’, and that nothing of importance can be achieved without this, and with it, everything will be achieved. This obviously lends itself to being parodied as a sort of apocalyptic religious cult: at some unspecific future time there will be an explosion and then everything will be different.
I don’t know how many ‘revolutionaries’ have something like this at the back of their minds, but it’s certainly not the most sensible way to understand all this talk of ‘revolution’.
