SOURCES FOR REVOLUTIONARY INSPIRATION:

Albert Camus discusses the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. He notes that a rebel is merely challenging authority as a means to identify himself as someone making noise. The rebel image needs the authority as a means to create a fashion statement. However, a revolutionary is someone who wants to change the system completely in order to make a better system, and a more inclusive system.

Unfortunately, most revolutions have had leaders that entered after the initial actions of change and usurp the potential of the revolution. This happened with Napoleon and Stalin. Other revolutionary leaders, like Mao, passionately fought in the revolution only to get corrupted due to the nature of power once gained. Other significant leaders who pressed passionately for change died before they had the opportunity to prove their true quality of post-revolutionary pedagogy.

During Ho Chi Minh’s early years, he contacted Presidents Wilson in 1919 and Truman 1945 to help bring independence to Vietnam from the French in the similar spirit of the American Revolution. Both Presidents in their perspective time, snubbed him and without compassion disregarded the notion that the Vietnamese would want freedom too. The reactions only directed Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism further and to eventually be certain Communism was the only means to overcome colonial hubris and capitalist greed, ideological double-standards and the contrast of who democracy is willing to protect and who not.

Gandhi opted not to seek a political position in the independent government of India, because he felt that he could reach the people without predetermined posts designed from prior oppressors. Politicians tend to replete their promises and perhaps fail to honor their initial will. Falling back into the same leadership roles of those who oppressed the public before independent change has merely reflected new wine in old bottles.

In particular, the revolutionaries who impassion me most at this time in my research and thoughts are still Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Rosa Luxemburg, Tina Modotti, and Louise Michel. There are many others. However, these five women had an edge we can still learn from. Two of which were considered the most dangerous women in America at one time. 

Mother Jones’ famous cheer was “Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the Living!” She not only wanted to liberate women from patriarchy but she primarily fought with the labor movements to liberate men and women from the exploitive chains of a growing corporate elite that dictated over the mass public. In the society of her day and today, regardless of gender she invoked that all forms of slavery including those in capitalism, if not especially, were negative and unjust. “You don’t need to vote to raise hell!” (Autobiography of Mother Jones).

Louise Michel admits that her revolt went beyond the silent pity of suffering, “My revolt against social inequalities went further. I grew, and I have continued to grow, through the battles and across the carnage. It dominates my grief and it dominates my life. There was no way that I could have stopped myself from throwing my life to the revolution” (The Red Virgin).

Like her predecessors in the US and France, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany was adamant about change and just action in a society where workers were manipulated through the elite capitalist class. The suppressive system continually reflected that legislative reforms and electoral political party change would be insufficient and misleading. Embracing the “element of spontaneity” and spontaneity was not just referring to “instinctive action as a conscious direction” but on the “contrary, spontaneity was a driving force … because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them” (Reform and Revolution).

No one single individual is the key to a revolution. During the spontaneous act of revolution all fractions are significant elements in the chemistry process, only after the revolution if alertness and awareness are put down do faces takeover and claim or usurp the leadership role: Lenin in Russia, George Washington in the US, and the Ayatollah in Iran. A singular face to a revolution drowns out the multitude reasons for the necessity of change. Then the repetition and resemblance of ill-pedagogy steps in: new wine in old bottles.

The artist and revolutionary, Tina Modotti, as an Italian immigrant to the US and active in the struggles of the working class knew that art and revolution complemented one’s internal force with his/her outward dissent. Yet as her most common quote would reflect, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” Her art would come secondary to her commitment to society when it was necessary to fight.

Emma Goldman was no stranger to the creed that Tina Modotti followed. “It is the obligation of each of us to make human equality a reality, starting in our own lives,” Emma Goldman states, and during her time and our time “Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.” Her intellect noticed how “under the present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in the relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a cooperative commonwealth” (Anarchism and Other Essays).     

Sources for revolutionary inspiration, high and wide, remind us of how far we have yet to come in the continual struggle for uploading human dignity to each individual  who is unconsciously unaware. Overcoming the resemblance of new wine in old bottles, one hopes that enough voices can speak out so that eventually society learns from history and so that revolutions do not fall ill to similar patterns.