Professor Chirot’s theory is that revolutions break out when an outmoded governments refused to recognise their own outmodedness and hence to reform. This obviously has some similarities with the Marxist idea that revolutions occur when the relations of production of a society can no longer contain its productive forces, and is in contradiction to Tocqueville’s idea that revolutions break out not when rigid and dictatorial regimes are at their most oppressively rigid and dictatorial, but when they begin to reform and meet the demands of those who demand change. This is not to say that Professor Chirot is wrong, but one might have expected him to make allusion to the two theories.
The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which he is happy to call revolutionary, also does not support his rough schema. It is not that the communist regime refused to reform, it is that it was incapable of reform for the same reason that a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant. If a regime makes the kind of claims for itself that the communist regime made, even if the leaders had themselves long since ceased to believe them, namely that it is the ineluctable denouement of all history, if not that of the universe itself, it cannot retreat, all the more so because its crimes, which one could and would have been claimed as a step in the march of history, would thereafter be seen for what they were: the choices of fanatical psychopaths avid for total power.
Professor Chirot seems to have a slight soft spot (admittedly only implicit) for socialism, that is to say for something more than mere social democracy. In his discussion of the case of Angola, in which a revolutionary movement emerged triumphant, but whose post-revolutionary regime was a pure kleptocracy under cover of Marxist rhetoric, he says: “Much more could have been done through either a market-friendly or a genuinely more socialist approach to economic development”.
This surely implies that somewhere, at some time, there was a socialist regime that would have handled Angola’s oil bonanza better, in which case one would have liked an example that it might have followed. Norway, perhaps? But Norway is not socialist, it is social democratic. Besides, Norwegians and Angolans are scarcely the same in a very large number of ways. I would have thought that the chances of Angola following the Norwegian model were, and are, approximately, and perhaps even exactly, zero.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.
May 16, 2025
QotD: Marxist and socialist revolutions
Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Quotations — Tags: Angola, Communism, Norway, Revolution, Socialism, TheodoreDalrymple — Nicholas @ 01:00
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