I've little doubt that when writers like myself speak of overthrowing our local government the Fascists in charge would love to have me charged with crimes and hauled away to a North Carolina prison but as Chris Hedges writes on Rosa Luxemburg:that would never fly and they know it:
A population finally rises up against a decayed system not because of revolutionary consciousness, but because, as Luxemburg pointed out, it has no other choice. It is the obtuseness of the old regime, not the work of revolutionaries, that triggers revolt. And, as she pointed out, all revolutions are in some sense failures, events that begin, rather than culminate, a process of social transformation…Revolutions cannot be made at command. The very charge of inciting a riot is a contradiction in terms, flimsy at best, and to think that an entire revolution could be incited by the actions and words of one or a few is absurd at best.
“Revolutions,” she continued, “cannot be made at command. Nor is this at all the task of the party. Our duty is only at all times to speak out plainly without fear or trembling; that is, to hold clearly before the masses their tasks in the given historical moment, and to proclaim the political program of action and the slogans which result from the situation. The concern with whether and when the revolutionary mass movement takes up with them must be left confidently to history itself. Even though socialism may at first appear as a voice crying in the wilderness, it yet provides for itself a moral and political position the fruits of which it later, when the hour of historical fulfillment strikes, garners with compound interest.”..
She warns us that in a crisis, the liberal elites become our enemy. She cautions against terror and gratuitous violence. She urges us to maintain open, democratic structures to ensure that power rests with the people. She keeps us focused on the ultimate savagery of capitalism. She understands the danger of imperialism. And she reminds us that those of us committed to socialism, to building a better world, especially for the oppressed, must hold fast to this moral imperative. If we compromise, she knew, we extinguish hope.
We, who write of this Greensboro revolution or even a nationwide revolution are simply predicting the future the Elites are trying to ignore and wish you'd never see.
