Reversals to Capitalism
In the last one hundred and fifty years, at least three major efforts have been made to eliminate the inefficient, oppressive irrationalities involved in oppressive class societies. These three efforts were the Paris Commune, the Russian October Revolution, and the Chinese Liberation of 1949. After persisting for varying lengths of time, each of these was “overthrown” by a “counter-revolution.”
These reversals to capitalism were proclaimed by the surrounding capitalist societies to be more rational and intelligent than the revolutionary systems they overthrew, even though the successful “counter-revolution” in each case was clearly based on the re-installation of oppressions that had been largely eliminated by the revolutionary forces while those revolutionary forces persisted in power. Each such counter-revolution was preceded and prepared for by sapping the strength of the revolutionary regimes with philosophies of elitism, with plundering of resources, and with assigning blame for the reinstated oppressions to the oppressed people themselves.
Practically speaking, the overthrown progressive societies appear to have been made vulnerable to overthrow by their failure to clearly understand the distinction between intelligence and distress-patterned functioning, by their lack of deliberate use of the universally available processes of discharge and re-emergence (tears, trembling, laughter, raging, yawning), and by the long-standing prejudices against using these processes in the societies from which the revolutionary regimes had arisen.
From pages 217 and 218 of “Taking Stock of Ourselves,” in An Unbounded Future
(Present Time 191, April 2018)