A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [123]
Perhaps that explains the behavior of my friend Dave as well. He cannot escape his economic conditions, but these conditions do not disallow a love for his family that gets him through each day. He can hold them, and love them, as meanwhile slip away the hours of his life. The same is undoubtedly true from his wife's perspective.
Maybe this is it, I thought: instead of creating a revolution, rushing and overpowering our armed guards—both tangible and internalized—we adapt as best we can, put our heads down, get through the day.
Then I had another thought: perhaps the problem is that those of us striving for egalitarianism, or just trying to make a fine, noble, and happy life, tire of this struggle more quickly than those whose wounds for whatever reason give them a superhuman stamina in their indomitable quest to control and destroy. Perhaps revolutions fail because those in power feel more fear than we feel love. Or perhaps because we ourselves feel more fear than love. I don't like to think this, but evidence suggests it may be at least partly true.
I think also of something George often replies when I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many people earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other obviously destructive jobs: Sixty days, he says. That's how long it takes before people begin to die of starvation. Sixty days. Dave can't quit his job because in sixty days his children will die. No longer can Dave kill and eat Eskimo curlews from a flock that one day may have passed directly over the spot where now he lives. No longer do most of us—myself included—have the skills to raise or gather our own food. We are members of only the third or fourth generation in the history of humankind who have not known how to build our own shelters. I say I want a revolution, and that I want to "shut down the machine," but until we find a new equilibrium, how are we going to eat? Sixty days: those two short words, those two altogether too short months, are a primary reason most of us do not rebel. We still have too much to lose.
While all of these are clearly contributing factors to the inevitable failures of revolutions, and also failures to revolt, I recently came across some analysis that finally makes clear the reason for the lack of success. It's not good news. Just as the problems with our schooling are not psychological—only requiring we find better teachers—so too do we not simply need to find better revolutionaries. The problems inhere in the structure and functioning of our society.
The analysis came from a book entitled Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, by Karl Kautsky. One of the groups Kautsky describes is the Taborites, a group of communists who were never conquered externally, but whose experiment devolved nonetheless into a pseudo-community as selfish, militaristic, and intolerant as surrounding city-states. This selfishness, militarism, and intolerance extended, to provide one example among many, to the extermination of the Adamites, a sect more communistic than they ("Those whom the sword had spared, the fire consumed," comments Kautsky). "The fate of Tabor is of the greatest interest," Kautsky writes, "for it shows what would have been the outcome of the Münzer movement . .. and of the Anabaptist movement ... if they had remained unconquered." He follows this with a few sentences I disagree with, and then says, "While the needs of the poor engendered the