All political revolutionaries imagine a future constellation of their society and, if and when they succeed in disrupting the old system, use Power to implement the new one. This is bound to fail, and the consequences are consistently horrible (for exceptions see below).
Here is why:
Societies are Complex Systems, and only some of their possible states (constellations of its components) are stable (their Attractors). It is extremely unlikely that revolutionaries can a priori (without empirical experimentation) design, predict or implement a new attractor. What they do is develop and use Explicit Models of the system that give plausibility to the prediction of the new attractor (otherwise the revolution wouldn’t be attractive and gain traction). But these models are very likely to be too simple and thus not adequate.
When the system is destabilised (revolution), it will not settle into the imagined attractor, but enter a Liminal Space in which it goes through and selects various (sometimes chaotic) recombinations of smaller constellations (Selection is Bayesian Search) until it reaches a new stable state. (The model guiding this search is the Implicit Model the system has of itself.)
This new attractor looks (sometimes very) different from the imagined
one: You might get terreur and an Emperor when you were
fighting for reason and freedom, Stalinism when you wanted Communism.
Which of the many possible attractors it will be is – again –
unpredictable for the lack of an adequate explicit model of the
whole of society.All such new attractors have in common, though, that
Ideology
plays a central role in their
Emergence
and stabilisation.
The only exception for this is a switch to a relatively
stable “copied” attractor, e.g. after the “peaceful revolutions” in
Eastern Europe where Western
Capitalism
quickly stabilised post-revolution societies, albeit not in the state
many revolutionaries wanted to see them.
This insight was at the heart of Bakunin’s criticism of Marxism and its, as he saw it, inherent authoritarianism:
His first argument against it concerned the mismatch between the complexity of the task and the instrument supposed to execute it: ‘where are the intellects powerful enough to embrace the infinite multiplicity and diversity of real interests, aspirations, wishes, and needs which sum up the collective will of the people?’ […]
The second argument concerned what he saw as the inevitable result of such an attempt. The ambition ‘to invent a social organization’ like that – to ‘perform the task of chief engineer of the world revolution’ – can only lead to the new order becoming ‘a Procrustean bed upon which the violence of the State will more or less overtly force unhappy society to stretch out’.
Finally, he related these two arguments back to a common condition: idealism. It was ‘the position … that thought precedes life, that abstract theory precedes social practice’ that led Marxists to believe that ‘since thought, theory, and science are, at least for the present, the property of a very few individuals, those few must be the directors of social life’ – a ‘learned minority which supposedly expresses the will of all the people’.Nunes (2021), ch. 3
A reasonable attempt to change society that nevertheless goes beyond
gradual evolution by disrupting its state when necessary has to focus
not on determining its future state, on an imagined attractor, but on
better equipping the system for the liminal space and the search
process so it can avoid undesired outcomes (violence, injustice,
oppression, war).Lenin himself came to adopt much of this position in
his later writings: he emphasised “‘the limits and conditions in which
revolutionary methods are appropriate and can be successfully employed’”
and “believed the new situation required a ‘reformist approach’ that
‘cautiously, slowly and gradually remodels [the existing order], taking
care to break as little as possible’.” (ibid.)
The same is true for preparing for a possible (revolution-free) Collapse and its
liminal space: what is needed here aren’t imagined solutions, but the
competences that enable the system to find better solutions
quicker.See Fleming (2018) for an example how such a position
can be articulated.
References
- Fleming (2018), Lean Logic
- Nunes (2021), Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation