>>11 Marx was wrong about a lot of things. We shouldn’t generalize his view of peasants. In history, nomads and peasants have always rioted and invaded the cities. The Syrian revolution was a very rural revolt. Look what happened in Afghanistan, what’s going in the Sahel right now. Are peasants really static or is that just a stereotype? I’ve known peasants who commute to do prole jobs in the city and go back to their fields. Peasants and tribesman rely on their kinship network to rally and resist. Marx never appreciated rural life. He looked down on it like many high modernist thinkers.
There is no need to form a coherent mass. You only need enough people to crash the system. The idea of a whole class wide collective mobilization with a clear leadership and organization is a thing of the past, probably never happened. Iran or Syria is the post-modern revolution. Am amorphous mass of unemployed curb dwellers, peasants, Bedouin tribesman, roving jihadists, aimless wanderers, some organized, some disorganized, but none of it centrally planned. Their battlefield were the streets, highways, and lanes, not factories and workplaces. They didn’t know what they wanted, beyond death to the Shah, to Assad etc. there was no vanguard party. What held them together was speed and motion and what put them in motion and kept the motor going was a revolutionary spirituality.
Marx was wrong about a lot of things. We shouldn’t generalize his view of peasants. In history, nomads and peasants have always rioted and invaded the cities. The Syrian revolution was a very rural revolt. Look what happened in Afghanistan, what’s going in the Sahel right now. Are peasants really static or is that just a stereotype? I’ve known peasants who commute to do prole jobs in the city and go back to their fields. Peasants and tribesman rely on their kinship network to rally and resist. Marx never appreciated rural life. He looked down on it like many high modernist thinkers.
There is no need to form a coherent mass. You only need enough people to crash the system. The idea of a whole class wide collective mobilization with a clear leadership and organization is a thing of the past, probably never happened. Iran or Syria is the post-modern revolution. Am amorphous mass of unemployed curb dwellers, peasants, Bedouin tribesman, roving jihadists, aimless wanderers, some organized, some disorganized, but none of it centrally planned. Their battlefield were the streets, highways, and lanes, not factories and workplaces. They didn’t know what they wanted, beyond death to the Shah, to Assad etc. there was no vanguard party. What held them together was speed and motion and what put them in motion and kept the motor going was a revolutionary spirituality.