Issue 100: Fall 2009

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Revolution

By María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo on October 30, 2009
Abstract: This essay reflects on the SOCIAL TEXT articles on revolution. Many first-world contributors to SOCIAL TEXT, on the one hand, reassessed Marxist theories of political consciousness and political economy in light of the praxis of third-world revolutionary experiences, especially those in Latin America. The reality of these processess permanently debunked the developmentalism of Euro-American Marxist theory that privileged a model of revolutionary agency stubbornly identified with urban, industrial labor. The cultural and sexual policies of revolutionary governments, on the other hand, were also often the subject of criticism for contributors. This essay argues that such criticism is often ahistorical in its focus on Cuban politics in the seventies. Rather than prognosticate the death of revolution and the triumph of liberal democracy, as SOCIAL TEXT contributors tended to do after 1989, the authors reflect upon the dynamic and historically contingent nature of revolutionary consciousness, change, and culture that is ongoing.
To be a communist is a beautiful thing, 
although it causes many headaches. 
And the problem with communist headaches 
is, as we all know, historical; 
they don't yield to aspirin, 
only to the realization of Paradise on Earth. 
So it goes. 
Under capitalism, if our head aches 
it gets chopped off. 
In the struggle for the Revolution 
the head is a time bomb. 
In the period of socialist construction 
we plan headaches, 
which does not make them go away, quite the contrary 
Communism will be, among other things, 
an aspirin the size of the sun. 
 -- Roque Dalton, "On Headaches" 


Roque Dalton's poem reflects our jubilant encounter with the Social Text articles on revolution. The poem appeared early the journal's publication history (ST 5, 1982), reminding us that the founders of the journal considered the dissemination of revolutionary aesthetics to be a key part of the journal's praxis. Articles on revolution from the first decade took seriously the possibility of its coming in various quarters of the globe, planning for its arrival with a sense of expectation, and reflecting the collective's envisioned engagement with a politics of the present. This revolutionary optimism extended to matters of race and sex. Manning Marable, for example, discussed the utopian project of black revolution, weighing the contradictions between socialist revolution and black liberation, prognosticating with great detail on the possibilities of this joint process, and predicting that the coming socialist revolution "would set the historical stage for the final assault against white racism" (ST 4, 1981). Ellen Willis, meanwhile, chided the feminist movement for a certain prudishness in matters sexual. She theorized the utopic possibilities of sexual satisfaction: "From a radical standpoint, then, sexual liberation involves not only the abolition of restrictions but the positive presence of social and psychological conditions that foster satisfying sexual relations" (ST 6, 1982). Revolution will be an orgasm the size of the sun.

 

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