In the context of Brexit, Trump, etc., some commentators have expressed the notion that the only way to make things better in the long term is to deliberately make them worse in the short term. For instance…
On Brexit:
“For sure, leaving [the EU] and leaving without a deal is going to be an ugly business, but it is at least politically constructive. From there we can rebuild and reform.” - Peter J. North
On Trump:
“Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in. Then things will really explode.” - Susan Sarandon, 2016
This is "the old Leninist idea of ‘heightening the contradictions,’ which holds that social conditions need to get worse in order to inspire the revolution that will make them better.
“In this way of thinking, the real enemy of progress is incremental reform that would render the status quo tolerable.” [Slate.com]
So historically, has “heightening the contradictions” ever worked in politics?
It’s a highly ideological concept, but are there historical examples of its success that might convince the non-ideologues among us?
The opposite effect can be seen in a lot of insurgencies. The insurgents attack and the people can lose trust in the government that can’t protect them.
Your list of examples seems to be mixing up two slightly different things.
In the case of Brexit, I don’t think its proponents deliberately want to make things worse; they just believe that accepting some short-term pain is the price they need to pay for things to get better in the long run. Like if you were stuck in a dead-end job and you decided to move over to a different job where you’d have a lower salary initially, but better chances to get promoted in the future.
That’s different from the “heightening the contradictions” concept of deliberately encouraging your enemies to be as brutal and oppressive as possible, in order to get to the inevitable revolution sooner. An example would be if someone were to vote for a “lower taxes on the rich” bill, not because they believed in trickly-down economics or anything, but because they expected that by increasing economic inequality they would help to hasten the arrival of some kind of communist revolution.
I don’t think that second kind of approach has ever worked out well.
“Heightening the contradiction” may work to hasten the upheaval. But what comes out at the other end of the upheaval is something you may not be able to control.
As mentioned, part of the idea is that incremental progress “protects” the system as it is and gets in the way of achieving the real transformation, that a “middle-ground compromise we can live with” only kicks the can down the road and postpones the inevitable, and if we wait longer it will only be even harder to put things aright. But you run the risk of coming to the point of wanting the revolution for revolution’s own sake with no road map out.
So, fundamentally, for this to work, you need two things.
You need a lot of people who understand what the problems actually are and what is necessary to fix them.
Things need to get so bad for so many people that the risk of losing everything in revolution makes sense for most or many of them.
In the current system, neither is a given. Systems are complicated, people are oversaturated with media, and it’s basically impossible for a message to reach some people. The meme about “I can’t believe they’d eat my face” is a funny joke, but the reality is actually darker - a whole lot of people hurt by republican policies and obstructionism over the last several decades have been utterly incapable of seeing that. You think they’re suddenly going to realize it why, exactly?
The easiest way to manipulate people is by instilling fear and anger in them, one of the problems with this is that the sort of people who would do that are the least suitable to be in a position of power.
For starters they have deligitimized themselves from the very beginning, a democracy works best on the principle of an informed population making reasonable decisions; fear stems from ignorance and anger trumps reason, so this is manipulation by deception is in total opposition to democratic principles.
Right, which is why anyone who actually believes in a “heightening the contradictions” is never a believer in democracy. They always believe in authoritarian rule by a vanguard of leaders who will guide the ignorant masses.
I’m going to ask for a definition here again. Are we talking about herding undesirables to the concentration camp so that in the future we have a “better” society? Or are we talking about things like moving to green energy, putting coal miners out of work in the process? Or moving everything to electronic databases causing several clerks to be laid off?
we will see in the 2020 runup. we seem to be in a test tube right now.
trunp def heightened the whole deal. now it looks like there will be a lot of left activity and discussion which we hope will result in more educated voting patterns. they are able to use the “treason” talking point which is a good one to have in the toolbox. every time someone thinks straight republicans lose.
Do you understand what the Marxist theory of “heightening the contradictions” meant?
The theory was that under a capitalist system all sorts of oppression would necessarily take place, because capitalism is oppressive by definition under Marxist theory. The only cure for this oppression was revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a communist system. Revolution was inevitable because the capitalists would never give up their power voluntarily, so an evolutionary transformation of society was impossible. The masses would rise up in revolution to overthrow their oppressors when the oppression became too, you know, oppressive. But in the meantime, ameliorative projects to improve life for the masses under the capitalist system were pointless, both because it wouldn’t work and because it would just delay the inevitable revolution. Since revolution was the only answer, anything that advanced the revolution was desirable, anything that delayed the revolution was bad.
Heightening the contradictions was a tactic whereby revolutionary cadre would provoke the ruling class into further oppressive measures, which would then radicalize the masses, which would bring the day of revolution sooner, which was good, since revolution was the only answer. So the worse, the better.
Given that, what exactly is you question? What in the world does green energy have to do with this topic?
You might have the idea that “heightening the contradictions” means that the communist ruling class would act ruthlessly to bring about a so-called better future, even if that meant suffering and misery and oppression for the people under the communist jackboots today. But that’s not it. Yes, the communists were famously indifferent to the suffering of actually existing people, for the greater good of people that would someday exist in the future, both when they were in power and when they were trying to seize power. But “heightening the contradictions” was a theory not of a ruling communist party, but of a revolutionary communist cadre.
IOW: agents provocateurs, but working for the Liberators of the People and not for the cops.
Re. the original question:
While sometimes an action provokes a larger and opposite reaction, attempts at manipulating the masses also have ways of backfiring; also, the Marxist conceit that the individual is irrelevant as the only thing which counts is the average of the Mass does tend to run into trouble any time it encounters a non-average individual.
For examples of the first, look at large social changes, which tend to go in pendular movements without any need for anybody to push the pendulum, and in fact to hit the face of anybody trying to manipulate said pendulum*; for the second, while the wide tendencies are there, maybe I’m being stupid but I just can’t believe that the history of the world would have been the same if Mary Tudor had been a Henry IX, or if John II of Aragon had died before his first wife did (therefore never begetting his favourite son and leaving his firstborn as King of Aragon and Navarre), or if the guy who was on duty on September 26, 1983 at a certain job in the Russian Army hadn’t been Stanislav Petrov.
It’s my post and I can mix metaphors if I want to.
The OP used the term “heightening the contradictions” and I thought he meant it in the traditional way, but then used Brexit and Trump as examples. Nobody seriously thinks that pro-Brexit and pro-Trump people want to hasten an armed revolution (but then again maybe I’m wrong).
That’s why I thought that maybe he meant what you suggested in the part of your post I quoted.
One clear example, I think, was al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack provoking a U.S. counter-attack. Although U.S. military might prevailed in the short term, radical Islamists and secular Iraqis flocked together to oppose the American giant. Bush’s misadventure strengthened radical Islam.
Yeah its a super successful theory, with tons of examples of it working in practice, IF you are violent extremist who wants to over through the system. If your measure of success is the collapse of a moderate system of government and its replacement with whatever brand extremism you are selling. There are countless examples of relatively short-term problems that cause that collapse, many caused by the extremists themselves.
If you’d rather not be murdered or sent to a camp, its a harder sell however.
Take your Trump example. He didn’t quote someone who voted for Trump because she supported Trump’s policies. He quoted someone who (foolishly) thought that if Trump got elected it would cause such obvious disasters that all the sheeple would wake up and revolt and overthrow the rotten system of which Trump is a part. Electing Hillary would be worse, because Hillary wouldn’t be an obvious disaster, which would mean more years of muddling along with our current rotten system.
Heightening the contradictions is a bit of communist jargon, and it just means that you think the current system is rotten and can’t be incrementally improved but only replaced by revolution. Therefore anything that props up the current rotten system and makes it better is bad, and anything that makes the current rotten system worse is good.
I’d agree with Brexit (that is just delusion) but there is absolutely a fringe of the pro-Trump crew who talk in terms of “bringing the whole system down”.