Wages of Rebellion (Chris Hedges) Book Review



In Wages of Rebellion, journalist, activist, and author Chris Hedges discusses the history of many successful and unsuccessful revolutions, revolts, uprisings, and insurrections. Drawing from Marx and other historians, Hedges concludes that revolutions are never made by the poor. Most successful revolutions have almost always been comprised of not only the poor and disenfranchised, but the professional and middle classes as well. In fact, Hedges revea

Wages of Rebellion (Chris Hedges) Book Review



In Wages of Rebellion, journalist, activist, and author Chris Hedges discusses the history of many successful and unsuccessful revolutions, revolts, uprisings, and insurrections. Drawing from Marx and other historians, Hedges concludes that revolutions are never made by the poor. Most successful revolutions have almost always been comprised of not only the poor and disenfranchised, but the professional and middle classes as well. In fact, Hedges reveals that in many cases the poor of society provide the “primary fodder for the goons, militias, and thugs employed by a discredited regime to hold on to power through violence”. He quotes Leon Trotsky as saying “In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.” Hedges point is not that the impoverished classes are somehow harmful to a revolution, but that they by no means comprise the main acting forces of one.



Additionally, Hedges quotes historian Crane Brinton who argues that “No government has ever fallen before attackers until it has lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them effectively…” Hedges goes on to say:



While violence and terrorism are often part of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolt is the nonviolent conversion of the forces deployed to restore order to the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, for this reason, fundamentally nonviolent...Once the foot soldiers of the elite--the police, the courts, the civil servants, the press, the intellectual class, and finally the army--no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished.



Hedges also claims that a precursor for revolution is the discontent that pervades through a society in terms of economic and social grievances. “[T]he greatest portion of people who join a revolution are preoccupied with tensions related to the failure to gratify the physical (economic) needs and the needs of stable interpersonal relationships” (James Davies). The idea is that revolutions usually take place after a society has gone through periods of prosperity, and then suddenly had these privileges taken away. It was when there is a large enough gap between expectations and realities.



Today, this key component of revolution--the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get--is being played out in the United States and many states in Europe during a new age of mounting scarcity, declining wages, joblessness, government-imposed “austerity” measures, and assaults on civil liberties. The rising living standards experienced by the American working class in the 1950s have been in precipitous decline since the 1970s. The real earnings of the median male have declined 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall by 40 percent from 1970 to 2010. Moreover, the memory of the postwar moment of prosperity and the belief that prosperity should still be possible--along with the revocation of protections under the Constitution that most Americans want restored--have left Americans increasingly alienated, frustrated, and angry. They have experienced the diminished expectations highlighted by Davies and Brinton. They have set those expectations against the bleakness of the present.



Hedges illustrates many examples--from small-scale to large-scale-- of revolutionary heroes, organizations, and activists throughout the book. From Occupy Sandy Relief to Edward Snowden who exposed the NSA’s illegal mass collection of telephone records; to US Army pilot Hugh Thompson who saved the lives of Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre in 1968; to the Zapatistas fighting for indigenous rights in Mexico; to Ronnie Kasrils’ attacks on the South African apartheid state; to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1943; to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s struggle in and against the prison industrial complex; to Socrates, Thomas Paine, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Wiebo Ludwig, and many more. He uses these individuals and organizations to demonstrate the importance of real moral courage.



To rebel requires that elusive virtue that Snowden exemplifies...moral courage. I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage. The person with moral courage defies the crowd, stands up as a solitary individual, shuns the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, and is disobedient to authority, even at the risk of his or her life, for a higher principle. And with more courage comes persecution.



Socrates was was sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting the moral of Athenian youth, Thomas Paine was scorned by his community and died in relative obscurity, Julian Assange has been holed-up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over three years, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, Wiebo Lugwig was boycotted from many of the establishments in the small Albertan community where he lived. The life of the rebel is almost always defined by alienation from the community at large. As Auguste Blanqui said, “The duty of a revolutionary is to always struggle, no matter what, to struggle to extinction.”



Hedges spends much of his time exploring the political and economic systems which have brought us to the situation we see ourselves mired in. One of the most interesting perspectives in the book comes from his discussion with Avner Offer, an economic historian.



According to Offer, our ideology of neoclassical economics--the belief that, as E. Roy Weinstraub wrote, “people have rational choices among outcomes” that can be identified and associated with values, that “individuals maximze utility and firms maximize profits,” and that “people act independently on the basis of full and relevant information”--is a “just-world” theory. “A just-world theory posits that the world is just. People get what they deserve. If you believe that the world is fair, you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually be blaming the victim.”



This ideology pervades our society. We see it in the victim-blaming rhetoric of politicians--from Reagan, who made the denial of compassion acceptable, to Hillary Clinton, who recently suggested in an interview with Black Lives Matter activists, that it is primarily the responsibility of the black community to propose reform, not policy makers.



“So,” Offer went on, “everyone gets what he or she deserves, either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one asks how he or she got this property. And if they don’t have it, they probably don’t deserve it. The point about just-world theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that is provides a warrant for inflicting pain.”



“There are two core doctrines in economics,” Offer said. “One is individual self-interest. The other is the invisible hand, the idea that the pursuit of individual self-interest aggregates of builds up for the good of society as a whole. THis is a logical proposition that has never been proven. If we take the centrality of self-interest in economics, then it is not clear on what basis economics should be promoting the public good. This is not a norm that is part of economics itself; in fact, economics tells us the opposite. Economics tells us that everything anyone says should be motivated by strategic self-interest. And when economists use the word ‘strategic,’ they mean cheating.”



Offer argued that “a silent revolution” took place in economics in the 1970s. That was a time when “economists discovered opportunism--a polite term for cheating,” he said. “Before that, economics had been a just-world defense of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating. Public-choice theory was about cheating. Asymmetric information was about cheating. The invisible-hand docrine tells us there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the best. But once you enter a world of cheating, there is no longer one outcome. It is what economists call ‘multiple equilibria,’ which means there is not a deterministic outcome. The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economics are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.”



These perspectives are very relevant in our current state of casino capitalism. We can see how the Objectivism of Ayn Rand and the neo-liberal economic policies of Alan Greenspan and the proponents of the New Economy have ended up taking us to an absurd reality where criminal financiers and parasitic CEOs have legally stolen billions of dollars from taxpayers and looted the US Treasury with no consequences whatsoever.



Adam Smith, he noted, “wrote that what drives us is not, in the end, individual selfishness but reciprocal obligation. We care about other people’s good opinions. This generates a reciprocal cycle. Reciprocity is not altruistic. That part of the economic core doctrine is preserved. But if we depend on other people for our self-worth, then we are not truly self-sufficient. We depend on the sympathy of others for our own well-being. Therefore, obligation to others means that we do not always seek to maximize economic advantage. Intrinsic motivations, such as obligation, compassion, and public spirit, crowd out financial ones. This model can also motivate a different type of political and economic aspiration.”



We’ve been taught many times over, most notably in Garrett Hardin’s simplistic essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, but also through philosophers like Ayn Rand and scientists like Richard Dawkins, that human-beings are by nature selfish and that we should create societies that reflect this knowledge. This view, however, remains fundamentally unfounded, and has only served to promote selfish behaviors--a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, human-beings are highly social creatures. Social rewards play a very important role in determining our behavior--and as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict showed us through her research in the 1930s, societies that reward acts that benefit the group over the individual are much less aggressive (less interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, cruelty, war, etc) than societies that reward actions that emphasize individual gain (Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words).



After dotting an otherwise somewhat disheartening narrative with points of heroic struggle and inspirational accounts of resistance, Hedges ends on a positive note. We must continue in the traditions of the great disobedients, those who struggled against overwhelming violence and tyranny. We can draw our energy from the great dissenting voices. Those of Popé and Tecumseh, Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner. Those of the Paris Commune, who created a radical socialist revolutionary government in Paris for two months before it was brutally crushed in 1871. Hedges ends with a line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, “I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”

