Apologies for last week's installment being missing. I was scheduled to post but had no internet access for the afternoon. So, the schedule has been moved up a week, and today we continue our discussion with the chapter on "Justice Through Revolution."
Niebuhr begins by noting the middle class abhorrence of violence and revolution as permissible instruments of social change - an abhorrence that governs site policy here, as well. But, Niebuhr begins with a moral principle that aside from ill-will, nothing is intrinsically immoral. Given that Niebuhr has already postulated that a degree of coercion is necessary for the cohesion of society, Niebuhr turns to ethical reflections on the moral justifications, assessing strengths and weaknesses, for violent revolution.
If a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical ground upon which it can be ruled out. (179)
Note the two criteria: the creation of a just social system, and the possibilities of its preservation. The latter, of course, is far more difficult to guarantee than the former.
Can the workers overthrow the existing power and come in control of both the apparatus of the state and organs of education so that they can establish an equalitarian world and educate a new generation which will maintain it? The realistic Marxians who have analysed this problem in terms of the comparative resources of power available on each side, do not give themselves to the romantic illusions current among certain classes of intellectuals, who think that a revolution is a fairly easy achievement. (180)
Niebuhr furthermore notes that the will to revolutionary struggle is dependent on a certain kind of hopelessness easily defused by a modicum of social progress. Where the revolutionary hopes for a truly equalitarian world, Niebuhr notes that the "reactionary" policies of the American Federation of Labor pit skilled against unskilled workers, leaving the latter to misery, while the skilled laborers progress within the capitalist system. The ethical failure of the skilled laborer vis a vis unskilled labor
proves that as soon as workers have something more to lose than their chains, as soon as they have the slightest stake in the status quo (it need not be property, it need be only a fairly secure job or the minimum security of a semi-adequate unemployement dole), they will sufer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, rather than fly to evils they know not of. (185)
He continues with a comparison of socialist struggles in various countries, noting that the Russian example is probably less predictive than those of Germany and England.
While Niebuhr holds up the possibility of revolution as an appropriate ethical means to the end of a just society, he is far less sanguine about the possibilities of sustaining justice in a revolutionary society. He spends much of the chapter showing challenges a revolutionary society faces in sustaining justice.
He concludes:
Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal. (199)