There is “no tradition, either revolutionary or pre-revolutionary,” she wrote, that “can be called to account for the regular emergence and re-emergence of” what she calls “the council system ever since the French Revolution.” And yet she sketches a tale of the “appearance[s] of these organs of action and germs of a new state” in easy strokes:
[T]he year 1870, when the French capital under siege by the Prussian army ‘spontaneously reorganized itself into a miniature federal body,’ which formed the nucleus for the Parisian Commune government in the spring of 1871; the year 1905, when the wave of spontaneous strikes in Russia suddenly developed a political leadership of its own, outside all revolutionary parties and groups, and the workers in the factories organized themselves into councils, soviets, for the purpose of representative self-government; the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, when ‘despite different political tendencies among the Russian workers, the organization itself, that is the soviet, was not even subject to discussion’; the years 1918 and 1919 in Germany, when, after the defeat of the army, soldiers and workers in open rebellion constituted themselves into Arbeiter- und Soldatenrate, demanding, in Berlin, that this Ratesystem become the foundation stone of the new German constitution, and establishing together with the Bohemians of the coffee houses, in Munich in the spring of 1919, the short-lived Bavarian Raterepublik; the last date, finally... the autumn of 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution from its very beginning produced the council system anew in Budapest, from which it spread all over the country ‘with incredible rapidity.’
This is a story that resonates for me with the claims of the inveterately hopeful technoprogressive social software enthusiasts, both in its appealing if romantic discernment of and hopes for a deeper and more direct democracy mobilized from an occasion of social destabilization (although for the technophiles the occasion arises particularly from congenial conjunctions of technological developments), as well as in a susceptibility it shares with technoprogressives to degenerate into a rather naïve kind of political anarchism.
The decisively more direct democratic councils and associations and structures of governance that seem to emerge inevitably “out of the organizational impulses of the people themselves” in the revolutionary situation for Arendt, are “never thought of... as germs for a new form of government,” for the “professional revolutionaries” of the avant-garde but are “regarded... as mere instruments to be dispensed with once the revolution came to an end.” It is for this reason that her story of an episodic re-emergence of “the council system” in moments of revolutionary upheaval and its apparently inevitable supersession in the aftermath of revolution by the re-imposition of less democratic modes of governance is for Arendt finally such “a strange and sad story,” and constitutes what she calls “The Lost Treasure [of]... [t]he Revolutionary Tradition.”
And while sometimes, certainly, the differences between word and world that distinguish the furniture from the poetry of social software bespeak little more than a considerable bamboozlement by hype on the part of its enthusiasts, surely sometimes it testifies likewise to comparable betrayals, corruptions, failures of imagination or of nerve, and so traces a trail of “buried treasure” in the portentious, epochal, but always somehow still terribly disappointing succession of technological “revolutions” that preoccupy them as well.
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