The Harvard Review

The Summer-Fall issue of The Harvard Review-- a collection of essays, book reviews, and relevant speeches--illuminates some of the contradictions and ambiguities of the concept of revolution in the present day. Using Tanzanian President Nyerere's definition of revolution as "fundamental change in the conditions under which our people live," the editors of The Harvard Review have put together an excellent compendium of descriptive, analytic, and historical essays.

The main descriptive essay--"Tanzania: the Revolution as Reconstruction" by Peter Evans--conveys well the feeling of living in a country undergoing fundamental change. Although Evans' ideas could be better ordered, the loose organization of his essay brings across the sense of a country experimenting with a great number of policies--trying to solve many problems at once. Evans draws a poignant picture of a Tanzanian Development Officer leading the fight against backward traditional customs.

"Freedom," she shouts, and there is an echoing chorus. "Freedom and Development," she continues. The audience returns the slogan. "Freedom and Eat Eggs," she shouts, and again the chorus, even though it has been believed among people for generations that eating eggs brought sterility to women and disease to children.

Evans also has an excellent description of the enthusiasm of adult students after they have heard a speech on political reform by Tanzania's President. "To them the President's speech is not just a political pronouncement. It requires thinking, and talking, and active involvement."

The section "Voices of Revolution" is especially interesting because it brings the reader into the atmosphere of a political rally. Leaders from Venezuela, Mozambique, and Peru pound out the inexorable logic of their position, call for unity of classes, and preach nationalism. The spout neo-Marxian polemics--"We have nothing to lose but the chains that destroy our dignity;" and the revolutionary vocabulary of diatribe--"imperialism," "industrial reserve army," and "pauperization."

The analytic essays take a step back from actual revolutionary experience, and raise some questions about revolution in general. In "Roots and Direction of Nigerian Revolution," F. Chukwuma Obinani shows that the political order must be relevant to economic needs. Obinani feels that the government was overthrown, although it maintained law and order, because the political system did not try to fulfill the economic needs.

He realizes that the revolutionary government must attain these goals at the same time it bridges the political gap between regional tribe loyalties and mass feeling for a centralized policy. Obinani does not see, however, that as the government fulfills stated economic needs, new needs are inevitably generated. This is the "revolution of rising expectations." Since no government can possibly keep pace with increasing demands of the people, can Nigeria have a stable policy for any length of time?

David Gordon's "Communities of Despair" points out an analogous problem. As developing countries will probably not be able to reach desired rates of economic growth, so too will Negroes be unable to attain true equality of achievement for a long time. Gordon says that the "excruciating frustration of negritude--engendered by that persistent gap between aspiration and perceived reality--provides a constant goal to leader and followers alike." He sees two possible paths out of this circular dilemma: changing the social structure of the country, or introducing a new criteria of equality, participating democracy, to replace the conventional criteria of wealth, job and social status. Since Gordon considers changing society an impossible task, he sees participatory democracy as the direction of the Civil Rights movement.

Participatory democracy means the equal right to make decisions affecting one's own life. In concrete terms it means that the Negro community will reject outside help unless specifically requested. Similarly, developing countries might decide to accept foreign aid or adopt Western institutions only when they wanted to.

But Gordon does not discuss the problems of actually establishing his criterion of participatory democracy. For such a criterion to work in America or a developing country, potentially mobile individuals would have to reject assimilation into white middle-class culture or a Western-type elite in a country like Nigeria. Independence from larger society or other countries might requite considerable courage and deprivation. For the larger society may not grant the Negroes or Nigerians what they ask for, and these groups connot accept unsolicited aid.

According to his historical essay, "A Negro Separatist Movement," Archie Epps would disagree with Gordon's criterion that is independent of larger society. Epps points out that even a radical American Negro group like the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) had to work through society. For Epps argues that there is an "intricate network of connections which bind Negro culture and history to the larger society and visa versa." The AME had to draw upon Christian egalitarian ideas of the larger society to justify their positions. In parallel fashion, developing countries would face many problems breaking connections with industrialized powers because of traditional economic and cultural ties.

Epps describes a basic contradiction of revolution: in order to make a fundamental change in society, a revolutionary movement may have to use the existing structure of power to some degree. But Epps does not discuss this contradiction in depth. All the other essays in this issue hit at the same contradiction. In Nigeria, Tanzania, and the American Civil Rights movement, people want to gain independence, but they need help from larger society. At some point revolutionary movements may have to compromise their radicalism in order to succeed. Still they must hold off compromise as long as possible to attain independence in the end. Peter Weiner's article called "Guatemala: the Aborted Revolution" is distressing because it places most of the blame for the failure of that revolution on the United States. If American aid is so important for the success of a Guatemalan revolution, then these people will not become independent. Aid means future obligations.

There are many countries in which people are politically oppressed and economically deprived. The Harvard Review has a competent, sometimes brilliant, discussion of some people who revolted. But the Review would have been strengthened if it had included a study of a potentially revolutionary country like Paraguay that never revolted.