Continuing the theme in my previous article:
Let’s talk specifically more about ‘The Revolution’ mentioned in that article, or, at least, its critical components. A socialist revolution, in particular, can be said to be composed of seven co-equal, co-terminus, often contradicting, sometimes reinforcing the other, sometimes not, key markers; or, to use the Biblical appellation, “seals”. These seals may one, all, or some, be broken out of sequence, or sequentially, or contemporaneously with all the others. In other words, there’s not a set pattern to the breaking of the seals.
Neither are seals broken with a single act, but rather a confluence of acts, and inside each is a multi-dimensional matrix of contradicting and reinforcing forces; action and reaction to the ongoing breaking of the seal. Thus it can be said these seals at first bend, and only then break, just as other forces attempt to keep the seal together. To put it to some vivid image: imagine a large, brass-bolted lock, shut tight for many silent centuries.
Imagine that brass-bolted lock rejecting all manner of picks or subtle facsimiles of keys for all that while, until one rod, one single molten hot rod of rarified metal, barrels its way through the crevassed edges of the keyhole with its forceful heat, bending the keyhole to its shape. Whatever gives the key rod its heat is evaporating in the air though—the counteraction to the action. Can the key rod reshape the keyhole to fit in time, or shall cold snap its progress away?
When it does break the lock, when its force indeed is too much for the simple keyhole to handle, then the lock is broken for good, but who can say what singular action led to that final breakage, only that the confluence of all actions in the shaping of the key led to the great breakthrough.
Or: a man sells the inheritance of his children in return for drink and wastage. The eldest child curses his father, and leaves him. The middle child curses his father, and kills him. The youngest child mourns his father, and buries him. Who was the prime actor, the key and the seal? The father forged in his own keys and his own seals, as he tried to unmake them, as his children likewise made and unmade them until the final fatal breakage. The youngest child alone must rebuild what the middle wrought, and what the eldest fled from. This is the job of socialists.
We are the key and the breaker of seals, as we are the seal themselves, and sometimes even, their silent, almost removed observers.
Of the seals, there are seven, or seven revolutions—seven key incidents which form and shape the totalistic vision of a socialist revolution. All seals must be broken in order for a socialist revolution to succeed.
They comprise the following:
The Bourgeoisie Revolution
The Military Revolution
The Social Revolution
The National Revolution
The Class Revolution
The Urban Revolution
The Great Socialist Revolution
As stated above, these seals, or revolutions, can happen in any particular order, and some may not happen until the very end. The specific role of a socialist or socialist party is only illuminated in the seventh and final revolution; socialists and their parties may partake in the other revolutions, but they are not the prime movers until the seventh.
BEFORE THE SEALS BREAK
The world in all its normality and all its brutality exists. The elite, ruling classes have their own laws and order which they follow, even at personal, individual losses to themselves. The military follows a single unitary command, and a veil of normalcy wraps and infuses itself amongst the remainder of society.
The seals, the revolutions, are so alien in the day-to-day lives of people that most deny they exist, or that they can ever be broken. These notions are disabused when the seals start to bend, start to break, as they invariably always do, as capitalism or just society falls into precarious crises yet again.
THE FIRST SEAL
The Bourgeoisie Revolution
Whatever binds the liberal elite, owning classes to themselves and each other, to the continued maintenance of their law and order in their country, frays and comes undone. Internal class peace breaks down, and the competition for resources becomes an all-stakes battle for total domination. Most crucially, the laws their class wrote and enforced for years upon years are conveniently and constantly tossed aside, to the temporary and reclusive benefit of a smaller chunk of the elite.
This revolution may be arrested only by internal actors, who can, through rebuilding elite consensus, restore the status quo ante the first seal bending to the melting point. But if there are no internal actors willing or capable of uniting enough of the ruling classes together, the seal breaks, often in a brilliantly brutal fashion—a street revolution, a military coup, or something similar.
Historical examples: The Wuhan (1911) Revolution, The Russian (1905) Revolution, The Russian (February 1917) Revolution
Modern American considerations: The elections and administrations of Donald Trump, January 6, Elon Musk’s DOGE
THE SECOND SEAL
The Military Revolution
The military of the country ceases to be a single unified force. They, more importantly, no longer swear unified allegiance to the civilian command. Perhaps they have directly overthrown the civilian government and installed a military-led junta. Or, they have helped a civilian government transition extra-constitutionally, extra-legally from one government to another. You can tell when the seal is broken when soldiers are no longer willing to follow orders from a lawful superior, when the very notion of following the order from that superior becomes laughable.
Examples: In each of the previous, consider the role the military had. They all played an intricate role, and often took part in building the new governments created in the aftermath of the revolution.
Modern American considerations: January 6, 2021
THE THIRD SEAL
The Social Revolution
The masses stir. Without waiting for direction from above, they begin to emancipate themselves from the existing laws and order, crafted by the yet-extant, yet-fading bourgeoisie order. They burn debt ledgers, they free political prisoners, they redistribute land. They create new norms and mores, new forms of trade and material conditions. The changes are atomic, at the minute level, as they are nuclear, at the societal level. Nothing is spared the breakage of this seal.
Examples: how Chinese society changed between 1911-1921; the Great Peasant Revolution of 1917.
Modern American considerations: ongoing before our very eyes.
THE FOURTH SEAL
The National Revolution
The localities and regionalities claim power and resources for themselves, no longer adhering to the concept of a unified core. They can be quickly corralled back into unity or disunity, depending on key cultural, linguistic, historical, and political reasons. At its most extreme, it is a total breakage, every village, household, room and board, against itself in perpetual war; the imagined nuclear Apocalypse of movies and games. At its median-likely outcome, a few provinces will have their own governments, separate and sometimes warring amongst each other.
Examples: The Chinese Civil Wars of 1911-1949, The Russian and Soviet Civil Wars of 1917-1921.
Modern American considerations: Federal-state conflicts escalating; state-local conflicts escalating
THE FIFTH SEAL
The Class Revolution
The working class begins to think of it as such; it is the achievement of conceptual mass class consciousness. The classes, now conscious of their historic role, unite and self-organize into units capable of establishing governments, militaries, and political legitimacy, far beyond and removed from any strictures of heretofore legal state formation.
Examples: the formation of the Chinese and Russian Soviets during the respective revolutions of 1921-1926 and 1917.
Modern American considerations: The modern DSA.
THE SIXTH SEAL
The Urban Revolution
Cities in any time period are chaotic, multi-dimensional units of fortified manmade mountains and hills, hardly scalable or infiltratable even by modern militaries. Whoever can control not only cities but also crucially their supply lines rules them, and thereby, the core population and industrial centers of their respective polity. The urban revolution occurred at the start of agriculture; whomever can control the urban centers can finish this cycle of revolution.
Examples: Multiple points throughout the Chinese Revolutions and Civil Wars 1911-1949, The Soviet October Revolution of 1917.
Modern American considerations: George Floyd, Post October 7 occupations, ongoing.
THE SEVENTH AND FINAL SEAL
The Great Socialist Revolution
A party, mutual association, or otherwise just ‘grouping’ of individuals along socialist lines coalesce ideologically with the building mass consensus of society, towards completing the socialist revolution and shepherding all classes through to that conclusion, of building the predicates to a classless and stateless society.
Examples: Multiple points throughout the Chinese Revolutions and Civil Wars 1911-1949, The Soviet October Revolution of 1917.
Modern American considerations: not yet.
After the Seals
What comes after every deluge but silence, a pause, necessary reflection. As they did, we shall rebuild, we shall recuperate, of course. But much was lost, homes destroyed, lives gone. Whole futures wasted on battlefields of mind and blood alike. We can never un-break the seals that were broken, were broken by many chaotic tugging, pushing and pulling, hands together. Mourning is a word that does little justice to the deed.
But a time comes when the mourning ends, when willful hands must stir themselves again. In a better world, we’ll trumpet our triumphs to the world, and spread them across the seven seas to the seven distant continents, uniting the world under a single socialist light.
And from there, we can finally begin to build communism, that predicate to a classless and stateless society, that which we all dream to achieve, that which we all shall achieve, either in our lives, or in the lives of those to follow, through the continued class struggle we all partake in, being a composite part of class and society ourselves.