Rees - ˜Theœ Algebra of Revolution The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition

The very possibility of human life is governed by contradictions. Consider this: In the last three decades, the average life span of a human being has lengthened by ten years or more. In the poorest parts of the world, it has grown from fortyeight years to sixty-three years. The causes are various, but any account would include the increased application of science to agriculture (the so-called green revolution), improvements in medical provision, and the consequent halving of the infant mortality rate. Progress, by any criterion.

But this is only half the story. Over a similar period, in the years since the Second World War, there have been 149 wars which have left more than 23 million deada population almost as large as Canada's today. On an average yearly basis, the numbers killed in wars during this period have been more than double the deaths in the nineteenth century and seven times greater than in the eighteenth century. Were we to extend our survey to the entire twentieth century, and thus include two World Wars, our age would appear even more murderous. Regression, by any criterion. Yet it is the very same development of human productivity that gives rise both to the possibility of life and to its destruction.

The number of physicians in the world has grown from nearly 1.6 million in 1960 to nearly 5.7 million in 1990. A step forward certainly. But the numbers of the armed forces have grown from over 18 million to over 26 million in the same period. A step backward. In the same thirty years, education spending has grown worldwide from $486 to $1,048 per student. But military spending per soldier has risen from $18,140 to $26,536.

Everywhere we look another paradox appears. How can it be, for instance, that in the richest capitalist society in the world, the United States, real weekly incomes have fallen steadily since 1973?

The contradictions are no less striking if we shift our gaze from economics to politics. The introduction of the market into Russia and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring stability and prosperity but has actually produced the opposite. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a peaceful New World Order. In fact, even if we exclude the Gulf War, the global number of conflicts rose to an all time record of twenty-nine major wars in 1992 with war deaths reaching a seventeen-year high. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War, fascist organizations reached their postwar peak of influence in several European countries. Yet at the same time, when the working-class movement in the advanced industrialized countries was regularly described by journalists and academics alike as a spent force, there were mass strikes during the 1990s in, for instance, Italy, Spain, Greece, Canada, and France.