The Other Revolution

Karl Marx was never satisfied with the American Revolution. In the 1850s he expected another momentarily. For Marx and many later observers, the colonies' uprising was a "conservative" revolution that failed to make radical shifts in social and economic relations. Perhaps not at the time. But, above all, the American Revolution presented the world with a daring concept: the right of people to choose their own form of government. When Marx's revolution finally occurred in Russia, exactly the opposite principle was established: an elite was given the power to choose the government for the people. That this example has been so widely copied is perhaps an indication that it is easier to rule people autocratically than to reason with them.

Looking around the globe, we would conclude that the current descendants of the early Americans are outnumbered by the contemporary children of the Marxist revolution.

Yet when the representatives of 29 European Communist parties met in East Berlin last week (see THE WORLD), many of the leaders not only ringingly announced their independence from Moscow but insisted that in the West, at least, the only way of gaining power was through reliance on a magic word. The word is democracy, which Western European Communists now claim to espouse. It was in its own way quite a tribute to that conservative revolution.

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