Thomas Frank: Why Occupy failed and how it's more like the Tea Party than anyone wants to admit

[NoPasaran]

70. 1848? Really?

The Springtime of Nations, which was over by 1849? The result: the old despots almost everywhere still in power, thousands of revolutionaries dead in battle, executed, imprisoned, or in exile. But a couple of those soon-to-be exiles wrote a famous pamphlet, so I guess it was all worth it somehow.

About the only place where the old monarch didn't hang on was France, where the Second Republic emerged and quickly repressed the crowds in the streets. But they weren't able to repress the rise of Louis Bonaparte, who within a few years followed his famous uncle and founded his own tyranny, the Second Empire. (Marx put his prolific pen to that subject as well.) And the downfall of Napoleon III leads us to the next stop on the Roll of Glorious Defeats, the Paris Commune. Several weeks of a beacon of liberty, equality, fraternity; followed by firing squads for all those not quick enough to evade the bloody clutches of Thiers.

On the other hand, we have the great Sit-Down Strike of 1937, the Civil Rights Movement, the foundation of the Populist Party. Not as huge a bodycount as the European examples, perhaps not quite as profound in shaking the relationship between Man and Capital. But each of them empowering, achieving actual goals. Goals which may have fallen short of a totally revolutionary transformation of society, but real achievements none the less. More real than just another glorious sanguinary chapter for the history books.