Peter Camejo 1969 : " How to Make a Revolution in the United States "

How it's done

Now, how does the ruling class do it? Here, you've got some 30,000 people running a society of 200 million and most of the people in the society don't even know it. In the past, ruling classes were proud of their role. They would walk around with feathers in their hats, or big robes and things, and when they went down the street, people would say: "Hey, there goes one of our ruling class." Nowadays, they don't do that. Now, they can slip on the campus where you are, and somebody in the ruling class could walk right by, and you wouldn't even know it. They dress just like you. They're incognito.

Rockefeller would never come to your campus and say: "Hi, how're you doing? Are you studying hard, getting your degrees so you can come to work for me and make me richer?" No, they don't do that. They go around saying that there aren't classes in America, that everybody's middle-class, only that some are a little more middle-class than others. In other words, they are ashamed of their own existence. They have to hide it. And there are good reasons for that. One of their problems, of course, is that they're so small. Why, there are more than 30,000 people on just one or two campuses.

Now, how do they maintain their rule? To find this out you can try an experiment. Get all dressed up, put on a jacket and tie, and walk into some corporation and say: "Hello, I'm a sociologist, I'm here to do a study. Could I just walk around and talk to people?" And then you walk up to somebody and say: "Who's your supervisor?" And he'll point to someplace, and you find someone with a little name plate, and it's a supervisor. And you ask him: "Who's your supervisor?" And he'll point to a different place, and you walk in and there'll be a rug. And you say to him: "Who's your supervisor?" And he'll point to a different floor, and you'll find it gets harder and harder to get in the doors. There's more and more secretaries, and phones, and the rug gets thicker and thicker. Eventually you have to make appointments. And then you hit the sound barrier. Here is where you switch from the people who carry out decisions to people who make the decisions. And that's your local ruling class.

The structure

By the way, if you test out any institution in our society, you'll find they are structured in the same way. A pyramid from the top going down. That's the way all institutions are structured in this democratic country. This goes for government, for the political parties, the army, the churches, the universities, for every basic institution. And when you get to the very top of these structures, to the most powerful people, you will invariably find people who own big property.

Now, how do they keep the structure going? It's a very subtle thing. In the United States, we have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and other democratic rights. So, say you go to your job one day and test it. Wear a big button that says, "Vote Socialist". And watch how fast you get promoted. Watch how you are treated. Formally you have the right to have any political view you want. But, the truth is that in all these institutions there is a very worked out, institutionalised way of going up. And on the way up, you sell your individuality, you commit yourself to the values of the system.

And you learn very fast that in return for full commitment to the system — for personal discipline, for showing up every morning wearing the right clothes, keeping your hair short, and the rest — in return, you get privileges. It's done on the basis of privileges. That is what holds the society together.

When was the last time you heard someone say: "Capitalism's a great society"? When did you hear anyone say: "Just think what our 30,000 ruling class has done for us. We should give them our full support." They never say that. They don't try to build up an ideological support for capitalism in the sense of telling you the full truth.

All the institutions under capitalism are ideological institutions in the sense that all of them maintain and demand support for the system. So it should be no surprise to you that the higher you go in a corporation, the higher you go in the university structure, the higher you go in the army, the people get more and more reactionary. They get more and more consciously pro the system; they are more and more for whatever crimes the system has to commit. They simply wouldn't be there if they weren't. This is why you can never capture the existing apparatus and use it for making a basic change.

Peter Camejo, 1969

How to make a revolution in the United States

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Source : Speech at an educational conference of the US Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance, May 3, 1969, printed in abridged form in The Militant, May 30, 1969
Transcription and mark-up : by Steve Painter

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Revolutionary socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow the US government by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is to imply that we want to abolish capitalism with a minority, that we want to force the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people in this country to support a change in the system. It will be necessary to make a revolution precisely because the ruling powers will not peacefully accept a majority rule which wants a basic change.

How can a revolution involving a majority of the people actually take place in the United States? This is the question I want to discuss today.

First of all, you have to have clear in your mind the meaning of the word "revolution". Many people have a stereotyped picture of what a revolution is like. They say a revolution is when people come with guns, when they surround a fortress or take over a city. What they do is they confuse revolution with insurrection. Insurrection is just one stage of revolution. Revolution is a lot more. It's a long process.

In a certain way you can make a parallel between revolution and pregnancy. In the very early stages of pregnancy, if just on empirical evidence you ask whether or not someone is pregnant, the answer will be no. However, with the use of science you can determine whether the person is pregnant very early. Later on it becomes evident for everybody to see.

The same thing is true of social revolution. In the early stages most people don't see it. You always begin on the assumption that in every society that needs a revolution, the majority of the people don't think it's possible. This is most certainly true for the period in American history we are in right now. We're in the early stages of the third American revolution. I say the third revolution because we've had two others — the revolution of 1776 and the civil war.