10.103- The Final Chapter

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode ten point one hundred and three, the final chapter. On 05/19/2019, I published the first episode of the tenth and final season of the Revolutions podcast. It was episode 10.1, the International Workingmen's Association. And now, here we are more than three years later. It took 39 episodes just to get through the revolution of nineteen o five, then a hiatus to finish Hero of Two Worlds, which went from blank piece of paper when I started this series, to a completed manuscript, to the hardcover release. And now, as I read this, the paperback is imminently forthcoming. The pandemic hit, and then it went on and on and on. It still goes on. I was personally in and out of French operating rooms, then we moved back to France, not that those two are explicitly linked. There have been a million upheavals, big and small, personal, professional, public and private. There have been political upheavals that we all follow even if I don't talk about it here on the podcast. Wars and insurrections, mass protests and attempted coups, ruling class intrigues, systemic failures and insufficient responses. The greedy, the timid, the daring, the inept, the fearful, the blind, the cunning, the unwilling, and the bold all crashing into one another. The unthinkable is thinkable. The impossible possible. The past, not even past, but the future staring us dead in the face. It's been a long three years that went by in the blink of an eye. Now in episode 10.1, we saw a scruffy crew of political dissidents and radical social activists convene in London in 1864 to plot a new course for European civilization. And by virtue of Europe's colonial stranglehold on the world, to plot a new course for human civilization. Most of them were veterans of the barricades of forty eight, or at least the printing presses of forty eight, and they worked in the reactionary aftermath of the failures of forty eight. Their concern was a monstrously exploitive economic system enforced by the hired guns of the ruling class. Their objective was nothing less than total revolution, not just swapping out this ruler for that ruler, but the end of rulers, not just transferring property from this tribe to that tribe, but the end of property, not just the rise of one tiny political faction overthrowing another tiny political faction, but the end of factions entirely. The end of the minority ruling the majority. The end of mass exploitation, misery, and degradation. The triumph of dignity, justice, and prosperity for all. Liberty, equality, and fraternity. Finally, from its inception, the international socialist movement was run through with internal conflicts, arguments, backbiting, shit talking, and infighting. Their assaults on capitalism and imperialism were almost as vicious as their assaults on each other. In a few short years, the first International Workingmen's Association explicitly organized to unite them in unbreakable solidarity, broke into two rival camps, two internationals, with each side …