As those who participate in a common faith community but work on different continents, we are condemned to discerning our way through revolution across the expanse of diverging "situations." But we may at least gain common ground by critiquing the main presuppositions that compete for influence.

All human beings need myths. Myths are not so much false or true, but shared mental structures that give order to reality. No one needs a myth more than the person who must steel him or herself to take risks voluntarily in a dangerous or tragic situation. There must be some overarching reason why it is worthwhile to do so.

Myth #1: The "vanguard" is a representative interpreter of the people's aspirations, and is their necessary guide.

The vanguard, in Marxist thought,¹ is that group which has rightly perceived the direction of history, has analyzed the present opportunities and forces for moving in that direction, and is capable of exercising the leadership required for doing so. The vanguard develops such revolutionary virtues through two processes: (1) direct experience of dispossession, or at least with the dispossessed, and (2) scientific analysis of both the dispossession, and the true interests of the dispossessed. Such analysis demands a precision only a minority from among the masses may be capable of sharing.

The possibility exists that a group may actually serve the people in this way. Where revolution really is revolutionary it is a spontaneous, indigenous response to authentic social needs. An invading force cannot impose it, as occurred to a large extent, in Central Europe. The leadership that emerges in the process of an indigenous revolution must to some initial degree respond to theperceived interests -- even if only short-term -- of a significant portion of the population.² To the degree that would-be revolutionaries are truly willing to live among and learn from the poor, adjusting their strategies accordingly, they stand a chance of offsetting the concept's elitist tendencies, at least for a while, and making "vanguard" an accurate description of their catalytic role. Nicaragua's Sandinistas would not have broken with the Marxist doctrine of religion, nor developed such a pragmatic land reform policy, without years of just such grassroots listening.

The problem with the myth of the vanguard is not that it never conforms to reality but that it so easily becomes a doctrine rather than a description. As such it becomes a kind of "divine right of kings" to those who believe in neither divinity nor monarchy. The "vanguard" may have long ago become a bureaucracy or a privileged elite. It may have long ago lost touch with the grassroots of society. Preserving its prerogatives rather than articulating the people's interests, it may have long since lost its historical function. Yet the group continues to possess a belief that legitimizes its rule -- however harsh and unresponsive -- in the name of the "vanguard's" unswerving perception of the people's "true" interests. Assurances that the belief is "scientific," and not a myth at all, only harden it.

Myth #2: The people are caught in the middle, in the crossfire between rivaling extremes.

This is our myth, the shared idea that, true or untrue, helps us manage a complex reality. As peace churches we have good biblical reasons to suspect the pretensions of all governments. In the Old Testament even the annointed state apparatus of the liberated covenant people soon became oppressive (1 Samuel 8:10ff). Reading the New Testament we come to suspect that the state is at best a concession to hold sin in check, but more often takes on demonic dimensions. To master the "kingdoms of the world" in order to usher in the kingdom of God is the option that Christ struggled hardest against, and ultimately rejected. We therefore find every precedent for questioning both the sacral claims of those who defend the status quo, and the messianic claims of those who work to overthrow its oppression.

The possibility of the crossfire myth conforming to reality is all too high. The poor are usually the ones who suffer most. Long after battle has taken on a life of its own, long after the costs of warfare have exceeded all but the most long-term and elusive of possible social gains, armies and guerrilla bands continue marching across the lands of the poor, firing at each other across their heads, or using their communities as human shields. Meanwhile someone is always invoking the name of the populace to justify one cause or another. The revolutionary forces may make greater claims to popularity, yet even the most repressive forces of the status quo find ways to cite the "higher honor" and the "greater good" of the fatherland.

The problem is that sometimes the poor really do look upon the armed revolutionary organization as defender of their cause. Attempts to find moderate Palestinians to speak or negotiate in place of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have generally failed. President Napoleon Duarte and his Christian Democratic Party present themselves as a besieged center in El Salvador, caught between the extremes (a sort of democratic vanguard, perhaps). But this so-called center is at least as much the creation and representative of the U.S. government as of the Salvadoran people. These negative observations do not logically prove that either of the respective alternatives, the PLO or El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), is the legitimate voice of "the people." But if those who are on the scene, developing trust at the grassroots, sense the wind blowing a certain direction, their word gains all the more credibility when efforts to create a contrary image are so foreign and contrived. In any case, there are just enough examples of massive, spontaneous and truly popular support for revolutionary causes that we cannot rule out the possibility.³

Notes

¹More specifically, it was Lenin who was able to forge a militant and cohesive revolutionary party by perfecting the doctrine of the vanguard in such a way as to counter scruples against elitism. This is the essence of "Marxist-Leninism," at least when commentators use the term correctly.

²Nightmares of tyrants or pretensions of terrorists to the contrary, small cliques do not take power through brute force alone. See the work of Gene Sharp, who sums up his political science theory in Power and Struggle part one of: The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sarge Publishers, 1973).

³There are other myths of revolution, of course, but most often they simply exchange one elite for another vanguard. Capitalist ideology simply has a different vanguard, the bankers or the economists or the development technocrats who "know" how to balance the social costs of their development policies with the long-term benefits of an expanding economic pie. For our heuristic purposes we do not need an exhaustive typology of all possible myths of revolution and counterrevolution, but a simple contrast between the most relevant form of taking sides and the most relevant form of refusing to do so.