Under några sköna dagar i Frankrike läser jag om Jean-François Revels klassiska bok "Ni Marx Ni Jesus" från 1970 om hur den nya världsrevolutionen kommer att starta i USA. Revel kunde skriva och han kunde skriva bra, det kan han fortfarande. "La révolution de XXe siécle aura lieu aux Etas Unis. Elle ne peut avoir liéu que là...." Revel fick problem när Nixon återvaldes 1972, och idag framstår boken som helt missvisande.
Revel som besökte USA 1969 mitt under den sociala nydaningens tid kunde inte ana att kontrarevolutionen redan var på väg. Denna kontrarevolution skulle sätta just Jesus på förarplatsen och skulle försöka att rulla tillbaks hela den sociala nydaningen som Revel bevittnade.
Revel har försvarat sin tes bl.a. så här:
During my time in the United States in 1969, I identified what I believed could fairly be called a revolution. In its narrow sense, “revolution” usually means the replacing of one political regime by another, usually by means of a violent coup d’état accompanied by insurrection—followed by purges, arrests and executions. Indeed, many a revolution conforming to this pattern has led to dictatorship and repression. As I stressed in Without Marx or Jesus, what I meant by “revolution” in the context of America was less a political phenomenon at the highest levels of power than a series of transformations spontaneously occurring within society at a deep level. These radical changes had been born, were evolving and would continue to evolve independently of political transitions at the national level. You can change the government without changing society; conversely, you can change society without changing the government. The American Free Speech Movement sprang forth and continued to grow as vigorously under Republican presidents as under Democrats; it was able to do so largely because it never—or very rarely—regressed into the backward ideologies of the nineteenth century or the Marxist pseudo-revolutionary theoretical straitjackets of the twentieth. In my book, I argued that a revolution in this sense is a phenomenon that had hitherto never taken place, an event that would develop along lines other than the known historical ones and that could not be thought about—or even perceived—in terms of the old categories. It was obvious to me that the real revolution was taking place not in Cuba, but in California.
The side-by-side comparison I had carried out, a stark confrontation between what was everywhere said about the United States and what one actually encountered upon going there, inspired my frontline report, which apparently resonated with many people throughout the world. Without Marx or Jesus was a bestseller in France and in the United States, taking off spectacularly before it came to the notice of the critics and continuing to stay aloft even after lukewarm, even hostile reviews; it was translated into at least twenty languages. This landslide revealed the gulf between the desire to know on the part of the “silent majorities” and the desire not to know on the part of the intellectual and media elites, not only in countries like France, Italy and Greece that were under overt Communist influence, but in social democracies like Sweden that were theoretically opposed to totalitarianism.
Sett ur en fransk synvinkel så var skillnaden mellan just Kuba och Kalifornien slående. (Trots att Revel dock vad jag vet aldrig besökte Kuba). Men Revels huvudtes, att det skulle komma att vara USA och inte Kuba eller Kina eller Sovjet som skulle komma att stå för nydaningarna i världen var lika riktig då som nu.
Vad han inte kunde ana främst eftersom han inte grävde djupt nog, var den virulenta kontrarevolutionen som redan startat med Barry Goldwater 1964 och som idag har uppnått total politisk makt i USA.
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