I wonder why intellectuals working on revolutionary change seem to inevitably either lose touch with the masses and fall into the place of the dictator they tried to overthrow or they fight a losing battle for change that the masses seem to never get behind. I’ll suggest that the unfortunate state of the conscious revolutionary is a result of the fast-paced and necessarily spontaneous nature of revolutions and how it’s very difficult to keep the intellectual, authoritative work of the revolution in line with the views of all areas of the masses.

As we saw in The Baader Meinhof Complex film and we’ve seen in revolutionary cases like the Iranian and Haitian revolutions, the beginnings of revolutions seem to always be pure and righteous. It’s the slave standing up against the master’s torment. It’s the man refusing to obey the police officer. The activist who needs to take a stand against blatantly cruel acts from their government. We’ve seen that revolutions seem to be triggered by spontaneous action, usually in line with general dissatisfaction from the masses, and that carefully planned and prepared-for revolutions often fail to occur. Somehow, in a short period of time, there are enough people in the masses who feel the same way about an issue and in some quick early movements, decide to move together in protest. The revolution seems to fall apart, however, once the beginnings are already set in motion and someone needs to decide where it goes. The role of the intellectual in this case, when choosing the correct action to move forward, is to either survey the masses and master what the masses want (which takes time—enough for the spark of the beginnings to die off) or take the responsibility of deciding where the revolution goes into their own hands (which necessarily implies that the work of the revolution cannot still be in the interests of the entire community—unless there is a quick execution of effective propaganda to the masses). When the intellectual revolutionary takes on the responsibility of leading the revolution, it loses its purity; no longer is the revolution a beautiful concurrence of values and interests of a mass, but it becomes the result of planning by an individual—an individual that cannot possibly read the minds or understand the backgrounds of thousands, and an individual who is subject to fears and desires and impulses as any other human being. Therefore, if a revolution is able to continue past its harmonious and just beginnings, it must be led by an individual who will inevitably lead the movement in a direction that the masses no longer support, thus leaving the intellectual leader in a position very similar to the oppressive regime the revolution sought to overthrow.