How people in revolutions think

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Jack Shenker, “The Journalist and the Revolution,” New York Times, October 16, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/john-reed-russian-revolution-journalism.html?comments 

True revolutions change not only how the society is organized but how people think. Journalists and historians as well as scholars and scientists, writers and artists, find, in revolutionary contexts, that the autonomous resources of thinking in their discipline are not so autonomous. Partisanship vs. objectivity becomes a false opposition. The first task of a journalist in [John] Reed's position must be to discover in an intimate way how the participants in the process understand what they are doing. 

As the French political philosopher Alain Badiou has shown, social/political "events" divide the world between old regime and participants in the process of constructing a new. People of the old regime of thinking literally cannot grasp or understand what is happening, and so for them it is not an event but a mere anomaly to be described in existing categories of moralism or abnormal psychology. 

This was true already in the American Revolution, to the extent that it was one. From a radically democratic point of view, the Soviet Revolution cannot be thought mistaken at the outset, but at most flawed, and its realization failed through either constitutive imperfections or the betrayal of a conservative faction (Stalin) or both. The reason is that behind the Event is not just an Idea or ideology but a Desire, to which we must be faithful. The desire is for liberty, equality, and democracy. Failed ideas, like those of Marx, or Jefferson, are excellent places to start.