Thing is, they’re partially right. Revolution means war and war is violent. Innocent people will be murdered. Sick children. Homeless people. The elderly. Perfectly healthy random people. Pets, wild animals, you name it. Stuff that shouldn’t have to die will die. That’s the nature of war.
The reason it’s still worth it is that we’re already at war. It’s just that largely only one side is waging that war. Innocent people are being murdered under the status quo every single day. Sick children, homeless people, the elderly, perfectly healthy random people, pets, wild animals, you name it. They’re already being murdered. Revolution only looks violent and unreasonable from the privileged position that the status quo isn’t violent.
If you think it’s a tragedy when people can’t get their groceries and medicine, boy do I have some news for you!
See the “2 reigns of terror” quote
Man it’s a good thing structural violence isn’t a thing. Otherwise incremental reform (or more honestly, its vain pursuit under bourgeois democracy) would have its own death toll that is being assumed as the normal, immutable state of things
Tagging your essay with #de-radicalisation is literally the soyest thing imagibable
Essay? This wouldn’t even get a C- if you turned this in at Highschool.
Why do people think the revolution is one singular magical eschatological even that will happen everywhere at the same time, and involves destryoing everything? Why did i believe that at one point? Where did that idea come from and why does it persist?
Not reading history outside of fantasized media
This, only revolution you see in mass media/consciousness in the west puts it forth as some sort of pseudomaterialist rapture. When really history isn’t quite linear and easy, you could say revolutions began long before its obvious and it doesn’t matter what precious pearl-clutching scratched libs think, we’re already in several. You’ll get all sorts of flavors of slow and steady and quick fascistic collapse, which is what they desire in their scratched lil dark heart.
Yeah I think a lot of people miss that revolutions are the culmination of decades or even centuries of contradictions between the ruling hegemony and evolving material conditions. But that doesn’t make for a good 90 minute action-adventure so instead that bit gets glossed over or presented as window dressing for the Great Man’s initiative.
It would make a great year long series and everyday people just living their lives, making even the smallest steps to prepare the future would help advance it, no it would not do well for the silly great man theory though so it’d be an axed plan.
Christian brainworms i think
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” -Mark Twain
-Happybadger
before you start a revolution, you have to submit detailed plan and schedule of your movements to your local fbi headquarters, so that they can ensure steady workings of proletarians (who will otherwise crumble into ash when shareholders can’t answer their emails)
also also, think of the poor babies of the plantation owners, who didn’t get to see their daddy
de-radicalization
People who ideology-hop into marxism and plant no roots by reading theory will just as quickly ideology-hop out of marxism. Simple as.
Also, now?! This is the point in history where you want to be less radical?
Sometimes I think I’m too doomer, but this is what real defeatism looks like. Pure “I don’t care” energy distilled into a thread.
Those people are currently dying and would be saved by a revolution. They just described what’s happening right now.
EXACTLY. we need to build new systems of care because the american system fails and eventually kills everyone below the morality line
these new systems WILL be violently opposed, which will require self defense.
Gonna need a list of revolutions where all the children in the hospitals spontaneously died.
Oh wait guess what… Didn’t happen. Even when shit gets really bad the hospitals make it work right up until you create literal famine conditions like Gaza. Shut up lib.
I get what you’re saying and largely I agree, but I think it’s more honest to admit that unfortunately people are going to die during a revolution. The thing is these same people are going to die if they can’t pay their medical bills, which the libs will never admit to.
People are going to die but claiming that every kid in a hospital is going to spontaneously combust is fucking ridiculous.
People are going to die because there’s going to be a literal civil war that occurs, with all the problems of a civil war that there usually are. Generally speaking neither side wants to kill everyone in hospitals in a civil war though, they both have to try and appeal to the population so “everyone in the hospital died” doesn’t tend to go down well.
With medical provisions that aren’t getting produced in the country anymore aid agencies pick up the slack.
I’m not arguing with you, in hard times people often do come together and figure it out to the best of their abilities. I’m just saying unfortunately even with that support vulnerable people often do fall through the cracks and it’s okay to admit that especially given the circumstances. Circumstances that are not the fault of the people, but of the bourgeoisie who allowed conditions to deteriorate to the point civil war breaks out.
To the extent libs will admit this, it’s regrettable but necessary. Cold blood beats in these hearts
I don’t know where in the world you live and how rich you have to be to think “slow steady and long term changes” could possibly be thought of as positive considering the entire world has obviously been on a very steady downward spiral since like the 60s.
not the entire world
Because, of course, the one and only defining trait of every revolution is taking a flamethrower to the paediatric unit of your local hospital.
“Fuck them kids, bro!”
- Che Guevara
Kind of like how when a climate protest blocks the road every single car is an ambulance or a wrongly convicted felon on their way to a probation meeting.
Every action a leftist does has to trigger a mass dying.
This was set out in Kropotkin’s seminal work, “Mutual Destruction”
Yeah, that period when he joined Megadeth wasn’t great for him.
Incidentally, the Megadeath is the standard unit of measurement for communist death tolls.
Soooo, these people think the American revolution was a bad thing? The Haitian revolution? French Revolution? Do they think the Vietnamese should have just rolled over and been content with being French subjects because otherwise the supply of baguettes might have been interrupted? Once again, libs love every prior revolution and hate the idea of the revolution around the corner.
Oh they definitely think the Haitian revolution was bad
These are the people who see revolution not as one stage of an ongoing struggle to improve the world, but as a spontaneous rapture-like event divorced from the conditions before. The kind of people who’ve read no theory or performed no praxis and assume that socialists want the system to be violently upheaved and rebuilt with themselves at the top with no further changes. They’ve never heard of dual power, of communities taking care of their own, or even Food Not Bombs feeding the needy for free
Literacy is oppression for those who can’t read.
