Another rant, coming in hot.
I see a lot of people around saying we need a revolution. "Voting will never get us there, the working class can rise up and take power directly!"
And like, hypothetically, yeah. That's not fundamentally false. An organized and unified working class could certainly do something like that, and a big enough coalition could actually succeed.
But look around you. Do you see a unified, organized working class? Because I don't. Spontaneous revolution can work with high class consciousness, or at least an impoverished peasant class with nothing to lose.
Anything left of Reagan is heavily, and successfully, propagandized against in America. The average prole doesn't know the difference between Social Democracy and Anarcho-syndicalism, and calls "It" anything from "liberalism" to "communism". Class-consciousness isn't there yet.
Capitalism does nothing better than providing bread and circuses. I've worked with a lot of low income individuals, and most of them had enough disposable income for fast food and video games. Our peasant class is too fat and entertained to risk the biscuit for some nebulous "dignity".
What does revolution want anyway? A system of democratic representation with obstacles to autocracy? I think the founding fathers did a fairly decent job of constructing a system of checks and balances to represent the people and obstruct tyranny. Obviously that system has been compromised by decades of careful calculation from the right to impose tyranny upon it, but that still took decades, which is pretty resilient so far as governments go. How would an alternative be fundamentally different, besides undoing a lot of specific legislation?
Seriously, look at the structure of the US government and tell me what would be better. That's not a rhetorical question.
Talking about revolution scratches an idealistic itch, but it's just not achievable at this particular point in time. If the economy absolutely nosedives, or a lot of people get really savvy real quick, then sure. But barring that, we're going to have to figure out a less drastic path forward.
I think there are several, but we've gotta abandon this Leninist idealism. Lenin's revolution degraded into state capitalism in like half a century. And they didn't even have to overcome a 250 year old government, starting from scratch was easy.
I don't think starting from scratch is productive.
The peasants are generally not revolutionary, even when desperate. Even in the Russian Civil War, peasants were as often with the counterrevolutionary Whites or the non-revolutionary Greens as they were with the revolutionary Reds or Blacks.
Living standards aren't really relevant to a demographic's willingness to perform an uprising. All political issues are matters of perception - namely, the perception that the social contract is being upheld (and the perception that victory is possible against the government). So long as people believe that the government is, roughly, executing its duties and responsive to the pleas it should be responsive to according to that social contract, people remain generally passive.
The trick of revolution is not finding the people at a point when they aren't 'fat and entertained', but changing either the perception of the government's fulfillment of the social contract, or changing what a demographic sees as an appropriate social contract to begin with.
Proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, elimination of the Senate and reduction of the number of states, term limits for SCOTUS.
Very true. Still, that's a process that will take time and effort. We should certainly push for it, but let's not pretend that's the story of change that's likely to happen quickly.
Totally agree, but I'm talking about the structure itself, not the particulars. Those are all fairly straightforward legislative reforms within the overarching structure of the government.