this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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This week, I'd like to discuss something that I've not seen discussed much elsewhere.
Many on Lemmy are the type to want to see their government go through a revolution of some kind and think that slow change is impossible, but what happens after? Say you get a group and topple the oligarchy or shitty government in power, what then?
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- How do you defend what you're building from those who have more resources than you?
- What does the government look like?
- Would you keep anything from the old systems?
- What kind of leaders would you need?
- How do you stop it from turning into the NEXT horrible thing?
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"Revolution" as a means for any kind of positive change in any modern western society is pure fantasy by and for those who haven't applied sufficient critical thinking to the idea. The questions you posed illustrate this perfectly, as they're unanswerable in any realistic revolutionary scenario.
Revolutions are not won by a bunch of common people waving a few pitchforks around and then going back to their daily lives. Toppling a government requires force and some kind of organized military action. That means to be effective you need command structures and centralization of authority. The new authorities that are thus installed are going to be in it entirely for personal gain and acquisition of more power. They will always be either so greedy and selfish that no amount of power and influence acquired through more peaceful processes will ever seem enough, or so radical and extreme that they cannot work with any existing structures to affect any change over the longer term.
About the only exception to this would be if an administration held onto more power/authority than they had been granted and there was military action to remove them and restore the status quo, but that's more of a benevolent coup than a revolution.
Political action will always be more effective at change than revolution as long as a shred of democratic structure exists. And if you can't enact sufficient political action to affect change, you have no chance at a successful revolution.
That was the impetus for posting this to begin with. I couldn't parse all of the revolution talk everywhere else on Lemmy as it seemed to be just armchair anarchists or Communists that didn't have ideas on what to do, how to do it, and how to proceed once it was accomplished.
I was trying to have a conversation with some of them with this topic in hopes that I had missed something. I'm not sure I did.
Just about everyone calling for revolution is using it as a fantasy. Wanting to believe that there's a relatively quick and easy way for things to be the way they want.
But there isn't.
If we want change of any sort we need to do the work to get there, and it won't happen overnight.