Underminer

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.

Trump is a massive problem, but he's not the ROOT problem. He's more indicative of the deeper running problems than a cause. Decades of consolidating power at the top set things up for a single bad actor to be incredibly destructive.

Some of us have been waving the flag about that issue for years and consistently been told that being concerned about a malevolent or dictatorial presence gaining office in the US or Canada is crazy...

Some of us said Obamacare was a bad approach, not because the US didn't need health reform (they did and still do, obviously) but that it needed to be either towards single payer or other socialization and not utilizing insurance companies in the mix. Mainly because the proposed changes were putting too much power in the hands of insurance companies, and would result in less functional coverage and increased costs to citizens within about 10 years....

The state of affairs south of the border right now has me feeling sad and horrified, but also a little vindicated.

At the end of the day, everything happening right now is about a bunch of crony corporatists trying to extract every bit of value they can at the expense of everything else. Everyone with a stake is trying to get rich, and give the corpos the most control possible going forward.

Cyberpunk was never supposed to be an instructive dystopian genre.

"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.