from observations, I feel like many people took âhistory books are full of propagandaâ and ran with it and instead of more deeply investigating history from varying sources, they just donât know jack shit about history
I need everyone that has ever talked about âoverthrowing capitalismâ to understand that
people have tried to create a peaceful, oppression-free society before, but it turns out thatâs really hard.
The reasons itâs really hard are almost entirely practical and many of them are the boring and logistical sort of practical.
Change happens incrementally. Revolutions and revolts...they happen when people hit the breaking point. But the idea that they throw out an old society completely and create a new one from scratch is itself propaganda. They donât always result in a better society. They always result in a deeply flawed society. Also people die. Very often the most powerful people donât die, and sometimes they end up powerful in the new society.
"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."
- Niccolò Machiavelli, from The Prince (1532)
I feel like all the wannabe revolutionaries on Tumblr really need to accept the fact that, if you hold a revolution, people will die.
And not just the people you want to die. In fact, the members of The Rich (⌠and their kids. Most 'kill the rich' revolutions have also ended up having to murder their minor children so as to avoid them growing up into counter-revolutionaries) that you don't kill personally are probably more likely to survive than your average person. One of the benefits of being The Rich is easier access to resources.
But like⌠overthrowing the government and reworking society from scratch is probably going to fuck over the healthcare and welfare systems at least a little, and people depend in them to survive. The inevitable counter revolution and fighting in the streets will lead to innocent civilians getting caught in the crossfire.
And if you think that that's worth it then⌠sure. It's not like violent revolutions have never achieved positive results. But like, you don't then get to go around telling people not to vote in elections or work to achieve change through peaceful means, because "it won't fix everything". Neither will a revolution.
I agree, but I want to draw attention to âprobably going to fuck over the healthcare and welfare systems a bitâ because thatâs the understatement of the century.
An actual violent armed revolt and overthrow of the U.S. government (not that I think many people have seriously thought about/considered that) would result in mass death, likely of millions or tens of millions of people. The reason is depressingly simple: infrastructure.
The Texas cold snap disaster and the Nashville bombing are tiny pieces of foreshadowing for what could happen if violent unrest spread across the country.
First thing: foodways. We are totally dependent on a huge, inter-state system for food. Very little of the food eaten by anyone anywhere in the country is produced locally. If we suddenly stop being able to ship food supplies across the country and in from other countries, many communities cannot fall back on local resources. At all. Our crops are grown in gigantic monocultures. Rural and isolated areas are often almost totally dependent on chains like Dollar General for grocery shopping.
Second thing: electricity. Not only would it be ridiculously easy to knock out the electricity of most areas, our electrical infrastructure would probably fall apart within like a few months on its own without constant maintenance. Over winter break my community had a couple power outages that affected a few hundred people. They lasted only about half a day because there are workers on call at all hours of the night to address and fix those problems. Weâre literally dependent on people being available at all times to access and repair the infrastructure, and if anything happens to those people, their resources, their supplies, their ability to travel to the source of a problem, weâre fucked. Homes will no longer be heated or air conditioned, food stored in freezers will thaw out and rot.
Third thing is transportation. Americans are almost exclusively dependent on personal vehicles that run on fossil fuels for transportation outside of large cities. There are no passenger trains or buses for a huge portion of the country. If anything happens to peopleâs ability to access fuel and to drive on roads in cars, theyâre not getting anywhere except on foot.
It is important to realize that America is BIG. A lot of Americans live in very isolated areas with an incredibly low population density. It is not at all uncommon to have an hour-long commute to work every day, or to live two hours from the nearest supermarket. Distributing aid after a wide ranging collapse of any of our infrastructure would be an absolute nightmare. You couldnât easily gather people at a central location and provide them with necessities. They canât get there. You canât even tell them where âthereâ is.
Every life sustaining system in the country is being held together by a scrap of dingy duct tape. The system is thoroughly broken but itâs broken in such a successful way that there is nothing else to fall back on. There are no local communities that are meaningfully self sustaining, at least not any that couldnât be thrown into fighting for survival practically at the push of a button.
And literally all of these things are designed around capitalism.
If you violently overthrow the American capitalist system and replace it completely with something new, these life-sustaining systems are going too. The private companies that manage the power grid are gone; whoâs coordinating efforts to keep it up and running, and how? The big companies controlling all grocery stores are gone; how are we going to reorganize foodways? How are we going to source and distribute food? Weâre doing away with fossil fuels; where is our electricity coming from, what is powering the vehicles that carry our food, how are 300 million people going to make it to the places where food is being distributed? How will you inform them?
It only takes about 5 minutes of thought to realize that actually âoverthrowingâ capitalism means that everyone within capitalism that is most harmed and oppressed by it ends up dead within a month because there is no existing system to take care of those people.
I think people are just wildly optimistic about the ability of a loose unorganized group of revolutionaries to miraculously organize and distribute necessities to people, to which I can only answer that you need to read a goddamn history book.
This is what I meanâhorrible botched revolutions, and in particular communist revolutions, usually arenât horrible because primarily their ideas are flawed. They turn into nightmares initially because of very boring reasons like logistics.
Even if all humans were innately good and unselfish, it is just so ridiculously fucking hard to coordinate large numbers of people and large amounts of resources and all the red tape that is necessary to even begin to work out how to make a built-from-scratch society function is mind boggling. âWhoops! We accidentally starved a million people to death because we miscalculated how much bread they would need. Sorry....â
Imagine starting to try to regulate food safety, but the FDA no longer exists, food safety laws are void, the people that worked for the FDA are unemployed, the people that worked at the meat packing plant are unemployed, the people that shipped beef to the meat packing plant are no longer doing that (and also their trucks have no fuel because you shut down the fossil fuel industry), the basis of the farmersâ livelihood has collapsed. How do you even consult the scientists that would know about food safety and make sure their work is peer reviewed?
The answer is that you donât, because everybody is eating rats cooked over fires made from burning furniture, because you canât just pop one Entire Societal Structure out and slide a new one in like theyâre VHS tapes. It never happens this way.
So what do you do? You copy the previous society, and its flaws! OR, as the leader of your country, you just come up with whatever ideas you think are good and make everybody do them, because in practice the ability to broadly coordinate actions and the ability to coerce large numbers of people are not super differentâand you kill millions of people because you were slightly mistaken about something crucial about ironworking or farming or ecology.
this kind of cataclysm is also what usually spurs targeted genocide because people have few resources so they turn on a group of people they can destroy to free up resources (e.g. money, homes, farm land, etc.). if you've only got so much food and you're stressed out 24/7, any dissonance between you and someone else eating the food makes it easier to feel validated in removing them from the picture and having more food for yourself. shiny human ideals are often no match against hunger and suffering, especially when they were designed to fight an enemy you've already overthrown.
