'#half the time revolutions don't end up really addressing the stuff they set out to change anyway' - Explain this!
Oh, I just meant that quite often, revolutions succeed in expelling whoever was in power from power and putting people from different walks of life into power, but they fail to really change what power is–the structure of it, its operation, its sources, and who and what it acts upon. This can happen in any number of ways, including counterrevolution if it’s quick enough, but often as not it’s because changing what power is, what it does, and how it’s justified is a lot harder than changing the roles of who holds it. You can look at a huge number of revolutions through history and find that while they may have changed the course of history in any number of ways, the signal issues that motivated any given revolution–the bases for it–aren’t really solved by the revolution itself. So since that was a tag on a post about the necessity of smaller-scale, more direct-impact activism and work, and how such work is valid even if it’s not placed in the context of a full-scale revolution, my point was that addressing outcomes and issues in and of themselves is a smart thing to do because even when revolutions do occur, often they affect those outcomes less than you’d expect.
People’s ideas about what power looks like, who can exercise it, what justifies that exercise, and the forms in which it functions are incredibly deeply held and intertwined with daily life. Therefore they are very hard to change. It takes massive efforts in social re-education and investment from significant parts of the population to make it happen. To take a really innocuous, minor example, here in the US we all know what the emergency alert system sounds like. It’s a very specific sound that has been inculcated into all of us for generations and fiercely protected by FEMA and the FCC so that its significance can’t be diluted or misrepresented. If, tomorrow, we had a revolution here, that sound would still cause at least most of us to stop in our tracks and pay attention. Even if the new government announced a new system that didn’t rely on sound at all, or used different sounds, that deep habit of obedience is still there in us, the population. That is state power in action.
This is just a kind of parable, but I hope the point is clear: that same continuity applies for things like which lives we value, what we consider to be success or failure, what we consider to be a crime or an appropriate punishment. If the US had a socialist or communist revolution tomorrow and we switched to a universal basic income, there would be huge resistance from people who have been indoctrinated all their lives to believe they can’t be successful without hard work in a competitive marketplace, and that success is measured by comparison against others who are less successful; that resistance would probably be expressed in all kinds of ways that might, in combination, cause said UBI to fail and the capitalist market economy to persist despite a revolution premised on its abolition. (I keep thinking about the history of revolutionary land reform in many Arab countries as another example, but I’m betting that would require a lot more explanation.) These people might not even feel resistive about it in a consciously political or ideological way; I’m not talking about libertarians or ancaps here, but your “average hard-working American” who may even consider themselves a non-political person.
State intervention (in education, for example) and very large social movements sustained over time are basically the only things that can deliberately change social ideas about power and its expression. (Social change also occurs more spontaneously than this, but you can almost always find social-movement activism behind any major cultural and social change in exercises of power; #TimesUp is a great example, as are temperance, decriminalization of marijuana, and the recent loss of power by “gatekeepers” in the media.) I’m not saying a revolution can never succeed in this way, and indeed some of them are born of social movements that do exactly this, or install state policies to accomplish it it after seizing power. But a revolution itself is not a guarantee of succeeding on this level, which is why, as the post that tag of mine comes from says, it’s also at least as valid to focus in analysis and in practice on this level itself without requiring that it be part of a larger revolution. “We argue that in order to be historically significant, social change need not just be about large, transformational events recognizable as revolutionary, but can equally be about relatively localized everyday attempts to marginally improve the day-to-day drudgery of life.” I was referring to kind of the flipside of that, which is that “transformational events recognizable as revolutionary” are actually not always so transformational, and so we need to be looking further than such moments.
I also highly recommend reading Asef Bayat, who has written a lot about social movements and how very small, individualized actions at the margins of society can create change. Happily, @vi0lentquiche just happened to send me a link (thank you!) to a pdf of the relevant book here, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, because I also tagged that same post “quiet encroachment” in reference to his work. Check it out here! I especially recommend Chapter 3, “The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary.” I think that chapter has a lot of relevance for anyone anywhere, even though the book is obviously focused on the Middle East.