this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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This is kind of a garbage take. Revolution is just one puzzle piece in the large set of tools necessary to effect real change. Revolution can also happen in many different ways from silent to political to violent. And all of those can very much happen overnight if all the pieces are in the right place.
Do you have any examples of successful overnight revolutions?
I think (I hope) by overnight revolution, they mean the tipping point from civil unrest into actual change. It took a decade of protesting for Civil Rights to get popular support, but the law was drafted, written, and signed in less than a week due to the destruction wrought across the country after MLK was assassinated.
Right? If China and Russia are anything to go by, I want none of that revolution. They still have garbage governance even today. I'm convinced a revolution would get us from shit to absolute vile hot diarrhea.
I think I prefer trying to change the diet instead, just to stick to the metaphor.
Before the revolution, China had regular famines. Today they have none and have experienced one of the highest increases in living quality in human history.
The same phenomenon applied to the USSR (before Yeltsin's coup undid all that and caused the largest drop in life expectancy outside of a war).
China famously had some pretty massive famines after the revolution as well. China's real ascendency happened after Mao had been gone for a while and reformers were able to change his worst policies. China still struggles to this day to elevate its massive rural population, with more than half not receiving a high school education.
But more to the point, all industrial nations saw the exact same (and more) living improvements, so it's hard to really attribute it to political violence.
Yes, the revolution didn't fix everything overnight, but it did lay the ground-work that allowed them to fix their problems. Unlike say India, who is a net-exporter of food, yet still has excess deaths associated with malnutrition.
By pretty much every measure China lagged the industrial world for several decades. China beat Japan in WW2, a country which got nuked twice, and didn't pass the much smaller country in economic output until the mid 90s. Pretty much everyone outside China agrees that Mao's policies held them back immensely due to poor economic planning and continuous political strife.
This has got to be bait
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-russia-all-time/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/
Most of the pictures of soviet bread lines and poverty that form the popular image were from the 90s, when the former USSR embraced capitalism and was eviscerated by it. The subjects are too broad for me to recommend just one book, but this one does a good job of explaining the west's economic policy towards Russia and ideology behind it during the 90s that caused that dip.
You say that cuz you're comfortable. If you were a serf in Imperial Tsarist Russia you might have a different mindset.
This is the difference though. Many modern leftists insist that iterative harm reduction under capitalism is exactly the same level of oppression as being a feudal serf. That's actually the core basis of their thesis - that any capitalism is literally violence against them and therefore justifies violence against others.
Have there been just revolutions in the past? Of course. But overthrowing kings and dictators is quite a bit different than tearing down a society which has both injustice but also a high standard of living. It seems to imagine that only the injustice will be eliminated through violence, which is demonstrably untrue.
Yeah the problem with your statement here is that we know for a fact that the only thing that stopped capitalism from making people literal serfs is political violence. We had to fight a second Civil War in this country. Literal battles. If it weren't for those you'd be chained to a factory right now. That's the way capitalism will always go. You shouldn't be under misunderstanding that the current level of standard of living has anything to do with capitalism. The Golden Age of capitalism is the Gilded Age.
you can say whatever you want but china and russia had unprecedented growth because of their respective revolutions.
Russia added some territory in the last few years, but that was at the hand of authoritarian imperialism and NOT due to a revolution.
Stop apologizing for crimes of fascists.