It's a choice between being exploited, working for little reward and having no freedom or the opposite?
What do you think!
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Do ordinary people want revolution?
One very important question which we must ask ourselves, is if ordinary people (workers and "the majority") want to have control of the means of production, or if they simply want a fairer share of the resources.
Even if they may hate a government or a leader, the majority seldom hate the hierarchic system in itself but just its representatives. You know the conception of the "good white king" and the "wicked black king" inherited from medieval Europe and the late Roman Empire.
They may want more influence or at least oversight over decisions as well, ut generally accept differences in social positions as long as they could survive and prosper.
Discuss.
It's a choice between being exploited, working for little reward and having no freedom or the opposite?
What do you think!
I think that people generally are content if they are allowed to have the opportunity to have an own little sphere, an own income and some social safety, and that they gladly relinquishes the burden of political authority to various types of elites.
If the majority of people had been like you, then capitalism would have been dead a long time ago.
The majority of people in society are largely non-political, and make political choices after how they think it will affect their own survival skills. During crises, political engagement increases in the fringe (both left- and right-wing fringes) at the expense of the centre (where the liberal and urban elite is concentrated), but as long as the elite is able to give the impression that it provides the opportunity for social advancement or at least social safety, the majority of people are happy with the order of things.
This is not a defense for reformism, I should add, but an attempt to analyse how the "mass" in mass-movements think in order to decide to join the mass-movement.
Or we could just lean back and for ideological reasons assume that the majority of workers find the capitalist system outrageously despotic, and that they just wait for the moment to tear it down with their hands.
Last edited by Dimentio; 22nd May 2008 at 14:01.
I think you should read The German Ideology and generally educate yourself about revolutionary politics.
I do not believe in scripture of dialectal processes. The world is not dualistic, but evolutionary in its structure. But I agree with materialism, that people are most driven by material concerns (for their survival and social advancement).
What we must do is to understand people. To hold overtly idealistic or dogmatic views of to what extent the workers are wanting a revolution does'nt help the revolution along.
From my viewpoint reading human history, it strikes me as people generally only reluctantly overthrow elites (except maybe for new, not yet established elites like the Jacobins in France and the transitional government in Russia).
Well actually I've been thinking about that stuff too. To me it seems that a lot of people would want change in the goverment, but like you said they just expect that change in the form of a "good" politician.
But I have also seen in Mexico a good number of people who really don't believe in the system all together.
And yea most people also hate war, and sometimes prefer peace and "stability" even if that means we continue to live in the sytem that we do.
[FONT=Arial Black]WAR IS PEACE!
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH![/FONT]
-INGSOC slogans
The reason why many people in Mexico hate the Mexican system is that it is terribly intrusive and despotic, and that the Mexican elite is quite stupid. An elite which is smart tries to give the masses the impression that they are in command, while an elite that is stupid simply represses the masses.
It might be so that Mexico is not capitalism proper, but rather a former semi-feudal rural state recently industrialised, and that the Mexican national bourgeoisie has been absorbed into the cultural values of the previous landed hacienda owners. I do not know.
Like I said, read The German Ideology. Also look into Marx's theories of alienation.
Last edited by The Feral Underclass; 22nd May 2008 at 16:01.
A lot of people don't want to control the means of production because they think they already do. The answer to this question lies in simultaneously bringing about revolutionary class consciousness while promoting a revolutionary understanding of the state as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. As long as people buy in to bourgeois democracy, there's not going to be a real revolutionary movement.
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the World Unite!" -Karl Marx
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. " -Vladimir Lenin
"The People's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most far-sighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs." -Mao Zedong
Most don't even understand feudalism as the schools gloss over class relations even under feudalism and emphasize individuals, schools teach it is never the system and always the individual (unless your talking about communism then they claim it is away the system and never the individual).
It boils down to capitalism being so effective because workers don't really know they are being exploited systematically and instead think they are being exploited by power individuals.
wrong. this is an idealistic explanation. the mexican elite, like all semi-colonial bourgeoisie, is constrained by imperialism and therefore cannot offer the same social model as first-world elites can.
regarding your question: did most feudal serfs want an end to feudalism?
Last edited by Zurdito; 22nd May 2008 at 17:17.
Lenin’s internationalism is by no means a form of reconciliation of Nationalism and Internationalism in words but a form of international revolutionary action. The territory of the earth inhabited by so-called civilized man is looked upon as a coherent field of combat on which the separate peoples and classes wage gigantic warfare against each other. No single question of importance can be forced into a national frame.
Leon Trotsky
TVPTS - 24hr news, analysis and opinion, from a revolutionary perspective
most people are content for as long as capitalism manages to pay their wages and they can pay all their expenses with those wages.
why risk anything while things are not bad ?
we as communists/anarchists know that things will eventually get bad and from what i hear from everyone around me they know too but they do not want to do anything risky until they are forced to do so.
if people still have a roof over their heads clothes on their backs and not going hungry they will not risk anything until they think they do not have a choice anymore.
You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror...
"events will make the truth clear. in lieu of events, there are bolsheviks".
Lenin’s internationalism is by no means a form of reconciliation of Nationalism and Internationalism in words but a form of international revolutionary action. The territory of the earth inhabited by so-called civilized man is looked upon as a coherent field of combat on which the separate peoples and classes wage gigantic warfare against each other. No single question of importance can be forced into a national frame.
Leon Trotsky
TVPTS - 24hr news, analysis and opinion, from a revolutionary perspective
I think this is true. I also think that a value of individualism leads many people to identify particular individuals as bad rather than to consider even a possibility that the system might be flawed.
And as I think someone else was pointing out in another posting somewhere--with a quote from JP Morgan, if memory serves--the rich calculate that they can always buy off enough members of the lower class to diffuse any rebellion. Reading Das Kapital is real slow going, particularly when I have so many other things I need to be doing. I've barely gotten a few pages in, but I don't have a sense that Karl Marx anticipated this.
I think it poses a real problem for those who advocate change, whether through prefigurative politics or through rebellion.
I disagree. If they thought they already control the means of production, surely they would use the leverage they do in fact possess--nothing happens without labor, regardless of how many resources one controls.
the desires of the masses who have access to mass communication are coldly manipulated by the media-military-industrial supra-national complex -the ruling ideology shall be the ideology of the ruling class, : gimme more stuff and someone to look down on sums it up. the racism of the dublin working class that I hear every day on the bus is gut churning. and replacing 'what do you work at ' as the social placement signifier is 'Are you going anywhere nice on yer holliers' -not on my higher education grant, no, actually.I need it for furniture.
No. Most of them saw feudalism as nature's order. Most often, when they rebelled, they did it in the name of the king, for surely, the king would end the injustices if he wanted to
That might be partially true, yet the elites in some other Latin American countries are behavinh in a much more subtle way.
Reminds me of Marx's statement in The Holy Family:
'It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.' (link)
The working class today, on the whole, does not possess revolutionary consciousness. It accepts, perhaps to an unprecendented degree, that there's no alternative to the status quo. But does this mean that capitalism is in the objective interests of working class people? We should all know that it doesn't.
Last edited by Vanguard1917; 23rd May 2008 at 03:01.
[FONT=Arial]At the moment, a good number of people are alarmed by wealth inequality, market instability, and corporatism. I don't think many workers in the developed world are opposed to small businesses, but I can't seem them cheerfully defending corporations - unless, of course, they're a warped Rand and Mises form of libertarian.
Not that I place my such stock in assumptions, but America's score on the Gini coefficient graph flirts with .5, which is the (assumed) point when social unrest occurs.
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Last edited by Schrödinger's Cat; 23rd May 2008 at 03:11.
as long as a man has 3 meals a day and a job, there can be no revolution or reform in that matter.
